Four months ago I was devastated. I was furious and afraid all the time. I felt only a wound where my heart used to be.
Since December I have been volunteering as much as I possibly can. I complain when I’m not being worked hard enough. (Sometimes I’m joking.) For a while, if I was tired or sore enough at the end of a day of volunteering, then I wouldn’t be focused on the emotional pain.
After October 7 the first person I saw wearing IDF identity tags was my father. He had gone down to the basement and pulled them out of their bag in the drawer. Afterwards I realized that almost all former IDF were doing that.
When I got to Israel, my aunt gave me one of the tags that the Hostage Families Forum produced. On the top they say הלב שלי שבוי בעזה, “My heart is a prisoner in Gaza.” (That’s how I learned to say “prisoner” in Hebrew.) They described exactly what I felt: a stolen heart. For at least a month, I never took it off.
When I got to Talmei Yosef, I came wearing that necklace. After a week or two, I went to put it back on after a shower, and I read that sentence again, “My heart is imprisoned in Gaza.” And then I thought about where my heart was. My heart, slowly, is making its way back to its place.
My heart is in a poorly furnished apartment, on a dirty street in Tel Aviv, where I first realized that there were volunteers joining me who had never even been to Israel before. It’s with the man who prayed for my success at a bus stop after I told him I had just arrived that week to volunteer. It’s in the tears of the farmers who wept with joy when they saw twenty or thirty young Jews from around the world getting off a bus to help save their crops. And my heart made a faint beat each time I saw soldiers explain to each other that they were meeting a group of Jews from around the world who had come to support them.
My heart is in the kitchen of a family home in Moshav Talmei Yosef, where I spent a weekend cleaning everything for myself and a rotating roster of roommates, where I eat cold leftovers because the microwave doesn’t work, where I get up each morning to try to save a farm. I keep doing it because there is nobody else to do it, and maybe I’m afraid what will happen to me if I stop.
My heart is in the cellphone that never stops beeping and is never fully charged, the phone of the young man who appointed himself volunteer coordinator for a moshav and a half. My heart is in the pair of sweet teenage girls who are choosing to spend their free time away from home, serving their country - before they enlist in the IDF in the coming months. (One of them says things to me like ראש גדול, and ברק בעיניים, when we talk. (“Rosh gadol” means “big head” and refers to people who think beyond what is required of them, “Barak Ba’einaim” means “lightning in the eyes.”) The other one likes that I built her a pull-up bar and invites me work out.) It’s in the insistent helpfulness of the 29-year old woman in our house, who, as I write this, is now maternally scolding one of the girls to take better care of herself.
My heart is called to the princess of Talmei Yosef, a woman whose bravery and compassion made her more than just another hero. When she told me that she had left her family to return to volunteer, alone, to the same moshav where they had been stuck in a shelter on October 7th, my heart swelled with admiration. And in sorrow.
My heart is in the hands of the woman who for months has done more than she knew she could do, in terrifying circumstances, because she has a heart made from gold that pumps blood filled with courage. Before the war began she wanted to go to Portugal. Now she manages a passionfruit farm, making phone calls to guide volunteers and comply with government offices while we are in the fields to pick fruit or pull weeds, while her brothers are fighting the war we can hear a few kilometers away. She tells me she is planning to take a trip with a friend to Thailand, at the end of this month, and I hope she does. She is so tired, but still works like a horse, always smiling, and looking after everyone else to make sure they are okay. If she is scared inside, and she must be, I've never seen it. I've only seen humility and grace.
She says that Talmei Yosef has the sweetest Thai workers in all of Israel. I think the Thai workers of the Duvdevani farm in Talmei Yosef are lucky to work with her, a woman who learns their words, talks with them outside of work, and values their friendship, all when it would be easier for someone in her position to be uncomfortable, aloof or even racist. But she is too kind to even come close. I think the Thai men know that they are lucky, which is why her front porch is always filled with flowers, arranged around a handmade table Oh (their foreman) presented to her as a gift. Each time she says something about the kindness of the Thai men she works with, my heart wants to shout. I’ve been to a lot of farms, a few also had a young woman in exactly her position; her relationships with Ta, Oh, Jem and Titen are something special. Through her, I and other volunteers have also been able to grow close to these men, despite having to talk through Google translate. It’s sweet how she doesn’t even realize that it is all because of who she is.
My heart is enchanted by the vegetarian daughter of cattle farmers, who sings along to old school rap and reggae music while we work. Sometimes, as we wander in and out between rows of passionfruit vines, searching for ripe fruits, we pass one another. My heart returns to my chest a moment, only to jump out again when her eyes meet mine and her red hair turns blonde at the tip as it waves in the wind and sunlight. She’s so beautiful; when she smiles at me, her face pink from a hard day’s work, I could forget my own name.
When I realized I was thinking about her all the time, I offered her a piece of my heart.
She wasn’t interested.
I am grateful that I could feel my heart sink. I am happy that I have to work a little to keep it from breaking.
They are signs that my heart is still there, that somehow, I'm going to be fine.
עידן, אני אוהב אותך
I enjoy reading your posts very much! You are a great writer, and I think you are a very brave and talented young man and no doubt you have a beautiful heart ❤️
Take care.