In between Israel's 72nd and 73rd birthday, my love for Israel was rekindled by a group of people who had never been here.
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Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't love Israel; in fact, I vividly remember the moment I fell in love with this country. I was a young American 8th grader visiting the country for the first time and awed by this place where one could order kosher pizza on every corner – and in Hebrew no less! In high school, I counted down the days to my family's annual visit and the chance to again explore the land of my ancestors.
But ironically, something changed after I moved here.
When I made aliyah at the age of 16, my friends back in the United States often asked me how many times I had visited the Western Wall since landing. A seasoned Jerusalemite of a few months, I would proudly boast that I "only visited occasionally." Only those living outside of Israel, I felt, who cannot visit the Kotel whenever they want to, dream of praying there each morning.
"An outsider wouldn't get it," I would explain, "but the greatest excitement is when you stop getting excited because you've gotten used to the Kotel being right around the corner."
Nearly a decade after those boasts, I began my journey as a tour guide, and since then I have proudly lost count of my visits to the Kotel. But the challenge of not taking Israel's treasures for granted remains tremendous.
Good tour guides cannot be complacent. A guide whose heart stops beating with the energy of the Holy Land will never electrify the souls of tourists. But after so many visits, it's only natural for the magic to dissipate, making it hard for one to breathe life into the country's ancient stones.
Although this is a professional hazard for tour guides, I assume that this syndrome exists throughout Israeli society.
Israel is a country that suffers from a surplus of history and all the symptoms that come with it. It is easy to get used to the blessed abundance – especially if you grew up with ancient views in your backyard, hung around famous churches, mosques, and synagogues as a child, and visited each and every historical site during your 12 years in the Israeli school system.
This year, with travel limitations turning every local excursion into a trip abroad, I hoped to rediscover the magic I felt in 8th grade. As I walked around the different locales, I made a mindful effort to put on my "tourist shoes" and recreate the wonder of seeing everything for the first time.
Fortunately, I had a little outside help.
Not long after the end of the first lockdown, I began guiding live Zoom tours for international groups on behalf of StandWithUs – the Israel education organization I work for. Since then, we have broadcast live and in real-time on almost 100 different occasions, bringing the city's familiar sites to virtual tourists around the world.
Except, as I discovered, the familiar sites were often far from familiar for many of the thousands who joined us, and even those who had been to Israel before were anything but bored by the so-called backyard views.
Zoom-fatigued 6th graders suddenly woke up, fascinated by stones and pillars from thousands of years ago. Cynical 11th graders sent notes to be tucked into the Kotel stones, and even the ex-pat Tel-Avivian cried when we sang Hatikva by the Kotel.
The virtual tourists thirsted to know the city from up close, to stroll through its alleyways, encounter its history, and even to meet its street cats.
And their thirst was contagious.
Sometimes it is precisely the outsider who gets it, and only their perspective can inspire jaded insiders to remember that until 73 years ago taking all of this for granted was a luxury that did not exist amongst the Jews who raised their eyes to the East and prayed, "to be a free nation in our Land," and to walk in "the Land of Zion and Jerusalem."
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