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“I just want to go home.”
Those were the words of one of the Israeli passengers stranded in Saudi Arabia after the flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv nearly ended in catastrophe this week.
The captain had been stabbed by his co-pilot, the aircraft had plunged thousands of feet, passengers had intervened, and another pilot aboard ultimately helped bring the plane safely to the ground.
By the time the passengers found themselves sitting in an airport in Tabuk, shaken and waiting for another aircraft, one of them reduced the entire experience to a remarkably ordinary desire: He wanted to go home.
Home, in this case, is Israel. That is what I cannot stop thinking about. After nearly dying on an airplane headed to Israel, these people still wanted to get on another airplane and continue to Israel.
We have a tendency to define home as the place where we are safe — the place where the door locks behind us, where we can finally put down our bags, where whatever danger exists outside stays outside. “Home” and “safety” have essentially become synonymous in the modern imagination, but Jewish history has never really permitted that definition.
For Jews, home has almost never meant the place where nothing bad can happen. If that were the definition, Jewish history would contain very few homes. Jews built magnificent civilizations in Spain and were expelled from Spain. Jews spent centuries in Iraq and were eventually driven from Iraq. Jews created communities across Europe that lasted longer than many countries have existed and discovered that centuries of belonging could disappear with terrifying speed.
The Jewish experience has repeatedly forced a more uncomfortable question: If safety can vanish almost anywhere, what actually makes somewhere home? That question has returned with unusual force since October 7th.
Israel was supposed to be the answer to the great vulnerability of Jewish history. And then, on one morning, Israelis watched the border collapse. Families hid in safe rooms waiting for soldiers who took far too long to arrive. Young people ran through fields while gunmen hunted them. Entire communities discovered that the Jewish state, created in part so Jews would never again be helpless before people who wanted to murder them, could fail catastrophically at the exact moment it was most needed.
October 7th therefore did something psychologically complicated to the Zionist story. It did not merely expose a military failure. It punctured one of the assumptions many Jews had quietly attached to Israel: that Jewish sovereignty meant Jewish safety.
But perhaps that was never the promise. Israel cannot promise Jews that no one will ever attack them. No country can make that promise. America could not make it on 9/11. France could not make it at the Bataclan. Britain could not make it in Manchester. A state can defend its citizens, deter enemies and build armies, but sovereignty is not immortality.
What Israel gives Jews is something different from guaranteed safety. It gives Jews somewhere to return to.
For some 2,000 years, Jews possessed a homeland primarily in memory. Jerusalem existed, but for most Jews it existed at an impossible distance. We faced it when we prayed. We mentioned it when we married. We broke a glass beneath the chuppah so that even at the happiest moment of our lives we would remember a destroyed city most of us had never seen. At the end of Passover we said “next year in Jerusalem” so many times that the sentence could have become absurd.
Generation after generation repeated it, including generations for whom Jerusalem was no more realistically reachable than the moon.
Then something historically bizarre happened: The sentence became an itinerary. You can now get annoyed at how inefficient Ben Gurion Airport is.
There may be no greater evidence of Zionism’s success than the fact that Jews can find Israel irritating. The miraculous has acquired baggage fees, traffic jams, bad customer service, overpriced hotel rooms, and taxi drivers that tend to talk too much. A longing that survived two millennia became somewhere you can fly to on a low-cost airline from Dubai. That mundanity is almost more astonishing than independence itself.
And perhaps that is why this week’s flight feels symbolically larger than it should. These people were not pioneers arriving by boat. They were not refugees escaping Europe or Jews secretly leaving Arab countries. They were tourists and families sitting on a Boeing 737 flying from one modern Middle Eastern city to another.
They were doing something utterly ordinary that would have been utterly unimaginable to most of their ancestors: They were going home. Then the plane began to fall.
There is an obvious metaphor here about Jews refusing to remain passengers, but I think the more interesting fact is what happened after the passengers were no longer in danger. They had landed. They were alive. Saudi Arabia was beneath their feet. The nightmare was over. They could reasonably have had enough of airplanes for one day. Instead, they boarded another one. Their destination had not changed.
That feels particularly important in a moment when Jews are once again being encouraged, subtly and sometimes not subtly at all, to reconsider where and how loudly they belong.
Across increasing parts of the West, the argument surrounding Jews has changed dramatically since October 7th. Things that would once have been immediately recognizable as antisemitic are increasingly placed into an exhausting courtroom of qualification.
Was the Jew attacked because he was Jewish, or because he was Zionist? Is the synagogue merely a synagogue, or is it somehow politically implicated by events thousands of miles away? Is excluding an Israeli acceptable if the exclusion is described as anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism? How much Jewish particularity is too much Jewish particularity?
The effect of all this is not always to tell Jews explicitly to disappear. Modern societies are usually more sophisticated than that. Instead, Jews are sometimes invited to remain visible on revised terms.
Be Jewish, but make it unobjectionable.
Be Jewish, but detach it from Israel.
Be Jewish, but not in a way that makes anyone uncomfortable.
Be Jewish, but perhaps tuck that particular part away.
There is enormous temptation in that bargain. Jews have been making versions of it for centuries. And then, Saturday evening and Sunday, we celebrate Simchat Torah.
I used to think the obvious symbol of Simchat Torah was the dancing. After October 7th, that became even more obvious. Jews were attacked on a holiday devoted to joy; Israelis at Nova were literally dancing when the massacre began; therefore we dance again.
The stranger part of Simchat Torah is what happens to the Torah. We finish it, and then we refuse to leave. That is an odd thing to do with a book. Normally, reaching the final page means you are finished. You close it. You put it back on the shelf. Perhaps you remember it fondly. Perhaps you move on to something else. Judaism does not permit that relationship with the Torah.
We reach the death of Moses, finish Deuteronomy, and then almost indecently quickly find ourselves back at creation. Finishing is not the same thing as leaving.
Jewish history is filled with things Jews could reasonably have left behind — places that betrayed us, languages that disappeared, traditions that became inconvenient, an ancient homeland most of us had never visited, a religion whose observance became harder to justify in the modern world, a peoplehood that modernity repeatedly predicted would dissolve.
There were endless opportunities to finish being Jewish. Instead, Jews kept returning, which is different from resilience. Resilience means enduring something. Return means choosing something. A tree survives a storm because it is resilient. A person returns to a house because it is home.
That is what makes Simchat Torah feel different to me this year. Three years ago, the holiday became inseparable from one of the darkest mornings in Jewish history. It would be entirely understandable if October 7th had permanently colonized the date, if every future Simchat Torah became principally a commemoration of what happened on that Simchat Torah.
But that would give October 7th too much authority.
Memory matters. The murdered must be remembered. The failures must be learned from. The trauma should not be sanitized into another uplifting story about Jewish survival. Yet Hamas does not get to decide what Simchat Torah means. Antisemites do not get to decide what being Jewish feels like. And danger does not get to decide where home is.
That is the thread connecting a Torah scroll in a synagogue to a shaken group of Israelis sitting in an airport in Saudi Arabia. Neither is a story about safety. The Torah has never kept Jews safe simply because we possessed it. Jews carrying Torah scrolls were expelled, persecuted, and murdered throughout history. Israel does not make Jews invulnerable simply because it exists. October 7th destroyed any remaining illusion of that.
These things offer something else: a place to return, a story to return to, a language to return to, a people to return to, a home to return to. That is why the passenger’s sentence stayed with me. “I just want to go home.” After everything that had happened on the way there, home was still home.
Later on Wednesday, another aircraft carried the passengers from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv, escorted by an Israeli Air Force jet. They landed at Ben Gurion Airport. And this Simchat Torah, Jews will reach the final words of the Torah again. We already know what happens next.
We need to remember 10/7/23, the Hebrew date on which it occurred: Simhat Torah 5784. Our opponents are co-opting 10/7 on college campuses and in the public square.
We remember Israeli Independence day on the Hebrew date; we remember the Yom Kippur War on the Hebrew date; and we remember our Bar/Bat Mitzvot by the parsha
This brought me to tears of joy. Never in my life have I felt more proud to be a Jew.