Advice for Young Jewish Parents...

Of all the decisions I made in my life that would impact on my children, I think the smartest one of all was the decision to move to Israel while they were young. Amira was seven...almost eight years old. Elie had just turned six and Shmulik was a delicious three and a half. We didn't ask them if they wanted to move here. We bundled them up, packed their toys, shipped their beds and changed their lives.

This morning, I drove to the airport. As Elie and Lauren loaded suitcases and carry-ons and a car seat onto airport luggage carts, I held my granddaughter. She knows she is going to New York. She told me so. She knows that I won't be there and that she won't see me for a few days, "and then I'm coming back to you."

So I asked her if she wanted me to give her a lot of kisses. She held out her hand and I kissed it a dozen times and even more and then she closed her hand tightly so the kisses wouldn't fall out. The luggage carts were ready to go. For now, so long as she would cooperate, little Michali would walk next to her parents while they pushed the carts.

"Abba, can you hold Savta's kisses?" I heard her ask her father, and then she handed him all my kisses and he put them in his pocket. My daughter-in-law and her family are amazing at keeping their connection solid.

Michali speaks regularly with her grandparents there and sees them via video all the time. She knows that you have to go to the airport and take a plane to go to New York (which she says with the most amazing New York accent).

As I drove away from the airport, I realized that I have advice for young Jewish parents. Come to Israel and live here. Now. Because if you don't...and if you instill in your children a love of Israel, as Lauren's parents did, as my parents and so many others did, the day will come when they move here themselves.

I can't imagine having a child of mine living across an ocean and I pray constantly that I'll never have to. I know that I am insanely blessed to have all of my children live in the same city, within a short distance from my home and every time I tell anyone that this is the situation, I add "but it won't last." I know it won't. But I love having them so close. I love seeing my grandchildren daily or almost daily.

Come when they are small, when they don't need to be given the choice. That's what I did and I"m so glad that they made their lives and their friends here in Israel. It isn't fair to take a 15-year-old from the world and the friends she has developed; it's unimaginable to tell a 17-year old that your life, your language, your friends are about to change and more, in a year, you'll be expected to go serve in the army of your new home.

Bring them when they are seven or eight and they will remember their previous life in that former home, but all that they are, all that they believe will be Israel; their language will be Hebrew and their souls will be entwined in this land. Bring a child at age five or six and your former home will be a distant memory. They will think in Hebrew, dream in Hebrew, count in Hebrew and be more Israeli than anything else. Bring a child at three or four and he will not remember his former home...or perhaps a slight memory but not more. He will be Israel, nothing more and nothing less.

Whatever age your children are when you come, they can acclimate. They can learn to love this land and make it theirs. But if you come when they are younger, their roots will be that much stronger and the thought of living in another country that much more impossible.

And if you don't come and they do, you'll be on the other side of the ocean. Your grandchildren's other grandparents will fill their hands with kisses and send them on their way knowing that they will be back soon. The plant that your granddaugther got in nursery school will sit in the window waiting to be watered while she is away. And your heart will break just a little at the distance, as my heart breaks a little now.

I don't begrudge her amazing grandparents in New  York this time with her. The opposite is true. I often feel guilty at how much time I have with her - dinners together, Shabbat meals. She helps me cook sometimes and the most special of all is when her cousins come over and my house is filled with little people building and climbing and throwing and talking and lighting up my house with love.

I sent her with kisses and she told me she'd be back soon.

Come home, dear parents...come home so that you are never on the other side of an ocean from your children because if you don't come...some of them, one of them, maybe all of them will come here. Here. Home. Israel.