It's early Friday. My husband and I are bicycling through the lush Quebec countryside, rolling past fields of wild chamomile and gentle verdant hills. We take a break and try to instant message family and friends in Israel We get through to some, but not others. We wish them a Shabbat shalom. Along the Mediterranean, in the Judean Hills, in the desert, in the valleys, in the highlands, Shabbat will soon arrive. But shalom seems like a longed-for, but illusive dream. 

By the time this column goes to press, perhaps a ceasefire, short- or long-term, may have been attained in Gaza. Things change radically and quickly. As my sister-in-law in Be’er Sheva said to me this morning, “We take it not day by day, but hour by hour.” Given this rapid unfolding of events and the gap between writing and publication, how can a columnist write about the situation in Gaza. Yet how can one not write about it?

Biking past small towns along tributaries of the St. Lawrence River, we’re struck by the cognitive dissonance of being here, but feeling there. This sense is shared by many CJN readers, seeing ourselves as deeply Canadian yet also tied with an invisible cord to a land that’s an ocean and a continent away, a cord that tugs at our souls always, but pressingly in times of crisis. I’m reminded of the plaintive call of the 11th- and 12th-century Spanish poet-philosopher, Yehuda Halevi: “Libi bamizrach, va’ani b’sof ma’arav” – “My heart is in the East, and I am at the end of the West.”

Late in life, he embarked on a perilous sea voyage to the land of his longings. We can’t be entirely certain that he reached its shores. Today, we’re more fortunate. We travel back and forth with ease. Many of us spend substantial chunks of time there. Living here in Canada, we go there for education, vacation, work and volunteer service. Many have second homes there. For many others, travel to Israel is the trip of a lifetime. Some of us speak Hebrew with fluency and ease, others can’t master its alphabet, grammar or guttural sounds. Still, most of us Canadian Jews, across the political spectrum and with a range of religious or secular loyalties, feel the pull of ties that bind us to Israel and make its welfare our own. 

Yet the very ease of travel, communication and up-to-the minute news feeds the inner dissonance we’re feeling today. Paradoxically, in times of crisis, our very modern situation resonates with the discordance Yehuda Halevi registered in the Middle Ages. “How can I taste what I eat and how could it be pleasing to me?” And yet, our daily pleasures go on, alongside our anxieties for Israel and those charged with defending it, and our concern for family and friends living under stress. 

This is the “the heartbreak of two homelands” – “hake’ev shel shtei hamoladot” – a phrase coined by the 20th-century poet Lea Goldberg. Goldberg was a Lithuanian Jew who moved to Tel Aviv as a young adult in the mid-1930s. Her poem Oren, or Pines, touches on the poignancy of being transplanted, even to the place of one’s longing, to a place that immediately becomes home. She identifies with pine trees that thrive snow-capped in northern Europe but also take to the Israeli landscape, where they provide shade from the intense Mediterranean sun. The poem’s sentiment captures the existential circumstance of many people who, like Goldberg, have made aliyah. But it also describes well those who, living in Canada – every bit a “snow-space” as Goldberg’s Lithuania – also consider Israel their homeland. “Perhaps only migrating birds know/ suspended between earth and sky/ the heartache of two homelands.” 

I tend to think of our deep and intense ties to Israel as a locus of meaningfulness and enrichment. But at times like these, there’s also the heartache of being suspended, strung between here and there.