Yesterday was my last day of work at my current job and while I realize that I am not moving far (to a lab five minutes away in order to begin grad school), after 1.5 years in the stem cell group (approximately 75% of my time in Israel since aliyah), I get the feeling that slowly, quietly, another milestone in my aliyah has crept up and passed.

I was super lucky (actually, I’d go a little further than that – I was super blessed). The lab was a great place for me to spend the first stages of my aliyah. People were friendly and so helpful about everything and also, I got the feeling that people truly wanted to help me and didn’t feel burdened.

I was fresh off the boat enough that most everyone, even the veteran olim in the lab, found my general cluelessness and sunny optimism adequately entertaining, amusing, and at times, just plain bewildering.

The only people I habitually didn’t jive with too well were the nurses on the clinical side of the department, who looked upon me with equal parts amusement and disdain with an occasional topping of intrigue. And I responded in same. The nurses station occupies a section of the hallway between the lab and my former desk space in the office area, so I traversed their territory tens of times each day.

Until yesterday my interactions with them didn’t really extend beyond them offering me the occasional “As you please, Queen” or “Don’t you ever say excuse me?!?!” (only said when they are completely blocking the hallway with carts of supplies while I meekly try to slip past unnoticed, flattening myself against the wall).

Sometimes our communication was of the non-verbal sort (once, one of them simply picked me up by the waist and placed me aside instead of asking me to move). I told a lot of friends about this, including some native Israelis, and everyone seemed to agree it was sort of Ms. Trunchbull in Matilda-like until one person was like, “Oh in Israel that’s normal. It’s a sign of endearment.”

More often than not, our interactions consisted primarily of Tobi and I passing by the nurse’s station in fits of spastic, uncontrollable laughter to which they would respond with a simple “What happened?” (Note, this was not a friendly “what happened so that we may laugh with you” but rather a “if you obnoxious twits keep this up we will catapult you across the building javelin-style” what happened).

Also, I should probably add that they have likely long suspected that I am either a drug addict and/or sleep around a lot, a misconception of my own doing, given that one of them once spied me and another individual sitting at the nurses station while transferring a fine white powder into a test tube labelled ‘gonorrhea test’ (to be clear, the test tube was sterile and unused and the fine white powder was actually a baking ingredient, but I understand that appearances can deceive).

Anyway, now that you have the full background, I was a little surprised when they called me over after my goodbye party. “Come here! Alissaaaaaa! Come here!” they barked. “We hear that you are leaving us?!? And where will you go?” I told them about starting school and switching labs, an answer to which they demonstrated satisfaction.

“But we will miss your modeling through the halls.”

My modeling through the halls?!?! I looked at them a little disbelievingly.

“You know, that tall guy who used to work here, what was his name, like he used to say…”

And now I remember, when R. used to work in the lab he would always tell me “Alissa, you have a pretty face and your body is very good but no man will ever notice you because of the way you walk. You slouch the arms and always look down and look to be in a great rush.”

And so when I would rush down the hall between lab and our office area, past the nurse’s station, he would call after me “Gait and posture! Gait and posture! Gait and posture!” (I think in some countries this might be considered a very odd form of sexual harassment.)

“We will miss this very much,” they reinforce. “And where are you from, New York?” I can’t believe after nearly two years of working here, we have finally gotten around to these niceties five minutes after my goodbye party. “I’m from Massachusetts, actually.” (Translation: I can’t believe you’d think I’m from New York!!!)

“Oh it is very nice in Boston, my son is there now. I wish he would come home to me but he will go to San Francisco next.” “Yes, Boston and San Francisco are both really nice cities” I reassure her.

A few weeks ago I had another very similar experience. Somewhat more surprising and dramatic, but more personal and less entertaining. Sometimes people who mystify you or disappoint you have good intentions, you just haven’t gathered enough data for those intentions to be revealed.

And sometimes you just need to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume the best of them, as much as I clearly enjoy making caricatures out of people with my vivid imagination on the basis of limited information.

As it turns out, not all gruff and seemingly rude Israelis are people-eaters or former javelin-hurtling school headmistresses. I should know enough about sabras to have this much figured out; I may not be rude or gruff but I can be misleadingly cool and aloof enough to garner an exterior as prickly and hard as the best of them, but surprisingly sweet and soft on the inside.

At the end of the day I realized my relationship with the nurses in the mysterious department I speak of was much more Boo Radley-like than Ms. Trunchbull-like, it just took me a while to see it. And as Tyra Banks once said, whatever happens in life, “you just model through it.” I’m sure the nurses would agree.

I realized I haven’t really written much here in a while. I guess life and my absorption into Israeli society has reached a standstill in the last half year and I haven’t had much of a desire to write about news events, as I find that I have nothing insightful or unique to say about the news here. As Alan wrote on my birthday card, “I’m getting used to not having our first anything in Israel anymore.” It’s not a bad thing. In fact, in many ways it’s a really good thing – it means life is becoming more comfortable and routine here. 

Right now, life is just continuing on as it has – sprinting after the 19 bus, cursing and simultaneously lavishing my silly cat with love, taking care of my cells, shul, lab meetings, bike riding, etc. I’ve collected some pretty good stories in between and occasionally even during the aforementioned activities. But I tend to not write them here, for fear of violating people’s anonymity. 

Like older people worry about Alzheimer’s and dementia, I worry about the loss of my English language abilities. I phrase thinks strangely. I notice useful and simple words slipping from my grasp. I still spend a lot of time on the confocal (or rather, in the confocal room…in addition to imaging, it is a quiet and private place for phone calls, napping, illicit snacking, etc).

I also lock myself in the bathroom a lot. At work it seems to be my new thing. I’ve done it three or four times in two weeks alone. I’ve developed this problem where I sort of over-shoot the lock, and the door gets jammed. I then struggle in earnest for a few minutes, which of course feels like nine hours when you’re locked in a bathroom with no obvious way out. If I am really lucky, there will be someone laughing hysterically outside when I finally extricate myself from the stronghold.  You can see how uneventful my life is because this is basically the only semi-eventful thing I have to write about. 

Hopefully something interesting will happen to me soon. In the meantime, I’ll just be falling asleep while imaging and locking myself in the bathroom for increasingly long periods of time:-)

On Monday evening, renowned cancer researcher Judah Folkman, Harvard professor and director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston, died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 74.

When I was in my junior year of high school, I saw “Cancer Warrior”, a Nova documentary on public television narrated by Alan Alda. The documentary was about Judah Folkman and his theory of angiogenesis, the process through which a tumor is able to generate its own blood vessel network. In order to grow beyond a certain size, tumors rely on their surrounding vasculature in order to obtain nutrients and excrete wastes. Folkman reasoned that if it is possible to cut off a tumor’s blood supply, a tumor could essentially be starved and maintained in a dormant state.

There was something magical about the way Folkman spoke. His electric energy, his grandiose ideas, and his enthusiasm for the way in which basic research can change the world was completely contagious.Listening to him tell his story about angiogenesis, I felt a passion and excitement for ideas that I had never known before. I remember at one point actually getting up from the couch and moving closer to the television in anticipation of the next turn of the unfolding story, as if I were watching an adventure thriller. Two aspects of the angiogenesis story captured my imagination: Folkman wasn’t ashamed to dream big and to share those big dreams – sometimes prematurely. Also, Folkman had a great, romantic story.

The major focus of cancer research in the 1970s was harnessing the new tools of molecular biology to study cancer cells themselves. No one was thinking about the tumor’s seemingly irrelevant normal environment. For decades Folkman’s ideas about the importance of a tumor’s environment were scorned and ridiculed. After all, he was a surgeon dappling in research in his free time. And he had the whole problem of his big ideas that he talked so freely about before he had any proof to substantiate them.

The work to prove angiogenesis was painstaking and slow because Folkman and groupies had to invent most of the tools and systems used to study angiogenesis themselves. Eventually, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a major stimulator of new blood vessel growth, was identified and in the years that followed a host of other stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis were isolated. With proof of such stimulators and inhibitors, tumor angiogenesis became a credible, accepted phenomenon. Overnight Folkman went from the quack with irrelevant, unprovable ideas to super science celebrity. The list of other diseases in which pathological angiogenesis is implicated keeps growing.

In 1998, two endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors, angiostatin and endostatin, were shown to cure cancer in mice, a study that made the front page of the New York Times and prompted co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, James Watson, to prophesize that “Judah will cure cancer in two years.” By the time I sat in my father’s downstairs study watching “Cancer Warrior” at the beginning of 2001, a whole new field of cancer research had exploded and a biography of Folkman, Dr. Folkman’s War by Robert Cooke, had just been published.

The next day I went to my high school biology teacher and I asked her if I could do an independent study reading about angiogenesis under her supervision in lieu of a regular course. She thought it was a great idea. I didn’t have Powerpoint, so for my end of semester presentation, I drew pictures of tumors in magic marker and color-copied them onto overhead transparencies. I loved every second of my independent study and by the end of my junior year, I decided that I definitely wanted to be like my hero Judah Folkman and become a scientist.

During my first year at Wellesley, I met a Harvard scientist who trained in Folkman’s lab and now had her own angiogenesis lab. I ended up working in her lab every summer during my time at Wellesley and also did independent studies in her lab during the school year. It was very lucky and special to actually become part of the research I first learned about in high school, especially since it was what inspired me to want to do science in the first place.

Every summer, Folkman would lead the annual surgical research department (later renamed vascular biology department) meeting at the Academy of Sciences in Cambridge. The meeting would consist of his own lab and the other collaborating labs in the department. Folkman was a pretty quirky guy (for instance, he drove a silver VW bug right into his 70s) and had very particular ideas about how this meeting should be run. For one thing, jacket and tie were required. The other rather interesting twist was that no Powerpoint or slides of any sort were allowed – “chalk talks” only. So you had everyone dressed in his or her finest garb in the middle of the day giving these very informal short talks with magic marker and chalk.

Every year Folkman would give a talk at the meeting that would more or less dictate the major themes of angiogenesis research for the next year. He’d get up there and be teeming with his electric energy and excitement and you’d know there was something special going on. It was just like watching the Nova documentary in high school all over again except it would be so much cooler, because I’d actually be in the room. It would set the standard for me of how I think all scientists should love their science and talk about their science.

The last time I saw Judah Folkman, he joked about his own death. Avastin (the first angiogenesis inhibitor to make it big which interestingly works more by normalizing the tumor’s convoluted vasculature to enhance deliverability of chemotherapy than by choking off the tumor’s blood supply) had just finished the last stages of clinical trials and had been put on the market. He said he was at a big press conference marking its release and one of the speakers commented, “If only Judah Folkman were still alive to see the results of his research.” Folkman then went up to the microphone during the question and answer session to say “This is the ghost of Judah Folkman!” (I think he really liked to tell this story).

I know that Dr. Folkman’s life and work affected thousands of other people very much like me and also very different from me and changed their lives forever – young people who were inspired to study science because of his story, scientists and physicians at all stages of their careers whose career paths and choices were impacted, patients in the death throes of cancer, some who lived and some who died, but all healed in some way whether by words or by drugs.

Now the patriarch of a whole new field, the man holding the light out front, is no longer with us. I am very, very sad. But I am pretty sure his boundless enthusiasm for ideas, his imagination, his creativity, and his unshakeable and stubborn pursuit of truth in the face of skepticism and adversity could reach from here to infinity. The stubborn rabbi’s son from the midwest turned surgeon “quack” scientist turned science superstar – you changed the world, Dr. Folkman.

Judah Folkman, cancer’s innovative enemy, dies at 74 Boston Globe

This morning started off as a fairly unremarkable and typical journey on the 19 bus. I was sitting on the bus on my way to work reading a section on evolution in a biology book. Having suffered from motion sickness when I was younger (and by younger I mean until about three weeks ago), I have been relishing the opportunity to read on the bus lately, and I feel as if I am making up for years of lost time.

I noticed that my favorite rider was on the bus today, a middle-aged woman with a raspy smoker’s voice who exclaims “Omigod! Omigod!” every time the bus approaches a stop with many people waiting (which is every stop at 8:15am), and then takes it upon herself to be the human traffic manager, shouting, “Yalla! Let’s go! Yalla! Let’s go!” as passengers board the bus.

Entertained by my favorite rider while reading my biology book, it was hard to pay attention to much else, but I did catch that the woman sitting diagonally across from me had stopped davening and was now scribbling furiously on notebook paper. I didn’t think much of it, and looked back down at my book. A couple minutes later, she tapped me on the shoulder and presented me with the following note:

The idea that man came from monkeys was after the horrors of the 1st World War when the Europeans wanted an excuse for sexual freedom.

Look on internet. Tel Aviv University Prof. Raz made a theory that there are apes and there are men. Men didn’t come from monkeys.

ShXXXXXX, 054-XXXXXXX

(Below this was a convoluted postscript about a religious text that, according to her, implicates one who believes in evolution will become a monkey.)

I thanked her for her reading suggestions and she asked me to call her so that she could present me with more material on the topic (and to introduce me to her very wonderful, very eligible son according to the careful analysis of the situation by a certain chemistry professor’s husband).

I was neither angered nor threatened by our interaction, only a little stunned. I could have been offended that she was suggesting I was ignorant about the subject and that she was there to enlighten me and inform me of the truth, but I knew that she meant no malice.

I suspect that Professor Raz is probably a credible scientist and also that his work does not attempt to disprove evolution, but rather that she took his work regarding evolutionary relationships between man and primate out of context and misinterpreted it. I am interested to find his work but a few cursory Google searches turned up nothing promising – perhaps she got the name slightly wrong?

I think that some of the onlookers on the bus probably thought I was an impressionable young girl being indoctrinated by this woman’s ideas because I was so receptive to what she had to say. But it was clear to me that refuting what this woman believes or arguing with her served no purpose; unlike her perception of me I did not believe for a moment I had any chance of changing her mind, especially if she is convinced that she has credible scientific “proof.”

Another added irony and level of complexity to the interaction is that while I am actually religious, she would have no way of knowing of this. The whole interaction made me reflect on what it means to be a religious Jew in science (certainly not an inherent contradiction in my opinion), but I am going to chicken out on expounding upon this one for now!

Once I shared my note in lab we got to wondering – what is this sexual freedom that the monkeys supposedly have that the Europeans wanted so badly? We secretly wish we didn’t have to wear underwear? I will leave you this question to ponder, but in the meantime, it’s really not half bad to be a monkey on the bus.

Every year around Chanukah, the Jerusalem Post puts out a sufganiyot guide. The authors of the guide sample sufganiyot at a bunch of bakeries around town and then write a compiled review of their findings. I had a few concerns about this process last year: Did the authors have an appreciation for the scientific method? What was their methodology? For instance, if they sampled a bunch of sufganiyot in one trip, they would clearly be biased against their samplings by the end of the day, by which time they would surely be ready to vomit.

I felt it was important that each sufganiyot be allowed its own day; its own moment of glory; its own sacred time for contemplation, enlightenment, and introspection. Also, what if the testers just sampled a piece of a sufganiya? You can’t compare the center of one sufganiya with the edge piece of another.

I wanted to level the playing field for all the sufganiyot out there and I wanted to introduce a little objectivity into the study. Most of all, I wanted to sample every sufganiya in Jerusalem. And, okay, as anyone who ever attended the Scooperbowl with me will attest, I am a very competitive eater. I feel strong loyalties towards my favorite foods.

Despite a few well-intentioned concerns about my cholesterol fielded during last year’s study, I am up for the challenge once again. My yearly sufganiyot experiment may still not be a double-blind controlled study, but I have goals in place and I’m working towards them. Ultimately, I aim for my study to be worthy of Nature publication by Chanukah 2009 or at least an Ig Nobel Prize. I still have two more sufganiyot seasons to perfect things. How can you help, dear reader?

There are a couple things you can do. You can recommend locations around Jerusalem for me to try – good and bad, but mostly good, please:-) You can add to the comments section of this post your own reviews of sufganiyot you have consumed in the Jerusalem area. And finally, dear reader, you can work on your own major scientific breakthroughs. I am sure the sufganiyot connection won’t be very difficult to establish. Not a very sophisticated system for now, I know, but as time allows maybe I will start a sufganiyot blog that will take on a life of its own.

Ready…set…go!!!

And Happy Sufganiyot Season 2007 – 5768.

P.S. Definitely last week’s news, but for those following the saga, Harriet was successfully spayed.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
- Anne Frank

This past Monday I took a vacation day and had the opportunity to ride my bike from Jerusalem to Sderot as part of a solidarity ride with the residents of Sderot organized by OneFamily Fund. The plight of the residents of Sderot is a cause that is close to my heart and something I care quite deeply about.The ride itself included a hodgepodge group of approximately 90 participants ranging from competitive cyclists to families to some folks who looked as if they hadn’t been pedaling anything with wheels for quite some time.

We were joined on the ride by victims of terror in Israel, including three young people who lost both parents in terrorist attacks. While not everyone was able to complete the ride on his or her bike, vehicles stayed at the end of our entourage and picked up stragglers so everyone was reunited in Sderot.

I was certainly among those moaning and groaning about the late start and also the frequent and lengthy breaks at the beginning of the ride, but the timing ended up being such that we arrived in Sderot against a dramatic foreground of orange, red, and gold as the sun set and I was grateful for the colorful sky along with cool early evening air that ushered in our arrival to Sderot. In addition, by the last 40km of the ride, when we really got going without frequent stops, we spread out, and I enjoyed the freedom and solitude of the open stretch of road, which provided some nice alone time to enjoy the beauty of the land and get lost inside my head.

It was interesting to see the change in the topography of the land as the ride passed on, from the slow, long, curving hills of Jerusalem to the quick, steep up and down and long areas of flat terrain through Kiryat Gat and Sderot. The first part of the ride afforded dramatic, panoramic views of hills and yishuvim while the second half of the ride consisted mostly of open fields turned golden and brown by the dry summer heat and undeveloped land. 

When we arrived in Sderot we had a festive meal of Middle Eastern fare at a local restaurant and then proceeded to the yeshiva, where we were greeted by over a hundred Sderot residents for a Simchat Bet Hashoeva.

The residents of Sderot have been living in constant terror among a barrage of daily Kassam rocket attacks that receive little attention from both the government and the international media. The reason for this is two-fold: the rockets are rudimentary and highly inaccurate so they rarely kill, but instead maim with shrapnel, which is not considered very newsworthy. In addition, the residents of Sderot are mainly poor Russian and Ethiopian immigrants with little political clout. In other words, more often than not, the forgotten ones.

The festivities included music, singing, dancing, and in my opinion, a really bad comedian who kept making stupid jokes about Americans. It was funny (and also a little awkward) to be singing and dancing in the yeshiva still in my cycling clothes with my Camelbak.

Overall, it was a very uplifting day but I look forward to the day when we don’t need to ride to Sderot for solidarity and we can just do it for fun. As one of my fellow cyclists commented while being interviewed when asked why he was doing the ride, “Because we are Sderot and Sderot is us.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Now if only our government and the international community could appreciate this.

In the moments that the sun set directly upon our cycling envoy and cast a glow over the land, before night fell, I pedaled alone on the shoulder of highway leading to Sderot through the thick silence of dusk. No sirens, no Kassams, just the rhythmic sound of the turn of my pedals and the rotation of my chain. I could see a few cyclists ascending the hill in front of me and if I turned my head I could see a few colorful dots behind. I was in a complete state of peace in what some consider a war zone, but how could I not be? I knew that even in Sderot, as my fellow cyclist implied, we are still home.

Today I celebrated the one year anniversary of my aliyah. Here are some pictures from my aliyah flight one year ago.Shabbat shalom.

Everyone has heard the familiar Israeli adage:
“Maybe means yes.
 No means maybe.”

I am giving an hour-long department seminar next week. I am mildly terrified to put it lightly after watching many of my co-workers descend into a panic the month before. And I’ve observed one or two of them sitting in front of Powerpoint weeks before crafting elaborate animations illustrating their experimental schemes. Animations so fancy that they can dance, play basketball, and oh you know, pipette and analyze data for you. In other words, robots.

Today I was sitting at my desk with my eyes staring into space, most likely drooling or foaming at the mouth (while mechanically consuming about 600 grams of peanut M&Ms – thanks Dad) when SK stopped by my desk. “You know, it’s so great that you’re so cool about this.” “Cool about what?” “Your seminar next week. I mean you seem really calm.” And I guess it’s true, being in a self-induced coma was a pretty calm thing to do. “I wouldn’t say that I am so cool, I am just … thinking,” I replied.

About an hour later RA breezed by with one of his three major pieces of advice about life: “Ohhhh bayyyy-beeee you don’t know what you’re missing!” (Sex… his second major piece of advice about life is that I should bring my graphing calculator on my next date and nonchalantly pull it from my pocket “because it is very prestigious” and his third piece of advice is that I should eat pork). 

Next it’s ST at my desk. “So I hear you volunteered to give the seminar next week. You go girl!!! When I heard I thought ‘Alissa is so awesome! She’s only been here six months and she volunteered!’” “Volunteered??? Who said I volunteered!?!?” “Oh, LO told me, she told everyone that – that you volunteered. I mean didn’t you?”

“She told me about six weeks ago that I had to present and I said, ‘Really?’ and she said ‘Yes’ so I said okay.” “Oh honey, you totally volunteered, then. You just need to become more Israeli. But don’t feel bad, you’re changing already, you really are. Now let’s practice you saying ‘no’ without laughing a few more times.”

“No. I can’t practice right now. I need to work on my seminar,” I say as I turn back to the computer screen keeping a straight face just long enough for her to slip out the door before returning to my usual self: a goofy American-Israeli consuming an inordinate number of colorful candies in front of a computer screen in a Jerusalem lab on a hot August afternoon. After all, I volunteered for this.

Dear Gilad,

What I remember most about the day you were kidnapped, 25 June 2006, were your thick glasses. In later pictures, pictures your family got to choose and send to the press, you would be wearing more stylish frames or no glasses at all. But what I remember on that first day, the day when the summer began to unravel so quickly, the summer of my own aliyah, were your thick glasses and your shy, childish grin beaming onto the newspaper page.

I thought you looked very young and also, no offense, like a dork. The newspapers said you had a low military profile so you chose to serve in a tank unit. But you still chose a combat unit when it would have been totally acceptable for you to serve as a jobnik. I would have done that, too.

We heard that you are good at physics and math, that you are quiet and gentle, and also that you can make anyone laugh. We don’t know much more about you than that. It’s been over a year since you were kidnapped, but still, you are in the headlines here almost every day. I think that means we haven’t given up yet on your return. We may be a generally impatient people, but we are equally as stubborn.

I hope that you haven’t given up either; I hope your life is not a cruel, taunting game and that you haven’t lost your imagination and the gift of blocking out reality by getting lost inside your head. I hope that when you are sleeping, you can still dream of beautiful things. If I am lonely sometimes, I cannot imagine your loneliness. If I miss my family, I cannot imagine how much you must miss yours.

And I wonder what it is like, to have been Israel’s looking glass for the past 14 months. When we look in the mirror, we see you smiling back – your thick glasses and shy grin – and then we see our own reflection. You did not choose this and yet here you are; our country’s reaction to your plight a recording of our own blunderings, our own wavering and indecision.

First we reasoned that we would not give into extortion, that there would be no prisoner exchange. If we give in, we will pay the consequences with even more similarly heart-wrenching abductions by setting the precedent that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is an effective bargaining chip, we thought. So we said that we would exercise tough love; we would not give in. There would be no prisoner exchange.

We thought about sending in a rescue mission but we were haunted by the botched rescue attempt of Nachson Waxman and then we got distracted with the Lebanon War. Many of us thought you may have been dead all along, but then in mid-September of last year, a letter in your handwriting came.

Finally we were ready to consider the prisoner exchange and then there was the constant back-and-forth, newspaper headlines assuring of your release any day, any hour, any minute, really. The negotiations stopped and started undulating with the back-and-forth of quiet and trouble in the region and again we saw our country’s own reflection in your plight.

Then on the one year anniversary of your capture, the audio tape was delivered. In it you read a message, its content probably dictated to you by your abductors. You implored us to accept a prisoner exchange and you said that your health was deteriorating; that you needed to be hospitalized. But soon after, the talks all but ended with the Hamas coup in Gaza. Now we hear of renewed talks, but are we more cautious this time? Or are we still convinced that it could be any day, any hour, any minute?

Where did we go wrong in this whole mess – what should we have done differently? I am not sure, but I am humbled by my inability to answer these questions. As we enter a new Jewish year, I hope the government will pick up its pace. I hope that we stay stubborn and defiant and continue to pray for and believe in your safe return. And I hope this year will be the one that marks the end of your nightmare.

I am haunted by knowing that you exist and think and breathe only a few kilometers away from where I type and yet you live in a parallel universe that may as well be on a different planet. But mostly I am haunted by your thick, dorky glasses and your wide, shy grin staring back through our nation’s looking glass, recording our rise and fall, our triumphs and failures, like a seismograph.

Happy 21st birthday, Gilad. I hope that for your 22nd birthday, you’ll be home.

List of Israel’s Missing Soldiers
Prayer for Missing Israeli Soldiers