Juda Honickman is Spokesperson for One Israel Fund
I know that sometimes what I write sounds intense.
I know it can feel like a lot. Like I'm pushing. Like I want something from you.
I want to explain why.
It's not anger. It's not politics. It's not a guilt trip.
It's this: I wake each morning in the Judean hills, on land our people have shed blood for, prayed over, and longed for across two thousand years. I have fruit trees on my land. My children play in the backdrop of where Jewish kings walked. The hills outside my window look exactly like the hills in Tanach. Because they are.
And every single day I'm aware, and I can't stop being aware, that I'm not living this only for myself.
I'm living it for you too.
I say that as someone who didn't grow up here. I grew up in New York. I know the life you're living because I lived it. I know what it costs to leave; the comfort, the community, everything familiar. I'm not writing from some place of lifelong certainty. I made a choice. I live with it every day. And I have never regretted it. Not once. Not even on the hard days.
And there are hard days. I have stood at graves of people who died for living where I live. I have held my kids a little tighter on nights when the news was bad. There is fear here, and grief here, and a weight that doesn't lift.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
But I know something now that I couldn't have known from New York: it's worth it. Not just for me. For something much bigger than me.
Because what we're doing here, everyone who came, everyone who stayed, everyone who shows up every single day, we're not just living our lives. We are maintaining the only sovereign Jewish address on earth. The only place where our calendar is the calendar of the state. Where Hebrew is the language of the street and the argument and the love song.
We are holding that. For you. For your children. For the Jewish future that requires this place to exist.
It belongs to every Jew who ever said next year in Jerusalem and meant it, even a little.
I am living the prayer our grandparents prayed and I don't take it lightly.
So when I write something sharp, when the urgency comes through and it feels like too much, like I am pushing, that's what's behind it. The weight of holding something on behalf of people who may not even know we’re holding it for them.
Living here is a calling, and it isn’t just mine, it is yours too.
This isn't about guilt. I'm not asking you to feel bad about where you are. I'm asking you to know that we think about you.
When we plant, we plant for you.
When we build, we build for you.
When we hold this ground through everything it demands; the wars, the worry, the grief that becomes just part of the texture of life here, we are holding it for you too.
When our brothers and sisters get killed for living here, that too is for you.
And we can't wait for you to be here.
Not as a demand. As a longing.
What we are living is not a concept or a cause. It's a home. And there are people here keeping it warm until you get here. People who love you without having met you, who are doing the hard and beautiful and sometimes brutal work of being here so that when you're ready, if you're ever ready, there is something real to come home to.
So yes, I'll keep writing with urgency. I'll keep saying the hard things. Not to shake you or shame you, but because I love you and I believe in what we're building and what God has promised us.
Come. Or don't. But just know that we have you in mind.
This land is yours too.