The first time my soon-to-be daughter-in-law visited our home, she brought boxes of beautiful dishes and platters as gifts. I looked at my son, who assured me that, “It’s a Moroccan thing”. A few months later, when he said, “Mummy,” his girlfriend and myself both turned around. I knew it was serious: “Mami” is a term of endearment in Hebrew — it has since been abandoned so that there is but one Mummy in the house.

Living in Israel may get you a darkon (passport) but it doesn’t necessarily make you Israeli. On Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day), when you bring a mini-grill, some hot dogs and hamburgers, a few buns and some cut vegetables to the local forest, you will find yourself next to a family whose generator is hooked up to a fridge and speakers, whose area is demarcated with crime scene tape and who’ve brought the family sofa out for the day.

On Pesach, your matzah and tuna, or cream cheese if you’re like us, will pale in comparison to the pots of hot food gracing the full meal being served by the family sitting at the table beside you in the park.

On family holidays you may get lucky, as did my dad and mum one hot summer day up north, when a family making a fully-loaded BBQ with homemade dips and speciality cuts of beef brought over plates piled with meat that could rival a chef’s restaurant.

My bewildered father, who doesn’t speak Hebrew, asked with hand gestures why they were giving him food. “For you, Sabba (grandfather),” was the answer.

While it’s true that my dad cannot handle Israeli drivers who consider indicators optional and horns obligatory, the grocer who checked in on them during Corona lockdowns and delivered their food to their door more than makes up for it.

Living here for 14 years means that you may have a Teudat Zehut (Israeli ID) but you’ll still be amazed at the Israeli tradition of parents making T-shirts emblazoned with the face of their soldier daughter, accompanied by the slogan, “this girl is on fire”, and who dress the entire family — from great grandfather to baby brother— in it to watch her officer’s graduation ceremony.

You’ll sit with Ethiopian, Bedouin, Druze, Charedi, Russian and every Israeli in between to cheer for your soldier under the hot Israeli sun.

And one day, your soldier may fall in love with another soldier, and they will meld their cultures into one family.

If you’re lucky, you’ll take your car, which seems to need repairs so much more often than when you lived in the “home country”, to a garage in a moshav where the family business is located among orange, grapefruit, pomelo and banana trees.

And you’ll be invited to sit in the garden on the swing chair to complete your article. You’ll recognise that what the world sees on television isn’t the real Israel. Daily, you see Arabs and Jews shopping, eating, riding buses and working together. Most especially in the hospitals, where so many medical professionals and pharmacists are Arab.

There’s something extraordinary about learning new things in your forties, fifties and seventies. And living across the world and marrying into different cultures is a gift.
Learning that the diaspora community you grew up in is just a small part of the world of Judaism, hearing stories of survival from across the globe, knowing that your grandchildren will descend from Jews from many countries but will live in the Jewish homeland, blending traditions and creating new ones, is a gift beyond riches.

If you’re blessed, you will learn to appreciate that you are part of the returning of the exiles and the joining together of the Jewish people. You will know (like me) that you cannot compete with Moroccan generosity, their ability to make three refrigerators’ worth of food in one day or the incredible tunes they know for Shabbat songs.

And that’s totally fine, because they don’t expect you to — you can be you and they can be them. And one of you will be Safta and the other Bubbie or Grandma. And you can both spoil the children rotten.

And every once in a while, if you miss something from the old country, you can visit that adorable little cafe run by an expat Brit and have high tea, even if it’s only 11:00 in the morning, as I was blessed to do this past week with my parents and sisters.

All while sitting in Jerusalem, the heart of our homeland and the centre of our collective history.