When our plane landed at around 5pm on Tuesday I turned to my friend to say, “Are you going to kiss the ground when you get off the plane?”. It was her first time in Israel and I couldn’t help but think back to a little over four years ago when I initially stepped foot on Israeli ground. She looked at me like I was crazy and replied, “ew no! That’s so unsanitary”. I smiled in acknowledgment but I remembered as my mom and sister and I walked out of our plane that we had been on for over ten hours, without any regard for cleanliness or reason. We bent down on the ground that time four years ago praising the Lord our God king of the Universe for giving us this life, sustaining us through our flight, and enabling us to reach this time.

This was but a slightly modernized example of the quote from Maimonides that was read to us from the peak of Tel Gezer that said, “the greatest of the Sages would kiss the borders of the Land of Israel and kiss its stones and roll around in its dirt, and so too Scripture states: Your servants take delight in its stones, and cherish its dust” As this quote was read to me over looking the various geographic regions of Israel, all I could think about was that first time in Israel or even, for people like my mom, those who were returning home after a very, very, long journey.

It was that desire to be intimate with the land that drove all of the people in Israel sage or servant to get the same dust of the earth under their fingernails that I had under my own after searching through the ruins of a once powerful city. Tel Gezer was a monument to the rise and fall, the departure and return of people over the course of thousands of years dating all the way back from Avraham Avinu to me.

Looking across the great expanse to the north, the south, the east, and the west It’s not only the intimacy with the land that is felt but an intimacy between myself and each layer of history.