Lost - and Found - in Israel

I thank and acknowledge you, O living and eternal King, for having 
compassionately returned my soul to me; great is Your faith (in me). 
(The "Modeh Ani" prayer, said upon awakening)

by Stewart Weiss
August 15, 2018

The day I arrived in Israel, a quarter of a century ago, a close friend 
who had already been living here for several years offered me a piece 
of wisdom that continues to support and strengthen my aliyah. 
"You will face a lot of challenges in the years ahead and no lack of 
disappointments," he told me. "There will be times when you will be 
so frustrated, so disenchanted with life in this country that you will 
even contemplate leaving.

But then something will happen – either to you personally or to the 
country as a whole – that will reaffirm your decision and remind you 
what an amazing place this can be."

Not long ago, my niece was visiting the Grand Canyon in Arizona. 
Stopping to take a picture at the magnificent Mooney Falls, she 
accidentally dropped her phone. It fell into a whirlpool below and 
vanished. She let out a scream, not only because a smartphone today 
is a compact library, symphony and lifeline all in one, but because 
she is a serial picture-taker and her precious phone contained 
thousands of photos and videos. She and her friends searched for hours, 
but couldn't find the phone; she even returned the next day and looked 
again, but to no avail. The phone had vanished.

Fast forward one month. A group of Israeli kids were rafting near 
the canyon – is there any place on Earth that Israelis aren't visiting? – 
when one of them spotted the waterlogged phone. He thought he would 
discard it, but another boy took it and said, "It's a mitzvah to return 
a lost article; I'm going to somehow find the owner and get it back 
to him or her." So the young man removed the memory card, which was 
still intact, and scrolled through the pictures until he came upon 
a screenshot of my niece's Facebook page. He looked up the names 
visible in the picture and then searched through all their friends until, 
lo and behold, he finally saw a name he recognized; it was that of 
my son, with whom he served in the army! So he took the phone back 
with him to Israel and gave it to our family.

Some time later, my niece came on her first trip to Israel and was 
reunited with her precious phone/photo album.

She called her rescuer and pleaded to send him a reward. He refused 
any compensation. "Mitzvot are their own reward," he told her.

"Well, let me at least come and thank you in person," she said. 
"I'm studying in yeshiva now," he replied, "so I don't have much 
free time. Just knowing you got back your phone is thanks enough."

This is one of those feel-good stories that help to restore our faith 
in the kindness of strangers and the goodness of others. But as 
I thought about the concept of lost and found, it struck me as being 
particularly relevant to the current month of Elul and our 
fast-approaching New Year.

In A way, many of us also find ourselves "lost" at times. We wander 
dizzily and directionless through the days as they frantically 
speed by us, wondering where we are going with our lives and 
how we are spending the precious, finite minutes which our Creator 
has given us. It is precisely that sentiment we express each morning 
when we open our eyes and recite the Modeh Ani prayer, thanking 
God for returning to us our soul, which lay dormant throughout 
the night in a state of semi-death. We are buoyed by the knowledge 
that if the Almighty, in His eternal wisdom, saw fit to give us 
another day of life, then He must surely believe in our ability 
to make good use of that life.

Yet lost and found is not restricted to our individual lives.

It is also a collective syndrome and metaphor for national life 
in Israel. Our society at times resembles a stranger lost in the 
woods, searching desperately for the way back to civilization and 
normalcy. We wonder if there will ever be peace with our neighbors, 
and what the best way to accomplish it is. We hear voices – 
strident voices calling for actions ranging from conquest to 
capitulation, and we feel lost. We are proud of the miracles we have 
witnessed and performed in this marvelous country of ours, yet 
so many – including various writers who fill these very pages – 
seem ashamed to unabashedly raise the flag of the only Jewish state 
in existence. We continually vacillate between forging a unique 
identity of our own, complete with a distinct moral and civil code, 
or mimicking the mores and causes celebres of the world at large.

Though Elul is devoid of any Jewish holidays, it does contain 
the custom of sounding the shofar each morning. That sound 
is meant to be a bell, a beacon to those struggling to find 
their way out, to find their way home. It is a call to lose our 
uncertainty, our self-doubt, our incitement and our infighting – 
to find our common ground, our collective soul and the absolute 
confidence that we are not sacrifices to, but shapers of, 
our own glorious future.  
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The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra'anana; 
jocmtv@netvision.net.il