March 12, 2026
The following column originally appeared on Substack.
The airport is almost empty.
Ben Gurion on a normal day is controlled chaos, queues, noise, families with too much luggage, that specific energy of a place where everyone is going somewhere. Today it’s quiet in a way that feels wrong. A few check-in lines open. A handful of people. Voices in languages I’m still trying to place, Russian, French, something I think is Portuguese, Hebrew, English with accents from everywhere.
Two flights an hour. Seventy people per flight.
That’s what they’re allowing out.
I pulled in this morning with my parents, who drove me here, one last thing they could do before handing me back to the world. We hadn’t even gotten the bags out of the car when the siren went off.
We ran inside together. The terminal was nearly empty, but the staff was everywhere, calm and deliberate, moving people toward the shelter with the quiet authority of those who have done this before and will do it again. Nobody panicked. Nobody needed to be told twice. We found the shelter, we waited, and when the all-clear came, we walked back out into a mostly empty airport like it was just part of the morning.
I landed on a Thursday. Came for my parents’ anniversary. The war started that Saturday, and they never asked my permission to stay.
Today is its ninth day. I’m leaving on its terms, not mine.
The route home is not a straight line.
Tel Aviv to Athens on Air Haifa, an airline I’d never heard of before this week. Enough time in Athens to decompress before the long leg home. Then Delta to JFK. Then home to Detroit.
I’ve been saying the word home so many times that it’s started to lose its shape.
I’m in line now. Around me, a dozen languages, a mostly empty terminal, the specific silence of a place that is usually anything but.
That’s something. That’s enough to start with.
Part Two: Leaving
Written somewhere over the Mediterranean
The security line was small.
Maybe twenty people. In any other version of Ben Gurion, that would feel like a gift. Today it felt like a wound. This airport moves tens of thousands of people on a normal day. Today it was us, a handful of strangers with boarding passes and nowhere to be except out.
Nobody said much. But you could feel everything.
Anxiety. Frustration. Anger at the situation, at the timing, at whatever had brought each of us to this particular line on this particular morning. But underneath all of it, and I think everyone there knew this even if nobody said it, was fear. The anger and the frustration were just the clothes fear wears when it doesn’t want to be seen.
The security staff was kind. Genuinely kind. Not performatively, not professionally, actually kind. The way people are when they understand what you’re carrying without needing you to explain it.
After security, I walked into the emptiest version of Ben Gurion I have ever seen.
Entire sections of the terminal were closed off so people wouldn’t wander. Gates dark. Shops shuttered. The terminal felt like a held breath.
Except for one coffee shop.
Almost everyone in the airport was in it. I got in line, ordered, found a seat, and looked around at the people who were leaving. Different languages. Different ages. Different reasons for being here. All of us were waiting for the same thing: a plane, a departure, a return to something that felt normal.
As I walked to my gate, I started doing the thing you do when you’re about to leave somewhere that cost you something—taking inventory and running the list.
My family, who hosted me. Friends who made sure my person was okay back home. Coworkers who were more worried about my safety than the work. A wife who held everything together while holding her breath. Identities, Israeli and American, that gave me the tools to navigate this and, ultimately, a path out when the path opened.
Lucky. Not deserving. Not entitled. Lucky.
My plane was small.
Eighty seats. Propellers. The kind of aircraft that reminds you of flying is still, technically, a miracle.
Boarding was emotional in ways I didn’t fully expect. Relief and grief in the same moment. Something about walking onto that plane felt like a goodbye I hadn’t prepared for to the country. To the family I was leaving behind. To the version of myself that had spent these days learning what he was made of.
We took off.
The flight felt like the shortest and longest I’ve ever taken. I watched the coastline disappear and didn’t look away until there was nothing left to see.
When we touched down in Athens, I felt something release in my chest that I hadn’t realized I was holding.
I was on my way home.
Not there yet. But moving. Finally, actually moving.
Part Three: Athens
Written at the airport, heading to JFK
I had a full day in Athens.
The last time I was here was on our honeymoon. One night, my person and I wandered the city, finding a small French-Greek restaurant, sitting across from each other and doing something that felt both spontaneous and completely right, a makeshift Shabbat, just the two of us, in a city that wasn’t ours, at a table that felt like it was.
I’ve been carrying that memory around all day.
When I got to my hotel, I looked out the window and saw a protest.
Large. Loud. Anti-war, pro the current regime in Iran, right across the street from where I was standing.
I had just spent days inside one version of this conflict. I stepped off a plane in Athens and walked straight into another perspective. A different crowd, different signs, different language, same war, seen from the other side of the argument.
I stood at the window for a while.
War is bad and ugly. People deal with it differently. That much I know. That much I think most people, if they’re honest, agree on, even when they agree on nothing else.
I didn’t go down. I just watched. Then I closed the curtain and went to find lunch.
I went back to the restaurant.
The same small French-Greek place. I wasn’t sure it would still be there. It was. I sat down, ordered, and let myself just be somewhere, somewhere that had nothing to do with sirens or safe rooms or closed airspace or the particular exhaustion of days of managed fear.
It didn’t disappoint.
I thought about that Shabbat dinner. Two people at the beginning of something, sitting in a city between two places, finding a way to make it feel like home for one night. I thought about those same two people nearly two weeks apart — her holding everything together in Michigan, me trying to hold myself together in Tel Aviv. Different kind of beginning. Same foundation.
The food was good. The memory was better.
Throughout the day, I kept hearing sirens.
Not real ones. Phantom sounds, a car horn, a distant alarm, something in the street that my nervous system had already decided to categorize. Nine days of war don’t disappear the moment you land somewhere safe. It just goes quiet for a while, waiting.
I don’t know how long that lasts. I’ll find out.
I’m at the airport now. JFK in a few hours. Detroit after that.
This journey ends physically soon. A gate, a plane, a landing, a drive home. My person. My dog. My own bed.
But I’ve learned enough over these days to know that the places we’ve been don’t stay behind when we leave them. They come with us, in the phantom sirens, in the gratitude that’s still too large to fully name, in the memory of a restaurant that was there on the best day and there again on one of the hardest.
Nine days of war.
I’m almost home.
Part Four: Home
Written at home, Detroit
The Athens airport felt like any other airport.
That’s the thing nobody tells you. You leave a place that has been loud and heavy and urgent; you pass through security; you find your gate; and the world continues. Families eating. People scrolling. Announcements in multiple languages about flights to places where nothing is happening.
I looked for it in other people’s faces. And I found it, just barely. A few familiar looks on the flight. A particular jumpiness at certain sounds. The kind of thing you only recognize if you’ve been carrying it yourself.
But mostly, nothing. The world hadn’t noticed. Or had noticed and moved on. Which, I’ve learned, is both the most disorienting and the most stabilizing thing about coming back from somewhere hard.
JFK was the same.
Shutdowns somewhere in the building, announcements, delays. Everyone is just living their lives and moving through the airport the way people do when the urgency belongs to someone else.
I’ve been thinking about the Book of Job lately. I recently read an interpretation that sat with me, the idea that we are a small part of a vast universe, and that what happens to us, as real and heavy as it is, is a statistical anomaly in the larger scheme of things. Not diminished and not dismissed. Just proportionate.
For some reason, walking through JFK that evening, that helped.
Not because what happened didn’t matter. But because the world continuing around me wasn’t indifferent. It was just the world being the size it actually is.
I landed in Detroit.
Got into a Lyft. Watched the familiar streets pass in the dark. Pulled up to the house around 11:30 pm.
I walked in.
They were both in the living room. My wife and our dog, asleep together, the particular kind of sleep you have when the thing you’ve been waiting for has finally happened, and your body lets go. The kind of sleep that looks like relief.
My dog woke up first.
She sniffed. Something familiar. She looked up, and then she was all movement, all joy, all wiggly and certain and completely without ambiguity about how she felt. Her Abba was home. She started licking my face and howling, which is her version of a standing ovation.
Which woke my wife.
She looked at me the way you look at someone when you’ve been holding your breath, and you can finally stop. Happy and calm and finally, actually at ease. The kind of look that doesn’t need words because the words would just be he’s here, he’s back, he’s in one piece, and also, I’m fairly certain, something about hiding my passport.
I’ve been trying to find the right way to end this.
But I think that’s it. That living room. That dog. That look.
Nine days of war. A Thursday landing that became something else entirely. Safe rooms and phantom sirens and a protest outside a hotel window and a restaurant that was there on the best day and there again on one of the hardest.
And then home. 11:30 pm. Two individuals asleep in a living room who loved me before any of this happened and will love me after.
That’s the proportion. That’s the thing the Book of Job was trying to say.
The world is vast. The universe doesn’t notice. And somehow that makes the living room matter more, not less.
I’m home.
Written across four locations: Ben Gurion Airport, somewhere over the Mediterranean, Athens International Airport, and home, Detroit. March 2026.
This piece was written with the assistance of AI, which helped me find the words for something I’m still learning to articulate.
