Steve Ornstein – Personal Reflection as Yom Kippur Approaches.
As Kol Nidre Approaches: The Blessings That Still Hold Me. Yom Kippur begins Sunday evening. The streets of Kfar Saba will grow quieter. Cars will disappear. The air itself will feel different, as if the whole country is drawing one long, shared breath before we stand before the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.
I will light a candle for Liz. Not because I need a reminder. She is with me every morning when I sit in silence, every time a grandchild runs through the door, every time I pass the photographs I placed around this house so I can stop and look at her face. Elisheva. My Liz. Forty-eight years. Companion, mother of our three children, grandmother who made each of them feel like the most special person in the room, student of Torah whose quiet presence taught more than many sermons.
We met on a high brick wall overlooking a lake at Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York. I offered her tea. I kissed her shoulder. Something in me recognized her immediately. She was already a woman in the fullest sense—light and serious at once, rooted and searching. We married among friends who understood that love and spirit were not separate things. We raised Rachel, Ori (Josh), and David. We made Aliyah in 1979 with three young children, returned to the States for family reasons, and came home again because Israel had already claimed us. This land is not an idea for me. It is the place where my life finally made sense.
Liz never stopped being grateful, even when her body grew weak. In her last days, she would light up when the grandchildren arrived. They ran straight to her for those long, unhurried hugs. She told each of them how unique they were. They spoke to her as if they already knew she lived in a wider space than most of us. I watched that and understood what we had been given.
Now they are six beautiful grandchildren. They still come. They still hug their Saba the way they hugged their Savta. My three adult children have become remarkable human beings—independent, compassionate, willing to take the risks that life in this country sometimes demands. My son-in-law Ido has folded me into family outings, vacations, and quiet Jewish meditation retreats in the north. These are not small things. They are the reason I still wake up grateful.
I miss her. I miss the ordinary miracle of sitting across from her at the Shabbat table, of hearing friends seek her insight, of walking through the garden she tended. I miss one more kiss, one more moment of simply being together. The tears still come easily. They are not only grief. They are the overflow of a life that was full.
Yom Kippur asks us to look clearly at what we have been given and what we have left unfinished. I look at the life Liz and I built—first in America, then here in the Jewish homeland—and I see more blessing than any man has a right to claim. Three children who grew into themselves. Grandchildren who carry both of us forward. A home in Israel that feels, after all the wandering, like the place I was always meant to rest.
This country is noisy, imperfect, stubborn, and alive. It is also the only place I have ever felt completely at home. Even now, with all the pain this land has known, I have no desire to be anywhere else. The daily kindnesses, the mixture of languages in the street, the knowledge that we are writing the next chapter of an ancient story—these things still astonish me.
I will cherish the friendships, past and present, that have been a saving grace throughout my life.
These days I am blessed with regular gatherings at a café with some of my friends, where we share freely our concerns, our jokes, and that quiet magic that weaves our energies together until they transcend our separate selves.
I am also blessed to meet friends one by one, in quieter, more personal conversations that carry their own depth and warmth.
Listening is the divine grace that lifts these relationships into a unity of being.
Then we go our separate ways. Yet those hours we spend together—whether gathered around a table or sitting with one friend alone—are the living blessing of friendship itself.
As the fast begins, I will sit with the silence Liz taught me to love. I will remember her laugh. I will feel the grandchildren’s arms around me. I will thank the Source of all life for the 48 years we were given, for the three souls we raised, for the little ones who still run toward love without hesitation, and for the privilege of growing old in the land of our people.
G’mar chatima tova.
May we all be sealed for a year of life, of return, of quiet joy, and of the kind of love that outlasts even absence.
