The Broken Bridge in an Unbroken Land
Finding health, hope, and wholeness in a fractured Israel.
Dear Healthy Jew,
These are tough days in Israel.
The battles in Gaza drag on. Scores of hostages, alive and dead, languish in brutal Hamas captivity. Tens of thousands of reserve soldiers are still in active duty. We all mourn lost families, friends, and neighbors. We’re alone and afraid.
Most worrisome, the unity we all felt after October 7 has long fallen away. The cracks in society are widening: between religious and secular, this type of religious and that type of religious, and, of course, the political right and left. There are whispers of civil war.
And yet, throughout it all, the Land of Israel remains the living body of the Nation of Israel.
Not just any life, but a healthy, balanced life. As I explain in my book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness (based on this post), Israel teaches us healthy living under any condition by seamlessly blending together a striking array of opposite landscapes: wet and dry, warm and cold, high and low. That’s what health means - the equilibrium between opposing extremes.
If we listen carefully to the land - not only its troubled people - we’ll hear calls of hope and healing.
As the land of balance, Israel also sits at the geographical and biospheric centers of the Old World.
If you drive south from the fertile Shfelah region (where I live in Bet Shemesh), heading toward the Negev, you’ll notice the greenery gradually get thinner until, almost without warning, you find yourself in an arid desert.
The greenery to the north stretches all the way to Europe, and the desert to the south heads toward Africa and Asia. I shared much more about this too in my book, based on this Healthy Jew post:
On a recent hike in the Purah Nature Reserve - a beautiful sprawling wilderness right at the edge of the desert - I came across this broken Turkish bridge across the Purah riverbed:
It’s almost fair to say that by crossing this bridge you’d leave the Shfelah and enter the Negev, moving from Europe’s green to Africa and Asia’s brown.
As I sat on the bridge, I pondered how places like this presents the solution to our current crisis: a deep appreciation of the Land of Health, and a just-as-deep yearning to know God in this perfect place for imperfect people.
There’s hope, my friends.
In case you didn’t see (at the top of this post) my message to you from the broken bridge, here it is again:
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I look forward to hearing from you!
Be well,
Rabbi Shmuel Chaim Naiman
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