The sweetness of milk and honey.

Like a good American, I love cereal. Itty bits of stuff you can pick at in milk and eat with a spoon? Awesome.

I bought Honey Nut Cheerios in Israel for the first time, and when I took my first crunch of the stuff this morning, you know what I got a mouthful of? Milk and Cheerios. No honey here. Honey Nut Cheerios is not that sweet in the land of milk and honey. Maybe it has something to do with Nestle manufacturing it. Or maybe when I was younger, anything that wasn’t string beans was sweet.

Anyway, it left me a bit disappointed and then I thought, what a metaphor for the leading bodies of this country right now. And then I thought, what a great and easy-to-forget lesson to share with all the incoming olim this summer.

We olim make aliyah to Israel: the place where Jews have felt the ultimate connection for thousands of years. The land of flowing milk, natural honey, holy olive oil, ancient forefathers, tragic temples, collective memories.

We don’t make aliyah to the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency, the Israel Defense Forces, Ehud Olmert, or even Shimon Peres. We don’t make aliyah to illogical bureaucratic systems, arsim in the supermarket or choking on language, as much as it may seem like it.

We make aliyah to the place we’ve felt inside for so long, the place we know as the future, the land of milk and honey. And although it’s not as sweet as we always imagined it, well… cereal is still awesome, you know?