Letters Across the Table

For the friend across the table.

You have loved Israel from a long way away. You have stood for her in prayer, given through your church, sat through the briefings and taken the trip and come home with a deeper devotion than most of the people in your zip code.

This book is the letter back. Thirty-one letters across a year, written from Tel Aviv kitchens and a moshav in the Negev, from a hospital ward in Petah Tikva and the ridge towns of Judea and Samaria, from a coffee shop in Windsor and a Pesach seder where a Holocaust survivor sat at the table.

Behind the door these letters open is the part your tradition rarely gets to see from inside: the calendar built around one specific country's harvests, the practice of forgiveness that runs in cycles of seven days and one year and seven years, the peoplehood that has religion inside it rather than a religion that has a people around it.

The chair is pulled out. The door is open.

Not a defense of Israel. An invitation across the table.