Scanning the decades of memory, my mind stops on one brief stretch that stands for much of what Israel means to me. It begins with a flight to Israel during the first Gulf War in 1991. I kept hearing a sweet but melancholy tune from the plane’s speaker system, one that seemed to reflect the mood of every passenger; someone said it was by Kenny G. On the ground in Jerusalem, during one alert of an Iraqi missile attack, I sat in a sealed room with old friends as we put on gas masks; the look on their faces, more disappointment than fear, was like seeing them naked, and I felt overwhelming sadness. But one of the motives for that trip was knowing I would feel better in Israel than I would viewing the war from afar, that community trumps anxiety. One day I went to a hotel housing newly arrived Russian immigrants. When I asked a group how they felt coming in the midst of a war, they looked at me as if I was nuts. They would take Israel, scuds and all, over what they left behind.

Three months later I was back in Israel, in the midst of another big story. Watching what looked like a scene from the Bible, I stood on the tarmac at Ben-Gurion Airport as thousands of Ethiopian Jews arrived. Would our ancestors, I wondered, view the arrival on jumbo jets as less miraculous than the parted waters of the Red Sea? I half expected celestial music to pour from the sky.

For almost 2,000 years, a bad day for Jews was often followed by expulsion or massacre. In modern Israel, a bad day is usually followed by a good one—and even when you have a rough day, consider where you are. Later that same year I heard that Kenny G tune again and asked if someone could identify it. It was called “Going Home.”