My life was shaped by a hundred tiny yeses—quiet moments when something inside of me answered a voiceless question. My first yes came long before I even knew the word “Hineni.” I was a little girl in the Israeli town of Bat Yam, where my grandparents lived and where my parents would transplant us, every year, for months at a time. To me, it wasn’t a vacation and Israel wasn’t just a place we visited. It was my second home. It was part of who we were. Every summer they brought us back, making sure we knew where we came from and who our people were. They taught us how that connection and that responsibility didn’t stop at the edge of an ocean.
During one such stay, my older brother took me to the neighborhood pitzutziya, where I got a grape-flavored ice pop and he chose a lemon one. We shared a bag of salted sunflower seeds as we wandered outside. I remember my sticky purple fingers. The August heat. The aged white government building across the street. The bus stop in front of it.
Then a bus pulled up. Soldiers stepped off. They looked exhausted. Their green uniforms clung to them in the summer heat. Their berets sat slightly askew on their shoulders after a long day. M-16s rested on tired shoulders. They weren’t standing in formation. They weren’t heroes in a movie. They were just nineteen-year-olds who happened to be our soldiers. And I couldn’t stop staring.
Even now, as I write this, decades later, I can still feel the butterflies that filled my chest. It wasn’t excitement. It was pride. It was belonging. I remember thinking, with a certainty that only children seem capable of, I want to be them. One day, I will be. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that was my first Hineni moment.
That day, I didn’t just fall in love with the soldiers. I also fell in love with the idea of service. Not because I romanticize war—quite the opposite—but because people who serve carry responsibilities and burdens that the rest of us pray we never have to carry, and they do so with quiet dignity. My parents never taught us to worship the uniform. They taught us to love the people inside it. Loving them has always meant wanting them to have to carry a little less.
The summer I turned ten offers another vivid memory of such an early Hineni moment. I wanted to understand the country that had captured my heart—my country—not only through its people, its streets, its sounds, and its stories, but through its language, too. I was already fluent in Hebrew, but I needed to be able to read it. To decipher its letters. To decode street signs, store names, and graffiti. Reading Hebrew felt like more than learning an alphabet. It felt like learning another way to belong.
My Saba Yosef took me to the mall and bought me a workbook called Hebrew at Your Ease. I sat with it for hours, slowly memorizing and sounding out letters until they became words. By the time I returned home to the U.S., I had taught myself to read and write Hebrew.
The passion I felt for my heritage didn’t stay confined to my grandparents’ place in Bat Yam. Back in the States, I asked my parents to transfer me to a Jewish school. Another small “yes.” Another quiet step toward a place and a people that were already my home.
Years later, I became the first American-born member of my family to return to Israel and volunteer for military service. Years after that, my American-born nephews would follow suit. I wish I could tell you serving was everything I dreamed it would be. Instead, I had to be medically discharged. I didn’t contribute the way I had wanted to. I have never admitted publicly how ashamed I felt—and in many ways still do. I had wanted so badly to give something back to the country and the people I loved. Suddenly, I couldn’t. Or so I believed. But then came the summer of 2014, and with it, another opportunity to answer the call.
Hineni isn’t necessarily saying, “I know exactly what to do.” It’s saying, “I can’t pretend this isn’t my problem anymore.”
I had just graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s in speech-language pathology when a war broke out following the kidnapping and murder of three young Jewish boys: Gilad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach. I had landed my first real job in Harlem, and my career was only beginning. Yet all I wanted to do was quit. I wanted to go home, to Israel, and help. But I couldn’t enlist. I wasn’t eligible to do so. So I asked myself a different question: If I can’t serve that way, what can I do? How can I be of service?
I started raising money. I flew to Israel with desperately needed equipment, which I delivered to combat soldiers. I showed up at rehabilitation hospitals, determined to volunteer as a speech-language pathologist, only to find out that I wasn’t licensed in Israel and that the paperwork would take months to complete. Frustrated, I spent my days visiting rehabilitation units instead and offering them my expertise, and most of all, my friendship. Somewhere along the way, the patients I supported became like my little brothers. I sat with them, listened as they strummed their guitars, lounged with them out on the lawn, watching the trails of intercepted rockets streak across the summer sky before scrambling to the shelters together. When each attack was over, we’d come back out, tune the guitars again, and keep singing. One day, I asked them what they wanted most, expecting them to ask for something they had lost. Instead, they asked for something they missed: “A party. No guests. Just us.”
And so that’s what we did. I found a D.J. We fired up the grills and covered tables with food. For one night, the rehabilitation center was transformed into a raucous gathering of old friends. At three in the morning, Israeli musician Kobi Peretz showed up and sang under the stars. For a few hours, these patients were no longer wounded soldiers. They were twenty-year-old kids again. They were having fun again. Never a conscious decision, my heart had simply decided to say “yes” long before my head could catch up.
Then came October 7, 2023, the moment life asked me to show up again. There was no grand decision, dramatic realization, or weighing of options. As instinctive as breathing, I picked up the phone, asked how I could help equip the very soldiers who’d become my family long ago, and how I could help speak for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. My cousin, Omer Shem Tov, having been taken hostage into Gaza, was one of those people. Once again, life asked to keep showing up and I simply kept saying yes, one impossible day after another.
Just like earlier in my life, I found that my responsibility didn’t just vanish into thin air when the crisis ended. Instead, it simply changed shape. After Omer and the rest of the hostages were released, I began looking for new ways to make a difference. That search led me to found Emet Advocacy— an organization dedicated to helping people understand the Jewish and Israeli story, to building bridges where others put up walls, and to defending truth without surrendering compassion. At its core is a simple belief: that advocacy and humanity should never have to compete. The work changed. The responsibility did not.
People still ask me why I chose this work. The truth is, life decided for me and I simply stopped refusing it. When I try to trace the source of that refusal, all I see is that little girl in Bat Yam, sticky grape ice pop in one hand, sunflower seeds in the other, watching a bus full of tired soldiers step into the August heat. Sometimes I wonder what that little girl would think if she could see where that first yes eventually led. To The White House, to the United Nations, to hundreds of flights, to thousands of strangers, to five hundred and five days of fighting for my cousin’s life. To Emet Advocacy. That little girl couldn’t have imagined any of it. She only knew that when those tired young soldiers stepped off the bus, something inside her quietly called out to her: One day, you’ll show up for them.
Hineni isn’t necessarily saying, “I know exactly what to do.” It’s saying, “I can’t pretend this isn’t my problem anymore.”It’s answering the call. That little girl has been answering that call ever since. She just didn’t know the answer had a name.
Here I am.
Hineni.
