"... With Tears, With Joy..."

This beautiful paragraph comes from an article by Noah J. Efron, American-born chairman of the graduate program for history and philosophy at Bar-Ilan University (where my late mother attended in 1956) in Israel:


In the summer of 2004, while I watched television and saw Gal Friedman receive an Olympic gold medal for windsurfing, "Hatikva" playing in Athens, to my alarm tears streamed down my face. I looked at my wife and her face was streaked with tears, too, and she said, "Look what we have done." She wasn't talking about the handsome, determined kid on the sailboard. She was talking about everything, about a hundred years of Jews who came to this place with nothing and built something. She was talking about the roads and the trees and the art and the music and the army and the Knesset and the universities and the million Russians and half-million Haredim and 60,000 Ethiopians. About loving this odd place so much and about all the heartbreak that goes with it.