There has never lived, in all the long history of the world, a prouder husband than I. When my wife Rachel decided at 17 to relocate her life to Israel, no one who knew her doubted she would succeed. When this young woman, without contacts or allies, decided she would serve in a military unit that’s very difficult to get into, no one who knew her doubted she would succeed. When this immigrant with little Hebrew and even less knowledge of Israeli law and politics decided she would go to law school in Hebrew, it was obvious to all that she would do well, that the ex-Supreme Court justices who were her professors would come to know this force of nature like the rest of us. When she went into the public service and almost as her first job became legislative director for the coalition, no one was surprised. When she quickly became a fixture in the halls of power, respected and trusted by ultra-Orthodox MKs and by secular progressives alike, no one who knew her was surprised. A Jerusalem Post feature at the time titled something like, “the 10 most influential English speakers in the Israeli public service” featured her prominently. She was the only person on the list who didn’t work in English. When as a senior advisor to the environment minister, one of the major regulatory positions in government, she was tasked with handling the High Court petitions… When she volunteered for an NGO that cares for the children of African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv… When her sheer determination, all alone in the country, helped convince five of her seven siblings that a future in Israel is a better one, a happier one, one worth the effort… When I first met her - she was 21, I was 24, and I knew this was it - and was brushed off with a wave of her hand because she was too busy and too serious to deal with a boyfriend (although she’d let me buy dinner, as long as I understood that)… When, at long last, she joined the lobby, that astonishing wonder of an organization that found a way to bring a real public voice deep into the nooks and crannies of the legislative process, solving a vast problem that no democracy anywhere has yet solved and proving, despite mounting evidence otherwise, that there’s nothing wrong with a free society that can’t be fixed by a free society… And now, when she decided to take the big step of walking away from these wonders she helped build to go, like me, into the teaching game, responding to the sometimes scary challenges of this moment by urgently building a new generation of Jews and Israelis capable of facing them… In all this crazy journey, from those first begrudging dinners (I played it cool, I promise), standing beside this force of nature and watching amazed each time the world bent to her will, I learned what gratitude was. There has never been a prouder husband in all the history of the world. https://bird.makeup/@rachelgur/1852225279365615943
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