If you’re Jewish in Israel, whether you’re religious or not, you have Shabbat dinner with family. For years, my brother-in-law and his wife made the two-hour drive every Friday from Kiryat Shmona on the northern border to my in-laws in Ramat HaSharon so as not to miss the family meal.
By contrast, once I left New York for New England and, later, the West Coast, I saw my parents once every few months, and this was the norm. This process of drift started in my parents’ generation. My mother grew up in a close-knit neighborhood of cousins in the Bronx, but adulthood took her first to the Mecca of Manhattan, where she met my father, a displaced New Jersey boy, and later to Queens. Along with the rest of their generation, my parents’ extended families scattered across the greater Metropolitan area, and then across the country.
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