Quoting a story from Mishpacha:
Many years ago, when we lived not far from Niagara Falls, I took my mother, Mrs. Rose Stark a”h, an Auschwitz survivor, to see this wonder. She wasn’t easily impressed, but I was sure that this miracle of nature would finally move her.
She looked around, smiled, and said, “It’s really nice.”
Really nice?
I must have looked disappointed, because she gently explained: “It is beautiful. I see that. But it doesn’t touch my heart.”
Then she added something I never forgot. “When I see something beautiful in Eretz Yisrael — that moves me. It’s like the difference between appreciating the sweetness of other people’s children, and cherishing the nachas of your own.”
My mother lived the last 21 years of her life in Israel, and she never stopped seeing its beauty through that lens — through the heart.
These days, many of us enjoy traveling the world, taking in the wonders Hashem placed across the globe. But we should never lose sight of the wonder in our own land, the beauty of our hills and stones, our people and our paths. The beauty of Eretz Yisrael isn’t just spectacular — it’s personal. It’s the landscape of our story.