Dear Friends,
Every week I write to you about the fight for Judea and Samaria, about the war being waged against Israel in the press, about what is actually happening on our borders. And every week I run into the same wall: I can tell you what a commander on the northern border said. I cannot put you in the room with him.
This March I can. From March 7–14, 2027, I am leading a small group through Israel together with Dr. David Wurmser. If his name is unfamiliar, it shouldn't be. He served on the National Security Council and advised the White House on the Middle East across multiple administrations, and he is widely regarded as one of the finest Middle East analysts alive. What I keep thinking about is not just the sites we will see, but the conversations between them — coming out of a Knesset meeting or off a border overlook and hearing Dr. Wurmser tell us what we just witnessed actually means. That is a seminar you cannot buy and cannot replicate.
Here is what I mean by access. We are going to the Knesset for private meetings with people who hold real power, and having lunch with public figures who will speak freely because the room is small. On the northern border we are being briefed by military experts and by Druze community leaders — not looking at Syria through a fence with a guide reading from a script, but hearing from the men who watch that frontier for a living. In Samaria we are standing in Shiloh with the archaeologists working the site, and then meeting the regional leadership of the heartland at the overlooks they defend.
Yes, we are going south. But we are not going as tourists filing past a memorial. We are sitting with first responders and with the people who ran toward the gunfire on October 7th, and with families who chose to rebuild on the same ground.
None of this scales, which is why we are capping the group at fifteen to twenty people. A senior official will speak candidly to a small group of serious people and will deliver a canned speech to a tour bus. Everything else is at that same level: the Mamilla in Jerusalem, the Galei Kinneret on the Kinneret, the Carlton in Tel Aviv, every meal, every site, every gratuity handled. This is a first-class trip in every respect, and it is priced accordingly. What you are actually paying for, though, is the week you will spend among the people deciding what happens next in this country.
You have been following this fight for years. This is the week you stop following it from a distance and stand inside it.
Rabbi Pesach Wolicki
