We were the last cohort to travel to Israel as part of the iCenter’s educator fellowship, a program that, for 18 years, trained Jewish educators to teach about Israel.
Sitting at HaMiffal, a creative, connective, art and community space in Jerusalem, during one of our final processing sessions, a facilitator asked: What will you take back with you? What is the theme of this experience?
As I looked around, I noticed a large art piece hanging from the ceiling. It resembled a waterfall suspended upside down in midair. Without overthinking, I answered: “Art hafuch.”
A few days before, we had traveled north to Haifa and visited Beit HaGefen. Like HaMiffal, Beit HaGefen is a center for arts and culture – one where Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Jewish Israelis come together to learn from one another, create art, and share stories.
As we toured the surrounding neighborhood, our guide stopped beneath a piece of public art: a rug hanging parallel to the ground, with a table attached beneath it, hanging upside down, complete with a traditional coffee pot glued upside down to the table, surrounded by cups filled with what looked like coffee, all of which were – you guessed it – upside down. Everything was inverted.
The artwork was titled Cafe Hafuch, the Hebrew term for the equivalent of a cappuccino, literally “upside-down coffee.”
It was a clever play on words, and a common Israeli scene viewed from a completely different perspective.
So when I was asked a few days later to name the theme of my experience, and my eyes landed on another piece of upside-down art, I instinctively reached for that same word, hafuch. Art hafuch.
Then.
A fellow participant misheard me. She thought I had said “heart hafuch.”
Somehow, that was exactly right. It wasn’t what I said, but it perfectly captured how I was feeling: an upside-down heart.
The Minneapolis Mifgash was my fourth trip to Israel, totaling nearly 80 days in the country since 2023. Eighty days over three and a half years is not enough to fully understand a place, but it is enough to feel its heartbeat.
This trip felt different from the other three: June 2024, January-March 2025, and December 2025.
I am different. For the first time in nearly 18 years, I am working in the Jewish community again, returning to the field where my career began.
But Israel felt different, too.
This time in Israel, I encountered more sadness. More despair. Hope may still be mandatory, but there’s less of it.
The image of an upside-down heart evokes fragility, emotional turmoil, and uncertainty. It implies complication. It signals grief.
It reminds me of those buckets at splash pads and toddler water parks – you know, the ones that fill and fill and fill with water (with emotion, with grief, with love, with sadness, with gratitude, with fear), until they overfill and tip upside down.
And yet – an upside-down heart is still a heart that loves.
So yes, for me, hope remains. Love remains.
But they now live alongside sadness, frustration, and uncertainty, and that combination tips my heart, hafuch.