In early 2005, on one of my first weekends home from bootcamp, I took a shower and suddenly had a profound realization. I had just started a 5-year military service in the Israeli Navy, and a striking thought came into my 18-year-old mind: "I am no longer a free person."

Growing up I was very strongly drawn to music, but when it came time to making decisions as a young adult, I was very much limited and afraid of following that passion. Then I became a soldier, not a free man. Now it was time to take orders, train, fight, listen to others. In a way, it was much easier than listening to myself.

Being a soldier can be sad. Whenever I stopped to think about the essence of being a soldier, the essence of a rifle, the essence of a navy ship, it was not inspiration that revealed itself, but an intention made of violence, fear, ugliness, waste. I found inspiration in the people I served with, in the beauty of looking at the sunrise with nothing around you but the deep blue sea, in listening to music and dreaming.

A Navy soldier is not among the fully confrontational or exposed positions in the military, but even so I had my fair share of being in conflicts, being in enemy territory, under rocket barrage. What friends you have near you and what your mind can suppress helps you get through in the moment, but I am still processing the full extent of these experiences today. War and conflict felt and still feel to me like a question too big to answer, something you're born into, something that is too scary and dangerous to criticize or reject. It pushed me and drove me to just get it over with and remove myself from it, for better or worse. I feel there is more than a little coincidence in the fact that I'm writing these words right now in upstate New York, an ocean away from Israel.

Towards the end of my military service, I began to feel in my heart that it was "now or never". After 5-long years, the prospect of being free again was finally here, but now I knew freedom from both sides. The very next day after I was discharged, I sat in the Israeli Conservatory of Music, enrolled in the program for Jazz studies in collaboration with New York's New School for Contemporary music. I had big gaps to fill, and a lot of practicing to catch up on, but having spent what some call the best years of one's life as a soldier forced me to listen to myself this time around and to go for it in spite of the many inhibitions that held me back up until that moment.

In the winter of 2020, I took a shower in my small Brooklyn apartment and suddenly had another profound realization. A striking thought came into my 33-year-old mind: "Until you leave this world and this body, you are not free." Now, I write music, and I'm trying to understand what this feeling means, how to live and feel free despite of wars without and within. We have wars in us, but we have freedom in us too. For me, music is a tool to sort out this inner potential for freedom and peace and to direct it outwards in the hopes that others can connect to it and feel the same. Soldiers are unified, uniformed, and forced to follow their leader. Music can also unify, can help people follow something in themselves, and help bring them together and direct their attention to something they might not be able to fully see on their own. It is my hope that we all find our inner peace and follow it collectively, with the aid of music and art, and move into a more loving era of humanity.