It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The first time I thought about the mixed emotions I would feel going on my honeymoon while the conflict in Israel this summer continued to escalate was while exchanging messages with my cousin Nitza in Sderot at the end of July.

She told me that her son, age six, was not able to cope with the constant red alerts, and therefore went to stay with his grandmother who lived on a kibbutz in the north. She told me that she could hear the bombardment of Gaza regularly, that her daughter couldn’t sleep because of her fear of being awakened by a rocket attack, but that she didn’t want to leave Sderot despite the bombardment because, well, whatever it is, Sderot is home.

She then said to me, “Enough about us. Mah nishma? (What’s up with you?)”

Well, I was about to leave on a two-week luxury honeymoon to Turkey and Greece.

My wife and I got married in March, and we waited until the summer to take this trip. We took our time to plan, research, consult with travel agents, look at maps and check with friends, and decided that Turkey and Greece would offer the ideal balance of adventure and relaxation.

We booked our flights and hotels, and immediately began the countdown.

In the meantime, Israel went to war. By the middle of July, the ground invasion of Gaza had begun, and the number of fallen soldiers was beginning to rise. Funerals took place, rockets kept falling, and each time I checked the news, the situation seemed to worsen. Ceasefires were broken, the civilian death toll in Gaza increased, Hamas remained defiant and air raid sirens were heard as far as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Nothing much had changed by the time we touched down in Istanbul. The same news continued to fill my twitter feed as we hiked across the small island of Santorini.

As we lay on the beach in the resort-town of Bodrum in Turkey (a town, I am told, usually hopping with Israelis), sipping our Efes beers and watching the sunset, I broke whatever inner peace we had found when I received a breaking news alert on my BlackBerry and told my wife that a 23-year-old Israel Defence Forces lieutenant, engaged to be married, had been captured and probably killed.

My wife and I both agree that our honeymoon was amazing. However, it will always be marked, somehow, by the unfortunate news that was this summer of conflict between Israel and Hamas.

We both will not soon forget the mixed emotions we felt throughout our entire trip – of excitement and despair, joy and unease, happiness and sadness, optimism and pessimism.

I started to write this article as an attempt to reconcile these opposite emotions we felt during our trip, and the conclusion I initially reached was that maybe, just maybe, this is inevitable. Maybe as a Jew, and more specifically as a Zionist, you always have to learn to balance the good with the bad.

If you are going to be a news hound, keep yourself informed, and, more importantly, care about what you read, then maybe as a Jew and a Zionist, you have to deal with hearing bad news and feeling these emotions at even the best of times. And maybe that is something that we all have to get used to.

It reminds me of a Mel Brooks quote in which the legendary comic once quipped, “You want to know where my comedy comes from?  It comes from the realization that as a Jew and as a person… even though you're better and smarter, you'll never belong.”

Nevertheless, I am not content with that explanation, and could never be entirely satisfied by being told that I will always have to experience the good while keeping in mind the inevitable bad.

Despite the news that emerged from Israel this summer, I balanced the negativity with the profound understanding that what Israel, my country, was doing, was just. I balanced it with the idea that even though soldiers were dying, and families were mourning, they were doing so for the protection of the State of Israel. They were dying in particular because Israel chose to fight legally, with lawyers over their shoulders and infantrymen going out of their way to avoid collateral damage.

I balanced the negative emotions with news of solidarity rallies that emerged worldwide, of the steadfast support by the Canadian government of Israel’s actions, of pictures that I received from Israel of my cousin Nitza’s mother hosting Israeli soldiers on her kibbutz on the Gaza border, and of news that my aunt Esther was helping to treat wounded Israeli soldiers in Petach Tikva.

While both the short-term and long-term outcomes of this conflict remain unknown, what is clear is that our Jewish communities, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, have been strengthened by both the wins and the losses in this conflict.

The truth about Hamas has been, to a certain extent, revealed, and my hope is that both sides will emerge from this conflict with a clearer sense of what is worth fighting for, what is worth dying for and what is worth celebrating.

To paraphrase the late Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Well, just as I will not soon forget the feeling of seeing for the first time the cliffs of Santorini, the mosques of Istanbul or the beaches of Bodrum, I will not forget the sadness I felt as I continuously refreshed my Twitter feed or read the news on my phone’s browser during my honeymoon.

However, neither will I forget the immense pride that I felt as I realized that Israelis were fighting and dying for something just, that Diaspora Jews were coming together for the sake of klal Yisrael, and the sense of belonging and community that I felt knowing that when I returned, I’d be a part of it all.

Adam Hummel is a lawyer and founder of Youth Ambassadors for Peace.