I’d been waiting my whole life to get to Israel, hearing stories and news from family and friends, learning about it in Hebrew school, and celebrating it on Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and I was thrilled to have finally made it there. It was a college Birthright trip, and I was spiritually elated. Upon our arrival, we headed straight to Jerusalem. Tzvi, our tour guide, led us through the maze-like corridors of the Jewish quarter until suddenly he stopped us and gave us each blindfolds. In the dark we traveled farther, holding onto the person in front of us for guidance, until we reached our intended destination. Instructing us to hold out our hands, he gave us each a small kiddush cup. He said, “open your eyes,” and what we saw was the Western Wall— the most sacred of sites to our tradition. Right there we made kiddush. The spiritual power of the place, for me, was palpable—it was as if God were a dense gas in the air. The Torah describes God’s Kavod — literally, God’s weight— as a physical manifestation that descended upon the Mishkan when we were in the wilderness. That while God is everywhere, God made God’s self known in a particular physical space to the Israelites. I felt this Kavod in Jerusalem. Though I had come wholeheartedly, I could not have possibly imagined how much sway this land would hold over my soul.
There were others on my trip who had not come with such enthusiasm. Adrian (names here have all been changed for privacy), one of my fellow travelers, had had no desire to go to Israel. Adrian did love to travel and see new places all over the globe, but the only way Adrian’s parents could actually convince him to go on Birthright was by pointing out the ridiculousness of his refusal to go to. “It’s a free trip, what have you got to lose?” So, Adrian signed up, and his world was shaken. He fell in love with the land and the people, and found a new devotion to Jewish life. A Birthright success.
One last vignette. At one of my previous pulpits, I was teaching some high school seniors about Israel. Curious, I asked them for their most honest answers about how they felt towards the Jewish homeland. One or two of them had been there and held a deep love for it. A couple of them were semi-interested, but most just couldn’t grasp why Israel was important. One of the students who felt this way, Livvy, had a mother who immigrated to America from the Netherlands. If there was a place she felt as attached to as her own country, it was her mother’s native land, to which she had traveled many times. Livvy’s detachment wasn’t for lack of trying. She had heard the pro-Zionist arguments. She’d experienced the “love Israel!” programs. She just couldn’t relate, and didn’t connect.
While many Jews are as excited as I was to make it to Israel, there are so many others, like Adrian and Livvy, who feel little to no sense of Ahavat Zion—of love for Israel.
In the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham to look around him, and along with several extraordinary promises, God states,
ונתתי לך ולזרעך אחריך את ארץ מגוריך, את כל ארץ כנען לאחוזת עולם והייתי להם לאלהים.
I will give to you and to your descendants the land of your sojourning, the whole land of Canaan. This is your inheritance forever, and I will be for you all God (Genesis 17:8).
This is huge. In Israel, we, the Jewish people, were given the whole land of Israel, as a home, for holiness and life. And for some, this argument of biblical inheritance is enough. For some, it is so powerful that they jump to settle in the West Bank, in the regions of Judah and Samaria.
For others though, Zionism needs some stronger, or at least more sensible, arguments of support. And sadly, the most effective argument, the one that allowed us to finally return to our land after 2000 years, was the increasingly clear reality that the Jews needed a safe place where they could be free from persecution.
Theodore Sasson, discusses in his book The New American Zionism one of the most convincing master narratives of our homeland (as taught in Birthright programming). He titles it “Ashes to Redemption.” He writes,
An assimilated Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, was the founding visionary and organizer of the modern Zionist movement. In 1894, while covering the anti-Semitic show-trial of the French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Herzl came to the realization that the only way to eliminate anti-Semitism was for the Jews to create a state of their own. Herzl declared, “If you will it, it is no mere legend,” and that, “in Basel […] I have founded the Jewish state.”
The Nazi Holocaust culminated centuries of persecution of the Jews of Europe. European Jewry was totally devastated. Indeed, Herzl’s own children perished in the Holocaust. But from the ashes of destruction [Herzl’s] vision was fulfilled. The modern state of Israel was established following World War II as a refuge for hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, It was built by idealistic young pioneers and achieved its independence through the self-sacrifice “on a silver platter” of thousands of Jewish soldiers.
Today, the state of Israel remains a refuge for persecuted Jews the world over. One [Birthright] participant summed up this narrative during a group discussion: “The thing that is most amazing is that they are trying to kill us all the time and do not succeed. They tried to kill us in the Holocaust, they tried [at] Masada, and still the Jewish people continue and survive and we even have a state” (Sasson, Theodore. The New American Zionism. New York: New York University, 2014. 96-97.)
For more than 2000 years, the fate of our people has followed the whims of foreign leaders. Even in the United States and Canada, it is only in recent decades that Antisemitism and prejudice have diminished. The Ashes to Redemption narrative is entirely correct. The Jewish people do need a place where they can be safe and determine their own future.
The pro-Zionism argument I just presented is convincing, and for a long time, it was all that we needed. Recently, however, it ceased being so effective. You see, for the first time in centuries, the argument of persecution stopped ringing true. It didn’t work for Adrian, or Livvy, or so many others.
Here’s the thing— in America, we have successfully assimilated. We’ve become part of the fabric of this nation, and the younger generations were fortunate enough, until recently, to have never encountered a world of religious persecution.
Old arguments stopped carrying weight because what they were asserting was no longer there. When one has never feared for his life from persecution and hate, it is hard to imagine a need for such a place.
This summer, though, I came to a sad realization. For the first time in a generation, Jews on a large scale really do need a safe haven. Throughout the world, Antisemitism, often guised under the term “Anti-Zionism,” has been on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League noted incidents from this past summer alone in more than 20 countries including Australia, Brazil, and the UK, and the papers have been filled with accounts of Antisemitic violence in Belgium and France.
I used to get excited hearing French, the first language in which I could read, spoken in Israel by Moroccans. And yet, on this trip to Israel, I heard more French than I ever had before. French Jews are leaving for Israel in growing numbers, for safety and a better life. What they say is that there is no future for Jews in France.
Yes, things are better here in America. Antisemitism in general is on a decline. But, Anti-Zionist and Anti-Israel sentiments are growing, and Jews here are often the targets of these sentiments. You may recall, this past year, a number of Jewish students at Rutgers received pamphlets under their doors warning them that they would soon be evicted, just like Palestinians in Jerusalem. These students were not all public Zionists or involved in pro-Israel activity. These students were targeted because they were Jews.
I don’t mean to sound alarmist. We live a wonderful life in this country, and violent acts against Jews are few and far between. But, there is enough happening now for anyone to see that maybe it would be a good thing for us to have a place where we are the majority and control our fate.
For the first time in a generation, the argument of Israel as a safe haven once again holds true. But, just because we can revert to the old argument does not mean that we should.
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To live in fear of the world, and to believe that we need a state because we fear what others may do is to remain in a trap of victimization and existential angst. To believe that Israel ought to be here so we can be safe draws lines between us and the world, and permits us to harden our hearts and suspend morality for the sake of self-preservation. Sometimes we do need to defend ourselves. But sometimes we do not.
To be Jewish is so much more than being a victim, and to have a Jewish State is so much more than having a religio-national bomb shelter.
Why did we, as a congregation, just recently go to Israel, and at a time of war, no less?
We went to experience our people’s history. At the City of David, the original Jerusalem built under King David, we saw how our ancestors lived more than 3000 years ago. We learned more about our own sacred texts by seeing first hand how the people of Jerusalem, atop a hill, could still have access to water while under siege from the Assyrians. We saw the houses of learning of the great rabbis who resuscitated our religion after the destruction of the Temple, and we walked the same streets as our mystic ancestors of 400 years ago, who composed prayers and rituals that we continue to find meaningful today.
We went out of solidarity for our brothers and sisters who live there— Israel is the place many in our family call home.
We went to see what Reform Judaism can be like in a land where assimilation is no concern, and where each person has a good Jewish education from public school and all the Hebrew skills they will ever need to have total access to our tradition. Israeli Reform Judaism, to me, is Reform Judaism at its highest potential, as people really are empowered to implement Judaism across their lives in meaningful ways.
We went to see what it means for Judaism to be the predominant culture, when instead of Katy Perry singing about the trouble she got into last Friday night, Arik Einstein secularly belts out in ballad the rest and joy of Shabbat in Israel.
We went to see what it’s like for Jewish living to be so ubiquitous that ritual objects become everyday treats. We learned that etrog essence can be very good for the skin, and its juice in a smoothie is delicious!
We went to Israel because Israel is our connection to our people of past and present. Israel is a source of light and guidance in meaningful Jewish living, and most importantly, to me, Israel is a laboratory for Jewish experimentation.
The head of our travel operator, Yitzhak Sokoloff, taught that there are two parashiyot that make clear to him the wonderful opportunity we’ve got in Israel’s Statehood. In Parashat K’doshim, we are told, קדושים תהיו, Holy shall you be (Lev. 19:2). Holiness, we can do wherever we stand, as long as we direct our hearts and our efforts. But in more recently read Parashat Shoftim, we’re told שופטים ושוטרים תתן לך בכל שעריך – Judges and polices officers, you are to place, in all of your communities (Deut. 16:18)— to ensure justice and fairness. For centuries, commentators have reinterpreted this verse to discuss how we ought to govern ourselves, because they couldn’t imagine ever being able to establish justice at a societal level. Now, this text takes on new meaning. Having lands means that we need to fill them with justice, and with all that it entails.
Justice is the challenge everyone has. But the challenge unique to the Jewish state is figuring out what it means to be a just and holy society. What does it mean to find the right blend of governance and godliness, to know that what we’re doing doesn’t just manage the people but enables them to be holy and exemplary? Israel is the only place where we really get to explore these kinds of questions!
Indeed, Israel is still in that place of exploration. There is still much that has to be done for justice and holiness to be achieved. Israel’s political system is often a mess, and liberal Jews are continually at odds with the Ultra-Orthodox establishment. While Arabs certainly lead a better life in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East, they remain second class citizens in many ways, and in regards to Palestinian moderates, the government can’t seem to decide whether to support or undermine their efforts to establish their own healthy government. It’s fair to say that justice and holiness have not yet been fully achieved. No one said that the Jewish Lab would be easy. But it is incredible, and it has so much potential. Finally, after 2000 years, we’re able to experiment with the big questions of our tradition and work to establish our values on a massive scale.
Jewish life here in the United States is wonderful, and we are blessed in many ways with all of our freedoms. But unlike in Israel, here we will always be working to balance our counter-cultural religious life with the American life surrounding us. Shabbat with sports and SATs, Rosh HaShanah with the start of school, and Pesach with tax season.
I am a Zionist, not because I need a place for our people to be safe, but because I need a place for our people to flourish. I believe Israel to be the unique place that allows us to bring Judaism, with its rich meanings and teachings, into every corner of life.
And so I encourage all of us, if we haven’t yet been, to find a way to get there. If we haven’t connected with the land or people, we ought to find Israeli music on iTunes, watch an Israeli film on Netflix, or pick up the work of an Israeli writer like Amos Oz, Leah Goldberg or Etgar Karet.
Let us think about how to be better family to Israel over here in the United States. Perhaps it’s through funding different efforts in Israel, like social service organizations in Tel Aviv, medical technology developments in Rehovot, or Arab-Israeli coexistence projects in the Galil. Perhaps it’s through investing in Israeli start-ups. Maybe, it’s better following the news, and forming stronger opinions and knowledge on current events. Or maybe, it’s touching base with any distant Israeli cousins we might have, or making an Israeli ex-pat friend right here in Middlesex County.
There are so many ways to establish a place in our hearts for Israel, and a place in Israel for us.
Israel may be the place where we can always find a home, but to me, it is the place where I best find holiness, and where my Jewish heart and soul recharge and find strength.
What is Israel to you?
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