The Costs of Hiding

            I first read “The Failure of the Jewish American Establishment” by Peter Beinart in June 2010, almost a year after it caused shockwaves among a certain set of American Jews. I was busy studying diplomacy and enjoying living in Israel, nearly a decade after my family had relocated to the United States. In the words of venerated Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua, I was once again living the life of a “complete Jew” immersed in Hebrew culture. But after another decade, I find myself back in the diaspora, and more connected to Judaism than ever before. My  immigrant experience has become a hyphen: Israeli-American. In the relative safety of the diaspora, I was able to examine prior prejudices and learn more about issues that, as Beinart pointed out, the organized Jewish community mostly avoided discussing[1] .

            We, Israelis, who yearly extol the primacy of liberty, have for more than fifty years been subjugating another people, stateless Palestinians longing for self-determination, much like we had for 2,000 years. We, American Jews, who have preached tikkun olam and welcoming the ger, the stranger, have for decades been ignoring the Palestinian next door on our trips to Israel. To an unfortunate degree, one of the few places of agreement between the average American Jew and their Israeli counterpart is their shared decision to turn away from the difficult details and intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This sweeping under the rug of the uncomfortable is not new. More than a century ago, Yitzhak Epstein, a Russian immigrant to Palestine, had lectured in Basel, not far from where the Seventh Zionist Congress convened, on the hidden question of the settlement enterprise in Eretz Israel:

Among the most difficult questions linked to the idea of the rebirth of our people on its land, there is one question that outweighs all the others: the question of our attitude toward the Arabs. This question, upon whose correct solution hangs the revival of our national hope, has not been forgotten, but has been completely hidden from the Zionists and in its true form is scarcely mentioned in the literature of our movement.[1]

Beinart hit a nerve when he told the leaders of the American Jewish community that they were not watching. And there is a sense of serendipity in him using Tommy Lapid, who had headed the Shinui (tr. change) party, to drive his point home about the undeniable empathy that comes from just watching. Two years after Beinart published his missive, Lapid’s son, Yair Lapid, announced he would follow in his father’s footsteps and run for Knesset. The younger Lapid also ran on a platform of change and even eventually joined a national unity coalition with eight factions representing a wide spectrum of political allegiances, most notably the first Arab faction to sit in the government. Lapid looked, and didn’t blink.

            American Jews, too, have begun looking. And part of the chill felt up the backs of too many communal leaders was the rushing draft from the door finally cracking open. But instead of responding with fear, they should welcome the new interest as a fresh breeze blowing through a room locked for too long. Because while some of the engagement comes with criticism, the criticism is not impacting the emotional connection American Jews have to Israel. As Dov Waxman noted in a 2018 lecture, the relative numbers have not veered throughout the many surveys of American Jews. And despite Yehoshua’s ill-conceived assertion that only 20% of American Jews visit Israel, the recent Pew poll showed that one in four of them has actually lived in Israel or been there on multiple trips.[2] As Waxman eloquently explains, the big change is that support is more complicated than before. Part of the explanation, according to him, is the difference in their generational memory. Few from the generation that remembers the Holocaust are with us. And those who followed, the American Jews who remember the existential fear of June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, who took pride in Israel’s seemingly inexplicable strength, they’re part of the leadership of those communal organizations who have been unwilling to air Israel’s dirty laundry in public. And the rising generations? They either have faint memories of the peace process breaking down and the violence that followed or were too young to remember the Second Intifada and know only a world in which Israel is a mighty military power.

            That the major organizations of Jewish life in the United States would still be hiding one side of the harsh realities of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict from their members, a century after as stark a warning as delivered by Epstein was disappointing, especially to one raised on the notion that proud Zionists were brash and unafraid of criticism, much like the protagonist of the classic Israeli film Hu Halakh Ba-sadot. And modern Israelis are certainly brash. After all, A.B. Yehoshua had no problem taking money from American Jewish organizations to tell them they were incomplete Jews to their faces. And Ha’aretz columnist Chaim Levinson had no qualms about calling American Jews soulless and materialistic in an unprovoked attack on Diaspora Jewry and Israelis who move abroad: “To this day I haven’t met anyone who has returned to America and whose return has expanded his or her soul the way the soul expands when you lie in your bed at home in Israel.”[3]

            Maybe he should visit Anu: Museum of the Jewish People at Tel-Aviv University, where he could meet a digital avatar of the senior rabbi at my synagogue, Rabbi Sharon Brous, whose sermons never shy from the truth and has built a reputation for moral leadership so widely known that I have friends whose families print out her sermons to read while their own rabbi speaks at Shabbat services. How ironic, then, that a visit to a museum purporting to show the beautifully varied tapestry of modern Jewish life commits the very cardinal sin of hiding not only the Occupation but the largest minority group in Israel. Worse, in a post Nation-State Law world, where Arabic has been relegated from its previous position as an official language, the museum excludes nearly 1 in 5 Israelis by neglecting to provide Arabic captions and materials.[4]

            This unnecessary erasure of Arabs from the history of the land they’ve lived and worked is one of the constant complaints on the farther reaches of the American left: the feeling of being betrayed, of being lied to, by the caretakers of our community. Hiding the Arabs and Palestinians from the narrative, especially in an age when information is more accessible than ever, only creates a culture of resentment once American Jews come into contact with Palestinian-Americans on campus or on social media. They will often say they feel unprepared for these conversations; a concern Jewish institutions have recently begun taking much more seriously, based on the proliferation of education and encounter initiatives.

            Places like the iCenter promote these siach (tr. dialogue) experiences as an antidote to the sanitized vision of Israel that most American Jews are shown through their largest institutions because they know that, unlike when Israel placed the West Bank under quarantine during the worst of the violence that followed the Oslo Accords, Palestinians can no longer be removed from the public eye unilaterally. Smartphones capture live streams of protests and evictions; when the Israeli Air Force drops munitions on Gaza City, people anywhere in the world can watch live as a father tries to soothe and protect his little girl. Images are powerful, and they tell stories that stick. No amount of justification or hasbara (tr. explanation/propaganda) can turn the tide of pathos.

            Yet the level of acceptable daily violence in defense of a deeply unjust occupation does not seem to greatly bother the Israeli public, one that has become more conservative over time. As Danny Gutwein has shown, the economic benefits for moving to settlements have driven many rightward and into the warm embrace of Greater Israel ideology, particularly Shas voters. Meanwhile American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal, and many of them, particularly in the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, see social justice work as tikkun olam, as part of their expression of their Jewish identity. American Jewish groups foster interfaith alliances at home and believe they can achieve their aims by building coalitions with other minority groups. Israelis have become more closed off over the decades, less and less likely to know or have Arab/Palestinian friends, and more likely to espouse views that make the two-state solution a dim prospect, while supporting sectoral politicians who are set on protecting their electoral fiefdoms and show little interest in working for the greater good of all Israelis.

            Early signs suggest the vast gulfs in culture, religion, and political beliefs between American Jews and Israeli Jews will continue to widen. A 2019 poll conducted by the Pat Brown Institute found that 31% of young Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 in Los Angeles were “not pro-Israel” while only 10% were fully supportive. But in all categories over 50, those old enough to have been raised by Jews who had likely known antisemitism firsthand or experienced it themselves, those numbers were reversed. But more than a silver lining, the fact that a large plurality of nearly 70% in all age groups are in the middle ground of “critical of some Israeli government policies” and “critical of most Israeli government policies” shows that American Jews don’t feel much different than Israelis do about their own government’s policies. And maybe the time has come for both populations to take a closer interest in one another.

            Israel is a country of contradictions. A place that simultaneously reveres its ancient heritage and its newfound role at the forefront of a technological boom. A state that is still in the state of becoming. And it is up to Israelis to work hand-in-hand with world Jewry to help the modern day Zion live up to the expectations of the dreamers and doers who brought it into existence. To achieve that lofty aspiration, the two centers of modern Jewish life will need to find a way to overcome their mutual small-minded desire to be in the driver seat and come to terms with their shared responsibilities.

Israelis, ever concerned about the lack of Hebrew education among American Jews, can reroute the extraordinary sums spent fighting the phantom of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to peoplehood programs that will benefit both parties, like expanding the Jewish Agency’s Shinshinim program and promoting educational exchanges like Masa Israel’s Teaching Fellows. American Jews, particularly its older representatives, need to not shy away from a critical relationship with Israel or from asking more difficult questions about whether their donations and funds are being used beyond the Green Line.

            Reflecting in his diary on the Oslo peace process, which he had helped initiate, Israeli historian Ron Pundak, contending with the rise in violence which followed the historic accords, wrote a hopeful note: “The ending to our story has not yet been written.” The sentiment holds true, too, for the long and winding relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state. Through its ups and downs and many twists and turns, what matters, as the iCenter believes, is that American Jews remain in relationship with Israel. The ending to that story is being written, sentence by sentence, as we live.

Works Cited

Beilin, Yossi. His Brother's Keeper: Israel and Diaspora Jewry in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Schocken Books, 2000.

Beinart, Peter. "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment". New York Review of Books. June 10, 2010.

Blumenfeld, Revital. “A.B. Yehoshua: Americans, Unlike Israelis, Are Only Partial Jew”. Ha’aretz. March 18, 2012. Link

Dowty, Alan, and Yitzhak Epstein. “‘A Question That Outweighs All Others’: Yitzhak Epstein and Zionist Recognition of the Arab Issue.” Israel Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2001, pp. 34–54. Link

Dubnov, Aerie and Aviad Moreno. מוזיאון ״אנו״ והאמריקניזציה של ההיסטוריה היהודית. הזמן הזה. April 2022. Link

Gold, Nili Scharf. Haifa: City of Steps. Brandeis University Press, 2018.

Gutwein, Danny. “The Settlements and the Relationship between Privatization and the Occupation.” Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, edited by Marco Allegra et al., Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 21–33. Link

“Jewish Americans in 2020”. Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. May 11, 2021. Link

Katz, Alisa Belinkoff. “Jewish Voters in Los Angeles County: Current Views on Israel”. Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs, California State University, Los Angeles, 2021. Link

Levinson, Chaim. “Israelis Who Move Back to America Gain in Money and Lose in Soul”. Ha’aretz. July 31, 2021. Link

Rudoren, Jodi. Israeli Labor Party Head & Minister MK Merav Michaeli with Jodi Rudoren, The Forward Editor-in-Chief. YouTube, uploaded by UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. April 21, 2022. Link

Savage, Nigel. “Israel and the Empathy Deficit”. Sapir. Volume 5, Spring 2022. Link

Shapira, Anita. Israel: A History. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012.

Tanakh =: [tanakh] : a New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985.

Waxman, Dov. "Are American Jews Abandoning Israel?”. Judaic Studies Program 2018 Max Ticktin Lecture. The George Washington University. November 2018. Link

[1] Alan Dowty, 2001, p. 39

[2] Jewish Americans in 2020, section 7

[3] Chaim Levinson, 2020

[4] Dubnov, 2022

Excellent opening paragraph

Site/Sight

The first time I was in Yad Vashem, I was on Birthright. My closest friends from college and I had just been through a whirlwind assault on our senses, shepherded through a multitude of Israel experiences. We had been wine drunk on the Golan Heights, trekked through Ein Gedi, and been immersed in the joy of Shabbat at the Kotel, the Western Wall.

It was the very last day. The very last stop on our tour. We had bonded with each other, with Israeli soldiers, and with the land. And here we were at Yad Vashem, ahead of a long flight back to the States, going through one of the most carefully constructed and curated of Shoah recountings, taken down from the heights of our joyous romp through Israel, to the lowest lows of am Israel, the people of Israel, in modern history.

I had not yet learned of my own family’s horrific survival of the silent shoah in Transnistria. It would be years before I found my safta’s appeal for reparations from German authorities. All I had known then was that one saba’s family fled before Kristallnacht, while the other saba was the only Eisenberg sent to Israel years before the Nazis invaded Poland, years before he would lose touch with the family in Warsaw, before they were murdered and erased from history, swept under the rising tide of antisemitism.

But the exhibits in the museum stirred something inside me which had been long dormant. The full immersion into the Jerusalem hillside, surrounded by physical artifacts of unexplainable horror was a full-fledged assault on my senses. Childhood nightmares surfaced which had been suppressed by the adolescent mind. I cried through most of the museum. Feelings of despair, ironically, threatened to drown my very will to live. Seeing the shoes, the rail tracks, the letters, the propaganda, the uniforms, the makeshift menorahs, the art created under the cover of a never-ending night, it was overwhelming, it was unforgettable.

And that’s when we walked out onto the balcony. Into the open skies of the Jerusalem hillsides, breathing the fresh pine-scented air which I was sure had jump-started many a Jewish life throughout time. The first time I was there, the first time I went through that emotional rollercoaster, it affirmed and reinforced my commitment to living Jewish and made me an ever-more ardent defender of Israel on campus.

I have never been to the forests of Poland where my paternal ancestors were murdered. I have not been to any of the concentration camps or to the site of the former Czernowitz ghetto, now in Ukrainian territory. Yad Vashem was and is the closest I’ve come to seeing firsthand the genocide of my people. Which I realized, in retrospect, was the point. As Shaul Kelner notes in his summation of Yael Zerubavel’s research, “those who use tourist sites to teach lessons must inevitably take a stand on the question of what the site means.” Maybe our guides had wanted to make the point that everything our tour bus had been through, all of those joys, was only possible because of the unparalleled lows chronicled by Yad Vashem. But Kelner’s insight is also essential to how we must adapt Taglit-Birthright.

In the preface to the 2020 Framework For Talight-Birthright Israel, Barry Chazan notes that “the new program must elaborate a blueprint that accounts for… new notions of such concepts as ‘identity’ and ‘allegiance’. It must furthermore account for the changing nature of the state, land, and people of Israel over the past generation, as well as the evolving mutual relationship of world Jewry to Israel.”

Which brings me to my last visit to Yad Vashem in 2018. In the decade that passed between my first and most recent visit, I had learned and read much more critical information about Israeli history, from more diverse sources, from Benny Morris to Breaking the Silence to Combatants for Peace. I had learned about the dispossessions and expulsions, about the cost of a Jewish Israel that the state has long preferred to keep quiet.

And this time I was not with a tour group but with my Chinese-American girlfriend. This time it was my responsibility to be the educator. As I walked her through the gut-punching exhibits, seeing her surrender to the sadness of the space, I couldn’t wait to get to the balcony, to the overlook that once brought me the requisite serenity.

Except this time, I was the guide, it was my responsibility to take a stand on the question of what this overlook means. It was my responsibility to tell her the whole truth, as a journalist, surely, but also as an Israeli, who learned on his own skin that avoiding the harsh truths only made them harder to accept later in life.

And I wanted to avoid the dilemma of how museum displays can detach the concepts cognitively from their true contexts. As Kelner warned: “Instead of merely presenting what ‘is’, representation creates new meanings.”

But Israel was not born tabula rasa. The creation of this gut-wrenching site of commemoration could not be detached from the truth that Jerusalem was not wholly occupied by Jews throughout time.

This time as we headed on to the overlook, I had a profound and disturbing realization: this beautiful pine forest which Israel planted in the 1950s, this north-facing balcony which opened up to the Jerusalem hillside, was also looking in the direction of the yet-undeclared country’s worst crime: the massacre at Deir Yassin a month before the famous declaration of independence in Tel Aviv.

The close locations of the sites, one commemorating the catastrophe of the Jews and the other a symbol of Palestinian erasure, presents an unrivaled opportunity for showing the complexities of the land and the history of the peoples who sought to live there. Nowhere else in the world can an Israel educator tie our past pain with our present problems as significantly, as viscerally, as on that balcony overlooking a new forest -- one that only appears to have been there for centuries -- and the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center -- built over the grounds of the former village of Deir Yassin.

The Blessings We Count

            In the classic Israeli film Hu Halakh Ba-sadot (tr. He Walked Through the Fields), there is a scene in which the protagonist, Uri, is informed his father is unexpectedly leaving for a risky mission in Europe. Instead of expressing his disappointment, he chooses to take out his frustrations in the field, manically working himself to exhaustion. While the film, on the surface, seems to exalt masculinity, it can also be seen, in its subtext, as criticism of the gibor (tr. hero) archetype and of gvura (tr. valor) as an ideal.

            Released in 1967, the film seemed to celebrate the militarism and pioneer ethos of Israel’s early years, as did many cultural artifacts from the period. It reflects the stereotype of the sabra (tr. prickly pear cactus) as described by Anita Shapira: “The sabras were said to be frank and direct, honest and brave, free of the hypocritical mannerisms of bourgeois society, with strength that lay not in words but in deeds.”[1] But below the brave facade of sabra masculinity, existential angst, inherited trauma, and the ever-present possibility of further loss simmered and weighed heavily on the psychology of both the individual and the collective. These converging forces needed an outlet, which, to an extent, was provided by lehaqot tzvayiot (tr. military bands), who were also unofficially entrusted with building the national identity.

            Along with Galei Tzahal (tr. Israeli Army Radio), which was founded in 1950, the military bands were seen as some of the most vital contributions of the Israel Defense Forces to the cultural life of the nascent state.[2] They offered a unifying element to a population that was otherwise fragmented by country of origin, socioeconomic status, and religion, among many other divisions, because the one point of contact all Israelis had with their government was their mandatory military service from the age of 18 to 21. It also meant most, if not all, Israelis were directly affected by the decades of violence in the region; they had lost friends or family to the fighting. In the 1948 war alone, nearly one percent of the entire population was killed.[3]

            The first and most influential of the military bands was lehaqat ha-nahal (tr. fighting pioneer youth band), whose alumni were among the most successful musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arik Einstein, Yehoram Gahon, Avi Toledano, Yardena Arazi, and Sholomo Artzi.[4] In 1967, its band leader found a poem written by Rachel Shapira in memory of Eldad Kruk, a soldier who was killed in the Six-Day War. He set the words to a simple melody and the band performed the new song, “Ma Avarech” (tr. How Shall I Bless), for the first time the following year.[5]

            The song is a call and response between an angel and a chorus, with the latter refraining “how shall I bless him; with what shall I bless him” and the former listing the many traits a child, like Eldad, is endowed with as he grows up, following him on his journey to manhood, with each step punctuated by the refrain of the question: “How shall I bless him?” As a child, he is blessed with a shimmering smile and big, sharp eyes. As a teen, he is gifted with dancing legs, a generous ear, and the capacity to remember every song. But, like the country in which Eldad was born, those innocent blessings needed to mature. As a young adult, the angel sings that he had blessed the child’s hands, once familiar with flowers, to adapt to the needs and the might of steel, that the capacity for song now translated to lips that learn the rhythm of combat commands. Then, in the fifth verse, the soloist, Rivkah Zohar changes from her emphatic delivery to spoken word, reflecting as the angel all that the lucky child has thus received, the many gifts he was lucky to have been bestowed. And after the chorus repeats the eponymous question once more, Zohar dramatically concludes: “This boy is now an angel / He will never be blessed again / Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord / if only you had blessed him with life.”

            The song was an instant hit. Shapira’s emotional lyrics, pervaded by a sense of anguish at a terrible loss, resonated with much of the public. Zohar recalled: “When I first sang the song in rehearsal, the members of the lehaqah were very moved … and when I performed for soldiers during the day and I could see their eyes, it was something special. I saw them all and became terribly emotional. I felt I was blessing each one of them.”[6] Like Uri before him, this child was also sacrificed to a larger cause. And every Israeli who heard the haunting melody knew an Uri or an Eldad. But unlike Hu Halakh Ba-sadot, which could be seen as glorifying the sacrifice made by Uri, the sentiment underlying the emotional thrust of “Ma Avarech” seems to question whether war should have prematurely ended the story of this blessed child. It’s possible that the impressive military victory of 1967 unsettled the internal image of the heroic underdog fighting for the survival of his people that was predominant in the previous two decades. Political disagreement over the future of those newly conquered and occupied territories continued to fracture the already divided society, and within a decade would undermine the dominant political order of the country leading to the Likud revolution of the late 1970s.

            But once a year, most Jewish Israelis are once again united. On Memorial Day, when Israel commemorates its fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, when the entire country shuts down for a pensive period that is marked with sirens and state ceremonies, Israelis come together to listen – and occasionally sing in public – many of the songs made famous by the military bands, including “Ma Avarech”. In 2014, ACUM (the Israeli Association of Music Composers, Lyricists, and Publishers) published a report on the most played songs by all radio stations on Memorial Day for the previous decade, placing “Ma Avarech” at the top of the list.[7] The song has also been performed many times at the state ceremony, with a particularly poignant rendition by Roni Dalumi, a modern military band success story, and has been covered by many Israeli artists over the past fifty years.

            My first memory of hearing “Ma Avarech” was at a small house in Hadera, where my family would visit the parents of Major Toval “Tuli” Gvirtzman each year for Memorial Day. Maj. Gvirtzman was killed in Lebanon in 1982 while trying to rescue soldiers from the destroyed husk of their tank. He was one of my father’s closest friends and his death, three months before my parents wed, was a loss they both carried, and still do. But my father, like many Israelis of his age, like Uri before them, rarely expresses his emotions, especially the anguish of loss. For years, I didn’t know if I would ever see the burly lone son of a Shoah survivor shed a tear. But almost a decade ago, when he was less savvy on the computer, he came to me on Memorial Day, and asked if I could play a song for him on the computer in his office. We had been living in the United States of America for almost 15 years. It had been a few years since we visited the Gvirtzmans. I found the original rendition on YouTube and walked away to answer a phone call. When I came back, nearly twenty minutes later, he was still sitting in front of the computer, still listening to “Ma Avarech”, and I saw, for the first time in my life, tears silently streaming down his face.

            It’s hard to explain the intangible pull of certain songs. It’s even harder to explain how a culture that prioritizes and promotes masculinity could so overwhelmingly react to a song that questions their most sincerely held ideals. But Rachel Shapira’s “Ma Avarech” has managed to soften up the sabras of Israel since its first performance back in 1968.

Bibliography

Bin-Nun, Sagi. May 4, 2014. The most played song on the radio during memorial day: Ma Avarech [in Hebrew]. Retrieved from www.walla.co.il

Bodner, Ehud, and Yoav S. Bergman. “The Power of National Music in Reducing Prejudice and Enhancing Theory of Mind among Jews and Arabs in Israel.” Psychology of Music 45, no. 1 (January 2017): 36–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735616640599.

Gur, Golan. 2018. "Military Songs as Popular Music: War, Memory, and Commemoration in the Songs of the Israeli Military Bands." Lied Und Populäre Kultur 63: 93-109. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/military-songs-as-popular-music-war-memory/docview/2210886006/se-2?accountid=11243.

Melamed, Laliv. “Learning by Heart: Humming, Singing, Memorizing in Israeli Memorial Videos.” In Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information, edited by Lindsey A. Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell, 1st ed., 95–117. Berghahn Books, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qcx6j.10.

Regev, Motti, and Edwin Seroussi. “The Lehaqot Tzvayiot.” In Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, 1st ed., 90–112. University of California Press, 2004. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pn6vg.9.

Shapira, Anita, and Anthony Berris. 2012. Israel: a history. Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press.

Index

Hebrew lyrics

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הילד? שאל המלאך.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הילד? שאל המלאך.

וברך לו חיוך שכמוהו כאור

וברך לו עיניים גדולות ורואות

לתפוס בן כל פרח וחי וציפור

ולב להרגיש בו את כל המראות.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הנער? שאל המלאך.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הנער? שאל המלאך.

וברך לו רגליים לרקוד עד אין סוף

ונפש לזכור בה את כל הלחנים

ויד האוספת צדפים עלי חוף

ואוזן קשובה לגדולים וקטנים.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה העלם? שאל המלאך.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה העלם? שאל המלאך..

וברך כי ידיו הלמודות בפרחים

יצלחו גם ללמוד את עוצמת הפלדה

ורגליו הרוקדות את מסע הדרכים

ושפתיו השרות את מקצב הפקודה.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הגבר? שאל המלאך.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הגבר? שאל המלאך.

נתתי לו כל שאפשר לי לתת

שיר, וחיוך, ורגליים לרקוד

ויד מעודנת, ולב מרטט

ומה אברך לך עוד?

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הילד? העלם הרך.

מה אברך לו, במה יבורך?

זה הילד? העלם הרך.

הנער הזה – עכשיו הוא מלאך.

לא עוד יברכוהו, לא עוד יבורך.

אלוהים, אלוהים, אלוהים

לו אך ברכת לו – חיים

English translation

“How shall I bless--with what shall I bless--

this child,” asked the angel.

He shall be blessed with a smile as pure as light

He shall be blessed with eyes big and observant.

To take in every flower, bird--life!

And a heart to feel all he sees.

“How shall I bless--with what shall I bless--

this youth,” asked the angel.

So he blessed him with legs to dance forever,

a soul to remember all the songs,

a hand to gather shells on the beach

and an attentive ear to listen to all.

“How shall I bless--with what shall I

bless--this young man,” asked the angel.

So he blessed that his hands, used to flowers,

Will succeed in learning the might of steel,

and his legs learn the dance of dusty roads,

and his lips learn the songs of rhythmic

commands.

“How shall I bless--with what shall I

bless--this man, this man?”

I have given him all that I can:

A song, a smile, legs to dance,

A gentle hand and a feeling heart

What other blessing might I yet give?

“How shall I bless--with what shall I

bless--this child, this tender young man?”

This boy is now an angel

No longer can one blessed him, and

no longer can he be blessed.

O God--if only you blessed him with life.

Footnotes

[1] Anita Shapira, 2012, p. 137

[2] Golan Gur, 2004, p. 94

[3] Anita Shapira, 2012, p.158

[4] Motti Regev, 2004, p.93

[5] Ehud Bodner, 2017, p. 41

[6]  Motti Regev, 2004, p.98

[7] Sagi Bin-Nun, 2014

Not Like All The Nations

Take a piece of paper and close your eyes. Take a deep breath in, settling into your space. And let the air out. A wise man once wrote, “Every moment, we take in a breath and the world comes into being, and we let out a breath and the world falls away.”[1] So, aware of that, take a deep breath, let the world come into being. And then, as you breathe out and the world starts falling away, I want you to write down the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “Israel”.[2]

Israel is a country, a land, a nation, a heritage, a tribe. It is all of those things at once, and it has not always been all of those things. Israel did not suddenly become short-hand for a nation of people or a geopolitical entity. There were four distinct eras in the relationship’s development: Biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern.

Like all good stories, our Biblical narrative begins with a heroic figure, our third and final patriarch: Jacob. After literally wrestling all night with a mysterious figure for a blessing, the son of Isaac is re-branded Israel, partly for his perseverance.

It is the twelve sons of the renamed Israel who go down to Egypt – and whose descendants become the nation of Israel enslaved by the pharaohs – but it is another Biblical hero, his son Joseph, the savior of Egypt, who promises to a dying Jacob that he will be buried in the land of his fathers. The relationship of this family to the land, already embedded in their covenant with God, is a foundational tenet of the religion they spawn. A religion based in a second covenant at Mt. Sinai, between God and the people. And, unlike the original unconditional covenant promised to the patriarchs, the Mosaic covenant was conditional upon following the Law given at Sinai. Whereas before God had promised the land for all time, the second covenant promises sovereignty in the land provided the people of Israel live by Their rules.

Thus, in the Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the people are referred to as Israelites and the nation as Israel, but the land is the land or the land of Canaan. The phrase “the land of Israel” only appears eleven times in the entire Bible, post-Exodus, and mainly to refer to the collective of the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel[3].

It wasn't until the common era that the Israelites in the land began to officially designate the political entity as Israel on coins and in letters and titles during the Great Revolt and the Bar Kochba Revolt. The precedent set was carried through to rabbinic thought and literature, which referred to the entirety of the Biblical land as Israel. But there was a significant difference: the nation of Israel was now dispersed. The First and Second Temples, which sustained the sacrificial cult ascribed in the Torah and around which Biblical practice revolved, were gone. The great rabbis of the Mishnaic period were suddenly tasked with the impossible challenge of translating a Temple-based sacrificial cult into a religion that can be practiced outside the land of Israel while maintaining the communal connection of the people of Israel to each other and to the land. To a degree they had, to adapt a line from Berditchevski, come to a time of two worlds in conflict and had to make a choice between being the last of the Israelites or the first of the Jews. It was their ingenuity, agility, and epistemological modesty that allowed for the creation of one of the most enduring ethical and philosophical works in the Western canon: the Mishnah. And it was the Mishnah that carried the Jews through to the medieval era and beyond.

Between the fifth century and the fifteenth century, the Jewish experience splintered further, with regional differences in fortune that led to a more fractured existence. Where in the first two eras, the people of Israel were expelled from their land, the expulsions that characterized Jewish life on the European continent and the British Isles from the turn of the first millennium and through the next five hundred years created both the reality and the myth of the wandering Jew. But the people of Israel, the Jews, were united by their Biblical narrative, by the Mishnaic texts, and by the Jewish urge to expound and wrestle with all that has come before. Their common language and studies helped them adapt to their new surroundings, from the Maghreb to Baltics, and allowed them to prosper in the few trades they were permitted to practice. While no realistic efforts were made to return to sovereignty in the land of Israel during this era, foundational commentaries were added, literally surrounding the text they interacted with, like a literary scaffolding offering a chidush or a new perspective. And though some of the great sages of this period dreamt and longed for a return to the land, few made the treacherous journey and even fewer remained, despite the requirement for 26 of the 613 mitzvot of a physical presence in the land of Israel. As the European powers began to dream of empire and expand their colonial ventures, as the seeds of nationalism were planted and watered by seemingly endless conflict, the condition of Jews continued to deteriorate in almost all of their adopted lands.

The transition to modernity – the interim period including the Renaissance, the age of exploration, and the colonization of the Americas – did not prove an improvement or provide relief for European Jewry. It was not until the French Revolution with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that European Jews were given the opportunity to stand up and be counted as (near) equals. And still Jews faced hardship and prejudice wherever they lived.

But the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, on the heels of the Enlightenment that characterized the 18th century and opened up new avenues for Jewish participation in civic life, presented as many new challenges as opportunities. Yes, the Jews were welcome as participants in the golden medinah of the United States of America, acknowledged by its first president and active in its industries and eventually its politics. But the struggle to be seen as American, British, French, or Italian remained. The people of Israel, long forced into their ghettos and their shtetls, faced new questions of their loyalty and allegiance to the state. Lionel de Rothschild, the British banker and philanthropist who provided essential relief during the Great Irish Famine, was denied his elected seat in the House of Commons for over a decade over his refusal to swear an oath on a Christian Bible.

In the same years, Moses Hess, the brilliant thinker who influenced Karl Marx’s theories, was rejected by his socialist milieu and embarked on an internal journey of reconnecting with his Jewish identity. While Jews in Europe embraced the cultural assimilation offered by the newly enlightened nations, Hess saw things differently. In the rising wake of a more scientific, more socially-acceptable and palatable Jew hatred, Hess recognized the limits of assimilation and drew the prophetic conclusion that the Jews would never be fully accepted by others until they have their own country. Decades before pogroms swept through the Russian empire and the Pale of Settlement, Hess laid out a vision for Jewish sovereignty in the land of their forefathers, based in a literal return to working the land, that would inspire Ahad Ha’am’s Labor Zionism and Theodor Herzl’s Political Zionism. Long before the Dreyfus Affair roiled the European Jewish elite, Hess published Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, warning his coreligionists that the assimilation they warmly embraced would always be limited, that no matter how much they integrated, their compatriots would never drop their suspicion that the Jews were not loyal members of their adopted nations.

And here we are, 160 years after the publication of that dire prediction, living in the golden medinah which European Jews chose to immigrate to over the dangerous trek to the harsh environments of Ottoman and British Palestine, still facing accusations of dual loyalty, still playing defense against antisemites who accuse American Jews of being a fifth column and manipulating American politics to benefit the State of Israel. I can spend many more hours of your time digging into the complicated relationship of Jews in modernity to the land of Israel and to each other. I can spend even more time pontificating about the dangers to the people of Israel posed by our bipolar Jewish world and the threat to our peoplehood posed by the rise of far-right Jewish nationalists in the State of Israel, who look back at our Biblical and rabbinic eras with ideological blinders to bend our collective past to shape their exclusionary narrative.

I will likely spend a lifetime informally educating every Jew I meet about the complexity of our history, the diversity of our narratives, and the opportunity we have, in every generation, to learn from the mistakes of our past, from our fragile Mosaic covenant to the fall of the Temple, and to uphold the centrality of the land of Israel to our faith, as my predecessors did at the World Zionist Congress when they fought stringently against the practical proposals to accept a Jewish homeland outside the land of our fathers as an answer to Europe’s Jewish Question. But the question before us today is not only what I think is the best narrative on Israel – the people, the land, and the political entity. It is also the question of how we educate the Jews, the people of Israel, on their heritage.

Whether they are on campus, in high school, or in the workplace, American Jews are often drawn into discussions on their personal relationship to Israel, on the connection of Jews to the land of Israel, and on the merits of proclaiming Jewish indigeneity in that land. While many advocates and consultants beat louder on the war drums of Jewish literacy and believe we must never stray from the senseless task of berating Jews for what they do not know, I propose a paradigm shift whose approach literally goes against the grain of our tradition. Instead of starting in the beginning, let us start with where we are at.

We cannot possibly know exactly what each learner or participant knows about the relationship between Israel, Jews, and Judaism. Instead, we must meet each and every one of these Jews where they already are. What is the narrative they are hearing from Jewish educators and leaders? What are the narratives they are confronted with outside those explicitly Jewish spaces? How do we help them make sense of what they already know? And is there a way we can nurture their curiosity to choose a path of deeper engagement?

We need to take a step back from our immediate instinct as Jewish educators and learners. Instead of telling the narrative from bereshit, we need to examine their needs from where they see it: Israel as the phoenix rising from the ashes of Europe, Israel as a Western haven in a sea of autocracies and theocracies, Israel as Goliath instead of David.

Much as we may want to weave the beautiful tapestry of the Jewish history from creation to covenant to enslavement to exodus to sovereignty, exile, dispersal, survival, and eventual return to the land, neither our desires nor the land of Israel are our true subject – the learner is. And, for the vast majority of them, our duty should be to help them make sense of the building blocks strewn across their floor, to guide them in constructing their own design, their own narrative, developing their own relationship to the Jewish story much as commanded in the Passover seder, for us to remember, in every generation, the feeling of liberation and communion, with God and with our community.

[1] Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared

[2] In a live setting, this would be a moment to ask participants to share their answers.

[3] Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, “From Judah to Israel: Territory and History”