This piece was originally published on October 9 on the blog of Daniel Gordis, and is reprinted below with permission from the author.
Dear Jay,
We don’t know each other, though I’ve known of you and your work for some time. Like many others, I recently read your “How I’m Losing My Love For Israel” in the Forward. Because you write so articulately, and because your column has attracted such widespread attention, I’m taking the liberty of responding.
The truth is, you and I agree about a lot. We’re both worried about some of what’s happening to Israeli society. We’re both tired of all the equivocating (though probably for different reasons). We’d both love some real leadership around here. We’d both like peace. And we’re both exhausted.
That exhaustion is the first reason you give for that fact that your “love [for Israel] is starting to wane.” But frankly, Jay, when you began to write about your exhaustion, I began to lose you. For, I have to confess, I don’t see the connection between exhaustion and losing love, or between exhaustion and committing oneself to what’s right and just.
I suspect that the Partisans were pretty exhausted, and they might even have debated some of their own tactics; but those were the least of their problems. Their main worry was that evil might triumph and transform their world into an uninhabitable hell, and their bone-aching fatigue notwithstanding, they committed their lives to making sure that human freedom survived those who wished to eradicate it.
The GI’s who slogged their way across Europe, up the cliffs of Normandy and across the frozen, bitter winters of that blood-soaked continent, were pretty exhausted, too, I’d imagine. Yes, many of them were kids, following their orders. And many of them were probably distraught that innocent Europeans were getting killed by the thousands in the process of saving the west. But many, I would also like to believe, knew that what they were fighting to preserve was infinitely more important than their own personal exhaustion or the tragic innocent losses that war always entails. Or even their own lives.
That clarity of purpose was, in the end, why we won, and why you and I live in democracies where we can write and say whatever we like. Had the Partisans and those GI’s given in to their fatigue, would you and I have the very liberties we so easily take for granted? I doubt it.
So, yes, we’re exhausted. And, if you’ll forgive me, I suspect that those of here are more exhausted than are those of you over there. Life here is conducted under a pervasive cloud of exhaustion that my most of American friends simply don’t comprehend. It’s the exhaustion that comes from coming home at the end of the day and finding on your door a diagram distributed by the Home Front Command showing you how many seconds you have to find shelter if a missile should be aimed your way. What do you do with that information? Ignore it? Or put it on the fridge as the sign instructs you to, so you can live with the looming warning every time you go to get a glass of OJ?ScudWarningVLoRes
But that’s really the least of it. The real exhaustion here comes from sending a smart but relatively naïve nineteen-year-old daughter off to the army (in Intelligence, in this case) and have her begin to learn things about Israel’s enemies that she will never be able to discuss. The exhaustion comes from the hollow look of an unfathomable sadness in her eyes when she’s home, from her bewilderment at the evil of which human beings are capable – an awareness a young woman shouldn’t have at that age. And you grow exhausted because you want to take care of her, to protect her. But you can’t.
You can’t take care of your kid because this is Israel. Because she can’t tell you what she knows. She can’t talk to you about the human capacity for hatred that she now confronts every single day. And because this is Israel, you can’t take of her – because here things are reversed. She’s out there taking care of you. So you get into bed each night knowing that you’ve sacrificed a part of her innocence and her youth on the altar of your beliefs and ideology, and you wonder, each and every day, if what you once thought was a noble life choice might have been the most unfair thing you ever did. That, Jay, is more exhausting than I’d ever imagined it would be.
She’s out of the army now. But her brother’s not. And there are those days, only once every few months, when I’m either leaving the house in the morning to go to work or coming home at the end of the day, when on the sidewalk outside our building are two IDF officers, and it appears that they’re walking to our entrance. Then comes that split second moment of breath-stopped horror, the fear that they’re coming to our house, bearing tidings that would be wholly unbearable. It’s only happened three or four times, but it’s enough. They walk past the building, Jay, barely even nodding to me because they’re in the middle of a conversation, unaware that I’ve even noticed them. But I’m a mess. Drenched with sweat. Shaking slightly. Knowing that the rest of the day or the evening is going to be a utter waste of time.
And at moments like that, you want to call your kid. Not for anything in particular; just to tell him that you love him. That you miss him. That there really isn’t a moment when you’re not thinking about him, or praying that he’s OK.
But you can’t. Because he can’t use his phone. Because he’s busy. Because he’s out there protecting his parents. And his brother. And his sister, who used to protect him. Simply because when he was a very little boy, we decided we wanted to live here; and now he’s out there, doing this, year after relentless year. Loving Israel is exhausting, Jay, you’re right. But really, it’s way more exhausting here than it is over there.
So the real question isn’t whether or not we’re exhausted – lots of us are tired. (I keep this picture ExhaustedSoldierson my desktop for those moments when I feel exhausted … to remind myself that no matter how tired I am, there are people out there (this is not my kid) who are way more exhausted than I am.) The real question, I think, is not whether we’re exhausted, but rather what we do with our exhaustion. What makes all the difference is not our fatigue, but what keeps us going when our tank feels empty, when it feels like all that’s left is fumes.
Like you, Jay, I know that I was raised on an image of Israel that doesn’t really exist. Maybe it never did. Like you, there were open fields in Jerusalem that I used to love (for you, it was Churshat Ha-Yaraeach) that are now filled by large apartment buildings. But when we lived in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, our older neighbors used to reminisce about the days when our neighborhood had been all orange groves. Did they stop loving America because fields got built on? I didn’t sense that. When we live in America and watch fields get built up, we sense progress. But when it’s a field in the Israel of our youth that’s now gone, we feel betrayed. What’s that about? Maybe it’s time we all moved beyond puppy love and ventured into something more mature, a sort of love that knows that the object of our love cannot, and should not, remain unchanged year after year, decade after decade.
Like you, Jay, I am concerned about some of the injustices that Israel commits. But unlike you, I could never be “more relaxed [in Berlin] than in Jerusalem.” You wrote very compellingly that you felt relieved that though there was political baggage in Berlin, “none of it was mine.”
But you know what I love about this place, Jay? I love that all the political baggage is mine. The Palestinians. The Israeli Arabs. (Some of) the Haredim. A collapsing educational system. Murders on the streets with a constancy we never used to have. A nation of roads and drivers that kills many more Israelis than our enemies do. That’s all my baggage.
But living here, my baggage is also the sight of young secular and religious Israelis going from restaurant to restaurant, inspecting not their kashrut, but how they treat their workers, and depending on what they find, giving them a “social kashrut” certificate. It’s the sight of many hundreds of people coming out to hear Rabbi Benny Lau on the Shabbat afternoon before Yom Kippur in a synagogue that couldn’t begin to accommodate them all, because, they knew, he would be the one guy in the city among all the derashot that afternoon who would tie whatever he was saying to a vision for a different kind of society, and call on them to do something about it. Living here is about spending a morning on Sukkot, going to the Church in Kiryat Yearim and joining a capacity crowd of Jews and Christians, largely secular but also some people wearing kippot, listening to the choir perform Bach motets on precisely the spot where the Ark of the Covenant once rested. It’s about the vision of people who, no matter what CNN will tell you, really can live with people who are different from them; it’s about a blending of the ancient past and the complicated present, of setting aside the equivocations of which you write so articulately for a beauty about which you say very little. Living here is about feeling the pulse of people who still have hope, who desperately want to build something different here, and who would never dream of saying aloud that they’ve given up.
Which is why, Jay, I can’t imagine leaving this place, and angry as I sometimes get, I could never write about losing my love for what we’re building here. Because I know that this is our last chance, and I know without a shred of doubt that the robust Jewish life that exists everywhere – in Manhattan as well as in Los Angeles, in London no less than in Johannesburg – exists because of Israel. Two generations ago, Jewish life in America wasn’t the Jewish life that you and I were raised on. It wasn’t nearly so secure after the war. And though 1948 made a bit of a difference, the secure and self-confident American Jewish life that you and I take for granted really emerged in 1967, when Jews around the world finally stood tall because they were no longer the objects of history, but were now the shapers of their own destiny.
Would that 1967 war prove to have a very complicated aftermath? Yes, it would – we’re still trying to figure it out. But it changed everything, Jay, for me and for you. For my neighbors and for yours. I can’t imagine a world in which I’d want to be alive in which this country didn’t exist; which is why I’m constitutionally incapable of saying that I’m losing my love for it.
That’s the real difference between us, Jay, and it’s the reason that your exhaustion leads you where it leads you, and mine leads me to dig in my heels. You write that as you notice your love starting to wane, you feel a “sadness that accompanies the end of any affair.”
That’s a fascinating metaphor. Because at the end of an affair, most people put their lives back together by telling themselves that despite the pain of the moment, there will be someone else. “A lot of fish in the ocean,” we told each other in college when relationships broke up, which was to say, “she’s not the only one out there, and she’s not the last one you’ll love.”
Which may have been true of our youthful relationships back then, but it’s not true of Israel. This is the only one. This is the last chance we get. We lose this, and the Jewish people heads into dark, uncharted territory that I don’t think you or I can begin to imagine. You yourself wrote that you “still awed by the tkuma, the resurrection and rebirth of my ancient people.”
You’re absolutely right. This country is the very foundation of the resurrection and rebirth of our ancient people. Given that, how dare we not love it, even with all its faults? Is love Israel exhausting? Of course it is. Does it require lots of equivocation? Yes, it does. Is it very unpopular in lots of circles? No question.
But it’s bigger than me. And it’s bigger than you. It matters more than all of us. So given that, I don’t think we have a right to exhaustion. Or, if exhaustion is inevitable, then the only thing I think we have a right to is a few hours of sleep, until we get up the next morning, roll up our sleeves and get to work again.
Because loving Israel isn’t like an affair. It’s a totally different thing. In a relationship, the person I love and I both matter – more or less equally, I guess. But not here. In this, I don’t matter. You don’t matter. Only justice matters. Only the future matters. Only the Jewish people’s survival matters. And without this place, there is no future, no Jewish people.
Given that, what’s the alternative to a deep and abiding love? I can’t think of one. So tonight, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and head off to shul. I’m going to put the news out of my mind, and for a few hours, I’m going to forget about the equivocation, about the fatigue. I’m going to hold on to my son, the one kid still left at home – and when the singing starts, I’m going to dance.
Shabbat Shalom, Jay, and Chag Same’ach.
Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center, where he is also a senior fellow. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and currents in Israel.
Jeez when will Gordis stop going on about his children suffering for his aliya? If he really felt as bad as he writes, he'd move back to america. His pain over his heroic children is just rhetoric.
I can go along with a lot of what you say, but someone please explain to me why it's OK for settlers to keep pushing outward. It wreaks of what my European ancestors did to my Native American ancestors. Can you tell me why folks should be able to do that? I'm not trying to be a smart-alek. I'm really trying to understand. Manifest Destiny doctrine was evil. Thievery and murder occurred because of it. I'm not grasping how ever-expanding settlements are different. Honest, I'm trying to see your point of view. Help me out.
I guess I'm older than either of the writers and I am an American Jew and I cherish Israel. I saw the faces of the "survivors." They were exhausted with just living. I saw anti=semitism in a small town. I read my history and about Jews being hung in the South. I followed Israel's birth and celebrated with all of the people I would never know. Survive...that's what we had to do and that is what Israel has to do so that we, my children, grandchildren and I, will never know the fear of those survivors. Why is it wrong for Israel to expand? Why was in okay for the US? Why didn't the countries surrounding Israel welcome it's birth and instead declared war? Why is Israel held to different rules than anywhere else? Why do we have to be more moral, better and kinder? I don't know Mr. Gordis or the other guy who is "exhausted" but I read both articles. Maybe Jay is too young to have looked into the face of a Sabra in l948 who swam to save a Jewish survivor who jumped in the water rather than return to Europe. Maybe he never met the soldiers who fought or the people who went back to Poland after surviving to be murdered. Jay disgusts me because he is too involved in his left-wing policies than to see that we must love Israel and we will fight to it's survival because we have no choice.
Reducing American history to Manifest Destiny and the genocide of Native Americans, while tempting, misses a WHOLE lot of what the U.S. is. Reducing Israel to being pissed off about the kibbutzim is similarly ridiculous. Both issues are vitally important to discuss, but losing one's love for America because of Indiana genocide, slavery, anti-catholicsm, and Japanese-American internment camps is perhaps even more silly than "losing one's love for Israel" because of these settlement issues.
Marsha,
You ask how an Israeli settler is different from those Americans who settled the west, displacing native Indians as they went. The answer is simple. It is impossible for either a Jew or a Palestinian to be a settler in Israel or Palestine. BOTH people are NATIVE to the same piece of territory. The equivalent of an Israeli Jew moving to the West Bank is that of the progeny of the Shawnee Indians reclaiming the state of Ohio. Would a lot of white Ohioans (born and raised in Ohio) object? Probably. But that would not make that Shawnee tribe "settlers" in their own ancestral Ohio homeland.
Whatever the final arrangements are regarding borders and populations (namely Palestine being Judenrein) at the conceptual level neither a Jew born in Brooklyn or a Palestinian born in Michigan can be a "settler" in Israel or Palestine in the same sense you reference of how Native Americans got displaced.
Correction, that last post was directed to Donna.
Palestinian nationalism as a doctrine in general refuses to allow any Jews on its territory. From 1948-67 that included Jewish communities that had been in place for centuries. Today Gaza has no living Jews. By contrast 20% of the Israeli electorate is Palestinian. The real issue is not how long a person has lived on that piece of land but rather a willingness to accept the organic legitimacy of the "other's" presence there. Most streams of Zionism today recognize Palestinian nationalism as organic to the land. Palestinian nationalism for the most part does not see Jews as organic to the land. The equivalent would be my complaining about the French "occupation" of Paris.
I've read the article, Gordis' response, and readers' comments to both. I find Gordis articulate and erudite but ultimately not compelling. To say that "I know without a shred of doubt that the robust Jewish life that exists everywhere – in Manhattan as well as in Los Angeles, in London no less than in Johannesburg – exists because of Israel" is, for me, a bit of a stretch and ultimately a self-serving argument for Israel. American Jews may have grown big ones after 1967 but is that the kind of Jews we want to be? The kind that pushes people out of our way like yarmulke-wearing Jews in Manhattan who cut you off in traffic because the world owes them?
Jews with power are like anyone else with power: susceptible to irresponsibility, corruption and abuse of that power. In that light Israel shouldn't be looked at by the world any differently than any other nation which believes it has a manifest destiny. But for a Jew, the notion that Jews need to possess nuclear weapons, incite each other to assassinate progressive statesmen, kill gay teenagers, and speak of Arabs as dogs strikes many of us as a betrayal at the deepest level of Jewish commitments to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.
I stand with Jay.
All I can say is I LOVE YOU. Without people like you who can articulate how I feel would leave me merely frustated after reading Jay Michaelson's disturbing opinion article.
Thank you!
This is presented as a riposte to Jay Michaelsons article and yet one talks about a personal relationship with Israel in the American Diaspora and the other about the feelings of a current Israeli. I didn't find it to be a compelling response. Of course Gordis cares and of course his involvement in current events is deeper, what he doesn't tell us is his vision for the relationship between the two communities.
I can't say that without Israel we are nothing. We existed thousands of years in the Diaspora without Israel, were we nothing then? I think not. We are first and foremost people of the Book. Our faith is based on law, not land. We should be careful to remember that.
To those who put all of their hopes and dreams on the shoulders of a nation far far away - go there. Share their fate. To expect millions of others to bear your expectations and hopes and live for your future is selfishness beyond compare. If you are not willing to carry that burden, let them go, leave them alone and get on with your own life.
I've got to applaud Mr. Gordis. Sometimes marriage is exhausting, children are exhausting and work and community are exhausting, but if I act like a mench I've got to plow on, don't I, and try not to get too discouraged. The same with Israel. Anything else is irresponsible.
To Lisa who thinks that we are only about Law, please note that the Jewish people are told to love Israel and so much of the Law is about the land. Right now we in Israel pray daily for rain ... rain here and not in America. The Book is about God, Israel and the Jewish People, not just the people.
By the way, our economy is still pretty much ok and our socialized medicine really works. When it gets too touch for you outside the Land maybe you will think that Israel's continued survival as the Jewish homeland is worth fighting for, even when you're tired.
"I can't help fearing that the Zionist enterprise will one day be seen to have done the Jewish people more harm than good. Our tenacious hold on this strip of homeland has become the scapegoat for the world's terrorism and this wouldn't be the case if we remained a people of the diaspora." --
I don't think Daniel and Jay can understand the exhaustion of the other. You cannot hold two competing beliefs in balance indefinitely. Eventually, reality forces accommodation and acquiescence to the stronger impulse. Survival always trumps Idealism. It is a crucible that can make us all fools. So I hope that both Daniel and Jay regain their strength.
Lisa B writes, "I can't say that without Israel we are nothing. We existed thousands of years in the Diaspora without Israel, were we nothing then? I think not."
The notion that we would return to a "normal" Diaspora existence were Israel to be lost is seriously delusional. Does one return to life as normal after losing a child, saying "Oh well, I didn't have that child before"? Would you be normal if shortly thereafter you lost a *second* child?
The Jewish people suffered cataclysmic losses in our time perhaps only comparable to those of the early 2nd century, connected to the Bar Kochba rebellion. To lose Israel so soon thereafter, after all that has been invested in it, I believe would leave us a broken people.
Moreover, I don't believe most recognize that Israel is both a frontline state in the battle against barbarism and a critical indicator of the state of justice in the world. If Israel falls, it won't be the only one.
This is in response to Donna's plea for help in understanding the difference between Jews settling Judea & Samaria and Europeans settling Native America. Well, Donna, you need to understand that the Jews are the natives of all the land west of the Jordan River all the way to the Medit. Sea. Why do you think the "west bank" is really called Judea (& Samaria). Please read any history book (Paul Johnson's The History of the Jews) or any of the Prophets to see whether the land was called Judea or Palestine or The West Bank. Then you will better appreciate that the Jews are the natives of the land.
Donna Mon. Oct 12, 2009I can go along with a lot of what you say, but someone please explain to me why it's OK for settlers to keep pushing outward. It wreaks of what my European ancestors did to my Native American ancestors. Can you tell me why folks should be able to do that? I'm not trying to be a smart-alek. I'm really trying to understand. Manifest Destiny doctrine was evil. Thievery and murder occurred because of it. I'm not grasping how ever-expanding settlements are different. Honest, I'm trying to see your point of view. Help me out.
Donna,
There is little difference at all between what the Zionists did to Palestinians and what the Europeans did to Native Americans, or, for that matter, what the Boers and English did to the Africans. They all were colonial enterprises that conquered the native populations and took their land, and in the case of the Zionists, homes, crops, and goods as well. That because a Hebrew kingdom of some unknown size and duration once existed thousands of years ago and that a small minority of Jews (anti-Zionist to the core, by the way) continued on the land does not make all Jews everywhere or even the Jews that remained the rightful owners of Palestine. The claim is childish at best, certainly ahistorical, and dangerous as a precedent. Should all peoples be allowed to return and claim the land their ancestors once occupied thousands of years ago? What chaos would ensue, and has ensued not just in Palestine. After all, this is exactly the claim Mussolini made when invading Libya. This was once Roman territory and we are the inheritors of Rome, therefore the Libyans are the unlawful occupiers and we Italians the natives.
What of the Palestinians? The ancient Hebrews shared the land with any number of different tribes. What of their ancestral rights? The very notion that every Jew remains a rightful heir after an absence of 2,000 years, yet no Palestinian has the same right after an exile of only 50 years (or less in many cases) is insane. Yet, this is where ethnic tribalism has always brought us - to the logically absurd, the untenable logic that is always applied only to one narrow case, to the dangerous notion that one group's fanciful notions should triumph over the rights of others.
To Peter
Your description of this "new Jew with balls" doesn't sound anything like Jews at all, but rather like radical Muslims. We have had nuclear weapons for many years and have not used them - they are a very important deterrent considering the fragile security situation in the Middle East. Israelis do not assassinate "progressive" statesmen, look at all the Arab MKs that condemn Israel in the Knesset and visit countries hostile to Israel. Instead the Israeli military and clandestine forces assassinate terrorist leaders hell-bent on destroying us all. I see a clear difference there. When have Israelis or Jews ever killed a gay teenager? What about in Saudi Arabia or the Gaza Strip where that happens much more often? How often do you hear Israeli politicians calling Arabs "dogs" or anything like that compared to Arabs calling us pigs and apes? I could go on, but before you start playing the blame game, make sure the insults you level on the Jewish people are actually true.
To Ayelet,
You say that the Zionist enterprise and the creation of the State of Israel has done more harm to the Jewish people than good. You say that the world uses Israel as a scapegoat for the world's terrorism and that this would never have happened if we had stayed in the Diaspora. Let me ask you, did antisemitism not exist in the Diaspora? Did Jews not have problems in the Diaspora? Have you heard of the Holocaust or of the horrendous pogroms in Russia? Anti-Zionism is just the new form of antisemitism that appears legitimate to liberal countries, people and the UN. Nothing has changed. Jews have been the scapegoat for thousands of years, whether it was while we were living in the Diaspora or in Israel. The difference is that now we have our own state, our own army and are able to take care of ourselves. The Holocaust and those pogroms will never happen again because now we are empowered to take our fate into our own hands. Do not be fooled that Israel has caused problems for us, it only changed the face of antisemitism and mitigated its effects upon the Jewish people. I'd rather have the UN complain about us or pass resolutions condemning us rather than being attacked or killed while in the Diaspora.