From The Tempo
Israel on My Mind
By Rabbi Stuart W. Gershon,
It was September 1973. I remember. The air raid sirens were screaming. It was Yom Kippur. Egypt and Syria had just launched a surprise attack against Israel. I was petrified, huddled in the corner of a Jerusalem synagogue with several classmates, all of us spending our junior year abroad at the Hebrew University. We expected bombs to drop on us from Arab fighter planes at any moment. All of us thought we were going to die.
A few hours later, we came to understand that the air raid sirens we heard were a signal to the civilian reserves all across the country to mobilize - Israel had been invaded! Our parents called us from the States, begging us to come home. But not one of us left. During the Yom Kippur War I worked in a factory that supplied bread to the Israeli troops. On the festival of Sukkot, I was piling sandbags to protect the windows of school buildings.
It was an eerie feeling to ride the buses or walk in town. Except for us foreign students, there were no young men to be seen anywhere. They were all on the battlefield. One day my Israeli friends were students, just like me, who read books and wrote term papers. The next day they risked their lives commanding tank battalions and piloting F-16 fighter planes.
Despite all the encouraging reports from the media at the time, Israel almost lost the Yom Kippur war. In its first few days, Israel was reeling. Many Israeli jets were shot down. The losses incurred by the army at the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights were staggering. There was not even one family in Israel that survived the war unscathed. Everyone lost someone: a husband, a father or a brother, a son or a grandson, an uncle or a cousin. The myth of Israeli invincibility had been broken.
As a young, twenty year old American Jew, the Yom Kippur war was one of the most sobering and searing experiences of my life. I experienced the grim reality of war and I contemplated the very real possibility of Israel's destruction. Folksinger Joni Mitchell sings the song "You never know what you've lost until its gone." Well, having almost lost Israel, I came to understand what she truly meant to me. No longer was Israel just a speck on the map. No longer was Israel just a philosophical abstraction in my mind. I fell in love with Israel, its people, and its national Jewish culture.
My feelings about Israel in 1973 could not have been more different from those I held as a young teenager growing up in Maplewood in the '60s. Then I knew nothing and cared nothing about Israel. During the Six Days War in 1967, I couldn't fathom why the adults around me were crying so hysterically. Did it really matter to us American Jews whether or not Israel survived?
Of course the answer was yes. It did matter. And after the Six Days War, Israel became the darling of American Jewry. Israel became the axis on which Jewish identity turned. To be a good Jew in those years meant to identify with and to support Israel. Among a significant proportion of American Jews, Israel surely replaced God as the central focus of their Jewish faith.
Everything Israel did made us proud. We delighted in the larger than life images of Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir; of blooming deserts; of kibbutzniks dancing around the campfire; of the daring Israeli raid on Entebbe. Israel's achievements were our achievements too. Israel helped us to be proud that we were Jews.
Israel's golden glow first began to fade with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now far more tarnished images were seen on our TV screens: the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps; the Intifadah; human rights abuses; Baruch Goldstein gunning down Arabs at prayer in Hebron; the assassination of prime minister Rabin.
Israel does not always make us so proud anymore. Sometimes her behavior rather embarrasses our American sensibilities. It is sad but true that American Jewry's concern and affection for Israel has vastly diminished from 1967.
While no one can deny the glaring gap between the Israel of our dreams and the Israel of reality, our love for the state and people of Israel must be placed on a level utterly independent of any particular Israeli government or policy.
At the annual convention of the Reform rabbinate in 1997, I personally witnessed the adoption of a historic new statement of principles on the relationship between Reform Judaism and Zionism. The international Reform movement emphatically reaffirmed Israel's crucial importance to the survival of the Jewish people, both physically and spiritually. Even more, this document of our movement proclaimed that Zionism is an integral part of Reform Judaism, and any attempt to sunder the relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel would be an affront to the Jewish tradition we revere.
Your Reform rabbis have gone on record: It is the religious responsibility of Reform Jews to continue to assist Israel politically and financially. And for the very first time in our history, the Reform movement officially encourages Reform Jews to consider making aliyah, immigrating to the land of Israel.
We in the Reform Jewish community, especially, need once again to make Israel and Zionism a priority in our lives. Our platform on Reform Judaism and Zionism calls upon all Reform Jews to intensify our commitment to learning the Hebrew language, to support Israel politically and financially, to visit Israel more frequently, to consider aliyah, and to send our teenagers there to visit and study. Only some ten percent of eligible Jewish teens visit Israel each summer. Did you know that the Mormons expect their teens to spend one full year of their lives in Israel doing community service? I believe that at least one summer in Israel must become an expected rite of passage for every American Jewish teenager, on par with Bar or Bat Mitzvah.
I am both a Reform Jew and a Zionist. I am a Zionist because Israel represents the triumph of the courageous Jewish spirit over 2,000 years of degradation. Israel insures that the Jewish people will never again be powerless. During the Middle Ages, the Jews had to rely upon the good will of Gentile kings in order to survive. Sixty years ago, President Roosevelt refused our plea to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz. No less than our medieval ancestors, 20th century Jews were still dependent upon the Gentiles to save Jewish lives! Had there existed a sovereign Jewish state in 1939, there would have been no need for us to beg in order to save Jewish lives.
I am a Zionist because Israel is more than a safe haven for oppressed Jews. Israel is a safe haven for Judaism and Jewish culture. Israel is the only place in the world in which the rhythms of public life are governed by the Jewish calendar. In Israel you never have to explain why you weren't at work or at school on a Jewish holiday. For if it's a Jewish holiday, then it's a national holiday, and everything is closed. Go to Tel Aviv and see Israeli children jabbering away in a living, vibrant Hebrew that the prophet Isaiah would have understood; Go to the Negev or the Galilee and see how the children and grandchildren of Jews once forced to dwell in urban ghettoes have made the desert bloom -- then you will truly understand the nature of Jewish culture.
I am a Zionist because Israel is the greatest Jewish experiment of modern times. As American Jews, we lead a highly privatized, individual, and family-oriented kind of Judaism. But God called Abraham and Sarah to be the founders of a society, a national and political entity, that will do what is just and right. The Brit, our Covenant with God, cannot be completely fulfilled here in America. Abraham's mission can be realized only in a sovereign Jewish state. Can a Jewish country be "A light unto the nations" as Isaiah prophesied? The unfolding history of the state of Israel will settle the question, once and for all.
Let us remember the words of psalm 137: "Let my right hand wither, if I forget you O Jerusalem!" Israel is the inheritance of every Jew. So let each of us determine to build a relationship with that land and its people.
