Gordis - The promise of Israel: why its seemingly greatest weakness is actually its greatest strength

Contents

Also by Daniel Gordis

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Does the World Need the Jews? Rethinking Chosenness and American Jewish Identity

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If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State

Home to Stay: One American Familys Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel

Coming Together, Coming Apart: A Memoir of Heartbreak and Promise in Israel

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Copyright 2012 by Daniel Gordis. All rights reserved

Cover design: Erica Halivni

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Gordis, Daniel.

The promise of Israel : why its seemingly greatest weakness is actually its greatest strength / by Daniel Gordis.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-00375-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22177-8 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-23547-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26028-9 (ebk)

1. IsraelPolitics and government21st century. 2. National characteristics, Israeli. 3. Zionism. 4. Arab-Israeli conflict1993Influence. I. Title.

DS128.2.G66 2012

956.94dc23

2011053472

For

Ada and Menahem Ben Sasson

and the children we share,

Talia and Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said:

This is my own, my native Land?

Whose heart hath neer within him burned

As home his footsteps he hath turned,...

From wandering on a foreign strand?

Walter Scott

The Lay of the Last Minstrel

August 1804

We have not yet lost our hope

Of being a free people, in our land

Hatikva, 1878

Introduction

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;

Till the war-drum throbbd no longer and the battle flags were furld

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall, 1837

What struck me most about California when I started to visit it was its newness. Nothing seemed old. The cars all appeared new; the people dressed young and acted younger. To a young East Coast kid just starting a career, California seemed all about the future, almost devoid of a past.

But all of us have pasts. All of us come from someplace, and even in the shiny new West, it often takes very little for people to start talking about their lives, their deepest regrets, and their senses of how they have, or have not, honored the legacies from which they were born. Its amazing, actually, what people tell a clergyperson, no matter how young he or she may be. When I first headed out to Los Angeles after finishing rabbinical school, I had no real conception of what awaited me. Some of what I hazily imagined actually came to be. Much did not. But one of the things that I remember most clearly is the stories that people, especially elderly people, told me, even though they barely knew me.

There was one story that I heard several times, in one form or another, always from people around the age of my grandparents. These people told me how their siblings who had arrived in America before them would meet them at the New York harbor. The new arrivals came off the boat with almost nothing to their names, but they had, in addition to their meager belongings, Jewish objects like candlesticks for the Sabbath or tefillin that they had transported with great care. The sibling (usually a brother) who had arrived in the United States a few years earlier would take the bundle with these Jewish religious objects, nonchalantly drop it into the water lapping at the edge of the pier, and say, Youre in America now. Those were for the old country.

The men and women who told me these stories were much, much older than I was, and the events they were describing had unfolded more than half a century earlier. When I was younger and first heard them, what horrified me was the mere notion of throwing those ritual objects into the ocean as if they were yesterdays garbage. As I grew older, I was struck by the fact that these elderly people still remembered that moment and that it troubled them enough for them to recount the story to a young person like me, so many years later.

Later still, I began to understand the deep pain and mourning implicit in those stories. There was a sense of having betrayed the world from which they had come. There was a sense of the cruelty of their brothers cavalier discarding of the bundles; it might have been well intentioned, but it was callous and mean, and half a century later, it still evoked such pain that they sought to talk about it.

Before we judge these siblings at the pier, we should acknowledge that both sides were right. Both the elderly Jews who told me their stories and the brothers who had tossed their possessions into the oily, filthy water reflected a profound truth. The brothers were right that there is a price of entry to the United States and that it is a steep one. In large measure, many immigrants have done as well as they have in the United States precisely because they were willing to drop bundles of memory, ethnicity, and religious observance into the harbor. And the people who told me these stories were right that the pain and the anger that they felt about that price were real, abiding, and deeply scarring. They had given up something of themselves when they came to the United States, and the scars never fully healed. Being forced to pretend that they had paid no price at all only made matters worse.