As the famous quote goes, if God doesn’t love Israel, then why is the sky blue and white?
I spent the past academic year in Israel as a visiting professor at The Weizmann Institute of Science. My stay affected me profoundly, both spiritually and in my appreciation of the difficulties Israel and Israelis face.
Every time I visited a city or town — be it Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv, Haifa or Eilat — or walked up and down the streets of Rehovot, or saw the many beautiful places along the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, an archeological site, or a museum, I thought how lucky I am to be in Israel, how proud I am of Israel, how much Israel is a modern day miracle.
I had the luxury of spending time with my sister, Caren, her husband, Dani, and their three children, who live in Jerusalem.
In the more than quarter century that my sister has lived in Israel, the last two years have been the hardest, she told me. It is not easy for a mother having a son in the army.
But it is much more than that. The terrorism is real, and it weighs heavily every day and every instant on those trying to lead their lives (as normal as possible in these dangerous times), and it is a constant source of worry and tension.
I remember Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur and many Shabbatot at my sister’s Conservative shul (Ramot Zion) in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood. There always was a member of the shul serving as a guard at the door, with a kippah and tallit, and a submachine gun strapped over his tallit. How many times I thought to myself: how terribly sad that a Jew who wishes to pray in Jerusalem must wear a weapon to protect himself and his fellow worshippers.
My sister, in tears, told me a story that reflects the current reality in Israel. Fourteen-year-old teenage girls were getting together, dressing up in their best clothes, putting on makeup and hiring photographers to take their pictures. They wanted the pictures for their parents so that in case they were killed, their parents wouldn’t just pick some random less-than-attractive shot of them from an album to give to the newspapers.
Ambassadors of Israel
But I don’t want to just tell heavy stories. So many wonderful, beautiful things happened during my year.
When I arrived, a woman I had never met baked me a cake. She did it as a “thank you” for coming to Israel, for being with Israel, for just showing up. I was embarrassed by her generosity.
I was also deeply touched when on Rosh HaShanah I saw women walking to shul carrying cookies, cakes and drinks for young soldiers guarding the intersections in French Hill. They were holy souls, these women, bringing something sweet for the sons of other mothers and fathers forced into dangerous jobs they definitely didn’t want because of “the situation.”
During the year I had a chance to get to know Israelis better. Israelis live life fully, or at least in a way that seems to give life richness.
Israelis are energetic, passionate, opinionated. At lunch at the Weizmann Institute, I often seemed to cause problems by posing a question about the news, history of the Middle East or politics. The discussions went from English at a relaxed pace to more rapid English to extremely fast Hebrew as Israelis argued over the issues closest to their hearts.
I am deeply grateful to Israelis who warmly took me in and embraced me. I was extremely well taken care of and invited frequently to many people’s homes. I will never forget their gracious hospitality.
As I see it, as Jews, we must play a role as ambassadors of Israel. We have a role to play in trying to explain what’s happening there to a world overloaded with anti-Israel feelings.
We have a responsibility to try to correct the misinformation campaign being waged, to counter the lies (which in Goebbels’ fashion get repeated and repeated until even some Jews think of them as true), to present the picture of events and history in a much more balanced way.
We are living in troubled, volatile times. Israel is a beautiful, special country with dangerous neighbors bent on her destruction. We may not even fully appreciate the burden of the difficult situations Israelis face every minute of every day and that I somberly believe we will soon face here.
In fact, there is a lot of tough stuff already happening right here. Anti-Israel sentiment is boiling at American universities. It’s acceptable in academic circles to be anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. And, terribly frustrating, some of this is fueled by self-hating, Israel-hating Jewish professors.
And yet, there are so many positive things to report about Israel.
We are witnesses to miracles. The rebirth of Israel after 2,000 years, the in-gathering of our family from over 70 nations in a melting pot, working together (admittedly, sometimes not as smoothly as we might like) in a vibrant democracy, Hebrew reborn as a living language — all of these are contemporary miracles.
Israel is a modern, Western democracy, with impressive social services, a hi-tech economy (suffering the effects of the global downturn and lack of tourism), and doctors and scientists and mathematicians and historians who win all kinds of world prizes for their work. At the end of May Israel launched a satellite! As an engineer, I can tell you that this is no small accomplishment.
I get goose bumps thinking about the magic of Israel, the nation promised to us by G-d and the home of our distant forefathers and, for me, my more recent forefathers.
It was an honor to be in Israel, to be a technical and cultural ambassador of the United States as a Fulbright scholar. I hope that I successfully fulfilled this role, that I contributed professionally and projected the goodwill of the U.S. and that I helped Israel. Israel certainly helped me.
Finally I want to thank G-d for bringing me, one of Abraham’s descendants, back home after thousands of years. It was good to be home – even if it was only for a visit.
Mark Nagurka, associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Marquette University, spent the past academic year as visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. In a Laboratory for Robotics Research in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, he conducted research to understand how people control their arms. This article is excerpted from a speech he made at Congregation Beth Israel on Dec. 14.
Loading ...