Israel is well into the process of constructing a wall through much of the country. I don’t want to enter the debate over whether to call it a security barrier or a fence or a wall. That’s the kind of thing inept Israeli spokesmen expend too much energy on in their feeble attempts at public relations.
I also don’t want to discuss whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong to be putting it up. A lot of it is up; and the rest will soon be “a fact on the ground,” as they like to say in the Middle East.
I want to point out how fitting symbolically the wall is, how much it says about Israel and the entire Jewish world.
The wall may be designed to keep terrorists out, but at the same time it surrounds the Jewish people in Israel. As an Israeli analyst recently noted, Israel is now constructing the biggest ghetto in Jewish history.
Of course, this time we are putting up the wall, which is designed to protect Jewish lives. And yet, after dreaming about our own country for more than 2,000 years, now that we have a sovereign nation in our ancient homeland, we live on the other side of a wall that tells us where we can and can’t go, and with whom we can and can’t live.
Back to the future, Jewish style.
While almost all the talk about the wall has concerned its political or military significance and effect, what interests me is its psychological significance and effect, which I believe will be profound.
For starters, it tells us that even in our own Jewish state, we are not safe. That is not true, but we more and more believe it.
Jews have never been safer or more powerful or had more friends than today. Yet we have never been more afraid.
Israel has one of the world’s mightiest and most sophisticated militaries, one of the world’s biggest nuclear weapons stockpiles. Yet the people of Israel and the Jewish people have never been more afraid for Israel.
Putting up a wall only confirms those baseless fears, makes deeper our needless scare. Says to us that even here, we must be afraid.
We may not like being afraid, but we are comfortable with the feeling. The only thing Jews need to fear, it seems, is the lack of fear itself.
Neighborhood blues
The wall also says that Israel isn’t even trying anymore to be part of its neighborhood; that the Arabs are out to kill us; and so there is no point in trying to live with them as neighbors.
So Israel does all it can to make itself into a little America, tries harder to join European institutions, thereby cutting itself off from the Middle East, building a wall between the part of the world it lives in and the one it feels comfortable being part of.
The wall also is a powerful symbol of what the Jewish world has become. It is a place of barriers between the Jewish people, who, in truth, is no longer a Jewish people. We are, instead, the Jewish peoples.
We are walled off from each other, seeing ourselves as having nothing in common, or diametrically opposed to everything other Jews believe defines being Jewish.
Different kinds of Jews have almost no contact with each other anymore. How often do haredi Jews interact in any way with Reform Jews? How often do left wing Jews have meaningful conversations with right wing Jews?
There are walls everywhere in the Jewish world. And we are so busy every day putting up more of them.
Yet the most precious thing we have is our connection to each other, how much we have benefited from the bond between Jews, how much we have learned from Jews not like us. Get rid of that and we are all lessened; ignorant, suspicious and disdainful of each other.
We’ve given up on finding a way to share the land with those we share it with, condemning ourselves to eternal discomfort in our own home.
Having built walls between Jews and anti-Semites and between Jews and Arab terrorists, we next turn on each other. More and more are we putting up walls between Jews, seeing those Jews who think, act and do like us as good Jews, and those who don’t as bad Jews. We see that every day.
But the thing about walls is that the more you put up, the easier it is to put up more. First, you decide Reform and Conservative rabbis are not really rabbis; then it’s that Modern Orthodox Jews are not really Orthodox; and on and on it goes. Wall after wall.
It used to be that if a Jew said “the wall,” you would think immediately of the Western Wall, our holiest site, the place all Jews hold dear. The wall that reminded us of all we have in common.
Today, say “the wall” and it makes us think of one that separates the holy land of Israel, neighbor from neighbor, cousin from cousin, Jew from Palestinian. And that symbolizes all the psychological walls today’s Jews are putting up, separating Jews from non-Jews and Jew from Jew.
Joseph Aaron is editor and publisher of the Chicago Jewish News.
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