This June, 61 years after Israel’s founding, I sat on a stiff folding chair with my mother and children in a little subterranean room at Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall, transfixed by an old gravelly recording of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem.
The singers had just watched David Ben-Gurion declare the creation of the State of Israel and the power of the moment was palpable in their voices. They were witnessing their dream coming true — the establishment of a Jewish state in the ancient land of Israel.
We watched footage of the people who had gathered spontaneously in the streets to celebrate. The museum docent told us about his grandparents’ journey from a prison camp in Siberia to the young Jewish state.
I didn’t expect to be moved, much less transported, to May 14, 1948, during my morning at Independence Hall. After all, I’m no tourist. I lived in Israel for about eight years, during which time I attended college, lived and worked on a kibbutz, got married, built a house in the Galilee, gave birth, sent my daughter to preschool and kindergarten, voted in elections … and then moved back to the United States.
Moreover, that tugging of my Zionist heartstrings irritated me. Why does it take stories from the 1940s to remind me why I love Israel? Israelis once knew that they were part of something miraculous. Do they still? Do I?
These questions set me on a train of thought that ran through my 10-day visit and has redefined the days since.
During a reunion of my husband’s kibbutz group, I asked his former classmate, “What does Zionism mean to you as an Israeli, as a mother? How do you convey your feelings about Israel to your children?”
Her answers were anemic: We light candles on Friday night, she told me, and we place a high value on serving in the Israel Defense Forces.
For my father-in-law, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who came to Israel alone at age 14 as an ardent young Zionist, loving Israel is as obvious as the sunrise and sunset.
He told me that the first time he saw a map of the proposed state during a Zionist youth group meeting, he decided then-and-there to be part of it. But why live in Israel now? What does it mean for your children and grandchildren? For him, the questions almost didn’t make sense. His answers were buried beneath thought, in a place sometimes inaccessible to words.
The issue, of course, is a loaded one for me. I made aliyah (literally “going up”) and then committed yerida (coming down).
I know that there’s no shortage of smart people analyzing, philosophizing and writing about the Jewish state and the new Zionism. But my current pursuit is not after their intellectual wisdom nor will I use this space to justify the state’s existence. I’m aiming for the gut. I wonder, instead, what pulls Jews to Israel and what is the nature of the fire that keeps them there?
For me, the need to be in the Jewish state snatched me up and wrapped me in its arms in the early 1990s. It led me to Israel soon after the first Gulf War, where I lived first on a kibbutz and then in a community village in the lower Galilee.
But it also turned me into an Israeli, swept up in the challenge of everyday life and the second Palestinian uprising. Daily life was coarse and Zionism seemed a remote concept, even as we spoke Hebrew and walked on the land of our ancestors. Peace seemed more remote than ever. Ironically, in Israel, I felt less connected to my roots and a little heartbroken.
My family’s backward exodus is a common theme among people of our generation. It seems that Israelis are constantly streaming out of their home country, setting up lives that seem easier and less stressful but defined by a juxtaposing longing that doesn’t wane.
So I ask: If you are not propelled by a deep religious commitment that can only be complete in the Land of Israel, why choose to live in the crowded, complicated modern state of Israel?
I spoke with my friend Rakefet Ginsberg on the eve of her return to Israel after three years serving as Israel emissary at the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
The new Zionism, she told me, is the unprecedented opportunity to define what it means to be a Jewish country. “Our grandparents’ generation founded the state. Our parents’ generation had to fight for its survival. And we — our generation and our children’s generation — need to build Israeli society as a Jewish society.”
“Existence is not enough,” she continued. “It’s not enough just to be a shelter. Nobody wants to live in a shelter for life. So what is the meaning of Israel beyond being a shelter? That is our challenge.”
Israelis must confront themselves and each other on a range of issues, including: What kinds of policies does a Jewish state establish? How does it treat its workers and non-Jewish citizens? What should be taught in public schools in a Jewish state? How does Israel resolve the gap between the Law of Return — which allows anyone with one Jewish grandfather to become a “Jewish” citizen — and Halachah (Jewish law), which defines a Jew as someone with a Jewish mother?
Israel “is an experiment that has never happened before,” she added. “We cannot copy from another state; we have to invent our own example. For me, that’s the exciting part of living in Israel today. We have an historic role.”
Rakefet is not alone. Dig a little and you’ll learn about a new kind of Zionism taking hold throughout the country in which young Israelis are grappling, confronting and redefining what it means to be Israeli. (Urban kibbutzim and the growth of pluralistic schools are two great examples.)
I’ve also been reading Daniel Gordis’ “If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State,” a series of letters and essays written from his 1998 arrival in Israel for a one-year stay, through his family’s decision to make aliyah and to the second intifada to 2002.
Calling himself a “classic Zionist,” Gordis struggles with a range of thoughts and emotions about the Jewish state and his family’s choice to live there.
During one poignant scene, he sat with his family watching a Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) ceremony on TV. Everyone became quiet as the army orchestra played “Hatikvah.” And then, from about two miles away from his Jerusalem home, Israeli tanks fired so powerfully that “the house almost shook,” he wrote.
“The contrast between the memorial service for Yom HaShoah and the sounds of tank shelling at the very same time brought home to all of us that that’s why we’re here. We’re here, in part, because having a country of our own means that that can never happen again. Little Israeli boys do not have to raise their hands in surrender, and now, if we need to, we fire back. Not all Israelis think we should be firing, and most of the world thinks that we shouldn’t. But at that moment, those questions struck me as minor. The fact is, we can if we need to. And that makes all this worth it.”
Rakefet and Gordis’ book are helping to heal my splintered heart and reframe the reasons that my eyes tear up almost every time I stand in a roomful of people and sing “Hatikvah.” They help to make this yearning not just an ancient promise or a memory of realized aspirations from the early 1900s but a miraculous and stunningly imperfect new world.
Why live in Israel? Share your thoughts and experiences as a letter to the editor or a short (200-300 word essay). Write to chronicle@milwaukeejewish.org.
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