Daniel Gordis

On my old blog I would occasionally copy and paste e-mail missives from Rabbi Daniel Gordis, who writes about Israel. His essays are sometimes sentimental but always crushing, and so I like to disseminate them. I realize, now, that this is probably illegal (despite the fact that I fully credit Rabbi Gordis) and so will urge you to join his mailing list so you can receive e-mails from him. Here's the link to his site, and if you have any questions feel free to ask me.

Despite calling myself out on being an illegal plagiarizing type I am going to copy one more e-mail from Rabbi Gordis...to tempt you to keep reading. Please do.

This Place Called Hope

A couple of months ago, I had an appointment with a new doctor, just
hours before I had to fly to the States. We didn't know each other,
this new doctor and I, but he seemed like a nice guy. I was in a rush,
and needed to get back home to pack. All I wanted was my prescription,
so I could get meds before I got on a fifteen hour flight to LA.

But he was in a kind of friendly mood. "Why you going to the States?"
he wanted to know. "Work," I said, not terribly effusively. "What do
you do?" I was feeling way too lousy to explain what the Mandel
Foundation does, and referring him to our website seemed a bit obnoxious
(and wouldn't help me get meds). So I lied, a bit, and said, "I write."
"What do you write about?" he persisted. Really not wanting to have
this conversation, looking hungrily at the printer which I was praying
would soon spew out a prescription, I said, "About the future of
Israel." At which, he looked up from his keyboard, turned to me and
said, "Oh, you write short stories."

I laughed, and he did, too, but it was clear that neither of us thought
that it was terribly funny. And in the weeks since that brief
encounter, I've thought about it more than a few times. For it
captured, I think, the mood here, a mood that no one talks about, but
that everyone feels. A mood, a kind of desperation which isn't about
the war that was, or the one that may be coming, but about something
deeper.

I was speaking with an IDF general the other day about some work we do
together, and our conversation turned to the recent government scandals
that have the government so busy defending itself that it can barely
function. Two Chief Rabbis under investigation. Two Justice Ministers
accused of wrongdoing, trials under way. The now-resigned IDF Chief of
Staff still pursued by accusations that he sold his stock portfolio in
the first hours of the war. Heads of the Tax Authority under
investigation, some under house arrest. The President accused of rape.
The Prime Minister under investigation for alleged corruption (he, like
all the others, insists that he's done nothing wrong).

"How do you explain this country?" the general asked me. "In any normal
country, people would be in the streets, burning tires, protesting by
the thousands. But here, nothing happens. People are going on as if
there's nothing to get worked up about."

I'm not so sure that it's terrible that people aren't burning tires.
Burning tires would suggest that a change in the government would be
enough. But that would be delusional. The reason Israelis aren't
protesting, I think, is that deep down, they understand that this
problem is much deeper than the government, or the corruption, or the
war. It's Zionism. No one frames it that way, but that's the real
issue. One hundred and ten years after the First Zionist Congress,
people are beginning to wonder if Zionism hasn't begun to fail.

Zionism, a failure? How, one could ask, could that be? A country with
what will soon be the world's largest Jewish population? An economy
chugging along quite nicely, even in the face of everything. Real
estate prices going through the ceiling in Jerusalem and elsewhere,
internationally recognized universities, an army that is still nothing
to trifle with, cultural and intellectual life that is astounding for a
population of this size. Think about what was here 75 years ago, look
at what's here now, and you can call this a failure?

No, Israel's not a failure. The State is a huge success. But, I would
still claim, it's not doing for the Jews what the original Zionists had
hoped. And part of the national funk has to do with precisely that.

A century ago, the early Zionist ideologues promised the Jews that if a
Jewish state were created, there would finally be one place on earth
where Jews could be safe. It might not be big, it might not be
beautiful, but it would be safe. Here, it was said, Jews would be able
to defend themselves. Here, it was said, they would be spared the
capriciousness of the world.

For a while, it seemed that Zionism had fulfilled that promise. Things
were bad in 1948, and in the days before June 1967. But the Six Day War
and other campaigns (and yes, even the security fence) seemed to make
the point -- the Jews would do what they needed to do to defend
themselves.

But the summer of 2006 put an end to that illusion of safety. For
thirty-four long days, the IDF unleashed enormous portions of its
(conventional) firepower, but it couldn't stop the firing of Hezbollah's
Katyusha rockets on the north. As more than a million Israelis cowered
in bomb shelters that few people here thought we'd ever use again, the
IAF destroyed huge chunks of Beirut, blockaded Lebanon, sent troops way
into the north of Lebanon, even close to the Syrian border … but it
couldn't keep Israeli citizens safe. In the end, the only thing that
stopped the shelling of Israel's northern cities was the United Nations.


As the rockets flew over the entire north, few people in Israel missed
the irony of the fact that it's now more dangerous to be a Jew in Israel
(at least in certain periods, like in Jerusalem during the Intifada, or
in Haifa during the war) than in any other place in the world. Nor, as
the war drew to a close only because Israel agreed to a UN-brokered
cease fire, were they oblivious to the irony that Israelis were
dependent once again on the international community for even a modicum
of safety. With that, the national depression began to set in.

And if Hezbollah wasn't bad enough, Israelis are asking, what about
Iran? What will happen when they get the bomb? What does it mean for
Jews, and for Zionism, that just seventy years after the world conspired
to let the Jews be erased, more than half the world's Jewish children
(i.e., those living in Israel) could soon live in the crosshairs of a
nuclear-armed maniacal Muslim fanatic? That's a refuge? That's success
for Zionism? What does it mean that the world is clearly demonstrating
that it is willing to watch this happen and not intervene? Another
wholesale extermination of the Jewish people looms, and Herzl would dare
call Zionism a success?

As if the loss of a sense of refuge isn't enough, Israelis are also
coming to terms with the fact that Zionism failed in another of its
promises. A century ago (approximately), the early political Zionists
believed that having a country would normalize the condition of the Jew
in the world. The Jews were singled out, people like Herzl and Nordau
(and many others) believed, because there was something un-natural about
a people not having a home. Poles had Poland, the Italians had Italy.
If the Jews had a country, then finally, the condition of the Jew (being
everywhere but being at home no where) would change. And the world
would eventually cease its relentless attention on this tiny fraction of
the world's population.

But that, of course, has not happened either. Yugoslavia, Rwanda,
Darfur -- all conflicts that have taken infinitely more lives than the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- receive nowhere near the attention that
Israel does. Thousands are raped and butchered in Darfur, and days go
by with scarcely a mention in the world's papers. There are 200,000
child soldiers in Sierra Leone alone, but who even knows about that?
Yet one protester ignores IDF warnings to stay out of the way and
accidentally gets crushed by a bulldozer, and the world goes ape. Then
Broadway produces a (bad) play about her. This is normalcy?

North Korea goes nuclear, Iran threatens to do the same and publicly
says that Israel should be destroyed, and still, there's only one
country in the world whose right to exist is still debated. And no,
it's not North Korea. Or Iraq. Or Iran. Or Saudi Arabia, busy
exporting the Wahhabism that was key to the 9/11 attacks.

Professor Tony Judt of NYU writes an article in the New York Review
saying that Israel is an anachronism, because the Jews got on the
nationalism bandwagon too late. The fact that the Palestinians started
their nationalist efforts three-quarters of a century later doesn't seem
to enter the equation. The solution to the Middle East crisis, Judt
wrote, is an end to the Jewish state. "But what if there were no place
in the world today for a 'Jewish state'? What if the binational solution
were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome?" he
wonders.

Jimmy Carter writes a book calling Israel an Apartheid state, and
despite the numerous reviews which point to the book's unfairness and
numerous errors of fact, the book rockets to the bestseller list. In
the United States, not Egypt. It should be lost on no one that people
tend to buy books that espouse positions with which they agree.

Who cares how Jimmy Carter tosses the Apartheid word around? We should
care. Recall the comments of Jostein Gaarder, the author of "Sophie's
World" and a well known Norwegian intellectual. Gaarder didn't like
Israel's policies during this summer's war in Lebanon. His reaction?
"We could not recognize the Apartheid regime," he recalls about South
Africa, so therefore, "We no longer recognize the State of Israel. We
need to get used to the idea: The State of Israel, in its current form,
is history."

When any other country in the world does something people object to,
they object to the leader, or the policy. Does anyone opposing the war
in Iraq say that the United States no longer has a right to exist? Or
that Britain ought to be dismembered? Or that Turkey (an aptly named
country if there ever was one) should be shunned because of its
treatment of political opposition and its denial of the Armenian
genocide?

One hundred and ten years after Herzl, Zionism has not brought normalcy
to the Jews. Not in Israel, and not in Europe. Just ask the Jews of
France, where the police removed Jewish kids from the Champs Elysees
because they couldn't keep them safe from the mobs of Muslim teenagers
(how's that for a repeat of a European precedent?). Or in Germany,
where the first rabbi ordained since the war recently noted that he
can't wear a kippah in public because the far right now knows that they
own the streets?

Israel has progressed, but the world hasn't changed much. Normalcy
hasn't come. And it isn't likely to. Exit Herzl and Nordau. Enter the
desperation.

When faced with the realization that Zionism has brought neither safe
refuge nor normalcy to the Jewish people, how hard is it to understand
state of Israelis' morale? "What's the fight about?" they ask. If the
experiment called the State of Israel still leaves us vulnerable both at
home and throughout the world, why pay the price? Why send generation
after generation to the front, with thousands of mothers and fathers
waiting up at night, night after night after night, anxiously waiting
for their son to call, so they'll know he made it back once again? If
we got security, or normalcy, then maybe it would be worth it. But all
this, just to remain vulnerable? All this, just to remain the only
country in the world without a right to be?

It's not hard to understand the fact that there are no protesters in the
streets. This is something way too big for mere protests.

The issue, of course, isn't really Israel, or even Zionism. It's the
Jews. Again. Amos Oz has written with sadness about the irony that
when his father was growing up in Europe, he saw signs that said "Jews
Go Home to Palestine," but that when he, Amos, was growing up in
Palestine, the signs said "Jews out of Palestine." Oz, one of Israel's
best known left-wing intellectuals, summarizes the unavoidable point.
"Don't be here. Don't be there. In short, don't be." An exaggeration?
I don't think so. What did Gaarder call his editorial objecting to
Israel's military policy, claiming that Israel is now "history"? "God's
Chosen People." How on earth is the issue of Israel's conduct of the
Lebanon war connected to "God's Chosen People," unless the issue really
isn't Israel?

It's not.

Which leaves us with a decision -- the Jews have to decide, once again,
if we want to survive. If we want to make it, then we need to rekindle
one of the basic premises of Zionism, and take matters into our own
hands. It's not enough to simply feel that we're back where we started,
110 years ago. The question is what we're going to do about it. The
question is, how do we restore hope?

Amazingly, very few people, either in Israel or beyond, are talking
about that. The tragedy of today's situation is that you ask young
American Jews to free associate with the word "Israel," the first thing
you're likely to hear is "Palestinians," or "war," or "fence." But the
State wasn't created for any of these things. Most young Jews, both in
Israel and outside, can't say an intelligent word about why the State
was created. They might mention the Shoah. Or the refuge issue. But
they'll miss the major point -- that the purpose of Israel was not
Statehood. It was hope.

They don't know, anymore, that the Zionist movement, and then the State,
took as its national anthem a poem called "The Hope." They know the
melody, and Israelis know the words. But they have no idea what it's
about. They can't begin to articulate the notion that Israel
represented to Jews across the globe, after the worst century we'd
known, life over death. Continuity instead of extermination. A
homeland instead of exile. Rebirth instead of extinction.

They're so consumed with the plight of the Palestinians (a horrific
plight, obviously, that has to be addressed -- as soon as the
Palestinians make that their priority) that they don't resonate at all
to the pride Jews once felt about the rescue of Ethiopian Jews, or the
rescue at Entebbe, or the technological prowess of Israeli companies, or
by the now stereotypical tanned and hardened Israeli youth, stark
contrasts to the common portrayal of Europe's Jews as pale and passive.
They don't understand that it's because hope -- life over death -- was
at the core of this country that explains why there are still huge book
fairs in this country, celebrating the mere simple fact that thousands
of books are published each year in a language that 150 years ago,
virtually no one in the world spoke. It was why dance became an
integral part of this culture, and why Jews got excited about a song
celebrating a sprinkler, written when the National Water Carrier project
was completed. What person in their right mind sings about a sprinkler?
Who dances to the idea of a sprinkler? Jews did, and do, when the
sprinkler brings water from the north to the south, when it bring life
to the desert, when it bespeaks not just the flow of water, but the
possibility of hope when there could have been nothing but despair.

Songs like that strike our kids' generation as kitsch, as relics of an
era that's long since gone. But we can't afford the cynicism. What
strikes them as kitsch was what struck Jews a generation ago as rebirth.
If today's Jews are ambivalent about the image of the Jew as soldier,
other Jews understood until recently that the Jew as soldier, with all
the complexity it would entail, meant that finally, Jews would determine
their own fate. If there's anything that Lebanon II, Iran, Judt,
Gaarder, Carter and all the rest have in common, it's that they afford
us a reminder that once again, this place called hope, needs to take
control of its destiny,.

If the government is hopelessly corrupt, then it won't be enough to
topple it (it will do that on its own). We'd better build an
institution, maybe like Harvard's Kennedy School, or France's Ecole
Nationale d'Administration, to finally train a decent cadre of leaders.
If the system's broken, let's fix it.

If it's unthinkable that more than half the world's Jews could live in
Ahmadenijad's crosshairs, then we'd better figure out what we're going
to do. The world won't stop him. Will we? What kind of power would we
be willing to use to put an end to Iran's nuclear capabilities? Would
be it moral to use weapons we've never used if that's what it would
take? Would be it moral not to, if the future of the Jewish people is
at stake? How much are the Jews willing to do in order to survive?

Hizbollah has no territorial quarrel with Israel, but still went to war.
Hamas doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist, and says that it never
will. Why the hand-wringing? Let's pick borders, and defend them.
That much, at least, Sharon understood. The rest of the world doesn't
like unilateralism? What, exactly, does the world actually like about
us? The question ought not be what the world wants. The question is
whether Zionism can reassert the basic question -- what do we want?

We want a Jewish country, and we want a democracy. And we've got a huge
Arab minority that is growing. Are we going to do something about that,
something morally defensible? Can we have a State that is both Jewish
and that is democratic? What would it take to have both? It wouldn't
be easy, and it wouldn't all be pretty, but it could be done. Do we
want to survive badly enough to start? Or even to ask the question?

Or how about poverty? Or an educational system badly in need of repair?
Or the slave trade of women in this country? Does anyone really think
that a state can generate hope without tackling those issues? Do we
have it ourselves to roll up our sleeves and to get to work? Would it
help if we understood finally that it's not only about poor people, or
literacy, or helpless women -- but that it's about hope, about a future?
About the survival of the Jewish people?

No, that's not hyperbole. It really is about the survival of the Jewish
people. Does anyone really imagine that American Jews could survive
without Israel? Are people really naive enough to believe that if
Israel stumbled so badly that it couldn't recover, that American Jewish
life would simply chug along? It would last a generation, maybe two.
For there is a limit to how much hope a people can lose in the space of
a century, and still bounce back. A people cannot long for sovereignty
for two thousand years, find itself at the precipice of extinction,
bounce back, get a state, and then lose that, too, and march on as if
everything is OK. Nothing would be alright, and the optimism that now
characterizes much of Diaspora Jewish life would disappear soon after
the State did.

I disagree with my friend-the-general. I think it's good that people
aren't protesting. Protests would be about the government, and the
government is the least of our issues. The problem isn't Olmert, or
Katzav. This is not about Israel. It's not even about Zionism. It's
about the future of what we call the Jewish people. Hezbollah gets
that. Hamas gets it. Ahmadinejad gets it. Gaarder gets it.

Why don't we?

(c) 2006 Daniel Gordis