Today Ill be a rabbi. We modern Jews have it too easy. We are free to disassociate ourselves from Jews and Judaism, so we forget that thats only a fairly recent option. Today the only forces keeping Jewish people involved with Judaism come from within. And since no one has been successful in perpetrating genocide against us for about seventy years, we are quick to forget that this moment in history is not normal. The last sixty-six years have been the exception to Jewish life, not the rule. Thats why Im a Zionist, because I know that as much as the State of Israel is a modern miracle, its something created by a people whose millennia of yearning and struggle reached its tipping point when faced with annihilation. When there is nowhere else to turn, people head for home. We have it easy, but our grandparents did not. I am a Zionist because I believe that the Jewish people has a right to live undisturbed in its national home, to determine its own destiny. Its not a miracle to be taken for granted. I dont take it for granted living in the USA, and Im betting that people waiting for air raid sirens dont take it for granted either. My rabbinate has been spent working primarily with people born after 1948 and 1967 (like I was). We have a skewed view of the universe, because we dont know first-hand a world without the State of Israel. We have no eyewitness memory of Jews on death marches. We may know people who have those memories, but they are the stuff of history to us. History, not memory. It is through this prism that I experience the realities of Israels crisis today. Those sworn to destroy the Jewish state make clear that they prefer not just no Jewish state in the Levant, but no Jewish people anywhere. (And the great irony is that the Jewish values that have sustained us for so long make us among the first to sympathize with people who want us destroyed. Im guilty of it, and am not sure how to reconcile my parochial concerns with my universalism. I prefer not to become my enemy). We have it too easy because we dont know anything different. But what will our children and grandchildren know? I try not to be alarmist, but its hard to be optimistic about a thriving Jewish future when so many appear eager to erase the Jewish gains of the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, too few are willing to stand up for a people that is roughly one quarter of one percent of the worlds population. Demography and history are not on our side. Today, after thousands of years of wandering and suffering, were finally at home again and relatively safe. But for how long, nobody knows. We have it too easy. For now.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 16:01:37 +0000