What can I say to you?
We are of the same stock, you and I, yet it is as if we have been raised on different planets, and that we stand on opposite sides of a chasm.
The chasm is this: while you live as part of a community, you know your community is part of a nation. You have been taught to view yourselves as part of something larger; you know to place your own needs aside in favor of the klal. You are content to get by with less, and you place your obligation to your people at the forefront of your lives.
Whereas I – I have been raised in a world where we are predominantly self-centered. We only seek our own bread and survival, not raising our eyes or broadening our minds to think outside of ourselves. Yes, we too provide for our sons and daughters, we exert ourselves for our communities for the sake of heaven, but there the circle stops. We do not think to contribute to the advancement of the nation as a whole.
Yes, if I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, what am I?
What am I??
I cannot hold a candle to your torch
You are infinitely greater, more mature than us. The decisions you make are ones of substance, of lasting consequence: while not yet out of school you are discussing which unit you will join in the army, then you give up the best years of your lives to stand on the front line, because you are Jews, and a Jew is obligated to defend his people. Even those of you who don’t join the army give of yourselves in national service.
You know what it means to serve God with all you heart, with all your soul and with all your might. Me – how can I ever claim such a thing?
Here I am, sitting way out here in a two-story house in a bedroom that could sleep four people and never, ever worrying about more than which university I will attend and what will be on the menu for dinner tonight.
It’s exhausting.
But not only was I once like this, I was unaware any alternative existed, and I don’t know what would have happened if it had not been for the time I spent in Israel.
When I came to Israel for a gap year, the land opened my heart and a new spirit entered me, transforming me.
Israel opened me to a world which I belonged to but scarcely knew of, never having moved far beyond the four walls of the modernized ghetto in which I grew up. Through Israel I learned what it means to be a people, an Am, not just a kehilla. Through Israel I learned it is healthy to belong to land, utterly empowering to have a destiny. I learned that self-transcendence is a good thing, and it is worth foregoing life’s luxuries for the privilege of being part of something greater than ourselves. I learned every one of us has an infinite well of strength inside us, and that we are capable of feats we could never imagine.
Then I left and it was like being plunged into a bucket of water.
The West demands that I cool off, that I return to the tunnel vision with which they inculcated me. Go to college, graduate, get a job and make money to satisfy the endless stream of desires they throw at me. It’s all about you, you deserve better, don’t settle for anything less. Don’t make a fuss, because then we might have to take away your free healthcare or cut your benefits.
But I’ve changed now. The veil hung over my eyes has become transparent. Now I see them for what they really are. And I know they can never reach me again.
And as I walk past these red brick houses, looking, seeing, seeing the Diaspora for the first time, I send a message to all my peers with roots in the land. This is my plea to you:
Come.
We need you.
We need you, because the consciousness of Edom has clouded our minds, smothered our souls, and it is like we have been drugged. Our values are no longer the immutable, Divine values our fathers and mothers transmitted from Sinai, but the flashy, empty precepts of a culture that cannot hold water.
We need you, for there is a famine in the land of Egypt, and our souls are dying of thirst.
We need you, for we have shut ourselves in an enclosure with lions and leopards and bears, and they encircle us.
We need you, for if no one teaches us how to transcend this hyper-individualistic culture and we remain bound to the slopes of Seir digging for gold, they will fall upon us without mercy.
We need you, in short, to become our teachers. Come to us, and bring Eretz Yisrael with you. Don’t just bring your culture, your hummus and tahini.
Bring your Torah. Bring our culture.
Teach us, for we have forgotten, the Torah that sustained our ancestors in the rock-covered hills of Judea and the mystical mountains of the Galil. Teach us the Torah of nationhood, for the Torah pertaining to the individual is insufficient to bring a scattered nation home.
Teach us what it means to belong to a land, to see the ground beneath our feet as something to love, to forge a bond with, as a soulmate. Not merely as real estate, as currency, to be traded by indifferent men in pressed suits whose only wish is to line their own pockets.
Teach us that there exist greater goals in life than financial security, and more worthy goals things to strive for than a two story house. These are false ideals, implanted in our midst by the Edomite priests who desire us to help build their tower, to eliminate our differences by stacking bricks ever higher with the ultimate aim being freedom from the Divine.
Teach us what it means to be part of an Am, and not only that, but an Am Segula. Teach us to rise up from our narrow straits and break through the threshold, achieving the first level of prophecy.
Yes, we need you. And dare I say it – you need us, as well.
Israel is becoming increasingly isolated on the world stage, as the rise of social justice and liberation movements renders it no longer “cool” to support Israel. We cannot pat ourselves self-assuredly on the backs saying, “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” Such thinking will not win us any meaningful allies.
Jews are an oppressed people, albeit not in the usual way, and as such the other oppressed peoples are our natural allies, but it seems we lack the political awareness to reach them. Nearly two thousand years of exile have robbed our people of much of our political sense and at times has left us acting, I hate to say it, like fools. Israel does not see itself as an oppressed people, and does not speak the language of one.
The Jews who do speak this language of social justice, who understand politics and colonization and the need for the oppressor to break free of the oppressed – most of these Jews are far removed from our land and our Torah, deep in the Diaspora and an exile of the mind. They point at us with their fingers and their voices and are not shy about saying what they think of us.
And yet, we need them. We need to relearn from them the political awareness that once brought us to freedom from the Syrian-Greek Empire but that faded over the course of our long exile. Then, not only will we be able to accrue meaningful allies but we will be able to operate on the world stage to achieve the goals laid down for us by the Torah: To become a nation that benefits others, instead of allowing ourselves to be manipulated into oppressing others with the erroneous belief that it is somehow necessary for our own security.
Do you agree with me? Probably not. After all, I’m a Diaspora Jew. I was not raised in a house with a bomb shelter, I did not go to the army. But while you have seen and lived many things I have not, I have seen things you have not. And I must say this: No longer can we continuously deflect every single accusation leveled at us with the cry of “But they’re terrorists!”
The story of Jewish survival, of destruction and rebirth, the ingathering of the exiles, will not be enough to gather every Jew back home, because it does not address the way we treat the peoples under our control. There is only so many times one can sing “Am Yisrael Ḥai.”
This I must say, even though it entered me, even as I stand now on the edge of the Diaspora, burning, yearning, demanding, “Let me go, for dawn has broken.”
This I must say: What happened to the universalism? How have we developed such a deep rift dividing our people, with Kodesh and Umah on one side and Enoshut on the other?
There are so many Jews today, young and old, who do not learn the full, true story of our people. As such, when they encounter the Palestinian camp, one of two things, typically happens. Either a fight-or-flight reaction, born from years of pent up Jewish trauma, in which the Jew denies any Palestinian claims out of hand, backing Israel no matter what, “because if they are telling the truth then I have nowhere to go.”
Or a rebellion, in which the Jew feels betrayed, lied to by their establishment and defects to the other camp, attacking and condemning Israel often even more vocally than the Palestinians themselves.
Surely there is a third response! In which the Jew realizes they have not been told the full story of our people, and proceeds to learn it in all its depth and color. As the Jew becomes more knowledgeable in his/her history, more comfortable with their sense of peoplehood, they may come to realize that Jewish and Palestinian goals do not in fact contradict. That we are a people that has fought to come home for thousands of years, and now their people can play a part in building the society we have come home to create.
Which is why we need you. We need to relearn our sense of peoplehood. We need to be connected to the Torah of Eretz Yisrael. We need to know who we are. If we remain indifferent to our destiny, disaster will follow.
Come. Please come. Even if you disagree with much of what I have written, we need you to rouse us from our slumber. Bring the Torah that sustains you, that it may sustain us. Teach us our story in all its depth and glory, so we may come to know who we really are. We can work from there. And maybe, just maybe, Diaspora Jewry can teach you something as well.
As for me, I wish I could be with you right now. But the One who runs the world has decreed I have a role to fulfill out here, and I cannot return home just yet.
But I haven’t forgotten you. I can never forget you. And one day soon, I will spread my wings and soar, soar like and eagle out of the Diaspora to the land flowing with milk and honey, with song and prophecy. I will set down roots and join you in this glorious task of rebuilding our nation, a nation which – once complete – will illuminate the world from one end to the other. I will not stand by my brother’s blood. I will not let you down.
I will not forget you, Jerusalem…
