Today, after 66 years in exile, including 30 years in prison and another five on parole, “Prisoner of Zion” Jonathan Pollard came home to Eretz Yisrael.
The incredible videos of him and his wife Esther disembarking from their plane and kissing the ground, even before greeting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud), who was there to welcome them home, are a testament to his deep desire to come to the land of his forefathers, for which he took such great risks and sacrificed so much of his life.
As a United States Naval intelligence analyst, he passed information to the Israeli government which he saw as vital to Israel’s security. Like all Jews outside of our land, Pollard experienced conflicting pulls between the United States, the land of his birth which had provided him with a home and a job and a life, and Israel, the land of his forefathers and the focus of Am Yisrael’s material and spiritual rebirth in our days.
For many Jews, Israel holds no real attraction, and they remain happy to remain in their exile. For others, whether out of desire, convenience, or necessity, Israel stands far higher in their priorities than their host nations, and aliya back to Israel becomes the obvious outcome.
Yet for many, the two poles exist in tandem. As long as possible, they can even exist in harmony, as these individuals, and the institutions that they build work to maintain shared interests and common cause between Jerusalem and Washington in order to not have to choose.
But Jonathan Pollard’s story exposes the shallowness of such an approach. It is unlikely (verging on impossible) that any two nations have perfectly aligned political and economic interests. But for Israel, which has a unique national mission to bring light into the world through our economic, political, cultural, social, and spiritual pursuits, it is not only possible but necessary that we butt heads with the great empires of history and challenge them to recognize HaShem’s kingship over the whole world, and the far reaching moral implications of that revelation.
While we should feel genuine gratitude for Pollard’s freedom and return home, we shouldn’t forget the deep educational value his story has for the Jews still psychologically trapped in foreign lands. US Jewish leaders have for years shied away from working for Pollard’s freedom for fear of accusations of dual loyalty in the United States.
The entire Pollard affair forces pro-Israel Jews to confront their own cognitive dissonance and recognize the fundamental conflict between the national interests of Washington and Jerusalem.
In fact, Pollard should be viewed as having corrected the sin of American Jews during the Holocaust. At that time, the US Jewish community was so desperate to be accepted into society that they refused to fight for their people in Europe for fear it would call their loyalty to the US war effort into question.
Pollard was confronted with a similar dilemma and chose his people over Washington’s imperialist interests in the Semitic region.
In many ways, Pollard has spent the the last 35 years as the only free Jew in the United States because he asked himself difficult questions that led him to liberating conclusions. Although the organized US Jewish community prefers everyone forget about Pollard and move on, publicizing and honestly confronting his story may just be the key to psychologically freeing them.
Jonathan Pollard should be seen as the antithesis to all those Jews desperate to convince themselves that they can continue to live their lives in the United States while expressing loyalty to both nations because both share a special bond that somehow transcends US imperialism and Jewish national interests. But it has been precisely this illusion that has psychologically blocked many Jews from appreciating the historic significance of Israel’s national rebirth.
Once US Jews stop struggling to convince themselves of the indistinguishability of Israeli and US interests, they might be able to entertain the type of questions Pollard must have asked himself. They might finally see the fundamental conflict of interests between Washington and Jerusalem and begin to resent the fact that successive US administrations have spent decades controlling and limiting Israel’s economic and military independence.
These Jews might also finally discover that they are part of a proud ancient people with an inspirational story and an incredible destiny that they could choose to become apart of rather than attach their futures to an empire in decline.
Today, Jonathan and Esther Pollard made it home, and will begin the next stage of their lives as free Jews in the State of Israel. As we conclude reading B’reishit this Shabbat morning and enter the Egyptian exile with our ancestors as we begin Sh’mot at minḥa, those Jews still in exile should all be blessed to recognize the exile in which they live for what it is, and strive like Jonathan Pollard to return home to freedom in our land.
