At Torah study last Saturday, the talk moved naturally from the fragility of the sukkah to the fragility of peace in the Middle East.
“If there’s a war, will American Jews be there for Israel?” Adlai asked.
I leapt to reassure him. Of course! Of course! But how was he to know?
Two years ago, his own rabbi had sermonized during Rosh Hashanah that American Jews were growing lax, had forgotten how to gather around Israel in peace, so how could we be assured they’d be there in war? Now that Jerusalem was tense, the rabbi’s words haunted the young man, whose last memory of Israel in need had been during the ’67 war, when he was 8.
“What I remember about ’67,” he said, “is that we got a phone call to come to a rally and then we were all there.”
Are we all there now?
American Jews around the nation began the process of ingathering last week. Four rallies in Los Angeles alone brought us out for speeches and prayer. Money is being raised. I witnessed the response last week while speaking for United Jewish Communities in Indianapolis; women today control the purse strings and are raising their pledges 10 to 33 percent.
But for all the evidence that I can document about fervor, passion and concern for the peace process and Israel, there is a way to go before we can satisfy Adlai that we really are “all there.”
On Thursday evening, I walked with the brooding crowd into the Bernard Milken Campus of the West Valley JCC in suburban Los Angeles. Gordon Wallack and his son, Ben, walked beside me.
“Ben’s class at Milken discussed Israel,” Gordon, an attorney, told me. “I knew that tonight we both had to be here.” The very presence of the boy and his dad walking through the security system into the crowded basketball court reassured me. The job of education was being done. We were raising the future activists we’ll surely need.
But once seated, I looked around. The bleachers were crowded, but in the 8-15 age group, Ben was virtually alone. In the Gen J division, too, there was practically no one. The country club set was missing. The Jewish renewalists, too, were not to be seen.
I know they all care. Everyone is talking. Many are acting. But for the great Jewish middle, rallying may indeed be a lost art. About this there is reason for concern. Speaking at the West Hills rally, Michelle Zamanzadeh, features editor of the Calabasas High School newspaper, represented the voice of youth. She had just returned from Israel on a sister-city program sponsored by the Jewish Federation. She read an e-mail from Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv, Calabasas’ twin high school, thanking her for her prayers and support in this frightening time. It was a comforting reminder to the adults present that the torch is being passed.
Everyone I know is getting e-mails from Israel, but why are our youth staying home alone?
The Milken rally was a successful show of numbers. It did what rallies do, offering spirited speeches and reasoned rhetoric after a week of lynching and deaths. Everyone there felt emboldened to fight for peace another day.
But candor says that this is only a beginning. War or peace, we cannot raise a Jewish community that operates well on the Internet but does not show its face.
So drastic is the inertia that Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis has called for a “teach-in” on Israel. Those of my generation will remember exactly what this means. The teach-in is an activist’s tool, used at times of national or world distress to educate large numbers about the urgency of the moment. Teach-ins during the civil rights movement led to Selma. Teach-ins during Vietnam stopped the war.
Teach-ins are a tool of the political left, and it is this group that is most demoralized by the events of the last weeks. Those who have long advocated peace are shocked by the limits of diplomacy and seem to be throwing in the towel. Yes, the time for a teach-in is at hand.
“We must stop the ingestion of toxic pessimism,” Schulweis told the JCC crowd. “We will not capitulate to cynicism.”
Now is the time when push comes to shove. We’ve told ourselves that we are a great Jewish community, that we’ve raised two generations to love Israel in freedom. But what does that mean in a time of crisis?
Where is today’s Jewish baby boom? Where are our day school students? Where, last week, were the campers, the Hillel students? Unless they show up at community rallies, they will not know the heritage, strength and comfort of the larger community that is one of American Judaism’s greatest assets. They will think that concern is something that lives from first period to sixth, and then we go first to football practice and then home to the computer.
Why didn’t any high school teachers offer extra credit for those who could report on Israel Consul General Yuval Rotem’s speech?
“When will we defend ourselves, if not now?” Rotem said in West Hills. “When will we speak with one voice, if not now?”
To speak with one voice, we must, periodically, show up in one place.
