From HuffingtonPost.com:
It was on Sunday nights at Temple Bet Ha’am in South Portland, Maine—a reform congregation my mother started in 1985—that I first learned to think and talk about Israel. For members of my religion, Israel is the physical manifestation of our endurance as a people; though a younger political entity than Joe Lieberman, the nation represents the ancient beating heart of our identity, earthen evidence of our triumph over a history of violent oppression and unending hate. Halfway across the globe, American Jews end their Passover Seders with the words “next year in Jerusalem,” and in Hebrew schools from Boro Park to Fairfax Avenue the children of Americans who were born alongside Israel in the aftermath of World War II have learned to love and protect the world’s only Jewish state.
It has become clear to me in the wake of the botched flotilla raid of last week that loving Israel means something starkly different to different generations of American Jews. For those who lived through the Yom Kippur War, for whom the very survival of the Jewish people has been at times a terrifying uncertainty, love means never having to say you’re sorry. Every policy of the Israeli government is justified in the name of self-preservation, acts of apparent aggression are in fact preemptive defenses against enemies whose sole desire is Jewish extinction, and any reactions among the international community that question—even in the slightest regard—the propriety of Israel’s actions are borne of the rotten fruit of anti-Semitism. For those of us who came of age in a world where the Holocaust was a tragedy of the past—a chapter in a book rather than the memory of a parent—Israel is a sacred and beloved state, but not one that we tend to connect viscerally to our own sense of survival.
The fundamental disconnect that exists between generations of American Jews has of late widened the gulf of commonality when it comes to how best to support Israel. For many Jews my age, who love Israel and strive to nourish her efforts to thrive in a hostile region, defending her actions in Gaza has too often become an immense moral struggle that requires the suspension of our values as human beings and, notably, the suspension of our values as Jews. Where many older American Jews see a faultless and holy entity struggling simply and nobly to exist, we of the younger persuasion see a government—a special government, presiding over a place near and dear to our hearts, but a government nonetheless—with the capacity to make wrong decisions in light of a tortuous history. Some among my mother’s friends rejoice in violent attacks on Palestinians who seek to harm Israel, while my friends cringe at the initiation of bloodshed by Jews. We see their aggressive stance as zealotry and paranoia; they see our discomfort as abandonment and naiveté.
Read the full article at HuffingtonPost.com.
