Not too far from my home, there’s a street named for the German poet Heinrich Heine, a baptized Jew and metaphorical Marrano. Sometimes on Shabbat afternoons I take a long Jerusalem walk with my son, soon to be a soldier, and Lizzie, our German Shepherd dog, a breed that in my wildest Diaspora dreams I could never imagine owning. We walk past the Heine Street sign by the Montefiore windmill, and gaze at the Ottoman walls of the Old City and the Tower of David, a Crusader structure made over into a mosque. Behind us is the King David Hotel, blown up by Jewish fighters in 1946, occupied by George W. Bush in 2008. Beyond us are picturesque Arab villages and the biblical landscape of the Judean desert.
My son and I look around, each time with renewed wonder and gratitude, and say to one another, “Can you believe we live here?” Israel is a place you never take for granted, even if you were, as he was, born here.
All else is commentary.
In an essay of 1852, Heine observed wryly: “The Jews, who know a thing or two about valuable things, knew very well what they were doing when, during the burning of the Second Temple, they left the gold and silver sacrificial vessels, the lamps and the candelabras, even the breastplate of the High Priest with its large gems, and saved only the Bible. This was the real treasure of the temple . . .”
Elsewhere, Heine called the Bible the “portable fatherland” of the Jews. Even today, after we have returned to the Land of Israel and built a modern democracy on the rocky foundations of antiquity, the notion of a virtual homeland remains an attractive concept, particularly for Jews who are dismayed by Israeli militarism. As the French-born, Anglo-Jewish literary critic George Steiner put it in 1985, in an essay called “Our Homeland, the Text”: "The man or woman at home in the text is, by definition, a conscientious objector: to the vulgar mystique of the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims ‘my country, right or wrong.’"
Twenty years later, I sat politely in a Jerusalem auditorium and heard Steiner expand on this lofty notion. Two millennia of powerlessness, he said, had conferred a "moral aristocracy" upon the Jews. "It made us the princes of life like no others,” he declared. “We did not torture another human being." The Israelis, he noted, can make no such claim. Jews and all other people, Steiner said, "must learn to be each other’s guests," to be "tossed into life." "The homeland of the Jew," he told a hall full of unimpressed Israelis, "may be that of exile."
The following year, in the spring of 2006, I sat at my desk in Jerusalem and raptly watched the online video of the 100th-anniversary celebration of the American Jewish Committee, in Washington D.C., at which the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua affronted his hosts by insisting that secular Israeli Jewish identity is by definition thicker, more complete, than Jewish identity in the Diaspora. "It’s my skin, not my jacket," he said. "You are changing countries like changing jackets. I have my skin, the smell of the territory, the smell of the language." American Jews who dwell on texts are "playing" with Jewishness, he charged. "The problem is not text, it’s life," he said. He was right, of course, but for Jews, the two are never disentangled.
And this spring, as Israel marks its 60th birthday, the Atlantic monthly runs a cover story entitled, “Is Israel Finished?” Its author, the respected American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, writes with great skill about Iran and Hamas and the dwindling viability of the two-state solution, the urgent stuff that all of us writers who care about Israel write about all too often. Goldberg, a veteran of the Israel army, asks Prime Minister Ehud Olmert flat-out why it is that Jews today are physically safer in America than in Israel. “Jews are not safer in Israel than they are in other parts of the world, but there is only one place that Jews can fight for their lives as Jews, and that is here,” retorts Olmert, banging on his desk, adding for good measure the traditional Zionist refrain that “Jews in Germany — and I don’t draw any comparison at all — Jews in other parts of the world were very successful all their lives, and that didn’t provide them with safety.”
Often, when I speak about Israel, in public or in private, to American Jews, I’m asked why Israel’s “message” in the media is less clear-cut and effective than that of Israel’s adversaries. Aren’t we the people of the Book, the word, the text? Why aren’t we better at public relations? Why, after 60 years, is it so difficult to sell Israel to the world? Why do so many intelligent people wonder if the “Israel Lobby” has too much power in Washington? How can we combat a former American president who warns of “apartheid” in the Holy Land, and chats cozily with Israeli’s sworn enemies?
By way of an answer, let me add to the texts above – each of them good food for a spirited Independence Day discussion, fueled by a world-class bottle of Israeli Cabernet – a profound Jewish joke. Elderly, ailing Mr. Rabinowitz has demanded to be moved from St. Luke’s Hospital to Mount Sinai. His new doctor wants to know why: Was the medical care inadequate at St. Luke’s? No, says the old man, it was all right. How about the nurses? “The nurses were nice, I can’t complain,” he says. The food? You didn’t like the food there? “Nah, the food was OK, can’t complain.” So why, asks the doctor, did you demand to be switched to Mount Sinai? “Because here,” says Rabinowitz, “I can complain.”
Jews argue, that’s what we do. We are never content with pat ideologies or party lines or simple interpretations. For 2,000 years we’ve banged on the table in the beit midrash, protesting each other’s readings of the Bible and Jewish law. Today, Steiner and Yehoshua, advocates of opposite poles, are both right, because the homeland – the Jewish State – has become the living text, wrapped in ancient parchments, buzzing with digital data, that Jews argue about most. Israel at 60 is not the safest place for Jews, but it is surely the most interesting. Here, secular intellectuals and traditionalists alike re-invent Judaism as a guide to daily life. Here, the leader of the Orthodox Shas party can meet with Jimmy Carter, while the Prime Minister shuns him. Here, a Jewish pundit can speak the word “apartheid” as cautionary metaphor, and not lose his seat in the synagogue.
I spent Passover with my family in California, as we often do. I took a walk with my son along the American River in Sacramento and came upon a plaque on the leafy trail commemorating a vanished Indian village with the oddly familiar name of Kadema, which stood on the spot until the early 19th century. The Maidu-Nisenan Indians lived there for centuries, but that was then, and this is now. For Olmert’s ruling Kadima party – the word means “forward” in Hebrew – there is no boundary between then and now: Jews and Palestinians are here to stay. Neither is there any guarantee that the dynamic and prosperous Jewish State, or the phenomenally successful Jews of America, will be as secure 60 years hence as they are today.
I’ve lived in Israel since the country was 40, and so was I. For many years I’ve tried to convey in words a sense of what it’s like to live a rich Jewish life – and life of the mind – in a land that sometimes seems a bit too historical, and holy, for its own good. As the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote: “The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams / like the air over industrial cities./ It’s hard to breathe.”
I’ve walked the hills and beautiful beaches, marveled at the myriad achievements of a Hebrew culture reborn, explored the ruined fortresses of the Negev and Galilee. What it comes down to, as I look down the long road, is what Rabbi Yose told Rabbi Hiyya, as they traveled from Usha to Lydda (or so we are told in the Zohar, the medieval masterpiece of Jewish mysticism): “I was contemplating in my mind that the world endures only because of the leaders of the people. If the people’s leaders are worthy, it is good for the people and good for the world. If they are unworthy, woe to the people, woe to the world!” Let us all choose our leaders wisely, and wish them well.