WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Amb. Friedman wrote this week that Jewish Diaspora’s future hinges on increased “Judaism fluency.” By me, he’s close to the mark. Diaspora Jews’ and ultimately Israelis’ future, I think, hinges on enhanced awareness and appreciation of the monumental Jewish history events of our time. I suggest how we can help particularly our American Jewish youth gain this awareness. The rest rests with them.
This Week: Amb. Friedman Hits Close to the Mark
World Israel News had an article this week (Thursday, June 4) , “Ambassador Friedman: Diaspora Jews Are Too ‘Illiterate’ About Judaism.” Photo caption:
“U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman tells online conference on Judaism he believes that the Jews’ lack of knowledge about their own religion is the ‘greatest threat of all’ to the future of Jewish life outside Israel.”
Amb. Friedman, a practicing Orthodox, says that in 1941 there were 18 million Jews in the world, 12 million in 1945, and 15 million today. Most of that recovery has been in Israel. During that time period world population has more than doubled. He says that “doing things that are morally just or helpful to others,” in which Jews do not have a monopoly, adds nothing to “fluency in Judaism,” that education in Judaism “is an imperative for the future of the Jewish people, especially outside the state of Israel.”
Being far from “fluency in Judaism” myself, I can’t comment whether Amb. Friedman is right about us Diaspora Jews’ grasp of our religion. But either way, there’s a further piece to our incomplete knowledge that needs addressing. I had a brief conversation some years ago that showed me this clearly. I had a young man working for me for awhile in my software development business (less than a threat to Microsoft). He was Jewish, college educated, bar-mitzvahed, observant. He asked me one morning when he came in, what was that book I was reading. “Trial and Error,” I said, “the autobiography of Dr. Chaim Weizmann.” “Who?”
* It seems to me inconceivable that any American Jew the least bit familiar with Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence could contemplate returning to Arabs’ control Latrun, that protruding block on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road that was the site of defeat after defeat in the newly reborn Jewish state’s desperate battles to supply the besieged Jewish-held part of Jerusalem.
* It seems to me inconceivable that any American Jew superficially familiar with the treatment of Jews and our holy places in Jerusalem by the uninterrupted stream of foreign conquerors from the Romans defeat of Jewish Judaea in 70 CE through the British and then Jordanians in our own time could contemplate Jews walking out of historic Jerusalem half-a-century after restoration of homeland Jewish Jerusalem rule as the land’s next native state after Judaea.
* It seems to me inconceivable that any American Jew aware of the persecution of Jews in Europe not just during the Holocaust, but before and even after the Holocaust, and the struggle to bring out from that cursed continent the Holocaust’s survivors and surviving partisans where they weren’t even wanted, could support anything short of a whole and secure sovereign Jewish homeland.
* It seems to me inconceivable that any American Jew aware of Arabs’ endless threats and actions to destroy “the Zionist entity” could contemplate halving the land of Israel, held in its unified entirety now by the state of Israel for half a century, into Jewish and Arab states, and leaving Israel with the Jewishly meaningless historic Jerusalem-less indefensible nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle half.
And yet American Jews’ Reform and Conservative religious movements, rabbis and all, and other establishment Jewish institutions, presumably shaping or reflecting the views of their followers, call for just such a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for any agreed-in-writing “territorial adjustments.” Exactly what the world, with U.S. abstention, calls for in UNSC 2334.
It’s also the stand of one of America’s political parties (see article co-authored by Daniel Shapiro, US Ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017, in the Times of Israel, 5/18/20, Democrats’ Stand on Annexation Poses a Dilemma for Israel):
“Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….”
Well, at least Shapiro said “1967 lines,” and not “borders” (though “swaps” makes those “lines” as equity-bearing as though they were “borders”). But this will put, among other places, historic Jerusalem (Old City with its Temple Mount and Western Wall), the City of David, Latrun, the Jordan Valley and Judea-Samaria hill country ridge, and other strategic and Jewish holy places into Arab hands. The Rabin and Allon plans, and the Trump plan (potential Arab state and all) would not leave Israel so Jewishly meaningless and strategically vulnerable.
So What Can We Do About It?
An effort has to be made, to borrow a phrase from Amb. Friedman, to enhance American Jews’ Jewish homeland history “fluency.” In this, I think different approaches would be appropriate for approaching our adults and our young people.
In appealing to American Jewish adults, we should try to disassociate supporting or rejecting “the two-state solution” from supporting or rejecting Biden or Trump. We should emphasize that Rabin saw the Jordan Valley as critical for Israel’s defense, and that Rabin was for retaining Jerusalem.
In appealing to American Jewish youth, we need to drive home to them the significance of the monumental Jewish history events occurring in our/their time – the Holocaust, the briha-aliyah bet struggle against the British to bring home Holocaust survivors, fulfillment of the dream of generations for the homeland’s sovereign rebirth, the close calls of the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars, American Jews’ honorable if illegal sending of “farm machinery” in 1948, the immense Jewish history significance of the liberation of historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria in 1967, the bringing home of Middle East and North African Jews who lived for centuries as dhimmis.
I do not think, given today’s Jewish establishment viewpoints, that this instilling of awareness of our/their time’s significance will come about through establishment channels.
What we can do is encourage our young people to familiarize themselves with these things through reading about them. These books have to be exceedingly excitingly readable. Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmut” (intro, p. x), is a sterling example. Given that, they will hopefully form their own structures – by me, the Brith Sholoms of their time – like we and our parents did in our times. Can sufficiently motivated young people achieve this? American Black youth of the Civil Rights movement did.