#1097 1/30/22 – Reflections on Our Place and Time

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Krauthammer was right that by and large American Jews under-appreciate the great significance of the Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth in our time, some even unjustly criticizing Israel ourselves.  In these days of unprecedented delegitimization of Israel in the UN and around the world, Israel’s American Jewish supporters must make our people’s homeland case in straight-forward clear terms, starting to our own American Jews.

Reflections on Our Place and Time

My birthday’s in February.  Two years ago, when I confessed in that week’s BSMW edition that I’d just observed my millstone birthday of the biblical four score years, I received in its wake three emails I’ll tell you about.  One was from a stickler for catching supposed typos: “You meant to say ‘milestone.’”  I wish.  The other two came from faithful readers with whom I’ve had repeated email exchanges over our differing views on “the two-state solution.”  One of those readers regards such an eventuality as “inevitable,” the other as worthy of being pursued.  That both take time and interest to debate this with me helps justify my weekly endeavor, but what they both voiced was a suggestion I should start seeking an eventual weekly email successor.

Interested?  Apply within.  But what I would like to leave as a legacy when the time comes (by me, no rush) is my belief that Charles Krauthammer was right that by and large we American Jews, heavily fixated on memorializing the Holocaust, insufficiently appreciate the magnitude and significance of the seminal Jewish history event of our time – our Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth after eighteen hundred years.

Years ago, I asked our readers one week:  When and where would you most want to have lived? Would you have stood with Moses at Sinai?  Crossed the Jordan with Joshua?  Made Jerusalem our eternal capital with David?  Been with Solomon at the Temple’s dedication?  Reclaimed the Temple and celebrated the first Hanukkah with the Maccabees?  Lived here and now?  That last choice was the one for which I’d hoped, but was the one response I didn’t get.

So let me, erev my eighty-second birthday month, make a case for it.  A grassroots person ought to pick a time and place to want to have lived when there existed a desperately needed aim in which he deeply believed to be achieved, and a role for the grassroots in achieving it.  Such a belief was most emphatically expressed, I believe, by a former vice president of the United States.  On April 30, 1956, Alben W. Barclay addressed the Mock Political Convention conducted every four years by Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.  He climaxed his remarks, “I would rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than sit in the seat of the mighty.”  He instantly suffered a heart attack and died on the spot.  (I know this because I graduated from W&L in 1961, but the occurrence is referenced in Wikipedia.)

Grassroots American Jews should take to heart this admonition of Krauthammer’s:

“It would be a tragedy for American Jews to make the Holocaust the principal legacy bequeathed to their children. After all, the Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty, the revival of Hebrew (a cultural resurrection unique in human history), the flowering of a new Hebraic culture radiating throughout the Jewish world.

“Memory is sacred, but victimhood cannot be the foundation of Jewish identity.  Traditional Judaism has 613 commandments.  The philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously said that the 614th is to deny Hitler any posthumous victories.  The reduction of Jewish identity to victimhood would be one such victory.  It must not be permitted.”  (Charles Krauthammer, “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity,” Washington Post, 3/10/16)

Israel is under unprecedented attack today in the United Nations, the “human rights” agency of which has just instituted a continuing investigation of its “war crimes” against “the Palestinians.”  (See, e.g., JNS last Sunday, 1/23/22, The UN Descent to Its Deepest Depths of Hostility Against Israel.)  This on the heels of UNSC 2334, which declares Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem (Old City with its Temple Mount and Western Wall, City of David and all), none of which “the Palestinians” have ever ruled ever, to be “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”   We grassroots American Jews must try to marshal American Jewish support for Israel in this utterly unjust delegitimization of it.

What we are facing in our efforts to do this is not just hostility to Israel of extreme anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, but unjust criticism of it by the American Jewish mainstream, not least among young American Jewish adults.

***  A May 15, 2021, Jerusalem Post article, Rabbinical Students Sign Letter Calling US Jews To Hold Israel Accountable, led:

“Dozens of American rabbinical students have issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the ‘violent suppression of human rights’….

“…. The letter is unusual for its stark criticism of Israel and the Jewish community — a community that the signatories will represent upon ordination. It is also a landmark collaboration across American seminaries: Nearly 90 rabbinical students had signed by Friday morning, representing a significant portion of students who are enrolled now in the country’s nonOrthodox rabbinical schools. No students in Orthodox seminaries have signed.”

***  As for young American Jews who aren’t non-Orthodox rabbinical students, a 5/11/21 Jerusalem Post article on a survey of American Jews, Young US Jews Increasingly Detached From Jewish People – Pew Report, stated while “in 2013 69% of US Jews said they felt very or somewhat of an emotional attachment to Israel,” today that number is 58%.

“The level of connection to Israel in 2020 is significantly lower for the younger generation, with only 48% of those aged 18-29 saying they have an emotional attachment to Israel, and 51% [a majority!] saying they have little or no such connection.”

***  I still haven’t recovered from the 2019 public letter to President Trump – signed by ADL, Ameinu, ARZA, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Jewish Women International, Israel Policy Forum, MERCAZ USA, National Council of Jewish Women, Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism – that “strongly urged” him to  support a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for agreed “territorial adjustments” thereto, and to oppose “annexation” by Israel in “the West Bank.”

In last week’s #1096, I argued that America is unique in its acceptance of us American Jews as included in the American people.  (By comparison, consider the World War II experience of a European Jew, a passenger on the Exodus, recorded in Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling.  He’d escaped the Holocaust by fleeing east, ultimately becoming a decorated officer in the Russian army.  His unit, which included some Jewish soldiers, was marching along one day in the spring of 1945 when they learned that Germany had surrendered and the war was over.  They celebrated for hours.  Then a formation of Russian war planes flew over and one of the Jewish soldiers shouted “There go our eagles!”  “What do you mean ‘our,’” one of the Russian soldiers responded.  “You’re not one of us.”)

I then qualified that acceptance of us as not extending to Jews beyond America’s borders by quoting Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus summary of American inaction in saving Holocaust Jews during WWII and its abstention now in the UNSC Resolution 2334 calling core parts of our people’s homeland, defensible Judea-Samaria and most Jewishly meaningful historic Jerusalem, “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

I said of non-American Jews’ need of our homeland:  “Over the course of centuries past, majorities of our people lived as perpetually-persecuted homeland-less outsiders in Christian Europe – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom, all designed expressly for us – and as persecuted dhimmis in Muslim lands.”

But it’s not enough, of course, for us to base our people’s homeland claim on Jews beyond America’s borders existentially needing it.   We have to make the case that it’s ours as strenuously and convincingly as Arabs and their advocates claim that it’s theirs.  Our case must be as straight-forward and clear to western publics, including American Jews including non-Orthodox rabbinical students, as their “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”  By me, our case is that by three thousand years’ homeland-claiming Jewish presence, in which Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, and under the UN-adopted Palestine Mandate which gave 78% of Palestine to Arabs and recognized 22% as the Jewish national home, that 22%, the defensible, Jewishly meaningful historic land of Israel, is the homeland of the Jews.