WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Timely efforts are underway to strengthen American Jewish leadership and senses of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism within the Reform movement. But it’s our pro-Israel grassroots that can most directly encourage stronger Jewish homeland ties in our community at this time of dangerous-to-Israeli-security US government policies. I suggest a powerful aid to help us encourage this.
The American Jewish Soul: Our Grassroots’ Role in Redeeming It
Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser’s new book, Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, and Rabbi Hirsch of New York’s effort to strengthen senses of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism in the Reform Jewish movement are indeed welcome actions to reinvigorate our American Jewish community’s support for our Jewish homeland of Israel.
But our American Jewish leadership and our religious institutions aren’t the only subsets of our community needing a strengthening of Jewish peoplehood and homeland support commitment. The bulk of America’s grassroots Jews need to be reached, and the more so-committed amongst us can most directly and effectively do this. So here’s my suggestion for action this week for that distinguished subset of grassroots Diaspora Jewry comprised of You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly.
Over decades of haunting used book stores and Jewish neighborhood public library book sales, I’ve amassed, as some of you know, a personal library approaching a thousand non-fiction books about Israel, ancient and present (the “Palestinians” call them all fiction). I’d have you lay your hands on, say, three particularly selected of these books, refresh your recollection of their substance, and then, one-on-one, badger your less-than-intensely-Zionist Jewish friends to borrow them from you and read them.
These selected books must be grippingly readable and drive home the Jewish peoplehood and homeland significance of the historic events they portray. So here are my suggestions for making our case to our fellow grassroots American Jews.
[1] Six-Day War Combatants’ Accounts
Standing beneath Herzl’s portrait in a Tel Aviv museum on May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion called on the Jews of the world to stand by Israel in that pivotal moment in the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our Jewish people’s homeland’s sovereign redemption. It indeed was a key moment, but the miraculous fulfillment achieved in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence was incomplete. Historic Jerusalem (Old City with its Jewish Temple Mount and Western Wall, City of David and all) and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland lay, under the 1949 ceasefire lines, in the invader Transjordan’s hands, leaving Israel in an existentially perilous ceasefire line nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle.
Nineteen years later, in one of history’s most astounding military occurrences, Israel’s homeland army ousted Jordan from the entirety of western Palestine, the historic land of Israel, liberating Judea-Samaria and most meaningfully, historic Jerusalem. Every Jew should read not just a “history” of the Six-Day War, but one that both intensely puts him “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet,” and elucidates in first-person words the meaning of that incredible victory to Israelis themselves and by extension to all the world’s Jews. If like me you were of age in June 1967, you felt it. Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate is that book.
And, not as a bonus, but as essential background in understanding the magnitude of that accomplishment in historic terms, the book has completely relevant flashbacks to participants’ 1948 war and earlier experiences in that Dream of Generations’ long course of fulfillment.
[2] Extant Evidence that Homeland Jewish History Happened
I am sick and tired, as you doubtless are too, of Palestinian Arabs’ ludicrous insulting incessant denials that our biblical era Jewish homeland history happened. We have extant today, though we ourselves fail to grasp its conclusive significance, the most powerful piece of physical evidence that one could imagine, our Jewish Temple Mount in the very center of the very capital city in which this Jewish history happened.
In a tour de force of archeological architectural reasoning, based on extant evidence, acknowledged expert Leen Ritmeyer has not only demonstrated to general acceptance where on Herod’s greatly enlarged Temple Mount the First Temple’s Mishnah-described 500 cubit square Mount lay, but beyond that has made quite a good case, as Biblical Archeology Review (“BAR”) editor Hershel Shanks assessed it, where the Temple stood on that Mount, and even where in its Holy of Holies the Ark of the Covenant rested – in an Ark-sized niche carved in the Foundation Stone in the center of that Holy of Holies, preserved for three thousand years and visible today in that Rock in the center of the Dome of the Rock built on the site of the Temples! On that Rock Jews can and should build our case that biblical era Jewish homeland history happened.
Leen Ritmeyer laid out his reasoning in a very impressive book, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, on Amazon, even “used,” for fifty bucks, but there’s a shorter “popular” version, put out by BAR, is Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, costing a lot less on AbeBooks.com.
[3] Most Inspiring: Aliyah Bet – Palestinian Jews, Survivors, and US Jews Working Together
Of all the eras of homeland Jewish history spread over my not quite thousand mostly “used” books, the era that has inspired me the most, and might perhaps many less-than-Zionist Diaspora Jews, is that of the Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews-enabled, volunteer American Jews-aided, escape from Europe to the homeland, against the anti-Jewish British blockade, of Holocaust survivors and partisans.
Acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, is among the most gripping of Exodus books, as are Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus and Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling. Of other Aliyah Bet ships’ tales, my favorite is Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua.
Put one of these Aliyah Bet books vividly recounting the guts and endurance of all involved into the hands of less-than-ecstatic-on-Israel grassroots American Jews, and see if it helps. If not, nothing will.
Why We Must Try To Reach Grassroots American Jews
Books like Jacobs & Goldwasser’s on the failure of American Jewish leadership and efforts like Rabbi Hirsch’s on strengthening senses of Jewish peoplehood and Zionism within the Reform branch are crucial, but it’s the committed grassroots that can most directly and hopefully effectively get through to our fellows.
The internet these days has several pleas by Jewish advocates – e.g., Steven Flatow, Blinken Says Israel Must Be Nine Miles Wide To Be Secure, which I quoted last week; ZOA’s Mort Klein, ZOA Condemns Secy Blinken’s Extraordinarily Hostile-to-Israel & Jews AIPAC Speech – on the existential danger to our people’s Jewish homeland of Israel of “two-states along the 1967 [1949] lines with [hardly likely] mutually agreed swaps” to which the American government is presently so fervently committed. But I would leave you with how “my” rabbi, who lives in Jerusalem’s Old City (and is himself an archeologist) put it in an email to me this week:
“Most dangerous, Jerry, is the blatant mortal danger that it would place us in without having any pressure on the Arabs. Frightening. Hence, we are part of God’s story and we must do teshuva and live up to being Yisrael and not think it has all gone away and that our friends are our friends.”
Our friends, foremost America, will be our friends when our community in unison practices that first admonition of Hillel’s – If we are not for Ourselves, Who will be for us? And that third admonition – And if not Now, When?