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Love, Hate, and the Jewish State
By Jewcy Staff / May 22, 2009
How do you feel about Israel?
It seems like a pretty simple question, but any diaspora Jew can tell you that their thoughts on Israel are layered, complex, and emotionally charged. Makom and the New Israel Fund are organizing an event on June 18th in New York City called "Love, Hate, and the Jewish State." Jewcy is cosponsoring this event, and we’ll be encouraging panelists and participants in the discussion to continue their dialogue here on the website.
You can learn more about the event here or sign up on Facebook. Below is a video of young Jews discussing their complicated feelings about Israel and social justice – you might recognize a Jewcy contributor or two in the mix.
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Just what we need.
More misty eyed Jews worried about social justice and quick to blame Israel which is by far one the most decent nations that ever existed. Any Arab hand wringers worried about injustice in their home nation and full rights for all people?
I love Israel. :)
Can someone please explain to me what the term "social justice" even means? I’ve heard this over and over again from college onward, and still have no idea what is meant by it. It seems nonsensical and oxymoronic. Justice has to do with according one his/her individual rights. What the hell is "social" about it? I’m not one to sympathize any more with the right than with the left, but I’m sorry, this phrasing just sounds like shorthand for socializing (in a broad sense, not necessarily political – but possibly incidentally political) a concept that has only been successful when applied through the lens of individual rights. I suspect that it’s sloppy thinking… that it’s a bunch of gobbledy-gook emoting, is what it is. An impression this short clip doesn’t help to dispel. Sorry the kids feel so conflicted. Maybe Judaism’s notion of society is at odds with itself. Another possibility is that it is poorly underdeveloped. It is an explicitly tribal creed which aspires to have a universalist impact (and which, in some ways, it already has – assuming you consider the begetting of two daughter faiths embraced by nearly 2/3rds of the world any measure of success).Â
I think these kids, and Judaism, would do well to separate out an obligation to respecting the rights of others as individuals from an option to perform additional acts of kindness with some eye to the supposed "greater good" of… whichever collectivist idea or social phenomenon is at stake. I have the impression that Judaism has already systematized such a hierarchy of charity to a greater degree than have Christianity and Islam. Trying to prop up the moribund creed of socialism with a religious brace is not appealing to me, even if others are free to do it.
If people want to do good for society they might as well take advantage of the fact that traditionally "capitalist" incentives are already evolving to address the formation of more advanced and increasingly altruistic social networks. The "option" of promoting some "greater good" is becoming less dispensible and more profitable, as it were. But I’m not going to pretend that an overly collectivized notion of self-worth or self-esteem, no matter how outwardly noble, is any less selfish, or flawed, or unthinking an incentive for improving a society than any bullshit excuse that Gordon Gecko rationalized.Â
Macrocompassion
The easy solution is to stay at home and sit in front of your screen and type messages about how much you love or hate Israel of some other related thing which somewhere in your blurb states "but I cannot manage to go to live there"
The fact is that this approach gets nowhere. Israel IS REAL and the only thing to do is to get out of your shell and make the effort of Alyiah. I did 45 years ago and have been living in this real and somewhat rough world ever since. Nobody is pretending that this approach is simple nor easy and after living here for only a few years the pull of the old country is there and strongly suggests that conditions are not right and it would be best to give up and go back. But that is defeatism.
What have you got thats so fantastic that you would miss it out here? lots of money, big car, large house and bank account to suit? Today the old style Israelis are getting closer to their American Dream but not quite. We have many of the pleasures of the US to choose from as well as many more of its faults. But there is one positive thing that noboby can deny us, when you live in Israel one does things for a purpose that will last for generations and return to the Land that was promissed to our fore- (or three) fathers, whatever, and for which one day will be a beacon (not bacon) to the rest of the world.
How? well as is written on the walls of all the best public toilets:
"The Future of Israel lies Lays in Your Hands!".Â
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You are a racist
I like the way you put the "both my brothers" bit, yonahred.
As for Jewish normalcy, it does exist. It is exactly "living next door to Ishmael, carrying guns, fearing nukes and needing peace". If we look at this set up you’ve created, Israel begins to look an aweful lot like a shtetl in the Diaspora, minus the guns.
That is Jewish normalcy! Maybe our lot is living among people who don’t like us to varying degrees? In Israel, the world’s Jews have gained at least some sort of stronghold into which to retreat for relative safety.Â
Yeah Israel is a nice country (was there once), but I don’t like jeweish people (and I’m not a rasist)
as a woman I am deeply disturbed at the growth of fundamentalist parties and the increasing influence of these on Israeli politics. Women’s rights have shrunk instead of grown…if you had told the average Israeli in 1967 that Women could be imprisoned for 7 years for praying with a Torah at the Kotel or that women in Jerusalem could be asked (or in some cases intimidated) to move to the back of the bus and be sex segregated on public transportation…they would have thought you were kidding. Also, the stranglehold of Orthodoxy to the exclusion of Conservative and Reform Judaism speaks to me of a quasi-theocratic state that is at odds with democracy. So even if they wanted me (and the super-frum segment of the populace is openly hostile to <gasp!> Reform Jewish feminists, and certainly would exclude any Jew whose mother had a conversion in any branch other than Orthodox) I can do without making aliyah.
The whole thwarted peace process is another mess…seems like when I was in Hebrew day school singing Hatikvah and Teddy Kolleck was mayor of Jerusalem in the 1970′s we were a heck of a lot more hopeful about peace and the idea of living in peace one day than we are today (again, thanks to the fundies) which is just demoralizing.
That being said, love the place, a once in a lifetime experience to be the majority (even the dysfunctional, infighting majority)…a great place to visit and I pray it will have real peace and freedom and equality for all its citizens (even those with fallopian tubes) one fine day.
Shalom!
Being Jewish has been a challenge for quite some time now, at least since the destruction of the second temple and judging by the pressures that produced the milieu that produced a character like the Nazarene, for at least a little while before the destruction. Our generation: post Holocaust, born after the state of Israel was established is not necessarily more pressured than those that came before us, but certainly the Zionist goal of normalization has turned out to be a laugh. My Jewish heroes are Dylan and Woody Allen and Saul Bellow rather than Moshe Dayan and Theodore Herzl, but Jews who do not speak Hebrew seem strangely deracinated and uprooted to me. Thank God I can add characters like Gershon Scholem, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber, Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi into the mix and neither diaspora nor Zionism are denied.
Those of us who allowed our hopes to be raised by the handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin and that dude named Arafat are certainly disappointed by the fifteen or so years since then. We dreamt of peace and instead we have a God awful mess. But both those who love Judea and Samaria so much that they feel that giving it up would be a sacrilege and those who love justice so much that they feel the injustice caused by the occupation to their core are both my brothers. Especially if they are on the spot here in Jerusalem and Israel. Unfortunately talking in extremes and talking so loudly that they can’t hear each other is disheartening.
Two midrashes stand out in my mind: the story of young Abram who breaks his father’s idols and puts the blame on one of the idols to show the folly of idol worship.
and the story of baby Moses tested by Pharoah after putting the crown on his head, forced to choose between coals and diamonds, heads towards the diamonds until the angel pushes him towards the coals and puts one in his mouth so as to become a lifelong stutterer.
Certainly one can be in Brooklyn or St. Louis or Winnipeg or Kiev or Prague or Johannesburg and still appreciate the pull of diamonds, coals and breaking of idols.
But let us not forget that the language of these Midrashim is Hebrew and that at this point of time the stakes are higher here in Israel, living next door to Ishmael, carrying guns, fearing nukes and needing peace.Â
Still a huge fan of Israel. Its modern history, 1878-present, is fascinating. The story of Jewish people daring to dream the impossible and return to statehood just as Europe was wiping its Jews out for good is incredibly compelling.
Modern Israel is a work in progress and one of the most exciting nations on earth, which continues to grow and thrive in its own way despite the efforts of much of the world to delegitimize or otherwise destroy it.
The growing fundamentalist and antidemocratic tendencies worry me, but people are so hyperfixated on the day-to-day political minutia surrounding Israel, that they can’t always see the big picture–which is that Israel continues to evolve and grow in amazing ways, like no other nation.
It is a nation comprised of people from a hundred nations who speak a hundred languages. And despite seeming passe to bored, sheltered college students, the Jewish return to nationhood is one of the most incredible stories of our time. And it’s an ongoing story. Â
 I have strongly supported Israel’s right to exist but to seek peace more forcefully with the Palestinians. Don’t know if it can happen. Hope it can. Being raised as an adopted Gentile I have only a sense that I am somewhere in limbo, but God is the planner of it all. Â
Gary D Anderson
http://hubpages.com/profile/bgamall
An ethno-religious state is a growing anachronism in the West, and Israel strives to be a part of the West. Also, if some powerful anti-Semite wants to murder all the Jews, what better way to accomplish it than having us all in one small country? In the Torah G-d gave the land to us on the condition that we keep His commandments. I don’t think our love of Israel should be any less conditional than the original terms.
Except for that its not.Â
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This whole Diaspora thing is obsolete.
I have a very strange relationship with Israel. I speak no Hebrew and am not religious, yet I feel a deep connection to the Jewish State.
This feeling is inexplicable. And why does it have to be? It may sound pathetic, but Israel for me is the physical testament of the Jews’ existence in normalcy. For the first time in thousands of years we can witness all the utility and dysfunction of a State where Jews are the majority. It is OUR utility and it is OUR dysfunction.Â
Most importantly, Israel represents a place where I can always go. Its that simple. Am I likely to feel at home? No. Are there vast cultural differences between Israelis and Jews of the Diaspora? Yes. But should my neighbors ever come under the influence of some anti-semitic lunatic (they always loom just around the corner) I will have an escape route.Â
i love israel
love israel,
beautiful country amidst a lot of turmoil. Love it but couldn’t live there.Â
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