American Jew |
I first traveled to Israel more than 40 years ago, returning ebullient, as if I had just discovered a missing piece of my identity.
With a group of young, Jewish leaders from across the United States, we journeyed from Poland to Israel, from darkness to light, from the deep shadows of the Holocaust to the shining miracle of the Jewish state.
I will never forget the intense sweetness of the first sip of orange juice offered as we arrived in Jerusalem nor the warmth and brightness of the sun.
From darkness to light, indeed.
Later, as I sought to process the intensity of the experience, I wrote how it challenged my perception of who I was, how I perceived myself, a Jew or an American?
It was years before I studied Jewish identity construction, years before I read sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman’s apt description of dual identity as “negotiating both sides of the hyphen.”
But I became much more aware of the hyphen, and my own self definition, plumbing it further, was I an American Jew or a Jewish American?
I recall those words, that conundrum, with a heaviness now, as I quietly celebrate a war that seeks to dispel a looming existential threat to the safety and security – the very existence – of a state I have come to love, and its partnership with the country that I also love deeply, and beyond measure, that I call home.
It opened its doors to my four grandparents when they fled pogroms and persecution, in Eastern Europe and beyond, places that later were caught in the grip of Hitler’s deluded plan to exterminate the Jews, years before Theodore Herzl’s dream of a Jewish state, a refuge, a haven of safety and security, for Jews became even a faint possibility.
And now, the Jewish state is a super power in the Middle East with amazing technological, scientific, economic advancement, and an unrivaled military seeking to destroy Iran, the evil empire, that not only declares its intent to annihilate Israel, but its ally, the United States, as well.
Death to Israel, Death to America, chant the mullahs.
And, this after the horror of 10/7, when the hatred for Israel, for Jews, erupted with unimagined brutality unleashing virulent antisemitism world wide, including the US.
But, as Operation Epic Fury goes on, as the human toll grows, as Israelis live with a constant barrage of missiles, sirens hurrying them to safe rooms, and as America puts its troops in harm’s way, spends billions of dollars in support of the effort, many Americans question their president’s decision to go to war, endangering not only human lives but American families, struggling with inflation, rising costs at the gas pump and the grocery, and diminished government services.
How to reconcile the need to protect Israel from the terrorists who seek to destroy it, and how to reconcile American support in that effort with the huge cost it exacts from its citizens? And how to continue to back the leadership of its duly elected president who daily undermines the foundational values of our republic, rule of law, legislative power and judicial independence? And how to ensure the protection of those fundamental rights, the bedrock of our democracy?
How to be fervently Jewish and fervently American. And how to be true to myself.
And so, especially during the last days of Passover, with the tenuous prospect of a ceasefire, I find comfort in the Jewish values the holiday teaches of the preciousness of freedom and its sacred responsibilities, of the obligation to remember, to welcome the stranger, to care for those in need, to act with kindness, compassion, generosity.
And those innately American ideals of freedom, equality, justice that remain the foundation of our republic.
And how each informs the other, how each informs who I am, grateful for both.
As a Jew, as an American, that our values will sustain us, bringing more light, less darkness, more love and less hate, more good and less evil, more hope and less despair, an end of war and a world at peace.