Happy Birthday Herzl!

By Carine Warsawski

Yesterday, 10 Iyaar 5620, marks the birth of a true visionary. It also marks:

A most important holiday…
A hearty Zionist holiday…
An often forgotten holiday…

Yesterday was… YOM HERZL!

The 6th one, as a matter of fact. And this year we are celebrating 150 years since the birth of Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl.

The significance of Zionism for Jews in Israel has changed throughout the history of Israeli civil religion. Cultural processes such as assimilation and secularization have contributed to these social and ideological changes. There has since been a divergence in Zionist ideologies which one might argue has weakened the national collective identity for Israeli Jews. So Herzl Day is an attempt by the State of Israel to restore Zionist sentiment and provide Israeli Jews with a renewed sense of collective identity and nationalism.

In 2004, the Israeli government decided to observe Herzl's birthday rather than the day of his death specifically so that it falls during the school year, albeit landing in an already overburndened time in the Jewish calendar. By becoming the subject for youth essay contests in Herzliya, appearing on the Bagrut, and Galgalatz playing a hip new version of a song about Herzl, are we successfully appealing to youth and fulfilling the holiday's mission? I can't say. Come the next stage of Israeli civil religion and we might have a better idea, although it may already be too late.

My bigger question is: As Jewish educators living in America, are we on a mission to restore Jewish collective identiy, nationalism, or is it something else? How are we already striving to realize similar goals?

While maybe a grand total of 23 people on the planet annually celebrate Herzl Day (5 of whom are my family), it only feels right to remember the significance of this day alongside the group of people and community who most closely identify with its meaning.

Thank you for the work you do for the Jewish people. Herzl, if anyone, would truly appreciate it.

-Carine

What Happened to Aliyah?

-Andrew Fretwell-

It’s a storybook ending when they board the plane. They have found their destiny, their spiritual home, cultural core and Jewish navel. They’re making Aliyah! It’s their fresh life, reborn in the ancestral homeland. So we wave with teary eyes as they cruise off into the sunset, content with their new fully Jewish life.

So why do so many of them come back and ruin the picture perfect ending? It seems like the majority of 20-30 year olds who have made Aliyah end up back in America after a few years; some just go to serve in the army. Is that ideology, to love a place enough to die for it but not enough to live for it? What happened to the ideal of Aliyah? Returning from Aliyah is not a new thing but with so many olim who aren’t able to outlast the average Knesset, is Aliyah where ideology goes to die?

I think in some ways it has. Part of the premature nature of Aliyah has to do with modern mobility. If you can spend a year or two in New York, and a few years in California, why not spend a few years in Israel? But that’s not the whole explanation. Aliyah was established as the highest ideal in the time when Jews didn’t go to Israel to live, they went to build. As the saying goes, they went to build and to be built. With Israel’s prosperity and development, is that over?

There’s a scary realization here, one that leads down the road of Post-Zionism: the belief that Israel’s normalcy relegates it to just another name on the UN roll call. Aliyah was a shield against that. What other country had these brave ideologues who dedicated their lives to altering a country they were not even born in? Olim who came out of choice were the lifeblood of Zionism to so many. Aliyah was important and immediately gratifying when an oleh could assess his/her contribution to Israel through the existence and success of the Kibbutz they helped found, live on land they helped defend or liberate, or enjoy the Jewish majority they helped establish. But with Israel’s success in establishing its institutions and presence in the region, that gratification couldn’t be replicated the feeling of building Eretz Israel leading up to and shortly after the state’s founding.

So the question naturally arose, “Why should I make Aliyah?” The question only became more profound and harder to answer throughout as Israel became more modern, capitalist and began resembling America. Now, people felt less compelled to make Aliyah for the sake of building Israel or for the sake of moving out of the capitalist frenzied US to the socially egalitarian Jewish State. So why make Aliyah? Because Israel is my home? But what if America also feels like my home? Repudiation of Jewish life in the Diaspora has always been a reason for Aliyah, but with the American Jewish community’s comfort and success, that’s not going to resonate with too many. So if I don’t hate my life in the US, I’m not moving across the world for the sake of saying I removed myself from comfort for the vague benefit of the Jewish People.

So is it game over for Aliyah? No, it just needs new meaning, new significance. The state may be built but there’s so much more building that’s being done. No, they’re not draining swamps or doing guard duty to protect from Arab armies. They’re in the slums of cities working with the abused, with foreign workers and refugees, with the neglected and forgotten in Israeli society. Those NGOs and non-profits are building their better Israel. They’re also in settlements, Ofra, Maaleh Adumim, and Gush Etzion. Though the left-wing volunteers and the settlers have totally different visions for what makes Israel a better Jewish state, they both have given themselves the task of building Israel that way.

If we motivate American Jews to go beyond being great spectators and cheerleaders but active participants, we can reinvigorate Zionism and Aliyah. But to do that we need to go beyond the comfort zone of ensconcing ourselves in the unchallenged Israel but to place it under a microscope. The discomfort of breaking with the traditional turning of a blind eye to serious and deep reaching questions may be too much for Jewish institutions, but that comes at the cost of the Jewish world as a whole. We must move Israel engagement to where we are inspiring Jews not just to get to know their home, but with a vision of how their home should look, and to equip them to get to work and will that dream into a reality, because as Herzl said… well you know.

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Zionism and the Darfuri Refugees

-Andrew Fretwell-

Last year, the teen leadership of Young Judaea, the oldest Zionist Youth Movement in North America, did something that has for the most part gone unnoticed in the Jewish world. It placed humanitarian assistance to Darfuri Refugees currently residing in Israel at the center of its agenda.  
   

Its lack of reverberations throughout the Jewish world can be explained away by the economic turbulence of the Jewish philanthropic world as well as Young Judaea’s current budgetary and staffing challenges. However, this initiative is still developing and there remains huge potential to make waves. Supporting Darfuri refugees has generated vigorous debate within Young Judaea and Hadassah and has revealed a generational clash over the essence of Zionism and Israel. 

 

In one corner is the school of thought that has traditionally dominated Jewish philanthropy and activism in Israel: Save the Jews! This philosophy is rooted in the older generations who remember Israel before its rise to military prominence and a world with an Auschwitz but no IDF. To them, Jews have not achieved a sufficient level of comfort. Anti-Semitism will never be dead, just disguised or dormant. The next great pogrom waits patiently in the dark for the right moment to erupt. To them, IDF organ harvesting stories in Sweden and vandalism in Venezuela are just microscopic samples of the inevitable. 

 

And then there is Iran, the perfect mixture of every Jewish nightmare amalgamated to detonate our collective paranoia, mostly because of the legitimacy of the threat. President Ahmedinejad is the perfect villain: an unapologetic tyrant who denies the Holocaust, brutally suppresses his own people, he trains, equips and advises multiple terrorist organizations, he verbalizes his fantasies about destroying Israel, and he is getting so very close to building the bomb. With all these problems, it is dangerously irresponsible to look beyond our own needs, they argue. We need every ounce of strength and ingenuity just to survive in such a hostile world. However, in the other corner is a new generation increasingly on the ascent. This generation only knows a world with Israel as the preeminent military power of the Middle East and has had little to no direct experience with anti-Semitism. Their primary struggle is not the Jews versus the Goyim, but instead the village versus the globe (particularism versus universalism). They have unintentionally grappled their way to the same conclusions as Ahad Ha’am and Mordechai Kaplan: When it comes to Medinat Yisrael, it’s all about achieving Klal Yisrael. 

 

Due to Israel’s military prowess and political stability over the past twenty years, they believe the Jewish state has been irreversibly established and though Israel is not invincible, its problems are primarily political and social, not military. Therefore, their concern is for not the command center, but the community center. To them, Israel does not just need soldiers and advocates to guard the Jewish State, but also organizers and activists to guard the Jewish Soul. They believe Israel should now have the confidence to fully embrace its destiny of fulfilling Klal Yisrael. To do that, a higher priority must be placed on Israel to embody the values that bind us together as a people, even when the circumstances seem dubious. 

 

Enter these Darfuri Refugees into the conversation. Foreign refugees are never a desirable demographic but we know what it is like to be forced out of our homes and wander endlessly at the mercy of our hosts. This is our chance to be the change we always wanted to see in the world, to be a living protest of our old oppressors. These refugees escaped the first genocide of this century and while Israel cannot be the solution to the plight of the refugees, the Jewish state is compelled to be part of the solution. Not doing so is a betrayal of Israel’s Jewish character and an affront to its mission to manifest the Jewish People’s ideals. As a Jewish collective, the State of Israel is only as strong as our care for those strangers who have wandered into our country, hands clasped, pleading for compassion. 

 

That is the basis of Young Judaea’s actions and critique of mainstream Jewish society and traditional Zionism. The teens who have lead the way with this effort have at every turn been forced to justify how they can supposedly neglect their own people for these African migrants. Their critics say it is all too easy to have a short memory and forget how comfortable Jews tend to be right before its worst tragedies. They are accused of resting on false comforts and taking grave danger for granted. However, though they are yet to consciously articulate it, they intuitively understand they are not abandoning anyone, but are instead challenging us all to think more seriously about how Israel advances the Jewish People.