American Jews, though sympathetic, were detached. Israel was no longer the can-do-no-wrong country it had been for them in 1967. It was certainly no longer a country to consider living in. When friends visited from the States, the subject wasn’t raised. They came for their summer vacation, or part of it, and went home while I went back to another month in the army and the worry of paying the bills. I was bearing a burden they weren’t; more and more, it felt like the burden of Jewish history. I didn’t say this to their faces. I should be grateful, I told myself, that they bothered to visit at all. But had I been truthful, I would have said other things. And so I wrote Letters to an American Jewish Friend. . . .
What I was asking for was honesty—the honesty to face a historical situation and draw the right conclusions. . . .
My quarrel was with American Jews who did care deeply about being Jewish. I didn’t doubt that they were as committed to their Jewishness as I was to mine. I didn’t think that living in Israel made me a better Jew. I thought it made me a more logical one. It gave my life as a Jew its maximal value. . . .
And yet there were moments in which I needed firming up. Talking with my American Jewish friends, I sometimes felt a twinge of envy. Life was so damned easy for them. The second car they thought nothing of owning. (We could barely afford a first one.) The weekend house on ten acres in the country. (Ten acres? We were considered the owners of a latifundium for having bought three-quarters of one acre.) The vacations abroad. (In Israel there was something called a “travel tax” that charged you a fortune just for the right to buy a ticket to anywhere.) Things like that. I needed to reassure myself, not that I had good reasons for being where I was, but that I had better reasons than they had for being where they were. . . .
I had no trouble putting myself in A.’s place. I knew his arguments. They were, allowing for the changed times, the same arguments American Jews had always used to explain why life in Israel wasn’t for them. I thought these were evasions, rationalizations. But then American Jewish life had always seemed to me one big rationalization. It had always struck me as a kind of play-acting, even as a boy. Israel was genuine. Jews were fighting there for a country of their own, living in it, building and defending it. In America, they were listening to sermons. . . . I loved America for many things, but not for its Jewish life, to which I couldn’t see myself belonging if I remained an American. . . .
A great adventure. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
There’s been nothing like it in human history. A small and ancient people loses its land and forgets how to speak its language; wanders defenselessly for hundreds, thousands, of years throughout the world with its God and sacred books; meets with contumely, persecution, violence, dispossession, banishment, mass murder; refuses to give up; refuses to surrender its faith; continues to believe that it will one day be restored to the land it lost; manages in the end, by dint of its own efforts, against all odds, to gather itself from the four corners of the earth and return there; learns again to speak the language of its old books; learns again to bear arms and defend itself; wrests its new-old home from the people that had replaced it; entrenches itself there; builds; fructifies; fortifies; repulses the enemies surrounding it; grows and prospers in the face of all threats. Had it not happened, could it have been imagined? Would anyone have believed it possible?
Would anyone believe it possible that one could belong to this people, value one’s connection to it, even construct one’s life around it, but have no interest in taking part in such an adventure? Would anyone believe that one could repeatedly declare how much this people means to one but think the adventure is entirely for others?
Yet this describes the average “committed” American Jew. . . .