Dear Neighbor,
Today is the most terrible day of the Jewish year. It is the fast of Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Compressed into this day of mourning is the destruction of both ancient temples in Jerusalem: the First Temple by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, leading to the exile of the Jews to Babylon, and the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in 70 CE, and the subsequent dispersion of the Jews around the world. The Babylonian exile lasted seventy years, until the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return home. The Roman-initiated exile lasted nearly two thousand years, until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
As I fast, repeatedly glancing at my watch and waiting for this mini-ordeal to end, I think of Ramadan. The Muslims I know eagerly anticipate those thirty days of fasting as an immersion in sacred time. The thought comforts me, and helps me welcome the spiritual opportunity of self-denial.
The dry heat rising from the desert on this late-July morning feels aptly oppressive. The Hebrew calendar, after all, reflects the natural cycle of this land. We celebrate freedom and renewal on the spring holiday of Passover; we mark the giving of the Torah, the spiritual harvest, on Shavuot at the end of spring, the time of the wheat harvest. And so it’s somehow appropriate that the fast of Tisha b’Av occurs during our parched summer, as the land itself seems to convey despair.
Last night I went to the Western Wall, remnant of the Temple left by Tisha b’Av. The stone-paved plaza was crowded with the diversity of the Jews, almost as expansive as humanity itself. Worshippers sat in circles on the ground and read, in the accents of our wanderings, the book of Lamentations—“how the city sits solitary”—composed over twenty-five hundred years ago to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and our Temple. There were ultra-Orthodox Jews of a dozen sects, distinguished by the sizes and shapes of their black fedoras and by the lengths of their black jackets, chanting in the Yiddish-accented Hebrew of Poland and Hungary. Jews from Yemen with curled side locks chanted in a guttural Hebrew said to resemble the way Jews spoke it before the exile—before Hebrew was confined to liturgy and sacred study, exiled from the nation’s vernacular. There was Russian and English and Amharic and especially French: Jews from France are our latest wave of immigrants, fleeing anti-Jewish violence in a Western democracy.
And yet for all the formal gestures of mourning, I didn’t sense genuine anguish. Some of the pious cried out the words, but that seemed to me an imitation of grief. It’s hard to mourn the exile when the exile has ended.
True, not all Jewish prayers have been answered. We have returned, but the pervasive presence of Israeli soldiers protecting us at the Wall reminds us not only of our restored sovereignty but of continuing threat. Tisha b’Av has been only partly negated. Jewish tradition couldn’t imagine this limbo between return and redemption. And so we reenact the choreography of mourning but are restless, disoriented. Home, yet not redeemed.
Moving from circle to circle, I felt a sense of wonder. We have returned to our place of origin, just as Jews always believed would happen, to reconstruct ourselves from disparate communities back into a people.
Most Israelis I know are people of faith—if not necessarily in conventional religion, then surely in a life of meaning. Israelis sense that their very existence—speaking a resurrected language in a recovered homeland—is a miracle. “When the Lord returned the exiles to Zion we were like dreamers,” wrote the Psalmist. Being an Israeli is like awakening into a dream.
One morning I was driving my teenage son, Shachar, to school. Not far from the Old City, we got caught in a traffic jam. I said, “You know, in one sense here we are, sitting in a traffic jam, just like in any city anywhere. But sometimes it occurs to me that the most boring details of our daily life were the greatest dreams of our ancestors.”
I didn’t expect much of a response. Shachar, a jazz musician, tends not to speak in historical categories. But he surprised me. “I think about that a lot,” he said.
Of course he does, I realized. How can a Jew live in this country and not think about the improbability of our being?
Once, on a visit to Rome, I went on a pilgrimage of sorts to the Arch of Titus, a monument to the destruction of Jerusalem. On the arch is carved the image of our ruin: Jewish slaves carrying the Temple menorah through the streets of Rome. During the exile Jews made a point of not walking under the arch, symbolically rejecting submission to defeat. I entered the arch and offered a prayer of gratitude for living in a time when Jewish persistence had been vindicated.
How had the Jews done it? How did our ancestors in exile manage to retain hope? Why for that matter did they stay loyal to their fatally discredited faith, seemingly abandoned by God and superseded by both Christianity and Islam? How did we resist the pressures and temptations to convert to the dominant faiths under which we lived?
Some, of course, did abandon Judaism, which may be one reason why there are so few of us—barely fourteen million. Those who remain Jews are descended from men and women of incomprehensible faith. Our defeated ancestors believed that the story Jews told themselves of exile and return would someday be fulfilled.
One reason I am a believing Jew is because of their faith.
Tisha b’Av presented Judaism with its greatest crisis. Biblical Judaism was centered on the land of Israel and the Temple. But what to do now that a majority of the Jews had been uprooted from the land and the Temple destroyed?
Gradually Jews realized that, unlike their sojourn in Babylon, this time the exile would be open-ended, with no conclusion in sight. The Jews responded in a paradoxical way. They saw exile as God’s punishment for their sins, and so they surrendered to their fate for as long as God decreed. Yet they refused to accept the exile as permanent. They actively nurtured the hope, the faith—the astonishing certainty—that one day the prison sentence of exile would end and God would retrieve them from the most remote corners of the earth, as our prophets had predicted. Still, that prospect was so inconceivable that Jews relegated their return home to the messianic age. Surely only the messiah could restore to sovereignty the most dispersed and powerless among peoples.
In the prolonged interim between Tisha b’Av and redemption, the Jews maintained their dual strategy of accepting exile as a fact and rejecting it as permanent.
The rabbis, popular teachers and arbiters of Jewish law, emerged as the new custodians of Judaism. With the destruction of the Temple, the priests—responsible for its rituals—had become instantly irrelevant. The prophets had been silenced by the withdrawal of Divine revelation, one of the most painful expressions of our spiritual failure. (Prophecy, according to Judaism, is given to Jews only in the land of Israel.) The synagogue became a substitute Temple, prayer a substitute for animal sacrifices—a major step forward in the spiritual evolution of Judaism. Through these innovations, Judaism declared a truce with the exile.
But the rabbis built into the Judaism of exile its own negation, a subversive expectation that one day Tisha b’Av would be reversed—turned into a holiday of redemption. According to Jewish legend, the messiah would be born on Tisha b’Av.
Throughout their wanderings, Jews carried with them the land of Israel, its seasonal rhythms, its stories and prophecies. In their study houses they debated the laws of shmita—the commandment to leave the land of Israel fallow every seven years to rest and restore itself. They knew its rhythm of planting and harvesting, as though they were still its farmers. The Jewish relationship to the land of Israel shifted from space to time. For us, the land existed in past and future—memory and anticipation. One day, Jews believed, the land would reemerge from its exile in time, back into space.
Most of all, they preserved the land in prayer. Jewish prayer became suffused with the longing for the land. As a boy, growing up in a religious home in Brooklyn, I prayed in the winter months for rain and in the summer months for dew—regardless of the weather outside my window, following the natural rhythm of a distant land. In morning and evening prayers, in grace after meals, I invoked Zion. Before I’d even known the land of Israel as actual place, I knew it as inherited memory.
When Sarah and I stood under the wedding canopy, we recited, as Jews have done for centuries, the ancient psalm “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.” And then, at the moment of our greatest joy, we broke a glass, in memory of the destroyed Temple.
Perhaps the most powerful expressions of longing for return were contained in the prayer poems of the Jews of Muslim lands. “I will ask my God to redeem the prisoners,” Jews sang in Yemen, referring to themselves, exiles from Zion. The medieval Spanish Jewish poet Yehudah Halevi wrote a plaintive prayer adopted by Jews around the world: “Zion, are you not concerned for the well-being of your prisoners?” Moroccan Jews would gather in the synagogue at midnight to sing prayers of return.
In their radically diverse exiles, Jews nurtured rituals of longing—like the holiday of Ethiopian Jews, known as the Sigd. Once a year, in late autumn, thousands of Jews from villages in remote Gondar province would trek up a mountain. Dressed in white, fasting, they turned north toward Zion and prayed for return.
I learned about the Sigd from my friend Shimon, who moved to Israel around the same time I did, in the 1980s. Though he came from the poorest Diaspora community and I came from the most privileged, we had both been raised on the same love of Zion.
For Shimon, the longing to live in Israel began with the Sigd. He proudly informed me that he began fasting at the age of eight.
Severed for centuries from other Jewish communities, Ethiopian Jews believed they were the last Jews in the world. Their Christian neighbors feared them as black magicians—just as Christians in medieval Europe feared Jews as devil-worshippers and well-poisoners—and called them “Falasha,” strangers. They called themselves “Beta Yisrael,” the House of Israel. And year after year, century after century, they ascended the mountain, their faith mediating between patience and longing.
One day in 1983, Shimon and his family joined their neighbors and began literally walking toward Jerusalem. Israeli rabbis had recently determined that the Beta Yisrael were Jews—a status in dispute because of the community’s millennia-long severance from the rest of the Jewish people—and the Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin let it be known that they were welcome home. And so thousands of Ethiopian Jews were on the move. They walked for weeks through jungle and desert; old people died from exhaustion, children from hunger. No Diaspora community suffered proportionally more fatalities on its way to Zion than the Jews of Ethiopia.
The first stop for Shimon and his family was a refugee camp in the Sudan. Fearful of the Muslim authorities, Shimon and the other Jews concealed their religious identity and waited for Israeli agents to retrieve them. One day a Sudanese soldier, suspecting that Shimon was a Jew, lifted his steel-tipped boot and crushed Shimon’s bare foot. He limped ever since.
I think of Ethiopian Jews whenever I hear a Middle Eastern leader say that the only reason Israel exists is the Holocaust, that the Palestinians have paid the price for Western guilt. Many Ethiopian Jews never even heard of the Holocaust until they got to Israel. Half of Israel’s Jews come from the Arab world, where, for the most part, the Nazis didn’t reach.
Israel exists because it never stopped existing, even if only in prayer. Israel was restored by the cumulative power of Jewish longing. But attachment to the land wasn’t confined to longing. Throughout the centuries, Jews from east and west came to live and be buried in the land.
After the Romans destroyed the Judean state, they forbade Jews from living in Jerusalem, a ban reinforced under Christian rule. Muslim rulers of Jerusalem were more gracious. It was, after all, the caliph Umar who, upon conquering Jerusalem in 638 CE, allowed some Jews to return to the city. That kindness is part of the history we share.
The impetus for creating a political expression of the longing for return—restoring the Jewish relationship to Zion from time back into space—was dire need. In nineteenth-century Russia, millions of Jews were threatened by regime-instigated pogroms. Many Russian Jews were fleeing their homes and heading west.
The newly created Zionist movement was seeking a solution not just for Jews but for “the Jews”—a permanent solution to homelessness. Still, however desperate the situation, anti-Semitism and the need for refuge didn’t define the essence of Zionism. Need gave Zionism its urgency, but longing gave Zionism its spiritual substance.
Zionism was the meeting point between need and longing.
And when need and longing collided—as they did at a crucial moment in early Zionist history—longing won.
In 1903, the leader of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist obsessed with saving his people, had exhausted his options. Herzl had been an assimilated Jew who came to Zionism because of Jewish need, not longing. But he’d failed to persuade the Turkish sultan to permit mass Jewish immigration into the land of Israel, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. The pope told Herzl that he couldn’t support Zionism because Jewish homelessness was Divine punishment for rejecting the messiah. Herzl’s movement of impoverished dreamers was virtually bankrupt: Most of the wealthy Jews of Western Europe shunned him, fearing that his plan for a Jewish state would undermine their own efforts to be accepted into gentile society. Good luck with that, Herzl told the Jews of Berlin and Vienna.
Herzl was desperate. The mob violence against Russian Jews was intensifying. Herzl intuited that some unimagined catastrophe, far worse than pogroms, awaited the Jews of Europe.
Then, the British approached him with an offer to settle territory in East Africa. They hoped to get loyal colonists out of Herzl’s desire to create a Jewish homeland.
Herzl knew there would be opposition among Zionists to what became known as the Uganda Plan, but the Zionist movement, he believed, was pragmatic. If Zion was unattainable, he hoped his fellow activists would accept the possible.
Herzl brought the plan before the Zionist Congress. With a map of East Africa hanging behind the podium, he addressed the delegates. Nothing would replace Zion in our hearts, he said. But he urged them to consider the dangers Jews faced, especially in Russia. Need before longing.
He was greeted by cries of anguish. The most vehement opposition came from the young delegates representing Jewish communities in Russia. The very Jews Herzl was trying to save.
A young Russian woman rushed to the podium and ripped the map of Africa off the wall.
The delegates from Russia—led by a young Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president—walked out of the hall. They were mostly secular, socialist rebels from religious homes. But their instincts were, at that moment, deeply religious. They gathered in an adjacent room and sat on the floor, the way Jews do in the synagogue on Tisha b’Av. Some of the young people wept. They were in mourning not for Zion but for Zionism.
Herzl went to them. They received the beloved leader, the first Jew in two thousand years to organize a practical way out of exile, with polite coldness. Uganda, Herzl reassured them, would only be a temporary station on the way to Zion. Herzl managed to prevent a schism in the Zionist movement, but the Russian delegates remained deeply opposed.
In his closing speech to the Congress, Herzl raised his right hand and repeated the words of the Psalms, “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.”
A year later, Herzl died—at age forty-four, of exhaustion and heart failure. His rescue mission had faltered. Catastrophe would not be averted.
After the Uganda Plan, there were other attempts to create Jewish “homelands” in various parts of the world—like Birobidzhan, the Soviet fantasy of a Yiddish-speaking Communist homeland on the Chinese border. But every alternative to Zion failed.
Had the Uganda Plan prevailed, Zionism would have become a frankly colonialist movement. A tragic colonialism, impelled not by greed or glory but existential need. Still, there would be no escaping that hard judgment against Zionism.
But by insisting on Zion—against all odds, no matter the consequences—Zionism affirmed its legitimacy as a movement of repatriation, restoring a native people home.
Precisely because Zionism is such a unique phenomenon, it is tempting to fit it into other categories, like nineteenth-century European nationalism. From there it is a small step to defining Zionism as a colonialist movement.
Zionism was of course strongly influenced by European nationalism. But that was only the form that a two-thousand-year dream of return assumed. And though launched in the West, Zionism reached its culmination in the East. When the state of Israel was established, whole Jewish communities in the Middle East moved to Zion.
The first community to answer the call were the Jews of Yemen. Throughout 1949, an ancient community of over 40,000 was flown home in Israel’s first airlift. Many Yemenite Jews, who had never seen a plane, recalled the biblical promise to restore the Jews from exile “on the wings of eagles” and assumed that that prophecy was being literally fulfilled on the tarmac.
Then, in 1951, came the turn of the ancient Jewish community of Iraq. Over a hundred thousand Iraqi Jews—virtually the entire community—were flown to Israel, the largest airlift in history. They included cosmopolitan Jews of Baghdad and village Jews of Kurdistan, mystics and Communists and Zionist activists.
And then came the Jews of North Africa. And Egypt. And Syria. And Lebanon. One ancient Jewish community after another emptying into the state of Israel.
A majority of Israelis today are descended from Jews who left one part of the Middle East to resettle in another. Tell them that Zionism is a European colonialist movement and they simply won’t understand what you’re talking about.
Jews from the East were present at the very beginning of the political return to Zion. In 1882, Yemenite kabbalists calculated that the Hebrew equivalent of that date would be the year of redemption. And so several hundred Yemenite Jews set sail for Jaffa harbor, expecting to greet the messiah.
Instead they encountered the first group of Zionist pioneers from Russia. It was not a joyful reunion of brothers. The two groups of Jews from either end of the Diaspora regarded each other warily. The misunderstandings only grew between the deeply traditionalist Jews of the East and the brash young pioneers from Europe.
And yet the Yemenite kabbalists were, in a sense, right: The year 1882 was one of redemption for the Jews, because it marked the beginning of the modern return to Zion. And there, at the moment of birth, was a meeting, however difficult, between the Jewish East and the Jewish West. There had been no prior communication between them; the Jews of Yemen didn’t know about the groups of young Zionists forming in Europe.
Those Yemenites weren’t “Zionists” in any political sense. But they were Zionists in the deepest sense: They were Jews returning to their homeland, in anticipation of the restoration of their people’s sovereignty.
Zionism came full circle by the end of the twentieth century, with the mass immigration to Israel of Russian Jews, refugees from seventy years of Communism. Subjected to government-imposed assimilation, forbidden to study and practice their faith, many hardly seemed Jewish at all. But here they have rejoined the Jewish people, learning Hebrew and living by the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and marrying Jews from other parts of the Diaspora. Israel is the one place where assimilation works in favor of Jewish continuity.
I have heard Palestinian leaders cite the immigration from Russia—with its large numbers of intermarried couples—as proof of the inauthentic nature of Jewish nationhood. From a Zionist perspective, though, none of our waves of immigration is more or less “authentic.” Traditional Jews from Iraq and Yemen, assimilated Jews from the former Soviet Union: All are indigenous sons and daughters returning home.
Is it possible, as anti-Zionists insist, to separate Zionism from Judaism? Is Zionism mere “politics,” as opposed to Judaism, which is authentic “religion”?
The answer depends on what one means by Zionism. If it refers to the political movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century, then certainly, there are forms of Judaism that are independent of Zionism. In the era before the establishment of Israel, Jews vehemently debated the wisdom of the Zionist program. Marxist Jews rejected Zionism as a diversion from the anticipated world revolution. Ultra-Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism as a secularizing movement, while some insisted that only the messiah could bring the Jews home.
But if by “Zionism” one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism without Zionism. Judaism isn’t only a set of rituals and rules but a vision linked to a place. Modern movements that created forms of Judaism severed from the love of the land and the dream of return all ended in failure.
By the time the state was established, anti-Zionism had become peripheral in Jewish life. Aside from a vocal fringe, most ultra-Orthodox Jews made their peace with a Jewish state. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives of almost the entire spectrum of the Jewish community—from ultra-Orthodox to Communists. That document attests to the legitimacy, within the Jewish people, of the state created by Zionism.
In recent years there have been renewed attempts, especially on the fringes of the Diaspora left, to create a Jewish identity severed from Israel. But with nearly half the world’s Jews living in a thriving Jewish-majority state, that debate has long since been resolved. If in the past one couldn’t separate the land of Israel from Jewish life, today the same holds true for the state of Israel.
In the summer of 1982, shortly after Tisha b’Av, I left my home in New York City, boarded an El Al plane, and joined the Jewish people in the greatest dare of its history. I was twenty-nine years old, a journalist, and single. I left my old life behind, without looking back.
The Lebanon War had just begun, and Israel was bitterly divided. Left-wingers and right-wingers shouted at each other in the streets. Inflation was running at 300 percent. And I was home.
In a way, it was good to come at such a low point in Israel’s history. It left little room for illusion and disappointment. I came without preconditions and expectations. However this story played out, it would now be my story.
When people “back home” were puzzled and asked me why I’d left America for the Middle East, I used a journalistic metaphor: I needed to know Israeli reality not only from the headlines but from the back pages. I wanted to know the texture, the nuances of the Jewish return.
Everything seemed at once familiar and strange. I walked the streets slowly, feeling like a time traveler who had stumbled into the Jewish future. So this is what it looked like when the Jews returned home, I repeated to myself.
I felt humbled by the fortitude that ordinary Israelis take for granted, their capacity to contend with war and terror and wave after wave of destitute immigrants. I felt privileged to be living the Jewish holidays in the place where they were meant to be observed. I laughed at the absurdities of Israeli life of the early 1980s, like the television tax I paid for the pleasure of watching the single black-and-white government-run TV station. I tried to understand the emotional and psychological impact of life in a pressure cooker. Why did you leave America, you didn’t have it good there? perplexed Israeli teenagers asked me, and then inquired how they could get an American visa.
Through it all, one constant anxiety has accompanied me: Are the Jews going to make it this time? After all, we lost this land twice before. The great irony of Jewish history is that, for all the centrality in Judaism of the land of Israel, we’ve lived far more of our history outside of it than in it. We are a people of both homeland and Diaspora. The Torah warns us that the land “will vomit you out”—the language could hardly be more explicit—if we don’t live up to God’s expectations. In the words of one Jewish prayer, “We were exiled from our land because of our sins.” A terrifying conditionality haunts our return. Jewish sovereignty has been entrusted to us; will we be the generation on whose watch it unravels?
The challenges facing us are overwhelming. How to refashion a single people out of scattered communities that had little communication for centuries? How to balance religious and secular identities? How to create a shared civic space between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis? How to make peace with enemies who don’t accept our right to be here? How to defend ourselves against threat from every border? How to empower your people without endangering my people?
The consolation Israelis draw is that the challenges we’ve faced have been nearly impossible from the very beginning of our return. Israel has constantly surprised itself—in good ways and bad. It sometimes seems that we are intent on compensating for two millennia of lost sovereignty by cramming into mere decades the fulfillment of all our dreams, while repeating all the mistakes that other nations commit over centuries.
Yet none of Israel’s dilemmas or failures has ever caused me to regret my decision to live here. The opposite: Israel’s flaws are challenges, not deterrents. They are my flaws, distortions in my own Jewish being that I need to confront. In success or failure, in glory or disgrace: The fate of Israel is my fate, too, my shared responsibility. That, for me, is the meaning of Zionism.
Judaism was intended to be lived communally, shaping a society’s ethics and behavior. Here, then, is our chance to test our most noble ideas—abstractions in exile—against hard reality. This is where the worthiness of the Jewish story is being decided.
Though moving here was an individual decision, I was accepted by Israel as part of a people returning home. It didn’t matter if I’d come from New York or Mumbai, if I would be an economic asset or a burden. I was a Jew returning home, and so eligible for Israeli citizenship.
I was admitted under the “Law of Return,” which grants citizenship to any Jew requesting it. I imagine that the first law that the state of Palestine will pass will be your own law of return, granting automatic citizenship to any Palestinian in your diaspora who wants to come home. That is the duty of a state whose existence is meant to undo exile.
Every time I land at Ben-Gurion Airport after a trip abroad, and head for the line earmarked for Israeli passport holders, I experience something of the thrill I felt as a new immigrant. I tell myself to stop being sentimental, but it doesn’t work. After all these years, I’m still grateful to be an Israeli returning home.
For all the idealistic and aspirational motives that brought me to Israel, in the end I came for one reason: because it was possible. I was privileged to live in the time when Tisha b’Av was no longer the defining judgment on Jewish history.