The advantages of the first option are clear.

Once you are tagged as a “right winger” or “left winger,” people assume that they know what you’re going to say. If you’re “on their side,” they read and nod approvingly, feeling ever so validated by yet another column that says precisely what they already thought. And if they assume they’ll disagree, or worse, that the column will annoy them, they can just skip it altogether or sharpen their proverbial pencils and bang out the inevitably dismissive talkback. Either way, though, we know what we’ll think of an argument – and of a writer – before we’ve even read a word. Ah, the eternal quest for a predictable and comfortable life.

But I’ve never thought that thinking, or citizenship – or love – work that way. If we love our children, do we validate them or criticize them? This is the wrong question, obviously, for the answer should depend on the context.  Parents who never have a kind or defending word to say about their child probably don’t love them enough. But parents who never critique their children are incompetent.

It’s true of marriage, too. None of us would want to be married to someone who never had a kind word to say about us or to us, or who never made clear that they were proud of us.

But if all we want is that validation, we’re probably better off buying an iPhone 4S and talking to Siri than being in a real relationship.

A functioning relationship is one in which our partner wants us to be better than the person we now are and can lovingly suggest, pretty regularly, how we might get there.

It’s an anemic conception of love that would describe our role as parents, spouses, lovers, friends – or citizens, no less – as assuming a position of constant validation or of relentless criticism.

That’s why some of us who write about Israel take a different approach. We don’t care about being neatly classifiable as “left” or “right”; because to love a country is not that different from loving a person. It means defending but also critiquing. It means loving unconditionally but knowing that love does not mean overlooking serious flaws. To love Israel, I believe, is to know that the Jewish state is not just a flag or an army or some holy place. To love Israel is to love the real Israel, with all its many warts and imperfections. And to love Israel is to know that there is a difference between a wart and a serious disease; when an imperfection is so serious as to threaten the entire enterprise, then the most loyal thing that one can do is to insist that Israel be better.

But this approach makes life complicated for readers because they don’t know, up front, precisely what they’re going to get. They will have to read, and then think.

Not everyone responds so well to that sort of challenge. In recent weeks and months when I’ve defended the very legitimacy of the idea of a Jewish state, or pointed to the Palestinians’ obvious disinterest in peace, or stated my abiding belief that none of us (tragically) are going to see this conflict resolved in our own lifetimes, then one entire set of readers trots out the “he’s a peace-talk-pessimist” line. He must be in Bibi’s pocket. He doesn’t care about peace.

But the opposite is also true – critique this government’s entirely unimaginative mishandling of the so-called peace process, or point a spotlight at the medieval religious leadership that has Netanyahu wrapped around its pinky, and the opposite camp goes berserk. One regular reader wrote to say that he used to like my columns, but now I’m “beginning to sound a bit like a Meretznik, or even worse – like Thomas Friedman!” (Except for those three elusive Pulitzers, I guess.) Meretz is mostly gone, of course, but the derisive label seems likely to outlive the party. If you ever sound like them then you obviously don’t care about Israel. You’re hostile to Judaism. Or you’re blind to the dangers of our enemies. And if you ever sound like Likud then you don’t care about peace. And if you occasionally sound like both then you don’t know how to think. Eventually Leonard Fein will write a column in The Forward (June 23, 2011) called “Will the Real Daniel Gordis Please Stand Up?” Because you either seek peace (or care about social justice) or you defend Israel.

But you obviously can’t do both. Right? At a recent conference of the American Jewish Committee in New York one participant noted that she prefers, instead of “left” and “right,” the labels “prophets” and “guardians” – for those labels each cast the “other” in the best possible light. This nomenclature reminds us that “prophets” are more than mere leftwing social critics – they reflect a critical dimension of the Jewish tradition, Judaism’s classic vision of social justice. And “guardians” is better than “hate-mongers” or “peace-pessimists,” or “Bibi-supporters,” apparently, because every people needs “guardians,” as does every state. To be a guardian is not to be a dinosaur, but rather to recognize that the State we’re discussing is sacred, in desperate need of protection.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that “prophets versus guardians” still isn’t good enough. For the distinction nonetheless implies that either you’re a “prophet” or a “guardian.” You choose one. And then you write, vote, agree or disagree.

But life doesn’t work that way. We dare not force people to pick a camp, no matter how elegant the terminology. The Hebrew prophets railed against the injustices of ancient Israelite society but they were desperately concerned about the survival of Jewish sovereignty. And guardians need to protect against not only the obvious threats from the outside but also against the cancers that threaten to devour us from within. Will the Jewish people be any better off if Israel falls because of Jews than if it is undermined by the Palestinians? Either way, we’d be done for.

Genuinely loving this country means that there will be moments when we defend it and other occasions on which we bemoan its grievous shortcomings. Is that muddled thinking? Does that merit the cynical demand that our “real” self “please stand up”? I think not. It reflects, I think, the real messiness of life, of love and of hope. Imagine our world, and our discourse, if every one of us found the renewed courage to read, to think and to recognize that those with whom we instinctively tend to disagree might still have something to teach us.

His death was considered a loss of a once-in-a-generation leader.

Amazingly, though, outside that community, almost no one noticed. Most Israelis could not name him and were unaware that he had died.

Even those American Jews who know, however vaguely, of the Mir Yeshiva, could not have named the person who headed it. Nor did they hear that he had died.

We’re living increasingly in a world of parallel but non-intersecting Jewish universes, each with its own ideals and heroes, neighborhoods and values, each too readily dismissive of the other. In the aftermath of Rabbi Finkel’s passing, and the images of his funeral which were a sea of black, extending down entire city streets, it’s worth comparing this moment in our history to another Jewish funeral, also attended by some 100,000 people.

That was the funeral of the brilliant Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz, who died in Warsaw just shy of a century ago. Professor Ruth Wisse, writing in Commentary magazine in March 1991, described his funeral as follows: “Published reports of the funeral lingers on the by-then extraordinary fact that each of the splintering political, religious, social and cultural groups was officially represented in the procession – Hebraists and Yiddishists, observant Jews and all manner of secularists, Zionists and socialists and Territorialists in all their tangled branches, conservative community leadership and radical workers’ opposition.”

What a striking difference! How many secular Jews could be found at Rabbi Finkel’s funeral? How many observant Jews not in black? None of the former, I would imagine. And very, very few of the latter.

Which leads me to the following question: Who is there anywhere in the Jewish world whose passing would evoke the sense of shared loss that was felt when Peretz died? Is there anyone in the Jewish world – in Israel, the United States, or anywhere else – who would be mourned by secularists and religious Jews alike, conservatives and liberals, Zionists and those more dubious about the Jewish state? Were Haim Nahman Bialik to die now, would the Israeli religious community mark his passing? (In 1934, it did.) Were Rabbi Shlomo Goren alive now, would American Reform and Conservative Jews see his loss as theirs, too? Would Israeli Orthodox Jews take note of the loss of Abba Hillel Silver? There are (a very few) Israeli national leaders who will likely be mourned across the religious divide, but will their passing be marked in any meaningful way in American Jewish life? Is there a single American Jewish leader of whom Israelis would take note after his or her death? To tell the truth, I can’t think of a single Jewish person whose loss would evoke the kind of cross-chasm mourning that Peretz’s did. We live in a very different and much impoverished age.
What matters, of course, is not really who mourns whom at funerals. What matters is who takes whom seriously during their lifetime. And increasingly, I fear, we take seriously those people who are more or less like us. We embrace (and then “like” on Facebook, or forward to others) the views of those with whom we agree, and disparage (and don’t “like” or Retweet, and never forward) the views of those whose views we don’t share.

If people on the “Right” read writers like Peter Beinart, it’s not because they think that they might have something to learn from him (even if they disagree with his conclusions), but rather, simply to show how completely off-base he is. And when people on the “Left” read Caroline Glick, it’s also not because they think there might be something to glean from arguments with which they ultimately disagree. It’s simply to confirm their (incorrect) preconceived notion that anyone to their right is a Neanderthal.

How different we are from the sages of the Talmud, who carefully preserved the opinions of those with whom they disagreed, including even those opinions that were ultimately rejected.

Our sages understood that even the “losing” positions had what to teach, that there are moral and strategic insights to be gleaned even from those whose conclusions we do not share.

But are there any rabbis in Israel’s religious community who urge their students to read Ahad Ha’am’s vision for Zion or Amos Oz’s social critiques, or secular Israeli high school teachers who encourage their students to read Rav Kook’s (not so disparaging) religious assessment of secular Judaism? We’re all part of this troubling phenomenon, to some extent. After all, don’t we subscribe to those newspapers and magazines that say what we already think, and avoid like the plague those that might cause us to rethink the positions to which we’re now committed? Aren’t we, too, divided between CNN and Fox watchers, each of us proud of the fact that we never watch the other? Perhaps, I sometimes wistfully allow myself to imagine, it is time for those on the Left to subscribe to The Weekly Standard, and those on the Right to buy The Nation.

For the vast majority of the Jewish world, the death of Rabbi Finkel went unnoticed. And even for those outside his community who did hear about it, his passing and his funeral are yesterday’s news. But those images of the sea of black – and only black – on the streets of Jerusalem during his funeral procession ought to be a reminder of how different our world is from the world that Y.L. Peretz inhabited. Our response, I believe, ought to be to ask how we can begin to recreate the deeply interconnected Warsaw community, so lost in so many ways.

Perhaps we ought to start with reading, reminding ourselves that the important reading we do is not the reading with which we agree, but the reading that actually makes us think.

Before the Shalit deal fades entirely from view, many of us are hoping that you have noticed what you unwittingly unleashed.  I don’t mean the next wave of terror or the terrible decisions that Israel must make before the next kidnapping.  We knew about those even before last week.  But last Tuesday, all of us – those opposed as well as those in favor (and there were persuasive arguments on both sides) – rediscovered something magnificent about this country.  It would be tragic if we returned to business as usual without pausing to take note.

In addition to Gilad Shalit, we got one more thing in return that few of us could have expected; we got a reminder of the abundant goodness that still resides at the very core of this society.  You could see it everywhere.  Compare the speeches on our side, celebrating life and freedom, to the blood-thirsty Palestinian harangues calling for renewed terror and additional kidnappings.   Compare the respectful restraint of our press to Shahira Amin’s immoral and abusive interview in Egypt.  But more than anything, we saw this reservoir of goodness in the streets – in the people so moved that they could hide neither the tears in their eyes nor the lumps in their throats.  We saw it in the throngs along the roads, people who wanted Shalit to know that they, too, celebrated his long overdue freedom.  And we saw it in the hundreds of people in Mitzpe Hila who continued dancing long after he’d entered his house and closed the door.  

We all felt it – it was innocent, pure and thoroughly decent.  We were witness that day to an entire country believing in something again.  Those young people outside the Shalit home were singing not only about Shalit, but about this land, this people, and about a future in which they still believe.  Did you see them?  Women and men, religious and secular, dancing with abandon in celebration of freedom?  Did you hear them singing anachnu ma’aminim benei ma’aminim …. “We’re believers, the children of believes, and we have no one on whom to depend, other than our Father in heaven”?  You didn’t miss it, did you?  Hundreds of people of all walks of Israeli life, proclaiming without hesitation their belief in something bigger than themselves?

The reason that the trade was wildly popular, Mr. Prime Minister, wasn’t ultimately about Gilad Shalit. It was about Israel.  About a country desperate to transcend the cynicism, that still wants to believe that it’s worth believing in.  Shouldn’t we – and you – therefore ask ourselves what can we do next to justify people’s belief in this place?   What will it take to make this a country that its citizens can love even when we’re not freeing a captive?

How about if we start by eradicating evil?  Take but one example and deal with it.  There’s a small but vicious group of kids living over the Green Line who bring inestimable shame on the Jewish people.  They burn mosques, tear down olive trees and sow fear everywhere – all with the implicit support of their rabbis.  And they make many young Israelis deeply ashamed of this entire enterprise.  Last week, you showed us that you do know how to take decisive action.  So do it again.  Rein them in.  Arrest them.  Cut off funding to their yeshivot.  If you show this generation of Israelis that your government stands for goodness even when that means making tough domestic decisions, you’ll unleash a wave of Zionist passion like we haven’t felt here for a generation.  It wouldn’t be any harder to do than what you just did, and it would actually do even more good for Israel than getting one soldier back.

And beyond goodness, there’s also Jewishness.  No, we shouldn’t make too much of that anachnu ma’aminim benei ma’aminim song, but admit – it’s not what you expect to see lots of secular people singing.  Yet they did.  Because this is a strange and wondrous country; not so deep down, even “non-religious” people aren’t “non-religious.”  Just like their observant counterparts, they’re searching, struggling, yearning – and at moments like that, they know that the well from which they hope to draw their nourishment is a Jewish well.

That’s why it was wonderful that you quoted from Isaiah (the Haftarah for Parashat Bereishit) in your speech.  It was your suggestion, I hope, that at its core, this society must be decent, but it must also be Jewish.  You know what the main problem with the summer’s Social Justice protests was?  It wasn’t the naïve embrace of high school socialism, or the utter incoherence of the demands.  It was the fact that there was simply nothing Jewish about their vision for Israel.  Dafni Leef and her comrades could have given the same vacuous speeches at Occupy Wall Street.  Or in Sweden, for that matter.  Those inane speeches were testimony to the failure of our educational systems and of Israel’s religious leadership.  The Yoram Kaniuk affair and the court’s willingness to let him declare himself “without religion” is a reflection not on him, but on the appallingly uninteresting variety of Judaism that the State has come to represent.  Can you – or anyone else – name even one single powerful idea that’s come from any of Israel’s Chief Rabbis in the past decade or two?  Me, neither.

But lo and behold, it turns out that Israel’s young people still want to believe in something.  We haven’t given them the tools to articulate it, but they still intuit that whatever we become, it’s got to be Jewish.  So ride that wave, too, Mr. Prime Minister.  What would it take to shape a country where the profundity at the core of Jewish tradition became once again the subject of discourse in our public square?  Does Judaism in the twenty-first century suddenly have to become dull and backward, or can we restore the intellectual and moral excellence that once characterized it?  Can you take this on, too?  Appoint the right people?  Build the right schools?  Can you help make this a country encourages those young people now searching for Jewish moral moorings?

For or against, hardly a single one of us is not thrilled that Gilad Shalit is home.  He deserved his life back.  But so, too, does this country.  Shalit, hopefully, will now get better and stronger with each passing day.  Israel must do the same.  It needs to get better – we need to be honest about the evils lurking in our midst, and we must exorcise them.  And we must become stronger, which we can do only by engaging with the roots that brought us back home in the first place.

Can you do this?  Many of us hope so.  Because if this fails, it will in the long run have made no difference that Gilad Shalit came home.  But if it succeeds, we might just come to see his liberation as the turning point in our collective return to believing in ourselves.

As delegates gather in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly next week, the U.S. was seeking a last-minute compromise to delay a U.N. vote supporting Palestinian statehood. Turkey and Egypt have lent support to such a resolution, and American negotiators in the Middle East were in talks aimed at averting the U.N. vote. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel seemed intent on blocking it, and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority appeared equally determined to see it proceed. Is there a case to be made that Israel’s very survival depends on the creation of a stable and viable Palestinian state?

A brief column with a few other “debaters” on the New York Times Opinion Page today.

They’re reasonably well-dressed, and the town is actually pretty. Just a pleasant little place in the middle of nowhere.

Were it not for the extraordinarily beautiful synagogue that’s been turned into a museum (it’s cared for by non-Jews, of course, for there are no Jews in Tykotzin), you’d have very little way of knowing that a couple of thousand Jews once lived there. Yes, if you dared to venture up to the front doors of some of the homes, you might notice the now painted-over indentations on the right doorposts. But if you didn’t look that carefully, you’d find no indication of what happened there. Nothing about the people of Tykotzin suggests anything awry. They have nothing to hide. “Things happen,” their nonchalance seems to say as you try to take it all in. “And it was a long time ago, anyway.” But it wasn’t all that long ago. It was 70 years ago, precisely, this coming week. August 25 is the anniversary of the eradication of Tykotzin’s Jews.

Tykotzin – or Tiktin, as the Jews called it – isn’t a shtetl anymore. A town needs Jews to be a shtetl. Two months after the Nazis recaptured that area of Poland from the Russians in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, centuries of Jewish life came to an end. According to some accounts, the Nazis first required that all Jewish stores be labeled as such. The stores were then boycotted; long before the Germans eradicated the Jews, their non-Jewish neighbors shunned them. Then the Nazis encouraged the townspeople to loot Jewish property, a command that was apparently happily obeyed. By the time the Jews were rounded up in the public square in August 1941, no one even bothered to pretend they didn’t hate the Jews. Looking at the smiling, friendly natives today, you can almost feel their collective relief that finally the town is theirs, and only theirs.

You stand at the edge of the central square of Tykotzin and try to imagine that day in August. All the Jews of the town were gathered there. Their longtime gentile neighbors watched. Some jeered. Some used the moment to enter Jewish homes and steal more property even before the Jews were gone. But no one joined the Jews. No one said anything like, “We’ve lived together for centuries, and wherever you take them, you’re taking me.” Not a single soul, as far as we know.

Not the local priest, to be sure. But what would have happened, I asked myself, if all across Europe, as the Nazis gathered the Jews into central squares of shtetlach like Tiktin, parish priests had said, “Not on my watch. Our church stands for something.” What would have happened if, as the Nazis marched the men down the road and out of the village and took them to the verdant green of the Lupachowa Forest, all the other townsmen had joined and mingled with the Jews? Would the Jewish men, and the women and children who soon followed on trucks, still have been shot en masse and dumped into group graves? Might even minimal resistance have somehow unglued the SS Einsatzkommando firing squad, making them wonder if they could really do this? We’ll never know. The priest of Tykotzin didn’t say anything. Neither did priests in hundreds of other villages. The gentiles did not join the Jews, not in Tykotzin or almost anywhere else.

Will the residents of Tykotzin commemorate their horrific anniversary this week? I have no idea. But we, at least, ought to pause and remember.

Not only because of what happened, but because of why it happened. And because not enough has changed. It’s no longer politically correct to hate Jews too obviously, so the venom has morphed. Today, anti-Zionism is simply the newest avatar of that ancient hatred – and anti-Zionism flourishes in Europe. As Prof. Mark Lilla notes in his book,The End of Politics, “The Zionist tradition… remembers what it was to be stateless…. It remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others…. Eventually Western Europeans will have to re-learn these lessons, which are, after all, the lessons of their own pre-modern history. Until they do, the mutual incomprehension regarding Israel between Europeans and Jews committed to Zionism will remain deep.” Jewish sovereignty, Lilla understands, is about Jews’ reestablishing self-respect and demanding respect from others. It is about Jewish normalcy. Is it any surprise, then, that the UN may well recognize a Palestinian state next month, before the Palestinians declare an end to their desire to destroy Israel, before they recognize Israel as a Jewish state, before they give up on the right of return, which would destroy Israel’s Jewish character? Sadly it’s no surprise at all. Because if and when the UN votes, the real issue will not be the Palestinians, but the Jews. Will anyone stand beside the Jews, insisting that the Palestinians first acknowledge Israel’s permanence, only then voting for Palestinian statehood? The people of Tykotzin know what you’ve come to see. But they don’t avoid your gaze in shame. They look you in the eye, and smile and wave. Life goes on, and so does hatred. If there’s a UN vote next month, there will be no shame, no embarrassment that the vote will have been a scantily concealed attempt to undermine the state that might just give the Jews a future. No, there will be just smiles and handshakes, a sense that real progress has been made.

But progress toward what? When all is said and done, what has really changed in Europe? Not enough. That alone is reason to stop and to weep this week, not only for the Jews of Tiktin, but for the hatred that lingers at the heart of the world that we still inhabit.

Moments that provide a glimpse of what we could yet create in this young country of ours. With cottage cheese stealing the headlines, doctors on strike, the peace process in an utter stall and the UN’s September showdown creeping ever closer, they are moments worth reflecting on, and sharing.

Some three years ago, an anonymous donor gave the Shalem Center (where I work) a generous grant to offer liberal arts enrichment programming to the country’s top high school students. Schools weren’t challenging the best kids, we knew; most of what they learned was being taught for the bagrut matriculation exams, and intellectual curiosity wasn’t being cultivated. So we assembled a staff of superb teachers and counselors and designed a program in which students would come to a handful of weekends a year and study Zionism, or Bible, or democracy.

Our staff set out to find the students.

Across the country, they visited the best high schools, met with the principals and other educational heads, and then interviewed the students. There was great interest – but also suspicion.

“The kids are interested, but parents are afraid of us,” one told me when she got back to the office.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

Turns out we’d sent two teachers, one with a kippa and one without. Virtually all the parents were secular. What’s with the kippa? they wanted to know. And how can the program be free of charge? There’s simply got to be an agenda here, the parents said.

Thankfully, a few threw caution to the wind and let us have their kids for a few weekends a year. The seminars met in places relevant to the subjects – in Caesarea for “Thinking from the Beginning,” in Jerusalem for “The Bible and Us,” and in Arad for “A Jewish and Democratic State.”

Each weekend included study of a variety of texts on the subject at hand. Bible or Talmud. Plato or Aristotle. Nietzsche or Freud. Rousseau and Geertz. Quickly the students saw that the Bible and Aristotle were part of the same conversation – about great ideas, about the life meaningfully lived, about the good and the just, about what truly matters. They learned to huddle over texts and to argue – but to listen, as well. What they loved was that none of this mattered for the bagrut, and that there were no “right” answers. All that mattered was that they thought.

One of their teachers was the sort of person these secular kids never meet. He lives across the Green Line in a small community, in what the international press would call a “settlement,” has a whole bunch of kids – and he’s a remarkable teacher with as open and engaging a mind as one could ever hope to encounter. Perhaps he was the one who scared the parents, but these kids came to adore him, as well as his wife and kids.

A leading university scholar opened each seminar. I recall one particular professor, who’d walked in obviously wondering how he could have been cajoled into teaching a bunch of high school kids on a Friday afternoon. Within an hour, though, there he was, exchanging ideas and even arguing with these students, the passion and the energy overflowing the room. The kids didn’t let go, and walked him to his taxi at the conclusion of his session, still trying to get a response to one last question. As he got into the cab, smiling and exhausted, he seemed 20 years younger.

THREE YEARS went by. Very few students dropped out. They got busier in 11th grade, but kept showing up. By 12th grade, most had two feet out the door of their home and their high school, but they continued to attend. And then, a couple of weeks ago, we had a graduation ceremony of sorts. The staff decided that what we should do is show the parents what we’d done for these three years. So they assembled a set of texts, from Genesis, Maimonides and Kierkegaard – and had the students and their parents study in pairs just as the kids had done for years now.

There was only one problem in each of the groups that I joined for a few minutes – the kids had to elbow their way back into the conversation. These parents, the same ones who’d wondered what our agenda was or why we would actually teach their kids for free and with no religious or political ax to grind, left their children no space in the conversation. At one point, one of the young women about to graduate high school said, “Ima, you should let us speak, too. Why are you taking over the conversation?” It didn’t stop the mother, though: “Because it’s interesting,” she said. “I always loved this stuff.”

So why had life in Israel led her to drop the conversation? I wondered.

I stood at the side, watching. A room full of more than 100 people, all of them huddled over Genesis and Kierkegaard.

Kids tussling with their parents. Parents pushing back, saying, “No, I don’t think that’s what the Tanach means here.”

Scarcely a kippa in the room – just Jewish texts in dialogue with Western texts and with modern Israelis. I saw the students periodically getting up and hugging the children of this teacher – religiously and politically they came from different worlds, and now they were in tears at bidding farewell.

“You changed my child’s life,” more than one parent said to us that night. Perhaps.

But as I walked home in the afterglow of the learning and the tears and the thanks, I wondered – what if we’d also begun to change the country? What if each of these young people remembers, years from now, what it was like to bridge gaps political and religious, generational and dispositional – and many others – to think together, to study, to wonder, to imagine? What if someone picks up the ball from here and touches not dozens, but hundreds? Or thousands? What could these kids then make of this country? How would public discourse be different? What kinds of leaders would they demand, and become? And what kind of a country would they cultivate? Imagine. Just imagine.

Israel’s many military cemeteries are filled to capacity with anguished families visiting the graves of loved ones. Restaurants are shuttered. One of the country’s television stations does nothing but list the names of the 23,000 men and women who gave their lives to defend the Jewish state, some of them killed even before independence was declared and the last of whom typically died only days or weeks prior to the commemoration.

Twice on Yom Ha-Zikaron, once in the evening and once again in the morning, the country’s air raid sirens sound. On sidewalks, pedestrians come to a halt and stand at attention, and even on highways, cars slow and stop; drivers and passengers alike step out of their vehicles and stand in silence until the wail of the siren abates. For two minutes each time, the state of Israel surrenders itself to the grip of utter silence and immobility. During that quiet, one feels a sense of belonging, a palpable sense of gratitude and unstated loyalty that simply defies description.

I mused on this fact as I read a recent message sent to students at the interdenominational rabbinical school at Boston’s Hebrew College, asking them to prepare themselves for Yom Ha-Zikaron by musing on the following paragraph: “For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”

… continued at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/are-young-rabbis-turning-on-israel/.

…  This posting is the beginning of an article in this month’s Commentary Magazine.  Commentary does not permit full articles to be posted elsewhere, but has generously made the complete text of the article available on its website without charge, even for non-subscribers.  To read the rest of the article, see the Commentary Magazine website at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/are-young-rabbis-turning-on-israel/.

For other articles referred to in this article and the exchange that they elicited, see also:

My original piece in the JPost:

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=214664

My follow-up piece in the JPost

http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=216542

Dan Kaiman’s response:

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=216024

Gil Troy’s response:

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/treat-antizionist-rabbinic-students-four-sons

Scott Perlo’s response:

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=216898&R=R7

A blog response to Scott Perlo:

http://www.jerusalemcentral.com/2011/04/rabbi-perlo-and-big-lie-my-personal.html

Justin Goldstein’s column in response on JewSchool.com

http://jewschool.com/2011/04/09/26038/an-open-letter-to-rabbi-daniel-gordis/

Daniel Allen’s response:

http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/response-to-rabbis-gordis-and-perlo-and-david-breakstone/

Gary Rosenblatt in the Jewish Week:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/gary_rosenblatt/alienation_israel_hitting_liberal_seminaries

Arnold Eisen in the Jewish Week:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/opinion/appreciating_and_learning_talk_about_israel

Daniel Nevins in the Jewish Week:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/opinion/criticism_rabbinical_students_israel_unfair

Rabbis for Human Rights Response:

http://www.rhr-na.org/blog/?p=1980

[Note:  On May 3^rd, Daniel Gordis addressed the “J-Street Leadership Mission to Israel and Palestine.”  The following column is based on his remarks that day.]

Good morning and welcome to Jerusalem.  It’s a pleasure to meet with this Leadership Mission; I understand that there are some first time visitors to Israel among you, so a particular welcome to those of you who’ve never been here before.

Before we got seated, one member of your group conveyed a message from the Israeli Consul General in his home community.  The message was that I shouldn’t speak to you.  As you can imagine, I received similar advice from a wide array of people after I received your invitation; but I’ve chosen to ignore it.  As most of you know, I disagree strongly with much of what you do.  But I think that we have an obligation to meet with people with whom we disagree.  Given the extent of the forces aligned against Israel, seeking to delegitimize the very idea of a Jewish State, the pro-Israel camp needs a big tent.  Neither Israel nor the Jewish People will survive if we work only with those with whom we agree.  A big tent, by definition, means including people whom we disagree passionately, but who still share our basic goals.

Even a big tent, though, has its limits.  There are things that one can say, or do, that place a person or an organization outside that tent.  You know very well that there are many people who believe that J-Street is outside the tent, not in it.  I’m not yet certain.  That’s why I’m here.

Let me begin with a basic assumption:  I assume that we want the same thing.  We seek two states in this region, one a thriving, Jewish, democratic Israel, and the other a thriving, non-Jewish, democratic Palestine.  Of course, there are Israelis on both ends of the political spectrum who do not wish this.  Some Israelis no longer believe in the importance of a Jewish State and would prefer a State “of all its citizens” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  But as that would make Jews a minority in this country and thus end the Zionist project, I’m utterly opposed to that.  There are also Israelis who still resist the idea of a Palestinian State and who would prefer to either exile millions of Palestinians or forever keep them under our thumb as non-citizens, either of which is morally obtuse.  But the vast majority of Israelis, if presented with a genuine opportunity to live side by side a democratic, transparent, peaceful, de-militarized Palestine, would accept it.

So, assuming that that’s what you also seek, I assume that our disagreement is about how to get there.  You believe that people who are not willing to make major territorial concessions to the Palestinians right now are not serious about a two-state solution.  You think that those of us who claim that we favor a two-state solution but who are not willing to give up the store at this moment are bluffing.  Or we’re liars.  Or, at best, we’re well-intentioned but misguided.  But bottom line, if we’re not willing now to make the concessions that you think are called for, then we’re not really pursuing peace.

But that is arrogance of the worst sort.  Does your distance from the conflict give you some moral clarity that we don’t have?  Are you smarter than we are?  Are you less racist?  Why do you assume with such certainty that you have a monopoly on the wisdom needed to get to the goal we both seek?

In preparing for this morning’s session, I did a bit of reading of statements that you’ve issued on a whole array issues.  One, just released, is a perfect example of the certainty and arrogance of which I’m speaking.  Reacting to the most recent Fatah-Hamas agreement, this is what J-Street had to say:

“In fact, many who oppose a two-state deal have, in recent years, done so by arguing that divisions among the Palestinians make peace impossible. Obviously, reconciliation [between Fatah and Hamas] reduces that obstacle – but now skeptics of a two-state agreement have immediately stepped forward to say that a deal is impossible with a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas.”

“Obviously,” you say, “reconciliation reduces the obstacle [to a peace treaty].”  But I would caution you against ever using the word “obviously” when it comes to the Middle East.  Nothing here is obvious.  If you think that something is obvious, then you simply haven’t thought enough.  Why is it obvious that Fatah’s signing a deal with Hamas, which rejects Israel’s very right to exist, reduces obstacles to peace?  Isn’t it just as plausible that it makes peace impossible, or that signing a deal and returning large swathes of land to a group still sworn on our destruction would be suicidal?  I suppose that reasonable minds could debate this matter, but how is it “obvious” that this is good news for peace?

And then you go on to say that “skeptics of a two-state agreement have immediately stepped forward to say that a deal is impossible with a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas.”  There you go again, telling us that if we don’t agree with you, then we’re not serious or honest.  If we think that the Fatah-Hamas deal is terrible news for peace, then we’re just “skeptics of a two-state agreement.” In your worldview, there’s no possibility that we’re just a bit more nervous than you are, that we do not want to make a mistake that will turn our own homes into Sederot, that we are frightened of restoring the horror of 2000-2004 to our streets, buses and restaurants.  No, that possibility doesn’t exist, because anyone who doesn’t agree with you is by definition a “skeptic of the two-state agreement.”  I’d suggest that if you want to convince those of us still deciding whether you’re part of the big tent that you are “in,” that you drop this sort of condescension.  It’s arrogant and intellectually shallow; it doesn’t serve you well.

And if you want those of us who are still unsure to become convinced that you are part of the Big Tent, then I have another piece of advice for you – recognize that not everyone can be part of the tent.  There are groups who are clearly opposed to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state; they are our enemies.  It doesn’t matter if they are in Israel or outside, or if they are Jewish or not.  If they are working to end Israel, or to end it as a Jewish and democratic state, then they are our enemies, plain and simple.  There are enemies who cannot be loved or compromised into submission, and you need to recognize that.  The BDS [Boycott, Divest and Sanction] movement is a case in point.  No one in their right mind doubts that BDS is opposed to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish State.  So why were they invited to your annual conference?  There need to be limits to those whom you’d welcome into your tent.  You need to show us that you care about Israel more than you care about dialogue with Israel’s enemies.

I still remember the first time I was struck by this tendency of yours to assail Israel when you’d been silent about what Israel’s enemies were doing.  It was the first day of the Gaza War at the end of 2008.  Sederot had been shelled intermittently for eight years, and relentlessly in the days prior to the beginning of the war.  It was obvious that this couldn’t go on, for the first obligation of states to their citizens is to protect them.  For years, Israel had been failing the citizens of Sederot.  But when Israel finally decided to do what any legitimate state would do, J-Street immediately called for a cessation of hostilities.  The war was only hours old, nothing had been accomplished and the citizens of Sederot were still no safer than they had been.  But J-Street had had enough.  Why?  Why had you said almost nothing for all the years that Sederot was being shelled, but within hours of the war’s beginning were calling for it to end?  What matters more to you – the safety of Israel’s citizens, or advancing your own moral agenda in our region of the world?

If you want us to be convinced that you’re in the Big Tent, show us.  Show us that there are times that you will stand up for Israel, not her enemies.  Explain why you lobbied Congress against a resolution condemning incitement in Palestinian schools.  Explain why, when Israel is marginalized as never before (a recent poll showed that Europeans rank Israel and North Korea as the greatest threats to world peace!), you pressured the US not to veto a UN resolution on settlements, which the mainstream of American Jewry all thought need to be vetoed.

And ask yourselves this:  if you were to take all the money you’re spending in the United States and do your work here in Israel, trying to strengthen the political parties who are more inclined to do what you seek, how much traction would you get?  We all know that you would get a pretty chilly reception.  Ask yourself why that is.  Is it that we Israelis really don’t want to end this conflict?  We enjoy sending our children off to war? We look forward to the next funeral at Mount Herzl?  We’re not aware that time is not on our side?

Or is it that we live here, and that even rank and file Israelis know a bit more about the complexity of this conflict than you give us credit for?  Why would you assume that we’re stupid, or immoral, or addicted to the conflict?  Why do you insist that the Fatah-Hamas agreement is a good thing, or that it’s best for Israel if the United States twists its arm even harder?  At a time when Israel is so alone, can you see why it’s hard for many of us to buy the argument that you’re genuinely pro-Israel, or that you should be part of the Big Tent?

It’s time for you to show us.  Show us that you seek peace, that you care about the Palestinians, but that even more (yes, more, because that’s what the particularism of peoplehood requires), that you care about us.  It’s one thing to put “pro-Israel” in your tag line, and another to be “pro-Israel.”  You certainly don’t need to be a rubber stamp for Israeli policy – that’s not what’s at issue.  Israel desperately needs critique, and Israelis issue it all the time.  So, too, should Diaspora Jews.

No, what’s at issue is for us to see you pressure someone, anytime, to be in Israel’s camp on something.  That’s what we want to see.  When we see that, more of us will believe that you’re part of our tent, and then, even with all our disagreements, we’ll be convinced that we could work together for a better future for all the peoples of this region.

Postscript: in the Q&A session that followed, J-Street Founder Jeremy Ben Ami asked the first question.  He said that he found it “astounding” that I had given an entire presentation “without mentioning the occupation of another people.”  But interestingly, in the May 12^th issue of Globes, Vered Kellner, who traveled with the group and went with them from my session to their meeting with Salaam Fayyad, noted that Fayyad didn’t mention the occupation either.  “Is it possible that the occupation conversation simply doesn’t interest anyone anymore?” she asked.

“True,” Ben Ami answered, “neither Gordis nor Fayyad raised the occupation, but we’re here to remind Israelis that you can’t pretend that the occupation isn’t part of reality.”

So here’s my final suggestion – if the way that you’re framing the issues is no longer the way that Israelis and Palestinians are discussing them, is it possible that you are not even addressing the core issues that matter to the people actually in the conflict?  Perhaps the time has come to ask yourselves what matters to you more: actually moving the policy needle, or assuaging your own discomfort with the undeniably painful complexities of this conflict.  If what you want to do is to affect policy, how effective would you say you’ve been thus far?

This year, however, that unbridled euphoria is going to be hard to come by. Israel is marginalized in ways that would have been difficult to predict just years ago. Hamas and Fatah sign a treaty, but the international pressure for Israel to negotiate, and perhaps even to capitulate, continues unabated. President Barack Obama can say with impunity that America “will be relentless in defense of our citizens,” but Israeli leaders are not permitted that same unabashed determination. Osama bin Laden can be summarily killed, and no one calls it an extra-judicial killing. Egypt threatens to open the border to Gaza, Iran pursues its weapon, Turkey jettisons Israel and cozies up to Iran, Hezbollah has completely rearmed under the nose of the UN – and the pressure to make peace is consistently applied only to the Jewish state.

OUR CELEBRATION of Israel’s independence – an extraordinary accomplishment by any measure – takes place this year under the cloud of an awareness that the Jewish state’s future is tenuous and fragile.

Consider this: There is no other country about which the following two predictions can be made with equal plausibility.

The first prediction: In 50 years, Israel will be a thriving democracy, at the cutting edge of technology, medicine and education, a First World country in every way.

The second prediction: In 50 years, Israel will not exist.

There is good reason to put stock in the first. Israelis receive far more Nobel Prizes per capita than any other country, boast a hitech industry second only to the United States, have cutting-edge military power, medical care and research, and universities that are impressive by any international standard. Israel today exceeds by far what anyone in 1948 could have dared imagine. This could be but the beginning of our greatness.

But the second possibility is equally plausible. Increasing numbers of academics and diplomats, as well as rank-and-file Europeans, now assert that the creation of the Jewish state was a mistake. Polls show that Europeans rank Israel close to North Korea as a threat to international peace. Israel is the only country that British academics are eager to boycott. No other country’s “right to exist” is openly debated in the pages of the New York Review of Books. It is not out of the question that the world could end Israel’s Jewish character or bring it to its knees altogether.

We would do well to note the patterns of Jewish history. Israelite national history in the Bible began in the crucible of Egyptian slavery, marched toward homeland and independence and crested with the rule of King David. From there, it was descent into division, relentless attack from the outside, defeat and exile.

Then, the pattern began again. From the depths of Babylonian exile, stragglers returned, rebuilt Jerusalem, reclaimed independence.

The peak, perhaps, was the Maccabean revolt against foreign domination and influence along with the short-lived relative independence that followed, but that success also faded quickly. Internal division, a loss of moral compass and religious moorings, short-sighted foreign policy and external powers too enormous to contend with – again brought defeat and exile.

Might that pattern be playing itself out again? Our round of Jewish sovereignty was born in the depths of European exile and anti-Semitism, gained momentum during and after the Shoah, led us to November 29 and then May 14, and then to a country more powerful, more democratic, more stable and more flourishing than anyone had a right to expect 63 years ago.

We have had our peak moments. The lightning victory of 1967. The heroism of 1973 that turned the tides of initial defeats. Peace with Egypt and Jordan, even if chilly, suggested the possibility of a different future. Israeli leaders once went to the White House in celebration, not in dread. There was an era in which it was clear to the world that the Israelis, and no one else, were the ones pursuing peace.

HOW TIMES have changed. Today, Egyptian peace may be fraying. Jordan’s King Abdullah is vulnerable. Relations with the Obama administration are strained. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can speak at Columbia and walk the streets of New York, but Britain issues arrest warrants for Tzipi Livni. Israelis wonder with whom, precisely, they are supposed to negotiate a deal when Hamas and Fatah become one, yet the world still holds Israel accountable for the impasse.

It is an unenviable situation to be prime minister faced with a speech to a joint session of Congress, but as Mordecai said to Esther, this is not the moment to permit history to carry us away in its currents. This is the time to act, to do something, “for who knows if it was for a moment like this that you came to power.”

The prime minister’s predicament is our predicament. It is a moment in which there are no good moves, but in which not acting is also unthinkable. It is a difficult time to write a speech, a difficult year in which to reclaim the initiative.

But act we must, and celebrate we must. For only by rejoicing in the accomplishments of the past 63 years can we gird ourselves for the complicated days ahead. Only by reminding ourselves of what is at stake do we have any chance of finding the fortitude to stand firm where we must and to bend where it will serve our future.

Israel is still the Jewish people’s new lease on life, and whatever our politics, our religious dispositions or our place of residence, none of us has any obligation more sacred than to cultivate it, and to bequeath it – whole and flourishing – to generations to come.

It’s that famous line from the Haggadah, which Jews around the world will recite in just a few days: “And even if we were all wise, filled with understanding, all elders and all learned in the Torah, we would still be obligated to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt.”

Why, though? If we were all so deeply learned, what possible need would there be to tell a story? The message is clear – there are truths that emerge from stories that cannot be gleaned from “mere” study. There is knowledge to which the heart can lead us that the mind cannot. As much as Jews take the intellect seriously, we understand its limitations. There is a sort of knowing that can come only through telling – or hearing – a story.

It is the difference between great philosophy and profound literature. As critical and even world-changing as some of the great philosophers have been, for many of us, it is the broken heart and the soul laid bare that we encounter in great literature that touches us more deeply.

From there, we glean our most profound insights about what matters, to what we hope to dedicate our lives. The notion that we can create real allegiance only through minds and without touching hearts is foolish. That is why the Bible contains no rigorous philosophy, but many stories. And that is why the more we tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the Haggadah tells us, the more we are to be praised.

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I wrote a column (“Of sermons and strategies,” April 1) about American rabbinical students who feel distanced from Zionism, some of whose critiques of Israel seem to me to have crossed red lines. Since that column appeared, I’ve had numerous meetings with students studying in Israel for the year. Some I met in groups, some alone.

Politically and religiously, they represented a broad spectrum. They were smart, sensitive and genuine. As we spoke, some shared their most basic worry – that Israel would not be decent.

And I shared mine – that Israel would not survive.

Obviously Israel’s decency is critical.  But a country that does not exist cannot be decent. And as we spoke, memories began to emerge. I shared with some of these students my earliest memory about Israel. It was June 1967, and I was almost eight years old. We were in the kitchen, in Baltimore, having dinner. But this dinner was different from all other dinners.

My brothers and I ate, and our parents served us. As on almost every night, our little black-and-white television was tuned to Walter Cronkite. But on this night, my parents didn’t eat – they didn’t even sit at the table. All they did was feed us, watch TV – and pace across the kitchen.

The next evening, when that odd scene unfolded once again, I finally asked them, “Aren’t you going to eat?” “We’re not hungry,” they said. I was dumbfounded. How could you not be hungry at dinner time? And two days in a row? When my own kids ask what it was that led us to move here, I say nothing about lectures I heard or books I was given to read. It was, I explain, the simple fact that with Israel seemingly on the very precipice of destruction, my parents simply couldn’t eat.

Some of the students then shared their own earliest memories of Israel. One recalled the day that all the students in his Orthodox day school were summoned together for an assembly, and how the whole school watched as Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty. For another, it was the intifada, and the images (again, on television) of helmeted IDF soldiers with rifles chasing young boys who’d thrown rocks.

My formative memories were of Israel on the verge of extinction, while theirs were of Israel being recognized by its neighbor or of the seeming imbalance of Israeli-Palestinian power. And that makes all the difference.

None of us knows with certainty how widespread the alienation from Israel among these students is, but no one ought to deny that it is there. And it is obviously even more widespread among college students at large. What Pessah is designed to remind us is that a major part of our response has to be memorycreation.

Many American rabbinical students go to Bethlehem each year, on a program designed to expose them to the feelings of the “other” side. But there’s passion to be felt on this side, too. Go to Bethlehem, fine. But why not also visit Ein Prat and witness the meeting of Western civilization and Jewish tradition in a beit midrash populated by post-army secular and religious Israelis together? Speak to people in Bethlehem (though hopefully without being foolish enough to imagine that those are the kinds of people who are our real enemies), but then go to the student-run villages of Ayalim, where a new, socially aware, politically diverse, largely non-religious Zionist activism is taking root precisely among young people their age. Those are the sorts of memories we have to add to the hopper.

What’s shaping these students? It’s fine to assign books on human rights and on the problematics of Israeli democracy.

But I’d have them read Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, too, so they can see the non-negotiable love for Zion with which a staunch leftist writes. I’d have them read Yehuda Avner’s The Prime Ministers, and “visit” the offices of Eshkol, Meir, Rabin and Begin – “relive” moments when life here hung by a thread. (Most of the students I asked had not read either one.) True, they won’t have actually lived through it – but the Seder night suggests to us that we can remember even things that we did not experience.

A student dropped me a line after one of these meetings. “It may sound strange,” he said, “but for some of us, the most memorable idea to come out of the meeting is that Israel might actually not survive.” For someone of my generation, what is shocking is that that was surprising.

But it’s not a matter of anyone’s “fault.”

It’s a matter of what we remember, and what we don’t. That’s the business that we’re in this coming Monday night. The Seder is the moment for reminding ourselves – and each other – that the next generation of Jewish leaders will join us not if we beat them into intellectual submission, but if we can bequeath to them new memories – and thus, at the same time, our aspirations, as well as our foreboding awareness of the fragility of freedom.