From a strategic perspective, freeing Gilad Shalit in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians makes no sense. The hundreds of prisoners now in Israeli prison were captured in dangerous operations, many of them at a cost of other Israeli casualties.

The outspoken opponents of the trade, who claim that the freed terrorists will return immediately to terrorist activity and may soon kill more Israelis, could well be right about that, too. So, too, are those who fear that paying such a high price for Sgt. Shalit will only induce Hamas and Hezbollah to try to capture more Israelis, both at home and abroad.

The Shalit case is also a reminder to all Israelis that that many of the once apparently inviolable red lines of Israeli foreign policy are now much more blurred. Despite Israel’s stated position that it will not negotiate with terrorists, Israel is clearly negotiating with Hamas.

We don’t know each other, though I’ve known of you and your work for some time.  Like many others, I recently read your “How I’m Losing My Love For Israel” in the Forward.  Because you write so articulately, and because your column has attracted such widespread attention, I’m taking the liberty of responding.

The truth is, you and I agree about a lot.  We’re both worried about some of what’s happening to Israeli society.  We’re both tired of all the equivocating (though probably for different reasons).  We’d both love some real leadership around here.  We’d both like peace.  And we’re both exhausted.

That exhaustion is the first reason you give for that fact that your “love [for Israel] is starting to wane.”  But frankly, Jay, when you began to write about your exhaustion, I began to lose you.  For, I have to confess, I don’t see the connection between exhaustion and losing love, or between exhaustion and committing oneself to what’s right and just.

I suspect that the Partisans were pretty exhausted, and they might even have debated some of their own tactics; but those were the least of their problems.  Their main worry was that evil might triumph and transform their world into an uninhabitable hell, and their bone-aching fatigue notwithstanding, they committed their lives to making sure that human freedom survived those who wished to eradicate it.

The GI’s who slogged their way across Europe, up the cliffs of Normandy and across the frozen, bitter winters of that blood-soaked continent, were pretty exhausted, too, I’d imagine.  Yes, many of them were kids, following their orders.  And many of them were probably distraught that innocent Europeans were getting killed by the thousands in the process of saving the west.  But many, I would also like to believe, knew that what they were fighting to preserve was infinitely more important than their own personal exhaustion or the tragic innocent losses that war always entails.  Or even their own lives.

That clarity of purpose was, in the end, why we won, and why you and I live in democracies where we can write and say whatever we like.  Had the Partisans and those GI’s given in to their fatigue, would you and I have the very liberties we so easily take for granted? I doubt it.

So, yes, we’re exhausted.  And, if you’ll forgive me, I suspect that those of here are more exhausted than are those of you over there.  Life here is conducted under a pervasive cloud of exhaustion that my most of American friends simply don’t comprehend.  It’s the exhaustion that comes from coming home at the end of the day and finding on your door a diagram distributed by the Home Front Command showing you how many seconds you have to find shelter if a missile should be aimed your way.  What do you do with that information?  Ignore it?  Or put it on the fridge as the sign instructs you to, so you can live with the looming warning every time you go to get a glass of OJ?

But that’s really the least of it.  The real exhaustion here comes from sending a smart but relatively naïve nineteen-year-old daughter off to the army (in Intelligence, in this case) and have her begin to learn things about Israel’s enemies that she will never be able to discuss.  The exhaustion comes from the hollow look of an unfathomable sadness in her eyes when she’s home, from her bewilderment at the evil of which human beings are capable – an awareness a young woman shouldn’t have at that age.  And you grow exhausted because you want to take care of her, to protect her.   But you can’t.

You can’t take care of your kid because this is Israel.  Because she can’t tell you what she knows.  She can’t talk to you about the human capacity for hatred that she now confronts every single day.  And because this is Israel, you can’t take of her – because here things are reversed.  She’s out there taking care of you.  So you get into bed each night knowing that you’ve sacrificed a part of her innocence and her youth on the altar of your beliefs and ideology, and you wonder, each and every day, if what you once thought was a noble life choice might have been the most unfair thing you ever did.  That, Jay, is more exhausting than I’d ever imagined it would be.

She’s out of the army now.  But her brother’s not.  And there are those days, only once every few months, when I’m either leaving the house in the morning to go to work or coming home at the end of the day, when on the sidewalk outside our building are two IDF officers, and it appears that they’re walking to our entrance.  Then comes that split second moment of breath-stopped horror, the fear that they’re coming to our house, bearing tidings that would be ­wholly unbearable.  It’s only happened three or four times, but it’s enough.  They walk past the building, Jay, barely even nodding to me because they’re in the middle of a conversation, unaware that I’ve even noticed them.  But I’m a mess.  Drenched with sweat.  Shaking slightly.  Knowing that the rest of the day or the evening is going to be a utter waste of time.

And at moments like that, you want to call your kid.  Not for anything in particular; just to tell him that you love him.  That you miss him.  That there really isn’t a moment when you’re not thinking about him, or praying that he’s OK.

But you can’t.  Because he can’t use his phone.  Because he’s busy.  Because he’s out there protecting his parents.  And his brother.  And his sister, who used to protect him.  Simply because when he was a very little boy, we decided we wanted to live here; and now he’s out there, doing this, year after relentless year.  Loving Israel is exhausting, Jay, you’re right.   But really, it’s way more exhausting here than it is over there.

So the real question isn’t whether or not we’re exhausted – lots of us are tired.  (I keep this picture on my desktop for those moments when I feel exhausted … to remind myself that no matter how tired I am, there are people out there (this is not my kid) who are way more exhausted than I am.)  The real question, I think, is not whether we’re exhausted, but rather what we do with our exhaustion.  What makes all the difference is not our fatigue, but what keeps us going when our tank feels empty, when it feels like all that’s left is fumes.

Like you, Jay, I know that I was raised on an image of Israel that doesn’t really exist.  Maybe it never did.  Like you, there were open fields in Jerusalem that I used to love (for you, it was Churshat Ha-Yaraeach) that are now filled by large apartment buildings.  But when we lived in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, our older neighbors used to reminisce about the days when our neighborhood had been all orange groves.  Did they stop loving America because fields got built on?  I didn’t sense that.  When we live in America and watch fields get built up, we sense progress.  But when it’s a field in the Israel of our youth that’s now gone, we feel betrayed.  What’s that about?  Maybe it’s time we all moved beyond puppy love and ventured into something more mature, a sort of love that knows that the object of our love cannot, and should not, remain unchanged year after year, decade after decade.

Like you, Jay, I am concerned about some of the injustices that Israel commits.  But unlike you, I could never be “more relaxed [in Berlin] than in Jerusalem.”  You wrote very compellingly that you felt relieved that though there was political baggage in Berlin, “none of it was mine.”

But you know what I love about this place, Jay?  I love that all the political baggage is mine.  The Palestinians.  The Israeli Arabs.  (Some of) the Haredim.  A collapsing educational system.  Murders on the streets with a constancy we never used to have.  A nation of roads and drivers that kills many more Israelis than our enemies do.  That’s all my baggage.

But living here, my baggage is also the sight of young secular and religious Israelis going from restaurant to restaurant, inspecting not their kashrut, but how they treat their workers, and depending on what they find, giving them a “social kashrut” certificate.  It’s the sight of many hundreds of people coming out to hear Rabbi Benny Lau on the Shabbat afternoon before Yom Kippur in a synagogue that couldn’t begin to accommodate them all, because, they knew, he would be the one guy in the city among all the derashot that afternoon who would tie whatever he was saying to a vision for a different kind of society, and call on them to do something about it.  Living here is about spending a morning on Sukkot, going to the Church in Kiryat Yearim and joining a capacity crowd of Jews and Christians, largely secular but also some people wearing kippot, listening to the choir perform Bach motets on precisely the spot where the Ark of the Covenant once rested.  It’s about the vision of people who, no matter what CNN will tell you, really can live with people who are different from them; it’s about a blending of the ancient past and the complicated present, of setting aside the equivocations of which you write so articulately for a beauty about which you say very little.  Living here is about feeling the pulse of people who still have hope, who desperately want to build something different here, and who would never dream of saying aloud that they’ve given up.

Which is why, Jay, I can’t imagine leaving this place, and angry as I sometimes get, I could never write about losing my love for what we’re building here.  Because I know that this is our last chance, and I know without a shred of doubt that the robust Jewish life that exists everywhere – in Manhattan as well as in Los Angeles, in London no less than in Johannesburg – exists because of Israel.  Two generations ago, Jewish life in America wasn’t the Jewish life that you and I were raised on.  It wasn’t nearly so secure after the war.  And though 1948 made a bit of a difference, the secure and self-confident American Jewish life that you and I take for granted really emerged in 1967, when Jews around the world finally stood tall because they were no longer the objects of history, but were now the shapers of their own destiny.

Would that 1967 war prove to have a very complicated aftermath?  Yes, it would – we’re still trying to figure it out.  But it changed everything, Jay, for me and for you.  For my neighbors and for yours.  I can’t imagine a world in which I’d want to be alive in which this country didn’t exist; which is why I’m constitutionally incapable of saying that I’m losing my love for it.

That’s the real difference between us, Jay, and it’s the reason that your exhaustion leads you where it leads you, and mine leads me to dig in my heels.  You write that as you notice your love starting to wane, you feel a “sadness that accompanies the end of any affair.”

That’s a fascinating metaphor.  Because at the end of an affair, most people put their lives back together by telling themselves that despite the pain of the moment, there will be someone else.  “A lot of fish in the ocean,” we told each other in college when relationships broke up, which was to say, “she’s not the only one out there, and she’s not the last one you’ll love.”

Which may have been true of our youthful relationships back then, but it’s not true of Israel.  This is the only one.  This is the last chance we get.  We lose this, and the Jewish people heads into dark, uncharted territory that I don’t think you or I can begin to imagine.  You yourself wrote that you “still awed by the tkuma, the resurrection and rebirth of my ancient people.”

You’re absolutely right.  This country is the very foundation of the resurrection and rebirth of our ancient people.  Given that, how dare we not love it, even with all its faults?  Is love Israel exhausting?  Of course it is.  Does it require lots of equivocation?  Yes, it does.  Is it very unpopular in lots of circles?  No question.

But it’s bigger than me.  And it’s bigger than you.  It matters more than all of us.  So given that, I don’t think we have a right to exhaustion.  Or, if exhaustion is inevitable, then the only thing I think we have a right to is a few hours of sleep, until we get up the next morning, roll up our sleeves and get to work again.

Because loving Israel isn’t like an affair.  It’s a totally different thing.  In a relationship, the person I love and I both matter – more or less equally, I guess.  But not here.  In this, I don’t matter.  You don’t matter.  Only justice matters.  Only the future matters.  Only the Jewish people’s survival matters.  And without this place, there is no future, no Jewish people.

Given that, what’s the alternative to a deep and abiding love?  I can’t think of one.  So tonight, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and head off to shul.  I’m going to put the news out of my mind, and for a few hours, I’m going to forget about the equivocation, about the fatigue.  I’m going to hold on to my son, the one kid still left at home – and when the singing starts, I’m going to dance.

Shabbat Shalom, Jay, and Chag Same’ach.

I would have liked many more people to see her.  President Obama, for example, as he prepares for another stab at Middle East peace-making.  Hillary Clinton, who’s now telling us to make peace lest we lose American support in the looming confrontation with Iran.  All those Jews out there, beating their breasts, despondent that the Jewish state is so “un-Jewish” in its seeming unwillingness to make peace.

We hear all those people – of course we do.  And as we do, we can’t help but wonder if the world has begun to tire of us, to regret the decision that it made on November 29, 1947.  (We know without doubt, for example, that were the UN to vote today, Israel would not be created.)  Calls for Israel to negotiate with Hamas despite the latter’s commitment to Israel’s destruction, the poisonous environment of Durban II and the Obama administration’s willingness to engage with Iran even as it continues to enrich uranium, all contribute to this sense.

So to all those who are wringing their hands about Israeli intransigence and inflexibility, on this eve of Israeli Independence Day, a brief word about nations, and states, and purpose.  For without understanding purpose, there’s no understanding Israel.

Israelis elected Ehud Barak in 1999 because he promised peace with the Palestinians.  When Barak put the majority of the West Bank and even parts of Jerusalem on the table, most Israelis went along.  The deal fell apart because Palestinians unleashed the Second Intifada.  The majority of Israelis supported Ariel Sharon’s decision to disengage from Gaza and to uproot all the Jewish communities there.  They even elected Ehud Olmert in 2006, after he ran on a platform of further withdrawal from the West Bank.  How did a country that has continually favored painful concessions for peace end up with Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister respectively?  It is that which Obama, Clinton and all the hand wringers must understand if they have any hope of being heard here.

To appreciate today’s Israeli sentiment, all those people would do well to keep in mind two iconic photographs on which virtually every Israeli is raised.   These images have come to represent two radically different eras – Jewish powerlessness under the Nazis, and Jews at the height of their power, when they captured the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians.

The former period is represented in the minds of many Israelis by a black and white photograph of a Jewish boy, probably no older than nine or ten, dressed in his finest coat and hat, his black dress socks pulled up almost to his knees.  He is the model of innocence, of European-Jewish financial and social success, and yet, he is pitiful – the very picture of vulnerability.  His parents are not at his side, and no onlookers have come to comfort him.  His hands raised high in surrender as a Nazi points a gun in his direction, the boy’s fate depends entirely on the whim and will of his enemies.  He might as well already be dead.

A very different image was taken at the Western Wall in the aftermath of the paratroopers’ conquering of the Old City during the June 1967 Six Day War.   This photo, by David Rubinger, is equally iconic.  It, too, portrays Jews and soldiers – three, in fact.  But now, the Jews and the soldiers are one and the same.  No longer is the Jew the frightened boy looking away from the Nazi’s gun somewhere in Europe.  He is home, in Jerusalem, responsible for his own destiny.

Nothing in this image celebrates war.  The soldiers’ weapons are nowhere to be seen.  Their helmets have been removed.  The figure in the center ­is young, almost boyish.  What captured the Jewish imagination was not the Jew as soldier, but image of a Jew whose existential condition had been entirely altered in the period between those two photos, all because of the creation of the Jewish state.  The Jewish state, Zionism promised, would radically alter the condition of the Jew in the world.  No longer would Jews live and die at the whim of others.  No longer would our children’s safety be dependent on what our enemies decided.

Today, Israelis are concerned that that has begun to change, that we are sliding inexorably back to the reality represented by the first image.  For eight years, Palestinian rockets and mortars turned Israeli childhoods in Sderot and other cities into years of incessant fear.  Thousands of Israeli children studied and slept – and some died – at the whim of Palestinian Kassam-launchers.  And when Israel finally did respond, the world’s outrage was instantaneous.

Now, Israelis wonder if the Americans have quietly resigned themselves to a nuclear Iran.  If Israelis become convinced that that is the case, it will be not Netanyahu or Lieberman, but American policy, which will have caused Israeli intransigence.  For an Iranian nuclear weapon, even were it never used, would reverse the change in the existential condition of the Jew that Israel made possible.   Once Iran has nuclear capacity, every Israeli parent will put their children to bed at night knowing that once again, our survival and that of our children will depend not on what we do, but on what others decide our fate should be.  An Iranian nuclear weapon would represent not only a failure of American deterrence, but the failure of the promise of Zionism, to create and sustain a Jewish state that could keep its citizens safe.

An international community committed to significant progress in the Israel-Arab conflict must first convince Israelis that we are not being abandoned, that the world is committed to the purpose for which Israel was created.  Very few of us relish sending our sons and daughters off to war, to bear for life the scars of battle, or worse.  We, too, would like nothing more than an end to this horrific conflict.  Our voting record proves it.

But as we prepare to celebrate independence once again, one fact must remain clear: we will not end the conflict at all costs.  That is what the international community must demonstrate it understands.  For on this Erev Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, as on all the others, we, at least, know well what is at stake.  Given the choice between sending our children off to fight yet again, or of returning to the world of that first photograph in which someone else will decide if we live and for how long, almost all of us will choose the former.

Many movies had dealt with the Israel Defense Forces. But this is the first, to my knowledge, to address the trials and tribulations of a gay couple serving in the IDF. It’s a haunting, beautiful and sad movie, and raises harrowing questions about the real costs of the “macho” environment of the IDF. A classic in Israel, and a wonderful window on yet another dimension of Israeli life that is not often part of our discourse about Israel and its challenges.

I hadn’t really paid attention to the news, but Micha apparently had.  “Do you think we’re ever going to get Gilad Shalit back?” he asked.  Without even looking at him, I said, without even thinking, “Of course we are.  Definitely.”

“You don’t know that,” a different voice piped in.  Now, I looked up.  Avi, his older brother, was unexpectedly home.  “We may get him back, and we may not.  How can you possibly say that we definitely will?”  But the conversation was over.  Micha, overjoyed to see Avi, had quickly followed his brother upstairs, and I was left alone in the kitchen.  So I never got to answer Avi.

But had he pressed, and had Micha not been around, I would have said to him, “Why did I say that?  Because when he hears the news each and every day, the only thing that your brother thinks about is the fact that you’re about to get drafted.  And he’s beyond worried; he’s panicked.  Because he worships the ground you walk on.  And he needs to believe, to know.  He needs to believe that you’re going to be OK.  And he wants to know that though he lives in a country that asks its kids to do everything, to commit everything, that country also knows that it owes them everything in return.  And getting them home – no matter what has happened to them – is part of that.”

I never said any of that to Avi, but I recalled that conversation several times during this agonizing week of prisoner exchanges, of returned coffins, of funerals expected but still tear-stained, of Hezbollah celebrations and of all the columnists who insist that the trade was a terrible idea, that you don’t trade Samir Kuntar for two dead bodies, that they were “deeply ashamed to be an Israeli [and] not very proud of being a Jew either,” that we’ve weakened our bargaining position in the future, and, according to Rabbi Menachem Froman, that we’ve even made peace more difficult to attain, that Israel is committing suicide, and that we have now officially given the Hezbollah the crown of victory in the Second Lebanon War.

So, in the face of all the good arguments about how no self-respecting country trades a almost two hundred dead bodies and several living terrorists including Samir Kuntar (who, we should recall, shot a man at point blank range in front of his four-year-old daughter, and then killed the girl by smashing her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle – and all this at the ripe old age of 17) for two soldiers who were almost certainly dead, how does one justify this decision?  Wasn’t it certainly a mistake?

Yes, in strategic terms, it was probably a mistake.  But sometimes mistakes are worth making.  Take the Disengagement.  It is now clear that the Disengagement from Gaza was a horrifying, costly and still painful mistake.  But – and I realize that this is not a popular position – it was a mistake that Israel needed to make.  It was the mistake that proved, once and for all, that the enemies we face have no interest in a state of their own.  They just want to destroy ours.  That is what Israelis learned, now without a doubt, as a result of the Disengagement.  There’s almost no one left around here myopic enough to imagine even for an instant that further retreats will get us peace.  OK, there are still a few arm-chair peace-niks in the States, insisting that there is simply no conflict that cannot be resolved.  But here?  Precisely the opposite.  Now we know that the right was correct – further retreats will only embolden our enemies.  They’ll demand more.  And more.  Until we’re gone.

The benefits of that lesson are understandably of no consolation to the families who paid so dearly in the summer of 2005, who are still living in temporary housing, whose marriages didn’t survive, whose livelihoods have never been restored, whose children hate the country that did that to their parents – but despite all that, the Disengagement was probably a horrifying mistake that Israel needed to make.  For now we know, even those of us (and I include myself) who were naïve enough to imagine something else.  Peace is not around the corner.  Peace is not a year or two away.  Peace is not possible.  Not now.  Not a year from now.  Not a decade from now.  Because their issue isn’t a Palestinian State; it’s the end of the Jewish one.  We learned that through the mistake we made in 2005, a mistake that we probably needed to make.

And that’s why we had to make the trade this week.  Yes, according to a variety of strategic criteria, the trade was problematic.  It may raise the price for Gilad Shalit (not that those negotiations have been going anywhere, of course).  It may affect future prisoners of war.

But if it was a mistake, it was a calculated mistake, a mistake well worth making.  It was a mistake worth making when we think about what is the real challenge facing Israel.  The challenge facing Israel isn’t to win the war against the Palestinians.  The war can’t be won.  We can’t eradicate them, and they won’t accept our being here.  The challenge that Israel faces is not to move towards peace.  Peace can’t be had.  No – the challenge facing Israel is to learn how to live in perpetual, never-ending war, and in the face of that, to flourish, and to be a country that our kids still want to defend.  And that is what we did this week.

I didn’t watch much of the Hezbollah celebration on television.  I just couldn’t stomach it.  I watched enough, though, to see the crowd cheering a man whose main accomplishment in life has been smashing a girl’s skull with his rifle – after he made her watch while he killed her father.  I watched enough to hear about how Mahmoud Abbas – our alleged peace partner – congratulated the same Kuntar on his release.  I watched enough to chuckle at the sight of Kuntar in a decorated Hezbollah uniform – even though Hezbollah didn’t even exist when he perpetrated his murders and was captured.  I watched enough to be reminded of what (the word “who” somehow doesn’t feel appropriate) it is that we’re still fighting.

But I’ll confess to having watched more than my share of the Israeli side.  On the morning of the trade, I woke up and like many Israelis, I thought to myself, “Who knows, maybe all the intelligence reports are wrong.  Perhaps one of them will walk across the border, or maybe still be on a stretcher.”   Maybe.  This is a county that doesn’t easily give up on hope.  Our anthem, after all, says od lo aveda tikvateinu – “Our hope is not yet lost.”  So I watched the live feed that morning, waiting along with the rest of this breathless nation, until we saw the two black coffins.

And I watched the soldiers standing at attention – and weeping – as the bodies were transported into Israeli trucks and driven into Israel.  I watched the thousands of people who, the next day, lined the roads on the way to the cemeteries.  I watched Karnit Goldwasser’s extraordinary eulogy for her husband (click on the picture of her to watch the video – it’s worth watching the full seven minutes even if you don’t understand Hebrew).   I watched a country that is about life, and yes, even love, not about the celebration of death and hatred.

We did the right thing.  We gave Karnit Goldwasser her life back.  We gave Udi and Eldad the burial they deserved.  We gave their parents some certainty, and with it, the hope that maybe, just maybe, they, too, can start to live again, even with the searing pain that will never subside.  And perhaps most importantly, we showed the next generation of kids who will go off to defend this place that this is not a country about calculus, but about soul.  We showed them what it is to love.  We showed them that we’ll get them back.  No matter what.

And I was proud, not ashamed.  I wasn’t ashamed to be Israeli.  I wasn’t ashamed to be a Jew.  We proved to our kids once again that we’re the kind of country that’s worth defending.

There are those who claim that by making this trade, we’ve now formally admitted that Hezbollah won the Second Lebanon War.  But, really, was there anyone who did not already know that?  Have we forgotten the Winograd Commission and its two devastating reports about the government’s conduct of the war?  Have we forgotten the report that showed that, weeks before Udi and Eldad were killed, the army knew that the reservists they were sending there were sitting ducks, but that no changes in deployment were made?   Have we forgotten the IDF Chief of Staff who left the War Room in the first hours of the war to go sell part of his stock portfolio?  Have we forgotten the most cynical of political arrangements that got us as a Defense Minister a labor organizer who didn’t even pretend to know the first thing about military matters, but who still insisted on playing a role in the conduct of the war?  Have we forgotten the mayors of some towns in the North who fled their own cities when the rockets started to fall?  Have we forgotten the horrific non-use and then mis-use of ground troops, the arrogance of a former Air Force commander who imagined that he’d win the war from the air?  Have we really forgotten already how badly we lost?  Does anyone really imagine that this trade gives them the victory?  Please.

We lost.  We knew that already.  What we did this week is that we did right by the families who paid the price.  We showed that at the end of the day, it’s not only strategic calculus that matters in this country.  There will be other ways to get our deterrent edge back.  We’ll get around to that; there’s sadly no way that Hamas in the West, Hezbollah in the North, Syria to the east of them and Iran off in the distance will not force us to.  We’ll attend to that in due course.

But in the meantime, we showed ourselves once again that this country is about soul.  They won, and we lost.  They celebrated, and we buried.  They cheered, and we wept.  And I’d rather be one of us, any day.

Wednesday night, we drove Micha to the airport to drop him off for his flight to the States.  The radio was on during the entire drive, and we listened to the interviews with people who’d known Udi and Eldad, the constant updates on the plans for the two funerals to be held the following day.  “I feel bad being excited about going on vacation,” he said to us on the road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.  “It’s a sad day here.”

“Yes,” we told him, “it’s a sad day, but it’s OK for you to be excited.  Going to America is a big deal.”  He didn’t say anything.  We got off at the exit for the airport, pulled up to the security checkpoint, still surrounded by all those guys with the submachine guns at the ready, because the war’s not over and it’s not going to be.  I turned off the radio so I could talk to the young woman manning the checkpoint.  After a few quick words, we were ushered through.

It was quiet in the car.  We followed the access road to the departure terminal, each lost in our own thoughts.  I don’t know what Micha was thinking.  But I’m pretty sure that it was about the two soldiers.  About the funerals the next day.  About his brother.  And about America.

We pulled to the curb, still not saying anything.  I stopped the car, and said to him, “OK, buddy, let’s go.”  Micha looked at me.  “I’m really going to miss this country,” he said.

I was stunned.  Not, “I’m going to miss you,” but “I’m going to miss this country.”  And then, if I’d had any doubt before, I knew.  We did the right thing.  If we made a mistake, we made the mistake that we just needed to make.  We taught our kids that we may not know how to end this war, but we do know how to take care of them.

And he taught us, too.  He reminded us that even the kids here understand what an extraordinary country it is that they call home.  That this is sometimes a scary place.  But that it’s also a country that a teenager knows he can love, that he’s going to miss and that one day, he’ll defend.

In the end, that’s what matters most.  Even on the saddest of days.  Especially on the saddest of days.

“Pretty painful stuff,” I replied, as I’d been trying to imagine what it must feel like to be the parents of Gilad Schalit, Eldad Regev or Ehud Goldwasser, and to have as respected a person as Ya’alon say that, especially this week.

“True,” my son said, “but he might be right.”

“Or he might be wrong,” chimed in my daughter, who just got out of the army after three years of service. “How do we then tell soldiers that we never leave a man in the field? Are they supposed to go to war knowing that we might not, in fact, do everything to get them back?”

The exchange was brief, but significant, for it made clear that Ya’alon had accomplished something that the entire echelon of Israeli political leadership has failed to do in the two years since the soldiers were captured. He has engendered debate. Read the Web. Follow the talkbacks. Listen to the radio. Suddenly, people are talking, debating and disagreeing. It’s not terribly important whether or not one agrees with Ya’alon. What matters is that finally, someone’s got us talking, and maybe even thinking.

FOR THE many months that there has been talk of a trade for Gilad Schalit at an extremely high price, Israelis have engaged in virtually no significant public debate. Of course the Schalits and the Goldwassers were right that Ya’alon would not have said the same thing had it been his own child in captivity. The Schalits are doing what every decent parent must do – they are using every tool at their disposal to get their son back. They are right to do it, and for the dignity with which they have shouldered their burden and pressed their case, they deserve our abiding admiration and respect.

But painful though it may be to say, a country like Israel, with a steadily deteriorating strategic position made all the worse by a government that has raised playing its cards poorly to a virtual art form, needs to restore a public square pulsing with serious national debate.

Is it really true that we will do everything – regardless of the price – to bring soldiers home? What are the dangers of such a policy? Or will we not? And what would that decision say about our values? These questions are beyond agonizing, and we could make a strong case for either side. But what is more tragic than the fact that we will have to decide is the fact that we’ve lost the ability to discuss, and possibly to think.

This is a country that has become far too comfortable with ducking the hard questions. How often in recent weeks have we heard the absurd refrain, “Of course we want peace with Syria; we’re just not willing to give up the Golan”? It’s utterly meaningless chatter. Everyone knows that there’s no deal to be had with Syria that does not involve negotiating the status of the Golan. Perhaps some sort of long term rent-back, or some other creative solution, is possible. But if the Golan is not in some way on the table, there is no peace to be had. So let’s either discuss giving up the Golan, or declare that we have no interest in peace with Syria. Either is a defensible position; but bumper stickers in the place of national discourse will not save the Jewish state.

THERE’S A certain poetic appropriateness to the recent news that the OC Chaplaincy Corps will now be examining the evidence as to whether Regev and Goldwasser should be declared “killed in action.” Imagine that – the first thing that the rabbinate says or does after two years of captivity is to possibly declare two people dead. For those Israelis who’ve long assumed that Regev and Goldwasser are no longer living, this rabbinic decision will have added nothing. And to their families, who will understandably want much better proof, rabbinic pronouncements will also be meaningless.

It’s a perfect metaphor for the rabbinate, and for Israel’s alleged leadership at large.

In the days preceding Shavuot, as I read the advertisements for the various tikkunim across the city, I came across a poster for the lecture to be given by one of the chief rabbis at the Great Synagogue. The topic? Something about the views of halachic experts on the custom of praying at the graves of righteous men (tzaddikim). I was dumbfounded. That is what the Chief Rabbinate thinks the Jewish state should be discussing in 2008? That is the sort of topic that will bespeak the richness of the Jewish tradition to a population no longer convinced that Judaism has anything of value to say?

IF JEWISH statehood matters at all, it matters because sovereignty affords Jews the opportunity to build something unique, distinctly Jewish, informed by the very best that the Jewish and Western traditions have to say about human life and the nation-state. There were days when this society was racked by debates about what we should build here. Socialist versus free-market. Religious versus secular. Jewish or bi-national. While it is true that today’s abundance of small political parties is a serious liability, we ought also to remember that those parties grew out of deeply held convictions as to what the Zionist project ought to be about.

Moshe Ya’alon made some people very uncomfortable this week. He may be right; he may also be wrong. But he got us talking, and thinking, about the values that ought to lie at the core of the Zionist enterprise. There’s a word for what he did. It’s called leadership.