Aliyah: 25 Years Later

Posing a question which entailed a “this or that” choice, a wise Torah teacher of mine would regularly highlight and gently mock his adult students’ need for simple constructs to complex issues. Again and again, we would fall headlong into this pedagogical trap, until we finally caught on: More often than not, Judaism’s answer was: “gam ve-gam” – this AND that is valid and true. In the Israel that has been my home for 25 years, the gam ve-gam principle describes my evolution from an American-born modern Orthodox Jew, with clear, partisan ideas, to a sometimes confused, but a much braver heterodox Israeli.

An example of my limited sights: In the devastating first hours after October 7, I doubted that the IDF could factor in the safety of the hostages given the need to respond with blunt force. Addressing the existential threat would have to override awareness of the survival of individuals. But within the next days and weeks this amorphous group of hostages acquired individual faces, names and stories thanks to the families-of and other Israelis who refused to passively accept this hopeless construct. In this country, even when reality seeks to contradict it, hope is not easily quashed (and is a most apt name of our national anthem).

I have changed most significantly since the year of the “judicial overhaul,” followed by October 7th and its aftermath: I have come to reject all the binaries offered by the political class: right wing vs left wing, lover of Zion vs self-hating Jew, religious vs secular, the full vessel vs the empty cart (chiloni—the word used for non-observant Jews). Living here, if you lift your head out of your daled amot, your sociological bubble, you cannot avoid seeing the dizzying admixture of –everything. The contradictions, the gam ve gam-ness of disorder and kindness, farmers and hi-tekkies, black hats and rastot, moshav people and city folk. With our endlessly repeated longing for an ingathering of the exiles, perhaps we were unprepared for diversity and the incompatibilities that came with it. It’s about time we recognize this not only as a challenge, which it is, but perhaps a gift hidden in G-d’s plan.

There is a reason – spiritual or biological- whatever suits you- that the natural world is filled with dazzling diversity, all of which is in a constant process of change, mutation, and adjustment to changing conditions. In “The Botany of Desire” Michael Pollan offers a cautionary tale in which he describes how limiting diversity, specifically the phenomenon of a single-crop (agri)culture can lead to disaster. In the 19th century Ireland was a single-crop economy. Potatoes are prolific and easy to grow– until they are infected with a fatal blight and there is a total collapse. The Great Irish potato famine caused a million people to starve to death and a million to flee. In the mythic story of the Tower of Babel, some commentators see establishing a uni-culture as a misguided experiment, one which sought to create a singular linguistic monolith; as if that would bridge the divide between heaven and earth. God’s response was both punishment and remedy: scatter and fill the earth with many cultures and many languages.

Our tiny sliver of a country suffers from zero strategic depth; no one dare condemn our complex spirit and history to the same constriction. The tension produced by trying to ally seeming incompatibles is what generates our particular creative energy: democracy and the legacy of Jewish values and traditions, a citizen-army that dreams of peace. The issues and contradictions that threaten to break us, is the very stuff with which we can build a better world. This is so beautifully expressed in Tehillim (Psalms); Even ma’asu habonim hayta le-rosh pina: The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.