An Oleh’s First Election

There is a famous passage from Tractate Ketubot teaching that anyone who walks four cubits in the Land of Israel is considered to have done a good deed. Another rabbi holds that whoever walks that distance is guaranteed a share in the World to Come. For me, as an oleh voting in my first election, there is no greater deed, and no walk more heavenly, or more difficult, than the four cubits that stretch between the booth and the ballot box.

The reason it is heavenly is simple. I reject the three oaths on that same page, and with them the idea that Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah is forbidden. Instead, I wholeheartedly identify with Rabbi Abba, who would kiss the stones of Akko, and Rabbi Chiya bar Gamda, who would roll in the dust of the land, both to express their affection for it. I love Israel: the state, the land and most of all its people.

I left the land of my birth, Australia, because I could not bear to be on the sidelines of Jewish history. As I would preach to my friends, despite their repeated requests that I stop, the next 1,000 years of Jewish history will be decided not in Melbourne but in Jerusalem. How can I not be excited that I am three weeks away from casting my first vote for that future?

Yet the reason for my difficulty is just as simple. Israelis vote the way they live: intensely, tribally.

Ask any Jew from abroad what they found most remarkable about the country, and almost all will point to the feeling of unity: the sense that you are finally at home, among family. Simply living among Israelis is an unprecedented delight for most Diaspora Jews, who despite their passports often feel like strangers in strange lands. So nothing is more heartbreaking than learning that this unity is ephemeral inside the country itself.

Olim are not so naive as to wish for all Israelis to hold hands and form a 120-seat coalition. I certainly don’t expect a single grape in the Land of Israel to fill a barrel of wine, as the next page of Tractate Ketubot claims, nor milk and honey to literally flow in the streets. I am all too aware that Israel’s bureaucracy can best be described as Kafkaesque, and I wistfully remember the joys of Amazon same-day delivery. But for all its flaws, the country is constantly bathed in that greatest of all feelings: unity of experience.

Elections seem to be the exception.

It is easier for olim to be less partisan. We were not raised with the historical baggage of either side of the political spectrum, nor with the attachment people form to particular figures or parties. Other than with Misrad Hapnim, we have no grudges to settle. Our vision of Israel is often tied more tightly to the country we immigrated to than to what it could or should be.

That does not mean we have no aspirations nor political biases. No one moves halfway across the world, away from everything familiar, without a dream in mind. But that dream is invested not in Bibi or Eisenkot but in the country itself.

When I voice these dreams of unity, the most common response I receive from Israelis is dismissiveness. “Wait until you’ve been here 20 years, and then you’ll understand,” they say. They are right. In 20 years, I will undoubtedly have grown rougher political calluses. But I would ask them to imagine the reverse: 20 years in the Diaspora. Would any of their political grudges survive their longing for this land and its people?