And now for something completely different . . .
Home, Homeland, and Dual Loyalty
Home. I awaken for the second time, return to bed after prayer being the singular satisfaction of retirement, and I find the apartment empty. I recall that my estimable wife is making a shiva call in Ra’anana today–or was it yoga?–and I decide to prepare a special treat for myself.
Two eggs over easy, eaten sitting down at the table with a real plate and real fork, as though it were a hotel breakfast (but for my attire, which must remain undisclosed). I find the eggs, retrieve the skillet and plate from the dishwasher, heat the olive spray (butter has been unjustly exiled from my home for over twenty years with no redemption in sight), crack the eggs, wait for the sizzle, dump the eggs, rinse the bowl, lower the heat, separate the eggs in the pan, wait until the whites are firm, use my patented two-spatula method for turning the yolks unbroken, and wait for perfection. Slide the eggs into the plate, sprinkle a touch of salt and pepper, and eat, savoring each bite, thanking God for eggs, the most perfectly designed object in the universe other than grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I imagine myself in the dining room of my favorite hotel.
Then I lick the plate.
Home.
Another day, another morning: a 13-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Miami arrives at 5:30 a.m. A creaking 77-year old body, tending to insomnia under the best of conditions, staggers to the huge but mostly empty immigration pavilion. The multiple directions: those with US passports, those without, Global Entry. He, together with his beloved wife, who has incurred his grumpiness, resentment, and envy by sleeping almost the entire flight, make their way to Global Entry, where the blessed machine recognizes them immediately and sends them to the Border Control official, resplendent in a well-cut, military-style uniform. He glances at the US passports and whatever data the machine has communicated, smiles at the tired, broken old man, and says, “Welcome home.” For the first time in many hours, a sense of comfort and safety suffuses through his body and soul.
They walk a few steps, the man smiling, and his wife mutters, just loud enough, “Not my home.”
My life, summed up in two mornings.
I love the idea of living in Israel, enjoying a precious privilege denied to millions of my yearning, praying ancestors and co-religionists for two thousand years (by contrast, my wife loves living in Israel, a different thing altogether, but not the subject of this essay). I love the idea of a country that celebrates my holidays, where no one turns a sour glance or jaundiced eye at my lulav in the street or kippah on my head.
I love the idea of a people speaking its own resurrected language, freely, fluently, and way too quickly for me, even though I am condemned to spend the rest of my life identified as an immigrant by my pronunciation and limited vocabulary (a young lady from Tel Aviv once told me that I speak Hebrew like the prophet Isaiah; I was so shocked that an Israeli from Tel Aviv knew who he was that I didn’t realize the insult, and rejection, until later). I love the idea of a self-sufficient, confident, highly skilled Israeli army, with every single soldier a family member, loved and respected.
I believe that it was my destiny to live in Israel, though I probably would never have made the decision on my own. It is my homeland and I cherish it, but it is not–yet–my home. Some day it will be, God willing, may that day arrive “now, swiftly, and soon,” as the Aramaic prayer requests, contradictorily.
But I miss Christmas in Miami. Certainly not any spiritual or religious element, to the extent that those aspects still even exist. I miss the much reviled commercialism, the lights, the ubiquitous music (mostly written by Jewish artists), the sense of joy and celebration that saturates the stores and streets, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The mass exhilaration occasioned by jelly-filled doughnuts is not–yet–part of my holiday vocabulary.
I miss baseball. I miss adequately-sized parking lots and wide grocery aisles, fully stocked with familiar brands (who needs so much traife food?). I miss a Supreme Court that doesn’t think it has the right to tell the army or government that they need the Court’s permission to shut down an army radio station funded by the government. At least the US Supreme Court pretended that there was Constitutional justification for the internment of Japanese-Americans and discovered the right to abortion in a Constitutional emanation of a penumbra. Our guys just unabashedly make it up as they go along.
I miss July 4, even though it has lost its meaning to the majority of the country. I don’t miss Memorial Day, because I don’t need a new washing machine.
I imagine that Memorial Day after the Civil War approximated the feelings and emotions of Yom Hazikaron. It is hard for a Jew not to feel Israeli on Yom Hazikaron, or on Yom Ha’atzmaut.
In short, I am an American citizen who visits home occasionally, and an Israeli citizen who lives here in my homeland.
When God selected Abraham to found a new nation, He told him to leave his land, his birthplace, and the home of his father. All three. God understood the connection to the place of one’s birth, to the sights and sounds, to the cultural magnetism. He understood that one can never be fully separate, independent, and whole so long as those ties exist. The Torah suggests that Abraham was never fully able to comply. When he leaves Haran, he takes his brother’s orphaned son, thus bringing along vestiges of the family he was to have departed. When his son requires a wife, he insists on one from his tribe and homeland. And he probably spoke Yiddish or English until the day he died.
This is why we are the Children of Israel and not the Children of Abraham. Jacob never sent his children to a different country for wives; his final words beg his children to bury him in Israel.
I channel Abraham, knowing, as he did, that our shared grandchildren will be comfortable in their new home, language, and destiny. All my Israeli grandchildren speak English, more or less, but Hebrew is their home, as English is mine. And all my American grandchildren love Israel in their kishkes.
Even if America were Poland, or Spain, or Germany, or Russia, I would probably have twinges of homesickness and regret in my new life. But America stands alone in history, despite all its apparent failures, in providing a hospitable home to Jews. How could I not be grateful to a nation that allowed us to compete for success on almost even terms? How could I not be loyal to the flag, republic, and nation to which I pledged allegiance every day of my primary school life (in a Jewish day school, of course). Jewish law requires one to pray for the welfare of the government of the country in which the Jew resides, and America is one of the few countries that actually merited the prayer from its Jewish residents. To feel otherwise is to be kafui tova, which means “ungrateful,” but connotes a much ignobler, ungracious characteristic.
Why this uncharacteristic sharing of meandering, formerly personal feelings? Because some benighted legislators in the United States have sponsored legislation to abolish dual citizenship. Put aside the practical arguments for permitting dual citizenship–the enhanced freedom of movement provided by multiple passports, facilitating travel and work for people with family, business or cultural ties in both places, access to services, ability to vote, maintenance of family and cross-cultural connections, and the simple recognition that multicultural identity is a fact of modern life–this is not a subject upon which I choose to offer a rigorous analysis. And this is not the place to discuss religious obligations, to the extent they are relevant.
The crux of the question is whether dual citizenship automatically entails a disqualifying multiplicity of competing loyalties, and all I can offer are my feelings of utter despair at the thought of being compelled to choose.
Those of us with both fathers and mothers or more than one sibling or child know that it is possible to allocate love, allegiance, responsibility, and loyalty in more than one direction. Do conflicts occasionally arise? Of course, but rarely to the extent that they require the rejection of a loved one. More frequently, one works to find common ground, to establish comity, and to minimize ruptures.
It is no conflict of interest for me to love America as its native-born citizen and to live in and be loyal to Israel, my ancestral and adopted homeland. When and if disagreements arise–between parents, among siblings, and in international fora–an intelligent person may make appropriate choices. Being a citizen does not mean supporting every policy. On the contrary, in democracies such as the US and Israel, a citizen may disagree with a government’s policy and it is both expected and encouraged that he will support and defend deeply and honestly held opinions and preferences in the face of opposing government policy, so long as he does so within the law. In the rare circumstance when that becomes impossible, one must choose on the basis of a higher law, regardless of citizenship or dual citizenship. That has never occurred in my lifetime, though I have worked and voted, quite patriotically, I believe, to change existing governments and policies in both countries.
The claims of the “Exclusive Citizenship Act” that dual citizenship compromises allegiance are disproven every day of my and countless others’ existence. I believe that most people can easily understand this, and only those who choose to promote myths and stereotypes of dual loyalty are offended by dual citizenship for people who have strong cultural, religious, family, and historical ties to Israel. Israel may not yet fully feel like home for me, but it is my homeland, just as America is my native land. I still cherish the “land of the Pilgrims’ pride” at the same time that I identify with the age-old desire to be “a free nation in our country, the Land of Zion.” At the Olympics, I get misty both when they play The Star-Spangled Banner and (less frequently) Hatikvah.
To force me to choose between these deeply felt loyalties strikes me as unduly harsh and punitive, with no corresponding benefit to either jurisdiction.
And in the unlikely event that Israel goes to war against the United States, I’m too old to fight, anyway.