Lyrics to Live By

I did not plan to arrive in Israel on Yom ha Shoah, or to depart just after Yom Hatzma’ut, but that’s exactly what I did.  My husband and I scheduled our trip to take advantage of the availability of our youngest to provide coverage at home.  So off we flew, unaware of the symbolic bookends of our journey.

We landed on Thursday afternoon and checked in to our favorite hotel in Tel Aviv, one I’ve now stayed at four times since May 2023.  Walking through their doors is like coming home to family.  Which is our main reason for traveling to Israel.

We had Friday night dinner at my cousin’s house, the usual affair with too much food, and treasured company.  The next day, she drove us to Jerusalem, where we met up with her younger son and went together to the Israel Museum.  First time I’d seen fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Amazing, truly.

We headed to the Old City for lunch at an Arab joint, then back to Tel Aviv for us, and onward for my cousin.  Why all the logistics?  Maybe just to share the relative ordinariness of our itinerary in its first days.

We then traveled to Mitzpe Ramon on Sunday, our only formal outing of the trip.  Our guide was the man who was the primary guide for a volunteer trip my daughter and I joined in  February 2024.  I remembered him as too chatty and very knowledgeable.  Both are still true.

During our lengthy day together, I also asked our guide if he thought American Jews–and especially Jewish “leaders”– made any real difference in Israel.  He paused for a moment and then said, “No, I don’t think so.”  He has a son currently serving in Gaza, a daughter serving in the West Bank, and two other sons not serving at the moment.  But I have to imagine they likely will again, given the huge call-up of reservists planned by Bibi and Co.

Our guide was himself a Navy commando, in the Israeli version of the SEALS, one of the hardest–if not the hardest–service branches in Israel’s military.  His kids are also in elite units.  My sense was that he sees Americans as nice people–maybe even generous–but not much more.  Israel’s government will do what it will do.  And the opinions of American Jews won’t change that.

I asked the same question of my cousin’s sons.  One was in the Shabak, and said essentially that the only Americans with any influence at all are the crazy rich ones who fund Bibi and his government, but that he’ll even turn on them.  His brother said that Americans are fools when they give to Israel with no conditions, because that guarantees that they have no influence.

These conversations were followed by two related experiences that brought home to me the distance between American Jews and Israel.  The first was a visit I arranged pretty spontaneously to Brothers for Life in Kfar Truman.  I had gone there on a volunteer trip with my daughter, but it was too short and rushed a visit, with no chance even to see or speak to any of the brothers themselves.  Still, I had a positive sense of the group and wanted my husband to learn about what they do.

Our visit was 180 degrees from my first.  We spent the better part of the afternoon of erev Yom ha Zikaron with the brothers, seeing everything from aqua therapy to brothers just “hanging out” and playing cards.  They were also setting up for their own Yom ha Zikaron ceremony, to which they kindly invited us.  We chatted with several people, learned a great deal more than I learned during my first visit, and taking my husband’s lead, we made a very significant (for us) commitment to the organization.

We learned about the efforts of one brother, a boat captain when not a soldier, to train others in his craft, giving them well paid work.  He was the same brother–an army sapper–who told us of having to defuse the boobytrapped bodies of Hamas fighters, left on the battlefield by other Hamas fighters, so they can kill again.  He was struck, as he said over and over again, shaking his head, by the inhumanity of treating dead bodies like that.  But no worries.  They spared no humanity for dead Israeli soldiers, into whose bodies Hamas fighters put grenades.  Because no desecration, it seems, is too much desecration.

With a few hours left before the 8p.m. siren, we headed back to Tel Aviv, and walked to Habima Square, to hear the siren and to stand with Israelis during one of the many memorial services held throughout the country that evening.  Only ours ended with a human stampede, the source of which, we only learned later, was panic over a possible terrorist attack.  I got knocked down, and my husband on top of me.  It was, honestly, quite scary.  But nothing like the scene of a right-wing attack on a Reform Synagogue in Ra’naana–at which another of my cousins was present–where a screening of a joint bereavement ceremony for Israelis and Palestinians was taking place.  Whatever your opinion of hosting such an event on Israel’s eve of mourning, the violent attacks cannot be justified.  They happened anyway.  Because that is Israel now.  War, terrorism, internal strife.  And American Jewish impotence and irrelevance.

I thought I would find the comments about American Jews upsetting, offensive even.  Instead I found them liberating. The fact that American Jews don’t matter at all in Israel made my disappointment and even rage at American Jewish leaders’ silence about Bibi’s anti-Zionist campaign of cruelty and destruction melt away, to a great extent.  Those leaders were never going to have the courage to speak out.  But the joke is ultimately on them, because they fancy themselves influential in the Israeli/Zionist project when they are nothing more than suckers for an occasional dose of flattery from some visiting delegation of Israelis.  When it comes to what really matters–the actual dismantling of the Zionist dream from the inside–they are utterly, tragically useless.

You might wonder why this leaves me feeling somehow liberated.  I think it’s because for a long time, I had invested a large part of myself in believing that if I could only find the right institutional affiliation, the right leader, the right rabbi, I would be on a winning team, a team that stood up, stood out, made a difference.  Now I know that there is likely no team out there for me to join.  So it’s just on me to do what I know in my bones to be right, to be necessary.  Even if it means doing it alone, or just as our nuclear family.  So no more synagogue membership for me.  No more Jewish communal missions.  We don’t matter.  It might be the end of the world as we know it.  But somehow, I feel fine.