LOOKING AROUND: Back to basics

By Barbara Sofer
Jul. 4, 2002

Dear Friends,

I heard that when you got together recently in New York you all expressed your distress at my refusal to leave my home in Israel to return to the US. You implied that I was reckless, perhaps even immoral, to continue living here, endangering my children.

I was surprised. I'd always thought my motivation for moving to Israel and my continued commitment - these basic tenets of my life - were clear to those who knew me.
Evidently not. So here goes.

I moved to Israel soon after college because I believed that we Jews need to have a country of our own, both to renew our religious/cultural heritage and because, over much of history, our neighbors have had a tendency to persecute and kill us.

The logical homeland ought to be the land inhabited by our forefathers and foremothers, the land of the Bible, where there had been a continuous Jewish presence for most of the past 3,000 years.

The Jewish state was happily in existence before I was born. The way I saw it, an exemption from building the Jewish state came with my American citizenship.
Quite the contrary.

Having enjoyed a childhood in peaceful, verdant New England, with its strict education in democracy, meant that I had to take a turn contributing those values to the low-frills Jewish state.

In my case, the feeling of what I should do and what I wanted to do dovetailed. I fell in love with Israel, not just the vision, but the reality. The mix of Jews from all over the world, appointment books starting with Rosh Hashana, the Saturday night news beginning with "Good week," neighbors with names like Mazel, Shalom and Simha, praying at a 2,000-year-old Jewish holy site, resonated deep within me.

Then one day, when I was here as a student long ago, I was waiting in the ticket line in the old, cacophonous bus station in Tel Aviv - an odd site for an epiphany. Ahead of me stood a passenger for Kiryat Gat and before him, one for Haifa.

When I put down my coins and asked for a ticket to Jerusalem, the bus station seemed to spin. The men and women in line were transformed to the generations of Jews who came before me, my grandfather escaping the wrath of the local authorities when he threw a Polish policeman over a fence to protest pogroms in his town, ancestors in the Middle Ages who suffered Crusaders and blood libels, relatives who might have left Hebron in chains after the Bar-Kochba revolt. The failed revolt put so many Jews on the selling block that the price of slaves fell on the world market.

If we're here as Jews today, every generation preceding us had to have cared enough to have maintained the chain of Jewish identity.
What would any of my great-great-grandparents have given to pay a few coins for the bus and to name the destination "Jerusalem"?

At that moment I was in part of the great experiment called the Jewish state, for better or worse.

THINK BACK, please, to the time before there was a Jewish state. Auschwitz tattoo bearers are not uncommon here - a reminder of what not having a Jewish state was like. Nor were the Jews of America able to rescue their brethren in Europe. The majority of American Jews kept their Judaism low-profile back then. I bet you didn't see many young men secure enough to wear kippot on your college campuses.

The existence of our imperfect but spunky little state has made Jews proud and secure.
We have never had a single day of true peace. Still, we've built a democratic country with abundant achievements: everything from drip irrigation to, last week, a gene-therapy cure for bubble babies.

We've been able to absorb millions of our oppressed brethren, some who had never seen the inside of an automobile or a schoolroom.

The lion's share of that effort and of the money came from our own pockets.

True, the privilege of living here comes with very heavy taxes, and I don't even mean the hefty ones we pay monthly to the state to fund defense and education, nor the Jerusalem city taxes to repair ancient sewers and pick up modern garbage.

I mean the years of hazardous army service.

These days the danger permeates civilian life, too, as we in Israel have become the prime country targeted in the worldwide campaign by Muslim terrorists. We take precautions and encourage our kids to avoid what seem like the greatest risks.

We do everything we can to protect them, save running.

Imagine your own mayor advocating an exodus from New York or President George W. Bush hiding out in the Everglades to escape al-Qaida. Would you really bundle the kids into the back of your SUV and head for Calgary if your corner Sbarro was bombed?

Doesn't anything about terrorists want to make you stand your ground and hold firm to your homeland?

Deep down we believe that greater perils lie ahead for our children's future if we cave in or abandon our Jewish state. And while we try to keep them safe by sending our soldiers to seek out the enemy and by patrolling our streets, we are also concerned for their souls. We don't want our children to be perverted into vessels of hatred even as they face the enemy at the corner.

That's another challenge we've embraced.

So, my friends, we aren't leaving. Our children, Jerusalem-streetwise to the dangers, don't want to leave either. We don't know any Israeli families who have abandoned our country now. Instead, we recall the Prophet Jeremiah, who purchased a field in Jerusalem in a time of national peril. Says the Good Book: "Houses, fields and vineyards will yet be bought in this land