Why I love Israel

Though passionately committed to Israel, I’m often critical of its government, including the new one. Here’s an attempt to explain how I reconcile my love for the Jewish state with my misgivings about those who run it.

• In Israel I feel engaged in its future and free to express critical opinions because I care deeply. As I belong to it, so it belongs to me and to every Jew who shares in its destiny. That’s why, as a Reform Jew, I’m determined to oppose those who, in the guise of piety and fidelity, want to keep me out.

• In Israel, I live Judaism not only in my home and in the synagogue, but in the street and in almost everything I do, good and bad.

• I’m overwhelmed by the ingenuity that has created this modern state. Israel celebrates the human spirit at its best, but, alas, at times also at its worst. Yet all of it is real and open to the scrutiny of Jewish teachings and Jewish history.

• Without Israel, I’d have to choose between assimilation and the ghetto and thus be either a parvenu or a pariah. But I believe that to justify every political and military action by Israel, diaspora-style, only harms it. Loving a country mustn’t inhibit us from criticizing it.

• In Israel, Judaism is bound up with its future. In view of what we’ve been through as a people and considering our situation in today’s world, without Israel, Jews would soon become a quaint curiosity and Judaism a museum item.

• In Israel, where I live without fear of both assimilation and ghettoization, I’m better able to be open to the concerns of others. Neither parvenu nor pariah, I see myself as a full partner in the ways of the world. Here particularism and universalism strengthen each other.

• In Israel, I experience Zionism as the liberation movement of the Jewish people. This prompts me to champion the liberation of all peoples, including the Palestinians. I hope that, instead of seeing Zionism as the oppressive and imperialist enemy, Palestinians will come to view Israel as an opportunity that their Arab and Muslim brothers have denied them.   

• In Israel there are many unforgettable places, but for me Jerusalem is special, both in its physical beauty and in its link to the past. Here heaven and earth do indeed meet.

• In Israel, my wife and I have five of the 10 members of the immediate family with which we’ve been blessed.  

• In the words of Amos Oz, the famous Israeli writer: I love Israel even when I can’t stand it.