“Distance nears the distant and distances the near,” wrote Israeli Nobel Prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon. And indeed anyone who has traveled from Israel to another destination only to come across an Israeli there realizes just how true Agnon’s observation is.
At a supermarket in Ireland, near the tomato stand, two Israeli women meet. Distance brings them closer. “So, where will you be tonight?” asks one, a World Zionist Organization shlicha (emissary). “Why? What’s tonight?” replies the other, who has relocated to Dublin with her husband, who was offered a position in one of the local hi-tech companies.
“Seder night!” The shlicha responds.
“Oh, wow, how did I miss that?”
I will return to these two women later.
According to every study conducted in recent years, Seder night is the most widely celebrated Jewish holiday. Since that night when an entire nation made a hasty escape from slavery, introducing the idea of liberty to the whole world and for the past 3,500 years, the Jewish people have been commemorating this moment, our birthday. It is not yet our Independence Day, though, as history will prove that liberty and independence are two very different values.
The struggles of being Jewish in history
Throughout the generations, the Jewish people have undergone much turbulence. Such events have led to other nations’ extinction and to entire peoples and cultures dissolving into the nations into which they were exiled, assimilating into the countries to which they have immigrated, forgetting their homelands and origins.
The Jewish people have survived without a country or nationality and only with Torah, mitzvot and endless yearning to return to Israel. The vaccine known as Judaism has helped us withstand countless pogroms, anti-Jewish edicts and persecutions.
Some 200 years ago, Jewish identity encountered a new challenge: emancipation. Jews were no longer persecuted, shunned or ostracized. The doors of the academic, economic and political domains were opened to them and they marched through them with vigor and tremendous success.
The winds of equality blowing from Europe were blurring every national, ethnic and religious identity, posing a challenge to Jews that they had never encountered before. More and more of them were finding contradictions between Judaism and modernity, choosing the latter and opting for universality.
BUT DURING that time, antisemitism remained intact. It was alive and kicking, sowing the seeds of evil from which the atrocious Holocaust later grew. Years earlier, Theodor Herzl had recognized the threat that was facing the Jewish people and his sincere concern for Jewish life itself led him to advocate for the establishment of a political asylum where Jews would be able to live their lives in safety.
The idea of Israel did not materialize prior to the Holocaust; however, it was put to practice immediately afterward. On May 15, 1948, a Jewish state was established in Israel.
Now, 75 years after Israel was founded, it clearly keeps Jews safe, but even more clearly, it keeps the Jewish people’s identity safe.
About 150 years ago, the large immigration wave of European Jews began. For every Jew who made aliyah, 100 Jews immigrated to the United States, the “golden state.” In view of such figures, one would assume that US Jewry would outnumber the Israeli Jewish population in Israel but that is not so. The largest Jewish community in the world lives in Israel and no, the offspring of these American Jews did not all make their way to Israel. Where are they, then?
The truth must be told. We are living at a point in time when it is easy to be a Jew. Jews are not being persecuted or ostracized and Israel is usually a source of pride. And yet, being a Jew outside Israel is no easy task. Every family decides what kind of Judaism it wishes to pass on to the next generation, but whatever the definition may be, this mission comes with high demands.
Recent history shows that if two Jewish parents wish to pass the Jewish torch to their grandchildren, they must live near a Jewish community and give their children some form of Jewish education. And even then, the challenges their children will face as they progress toward building their own Jewish families will be immense and difficult.
At every junction in their lives, they will have to ask themselves: What does it mean to be a Jew? What do we do by way of being Jewish?
By contrast, Jews living in Israel, even if they never put on tefillin, observe a single Shabbat or visit the Western Wall, live and breathe Judaism. They will never miss Seder night. Passover jumps out at them in TV commercials, on the news and at work.
These Jews living in Israel give years of their lives protecting the country in which they were born and raise their children here, never asking themselves what it means to be a Jew. They’re just Jews who will be raising generations of Jews right here in Israel.
And we have Herzl to thank for that, too.
The writer is vice chairman of the World Zionist Organization, head of its Department of Education and chairman of the Mizrachi Movement in the National Institutions.