Jews returned to Eretz Israel beginning in the mid-19th century when a group of rabbis in Russia began espousing the Jewish right to return to the land of the ancestors, promised to the Nation of Israel by God. Centuries of living as a diaspora would come to an end if the Jews returned in great enough numbers. And the Jews had to, they had to escape inquisition, pogroms, prejudice, inequality and segregation from each of the societies to which they dispersed since 132 A.C.E. when the Romans defeated the Jewish uprising and destroyed the Second Temple.
Sixty years ago, the high rises, cafes, boulevards, fashion, billboards, buses and convenient stores I see today in Israel were not here. Sixty years ago the Jews who moved here in the wake of the Holocaust were working the land on kibbutzim, creating the miracle of Ben Gurion's vision of blooming deserts, a thriving state and safe haven for Jews whose self-sustainability as a self-determined nation with territory was confirmed to be the only defense against the world's cruelty to the Jews. In the face of challenge to this realized dream, Jewish text and history has reminded the world that God designated the Jews as the Chosen People,a light among nations.
What a complex this has created.
Sizable migrations of Jews came in the late nineteenth century and the early 20th century. Finally, the largest numbers arrived on the shores of soon-to-be Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Starvation, humiliation, destitution, grief and loss united the Jews from all over Europe as they arrived to create a new nation, built on the desert sands and swamps.
Hebrew was reinstated as the common language of the Jews, a project that began with Herzl's Zionism in the late 19th century, and cultural Zionist Ah'ad Ha'am. A new Jewish culture was born in a land both familiar and foreign. Characteristics of the nascent Israeli identity were forming-- the sabra, the soldier, the innovative desert farmer. These pioneers, these Halutzim, mostly hailing from Eastern Europe, with a smattering of emboldened American Jews populated the land in the late 1940s. Iraqi, Moroccan, Algerian, Iranian, Yemeni Jews joined their Jewish brothers and sisters in the 1950s. The Ethiopians came later. The Jewish Nation had a firm grasp to the land, the State of Israel.
Facing a conflicted world on the legitimacy of the Jewish State, a hostile and shamed Arab world, and the long tradition of anti-Semitism, the first Israelis were united in the face of their adversaries, with firm conviction of their right to be here as God's Chosen People, apart from all the rest. Or were they united?
Survivors of the Holocaust arrived on the shores of Israel when it was the British Mandate of Palestine to discover disgusted Israeli counterparts. The survivors stories served as a reminder of Jewish feebleness and the children of modern-Israel had established a society exactly opposite to that of the victimized Jews of Europe. Another example, the regularly kassam-bombarded city of Tsderot near Gaza was created by Iraqi and Moroccan immigrants starting in 1952. They left their homes behind at the invitation of Israel, to come as Jews to live in the Jewish State. They did not find a welcoming population. The communities who had already set up thriving kibbutzim refused to assist the newcomers and so they had to build from sand, wind and nothing, a viable habitat. And so they did, without the help of their Jewish neighbors.
True, nowhere in the world and certainly not the Middle Eastern world does one find a society so open, dynamic, controversial, challenging and constantly stirring with new ways to survive extistentially and basically across socioeconomic lines. Nowhere in the world do you have to guard your spot in line to get on the bus by spreading your legs and arms as wide as possible in order to block the door from the 15 people behind you who think they should get on before you, and end up befriending the very person who you battled, ten minutes later, when they sit beside you. But also, nowhere in the world do you find fours cars pulled over on the side of the road trying to help a stranger haul his SUV out of the foothill of a sand dune. And of course, amongst four Israeli vehicles, there is enough rope and other gadgets necessary to accomplish such a feat.
Fortunately, I haven't been in Israel during a time of war. However, I imagine that in times of crisis, the country and its Jewish-Israeli citizens stand as one united nation in protection of what the Jewish people dreamed of for centuries. I have heard stories from the first Gulf War when young children would gather at each other's homes for school lessons because the schools were closed for fear of bombings. These are the times when hearts of mothers and fathers of each and every Israeli family with a son or daughter in the army beat a little faster, breathing more shallow in usual, for fear of the safety of their children's lives. In these times the playing field is leveled and there simply exists Israeli, Israel versus the world.
But on a normal day, in normal times, it is clear that Israel and the people in it are just as good, bad and indifferent as the rest of the world. The society is astonishingly divided. It is divided by color, by Ashkenazim versus Sephardim, between Jew and Arab, rich and poor, North and Center, religious and secular. There's this one population of the country with the stigma of being arsim (for the boys) and frehot (for the girls). Think Greasers, mafia-types who are made fun of for their dress and language style and considered socially at odds with the rest of society.
And why is this so vexing? Why is this division within diversity something that bothers me? It's not as if the rest of the world's countries' societies aren't also broken up, segregated, at odds with each other and varied.
On other days I see it as something miraculous. Jews from France, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Greece, the States, Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada...a United Nations of Jewry gathered together in this land because it is the Jewish State.
(And these are the days where I'm not contemplating the other elephant in the living room, the occupation.)
It's not like Israel is the only country whose education system is becoming more and more shoddy, with teachers who are severely underpaid. It's not as though more people in other countries have more interest in the outcome of politics than they do here. Certainly, Israel isn't the only country who values plastic surgery, stilettos and flat screen televisions more than picking up trash, saving electricity and organic produce. So why am I so judgmental and angry on some days? Why am I so disappointed in this place on such a regular basis?
I think I suffer from "The Chosen Complex".
Jewish history teaches that God promised unto Abraham a nation of people as numerous as there are stars in the heavens. These people who proclaimed faith to one and only one God were proclaimed the Chosen People, chosen to receive the Torah, to receive the "Promised Land", and to serve and be a light among nations.
Are we really the Chosen? Walk the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa. Try to buy a falafel, wait your turn in line for security, or deal with customer service. Good luck ordering in a timely fashion, good luck not getting pushed three people behind and fending for your life from flinging bags and other personal paraphernalia, and good luck trying to hang onto your cordiality with strangers and eventually accept that you too will speak to someone as though they are a complete idiot and the only way to get through to them is in fact to use a firm voice most people would consider harsh, rude and out of line.
And please, don't believe that those who are studying Torah every day, so intimate with the teachings of God and the Sages, are any more considerate in their daily interactions in the public space. I didn't know I missed chivalry until I came to this country and found men with Orthodox-indicating accoutrements so afraid of coming into physical proximity with women that doors have shut in my face when I'm carrying three too many bags from one bus stop or train station to the next and simply keeping one's hand on the glass for an extra 2 seconds could've really helped out a girl-in-need. Are we not all made in God's image? Am I so evil for having breasts and a vagina and/or he so helpless in the face of his animalistic carnal character that such a courtesy as holding the door open cannot be offered? Are the Chosen so powerless to their own human flaws that they cannot be trusted to work on those things? Sharpen the awareness and practice of limits?
There's so much expectation when one is Chosen to be a light among nations. I get this idea that these people shouldn't litter and shouldn't have an army that is aggressive and uses torture, creates nuclear weapons and lies about them, or have politicians involved in sex scandals. Excuse me for expecting the Chosen to live up to their own standard and fundamental principles of Oneness as expressed in the Shema, and instead focusing on itself.
I expect the Chosen to figure what the nation-state of the Chosen stands for-- exactly. Is it: "fuck the world and its anti-Semitism at all costs we'll defend and survive?" Or, is it about creating a place in the world with a vision for what the world could be if we all moved from the heart instead of the unchecked and unhealed ego and voracious and insatiable genitals? I wish it were the latter.
What happens when the Chosen behave as all the rest and still claim to be the Chosen? Israel 2007, that's what happens. Big balagan.
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