This coming Monday will be the 35th anniversary of one of the few times that I
ever saw my grandfather cry. He’s long gone now, but I still think of him very
often. A noted scholar, public intellectual and leading American rabbi, he
undoubtedly had more intellectual influence on me than anyone else. But at this
time of the year, it’s not his teaching of which I’m reminded, but his
tears.
I was a freshman in college, and Anwar Sadat was going to visit
Israel. Sadat was scheduled to land in Israel on a Saturday night, which meant
that it would be Shabbat in New York. In a newly deeply pious (and undoubtedly
insufferable) phase of my life, I wasn’t going to turn on a TV (which was a bit
of an academic decision, since I didn’t even have one in my dorm). But I knew
enough to know that this was a historic event, and I certainly didn’t want to
miss it. So my grandfather, who lived about three miles south of Columbia
University’s campus, told me to come over to watch with them.
That
Shabbat, I walked the three miles to my grandparents’ apartment near Lincoln
Center, trekked up the 24 floors of stairs and, drenched with sweat and out of
breath, knocked on their door. He looked me over, made the inevitable comment
about how “this is definitely what Shabbat rest is supposed to mean,” and
ushered me in nonetheless. Not much later, we sat down to await Sadat’s
arrival.
The three of us were seated on the sofa – my grandfather, my
grandmother and I – and we watched. The plane landed. The red carpet was rolled
out. Sadat emerged. Menachem Begin and his entourage greeted him. The anthems
were played. Begin stood at attention for Egypt’s anthem. Sadat, an erstwhile
enemy of the Jewish state, stood in respectful attention during
“Hatikva.”
It was pretty heady stuff.
Suddenly, in the midst of
all of this, I heard a sound that I couldn’t quite identify. At first, I thought
it was coming from the TV. But it didn’t seem to be. I looked around the room
but saw nothing that could have been making the strange sound. And then I looked
to my left and saw my grandfather weeping. He was a large person, not only in
reputation but physically too, and to this day, I remember his blue button-down
shirt, soaked with tears.
I’d never seen him cry before and, to a kid
like me, the sight and sound of a grandparent weeping was unsettling.
In
all the thousands of hours we had spent together – reading, studying, arguing,
laughing – it was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. To this very day,
whenever someone mentions the day that Sadat came to Israel, I think of my
grandfather. Much more clearly than anything else that day, exactly 35 years
ago, I remember my grandfather crying.
I felt very grown-up back then,
because I was in college; but I was, of course, just a kid. Barely 18 years old,
I didn’t have the developed historical sense to truly understand why he was
weeping. I assumed, of course, that it was about peace. I’d lived in Israel for
a couple of years in elementary school. I knew about our enemies to the north,
the east and the south. Now, it seemed, there would be at least one border on
which Israel might have some quiet. That was a dramatic change, undoubtedly for
the better. And that, I figured, was why he was weeping.
But that was a
rather anemic understanding of what Sadat’s visit must have meant to a man like
my grandfather.
He’d been born in 1908, five years after the Kishinev
Pogrom. The century that then unfolded had been unremittingly horrible for the
Jews. Kishinev was not the last of the pogroms, and the pogroms were not the
worst of what the 20th century would unleash. European Jewry went up in
smokestacks. Eventually, the Jews managed to create a new home in their
ancestral homeland, but that new lease on Jewish life was attacked from all
sides even before independence was officially declared.
If you’d been
born in 1908, you’d never have really known a moment when anyone, anywhere, was
inclined just to let the Jews be. The Jew remained the proverbial outsider,
buffeted by winds we could not predict and certainly could not control, left to
defend ourselves when we could and to suffer grievous losses when we could
not.
What was truly powerful about November 1977, then, was that it
suddenly seemed that all that might be changing.
Yes, of course, the
prospect of peace with Egypt was significant in its own right. But perhaps even
more important than the prospect of peace (for, if Egypt, the most powerful Arab
country in the region, was signing, how could Syria, Lebanon and Jordan not soon
follow suit?) was the image of Sadat standing at attention for “Hatikva.” An
Arab leader would stand for our anthem.
An Arab leader would speak in our
Parliament. An Arab leader appeared ready to usher in a new era, an era in which
Jews were like everyone else – neighbors and partners, not enemies and victims.
What Sadat’s visit heralded was the prospect of a world utterly different than
the one that my grandfather had witnessed from the day of his birth until that
moment.
If you were my grandfather, if you knew what he knew, if you’d
seen what he’d seen, how could you not weep? For 35 years ago this week, we Jews
believed that a new world might be dawning.
BUT IT never did. And that,
more than anything, is what makes this week such a tragic anniversary. If my
grandfather was still alive, I ask myself, might he not still be weeping? If he
was weeping, though, would it be for all that Sadat’s visit promised, or for all
that it didn’t deliver? Thirty-five years after that visit, our world has
changed much less than we’d hoped it might. Even when Israel did have peace
treaties with two of its neighbors, other challenges sprang up. The Palestinians
pressed their case much more effectively than Golda and Begin ever imagined that
they would, and though it appeared once or twice that Israel and the
Palestinians were headed to an agreement, that never happened.
Begin’s
doctrine that no enemy of Israel would be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon
was established with his successful destruction of the Iraqi reactor at Osirak
(extraordinary thought that mission was) and was reaffirmed by Ehud Olmert’s
successful attack on Syria’s reactor. But Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu
confronts a much more formidable challenge in Iran. Israel’s enemies are no less
lethal, and they have gotten smarter.
And as for the peace treaties, what
are they really worth today? The Sinai is no longer demilitarized. Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi, presiding over the chilliest spring one can imagine, is
a tyrant and a radicalized Muslim and he hates the Jews no less than did any of
his predecessors. With Israeli citizens shuddering under a barrage of rockets
from Gaza this week, Morsi has warned that if Israel uses ground forces, he will
recall his ambassador.
Egypt is chomping at the bit to undo the deal that
Sadat came to Israel to negotiate.
When Assad falls, as it appears likely
he will, will the decades-long stalemate with Syria still hold? For the first
time in almost 40 years, Israel fired into Syrian territory this week. Does
anyone really imagine that we know where that will end? And what will then
happen with Jordan? Once Morocco, Yemen, Egypt and Syria have fallen, is King
Abdullah secure? And if his Hashemite regime falls to his majority Palestinian
population, what then? Given that the world has not changed very much in the 35
years since Sadat descended those steps from his plane, it might seem that our
response ought to be to weep again. But were my grandfather still here, and if I
could still speak to him, I’d tell him not to cry. This is no longer the time
for tears.
Yes, those erstwhile hopes have been dashed. But some things
are still very different. Our enemies are no less consumed by hate than they
ever were, yet they can’t destroy us as they once did. They will exact heavy
prices here and there, but they cannot bring down the state. (Sadat came to
Jerusalem precisely because he recognized that.) Yes, Iran is worrisome. Syria
could erupt. Egypt could lose its mind. Hezbollah has rockets. Hamas makes life
utterly miserable for Israelis in the areas surrounding Gaza.
But no one
is going to destroy the Jewish state. There is going to be no genocide of the
Jews. For all that matters have stayed the same, matters are actually entirely
different.
The 20th century is not about to repeat itself because our
future is now in our hands – not in the hands of our enemies.
So, long
overdue, let’s change the conversation about Zionism. Probably 85 percent of the
time that we speak or read about Israel, we speak or read not about the Jewish
state, but about our enemies. That is depressing and exhausting, and it’s
chasing a young generation away.
Those conversations evoke none of
Judaism’s intellectual richness, but they’re almost all we talk about. What
would be left of most of our conversations about Israel if we ruled out any
discussion of Iran or the UN, the Palestinians and the Obama administration,
Egypt and Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas? What would we talk about if we didn’t
discuss Turkey and flotillas, Gaza and rockets, or drones and Israel’s not
not-entirely-impenetrable air supremacy? Would we have anything left to say?
What we should be talking about is what the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty means.
We should be talking about what we’ve accomplished educationally and what still
remains to be done. How will we raise young Israelis to be willing to defend
their country and to kill if they must, but not to hate Arabs just because they
are Arabs? Can we both sustain a Jewish democracy in which no one forces anyone
to study anything in particular and at the same time foster a society in which
more and more Israelis will wish to know something of the tradition they have
inherited? How do we fashion a marketplace of ideas that can make that happen?
Will we ever elect leaders who believe sufficiently in Judaism’s richness that
they would curtail the power of the rabbinate so that Judaism in the Jewish
state would have to compete for the attention and allegiance of millions of
Israelis seeking meaning in their lives, and thus emerge much more enriched than
the pabulum the rabbinate currently spouts? How is life in America different,
richer – and poorer – than what the Jews have created? And why? Those are the
sorts of things we should be speaking about.
Yes, it is sad that none of
us is likely to live to see Israel at peace or with internationally recognized
borders. But it’s only sad, not devastating. November need no longer be the
season of our tears. Now is the time to celebrate the things that we can
control, the society that we can create, the questions we can grapple with. It
is time, I would say to my grandfather, were he still here, to regret what
didn’t happen, but not to mourn it any longer. For today, the people who will
determine the future of the Jews are not our enemies, but us. Today is the day
to imagine not what they will do to us but what we will create, and to fashion a
conversation about Israel that evokes not tears and exhaustion, but images of a
glorious future of which Jews everywhere will wish to be a part.
Daniel
Gordis is senior vice president and Koret Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem
Center in Jerusalem. His most recent book is The Promise of Israel: Why Its
Seemingly Greatest Weakness is Actually Its Greatest Strength (Wiley 2012).
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