Heritage Trumps Hatred

As we begin the book of Shemot / Exodus and recount once again our descent into Egypt as a family and our ascent from slavery as a people, I am reminded by current events of the enduring value of peoplehood, and how it is a source of comfort in dark times. Within the first few verses of this book, the Egyptian pharaoh describes us as "benei Yisrael," the people of Israel (Ex. 1:9), the definition serving to set us apart as the other, as distinct from the native Egyptian population.

With today's hostage-taking episode in a kosher grocery in Paris, resulting in at least four dead and five wounded, our "otherness" was once again served to us in a particularly cruel stew of terror and hatred. On the heels of the killings earlier in the week at the office of Charlie Hebdo, it is evident that bad actors in this world include both Jews and free speech in the same cross-hairs.

In moments like these, when our inclination might be to respond in anger, I look to our tradition for strength. We are not a vengeful people; we are not bloodthirsty. Rather, tragedies such as these should be met with the same response that Jews have always had to anti-Semitic acts: to rally around our heritage, our tradition; to return to our mitzvot, our Torah; to remain stubbornly proud of who we are and who our God is. Our pride is more powerful than their hatred.

We mourn for those fellow Jews who fell at the hands of terrorists; our hearts go out to their families, to those of the French Jewish community who are feeling ever more besieged, and to all lovers of peace and freedom throughout the world whose hearts ache over the events of the past week. And we reach once again for the story of our national foundation, invoking as we do every time we finish reading the Torah the words of Eikhah / Lamentations (5:22): Hashiveinu Adonai eilekha venashuva, hadesh yameinu keqedem. Return us to you, O God, and we shall return; renew our days as of old.

Let this be a Shabbat shalom, a Shabbat of peace, for benei Yisrael.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson

You and I Will Change the World: Arik Einstein and the Hope of Israel

Leaving Israel is, for me, always accompanied by a certain sense of melancholy. Some authorities in our tradition (reading from Numbers 33:53) teach that while it is arguably a mitzvah to go to Israel, it is an aveirah, a transgression to leave.

But of course, I have a job and a family and a life here in Great Neck. I have a congregation that needs me (well, sometimes). I am 100% American, and in many ways I belong here. (Once in a while, I am complimented by actual Israelis about my accent in Hebrew, and they are surprised to learn that I grew up in Massachusetts. But I don't look or dress or have the body language of an Israeli, and the more astute observer can pick out an American long before he opens his mouth.)

Nonetheless, I feel a sense of belonging in Israel that I have never had here. These are my people. This is my land. Whether sitting at a cafe (and the cafes in Israel are numerous and excellent) drinking kafeh hafukh (literally, “upside-down coffee,” what the rest of the world calls cappucino), hiking through the desert, visiting an archaeological site, strolling through one of Israel’s many shopping malls (Israelis love malls!) or lounging on the beach, I feel at home. Yes, I speak the language, and I have spent in aggregate more than two years there, and am accustomed to the quirks and unpleasantries of Israeli society and culture that often make life there challenging for Americans. But there is something more there, a steadfast bond that connects me on a primal level to those ancient, contested rocks.

Apropos of the beginning of the book of Shemot / Exodus, the story is told of how God asked Moses which place he wanted to be the Promised Land. Moses, as we all know, was slow of tongue. So he starts to say California, but can’t quite get it out. So God says, “Canaan? That wasteland? Well, if you say so.”

But the last laugh may be on God, since the discovery of natural gas off the coast of Haifa in Israel’s territorial waters. It’s the largest natural gas field in the Middle East. Go figure!

I’m not sure exactly what is the source of my connection with Israel, or why it is so strong. But I do know that this feeling is quite real. Israel lights a fires in my soul. And my daughter seems to have the Israel bug as well: she has been saying for at least two years that she plans to marry her Beth HaGan classmate Andrew and make aliyah and live in Jerusalem. (Judy and I are not quite sure if Andrew was at all complicit in hatching this plan.)

And one thing of which I am certain is that Israel is a symbol of hope. It represents what the early Zionist poet Naftali Herz Imber called Hatikvah HaNoshannah, the ancient hope of our people to live in our own land. His poem was later modified to become the Israeli national anthem that we know and love. And there’s another hope, a hope for the future that Israel inspires in me: the hope of tiqqun olam, the potential for repairing the world. Both of these hopes were encapsulated in the best-known song of Israel’s most-beloved pop singer, Arik Einstein, who passed away a few weeks ago when I was there. Anybody who knows anything about Israeli pop will surely be familiar with some of his songs.

The NY Times ran an obituary for Mr. Einstein, which is remarkable not only because very few people in America have heard of him, but also because if we read anything in the American press about Israel, it’s only either about violence or the peace process, which paints a very narrow picture of Israel as it is. Let’s face it: Zionists only make for good copy when they are threatening or being threatened.

Arik Einstein's grave in Trumpeldor Cemetery, Tel Aviv, December 1, 2013.

But Arik Einstein was a Zionist - perhaps not overtly or politically, but he was an essential part of the fabric of Israeli culture, and a devoted citizen of the State of Israel and the voice of a musical revolution. Born in Tel Aviv in 1939, the son of a stage actor, he grew up in the center of the artistic and cultural ferment of the nascent Jewish State. Einstein took cues from the Beatles and other international pop groups of the 1960s and ultimately fashioned an experimental rock and roll sound that was at once distinctly Israeli and universal. While the state-sanctioned music of the time still presented the themes of love and war and good ol’ Eretz Yisrael, Mr. Einstein (to whom everybody in the country was referring as “Arik” in the wake of his death) emerged at a time when Israeli musicians, just like those all over the world, were beginning to challenge the status quo.

His best-known song was a favorite among American youth groups in the 70s and 80s: Ani VeAtah:

אני ואתה נשנה את העולם,

אני ואתה אז יבואו כבר כולם,

אמרו את זה קודם לפני,

לא משנה - אני ואתה נשנה את העולם.

אני ואתה ננסה מהתחלה,

יהיה לנו רע, אין דבר זה לא נורא,

אמרו את זה קודם לפני,

זה לא משנה - אני ואתה נשנה את העולם.

You and I will change the world

You and I, and then everybody else will come along too

Others have said it before me, but it doesn’t matter

You and I will change the world.

You and I will strive from the beginning

If there will be anything bad for us - no problem! No big deal.

Others have said it before me, but it doesn’t matter

You and I will change the world.

It is a tremendously moving song that speaks of the ability of each of us to influence those things that seem unchangeable, of the power that we each have to do good in the world and for each other, despite the naysayers. I have at times been moved to tears by this song.

Ani VeAtah is not explicitly Jewish, other than the fact that it is in Modern Hebrew. It does not quote any traditional source - the Torah or the Talmud or midrash or anything. But it implicitly references two fundamentally Jewish texts: Hatikvah, which I have already mentioned, and Aleinu, everybody’s favorite “we’re-almost-done-with-services” prayer.

Why Hatikvah? Because Ani VeAtah is the flip-side of the Israeli national anthem. Hatikvah is about the ancient Jewish yearning for return to Israel. It tells a story of hope, of national desire, and the actions of a small band of politicians, ideologues, and fighters that realized the ancient dream of Israel, a seeming impossibility. Arik’s anthem for changing the world is a plea to turn the realized ancient hope, that hope of 2,000 years, into the universal message that hope should never be lost in the future.

Why Aleinu? Because it contains a line (in the second paragraph, which we always recite silently here at Temple Israel) that speaks of our hope to repair the world: letaqqen olam bemalkhut Shaddai - we hope that that You, God, will perfect the world through Your sovereignty. In its original context, the author of Aleinu meant tiqqun olam to imply bringing everybody in the world to worship our God. But modern interpreters see this as the origin of the idea of repairing this very broken world through deeds of hesed, of lovingkindness to our fellow people. Arik’s 20th-century lyrics reflect our obligation to work toward this goal, that despite obstacles, we each have the potential to right the wrongs around us: to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to straighten the bent, to house the homeless, to promote environmental stewardship, to seek peace and pursue it, in the words of the Psalmist, and so forth.

You might think that the lyrics are naive, particularly given the great complexity of all of these challenges. And Arik himself confesses as much in the song. But, “lo meshaneh.” It doesn’t matter. The simple message of hope is the one that inspired the complex process that brought about the miracle of the State of Israel in our time, and this message will guide us in the future in our task of further perfecting the world.

It has often been observed that the book of Shemot is about the creation of the Israelite nation. Curiously, much of this nation-building takes place outside of the land of Israel, in Egypt and Sinai, and so from the very beginning of our people, we have faced the challenge of diaspora, of living away from our home.

There has been much talk, in the wake of the Pew Research Center study released in October, about the challenges facing American Jews concerning our relationship with Judaism. (Temple Israel and SHAI hosted Uri Cohen of the Queens College Hillel this past week, and he spoke about some of the implications of these statistics.) There are many voices in our sphere saying that contemporary Diaspora Judaism has a problem, that is, the disengagement of Jews with Judaism.

For centuries we have focused much of our yearning, as filtered through the lens of Jewish prayer and text, on redemption. This theme is found throughout your siddur, and permeates rabbinic literature. The future redemption that Jews have prayed for and meditated on and repeated over and over in the beit midrash, the study hall, like our first redemption from Egypt, is the return to our land after centuries of dispersion, the re-establishment of the Davidic throne over a united kingdom over the entire Promised Land.

Part of that redemption has arrived, ladies and gentlemen. It is an imperfect, incomplete redemption. But we now have sovereignty within our historical land. And that is, at least on a personal level, one of the most inspiring, most appealing aspects of living as a contemporary Jew, here in the Diaspora or in Israel.

The answer to the disengagement suggested by the Pew study is Israel. The messages sent by its pre-eminent rock-and-rollers, is the inspiration that we all need, the answer to the Diaspora’s Jewish malaise. It is the very essence of hope. Israel might very well be the world’s poster child for the ability of Hatikvah, of hope’s ability to effect change.

No, it's not perfect. No, it's mostly not even holy. Yes, there are many, many political and social problems in Israel.

But no other place gives me that sense of hope, of hatikvah hanoshannah, of ancient and future hopes that ignites a fire under my Jewish identity.

As another great Israeli songwriter, Ehud Manor, put it, “Ein li eretz aheret.” “I have no other land.” (Translation here.)

I am fortunate that on the heels of my most recent trip, I will be returning to Israel in February with 35 teens on Temple Israel’s Youth House trip to Israel. I know from having done this before that Israel will ignite a fire under those kids’ Jewish identities as well.

Through our active embrace of the Jewish State, by going there and experiencing all that Israel has to offer, we can sustain that feeling, that connection. We can feel the hope. And we can change the world.

Keep singing, Arik, and Shabbat Shalom.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 12/21/2013.)

Shemot 5772: Seeking Transcendent Moments

Did you notice the new rack sitting in the front lobby, opposite the office window?  If you were here during the day this week, you might have seen it displaying children’s books.  We have not officially “rolled out” the program yet, but the books are courtesy of a program called PJ Library, which will soon be providing Jewish books free of cost to children of this community who are 8 years old and younger.  I am sure that you will hear more about it very soon.

But the more interesting thing at the moment about that rack is its placement, just opposite the office window, where Susan (who usually sits at the reception window during the day) can keep an eye on it.  Why?  Because we are all pretty sure that, if nobody’s watching the rack, the books will climb down and walk out the front door, perhaps assisted by members of this community.  That is to say, they will be stolen.  

On what basis would we make such an assumption?  Well, it seems that theft is not an uncommon problem in this building.  I am not going to go into details, but children’s books and other items around the building have been stolen.  That’s right - in a place where people come, at least in theory, to get a taste of qedushah, of holiness, some valuable items need to be carefully guarded.  (It might be worth it to point out that we offer unlimited quantites of contact with God for free.)

As a naive, trusting soul, I never would have expected that.  Then again, I am also continually surprised when I see cars blast through the stop sign in front of my house, or people who throw trash on the ground in public places, or other acts that seem to me selfish.

And let’s face it - we live in a world of plenty.  Americans have lots of stuff.  We have so much stuff that many of us actually rent storage space outside of our homes to keep it.  We have to have stuff, because our economy depends on our buying more of it.  Not to have lots of stuff is un-American. (Perhaps some of you are familiar with George Carlin’s routine on stuff, which I of course cannot repeat in this space.)

Ironic that in such an environment, there are those who simply cannot resist a “free” item.  Now, there are many possible reasons why people steal, and among them may be genuine poverty or the thrill of getting away with it.  Not all theft is equal.  But on some fundamental level, theft, like disobeying traffic laws, like selling houses to people who can’t afford them or derivative securities to those who don’t understand them, or even like cheating on tests, all of these are acts of selfishness.  Whether conscious of it or not, the thief makes a statement that goes as follows: I and my desires are more important than those of whoever owns this item.  In order for theft to happen, the owner must be depersonalized, unconnected.

Of course, in some ways, putting oneself before others is necessary to our survival.  The sage Hillel says so in Pirqei Avot (1:14): Im ein ani li, mi li?  If I am not for myself, who am I?  But I’m talking about the kind of worldview that places the self above all others, the kind that Hillel goes on to chastise: Ukhshe-ani le-atzmi, mah ani?  And if I am only for myself, what am I?  And in this sense there is no question that we are living in a very selfish age.  What can we do about it?

Put that thought on hold for a moment; we’ll come back to it.

* * *

Let’s turn our attention to the Torah.  From a narrative perspective, the Torah really only contains three parts: before Egypt (i.e. the book of Genesis), the Exodus story through the giving of the Torah, and then everything after, which is kind of a mish-mash of lots of different types of material.

But the middle narrative, the one about Egypt and the Israelites’ exit, up to and including the episode at Mt. Sinai, is the shortest and perhaps most intense tale of the book, and arguably the most central to Judaism and Jewish theology.  

The Exodus story, as I noted two weeks ago in our Torah discussion about whether or not Joseph was a success, is the pre-eminent national myth that pervades Jewish life.  (And here I use “myth” in the positive sense - not a story that is untrue, but a folkloric tale that helps a community make sense of its experience.)  We refer to Exodus constantly in liturgy, on holidays, in sermons, in calls to social action, and on and on.

Leaving Egypt, the departure of the Israelite slaves, the children and grandchildren of slaves, is the second most important moment of the Torah, eclipsed only by the episode at Mt. Sinai.  These are the moments that define us as a people.  (One popular take on Sinai has it that all Jewish souls were there.  That is, indeed, a statement of transcendence.)

Really, it was not even God who was the first to declare us a people, but rather Pharaoh.  Not the good Pharaoh that appointed Joseph the viceroy of Egypt, but the the bad Pharaoh, the one who “did not know Joseph,” who enslaved the Israelites.  As we read this morning at the beginning of Parashat Shemot:

(Ex. 1: 9-10)
Hineh am benei yisrael, rav ve-atzum mimenu; hava nithakkemah lo pen yirbeh.

“Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us.  Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase...” (Etz Hayyim, p. 318-319)

Even in the mouth of the Egyptian despot, this is a transcendent moment in the Torah narrative.  The 70 people, members of a family who went down to Egypt at the behest of Joseph and the earlier, good Pharaoh, have now become a nation, an “am.”  

This acknowledgement marks the beginning of Israel, the people, the point of transition from mishpahah to am.  The Israelites needed to crystallize as a nation before God could give them the Torah, before they could enter the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, before they could think of themselves as a connected to each other.

Transcendent moments, however, are not limited to the Torah.  I am sure that we can all think of them - times that connected us - to other Jews, for sure, but also to other Americans as a nation, or to our families, or schools, or workplaces, or the modern State of Israel, or to ourselves as sovereign individuals, or God.

The tragedy of 9-11 is probably the most powerful example in recent memory.  For my parents’ generation, the killing of JFK in 1963 was a transcendent moment.  Those of us in the room who remember the Six-Day War, when nobody was sure whether or not Israel would survive, and yet triumphed, might think of that as a transcendent moment.  You get the picture.

The events that connect us to each other, help to make us feel like a part of something greater than ourselves.  They are, I think, the exact opposite of what we do for so much of our waking existence - that is, make our own choices, think independently, and go about our lives as distinct creatures.  Every now and then, we need to be literally shaken and reminded that we are a part of a larger subset of humanity.

We as modern Jews need more transcendent moments.  Young and old, Conservative, Reform, Orthodox, Haredi, Reconstructionist, secular, in Israel or the diaspora, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, the Jewish world is fragmented.  We need shared experiences that bring us all together.

Given events of late here and in Israel, one might think that different corners of the Jewish world have little in common.  We have such a talent for cutting each other down, such formidable zeal for denying legitimacy or respect for this group or that group.  

And therein lies one problem that we all face.  If we have no shared moments of transcendence as a people, no experiences to bring us all together, then how can we possibly feel connected as a group moving forward?  How will we prevent the global forces of modernity from continuing to strip from us our personal interdependence?  How will we ensure that our children’s children feel connected to each other as Jews?

And this, of course, brings me back to the beginning: if members of a synagogue community do not feel connected to each other, what will prevent them from stealing children’s books in the lobby?  Hanging a sign in the lobby that says, “Lo tignov,” do not steal (Ex. 20:13), probably will not work.

OK, so there will never be another Exodus.  And we may have to give up on the rest of the Jewish world, the ones who do not belong to Temple Israel.  But we can create transcendent moments here.  And sometimes we do.

Some of us have shared a moment when families come together for Shabbat Hamishpahah on Saturday evening, hold candles aloft and sing a Hasidic niggun as we bid goodbye to Shabbat.  Some of us share a moment when we strain forward in hunger and exhaustion at the end of Yom Kippur to hear the shofar blown.  Some of us share a moment when we gather food and clothes to deliver late on Saturday night for Midnight Run.  Some of us might point to a lifecycle event: birth, berit milah, Bar Mitzvah, wedding.  Some of us might even point to the moment in the Musaf service on Shabbat morning when we embrace others with our tallitot during birkat kohanim.  

Let’s face it: connecting a community of over 900 families is next to impossible, especially when we live in such a selfish age.  But we are going to continue to try, and the more that we reach members of this community in smaller contexts, the better chance that we have to reach deeper into the larger group, to foster the sort of transcendence that makes us all feel that we are part of something greater.

Prayer, singing, eating, learning, studying the Torah (Talmud Torah keneged kulam!) together all work to connect each of us to the other, even if we do not know each other.  Until we can bring everybody along on our journey with us, Susan will still have to keep an eye on the PJ Library book rack.  But let’s hope for and work together for a day when she can turn her back and know that it will be OK, because we will have transcended selfishness.  Now that’s a vision for the future!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 1/14/2011.)

Shemot 5771 - The Nexus of the Personal and the National

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel, 12/25/2010.)

Two weeks ago today, Shabbat morning, the day after I returned from Israel, I was awake at 4 AM. Zev woke up and cried briefly, but I managed to get him to go back to sleep. But I was wide awake. So I picked up the Jewish Week, and started to read it from cover to cover. Not far into the newspaper, I found myself crying.

Now, I have found that jetlag does tend to destabilize me somewhat, emotionally. But I found myself weeping over the stunning list of all the nations that provided support to Israel during the fire that took place a few weeks back.

Most notably, Bulgaria sent 92 firefighters and a plane. Greece, Spain, the US, and Russia all sent significant personnel and material. OK, not too surprising there. But the names on the list that really brought up the tears were Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the Palestinian Authority.

I cried not because of the tragedy itself; since I had actually been in Israel when it happened, and as such had long since recovered from the shock over the extent of the damage and the loss of life. No, I was crying because it was just so tragically beautiful that all of these nations, including some who are not necessarily on good terms with Israel right now, overlooked their differences, put the lives of their own sons and equipment in danger, and placed a higher priority on saving lives and trees and property than on political squabbling. I cried because, when it came down to it, these people, these nations, came to aid the modern Jewish nation.

Let’s take a step back for a moment.

We began reading the book of Shemot / Exodus this week, having just finished the book of Bereshit / Genesis.

So here’s a question: Considering the narratives of each book, what is it that differentiates Bereshit from Shemot?

Bereshit is about Creation, of course. But it is also about the establishment of the Israelite line, from Abraham to Joseph, and the individual relationship that each of these characters, the Avot / Patriarchs, the Imahot / Matriarchs, and Jacob’s children have with God.

Meanwhile, Shemot begins with a recap of this line, listing the family members that came down to live in Egypt with Joseph - his brothers and their families. But almost immediately, this group of 70 people, each of whom has a name and a distinct identity, becomes an ‘am, a nation. (Here is one small irony of this book - Shemot means "names," referring to those identified in the opening verses; from that point forward, not a single Israelite is identified by name until Moshe comes along.)

And who, officially declares the Israelites a nation? It is none other than the Par’oh / Pharaoh, the new king “who did not know Joseph,” as we read in the first aliyah this morning. It is, in fact, the only occurrence in the entire Tanakh of the phrase, “‘am benei yisrael,” literally, the nation of the children of Israel. Par’oh gives us this name.

And it is a nation that the Egyptians must reckon with. The rest of that story we know well because we retell it every Pesah, with all of its nationalist implications for ancient Israelites and modern Jews.

Our parashah today stands at this cusp, at the nexus of the personal and the national. It is the threshold of nationhood. And the rest of the Torah speaks of that nation’s relationship with God.

Now let’s return to the present, or at least to the late 19th century. (It is remarkable that the difference between 1860 and the present is tiny on the scale on which we are measuring.)

Modern Israel fuses the personal and the national. That was, in fact, the primary goal of Zionism, the political movements that emerged in Central and Eastern Europe in the latter half of the 1800s.

Partly in response to the Russian state-sponsored pogroms of 1881-84, and partly due to the growing Jewish intelligentsia in Eastern Europe, the first Zionist groups appeared in the 1880s in Russia. These groups were established to arouse a new, modern national consciousness among the oppressed Jews of Russia, shuddering from fear and cold in their shtetlakh (little Jewish towns). Some of those so aroused actually made it to Ottoman Palestine and established towns and agricultural collectives. Among them is the town where my son lives, Nes Tziyyona, established in 1887.

The goal of this new consciousness was to give the disenfranchised, unenlightened, ghetto-confined Jew hope for the future, an optimism that some day they might leave the troubled lands in which they dwelt and become, in the words of Hatiqvah, “‘Am hofshi be-artzeinu.” A free people in our own land. Naftali Herz Imber penned those words in 1878, in response to the establishment of the new Jewish settlement of Petah Tiqvah (literally, “the opening of hope”), now a major suburb of Tel Aviv.

The Jews of Russia began their transition from individuals to nationhood, not unlike the transition seen in Parashat Shemot.

Over the next few decades, other groups began to advocate for their own variations on the Zionist dream, culminating with the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.

113 years later, today’s Israel is a complex, multi-faceted, staunchly democratic society that still reflects the Zionist attempt to fuse the personal and the national.

For example, when I was there, the newspapers reported a kick-off party celebrating the establishment, in Jerusalem, of a new, secular yeshiva. The goal of this yeshiva is to encourage non-religious Israeli young people to wrestle with their Jewish identity by studying the great works of secular Jewish and Zionist thinkers as well as the non-halakhic portions of rabbinic literature. One of the founders, a young man named Ariel Levinson, identified this as “an experiment in Judaism.”

Another example: during my two-week visit, the winter rains were long overdue. (These are the same rains that we mentioned in this morning’s Shaharit Amidah, and will do so again in a few minutes, with the line “mashiv haruah umorid hagashem.”) This lack of rain is partly to blame for the great fire, but also has caused the water level of the Kinneret to descend past the “red line,” the point at which the salt content of the water is too high, to the “black line,” below which water can no longer be pumped from it for fear of damaging the water infrastructure.

To help ameliorate the situation (or at least to raise awareness), the Chief Rabbis of Israel wrote a new prayer for rain, and while I was there held special ceremonies at the Kotel to pray for the advent of rain.

What do these example point to? That Zionism and medinat yisrael, the modern State of Israel, as Dr. Kenneth Stein of Emory University put it, are the newest plank in Judaism. Zionism fundamentally changed the nature of the Jewish religion, because we now relate to God and other nations once again as a people, and not merely as individuals davening in a minyan, scattered about the world. That the modern Jewish nation-state is the completion not only of “hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim,” the hope that comes from 2000 years of yearning, but also, in effect, the transition to modern nationhood that began with the Israelites’ descent into Egypt detailed in today’s parashah.

As further evidence, I’ll point out a new tool I discovered this past week. It’s an application in Google Books called the Ngram Viewer, and it instantly searches the 5.6 million books that Google Books has scanned to date for any search terms that you want. It also graphs the data, so that you can compare the number of occurrences of one term against another.

So a couple of days ago I tried this with the terms “Zionism” and “Jewish nation.” “Zionism,” of course, did not occur in English-language books before the 1880s, because the concept had not reached fruition. The term, “Jewish nation,” prior to late 19th c., always appeared in a Biblical context. There was no contemporary concept of the Jewish nation outside of our ancient texts, both for the Jews and the non-Jews. The Zionist movement changed that.

Every time I come back from Israel, I am reminded that, although I love Great Neck and I love my work here at TI, and I am as American as the next guy, on some level Israel is my home. It’s the home of all of us. In some ways, I am aware of a fundamental yearning, the aforementioned “hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim” - “the hope of 2000 years,” that tells me to pick up and go. And maybe someday I will. For good. (Judy and I often fantasize about the newly-gentrified and very cool Neve Tsedeq neighborhood, in the oldest part of Tel Aviv.)

And so, as I wept over the Jewish Week two weeks back, I reflected (in my jetlagged haze) on the power of nationhood, on the transformation of a largely powerless, dispersed people into a unified political force. (Well, somewhat unified, anyway.) We may not be on good terms with everybody, but we are literally and figuratively on the map. That should never be taken lightly, nor should it ever be taken for granted.