Posted on 09/25/2003 12:22:40 PM PDT by yonif
I didn't know David Applebaum, the remarkable doctor who saved hundreds of Jerusalemites wounded in terrorist attacks and who was murdered in the Cafe Hillel atrocity with his daughter, Nava, on the eve of her wedding. But many years ago, I did know members of the family of his wife, Debbie - the Speros of Cleveland - one of those essential Jewish families that energizes an entire community.
And so I was among the thousands of people who crowded the Applebaum house during the week of mourning, held instead of the week of post-wedding celebrations.
The crowds moved slow and steady. People spoke quietly, restraining their grief; teenage girls gathered around family photo albums. No words of comfort were possible for such an epic tragedy. If a new book of the Bible were ever written about the modern return to Zion, it would have to include the story of the Applebaums.
Yet words of comfort were somehow unnecessary. Debbie received her broken well-wishers with clarity and strength, a symbol of Jewish endurance. Hers was the strength of those who see their own lives as part of a larger story.
The restrained dignity of the Applebaum shiva could only come from people who know they are home and whom no force can dislodge. In a contest between one society where murderers are celebrated as martyrs, and another where real martyrs are mourned without hatred or rage, I have no doubt which side will prevail.
Still, this wasn't supposed to happen to our post-Holocaust generation of American Jews. We were meant to be exempt from the curse of Jewish history. Our parents' generation was the most traumatized; we were the most privileged. After all, we were the generation of the Six Day War and Soviet Jewry liberation and American Jewish rebirth. Like the myth of the end of history invoked after the collapse of communism, we were implicitly raised on the notion that Jewish history was moving on a one-way trajectory, from destruction to rebirth - and, some even dared to say, redemption.
But for those of us who opted to leave America for Israel, the past three years have confronted us with the enormity of our decision to enter the heart of the Jewish story. Recently, I was interviewed by an American talk-show host who practically accused me of being an abusive parent for keeping my children in a war zone. What national dream or religious fantasy could justify that? he demanded.
And so, like other American immigrants, I've been trying to remind myself why I'm here.
FOR AS long as I can remember, I knew that I would live in Israel. My father, a Holocaust survivor, had come to America, instead of Israel, only by an accident of fate. In our kitchen in Brooklyn hung a bronze relief of Theodor Herzl; our Hanukka menora played "Hatikva"; and the only news that really mattered to us was news about Israel. I had no doubt that every Jew should live in the Jewish state.
But when I finally did come, at age 29, it wasn't because I believed that every Jew should live here, but simply because I believed that I should. I didn't want to be one of those Diaspora Jews obsessed with Israel without really knowing the actual Israel. I wanted to be intimate with the back pages of the Israeli experience, not just the headlines.
And I wanted to normalize my relationship with Israel. I wanted Israel to stop being a cause and simply become daily life. And it has. When I drive every morning past the walls of the Old City, my mind isn't on history or metahistory but on catching the next light.
When American Jews ask me whether I "like" living in Israel, I am perplexed by the question. Israeli life, with its combined informality and intensity, suits me. But I don't think about whether I like living here, any more than Americans think about whether they like living in America. There are aspects of Israel that I cherish, others that I detest, and still others that I find inexplicable and probably always will. In other words, life.
Most of all I came here because I couldn't bear not to be here. The encounter with a frenetic Hebrew culture that sanctifies the mundane and mocks the sacred has admitted me into the greatest Jewish adventure since biblical times. The dilemmas of Jewish statehood in the Middle East have forced me to abandon idealistic formulations and test my moral mettle against unbearable reality. And the encounter with Jewish sovereignty and power has helped free me from a post-Holocaust identity of victim and allowed me to become a "normal" human being, just as Zionism intended.
And being here is, above all, a privilege. To experience the ordinary courage of Israelis in this time is to glimpse something of the qualities that have made the Jews an eternal people.
Every American immigrant is here for a different reason. But in some sense we're all here for the same reason: the belief that Israel isn't only meant for refugees with nowhere else to go. We've come because history has finally made it possible for us to come. Our decision to leave the safest and most prosperous Diaspora in history is confirmation of the irreversibility of the Jewish return home. Despite our small numbers, that is the historic significance of the American aliya.
Leaving the Applebaum shiva, I felt proud to be part of the community of American olim, with our funny flat accents that our sabra children love to mock, and our sense of decent behavior that Israeli society seems intent on negating.
Not that we have the right to complain. We Americans moved here because we wanted to stop being spectators of Jewish history, cheering Israel from the sidelines, and instead assume our place on center stage.
We've gotten what we came for.
The writer is a contributing editor of the New Republic and an associate fellow at the Shalem Center. He is author of, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.
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