More Thoughts on My First Trip to Israel

Last week I posted two messages about Israel’s recent prisoner exchange with Lebanon and the difference in values between Israel and Hezbollah that it demonstrated. In this post, I would like to speak about Israel from a more personal perspective.

Tomorrow night, I’ll be leaving on my first trip to Israel with some of my seminary colleagues. We've added to our itinerary a visit to Israeli troops on the Lebanese border. This could be very moving because of the exchange and the emotions it evoked.

I’m long overdue for this trip, and I don’t have a good excuse for not having gone to Israel years ago. It wasn’t the expense – my family and I have taken a number of more costly vacations. It wasn’t the length of the flight – we’ve flown to Greece, which is almost as far, and to Japan, which is much further. I have to admit that security concerns were a deterrent for me, as apparently they were for others. American Jewish travel to Israel has declined significantly since the second intifada began in 2000. Fortunately for Israel, an increase in visits by US evangelical Christians has offset much of the Jewish tourism shortfall in recent years.

Since I imagine that others who haven’t been to Israel lately were also put off by security concerns, I would like to share two stories from my seminary colleague, Irwin Huberman, spiritual leader of the Conservative synagogue in Glen Cove, NY, who has been in Israel for a number of weeks and will be joining our tour. I’ve shared some of Irwin’s thoughts previously.

Irwin was riding recently with one of Israel’s great philosophers, a Tel Aviv taxi driver named Amnon, who lived in the US for 6 years before deciding to move back to Israel. He told Irwin that he came back to Israel because he wanted to return to a country where life is safer. Irwin, with eyebrows raised, asked him to explain. Amnon said: “Look at these streets…No one is mugged. No one is stabbed. Children can walk home on their own. If they get lost, a stranger will take them by the hand to their home…I feel safer here, even with one war every ten years, and an occasional terrorist attack.” Amnon then quoted the state motto of New Hampshire: “Live free or die.”

Some weeks ago, Irwin led a group from his New York congregation to Tzefat, or Safed, the northern Israeli city of 37,000 which is famous as the home of renaissance and modern mystics, teachers of Kabbalah. It’s where the prayer Lecha Dodi, with which we welcome the "Shabbat bride", originated. Irwin’s group asked a volunteer policeman how many crimes there were in Tzefat last year. He told them that there was one, but they really weren’t sure. Apparently someone borrowed someone else’s talit and they’re still discussing whether it was a theft or a case of a mistaken talit bag.

I wouldn’t want to minimize the threats to Israel from Iran, from terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas or from the surrounding Arab nations. I’m not ignoring the Kassam rockets which fall daily on Sderot and are starting to reach Ashkelon and other coastal cities. Most Israelis are sensitive to these threats to their very survival. We’re told that most Israelis have lost a member of their extended family to terror or war. We’re told that many Israelis walk looking over their shoulders, as I have in certain parts of Manhattan and in downtown Detroit, where I worked as a teenager.

Yet in spite of the stress of wars and attacks which has shaped their lives, there is something that keeps pulling Israelis back to Israel. My seminary Hebrew teacher, a native Israeli, a sabra, has lived and worked in the US for over 30 years. She keeps an apartment in Tel Aviv and goes there every chance she gets. Something pulls many visitors back as well. I have a cousin in Ottawa who has traveled to Israel over 20 times. I know American-born Jews in Westchester County, NY, who return to Israel every year.

I think part of the draw is that modern Israel is like no other Jewish community in the world: self-governing, engaged with the world and pluralistic, yet unmistakably Jewish, regardless of what percentages of its people are or aren’t religiously observant. Irwin says that on Friday afternoons and evenings, Israelis – religious and secular – greet total strangers on the streets with the words “Shabbat Shalom”.

I’ve come to believe that it’s not enough to support Israel in speaking with our public officials and our non-Jewish neighbors. It’s not enough to support Israel financially, though I’m sure that some of you who are reading this have given very generously. I think it’s critical to give Israel our physical support by going and briefly joining the diverse multi-cultural, multi-denominational mix of Jews there.

I intend to keep you updated on what my colleagues and I see and do in Israel by posting photos and comments here. I hope that looking at the photos and comments will help inspire those of you who haven’t visited Israel to make the trip and those who haven’t visited in a while to go back. Shabbat Shalom!