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Living in the Present
By Rabbi Brad Hirschfield
I love Yom Ha’atzmaut.
Celebrating the creation and existence of the State of Israel is a genuine
treat. But, it’s not without its complexities either. As the day approaches
I often find myself overcome by a barrage of self-congratulatory drivel that
makes it seem as if the State of Israel has never, and could never, commit a
wrong, and an equally powerful torrent of truly hateful propaganda that
would have us forget that Israel remains the one true workable democracy in
the that part of the world which needs them most. Let alone the fact that it
is at least a partial realization of thousands of years of collective Jewish
yearning. And yet, in a year that has seen real challenges for the State,
producing an unusually intense battle between apologists and mud-slingers, I
find myself feeling pretty good about taking this opportunity to reflect on
what Israel means to me and how much possibility it holds out for all of us.
Israel has meant many things to me over the years. From my first visit at
the age of nine when I spent the summer crisscrossing the country with my
parents and three siblings, I felt like the kid in the Disneyland commercial
who finally comes face to face with Mickey, declaring "I've been waiting my
whole life to see you." Later it was a place of starry eyed messianic
expectations as I studied, built, and protected the land when I was in my
late teens and early twenties.
Now I see Israel as the place which inspires us to live in the present, to
live life with all of its uncertainties and complexities, as fully and
richly as possible, worrying less about the past and the future and
relishing all that the present moment in Jewish life affords us.
Nowhere was this clearer than on a just-before-Pesah flight that I took to
Israel from Ethiopia, traveling with a group of fifty-three Falas Mura who
were leaving Africa for new homes and new lives in Israel. Meeting them at
midnight in a compound across from the Israeli embassy in Addis, I was asked
to say a few words in the dark courtyard in which we all stood, before
boarding the buses that would take us to the airport.
I reminded all of us that night, that we had a chance to say a blessing that
had not been uttered for two thousand years. When the rabbis debate how to
bless the moment in which we recall the Exodus, they are divided between
those who would thank God for redemptions in the past, and those who want to
use the moment to pray for the redemption that they hope would yet come. But
that night we recited the blessing not in the past tense, or in the future
tense, but in the present tense, acknowledging the redemption that occurs
right now -- a redemption that could not take place without the State of
Israel and the partnership of a strong Diaspora.
I see Israel as a place that offers the possibility of overcoming the riff
embodied by that Talmudic debate, one between our people's longstanding
tradition of being torn between nostalgia for a glorious mythic past, and
the longing for a redeemed and perfected future. Israel is the reality that
finds a place for both of those, but never at the expense of the real
questions of creating a successful society in which there is a place for
everybody who wants one, and through which our endless ideological debates
about the past and future are properly contextualized with real human needs
for the present.
Israel has been many things for me in the past and will probably mean still
others in the future and all of that is possible because each of those
moments is at some time, the present. For me there is no "what Israel has
always meant" or "what Israel must be," there is only the wonderful
opportunity to guarantee that as many people are as free as possible to
participate in building the place in which that conversation can continue
forever.
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