Landing in Holland

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Kol Nidre 5762 - September 26, 2001

A colleague of mine, who learned that his child has significant special needs, described the experience in this way.

Imagine that you have always wanted to go to Italy. You've collected guidebooks and you've spent hours making plans and figuring out exactly where you want to go. You've even learned a few phrases of Italian.

You get on a plane and everything goes fine until just before landing. Then you hear them announce:

Attention all passengers. We are about to make our final descent to our destination. Please be sure all trays and seatbacks are in their full upright position. We should be on the ground in just a few minutes. Local time in Holland is 11:02. Thank you for traveling with us and enjoy your stay in Holland.

Wait a minute, you say. There must be some mistake. Who messed up my ticket?

I didn't sign up to go to Holland. My friends are all going to Italy.

In constructing this analogy my friend chose Holland carefully. It is not a horrible place. If you don't spend all your time there wishing you were in Italy, you could actually have a pleasant visit. Of course you'll need a different set of guidebooks, and you'll need to learn a different language. Some distance may develop between you and the friends who did end up in Italy, and you may develop new friends with whom you share this Holland experience.

Most of us as parents, especially as our children have grown older, into their later teenage years and beyond, have had the experience of finding ourselves, at one time or another, not where we thought we were headed. But those whose children develop a significant disease or disability may have the most pronounced sense of dislocation. Initially people describe feeling lost or betrayed, looking sometimes for someone or something to blame, struggling to stay connected to their child and to the community. Sometimes it takes a long time until the joys and satisfaction that are possible in this new terrain become apparent and realizable.

I was thinking about the Holland analogy over the summer with regard to the economic downturn. Quite a number of our members were finding themselves not where they thought they were headed. Entrepreneurs, who had seemed on the verge of making it big, instead lost their companies. Individuals who had worked for the same stable firm for 20 or more years and believed they had chosen security over the potential for greater rewards in a start up, were suddenly dismissed. Others who had invested so much, both literally and emotionally, in the concept of an ever expanding economy, could not quite believe that the market would let them down. The economic downturn pre September 11th was for some people like discovering that dad really isn't a great pitcher and your mom doesn't sing that well either. People dealt with that disillusionment in a variety of ways. Some in examining their goals and aspirations, decided that a change of course was what's needed. Perhaps the golden ring they had been chasing, wasn't the one they really wanted.

One man who came to speak to me last month, seemed at some level relieved at his change of fortune. Though he had probably lost his chance to make a million dollars before he was forty, he thought he would be in a position to regain his evenings and weekends and to spend them with his young children.

The gold fever of last year seems like a distant dream. Now we are facing different challenges in keeping the economy afloat. The bumpiness of the current ride has some more obvious causes, and has brought forth some direct responses. Hopefully this will bring stability before too many people are hurt further.

But when we reach a new equilibrium, I hope there will be some remembrance of this summer that our bubble burst. Perhaps if our faith in the fairness of the economic market in rewarding our own efforts was shaken a bit, we will be more sympathetic to helping others who remain in need, even when our own fortunes improve.

Over the summer, thinking about my friend's analogy about Italy and Holland, I thought also about the reality of Israel. When I was growing up, Israel was a source of great pride to Jews in America. For a while, it seemed that Israel might even make the synagogue obsolete, so great was the sense of fulfillment found in supporting the Jewish homeland among American Jews. Years pass and I look around and it is almost like I am in a different country. During this past year, I have heard Jewish people, members of our congregation, talk about Israel as a source, not of pride, but of shame.

For my parents and their generation, Israel was the great miracle that they witnessed in their own lifetime. Israel was about idealism and social justice, a country of dreams made into reality with our own hands. Their memories are of Operation Magic Carpet, when all of Yemen's Jews were flown to safety- and of the 1950's as Israel valiantly absorbed immigrants equal in number to the resident population, even though food was scarce enough to require rationing. This was the Israel of orange groves and folk dancing, not McDonalds, malls and high tech. Israel's victory in 1967 was a surprise: more than that, it confounded expectations, and was seen as assurance that the Holocaust would not happen again. For Jews at that time, Israel's wars were in some ways like World War II, wars that needed to be fought and could be fought with pride. Supporting Israel in the years following the Six Day War allowed American Jews to solve their identity problem and helped many people to feel positive about themselves as Jews, All of the problems that would result from the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza strip, were distant thunder.

Those who are younger than me have very different memories of Israel's history. The war they remember most clearly may be the War in Lebanon, a dirty war, more akin to our own Vietnam. Perhaps they remember the Ethiopian Jews being airlifted out of famine ridden Africa, but media coverage has changed since 1959, and so we got to see the whole story, the difficulties as well as the successes. There were victories in the absorption of the Jews from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia in the 1990's, but the coverage many saw dealt with the problems -- the caravan communities, the problems in the schools. Reform Jews today are acutely aware of the legal disabilities the Reform movement experiences in Israel and of the monopoly the Ultra-Orthodox have on religion. Most certainly those younger than me have grown up on the distressing pictures from the first and second intifadas, pictures of Israeli soldiers with modern weapons and Palestinian children with rocks and stones.

For many people it seems harder to be a Zionist today than it was a generation ago. And its true that it is hard to justify everything the various Israeli governments have done or to maintain one's belief that the current Israeli administration has always made the wisest choices. I remain concerned that the settlements complicate all negotiations, and that inequities in the treatment of Israeli Arabs have come back to haunt us. Still I have been surprised over the past year to find so many people unwilling to give Israel any benefit of the doubt, to make any attempt to understand its truly threatening and difficult situation, or to think of how what Israel has done compares to what other countries have done in similar or even less dangerous situations.

It was not that long ago that in Europe, in one of the great cities of the ``civilized" western world, IMF protestors were shot and killed, though in this case the protests were hardly a threat to Italian society. Did people call Genoa a pariah city? Several years ago there was rioting in Los Angeles, following the Rodney King verdict. The rioting lasted four days. It took place within a very circumscribed area. The rioters were not armed with rockets or grenades, nor were they blowing up fast food restaurants and disco's. It was a mob of looters, intent on breaking into stores and stealing television sets. At that time 50 people were killed in LA in four days. I don't recall a move to cut off all federal and state tax funds.

I am not holding up the LAPD as a model. I am not suggesting that everything Israel has done is perfect. I am just trying to give a little perspective on the criticisms that we have been hearing all year long.

I have had disagreements with Israeli policy at times over the past year, but that does not mean I believe that the Arabs are justified in their reign of terror. As Woody Allen used to say, even paranoid people have enemies. Professor Benny Morris, one of the Israeli historians whose work has been primarily directed toward breaking down earlier myths of Israel's founding history, spoke last month in Berkeley. When he criticized Arab leadership for having missed an opportunity to move towards peace, he was heckled. Responding to the accusation that he, as someone who had been critical of Israel, should not make such an accusation, he responded: "I never said Israel was the only aggressor".

In our general community ignorance about Israel and the history of the Middle East abounds. Some people think there was once a Palestinian state that Israel destroyed. Few people are aware that more than half of contemporary Israeli Jews are refugees from Arab countries or their descendents. The average American's estimate of how many Palestinians became refugees in 1948 is off, not by percentage points, but by orders of magnitude. Few realize the proportionality between this issue and other world refugee situations, and fewer still are aware of how the Palestinians have been mistreated by their Arab brethren, the one topic incidentally, on which the Jews and Arabs in our primarily Palestinian Arab Jewish discussion group could agree.

I pray that this most recent cease-fire will hold, releasing Israel from the tremendous pressure of acting in a humane and just manner with an enemy who is not committed to similar standards of behavior. Perhaps the current situation will cause us to view Israel's dilemma more sympathetically, as it is not that different from our own. When fighting terrorism, it is not so easy to figure out how can one prevent attacks on one's own citizens, without doing harm to civilians or causing further hatred and resentment and thus future attacks. Having denounced terrorism at the World Trade Center, perhaps the other nations of the world will also denounce terrorism in Pizza Parlor's and discotheques?

Returning for a moment to our original analogy, the real question is what happens, not when we land in Holland, another relatively familiar and hospitable destination, but when we land someplace not previously on the map. For many of us that has been our feeling since September 11th. Even as we realize that our upset and anxiety, at this remove, is nothing compared to that of those who have suffered real and permanent personal losses, still many of us want to stand up and protest- this wasn't the movie I came to see.

When the world of our ancestors was turned upside down by the destruction of the Temple and the exile to Babylon- our people found the resolve to do something that had never been done before, to maintain their identify and faith, though they had been separated from their ancestral land. The vision they had of their future, of a Jerusalem rebuilt and at peace, carried them through very difficult times. At first they were insecure in the unfamiliar terrain, "how can we sing the Lord's prayers in a foreign land". They lacked a road map of how to get from here to there. But the words of Deutero-Isaiah inspired them, and kept them pointed in the right direction.

I believe that we as Americans have a vision of what our great country can be and of its potential to contribute to the world. That vision, of democracy and justice, prosperity and peace, difficult though it may be always to achieve, will lead us through this difficult time. As American Jews we have embraced the American dream, since George Washington assured us in his greetings to the Touro Synagogue in Newport Rhode Island that the government of the United States ( would give ) "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance". Tonight we join in Washington's prayer at the conclusion of his message, "May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths," ken yihi ratzon, so may it be God's will.