My Israel Is a Strong Israel

Elanna Cahn — June 19, 2014 – 10:27 am | Barack Obama | Foreign Policy | Israel Comments (0) Add a comment

Rabbi Jack Moline has a new Huffington Post blog- My Israel is a Strong Israel.

I have always considered myself a Zionist. That is to say, I believe in Jewish self-determination in our natural homeland, the land of Israel. “Zionism” itself is a political word, but what Zionism stands for is as old as our father Abraham.

While Zionism is ancient, the modern manifestation of Zionism, the State of Israel, is a very recent answer to the Jewish Question posed by cultures and societies for thousands of years. Just at the point when it seemed that Jewish identity was dependent on the pervasive presence of Jew-hatred, the builders of the State of Israel came along and said, “we have gathered from the four corners of the earth to be a free people in our own land.”

But there are still too many Jews who justify their sense of Jewishness by who their enemies are, real or imagined. Our defense organizations lift up data to prove the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism. Our far left-wing suspects every Evangelical of planning for our spiritual destruction. Our far right-wing paints every Muslim as a terrorist-in-waiting. Scratch a non-Jew and… you know the rest.

The notion that our identity depends on the antagonism of our enemies is the mentality of the Jew in galut (exile). It is so ingrained in our culture that you will find it in our sacred heritage (take a look at the liturgical poem Avinu Malkeinu) and in ourhumor (“They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”)

The one place we shouldn’t find it is in Israeli society. 

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