A Postcard From the Promised Land

The other day I passed a Chinese-looking man wearing a yarmulke. Historians say the last of the Chinese Jews assimilated and disappeared at least a century ago. I tried not to stare at the man, offering him the illusion of anonymity. I wondered if he belonged to the Burmese-Indian Shinlung tribe, some of whose members believe they are descended from the Israelite tribe of Menasse and have begun moving to Israel, the most recent “lost tribe” to resurface in Zion.

That moment on a Jerusalem street reminded me why I’d left my native New York in 1982 to become an Israeli, to join what Zionists call the ingathering of the exiles, the transformation of the Jews from disparate communities back into a people.

I came in search of Jewish vitality. American Jewry, I felt, was too homogeneous and had lost its creative edge, drawing on fading nostalgia for a vanished Jewish Europe. The Jewish future would happen in Israel, home to the most concentrated ethnic diversity in the Jewish world. To relate to Israel from abroad through headlines about the Middle East conflict meant missing the real story: the slow and painful emergence of an Israeli people, a synthesis of Moroccans and Russians and South Africans and Ethiopians--and Burmese-Indians.

Israel’s ancient prophets promised that the return of the exiles to Zion would be a sign of the messianic era. Israel’s radical diversity, its microcosm of humanity, seemed to me to contain a redemptive promise. Here the dilemmas of the entire world had to be resolved among the Jews themselves: the conflict between east and west, tradition and modernity, theocracy and democracy. Israel, I believed, would be a laboratory for an emerging human consciousness.

Since then, I’ve learned that what divides us is usually more obvious than what unites us. Our common Jewishness is routinely displaced by ethnic and ideological antipathies; the intimate Jewish world I thought I was moving to doesn’t exist. One of my first Israeli experiences was covering, as a journalist, a grenade attack on a Peace Now demonstration by a right-wing Jew; afterward I discovered that the one fatality was a distant relative of mine.

There have been transcendent moments when the miracle of ingathering intrudes on mundane reality, like watching thousands of Ethiopian Jews, wide-eyed and silent and dressed in white robes, descend from planes after trekking through jungle and desert, or seeing a woman who had once been a famous Soviet Jewish prisoner of conscience and whose photo I’d carried as a boy during protests in New York standing in line at a supermarket checkout counter. At such times, Israel, like an impossible but irresistible lover, reminds me why I’m still here.

Each wave of immigration has come in search of a different Israel. The deeply religious Ethiopians came to the Holy Land, the passionately secular Russians to the modern West. Somehow this strip of land must contain those conflicting geographies. Israel has to function as a normal state whose national identity embraces all citizens--including Arab Israelis and the many non-Jews among the Russian immigrants who have linked their fate to ours. And yet, paradoxically, Israel must remain in some sense Jewish: Only an ideologically Zionist Israel would have dispatched planes to Ethiopia to extract thousands of African Jewish tribesmen from a civil war and turned their rescue into a national celebration.

If Israelis seem more anxious than celebratory on our 50th anniversary this week, it is partly because we lack the most common understanding of what Israel is supposed to be. The founders of Israel hoped to unite us with their utopian dream of a pioneering socialist state, transforming human nature through collectivist selflessness. But in the end, socialism failed to inspire even the kibbutzniks, who had to hire foreign workers to tend the fields neglected by their own disinterested children.

Then came the turn of the West Bank settlers, who offered us a messianic vision of the Jews returning to the biblical lands and preparing the way for divine revelation. But redemption of the land meant suppression of another people, and that vision too couldn’t inspire us.

In this place of shattered utopias, the more modest vision that remains is of an Israel that resolves its contradictions by embracing them. We are at once an Eastern and a Western people, a democratic and a Jewish state, a secular entity and a holy land. When Israel learns to celebrate all of itself, it can begin to fulfill the promise of its maddening, exhilarating diversity.