Tlie Rabin Assassination: The Israel American Jews Should Support hroughout the 1970s and '80s, Israel's lads hinted at deep spiritual instincts, however identity as a Jewish state seemed unfocused, among secularists. As a people whose immutable. Diplomatically ghettoized, daily lives are constandy violated by death, Israelis and led by Holocaust survivors have a far greater need for religious expression TMenachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, Israelis than many of them know. felt a grim, if natural, link with the Jewish past. But those instincts and needs are not being Orthodox West Bank settlers displaced secular translated into new Israeli forms of Judaism. kibbutzniks as the new pioneering elite. Leading Jewishness and Israeliness are detaching into bohemian artists and actors became ultra- warring camps. Orthodox penitents, lending a new, if uneasy, Clearly, Israel must become more Israeli— legitimacy to religion. more democratic—extending national identity But in the 1990s a confluence of powerful to its nonjewish citizens not with a grudging for­ counter-trends is challenging the country's mality, but vigorously and unequivocally. It is Jewish identity. With the end of communism and absurd that a Diaspora Jew, with no intention of the beginning of the Mideast peace process, ever living here, can feel a greater sense of Israel has become an accepted member of the belonging to the modern state of Israel than a community of nations, eroding its sense of nonjewish Israeli who was born and will die in Jewish "otherness." Economic prosperity has shat­ Israel. A more democratic Israel means a less for­ Yossi Klein Halevi, a tered pioneering ideology and with it the mally Jewish one led by a secular government senior writer for The romance of the settlement movement. The grow­ equally representing all of the people. But at the Jerusalem Report, is ing participation of the country's 800,000 Arab same time, Israeli society needs to be rooted in author of Memoirs of citizens in the democratic process means that Jewish values and traditions, if only to resist a Jewish Extremist "Israeliness" can no longer be instinctively becoming a cultural chameleon, confusing its (Little, Brown, 1995). equated with Jewishness. And the arrival of over identity with the latest imported fads. He lives in Jerusalem half a million immigrants from the former Soviet On some level, democracy and Jewishness are with his wife and two Union, the least Jewishly educated and committed hopelessly contradictory. What do we do, for children. of any group of newcomers yet, has augmented example, with the Law of Return, which dis­ that Israeli minority that lacks any emotional criminates against non-Jewish Israelis and yet religious attachment. which most Jewish Israelis—understandably— In the increasing struggle over the country's insist on preserving? most basic identity—whether it will remain a And yet we have no choice but to struggle with Jewish state aligned with the Diaspora and the the paradox at the heart of our national identity. Jewish past or become an entirely secular Israeli In recent months, some important voices have state representing only its own citizens—Yitzhak been raised, calling for an Israel that is at once Rabin's assassination has substantially boosted politically more democratic and culturally more the latter option. For many secularists, the mur­ Jewish. In fact, an official alliance seems to be der has delegitimized not just Religious emerging, transcending Left-Right enmities and Zionism—until now the most credible bridge uniting liberal Orthodox Jews and Jewishly com­ between Jewishness and Israeliness—but Judaism mitted secular liberals. Among the Orthodox are itself. That rejection will hasten the process, Rabbi Yehudah Amital of the dovish Meimad already well underway even before the assassina­ Religious Zionist movement and West Bank set- tion, of the separation of religion and state, and dement activist Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun; among the with it, perhaps, the emergence of a post-Jewish secularists, novelist A.B. Yehoshua as well as Israel. prominent journalists Yaron London and And yet, the eventual collapse of statist Amnon Dankner, both of whom have recently Orthodoxy doesn't have to mean the end of a written essays bemoaning the superficiality of an Jewishly connected Israel. The opposite may be Israeli secular culture emptied of Jewish content. true: Separation of religion and state can free American Jews should learn those and other Judaism and encourage the development of an names, should begin supporting those trying to indigenous Israeli spirituality. The thousands of create an Israel that most closely approximates young people who gathered in Tel Aviv's Rabin their own vision. As a pluralistic community, Square lighting candles and singing Hebrew bal­ American Jews need a more democratic Israel. Shocks; and Aftershocks And as a Diaspora community seeking sources of dangerous to Israel's soul. inspiration and renewal, American Jews also need Israel is a web of contradictions, at once a more Jewish Israel. Eastern and Western, Jewish and Israeli, a holy That dual interest requires American Jewish land and a secular western democracy. Decisive liberals to reevaluate their own Israeli alliances. victory for any of its competing cultural camps Just as most American Jews wouldn't support will impoverish the country and alienate key Israel's anti-democratic forces, so should they groups from its national identity. refrain from aligning with militandy antijudaic American Jews should help us resist simplistic secularists, even if they are champions of greater resolutions of our identity conflicts. Maintaining democracy. Indeed, those "ultra-secularists" are the paradox of Israeliness and Jewishness will the mirror image of the ultra-Orthodox. The first insure our spiritual vitality and American Jewry's group finds nothing relevant in Jewish tradition; link with Israel. the second, nothing relevant outside it. Both are The Still, Small "Voices of Israeli Youth cannot speak to the havoc that Yitzhak insecurity—a personal need to be a part of some­ Rabin's assassination caused throughout thing stronger than ourselves. Intuitively, we all Israel and the Jewish world, but I can talk knew we needed this collective support. Only about the perplexing response of Israel's after we found ourselves feeling safe and com­ I[youth. I was among those who shed the tears, who forted in our own tender embrace did we start to wrote the poems, who lit the candles while hud­ think about what it was that had made us feel so dling together in the pitch dark night of confu- vulnerable in the first place. ion, singing songs that had never really meant During the time we spent singing and crying .nything to us before. and praying together, we slowly came to an The curious diing is, reflecting on those few understanding of what it was that we were so lays, that we do not really know7 why we acted as scared of—being by ourselves, being alone. Only i)we did, and are unable—even now—to define after being together did we become aware of the Jwhat it is that we felt, what it is that we are feel­ true significance of the murder, all of us together, ing. The truth is, we surprised ourselves as we sur­ each of us alone. prised our parents. Was it simply that we had lost our leader, on The meaning of our spontaneous reaction whom we depended for peace and tranquility? Micha Breakstone, 17, isn't anything easily defined. Rather it is con­ Was it the threat of a civil war that made us so was bom and raised in tained somewhere in the volumes of poems and fearful? Had our values been washed away in the Israel. He lives in testimonies we produced, which we published gushing surge of blood spewing from Yitzhak Jerusalem with his family. upon the walls and scattered among the flowers Rabin's heart? Was it the frightening lightness of offered by a country in mourning, and which we our being? laminated in a mixture of tears and melted wax. And why, why the hell did we take notice Wandering through the streets of Jerusalem only now? benveen 2 and 3 a.m. on my way from the prime Two articles in the Hebrew papers gave some­ minister's residence to nowhere, with the com­ what contradictory analyses. One heralded the forting strumming of the guitar now muffled by reaction of Israel's young people as a long-await­ a growing separation and rbneliness, I realized ed, but essentially unanticipated sign that my gen­ something that had evaded me earlier. At a dis­ eration—the first thought not to have imbibed tance of a few hundred yards from my friends, I the Zionist dream with their mothers' milk—was became aware of a vanishing sense of security. perhaps worthy after all of inheriting the Jewish I think that what moved the hundreds of thou­ state, which had indeed been handed us on a sil­ sands of teenagers who were out there in the ver platter. The second article discounted this streets long after the sun had set was not grief or assessment, warning Peres that if he wanted our the desire to mourn, but rather the feeling of support in the future, he would have to look for us not at nighttime vigils or in venues of political that will become clearer to others. I want to be activism, but at the malls. According to this assess­ able to believe—for me personally, and for my ment, the State is really of less interest to us than generation—that our reaction to the assassina­ the silver platter on which it has been served. tion was more than a passing urge to connect to I hope this is not true.