(Continued from p.5)
those Action Alerts had to do with issues of immigrant rights, welfare, and related matters. There is very, very little indeed, on threats to Israel, terror in Israel, American pressures on Israel, even though these have been, of course, all very live issues over the last two years.An interesting poll conducted by the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council in 1996 showed that while JCRC's across the country, including Indianapolis, and the national JCRC umbrella group, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, were all promoting an agenda emphasizing social action in a liberal vein, the Indianapolis Jewish community held very different views and had different priorities. With regard to Israel, while the JCRC's have typically claimed overwhelming Jewish support for Oslo, the Indianapolis JCRC poll indicated otherwise, with less than half those polled believing, for example, that Israel should give up Judea and Samaria, even with a credible peace. Less than half believed the PA should receive further American aid, more than two-thirds said Arafat could not be trusted, and eighty percent believed a Palestinian state would be a threat to Israel's security.
Clearly, the federation agenda and the JCRC priorities reflect a particular political orientation of the leadership; a promoting of so-called liberal issues, a desire to ally the Jewish community with the politically correct, and a discomfiture with defending Israel, no doubt especially Israel under its current government,
Many Jewish leaders prefer Jewish self-definition to interpret charity and good deeds in ways that converge with liberal political agendas.
But however significant tzedakah and tikkum olam are in Jewish teaching, if Jewish education is reduced to that, and more narrowly to a particular, politically correct social agenda, it is more liberal orthodoxy than Judaism and will not of itself hold people to their Jewishness. And if the education is more, if it is a genuine immersion in Jewish history and tradition, in the pageant of Jewish peoplehood, a necessary element for that richer immersion to have a hold on people will be its being perceived as having some transcending validity and potency, being a thing not just of yesterday but of today and tomorrow. And that ongoing validity must relate to Jewish life, to something essentially Jewish, in order to hold people to Jewish life, and not just relate to passing au courant alliances with external and transient social movements. More specifically, if Jewish history and tradition are seen as primarily something which in Europe ended in annihilation, the subliminal message to the youngno matter what face one puts on Jewish life, what one conveys of its beauty, in the schools or in Jewish homewill be that this is a vestigial people and a vestigial tradition.
From this perspective, the viability of Israel is essential for the survival of the Jewish people. The well-being of Israel, as a fulfillment of Jewish vitality and creativity, as evidence of the ongoing potency of Jewish creativity, is a necessary condition for the continued existence of the Jews. Nor can other affirmations of Jewish vitality and creativity replace Israel in this transmission of a sense of the continuing meaningfulness of Jewish history, tradition and peoplehood. Noting, for example, the disproportionate Jewish intellectual and artistic contributions to the broader society, or other Diaspora achievements, as evidence of the ongoing potency of Jewish creativity, cannot have the same impact. The achievements of individual Jews, although no doubt related for many in no small part to their Jewish background, and no doubt having always served as a source of ethnic pride in our communities, is hardly something that enhances connection to Judaism and the Jewish community. The parental embrace of Jewish achievers and achievements, if it inspires anything, is more likely to inspire the young to emulation of achievement than to fidelity to Judaism. And this is even more so as many of those so embraced have hardly been paragons of Jewish fidelity; have rather often been either indifferent to or even hostile to their Jewish background.
I add this in part because a commonly heard anti-Zionist argument, one still heard among those who prefer to distance themselves from Israel, is that Jewish creativity has been related to the Diaspora condition and that the normality of Israel, of being a Jew in a Jewish state, would undercut that creativity. Aside from the misconceived psychology, and the questionable morality in its neglecting the cost in pain and suffering that the condition of exile has so often entailed, a steep price to pay for creativity even if the link were bonafide, the argument also ignores the fact that the Jewish condition it is lauding is inherently unstable and cannot be
(Continued on p.7)
Outpost - 6 - April 1999