Can Judaism Survive Without Israel?

Can Judaism Survive Without Israel?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Rabbi Daniel Gordis has recently penned an op-ed piece entitled “No Jewish People Without Israel” (http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/109429/no-jewish-people-without-israel) in which he made a cogent case for the fact that the American Jewish community in particular will not be able to survive the potential loss of Israel.  

The motivation for the piece, of course, is what we hear regularly from America that younger Jews living there are disconnected from Israel and would not see it as a personal tragedy if Israel were to disappear.  As Peter Beinart put it in his much heralded book The Crisis of Zionism, “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Gordis, an author, rabbi and educator for whom I have the highest respect, makes a cogent case why he believes that “The loss of Israel would fundamentally alter American Jewry. It would arrest the revival of Jewish life now unfolding in parts of Europe. And Israeli Jewry would be no more. The end of Israel would, in short, end the Jewish people as we know it.”  It’s worth reading the article but the one item I found missing is the lack of personal experience in an America that existed before there was an Israel, and certainly before the amazing events of June, 1967.

Gordis was born 11 years after the state was founded and, therefore, doesn’t have the personal memory of living in America prior to ’48 although he probably remembers the sea change that occurred after June ’67 even though he was only 8 years old at the time.

I was born at the end of 1939 and even though I was only eight years old when Israel was established I remember what life was like living in the Bronx (where there were 650,000 Jews representing 44% of the total population) in the 40s and 50s.

When I was going to Hebrew School (as the after-school programs were called in those days) my friends and I had to walk just one block from 168^th Street to 167^th Street to get to the Jewish Center of Highbridge.  When we saw the Irish coming the other way, we crossed the street to avoid them.  We were bigger than they were but were still afraid and many times crossing the street did not help, because they could also cross the street and beat us up which they did….and often.

During that same period in 1952 right before Easter, the men’s club of the Sacred Heart Church in the neighborhood decided to pressure (under threat of boycott) all of the storekeepers on 168^th Street, most of whom were Jewish, to put a sign in their windows that said the following:  “We will close from noon-3 PM on Good Friday, April 11th in observance of the death of Christ.”  Can you believe?  And the Jewish storekeepers agreed.  I remember my father returning from work one night during this period and when he saw the posters he called an emergency meeting at the synagogue and, under pressure, the Church recanted. 

(see the NY Times article at: 

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9404E1DD103AE53ABC4E53DFB2668389649EDE ) 

But the fact that they even tried to do this was an indication of the pressures Jews felt in the US in those days.

I recall in 1956 at a college interview at Syracuse University when the interviewer asked me “tell me how you spend your Saturdays?” After all, they could not ask blatantly anti-Semitic questions but the meaning was clear…..we want to keep Jewish enrollment down.  Why in those days, with a Bronx return address, I couldn’t even get a course catalog from Smith College in Northampton MA.  And when my parents tried to make a reservation at a hotel on Cape Cod, which the hotel confirmed by phone said that they had space available, once they received the deposit and saw the Bronx address it was returned saying they made a mistake, there was no room at the inn after all.

Of course, some of that changed a bit after ’48 but the big shift came in ’67 because of Israel’s victory over its neighbors.  It was only then that people were comfortable walking around with kipot instead of hats, openly wearing stars of David around their necks and being more “up front” about their Judaism.

We know there is no guarantee that this situation would surface again if Israel were to go by the boards, but the risk is high and the memory is short.  I still remember Natan Sharansky telling people how much better the jailers treated him and other Jews in Russian prisons each time Israel scored another victory.

So if Beinart and the many surveys are correct and young people are opting out of support for the Zionist enterprise and feel that its demise will not affect them, Gordis’ analysis is “right on.”  

I heard a presentation once in Chicago by Yehezkal Kaufmann Professor Emeritus of Bible Studies at the Hebrew University, Shalom Paul who said:  “Judaism is the only religion in the world whose adherents continued to practice their faith once their temple was destroyed.  After all, if God lets his temple be destroyed, what kind of a God is he in any event?”  Those words are with me today, 32 years after I heard them as if it were yesterday.  We met that challenge once, heaven forbid we should be faced with it again as we just may not be up to the task.