...You don't volunteer for combat units or work with sick children because you feel like you matter. On the contrary, you feel significant because you endured captivity training or wiped the nose of a sick child. In a gross generalization, the emigre is not shirking a contribution to the country's future. Rather, there is no glue holding him here because he did not contribute in the past.
Emily Amrousi..
Israel Hayom..
18 October '13..
We have just read the weekly Torah portion of Lech Lecha about how Abraham makes his way to the Promised Land, and all of a sudden there is a revival of the very '70 s conversation about the new "yordim" (emigres) who turn their backs on the Promised Land.
Couples who discover that Berlin has excellent television, educated young people with a second passport for a rainy day, parents who give their children international names in case of relocation, Israeli neighborhoods in New York, and the periodic survey showing that almost all of us have ruminated over leaving this Levantine desert.
I look around at the Israelis I know and cannot imagine any of them leaving Israel permanently. Of course, you might say, you live in a religious Zionist community where people are indoctrinated from childhood to be eternal Zionists. But no, the people I am thinking of are both religious and secular. Naomi, who did a year of national service working with handicapped children, and Evyatar, a kibbutznik, who is studying in a secular pre-military academy, Keren from a students' village in the Negev, and Yehoshua from a project for at-risk youth in Ramle. People who served in elite commando units, and people who served in units so secret they can only be identified by an initial. I know for a fact that none of them would leave the land even if there were a drought of coffee.
What keeps a person in their homeland? A good living and the ability to buy an apartment are necessary, but are not a sufficient reason. For someone to want to stay despite the difficulties (and there are plenty) they need to see this place as a home and community. How does one engineer a sense of community, belonging and duty? Excuse the high-flown vocabulary.
A person needs to feel like he belongs to a place (a sense of ownership) and owes something to that place (a sense of responsibility) and more importantly, he needs to feel that he is important to the place: that he has his own value relative to his surroundings.
Community is an elusive concept, but one that creates identity. If the "community" identifies my abilities as critical to its existence, if who and what I am are essential to the place where I live, then I matter. And despair becomes a less convenient stance.
Neither Naomi or Evyatar will leave Israel. Their contributions to the country are not the result of that fact, but the reason for it. In the words of Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, you love the one to whom you give. In other words, you don't give to the person you love, you love the person to whom you have given.
You don't volunteer for combat units or work with sick children because you feel like you matter. On the contrary, you feel significant because you endured captivity training or wiped the nose of a sick child. In a gross generalization, the emigre is not shirking a contribution to the country's future. Rather, there is no glue holding him here because he did not contribute in the past.
We must provide our children with opportunities to contribute. We must give them the opportunity to be significant. Yes, whether they like it or not. To volunteer with Holocaust survivors, because it is an important thing to do but also to teach them to give, to love and to belong.
This week marks the anniversary of the death of our foremother Rachel. It turns out that God's famous words consoling Rachel, "Refrain your voice from weeping" (Jeremiah 31:15), were not spoken after the Babylonian exile had made the land desolate, but because the children themselves wanted to leave.
Anyone who reads the verses carefully discovers that the impoverished people who stayed behind after the Temple's destruction gathered at Rachel's tomb in Bethlehem and sought to emigrate to Egypt (Jeremiah 42-43).
Rachel weeps because they do not want to stay in their scorched homeland, and God comforts her by promising to bring them back. The Zohar's description is very moving: "In the future the children of Israel will come and weep at Rachel's tomb, in the same way that she wept over their desire to leave the land. They will weep over her grave beseeching her not to leave them."
The weeping is over those who voluntarily leave the land -- whether by giving parts of it away or buying a one-way plane ticket.
You don't need to board an airplane to emigrate from Israel. This week we learned that emigration can also be the arrest of a Jew because his lips moved in prayer (on the Temple Mount).
Jews who sang Hatikvah, waved the Israeli flag and recited the Shema in Judaism's holiest place were dragged into police interrogation rooms. Emigration from Israel is also the fact that all the world's nations choose to locate their embassies in Tel Aviv, while ignoring Israel's lawful capital, and we remain silent. Rachel weeps over her children.
Original Title: The test of belonging
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6019
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