My congregation teaches me...

One of the many rewards of congregational life at Temple Emanu-El is the collective learning of my ever-probing congregation.  An example:  here is a link to an article on the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict that was recently forwarded to me.  Probably on my own I would not have come across it.

The piece  is by Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Foreign Minister in the Ehud Barak government.  It is a review (in the magazine Foreign Affairs) of the new Benny Morris  book about the 1948 War of Independence.  Ben-Ami outlines in his review, what was achieved, but also the grisly and ongoing cost of Israeli independence for both Jews and Palestinians. 

Looking clearly at events shrouded in national myth is hard but vitally necessary.  To engage young Jews who are skeptical of any national narrative in today's less credulous age, I must be prepared to talk tachlis, as it were.  The facts of Israel's founding do not undermine my love of Israel nor my Zionism, but they do impact how I speak; my Zionism is grounded in a harder, more nuanced world of power and painful compromise than the softer and simpler world of myth.  Instead of myth, I offer young Emanu-Elniks (together with us older ones) a relationship with Israel unafraid of fact and grounded in a Zionist commitment, that can love the Jewish nation in Israel and beyond "warts and all" .  

So, for your copy of Foreign Affairs left in outside my study door:  thanks, Phil!