While you are reading these words, my family and I will be en route to Israel on aliyah.
A Zionist dream come true? Yes, but with our one-way El Al tickets in hand, all I can think about is the practical stuff: retrieving our nine suitcases, hoping our pets arrive safely, praying that all our paperwork is in order, getting a taxi from Ben Gurion Airport to our new home, turning on the electricity, renting a car. I even have to remember to bring at least one roll of toilet paper. I don’t recall reading about that in anything Herzl wrote!
Undeniably, this is a major step for my family and me. And the closer we get to departure, the more it is on my mind.
My wife is Israeli, so for her this is going home. One daughter is already serving in the IDF, and our youngest, age 10, is moving with us. Two other grown daughters already have their own lives — one in L.A., the other in Munich.
We are leaving beloved parents, siblings, nephews, nieces, cousins, and dear, dear friends and colleagues. This is hard. Very hard.
For over 30 years, I dreamt of this moment. Dreams are amorphous and not easy to catch, and it was simpler to grasp the immediate reality of getting a job, starting a family, embarking on a career. My “substitute” for aliyah became Israel advocacy, which took me first to the Anti-Defamation League, then to the Jewish Community Relations Council. But the dream lived on.
At this point, with three of our kids grown and our house taken down in the real estate crisis — a liberating experience on one level — now seemed to be the time to make a fresh start where we always wanted to be.
What drew me to Israel in the first place was a profound sense of grievance. “The world” owed us Jews “something.” I was 9 years old in June 1967, and I remember clearly my extended family becoming frozen with fear when several Arab armies mobilized for a war whose stated aim was to destroy Israel. Everybody was convinced that another Holocaust — only 22 years after the defeat of the Nazis — was about to descend on “us” yet again.
My parents and grandparents were not card-carrying Zionists — just ordinary Americans from Boston’s working-class Jewish “ghettos” of Mattapan and Dorchester. Yet, their solidarity with the imperiled Jews of Israel was complete and uncomplicated.
When I was 14, the massacre of Israeli athletes by PLO terrorists in Munich grabbed my attention. The grainy black-and-white satellite images of PLO gunmen holding the Israelis hostage captivated me for hours. I didn’t know a single Israeli then, yet when I watched the memorial service, live from Munich’s Olympic stadium, I mourned deeply. The Yom Kippur War, Entebbe, the bombings and shootings of Israeli civilians in their buses, supermarkets and schools were all part of the Jewish narrative of my adolescence.
Mixed with this existential fear for Jews thousands of miles away was my experience with gutter anti-Semitism. Before the age of 11, I had already been beaten, spat upon and chased by gangs calling me everything from “kike” to “dirty Jew” to “Christ killer.” With Israel’s victories and refusal to surrender, I came to see the proud, self-sufficient and tough Israelis as the answer to my neighborhood’s Jew-haters.
The Israel to which my wife and I are going is a far more complex, real and troubled place than what I imagined as a youngster.
Israeli Arabs still have yet to attain the full equality promised in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Religious pluralism is still out of reach. The difference between haves and have-nots is the widest ever. Shrill anti-democratic and xenophobic voices are grabbing headlines. Settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process remain unresolved.
Meanwhile, Israel’s existence is threatened by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and others, a sobering reality for all, but now a very personal concern.
I remember an old Jewish Agency aliyah poster with a photo of a beautiful rose nestled among many thorns. “We never promised you a rose garden,” read the slogan. Yet while some people prefer only to see the thorns, I have never stopped seeing the rose.
I see a vibrant state engaged in an open debate on its identity, Israel’s democratic institutions remaining strongly rooted, its free media as critical and boisterous as ever, a dynamic civil society, a strong-willed and confident people whose high- tech economy is the world’s envy. My rose is our new home at the Conservative Movement’s Kibbutz Hannaton, which promotes a pluralistic and egalitarian Judaism. It is a place where a “mixed” couple, an Ashkenazi Reform rabbi and an Orthodox Sephardi, wants to raise their children, and where a same-sex couple is raising their three adopted black Jewish kids. Hannaton’s open, tolerant, diverse vision of Israel is my vision.
We now have “skin in the game,” no longer watching the action from a safe distance. I am very proud of the work I did at JCRC on behalf of Israel, grateful for the many professionals and lay leaders whom I have had the privilege of working with, and fully confident that JCRC will continue to lead the pro-Israel advocacy effort in the Bay Area, the most challenging place to be pro-Israel in the U.S.
We will visit here as often as we can, so this is not a “good-bye” but an “until we meet again.” Shalom u’l’hitraot!
Yitzhak Santis is the immediate past director of the Middle East Project of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council.