Riding Two Horses At Once

On Friday night I went to my synagogue’s “Blue Jean Shabbat”, during which we all ate hotdogs, drank Sam Adams beer and welcomed the Sabbath Bride, who was accompanied by Uncle Sam, in commemoration of Erev July 4. A happily serendipitous confluence of celebrations: both spiritual and political.

When I was growing up, my mom would recite a Hungarian saying: “You can’t ride 2 horses with one bottom (in Magyar the word for the bodily part is “segg”, which is slightly more graphic, but you get the point). How do we American Jews/Jewish Americans manage this feat? How do we reconcile our affinity to both promised lands, the one in the east and the one in the west?

This concerns me in light of recent political events in the Middle East; the ramifications of which I fear will come to roost here. There has always been more or less a condominium of interests between the governments of Israel and the United States. When things weren’t so lovey-dovey, like during the period of Bush the First and the loan guarantees issue, these divisions were swept under the rug as much as possible. With Obama’s call for a true just peace agreement between Israel and Palestine on the table, and with Israel’s political leadership minimizing the centrality of the Jewish settlement issue in reaching said peace agreement, are we fast approaching some type of conflict that will be harder to hide?

How to we teach loyalty to a country and an idea (Israel and Zionism) when the practical policies of that land have the potential of running counterpoint to the stated policies and values of the U.S. of A? I’m referring not just to the issues of Jewish settlement in the West Bank but also pending legislation that would limit freedom of speech in Israel for non-Jews and their Jewish sympathizers. Which horse do we ride? More to the point, which Israel do we teach? What vision of Israel do we want the next generation to embrace – that of Shas or Avigdor Lieberman or Tzippi Livni or Gershon Baskin?

More practically, who decides which vision to teach? In the constellation of the American Jewish organizational alphabet soup, who is the arbiter of truth?

I offer no answers - just a lot of questions that we will all need to confront in the weeks and months to come as we move towards peace or war in Israel/Palestine.