A Life That Is Not an Edition

Most Jewish lives outside the land of Israel are edited. The calendar is negotiated with a workweek that does not know it. The language of prayer is not the language of the hardware store. Community is real, sometimes fiercely real, and still it is a precinct. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “Israel is now the only place in which a total Jewish experience is possible...It is the sole place where Judaism belongs to the public domain, where Hebrew is the language of everyday life and where the Sabbath and the festivals form the rhythm of the calendar.”

Total is a daring word. It does not mean perfect, it means unfragmented. The festival is not an insert in a gentile month, it is the month. Hebrew is not a skill reserved for the sanctuary. It is how a nurse speaks to a patient at three in the morning.

The Tosefta in Avodah Zarah taught, in language that startles modern ears, that “living in Eretz Yisrael is equal to all the mitzvot in the Torah.” The Sages were not ranking airline miles. They were saying that place is not a backdrop to Jewish law, place is one of the commandments’ conditions. A life can be devout and incomplete at the same time if the map is missing.

Yossi Klein Halevi caught the everyday version of that teaching: “Every so often I remember that the mundane details of my life as a Jew in a sovereign Jewish state formed the most extravagant dreams of my ancestors.” The line works because it refuses theater. A dry cleaner in Rehovot, a report card in Hebrew, an argument about a municipal tax. Ancestors would have recognized the sanctity in those scraps more quickly than we do. We have grown used to miracles and now want them to announce themselves.

Ariel Sharon, speaking to new olim in 2005, was blunt: “Israel is the only place in the world where it is possible to lead a fully Jewish existence. Only here can you ensure that your children and grandchildren will remain Jewish.” Demography is not destiny in every case, and Jewish creativity in the Diaspora is a fact of history. Still, a prime minister was naming what many families already whisper. Continuity is easier where Jewishness is the air. Easier is not automatic, but it is a head start the size of a country.

Aliyah in this light is less a leap than a decision to stop living in excerpt. Excerpted Judaism can be beautiful, it produces scholars, philanthropists, and communities that hold the line with astonishing loyalty. It also asks each generation to rebuild the frame. In Israel the frame is standing. One may love it or argue with it, but one does not have to invent it before breakfast.

A total Jewish experience includes the parts that do not photograph well. Army service for those called, coalition politics that embarrass, neighbors who vote differently and still sit in the same shelter. Rabbi Sacks’s Sabbath-as-calendar includes the Friday afternoon rush that is not spiritually pretty. Halevi’s mundane details include bureaucracy. The Tosefta’s equalization of living in the Land with all the mitzvot includes the mitzvot that only appear when one is actually there, holding produce and asking about tithes. Sharon’s fully Jewish existence includes the risk that one’s children will take Jewishness for granted. That risk is the opposite of disappearance. It is the risk of normalcy. After a long exile, normalcy is a kind of praise.

Readers who already give to Israel, visit Israel, and defend Israel sometimes believe they have completed the circle. Support is not residence, and residence is the unedited text. This column’s purpose is to keep the difference visible so that aliyah remains a live question rather than a slogan reserved for other people.

If the ancestors dreamed of our mundane details, the decent response is to live a few of those details on their soil. Not because disaster is coming, but because the total life is already possible, and possibility unused has a way of thinning into nostalgia.

A family considering the move will make lists that include schools, licenses, and aging parents. Those lists are adult, and they should be written. Next to them another list belongs: Hebrew in the street, a calendar that does not apologize, children who may grow bored of sacred stones and then, one day, like Halevi, remember. The second list does not erase the first. It keeps the first from pretending to be the whole story.

The call home is, at bottom, a call to an unedited life. Rabbi Sacks named it, the Tosefta weighed it, Halevi noticed it in the kitchen, and Ariel Sharon told new immigrants they had arrived at the only address where that life is the default. The rest is packing, patience, and the first ordinary Tuesday in a country that does not treat Jewishness as an intermission.