I was thrilled as a young boy to watch the rebirth of Israel. I knew of the Holocaust; pictures of people suffering and dead in the camps sent shivers up my spine. I celebrated with Jewish friends in Philadelphia when Israeli independence was declared in 1948. But it wasn’t the same, really, because I’m not Jewish.
For Jews, supporting Israel was choosing life over death, but I did not feel that. I did not have that personal stake.
My grandparents did not come to the U.S. because of repression or persecution. They came for economic advantage. My people did not suffer the consequences of a holocaust. Centuries ago some of my people suffered repression, but when they had enough, they moved across the English Channel to better their lot, and later across the Atlantic Ocean for the same reason.
In 1960, I went with millions of others to see Paul Newman and Sal Mineo as heroes in the film version of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus. Mineo played a young survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, a symbol of heroism and cunning in the midst of passivity and slaughter. Newman played a native Israeli, that new breed born of the kibbutz who was carving out a new land and a vibrant approach to being Jewish.
I was barely beyond youthful naivete when the movie came out, and it made a huge unfiltered impression on me. The key figures looked strangely like Americans transported into an Israeli context, but they were heroic as Jews. I realize that the casting was deliberate to garner support through identification, and the film’s caricature of Palestinians is in retrospect embarrassing. Yet overall the film was impressive, because it showed Jews no longer as victims, but as actors on the world stage.
Today, I love Israel – with its warts and its beauty marks. But there is a clear difference between my love for Israel and the love my Jewish friends have for this small nation. I can love it from a distance. I can love it critically. I can love it without going there. All of this is true for American Jews, with one exception. I’m not Jewish and they are, and that makes all the difference, because for them Israel matters in ways that it may never matter for me. It may matter as a source of pride; it may matter as a source of pain. Whatever the reason, it’s different for them.
I identify with the attempt to build a democracy on a precipice faced by Arab countries to the north, east, and south, and the ocean on the west. I identify with the technological advances made by this little country. But would it matter to me if Israel eventually fails as an experiment of modern rebirth? On one level I say yes, but on another level I cannot answer fully, because I am not tied to Israel in the same way as my Jewish friends.
As the years go by and the critique against Israel rises around the globe, and within so much of liberal American Christianity, I go deeper into my own psyche to understand the dynamic that draws me ever onward in Jewish-Christian relations. When I do, I see that my investment in Jewish-Christian relations has paid off in the form of a connection to Israel that is closer than that of many, if not most, other Christians.
I have a personal stake in Israel. I inhabit what Paul van Buren called “the Jewish-Christian reality,” a mental territory that will not allow for being Christian without a relationship with Judaism. Since all contemporary expressions of Judaism include a connection to Israel, I too am connected. Israel matters to me, even if I’m not Jewish.