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This past June, it crossed my mind to write a 4th of July piece for the Record-Journal about how much Jews love America.  My premise was that the only way to truly appreciate how special is this country of ours, is to actually contemplate having to leave it.  And indeed I have been doing more such contemplation over the last two years than I ever thought I would.

Writing such a piece would require me to publicly make a dangerous confession; that I have two loyalties, one as an American and the other as a Jew.  For more than two centuries, Jews seeking admittance into an enlightened West have been denying this charge.  In 1806, Napoleon, pondering the possibility of extending citizenship to French Jews, asked representatives of that community where their loyalties lay.  The Jewish response: we are Frenchmen first, and will fight for France, even against Jews whose loyalties lay elsewhere.  

Our lack of confidence in our status as citizens has always kept us sensitive to the charge of divided loyalty.  Several years ago, all four of my high holiday sermons focused on the idea that Jews constitute a distinct nationality.  We are much more than a religion, I argued.  We have our own language, our own history, our own land, and our own culture - all elements that constitute an identity as a distinct nation.  Several people warned me against phrasing my point this way.  “Say we are a people, not a nation,” they urged me, fearing the implication that the latter term has for our allegiance.

But Jews don't have a divided loyalty,  Rather, many of us have a dual loyalty.  Divided implies that one's two allegiances are at odds with each other.  The reason I wanted to write the piece for the Record-Journal was to let our neighbors know that it was precisely my love for Israel and its people that made me appreciate all the more how blessed I feel to call myself an American.  This was my message to all of you last Yom Kippur when I spoke of my fear that if we as American Jews didn't truly love our mixed identity, we would eventually lose one or the other.

My experiences over the past year have only confirmed this feeling as now six of our close Israeli friends have visited us.  Five of those six had either never been here, or hadn't done so in decades.  But all of them marvelled at how we live.  Let me provide you with one poignant example.  In my sermon last Yom Kippur, I spoke of visiting Israel's northern border where three countries - Israel, Lebanon and Syria - meet.  I pointed out that at some point on such a visit, someone will ask the tour guide to identify the actual border, and the guide will respond immediately, “if it's green, it's Israel.  If it's brown, it isn't.”  I contrasted this experience with returning to my home in Madison which is surrounded by lush woods.  In that sermon, the phrase I employed was the one I have been using to describe America since the first time I visited Israel nineteen years ago: “effortlessly green.”

Just recently, our friend Eyal shared with us a song written by his fourteen-year-old daughter Roni.  Roni is an aspiring musician and she played guitar and sang for us when she visited last summer.  Roni's song is called “Madison,” and it opens with the words “Everything I thought I knew about the color green lost its meaning the moment I laid eyes on you.”  In the chorus she dreams about donning hiking boots and getting lost in the woods.  

Roni's song is beautiful, but she is wrong.  It is we who are surrounded by it, who don't know what green means.  We take it for granted.  With all the upheavals we have experienced in the past several years, there is still so much that we take for granted here in America.   Our experiences in Israel over the past two years - as well as the experience of seeing America through the eyes of our Israeli friends - leaves me convinced we cannot take this country for granted anymore.

Which is why Terri and I, along with many of our Israeli friends, have planned what we hope will be a meaningful, powerful synagogue trip to Israel this coming June.  Of course all trips to Israel are meaningful and powerful.  But we are taking special care that this trip should be more than a sightseeing tour.

Where most trips to Israel, including the two we previously led, begin in the modern, bustling city of Tel Aviv and end amid the ancient walls of Jerusalem, we are going to travel in the opposite direction.  We will start in Jerusalem and examine Judaism’s 4000-year-old roots in this land.  But then we will move forward into the struggle for the modern state with all its challenges and promise.  We'll visit the borders and see for ourselves how truly small is this land that takes up so much room in our imagination.  We'll walk both the winding alleyways of the mystical city of Tsfat, and the equally winding streets of the port city of Haifa where Jews and Arabs live side-by-side in peace.  And we will talk to them and learn first hand the challenges, but also the rewards of such a life.

By the time we get to Tel Aviv, we will be fully immersed in a modern country, and there Itay and Paz will introduce us to Israel's rising generation - shaped both by the fight for Israel's survival and the promise of its future as the world's start-up nation.

And then we will see it all for ourselves.  We will become witnesses to that struggle in places like Kibbutz Be’eri and the site of the Nova music festival.  But we will also witness first hand how Israel is solving the world's most challenging problems - food insecurity, water shortages, encroaching desertification - by making the Negev the laboratory of life-sustaining innovation.  We will, in short, see Israel not as a tourist destination, but as an expression of the human spirit seeking to build a flourishing society amid a difficult climate.  Of course no twelve day excursion can fully immerse you in a country, especially one as complex as Israel.  But by the time we head home, you will have had so much more than a tourist's experience.  You will know Israelis whose lives matter to you.

For those of you who know Israel primarily through its struggles, you may be asking whether it's safe to go there.  Indeed, I have already been asked that question.  The person who asked it of me immediately knew my answer: it's safe to go right now.

The Covid pandemic should have taught me not to try to assess risk for other people.  That said, for me, I feel safer walking the streets of Tel Aviv than I do merging onto the Wilbur Cross Parkway.  Which is my way of saying that we take calculated risks with our safety all the time.  The difference in travelling to Israel is that many of us only know the country through its wars and the surrounding hostility - that is to say we have been prejudiced in our calculation of those calculated risks.

I truly do not believe that traveling to Israel is inherently more risky than any of a hundred other things we might do without giving it a second thought: eating sushi, drinking a toast, wading into the ocean, walking past a construction site.

And against that risk you must weigh the importance of doing so.  There are, I believe, three reasons for you to join me on this trip.  

The first reason is all about you.  You need to see it for yourself.  Israel is both the most sanctioned, most maligned state in the world, and the only one whose majority population is Jewish.  Those two facts should be enough to set off alarm bells.  And those alarm bells should be telling you that you need to see things for yourself.  And indeed you do.  As someone who didn’t travel to Israel until I was in rabbinical school, I can promise you that whatever you think you know about it, you don't know it until you've been there.

The second reason is all about me.  I want to see Israel through your eyes.  You are my community and as such, I want to share this most profound of experiences with you.  I want to hear your questions and try to answer the ones Google can't.  I want to feel that added sense of trust and connection that comes from being with someone at a meaningful moment in their lives.  And indeed this trip will be a meaningful moment in all our lives.

The third reason is all about us.  And it gets back to that article I never wrote for the Record-Journal.  A trip to Israel may or may not make you fall in love with that country.  But if you hold your Judaism at any value at all, it will most assuredly make you fall in love with this one.  It will make you appreciate what a truly unique privilege it is to be an American Jew.  It will make you want all the more to build and protect both our community and our country.   And you will learn the true meaning of the color green.

Come with me to Israel.  Itay and Paz and Eyal and Roni and so many others will be waiting for all of us with open arms.  I think you will leave part of your heart over there.  But even if you do, your heart will still be bigger when you come back.