Martha and I have been in the U.S. for more than two weeks and will go back to Israel in a little less than two weeks. She’ll return via El Al (I tagging along on another airline the same day) with her aliyah visa in hand and immediately, upon landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, become an Israeli citizen. (I did the same thing four-and-a-half years ago.) I’m reflecting on our experience in getting to America from Israel.
I was thinking about possible symbolic ramifications of all this. Pondering further, I offer a figurative flight of fancy…
Our journey took us through the Athens airport. We flew Bluebird Airways, a Greek-owned company, for that first leg of our trip from Israel; our connecting flight, with Delta under Air France auspices, went directly from Athens to Boston.
Athens, Greece - the fountainhead of Hellenism. Jewish life sifted through a Hellenistic filter (a space of dominant Greco-Roman influence with Christian and Muslim amplifications) for over two millenia.
Identifying with that civilization’s values, relying on its support, proved for Jews as much a bane as a boon, and Israel is wisely looking for better friends elsewhere. A parting of ways with Western civilization could be on the horizon.
Support for the Jewish people is weakening, if not crumbling, in the political and cultural life of the West. With surging antisemitism and antizionism, the rate of hate crimes against us is accelerating; defamation of the State of Israel has become de rigueur, a calling card flattering insecurities of a restive public drawn like moths to flaming populist demagogues.
Tuesday’s U.S. primary elections result from the state of Michigan, where one Senate candidate played on antizionist sentiment to defeat his Israel-affirming opponent, is illustrative. It shows an appetite, in the electorate, for simplistic policy prescriptions that depend on scapegoating of the Jewish State and its advocates. Reverberations of the trend are leading to violence against Jews: verbal threats and physical assaults.
This disturbance has further shaken and divided Diaspora and especially American Jewry, some of which is starting to question its general identification - since the New Deal era - with liberalism and progressivism embodied in the Democratic party. For Jews used to assuming they had unwavering allies and support among purportedly open-minded, justice-seeking social activists in the Land of the Free and the Brave, the shock of seeing themselves othered, ghosted, negated and vilified is beginning to sink in.
The bluebird symbolizes “a period of time characterized by sunny, cloudless weather1.” “The bluebird of happiness” is an image peoples across the world recognize and cherish2. Jews in the West did enjoy halcyon days for a time, especially in the United States during the post-World War II “Golden Age of American Jews3,” which came to an abrupt and horrifying halt on October 7, 2023.
Our Bluebird Airways flight from Tel Aviv to Athens symbolizes, for me, the historical movement - a reverse motion screening of Jewish destiny - that drew us away from our homeland into exile. The imperial army that literally dragged Jews in chains to Rome was an agency of Hellenistic design.
Jews got used to living in exile and found ways to validate, enjoy and even glorify it. Our pursuit of happiness led us to mimic our Christian (and to a lesser extent Muslim) neighbors in embracing Greco-Roman ideals.
Even before the 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem and subsequent galut/exile, Pharisaic leaders were dabbling in Greek philosophy; after, during the Christian and Muslim Middle Ages (whose religious cultures internalized and were beholden to Hellenistic values), some of our most prominent Rabbis - the towering multifaceted polymath Maimonides being the most obvious example - did in-depth explorations and examinations of, and found Jewishly “acceptable” applications for, ideas and methodologies drawn from Hellenism.
Earlier, while Jewish religion’s Jesus-oriented (ultimately, Christian) sister rival was quickly forming, Jewish scholarship led to Philo of Alexandria, an Egyptian Jew with a Greek name; he didn’t just dabble in Greek philosophy: he owned it.
Under its sway, he became the effective godfather of Jewish philosophy from ancient to modern times. And his ideas influenced formation of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian theologies - which are not only largely compatible with but intellectually dependent upon Greek ideas. Jewish people have for ages been circling around in a Greco-Roman orbit.
Jews with Ashkenazic roots (i.e., those who lived in northern Europe, eastern Europe excluding the Balkans, and western Europe excluding Iberia) became so acclimated to it that they gradually came to assume it was their natural habit. Yeridah/descent, a going down, opposite of aliyah/ascent or going up to the land of Israel, had turned into a default condition, one of spiritual depression and moral subservience.
It marked Jewish life for two thousand years. Internalizing the foreign code and being able to spout its dogmas mechanically became a badge of honor for Jews enduring the humiliation and degradation of Diaspora existence in Christian Europe.
(The Greek people I met on the plane and at the Athens airport were helpful and sweet. I want to go back to visit Greece; I can learn from them but do not identify with them.)
I see symbolic content also in the names of the airlines, Delta and Air France, that brought us from Athens to Boston. Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, is cognate with dalet, Hebrew’s fourth letter.
Number 4 bears several Jewish connotations. Kabbalists speak of 4 worlds: physical, emotional, conceptual and spiritual. I maintain that such compartmentalization of our lives is a sign of Jewry’s disunity: a disintegrated Jewish consciousness consonant with the exilic condition. Athens to Boston, Europe to America, represents futher societal rupture that Ashkenazic Jews, already split in their apprehension of what being Jewish means, endured in transitioning from Old World to New.
Jews moving into modernity were subject to divergent impulses, conflicting motivations, and contending persuasions. The bond of shared aspiration - to find our way home to eretz yisrael - that had held us together as a people was splintering.
Air France sponsorship of our Delta flight represents (in my figurative model) conditions or constraints upon Jews’ modern experience - first in Europe, then in America - of conditional acceptance and eventual betrayal.
France is where Jews were forced to choose between holding onto their ancient status as members of the Jewish nation and renouncing Jewish nationhood in favor of no longer being segregated and persecuted but Jewish in religion only and otherwise accepted as individual French citizens. They chose the latter option.
Offered as a solution to Jewish diaspora malaise, this was effectively a divide-and-conquer tactic. It led, by way of the Dreyfus Affair, to the Final Solution.
Witnessing Jew-hatred that erupted during the trial of (falsely accused and then convicted of treason) French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Theodor Herzl anticipated cataclysm and spearheaded the Zionist project of reuniting an increasingly divided and disheartened people.
Turnaround, knitting the Jewish soulscape back together, would mean: physically reclaiming the Jewish homeland and participating bodily, 24/7, in its building up; boosting downtrodden Jews’ flagging emotions; translating Jewish religious concepts into secular form; and reanimating our national spirit.
For Israel’s Sephardic and Mizrachi majority, Diaspora existence turned out to be a non-option; upon Israel’s founding, their parents and grandparents were forced to flee their homes in the Muslim world. Most American Jews - mainly descendants of Jews who escaped pogroms, poverty, and genocide from eastern Europe, but including Holocaust survivors and others from western Europe as well - still think of the U.S. as home.
I think they are ambivalent, uncertain about what comes next. They sense trouble but don’t know what to do, where to turn. They’re up in the air - like the plane Martha and I were passengers on. For us, though, that Delta / Air France nonstop flight from Europe to America was not a one-way trip.
Seeing a gathering storm of antisemitism, Herzl worried about the dismal prospects for Jews in modern Europe. In the form of antizionism, the danger has migrated to America. Realistic alarm spurred him to pave the way for Diaspora Jews’ - including Martha’s and my! - rejoining am yisrael in eretz yisrael.
The airport from which we departed and to which we’ll return was named after Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. He wanted to achieve for Jews a “normal” state. Israel’s circumstances are far from normal, but to be Jewish is normal in Israel and nowhere else.
see: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/
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