Imagine
it's January 1946. Imagine, too, that you are exactly who you are now:
thoughtful, educated, worldly, rational. And then, someone says to you, "Tell me
about the future of the Jews."
So
you survey the world in January 1946. It's a year after the liberation of
Auschwitz, and just months since the war has ended. You cast your eyes toward
Eastern Europe, which not much earlier had been the world's center of Jewish
life, learning, literature and culture. Eastern European Jewry is
gone.
Though
we commonly say that Hitler annihilated one third of the world's Jews, that
number is technically correct but misses the point. The number that really
matters is that after Hitler, 90 percent of Eastern Europe's Jews had been
murdered.
Prior
to the war, there had been some 3,200,000 Polish Jews. At the end of the war,
merely 300,000 were left. By 1950, estimates are that 100,000 Jews remained in
Poland. As far as Polish Jewry was concerned, Hitler had
won.
Hitler
won in Hungary, too, and throughout Eastern Europe. The great seat of Jewish
life was simply no longer. There are a few Jews left there, of course, but many
of those who did survive will for a long time be living under Soviet rule,
which, if you'd had a crystal ball, you'd know was going to get infinitely worse
long before it got any better. A future for the Jews? It did not look
pretty.
You
could look a bit westward. You might turn your attention to Salonika.
Some
56,000 Jews had lived there before the war; 98% of them died. Westward still,
you might consider France. But the story of Vichy France would bring you no
solace.
Europe,
until only some 10 years earlier the center of the Jewish world, was an
enormous, blood-soaked Jewish cemetery - only without markers to note the names
of the millions who had been butchered.
So
you might turn your attention across the Atlantic Ocean, to the United
States.
But
the American Jews you would have surveyed in 1946 were not the American Jews of
today. Today, at AIPAC's annual Policy Conference, for example, thousands of
American Jews (and many non- Jews, as well) ascend the steps of Capitol Hill to
speak to their elected officials about Israel. They do so with a sense of
absolute entitlement (in the best sense of the word), with no
hesitation.
But
between 1938 and 1945, how many Jews ascended those steps to demand that at
least one bomb be dropped on the tracks to Auschwitz, or that American shores be
opened to at least some of the thousands of Jews who had literally nowhere to
go? During the worst years that the Jews had known in two millennia, virtually
no Jews went to Capitol Hill or the White House. There was the famous Rabbis'
March of October 1943, in which some 400 mostly Orthodox rabbis went to the
White House (though FDR refused to meet with them), but that was about
it.
In
January 1946, American Jews did not interview for positions on Wall Street
wearing a kippa, and did not seek jobs on Madison Avenue informing their
prospective employers that they would not work on Shabbat. The self-confidence
of American Jews that we now take so for granted was almost nowhere to be found
back then. With European Jews going up smokestacks, American Jews mostly went
about their business, fearful of rocking the boat of American hospitality. A
future for the Jews?
There
was, of course, one other place where there was a sizable Jewish population -
Palestine. But in Palestine, too, the shores were sealed. Tens of thousands of
British troops were stationed in Palestine, not only to "keep the peace," but to
make sure that Jews did not immigrate and change the demographic balance of the
country. The story of the Exodus is famous, perhaps, precisely because it ended
reasonably well. Most Jews today can name not even one of the ships that sank,
carrying their homeless Jews with them. In January 1946, the British weren't
budging. A future for the Jews? In January 1946, there was little cause to
believe in a rich Jewish future. You might have believed that a covenant
promised some Jewish future, but it would have been hard to argue it was a
bright one.
Now
fast-forward 66 years, to 2012.
Where
do we find ourselves today? Jewish life in Europe, while facing renewed
anti-Semitism in some places, is coming back to life. Berlin is one of the
fastest growing Jewish communities in the world. There are Jewish cultural
festivals in Poland (though staged largely by non-Jews, since there are few Jews
left). In Budapest and Prague, Jewish museums, kosher restaurants and synagogues
abound. Soviet Jews are largely out, and those who remain have synagogues,
schools, camps and community centers. And across the ocean, the success and
vibrancy of American Jewish life is legendary.
There
was no way to expect any of this in 1946, no reason to even imagine
it.
 How did it happen? The simple but often overlooked truth is that what
has made this difference for Jews world over is the State of Israel.
It
was Israel's victory in 1967 that injected energy into Soviet Jewry and led them
to rattle their cage, demanding their freedom. Post-1967,
the world saw the Jews as people who would shape their own destiny.
Unlike
the Tibetans (or Chechnyans or Basques, to name just a few), Jews were no longer
tiptoeing around the world, waiting to see what the world had in store for
them.
The
re-creation of the Jewish state has changed not only how the world sees the
Jews, but how the Jews see themselves. The
days of "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we appeared to them"
(Num. 13:33) are gone, and the reason is the State of Israel.
We
are a people sometimes over-inclined to indulge in hand-wringing (and at others,
unwilling to do the hand-wringing we ought to). And we face our challenges. Iran
is worrisome, Egyptian peace is tenuous. Hila Bezaleli's tragic death was a
metaphor for the lack of accountability that plagues this country. The
behavior of Lt.-Col. Shalom Eisner, as well as the reactions to what he did, is
also deeply unsettling.
But
let us remember this, nevertheless: it is far too easy to lose sight of what we
have accomplished. Sixty-six years ago, no sane, level-headed person could have
imagined that we would have what we have. A language brought back to life, and
bookstores filled with hundreds of linear feet of books in a language that just
a century ago almost no one spoke. More people studying Torah now than there
were in Europe at its height. An economic engine that is the envy of many
supposedly more established countries. A democracy fashioned by immigrants, most
of whom had never lived in a functioning democracy. Cutting-edge health care. An
army that keeps us so safe, we go days on end without even thinking about our
enemies.
That's
worth remembering in the midst of the attacks on us, from the international
community as well as from Jews.
There's
much to repair, and too often, we fail to meet the standards we've set for
ourselves. All true, and they demand our continued attention, but at the same
time, we dare not lose sight of what we've built. To borrow the phrase from
Virginia Slims, "we've come a long way, baby."
The
Jews have a future because the Jews have a state.
There
are moments when a People has earned a celebration. Yom Ha'atzmaut is, without
question, one of those moments.
The
original Jerusalem
Post
column
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