Letters from Israel are moving, informative An American rabbi and educator recounts joys, challenges, of life in the Jewish state

Gil Troy

Montreal Gazette, Saturday, November 23, 2002

If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches From an Anxious State, By Daniel Gordis, Crown, 240 pages, $34.95

Daniel Gordis decided to stay in Israel after his sabbatical ended.

The title of Daniel Gordis's moving collection of E-mails from Israel, If A Place Can Make You Cry, prepares the reader to get mired in the tragedy of the modern Middle East. But just as the subtitle Dispatches From an Anxious State refers both to the state of Israel and the author's state of mind, the main title is multi-dimensional, too. Those tears were not shed over the wave of terror by Palestinians that has engulfed innocent Israelis - and therein lies this book's grandeur.

Gordis is an American Jewish liberal caught in the Middle East's magical yet murderous matrix. An author, rabbi and educator, he spent his sabbatical in Israel in 1998. He, his wife, Beth, and their three young children treasured the beauty of Jerusalem, the dream of living in the reconstituted Jewish commonwealth, the charm of a young, growing democracy where one individual could make a big difference, and the Oslo-fed hope that peace was imminent. And as parents, they were surprised to find that their children were safer on their own in Jerusalem than they would have been in Los Angeles. After the sabbatical, they stayed in Israel.

Gordis recalls watching his grandfather cry tears of joy when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem in 1977. Gordis recalls the tears he himself shed when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated 18 years later. Today, he regrets how long it took him to decode the message in those tears: "If there's a place in this world that can make you cry, isn't that where you ought to be?"

Here, then, is the theme of the first half, ominously titled Before. Gordis effectively explains so many modern Jews' love affair with Israel - which does not negate his love for his U.S. home and is not fed by anti-Semitism.

He delights in this "modern-day miracle's" historical depth and contemporary dynamism. When his 5-year-old says the Maccabees bombed the King David Hotel, Gordis rejoices that despite conflating stories 2,000 years apart, his son realizes that "This place isn't a city, or a country - it's a story. A story we tell and a story we live. A story about trying to have our one little place on the globe."

Gordis loves the place - but he is not naïve. Even while lulled by the Oslo peace process, Gordis criticizes certain Israeli policies. Unlike so many anti-Zionists, he understands that one can criticize a country, especially a democracy facing difficult challenges, without demonizing it, or negating its right to exist.

He also realizes that it is better to try to fix from within than to carp from without.

In April 1999, Gordis and others from his synagogue visit a Palestinian whose house the Israeli Army demolished. His 9-year-old son asks, "Why would you want to move to a place where people do things like that?" Gordis explains that "it's our home and we have to make it better," but is honest enough to concede that his son's "question was much better than my answer."

In the second section, After, the questions multiply and intensify. Gordis captures the fear, the confusion, the anger of liberal Israelis as mass murders shatter their faith in the peace process - and in Yasser Arafat as a peace partner. Even as Gordis realizes the war is against Israel's existence, not just about the settlements, he remains multi-dimensional - and proportionate. He teaches how one can excoriate the Palestinian turn toward terror while mourning Palestinian suffering resulting from Israeli counter-terrorism. He demonstrates that there are some rights and wrongs, that one can distinguish between brutal Palestinian attackers, whatever their grievances, and innocent Israeli victims, whatever their country's flaws.

Two years after Gordis befriended a Palestinian villager, an Israeli human-rights organization in March 2001 asks for help filling in a trench the Israeli army dug around a Palestinian village. The E-mail invitation says the activity "should be" safe. The danger, Gordis sighs, is from "the very people we'd be going to help!" Moreover, "with those trenches filled up, someone will get out and try to hurt us, just because we're Jews trying to live in a Jewish country." Gordis hates being forced to choose between "Jewish values or Jewish safety," but knows, too many deaths later, that survival comes first.

These "horrible choices," the guilt and fear he experiences as a Jew, as a human being and as a parent, permeate the second half of the book. In searing passages, Gordis and his wife wonder why impose this kind of complexity - and risk - on their beloved children.

And yet, Gordis is constantly reminded "of the miracle that Jerusalem is." He watches Holocaust survivors delight in watching unruly children at a Purim party, "For, they knew, the alternative to wild kids need not be tame ones. It can be no kids. And I felt terribly humbled. After all they'd been through, who was I to let this war get me to feel sorry for myself?"

Gordis delights in the Jerusalem custom of climaxing a wedding singing the ancient vow not to "forget you, O Jerusalem."

"This is the era," Gordis realizes, "that separates those who're willing to risk for a Jewish future, and those who, quite frankly, are not. ... None of us here wants to die in this war, but some of us will. We know that. And most of us, I think, understand that you don't get meaning without risk."

This ability to find inner meaning when risk is thrust upon us is a remarkable human trait. It is one that many of us will be forced to rely upon in the worldwide fight against terror, and as we in North America struggle to live our lives despite enemies who have vowed to destroy us.

If you want to know why Jews love Israel and need her; if you want to know how to criticize some Israeli policies while still supporting Zionism; if you want to know how Israelis cope with the horrors of Arafat's war; or if you want to see how terror robs innocents of the sublime pleasures of the everyday but can also lead them to appreciate the profound, read this powerful, inspiring book.

Gil Troy is a history professor at McGill University. © Copyright 2002, Montreal Gazette