Eretz Yisrael - Where the Wild Things Are

Those of you making aliyah need to know something: Israel is not like any other place in the world, and not necessarily in a good sense.

It is the home of the Jewish people, and it is the home of the soul of the Jewish people. It where the Jewish people has reassembled after 77 generations of wandering the globe, after centuries of wearing peaked caps and yellow garb and having to walk in the gutter when a gentile walks by... of having a nickel rolled by them to see if they'll turn around, of being used by princes for controlling the rabble and being murdered - along with the princes - by the rabble when it revolted.

Some communities were small, some big, but any diaspora community is an incomplete unit, a lone cell or group of cells, not an organ, certainly not a complete body. Jews got used to being self-contained: for 1,800 or 1,900 years they had no king, no president, no one from their own community whom they had to defer to on temporal matters, except for the rabbi. Yes, they had to defer to the state, but that state was gentile, and any respect they had for it was always mixed with contempt.

Their habits, their traditions, their cultures, their identities, their ways of thinking, their music, their clothes, even the color of their skins changed over the generations, with each community going its separate way. You see this in our synagogues, where olive skinned, dark eyed Yemenites pray alongside pink-skinned, blond Ashkenazim, where the sons of Moroccan Jews wear dark European suits and the sons of German Jews wear oriental style needlework skullcaps.

A large part of the nation rebelled against the rabinnical authority and went its own separate way, discarding their parents' religion in favor of a new religion, invented by a Jew named Karl Marx. These Jews became the prophets of modern Leftism, whether in its pure Marxist-Leninist form or in the watered down version called socialism. It was davka this group that had the gumption, the daring, the political/organizational skills and the revolutionary spirit needed for a return to Eretz Yisrael and the refashioning of the fighting, farming Jew.

All of these streams came together against the backdrop of the worst instance of state-sponsored sadistic mass slaughter ever, the Holocaust. It was as if the remnant of the Jews had escaped Europe just before the door came down, Indiana Jones style, leaving all those who were not nimble enough to die agonizingly in the snake pit. And they, too, the remnant, were thrust directly into a bloody, never ending war with the savage Saracens of the East.

So the result is not just a melting pot. It is a somewhat crazy place, where streams that diverged hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago meet again, mix again, collide and clash until one is found to be stronger and the other takes a back seat, or until they mix and are no longer distinguishable. Leftism is clashing with Judaism. Middle Eastern ways are clashing with European manners. Classical symphonies with the crying, rhythmic chords of Arab music. Some Ethiopian Jews strut about in dreadlocks while others sport peyos.

People have to get used to obeying a common Jewish authority. They have to get used to having a temporal leader who is a Jew just like them. We can't all be our own prime ministers any more! We can't just get up and move to the next shtetl when the goyim get restless. We have to get used to having power - this is more difficult than one may think! We also have to get used to not blaming ourselves for everything, and not being able to "play the Jew" when things get rough. No amount of walking in the sewer will make the Arabs let go of their hatred for us!

Relations between men and women have to be refashioned. The Diaspora created a Woddy Allenish nebbish-Jew. Eretz Yisrael calls for a new type of Jewish man, and as a corollary, a new woman. But this is more easily said than done. The socialist farmer-fighters did well for a couple of generations, but they are rapidly becoming extinct. That generation turns out to be a problematic one, and it has left us with leaders who are fat, corrupt, and soul-less, or weaselly, fake-smiled, pseudocultured bureaucrats. Reinventing ourselves is painful, but necessary - again.

The world's attention is on us. People from Irkusk to Argentina, from Namibia to Nepal, know the names of our political parties and are familiar with the layouts and histories of tiny communities on both sides of our disputed "Green Line". They either worship our ancestors or blame us for the great upheavals the world is undergoing, or both. People here believe in God to the degree that they will go unarmed to pray at a tzaddik's grave in a city crawling with terrorist snakes, or they will hate those same unarmed praying Jews with a burning heart and see them as the source of all suffering and pestilence.

If you come out here, that is where you are coming to. If the world is but a stage, we are center stage, the lights are on us, the top critics are all there in the front row, all the channels are feeding the picture live, and we have to give a great biblical show that we haven't properly rehearsed for several thousand years, or have done nothing but rehearse for several thousand years. If you come here, know that you are entering the cauldron, that you are becoming an actor in the greatest drama of all. It won't be easy. You will find yourself screaming, crying, cursing and asking yourself what possessed you to join this insane asylum... and at the same time you will know - this is mine, it is my place, my language, my earth I am treading upon, for good, for bad, for ever.