Resa and Rabbi Stanley M. Davids Closing Statement

The 1997 CCAR Platform on Reform Judaism and Zionism, overwhelmingly adopted at our Miami Convention, stated the following: “While affirming the authenticity and necessity of a creative and vibrant Diaspora Jewry, we encourage aliyah [immigration] to Israel in pursuance of the precept of yishuv Eretz Yisrael [settling the Land of Israel]. While Jews can live Torah-centered lives in the Diaspora, only in Medinat Yisrael [the State of Israel] do they bear the primary responsibility for the governance of society, and thus may realize the full potential of their individual and communal religious strivings.”

For us, this ten-year-old document is already deficient in its understanding of aliyah. We surely feel a religious obligation to settle the Land, but we also feel an equally powerful obligation to seize the historic opportunity created for modern Jews by a “perfect storm” of passionate pioneers, by dreamers who called us to their side in all forms of artistic expression, by relentlessly escalating anti-Semitism, by the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah and by the yin and yang of the rise of nationalism and the siren call of globalism.

Mitzvah? Certainly. A spiritual calling? Most definitely. But for us our commitment to aliyah also comes from our own realization that historic moments are quite fleeting: they appear—doors of opportunity are opened—and then the world tries to return to an earlier stasis and the doors of opportunity are rudely slammed shut.

Zionism awakened in the late-nineteenth century. Poets and philosophers, farmers and petty merchants, politicians and philanthropists saw in Zionism an incredible opportunity not to reverse history, since history by definition cannot be reversed, but to rectify history. To repair that which had been shattered. To right a terrible wrong. Despite the traditional language of Hashivenu v’nashuva, chadesh yamaynu k’kedem (turn us back and we shall return; restore our days as of old), we had no desire to go back to the past—if by that past we meant a monarchy, a priesthood and animal sacrifice. Kings and priests and an abattoir whose odors were disguised by the burning of incense have no appeal, for all but a frenzied ultra-minority of our people.

But we did want to reclaim our national sovereignty. We did want to reclaim our autonomy. We did want to recreate a rich and verdant garden of Jewish thought and aesthetic and culture that could revive our ancient heritage and adapt it to meet the challenges of the contemporary world.
The North American community alone can never create its own Golden Age, because most of the richness of American Jewish thought is still being expressed in English—divorced from the nuances, allusiveness and texture of the Hebrew which has sustained 3,000 years of Jewish life.

The moment is now—so we took it. We joined our fate to those who marched through a suddenly opened door, and we are attempting to replant that rich and verdant garden. We live most months of the year in Israel and we now are citizens of both Israel and of the United States. Others can do the same—and call it aliyah. 

Or they can send their children (young and young adult) on extended programs of study and of experience in Israel. Or they can plunge into a serious, committed personal study of Hebrew, and then use that Hebrew to engage with the authentic texts of our people. Or they can make their second or third home in Israel. Or they can make serious investments in the Israeli economy.

And call it aliyah.

Every Reform individual and/or family that chooses to make a twenty-first century aliyah also makes certain that the door of opportunity is wedged open ever more firmly. Every Reform Jew who embraces aliyah helps to guarantee that Israel will indeed become L’Or Goyyim, A Light unto the Nations—a place of democracy, of justice, of compassion and of overflowing Jewish creativity by which all Jews everywhere can be nourished.

We invite you to join us, in your own way.

Rabbi Karyn Kedar
Closing Statement

Hannah was a young girl who made aliyah as the Nazis took over her native Hungary. She was a bright girl and a poet, but as the Nazis grew in power, she was called upon to fight as a paratrooper for the Allies. She did so with enormous bravery and in the midst of her bravery, lost her life. I told this story in great detail, and the eyes of the children grew wide with admiration. At the end of the story of this brave woman’s life, I reminded them of a poem that they all knew from religious school and invited them to sing along with me: “O Lord, my God, I pray that these things never end, the sand and the sea, the rush of the water, the crash of the heavens, the prayer of the heart.” And so we sang, in Hebrew and then in English, as the waves of the Mediterranean crashed around us and the sand of the sea was under our fingernails; the history of our people and the beauty of our present and the vision of our future all converged in one brilliant afternoon in December, for one handful of Jews from Glenview, Illinois.

This is the power of Israel. This is what it’s like to bear witness to a miracle. This is what it means to be at one with a past and a tradition, while participating in the rebirth of a land that is holy and vibrant and awaits our participation.

I invite you, no, challenge you, to find a way to engage with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul. We simply cannot stand by as a historic opportunity beckons us to participate in self-definition and actualization. To be a Zionist is to be a participant in the phenomenon which some have called Zionism, part two. Zionism, part one, involved the establishment of the land. Part two, requires all of us liberal, religious Jews who understand and celebrate pluralism and democracy, to define the personality of this Jewish State. There are those among us who will help in the self-definition in making aliyah. For the rest of us, it is incumbent to feel the sand of the sea, to fall in love with the land, to have a conversation with its people and to ignite a spark in our children so that they know that Israel is marrow in the bone of Jewish existence.

Eli Eli, O Lord my God, I pray that these things never end… I pray with my heart, with my soul and with my actions.