It feels strangely appropriate that our family’s calendar has us celebrating the Fourth of July in Israel and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, in the United States.
Like many American Jews, we live in a liminal space, experiencing a push and pull between our at-homeness here and our at-homeness there.
This feeling of being in-between is even more acute after having spent last year living in Jerusalem, leaving us with the persistent challenge of knowing what home is: Is home where you can seamlessly express yourself in your native tongue, or is home where you belong to the majority culture? Is home where you vote and pay taxes, or is it where you imagine your family’s story originating and unfolding many generations ago?
As our family returned from a year in Israel last fall and transitioned from our Israeli lives, a constant negotiation of sirens, time zones, and school in Hebrew, back to our American Jewish lives, I worried that what we were bequeathing to our children a sense not of two homes but of no homes.
The blessing of being comfortably local in not one but two places, something our ancestors could never have fathomed, comes with the unsettling sense that one does not fully belong to either.
A bridge between the US and Israel
I recognize that this in-betweenness and nowhereness comes with an obligation to serve as a bridge, particularly when both homes are beset by global conflict, precariousness and threats to their founding visions.
For different reasons and in different ways, America and Israel have served as fertile places for Jews and Judaism to thrive.
In America, Jews thrive because they are a minority in a liberal democracy with separation between church and state and freedom of religion.
In Israel, Jews thrive because they are the majority with a Jewish public square and Jewish sovereignty. Each of these societies has something to learn from the other, and those of us with exposure and grounding in both places carry the responsibility of transporting perspectives, narratives, ideas and values so that they can cross-pollinate with the other culture and foster more understanding.
An inability to commit fully to either home
For my birthday last year in Israel, a colleague gave me a copy of the Hebrew-language poem “Pine” by Leah Goldberg, who was a poet and immigrant to British Mandate Palestine from Eastern Europe, mentioning that the poem reminded her of my own struggles to fully inhabit one place. Goldberg writes:
Perhaps only migrating birds know –
suspended between earth and sky –
the heartache of two homelands.
With you I was transplanted twice,
with you, pine trees, I grew –
roots in two disparate landscapes.
Despite her painful years spent in Lithuania and Russia, Goldberg nostalgically describes the pines of Palestine as bringing the snow-covered pines of her childhood back to life. She subsequently refers to this snowy, icy European landscape, paradoxically, as both “homeland” and “foreign land.”
The migrating birds are “suspended between earth and sky” and are the only ones who “know” (presumably like her) “the heartache of two homelands.” They fly back and forth, making them elusive and impossible to pin down.
Goldberg speaks directly to the pines, stably positioned in the earth: “With you I was transplanted twice, with you, pine trees, I grew– roots in two disparate landscapes.”
The juxtaposition of flight and rootedness suggests that even after planting firm roots in two distinct places, the experience of migration is melancholy and destabilizing.
Caught between the ideals of the US and Israel
For me, the heartache of two homelands is compounded by the disillusionment, anger and polarization that fills both of my homes today. Americans and Israelis are increasingly questioning whether these ambitious national projects are unraveling and whether they can still call their country home.
Many American Jews are caught in the tension between their Zionist commitments, the current far-right Israeli government, liberal democratic values and a growing experience of American political homelessness, with segments of both parties rebelling against the storied alliance between Israel and the United States.
While it used to be that our Jewish, democratic, Zionist and political identities felt like they comfortably coalesced, it increasingly seems that we must choose between our two homes and what feel like opposing sets of ideals.
With the pain of two homes, with the different at-homenesses they carry, comes the opportunity to act as the conduit between them.
Just like we courier consumer items back and forth for friends and family, we must learn to carry the intellectual, political and spiritual riches of each place to the other. It is certainly the case that these can get lost in translation or are fundamentally untranslatable, potentially leading to misunderstanding and tension.
There are risks in playing the role of traveling messenger or migrating birds, and there are advantages to choosing one home, one language, one narrative, and committing to it.
Yet, for those of us who insist on tethering ourselves to two places, it is not enough to go back and forth enjoying the good and ignoring the bad of each place because we have another location we can call home.
We are obligated to both places, not neither
We must consider ourselves obligated to our two homes. We must strengthen and improve them both. And we must seek to carry the experiences of each place back to the other.
Celebrating America’s birthday here in Jerusalem this year symbolizes a profound opportunity to transport the lessons of there to here, and back again.
In 1948, the first rough draft of Israel’s Megillat Ha’atzmaut (Scroll of Independence) was not only heavily influenced by American founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence but was written in English to be translated into Hebrew later.
On this 250th birthday of America, I celebrate the blessing of American citizenship while maintaining my at-homeness in Israel, and hope that those of us in this space of nowhereness, continue the messy exercise of transporting and translating the contemporary version of each place’s founding documents.