About Zionism

I’ve noticed many times over many years that words or themes or images often recur in the stories and columns in a week’s newspaper. They just sort of pop up. Sometimes it’s entirely coincidental. Sometimes it makes sense when you think about it.

And sometimes the reason is entirely clear. There’s something inescapable that’s going on in the world around us.

This week, the word is Zionism, and the reason for it is horrifyingly clear. That word, which most of us think of as describing a noble concept, a home for the Jewish people in the place that has been ours for millennia, has been loaded with filth, smeared with dirt, and shoved out to sink in the muck.

We can’t let that happen. We won’t let that happen.

Certainly there are many kinds of Zionism, or more accurately many beliefs that come together under that word. Zionism is not a synonym for Israeli politics. Disliking Israel’s prime minister, hoping that he will not be asked to form a coalition after the election in October, or at the very least hoping that if he is charged with doing so, he will fail at that task, is not being an anti-Zionist; in fact, a good case could be made for the person holding that belief as being a very good Zionist.

There are a range of beliefs about how Israel can survive in the extraordinarily hostile environment in which it finds itself. We each are free to subscribe to some and hoot at others. All or none might be true. Holding fast to one belief and detesting another does not make someone not a Zionist. Believing that the Jewish state should not exist is what makes someone an anti-Zionist. 

There are many voices in this week’s paper talking about Zionism. They take many different approaches. They all agree on the basic truth. We — not all Jews, we know, but our community, which is very broad — are Zionist. And Zionism is a beautiful word for a beautiful concept. 

And now for something completely different.

As our country fights internally over how we treat immigrants — and as that fight plays out at, among other places, Delaney Hall in Newark, where many Jews, both as representatives of Jewish communities and as individuals, most the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants, and some as immigrants themselves, stand in protest and solidarity — it might be worth thinking about President Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech, delivered in 1989.

I am sure that there is a range of feeling about President Reagan among those of us old enough to remember his terms in office. But his words in that speech are so moving, and so appropriate now, that I want to end with them. This is a short part of what he said:

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. 

“And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

That’s what we still need — the will and the heart to find the way out of where we are now and to get to where we should be.

—JP