What does it mean to support Israel?
I thought I knew. But as the day of my teenage son’s departure drew near and the war in the region intensified, circumstances beyond our control tested our family’s values.
Just three months earlier, in the midst of planning a business trip to Israel, I had no qualms about making the journey. When colleagues expressed concern over safety, saying they weren’t sure that they wanted to go, I talked them down without hesitation.
“We can’t let the terrorists determine our choices,” I said.
“You’re more likely to get hit by a car in San Francisco than for anything to happen in Israel,” I said.
“We’re going to have a great time,” I said. “There’s no place like Jerusalem in the spring.”
But that was the spring, and now it’s summer. That was adults, and now we’re talking about children. And while many friends’ and colleagues’ kids were among the thousands of American teens already in Israel when the bombing began, I had to draw a distinction there, too, between shepherding kids on the ground to safety and placing more American teens in harm’s way. Somehow, this conflict felt different. Was the situation really more serious, or were my protective instincts running on overdrive? Which Jewish mother in me was right?
On the other hand, friends and colleagues in positions of leadership had put so much energy and effort into revitalizing tourism in Israel since the second intifada that, at last, visitors had begun to return in droves. We didn’t want to break the momentum. We didn’t want to contribute to ghost-town hotels, plunging the Israeli economy into recession again. We certainly didn’t want to be the family to blame for lowering the teen group’s numbers below a critical mass, resulting in cancellation of the trip altogether.
I actually respected the organizational decision to go forward: For those who wanted to go, and in the absence of full-scale war, a Jewish organization should not deny Jews the opportunity to visit Israel. But still, I hoped my kid’s trip would be scrapped. I wanted the organizers to decide so that I wouldn’t have to.
The arguments I served up to my travel companions last spring reverberated in my mind. I could hear a previous, leadership version of me, rallying the troops, making a plea for reason, urging solidarity with Israel. “If we change our behavior, the bad guys have won,” I would have said. Yet, when it came to putting my son on the plane, every fiber in me screamed, “No! No! No!”
Our son spent the school year in leadership training and community service, building a human bridge with teens in Israel’s Galilee. He befriended the other 19 kids in his program, and felt a special loyalty to his closest friend since preschool, whose parents were leaning toward sending their son.
Although our son was less than enthusiastic, he vowed, “If Ben goes, I guess I’ll go, too.” Loyalty to his group and his friend was his bottom line. But I could see that his heart wasn’t in it. Frankly, neither was mine. And I felt like a complete sell-out for it.
I made my peace over cocktails the Saturday night before his Monday departure. It seemed Israel travel was on everyone’s mind. It was the last thing I wanted to talk more about.
“My boss was supposed to go this week,” a friend told me over lunch. “But the president of the Israeli company we’re consulting with asked him to postpone the trip.”
I perked up.
“Not that it’s a matter of life and death. Nobody’s going to get blown up or anything, but they’re a little distracted right now, you know? They’re worried about whether they’re going to get called up, or their employees are going to get called up, and how they’re going to manage their businesses and their lives in the short term.”
I nodded, appreciating as if it had never occurred to me the human drama that is daily life for Israel’s citizens, and freeing myself, at last, from the angst that I had been wrestling with for days.
“It’s like, if you were going somewhere to visit friends, and they had a family emergency, you’d postpone, right?” she continued. “You’d figure they have enough to worry about, dealing with their own tsuris, without having to entertain you, let alone worry for your safety. You’d just reschedule. It’s polite, right?”
Wow. Yes. Right. Absolutely. Thank you. I wasn’t a traitor! I was polite!
The following day the teens’ trip was “postponed indefinitely.” The organizations involved, both in the local community and in Israel, determined that they simply could not assure the teens’ safety.
So, in the end, I was spared the responsibility of making the tough call. But the responsibility to wrestle with family, friends, and colleagues over what it means to support Israel, what it means to be a leader, what it means to be part of a group, and what it means to be a loyal friend is one I will never abdicate. The responsibility to wrestle — to turn it over, and over, and over again — is what it means to be a Jew.
Susan G. Wolfe is the director of marketing and communications at the Koret Foundation.