Israel, goes the title of a book by Rich Cohen, Is Real. This message is coming home to me as I get ready for a six-week stay there—a blip in time to many, but a longish stay for me. What else could it be except real?

Well, it could be the Zionist dream of salvation I had at age twelve, dropping tears on a page of my well-worn paperback Exodus in my bed in Brooklyn. I was twelve, Israel was ten, the Shoah burned vividly in my mind, and Israelis were superheroes, the men and women who saved my people and their history from the humiliation and devastation of genocide.

It could be Yerushalayim, the vision of a spiritual world apart, beyond history and humanity, imbued in me as an Orthodox boy for whom God and Torah were close companions and the return to Zion something like the very first Hebrew crossing of the Jordan, or like every Jewish dream of heaven.

It could be the other-world of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland, in which the Jewish state of his own great original vision somehow morphs into a transethnic nation where Arab and Jew coexist without enmity or strife.

        Or it could be a historical fiction in which Israel was in effect a terra nullius—an empty land—when the Jews returned, so that they could reestablish their nation in its greatest ancient extent, with nobody else to bother them between the Jordan River and the sea.

But it isn’t any of those, although it could have elements of some of them. It’s the people in Yerushalayim (not “Yerushalayim”) who post apartments for rent on the web for transients like my wife and me, and appear to be doing well at it, thank you very much.

It’s my host at Hebrew University, a physician and global health expert, who brings a polylingual collection of students from all over the developing world, to learn what he and his colleagues know about how to improve health in their home countries.

It’s my friend the former helicopter pilot and current Yoga Master, whose high-tech day job is one of many thousands that helped make his country the world’s leading start-up nation.

It’s my friend the former Orthodox rabbi from Atlanta who has lived in Jerusalem now for twenty years and writes vivid essays about, for instance, a man who remained rude after the rabbi helped him, or a woman who lost her faith and fears her husband with find out.

It’s my friend the former stone-thrower from the first intifada who is married, owns a café in Ramallah and still dreams of independence for his people.

It’s my friend the grandmother who travels once a week with others like herself to a checkpoint in the West Bank to make sure that the scrutiny and harassment of Palestinians does not go too far.

And it’s also my old friends in Beit El in the West Bank—educated, dedicated, problematic “pioneers” whose final answer to the conundrum they and others have set up is that, failing all else, “Moshiach will come.”

Swirling around them all is an “Arab Spring” that may or may not bring summer weather to Israel, but will surely require dramatic adaptations; a worldwide weakening of support for Israel as the Jews, not the Palestinians, are increasingly seen as obstacles to peace; an insidious infusion of classical anti-Semitism into strident critiques of Israel; an Iranian nuclear threat that may not be stoppable either by Israeli power or American will; and a possible re-election of a quite popular U.S. president without much Jewish support and, therefore, without much sense of obligation to the Jews or the Jewish state.

And within? Israel continues to be governed by the bizarre coalition of Ehud Barak, a former hero who heads a declining left-wing movement and who sees the current situation as dire and strongly urges immediate moves toward peace; Avigdor Lieberman, whose constituency of Russian immigrants, many of whom do not speak Hebrew, harbors anti-Arab attitudes that verge on racism; and the confused, temporizing Binyamin Netanyahu, who seems to care more about not rocking his strangely poised political boat than he does about leading Israel into the future.

        As Passover quickly approaches and we celebrate our first Exodus, we can also celebrate our second arrival in the promised land, even if we don’t know what will happen next. So what do I think? I think—I know—I will go, and it will be frustrating—and real.

A Jewish American on the verge of visiting Israel finds internal as well as external conflict

I haven’t written about Israel for a while, partly because I’ve been uncertain about what I want to say. A picture on the front page of last Saturday’s New York Times , however, has jarred me enough to write. It shows Palestinian Muslims at prayer, protesting land confiscation in a village near

Nablus, watched by Israeli soldiers. But that’s not all it shows. Is it a questionable editorial in the form of a front-page photo? Probably. But it’s not a retouched photo either; it shows something real.

I’ve recently been approved by the Fulbright Foundation for a six-week visit to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May and June. I’ll be mainly at the Braun School of Public Health, on the Ein Kerem campus, giving seminars on evolutionary medicine and medical anthropology. I’ve been to Israel eight times, but never for more than two weeks, and it’s been far too long, seven years, since the last time—since my son, then 22, and I roamed the country visiting nature preserves and kibbutzim, the two things Adam was most interested in. A lot has happened since then.

Among them have been the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the death-in-life coma of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Second Lebanon War , Jimmy Carter’s ill-advised PR campaign against Israel, the failed British academic boycott of Israel. I wrote about some of these in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  and elsewhere , and then over the last three years I blogged about further unfolding events:

The 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, the Olmert scandals, the terrorist attacks on Jews and others in Mumbai , the Gaza War , the return to office of Bibi Netanyahu , the antics of his racist sidekick Avigdor Lieberman, the (now partly retracted) Goldstone Report , the Mavi Marmora incident on the high seas, and the revolution in Egypt that—whatever else it did—altered Israel’s strategic situation.

Throughout, I have rarely criticized Israel, in fact I have gone on record saying that Jewish Americans shouldn’t do that. I was known in Atlanta for helping to limit Jimmy Carter’s influence, even on his home turf. I lost some left-wing American friends because of what I wrote during the Second Lebanon War, and others during the Gaza incursion. I defended Israel against all comers, but not from any particular point of view.

Although I’m glad AIPAC is there, I’ve stayed aloof from it, because at times when Israel had Labor leadership—it seems an impossible age ago—that organization stayed to the right of that government on some issues. And I’ve mostly steered clear of left-wing parties and groups in Israel because, if they can’t persuade their own fellow-countrymen, who am I to put my two cents in?

Did I serve in the IDF? Do I have a son or daughter who will? Do I look at the Georgia sky and wonder if a katyusha, or a SCUD, or for that matter an Iranian nuclear missile might come down from it one day to obliterate me and those I love? These questions have always been decisive for me.

But although I am not an Israeli, I am an American, and I am expected to cast my vote and use my freedom of speech to be one of Israel’s Jewish ambassadors. Since I have the skill and connections to write for public consumption, I feel an extra weight of responsibility. I love Israel, and have as long as I can remember.

That means, from just after World War II, when I learned to talk and formed my first memories, just as the full facts of the Shoah were coming to light, and as Israel itself was born, in part out of the ashes. That is not Israel’s raison d’être —it is the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, where they had a right and an obligation to return after countless persecutions. And return they did, long before the Shoah.

But that event, as the culmination of millennial victimization, convinced the world of the need for a Jewish state. Now however the world may be changing its mind, and the so-called one-state solution is seen in many quarters as a viable and even perhaps inevitable option. That would bring an end to the Jewish character and destiny of Israel.

The difficulty is that another people—as I have written as well—also has a legitimate claim to part of the land. The only alternative is a two-state solution, soon. Even Netanyahu, dragged kicking and screaming to this conclusion, recognized the need for it in a landmark speech in 2009 —after which he and his government did little to advance that solution, while encouraging the expansion of Jewish settlements that almost the whole world calls illegal.

So a growing group of nations outside the Arab and Muslim worlds are already recognizing or moving toward recognition of a Palestinian state. The photo above illustrated an article about a forthcoming UN vote in September that could grant membership to the State of Palestine. The world is losing patience with Israel. I am not, but for what it’s worth, I am very, very worried. That is why I find it difficult to write, and even a little difficult to go—not because I’m afraid, but because I’m not sure I know any longer what to say to my friends when I go. But I will be doing both in the weeks to come.

Is this civil unrest good for Egypt? The United States? The Jews?

When my daughter Susanna and I went to Cairo in 2000, I made an impulsive proposal to the friendly bellman who helped check us in, and lo and behold we were riding up to the pyramids on horseback before dawn the next morning, with the full moon setting at sunrise. It was one of those experiences you remember with a smile decades later, maybe even on your deathbed. Surely a people who could build such things so long ago might still do great things today?

Coming back to the city was altogether different. The density of the highway traffic, the crowds on the streets below, the uncollected garbage, the half-built flimsy apartment buildings with people living on their top floors open to the sky—all this gave me pause. Everywhere we toured in Cairo over the next few days, except for the rich central hotel district, dust clouds rose around the car and half-visible children darted out of the street just in time, often with our sketchy driver honking.

The Egyptian population was then around 60 million. Just over a decade later, it is 80. It doubles every quarter century, with almost half under thirty. Cairo alone would be expected to double from 30 to 60 million. I did not see how stability could be maintained with such a large and rapidly growing youthful population, mostly very poor, and I wondered how long the “Cold Peace” with Israel would hold.

These questions are much more urgent now. No one in Israeli or world intelligence services predicted this uprising, which may spread throughout the region. No one predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the near-nuclear-war between India and Pakistan, or the Iranian revolutions of 1979 or 2009 either. Certain moments in human history are just simply outside the models.

But what does this one portend?

I was at a Shabbat lunch the other day with an Egyptian-Jewish-American scientist, brilliant and successful, who cares deeply about Israel. He sees basically only good in what is going on. “A democratic Egypt will be good for Israel,” he said, and he is confident of the outcome.

But people in Israel are worried, including seasoned commentators and national politicians. Peace with Egypt, however tepid, has been a vital Israeli strategic asset for three decades, and although a heroic Anwar Sadat was responsible for starting it, Hosni Mubarak kept it going for almost all that time. A main editorial in Haaretz today is called, “The West should encourage the new order of Mideast.” But what will that new order be?

According to the more centrist Jerusalem Post, also today, “the sad fact is that an overwhelming proportion of Egypt’s populace supports Islamic fundamentalists. When asked which they preferred, 59% said Islamists and 27% said modernizers, according to the latest Pew poll from last February.” I was not able to confirm these numbers, but the report did find that a majority of Egyptians (52 percent) had a favorable view of Hamas (compared to 44 percent unfavorable). Also, 95 percent of Egyptians had unfavorable opinions of Jews (interestingly, this compares with 35 percent for Israeli Arabs). As the photo from Haaretz shows, this is at least a minor theme in the current uprising.

The Jpost editorial goes on, “The mass protest on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other Egyptian cities is not an articulate political movement that has clear ideas about what it wants to achieve, other than the ousting of Mubarak. In fact, besides the Muslim Brotherhood or political parties taken over by it, there is not a single significant organized political movement in Egypt that can muster a large enough constituency to present a coherent alternative to the present regime.”

Today Prime Minister Netanyahu asked world leaders to stop criticizing Mubarak. Unlike President Obama, who has measured his every word, Bibi may be putting himself on the wrong side of history. But he knows that Israel can’t afford an Islamic Egypt on its border, or a chaotic Egypt, or even, probably, another Turkey. Some Israeli commentators are saying that Israel may have to turn to Syria to find a friend in the Middle East.

Commentators across the spectrum say that the IDF must develop new contingency plans for a possible war with Egypt, which it has not had to do for twenty years. This does not mean war, but it means war is less unlikely than it was.

I share the aspirations of the Egyptian people who have finally taken to the streets. They are not just legitimate, they are beautiful and just. I want them to achieve democracy.

But when I look at what happened in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in ’68, China in ’89, and Iran last year, I have to hold my breath. And when I think of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and many others, I see a history of democratic hopes and achievements trashed in a few weeks or months by violent autocracy.

I’m not saying that this can’t end well, but the risk is great. As (liberal) Brookings Institution expert Kenneth Pollack put it Saturday, “Revolutions are extremely unpredictable events, and the people who begin the revolution aren’t always the people who wind up ending them.”

A good friend asked if I were going to write about the Jewish angles on the Tucson tragedy. She got me thinking, and I guess I see three.

First, Gabrielle Giffords, the gravely wounded Congresswoman, is a proud Jew who came late to that identity but embraced it with all her heart. Giffords is the name her grandfather chose—“Giff Giffords,” no less—when he wanted his public Jewish identity to go away. But he started life as Akiba Hornstein, son of a Lithuanian rabbi. Gabi’s father was Jewish, her mother a Christian scientist, and she says she was raised in both faith.

But, fortunately for the Jews, this extraordinary young woman traveled to Israel a decade ago and, like many of us, was changed forever. She came back to embrace Jewishness and Judaism, and did find one branch of the faith prepared to accept her as Jewish by dint of her dad’s lineage.

So she joined Congregation Chaverim in Tucson, attended services there, and in this very Christian corner of America boldly stepped forward as a Jew. She cited the women in her family as role models, joined Hadassah like her grandmother, and while campaigning for Congress (in Tucson, not Brooklyn), said in an interview, “If you want something done, your best bet is to ask a Jewish woman to do it,” because Jewish women “have an ability to cut through all the reasons why something should, shouldn’t or can’t be done.” A Republican House Speaker swore her in this month using The Five Books of Moses.

She rides a motorcycle, avidly supports Israel, and like most Arizonans favors gun rights. She did, however, become concerned when a retired Alaska governor officially put her in the crosshairs, however metaphorically. There is no evidence of a connection, but she received threats, her office was vandalized, and ultimately an insane young man put a bullet through the whole length of the left side of her brain.

Her neurosurgeons did everything right, and Daniel Hernández, the young man who stopped her from bleeding to death—the perfect foil for her assassin—saved her life. But when the surgeons talk of a miracle, I don’t think they mean she’ll be in Congress anytime soon. That, given the bullet’s path, would be a miracle among miracles.

The second Jewish angle is the extraordinary video put out by a lapsed Alaska governor, who not only found it proper, in the midst of a nation’s grief, to try to make the story about herself, she invoked a term that resonates deeply and harshly with every Jew who knows the least thing about Jewish history: blood libel.

Considering how Jews have suffered from blood libels over the centuries, it’s at a minimum tactless for a politician to use the term. There is no evidence that Palin’s putting Giffords in the (metaphorical) crosshairs on her website provoked the assassin, but pointing out that she had done so and running a tape in which Giffords expressed concern about it is not a blood libel.

A blood libel is when people claim that Jews kill Christian children so they can use the children’s blood to make Passover matzah. Even the ADL’s Abe Foxman—no liberal—while defending Palin’s right to defend herself, questioned her use of that term.

But the video was not just tactless, it was a political blunder even without that Jewish reference. Don’t take my word for it, check out what Pat Buchanan, David Frum, and many other Republican commentators said: She showed that she lacks the stature to comfort a grieving nation in time of tragedy. Pundits baited her and she rose to the bait instead of

passing it by and rising to the occasion. A lot of Republican presidential hopefuls were celebrating.

Incidentally, Giffords’ Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, ran an ad in June on the Pima County Republican website inviting readers to “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” and to “Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelley”—no causal link implied of course.

So what is the third Jewish angle? It’s the comparison between gun violence here and in Israel. As is often pointed out, many homes in Israel with an actively serving soldier or reservist often have a powerful automatic rifle around, and other guns are freely purchased by law-abiding citizens, yet there is proportionately much less gun violence there than here. But there is some.

The mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein used his army rifle to kill twenty-nine Muslims while they were at prayer, and unlike in the Tucson case, it was clear that right-wing political rhetoric and rabbinical “teachings” had incited him.  A medical doctor, he chose Purim 1994 for his heinous genocidal act. Every aspect of it was premeditated and deliberate. Yet to some in Israel, this vicious assassin’s grave is now a shrine.

The assassin who murdered Yitzchak Rabin at a peace rally, the far-right ultra-Zionist law student Yigal Amir, was also clearly acting out of political motivation with the incitement of some rabbis. He used a Beretta semi-automatic pistol, a 9mm handgun not so different from the Glock used in Tucson, although Amir’s Beretta held fewer rounds.

And on the other side of the political spectrum, in 2001 Israel’s then-Minister of Tourism Rehavam Ze’evi, was shot dead in the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem by Palestinians who described it as a retaliation for targeted assassinations of violent Palestinian leaders by Israel. Ze’evi was known for extremist, racist anti-Arab views.

But overall, gun violence is far less common in Israel than in the U.S. Like Switzerland and Canada, Israel has easy access to guns but relatively few gun deaths—so much so that the pro-gun forces here refer to it as part of the proof that guns don’t kill people, people do.

It’s a view clearly shared by Gabrielle Giffords, at least up to now.

I got lucky again at lunch on Monday, the last day of the Chief Rabbi’s Atlanta visit, when I was seated next to him. Lady Elaine was present, as were some Emory Law students–the event being hosted by the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion. The Chief Rabbi made some observations about the differences between the American and British polities, and said he had informed top officials in the U.K. that they had some lessons to learn from us. “About what?” I wondered aloud, and the students were clearly interested.

“About covenant.” Reasoning that he probably didn’t mean the Abrahamic covenant, I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, except for forking salad into it. The students looked puzzled. “You know, when you go to Washington D.C. and visit the monuments, you see on every one of them something that you never see on a monument in Britain.”

Long pause.

“Texts. Every statue has a text. Visit the Jefferson Memorial and what do you see on the rotunda all around above the figure of the president? ‘I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’” I remembered being there and almost growing dizzy reading those words as I turned under the icon.

“You go to the Lincoln Memorial,” the Rabbi continued. “You gaze up at this massive stone carving of the man, but then you look to either side and you see the complete text of the Gettysburg Address on one side and the Second Inaugural on the other.

“And the new Roosevelt Memorial. It has a life-size bronze of him in his wheelchair,” a choice that stirred much controversy. “But each of the six decades of his political life is illustrated with a text from one of his speeches in that era.” He seemed now to be thinking about how to remain diplomatic while criticizing his own country.

“In Britain, the monuments have no texts. Even Churchill, whose eloquence arguably saved the nation, is memorialized only by a statue of the man. We need a covenant in Britain like the one you have in America. We need to develop a tradition based on texts.”

I thought, but did not say–the students were Christian–How very Jewish. Monumental statues, including Roosevelt in his wheelchair, can inspire a kind of idol worship. But if you have to stop, read a text, and consider its meaning–and if the text is inspiring enough–you will feel as if the man behind the stone or bronze is speaking those words to you. It’s a living connection. And you know immediately how much more important the words are than the shape of the man–that the words, in fact, made the man.

In America’s founding, great trouble was taken to keep men, living or dead, from becoming idols. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution–Britain doesn’t have one–and the Bill of Rights emerged as covenantal documents, words by which Americans would be bound to each other. Little wonder that the Founders’ generation resorted to imagery of the Exodus from slavery in idolatrous, tyrannical Egypt to the covenant freely chosen in the desert, binding the former slaves to an unseen yet all-seeing God, and leading in the end to a Promised Land.

The Rabbi’s incisive observations reminded me of a formal address he had given, a few weeks before I met him at the end of 2008. It was no less than a speech to the European Parliament, the body that all hoped would herald a new century something like the opposite of the previous one for Europe, laid waste by generations of war.

What, I wondered, as I began reading the speech on the train from Warwick to London to visit him, would this great Jewish spiritual leader choose to say to the assembled nations of Europe?

It was eloquent throughout, but the culmination, unsurprisingly, was an interpretation of text. “As I read the Hebrew Bible,” he said, “I hear from the very beginning God’s call to dialogue.” His prime example was Abel’s murder. Unlike most Bibles, the Rabbi gave his multilingual audience a literal translation of the Hebrew:

“'And Cain said to Abel, and it came to pass when they were out in the field that Cain rose up against Abel and killed him.'

“You can see immediately why it cannot be translated because it says ‘And Cain said’, but it does not say what he said. The sentence is ungrammatical. The syntax is fractured … the Bible is signalling in the most dramatic way – in a broken sentence – that the conversation broke down… or to put it simply: where words end, violence begins. Dialogue is the only way to defeat the worst angels of our nature.”

Rabbi Sacks went on to tell them that six days before the speech, he and the Archbishop of Canterbury had led a delegation, consisting of faith leaders in Britain–Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Baha’i, to spend a day at Auschwitz.

“There we wept together, and there we prayed together, knowing what happens when we fail to honour the humanity of those not like us. God has given us many languages and many cultures, but only one world in which to live together, and it is getting smaller every day. May we, the countries and the cultures of Europe, in all our glorious diversity, together write a new European covenant of hope.”

The transcript records that, “The House accorded the speaker a standing ovation.” They were moved, and rightly so. We must hope against hope that this covenant of hope will hold, that the dialogue with those who are not quite like us will never again break down.

“Judaism is God’s perennial question mark against the condition of the world.”

This is a quote from the book, To Heal a Fractured World, by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, who visited Atlanta last month. The particular reason for his visit was what was billed as the Happiness Summit, in which he participated with the Dalai Lama and three other religious dignitaries. They shared an ecumenical vision as well as their religiously specific ones.

I had been lucky enough to have had tea once with Rabbi Sacks and his gracious wife, now Lady Elaine, in their home in London two years ago–an unforgettable hour. I had read and admired his writings, as he, amazingly to me, had read and liked some of mine. There were great gaps between us, yet great common ground.

But I had not experienced his oratory gifts until this visit to Atlanta. I heard him speak first at Young Israel of Toco Hills, a modern Orthodox synagogue where he gave the Shabbos sermon, on the subject of Judaism’s role in the world. He did not quote his own book as I did above, but he made much the same point with great eloquence.

Here is a man who was knighted many years ago, who now sits in the House of Lords, who has socialized with the Queen and several prime ministers, and he said unequivocally that the Jews who get the greatest respect from others are those who completely embrace their Jewishness. Why?

His answer is that people understand what they owe the Jews. From the ethical edicts of the Torah to the laws of relativity and vaccines against polio, Jews have been able to stand outside the frequent complacency of the world and say, This is not quite right. Here is an idea about how to make it better.

Jews are not the only ones, and no one thinks they are. But they are over-represented among the people who make the greatest difference intellectually because they stand outside, because they ask the perennial questions, because they have learned for thousands of years to wonder, muse, and argue. Whether it’s in their blood or just in their culture, it is surely there.

At the Happiness Summit he shared the platform with the Dalai Lama, the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and a leading Muslim scholar. Before their very mixed audience, he acknowledged to their amusement that happiness is not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Jewish history. But he soon quoted Jacob, after his wrestling match with the angel: I will not let you go unless you bless me. His interpretation: In each bad thing there is a blessing, and we should not let go until we find it.

The Rabbi was in mourning for his mother, and had already lost his father, but he was finding the blessings in their lives, and even in their deaths, because the loss of one you love teaches you what a slender thing life is. “Sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy.”

He also cited a story of Rabbi Levi Yitzkhak of Berdichev, who observed his fellow townspeople rushing around one day. Stopping one to ask why, and receiving the answer, “I’m running to make a living,” Levi Yitzkhak asked him how he could be so sure that what he wanted was in front of him; what if it was behind him and he needed to stop to let it catch up? This, Rabbi Sacks said, is the purpose of the Sabbath: “Sometimes we don’t need to pursue happiness. We just need to pause and let it catch up with us.”

He also talked about three approaches to physical pleasure: hedonism, asceticism, and the Jewish middle way, the way of Halakhah, the commandments, the law. These correspond to the worship of pleasure, the denial of pleasure, and the sanctification of pleasure. As for denial, he quoted Rav, the great Talmudic rabbi who said “that in the world to come, a person will have to give an account of every legitimate pleasure he or she deprived themselves of in this life. Because God gave us this world to enjoy.”

I’ll have more to say about Rabbi Sacks’s visit and his many contributions in another posting. I also wrote elsewhere about the general discussion in the Happiness Summit.

Gideon Levy spoke at Columbia on September 28 about his new book, Punishment in Gaza, and his speech was broadcast this weekend on CSPAN Book TV. He was handsome, courtly, charismatic, and spoke excellent English with only a slight accent. He attacked Israel quietly, rationally, although certainly with an underlying passion and perhaps above all, resentment.

Why don’t Israelis listen to me? he seems to wonder. Why am I a lonely Jewish voice in a sea of willing Zionist occupiers? A voice crying in the wilderness? Why don’t they understand me? But he wasn’t whining in front of his Columbia University audience; he had them in the palm of his hand.

He could describe the Second Lebanon War as a destruction of that country, neglecting to say that Hezbollah, the trained and equipped long arm of Iran, kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers on the Israeli side of the border, simultaneously firing rockets at northern Israel, attacking and provoking their powerful neighbor while thoroughly undermining their own country and people.

He could describe the more recent Gaza War as a one-sided perpetration of atrocities by Israel, never mentioning the ten thousand or more Kassam rockets that Hamas terrorists shot at Israeli citizens in Sderot and other Negev towns, or the fact that Hamas “soldiers” hid behind women and children, or the IDF’s unprecedented campaign of warning Palestinians of impending attacks through phone calls and text messages, saving thousands of civilians while making Israel’s army more vulnerable.

(Colonel Richard Kemp, a British officer highly experienced in counter-terrorism, said during the war, “ I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more effort to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”)

And Gideon Levy could describe the Mavi Marmara ship-boarding incident as another instance of Israeli brutality against “activists” with no weapons, forgetting entirely that naval commandos who boarded after warning they would do so were met by strong, trained men swinging heavy metal pipes down on their heads until they had to defend themselves. And that previous, very similar ships had brought tons of advanced weapons from Iran toward Gaza.

Levy could do all this because his listeners, typical of university audiences, already knew the mantra and fully accepted it: Israel is the evil in the world. But why can’t he get it across to his own fellow countrymen? He has an answer:

They are in a kind of coma (somehow compatible with paranoia) that cannot be penetrated by his brilliant insights telling them the right and rational thing to do–which of all Israelis he knows best. But at least he can take comfort in the fact that the people in the safe confines of Columbia University agree with him.

Soon enough–just last Thursday–Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“I’m a Dinner-Jacket”) circled the town of Bint Jbail in southern Lebanon with his helicopters and touched down to speak to at least 15,000 followers. A few miles from the Israeli border, this relentless Shoah-denier and would-be annihilator of Israel spoke inspiringly of the rebuilding of Bint Jbail–with Iranian money–after Israel’s bombed it in 2006 in an attempt to root out rocketers and other Hezbollah operatives.

In his tirade he called, as he has done so often before, for “the Zionists to be wiped out” and he held Hezbollah up as a model for the world. Meanwhile a young man on horseback, one of a group chanting slogans of loyalty to Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah said, “It’s a historic day. We have Ahmadinejad on the border of Palestine. Yes, this is Palestine, not Israel, and God willing, Israel will soon vanish with the help of this man.” It had been rumored that he was planning to go right up to the border and throw stones at Israel, but in the end even he was not crazy (or courageous) enough to do that.

Israel’s minister of national infrastructure said “the lesson we should learn from Ahmadinejad’s visit is that Iran is on the northern border of Israel.” Fortunately, though, we know from Gideon Levy that this was just a paranoid, comatose fantasy. Reports by The New York Times, Reuters, and countless other news sources with journalists in Bint Jabail were just seeing things.

Israelis across the border from the Iranian nut-job released a barrage of helium-filled blue and white balloons, blaring the kachol v’lavan of the flag of the Jewish state high over both sides of the fence. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was speaking in Independence Hall, where in May 1948 David Ben-Gurion announced the birth of the country, the official return from exile, the attainment of bimillennial Jewish dreams.

“We heard the blasphemous curses from the Lebanese border today” Netanyahu said. “The best answer to these swears was given here 62 years ago: The state and all that was built and created since then.” Ahmadinejad and his Hezbollah puppets pose a real threat that will surely be taken seriously–to their lasting detriment and pain. As for Gideon Levy, he can continue to make a good living bashing the Jewish state in Israel and around the world. It’s a free country–unlike the ones that want to destroy it.

Although I am no longer a person of faith–I’m on an internet list of “celebrity atheists” and recently learned that I’m also in Who’s Who in Hell–readers of this blog and/or my books know that I am a persistent fellow traveler of religious people. I admire them, I love them, and on certain occasions I want to be with them as they show their devotion.

This includes the Yamim Noraim–Days of Awe–High Holy Days–Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So I’ve spent three of the past ten days mainly in synagogue–Shearith Israel, it’s called–wrapped in a talit (a tallis in my childhood), singing, swaying to chants and melodies of my warm and faith-filled early years. I was in our modern Orthodox shul in Brooklyn for classes, services, and activities pretty much seven days a week from age 8 to 16.

Half a century later, joining the Jewish people in prayer, I still sit and stand hour after hour absorbing the religious melodies, texts, and testimonies of the ages. I still fast for twenty-six hours or so on the Day of Atonement, and I certainly do atone for sins, many of which I have committed, although not necessarily all in the past year. You do not have to be talking to God or think God is watching you in order to examine your own life. You do not have to fear God’s punishment to aspire to be better than you are. You do not have to anticipate Heaven and Hell in order to cherish your life and put it to the best use you can.

I don’t mind saying prayers that praise or appeal to God, especially in Hebrew; they connects me to my childhood and to my parents, grandparents, and a hundred generations before them. However, I discovered yesterday that the English version of Al Chet, which hundreds of people read aloud together in our synagogue, works quite well without the words “against You”:

For the sin we have committed…by haughtiness…

For the sin we have committed…by envy…

For the sin we have committed…by causeless hatred…

For the sin we have committed…by wanton looks…

For the sin we have committed…knowingly and unknowingly…

It’s a long list, and not all sins apply to everyone. You know who you are, the tradition seems to say. And indeed I do know. The sin, though, is not “against You,” against God. The sin is against others, against life, against myself. And yes, I do beat my breast.

I like the idea of Neilah, the closing gates at the closing service, except they are closing within me. The gates of self-examination, of awareness. Not completely of course, but a teachable moment is waning. When you make a resolution in the closing hour of a fast, in the presence of so many others–even a tacit, private, general resolution to be and do better–it’s not the same as making one after a night of drunken revels in the midst of an aching hangover.

The sermons I heard, all by Rabbi Hillel Norry, were instructive and uplifting. One was about Rabbi Nechuniah, whose disciples asked him his secret to long life–which really meant, a good life. “I never honored myself by degrading my fellow,” was the first. In separate remarks, Rabbi Norry condemned in the strongest terms the then-anticipated Qur’an burning by a Christian pastor in Florida,. This, one might say, would have been the opposite of Nechuniah’s secret.

On Kol Nidre night, the beginning of Yom Kippur, he talked about three rabbis who came late to learning–Akiva, an illiterate farmer until age 40, Resh Lakish, who’d been a thug and a gladiator, and Eliezer, a grown-up scion of the upper bourgeoisie before he began. All became geniuses of Torah study; the point being: Take the first step.

But his most inspiring sermon by far was the following day, when he simply and beautifully talked about the breath of life. He described what it was like to witness the first breaths of his children, even imitating them, evoking the miracle of the first source of independent life, a breath of air. And he also said that he had been there to witness the last breaths of his mother and father.

He asked us to breathe in and out together, and he talked about the constant, rhythmic, awesome miracle of the breaths we take, and take for granted, between our first and our last. Although I don’t say that the breath was breathed into me by God, and I know exactly how it works, it still seems awesome to me, and a kind of miracle.

My friend James Gustafson, a distinguished Lutheran theologian and ethicist, used to say that awe, gratitude, penitence, even piety are universal human traits, and that they precede and usually lead toward God. Some of my friends say that I just take God too literally, that God is a metaphor for the spirit of life and how we feel toward it.

Be that as it may, awe, gratitude, penitence, and perhaps even piety are things I feel–especially when I take a slow, conscious breath, or fast, or savour food after a fast, or stand among hundreds of worshippers, or look at my wife and children and realize all that life can be.

For my response to the attacks on religion by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, along with some interesting comments, click here and here. For my account of Yom Kippur at the Great Synagogue of Stockholm, click here.

Tomorrow’s Torah portion is Ki Tavo, which was my Bar Mitzvah portion, and tomorrow is also the 51st anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah. Last year, on the 50th, I read from the Torah again. This was possible because of the kindness of Elena Rothenberg, whose Bat Mitzvah was the same day, and of her parents, Amy and Jerry. They allowed me to share in their great simcha—their rejoicing. Although Elena, Amy, and Jerry gave me permission to “go public” with my version of our shared event, I was wary of invading their privacy. But Elena herself wrote a note about it a few months later in the Shearith Israel Synagogue bulletin, in which she had some very nice things to say about the fact that we had shared the occasion. This emboldened me to blog about it.

Below, I’ve pasted the remarks I made from the pulpit that day, which were directed to Elena. The background is that she spoke before I did, and she talked about her life as a young horsewoman. Among other things she described her astonishment at the fact that some of her competitors in horse races—and their parents—would try to injure other horses in order to gain an advantage in the race. Elena quite properly saw this as violating the law, “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind,” which appears in our shared Torah portion. Clearly, she had matured to the point of being a “daughter of the commandment,” and of assuming responsibility for her own moral behavior and her own sense of how to tell right from wrong.

The most emotional moment of that day was when Jerry and Amy spoke directly to Elena. There were tears in their eyes as they described their hope of having a child, finally fulfilled when they were able to adopt her as a baby. To preserve her birth heritage, they gave her her first name, and to honor that heritage further, they gave out beautiful woven kippot—yarmulkes, or skull caps—from “Maya Works—Interweaving Lives—Made in Guatemala.” It also says, “Elena’s Bat Mitzvah, Shearith Israel, September 5, 2009, 16 Elul, 5769.” So the shul was densely dotted with these little woven circles of Mayan traditions, intermingling with Jewish ones. I still have mine, of course, and wear it often.

On a lighter note, I also had the privilege, thanks to Amy and Jerry, of giving Elena a special gift. They gave her a horse for her Bat Mitzvah instead of a hugely extravagant party. He was called Kasey, and I gave Elena a halter, inscribed with her name, Kasey’s name, and the date of our shared and unforgettable event.

Elena, mazal tov on this great day in your life, and congratulations on your achievement. Amy and Jerry must be bursting with pride. Until a couple of days ago I thought I was going to speak for a few minutes before the sermon, but I then learned that I would speak instead of the sermon! What can I say except, I’ll do the best I can.

I’m going to talk mainly to you, but if these other folks want to listen in, I won’t mind if you won’t. But I wasn’t sure how to do it. So I asked my youngest daughter Sarah, who’s 22, how I should talk to a thirteen-year-old person.

She said, “When I was thirteen, it was a huge change for me. For the first time I felt as if I had a past. I understood the passage of time and the cycle of life. My best friend Emily and I took long walks and talked about philosophy. I don’t think that the mind of someone who’s thirteen is that different from the mind of an adult. So whatever you do don’t talk to her as if she’s a child.”

So I guess it’s not an accident that we think of this as the right time for a girl to become a woman.

Elena, I don’t know you well, but it’s not every young person in Atlanta who spends years preparing for one morning, who sings heartfelt and beautiful prayers in a foreign language, who masters a portion of Torah and Haftorah.

And it’s not every Bat Mitzvah girl who owns a horse and rides him like the wind.

I also didn’t find it easy to get ready for today. I also got nervous. I had to relearn things I once knew, and learn new ones. Like you, I had other responsibilities. I had one especially big thing to do, something that meant a lot to me and that others were counting on me for.

But I learned, for the umpteenth time, to find a balance between the different parts of life. And I came here to do something different, and special.

The hardest thing I had to read in my Torah portion was “lo avarti mimitzvotecha v’lo shachachti—I did not depart from your commandments and I did not forget them.” Actually, that was the part I kept forgetting while I was practicing.

Of course, I did depart from the commandments, and I suppose you will too. But I know that you are a good person. The beloved rabbi of my childhood, Bernard Berzon, used to say that Judaism is not a bargain basement. What he meant was, you don’t do mitzvot to get something in return.

I have not been the best person in the world, but I have tried to do the right thing—enough to know that doing good is its own reward.

There will be moral dilemmas. You’ve already talked about one of them: the temptation to do as others do and try to sabotage your competitors horses in a race. You rejected that thoroughly. I’m guessing you’ve already run into some other dilemmas: a friend who betrays a trust; someone who says, “Come on, do it, no one will ever know;” or: “It’s okay not to invite her, she’s not popular anyway.”

The ethical challenges will not get smaller. You will rise to them.

I was always okay with being Jewish, but there were times in my early life when I could almost take it or leave it. Then, especially after my children were born, I asked myself: “Self, is this three thousand year old tradition going to end with you??” My answer is that I am here today, and, although they are grown up and live far away, my children are here too.

In these 50 years my life took many paths, and not all of them led to shul or Torah, but I always knew where I came from, and I came back. Wherever you are and whatever you do, today will be a part of your connection to Jewish tradition.

By letting me share your Bat Mitzvah, you and Amy and Jerry and all your family gave me a great gift. I did this because I felt connected to the past, but you’ve reminded me that there is something even more important than the past—and that is connecting with the future.

Maybe you know the song from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, “Kol ha-olam kulo gesher tzar m'od,”–all the whole world is a very narrow bridge—“V'ha-ikar lo l'fachayd klal”—and the main thing is not to be afraid.

As I look back, my life has been a kind of bridge between my parents’ generation and my children’s—between the past and the future.

When I was born, radio was the greatest invention, but I lived to have a little box in my pocket that lets me in on all the knowledge of the world and connects me to billions of people.

I was born under the shadow of the Shoah, the Holocaust, but I lived to see the Jewish people survive and thrive and amaze their former tormentors.

I grew up under the threat of nuclear war, but I lived to a time when the hope of one peaceful world may be within our grasp.

I grew up in a world where African-Americans could not sit down at a lunch counter, but I lived to see an African-American become president of the United States.

I grew up in a world where women were not allowed to touch the Torah, but I lived to see you hold it in your arms and read from it and lead this whole congregation in prayer.

And I was born in a time when the Jewish people were refugees and wanderers, but I lived to see the triumph of a Jewish national homeland—a place I have visited often and which I know you will visit next year–as it says in my Torah portion: Eretz zavat chalav u’dvash–a land flowing with milk and honey.

Well, today, it also flows with silicon, computer technology, music and art and theater and film and dance, athletics, mathematics, medical discoveries, Nobel prizes, and wealth that can help protect the future of our people.

But, I have to say, it also sometimes flows with blood and tears.

Elena, I hope, and believe that in your lifetime the blood will stop flowing, although the tears never do. I believe you will live to see an Israel that is universally recognized as “a light unto to the nations,” the Israel the Jews of old dreamed of.

In more ways than one, you have chosen to stand here today. For the times when you are not sure exactly what you believe in, some things are certain: Israel is one. The Jewish people are another. We need you, and you need us.

I know it’s hard for you to see yourself where I am now, but you too will see many changes. As an anthropologist I always take the long view; as Rabbi Tarfon said: “It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

There is plenty of work for you and your generation. My Torah portion reminds us, not once but twice: Take care of the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. It tells us not just that they must eat within our gates—achlu vish’arecha–but that they must eat until they are satisfied.

Because a hungry person is not free until she has had a meal. In your d’var Torah, you talked about not placing a stumbling block in the way of others’ dreams. But I am guessing you will go farther; you will go out and remove some of the stumbling blocks that are still in place.

You will use your great gifts—the love your parents give you, the courage you show every time you climb on Kasey’s back, your writing skills, the gifts and responsibilities you have gleaned from Jewish tradition—to make the world a better place for all its people.

I know you love to read and write. I do too. Those are wonderful things, and they will help you no matter what you decide to do.

But don’t forget to have fun. That too is part of a good life. And it lets you relax into your responsibilities and do more good than you would otherwise do.

Elena, when I look at you, I see a future that I can believe in. Do good deeds, read, write, have fun, and ride like the wind.

And I know that this congregation will say, Omeyn.

To the perennial question, the past month has produced interesting and potentially contradictory answers.

The July 8 issue of Nature has a paper called “The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people.” In it, far-flung scientists in Israel, Spain, Portugal, Russia and elsewhere report on the first systematic genetic analysis of the various, even farther-flung Jewish populations to be based on whole-genome studies. It largely confirms previous findings, which have shown that almost all Jewish populations have a lot of Middle Eastern genes, although the Jews of Ethiopia and India are closer to their host populations.

But there is a lot of news here. First, the Middle Eastern population that the Jews of the world most resemble is that of the Druze in Israel. Second, the Ashkenazi Jews are actually very like the Jews from around the Mediterranean, while those of the Middle East and the Caucasus seem to form a second cluster, and the Yemenite Jews a third, somewhat closer to the Bedouin. But all of these are close to each other and the Druze.

All Jews have mixed genetically with surrounding non-Jewish people, but the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel) are more like their host populations, although Y-chromosome studies show that the Bene Israel have a Middle Eastern connection on the paternal side.

What does all this tell us? Well, the Jews of the world overwhelmingly did originate where they say they did. Also, they were not shy about bringing in significant doses of non-Jewish genes over the centuries, although most Jewish groups did less of this, more often mating among themselves. The Ethiopian and Indian exceptions imported more genes.

All these groups have of course been officially designated as Jewish by the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate. Which is why the other new definition of who is a Jew is a bit strange. Also, it has the American diaspora practically up in arms.

A new law before the Knesset, already passed out of committee for parliamentary debate, will place all conversions, and therefore countless future marriages, in the hands of a tiny group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis. They will be empowered to and almost certainly will challenge the validity of not only non-Orthodox but also modern Orthodox conversions, outside of as well as inside Israel.

Large numbers of Jews converted in the United States will no longer be considered Jewish and therefore not allowed immigrate under the Law of Return or, if they have already done that, to marry in Israel, even if they have served in the army, lived in Israel many years, etc. Equally subject to question will be anyone whose mother’s conversion can be similarly challenged, or whose mother’s mother’s…

Don’t laugh. Couples trying to marry in Israel recently have had their Jewishness checked and challenged going back three generations. It’s a good thing these rules weren’t in place for the last two millennia. We’d have a worldwide Jewish population more like thirteen thousand than thirteen million.

Alana Newhouse, editor of the online Jewish magazine Tablet, wrote in The New York Times, “The redemptive history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust has rested on the twin pillars of a strong Israel and a strong diaspora…Neither the Jewish diaspora nor Israel can afford a split between the two communities…”

The Jerusalem Post, in an editorial, said the Diaspora’s should react “with dismay” and noted, “Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky called it ‘betrayal.’ The executive vice president of the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi Julie Schoenfeld, referred to it as ‘destructive.’ Reform Movement head Rabbi Eric Yoffie said it was ‘astonishing, foolish, disruptive.’”

The JPost editorial goes on: “In recent years, discussion among Jewish leaders and thinkers both in Israel and in the Diaspora has gradually moved away from narrow definitions of Judaism based on religious and ethnic criteria toward a broader more inclusive concept known as ‘peoplehood.’ First coined by Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, peoplehood is ‘the awareness which an individual has of being a member of a group that is known, both by its own members and by outsiders, as a people.’”

Of course, this is the one definition that is consistent with the genetic and historical evidence—not to mention common sense.

I don’t mean to say that all who simply declare themselves to be Jewish should get the label; that would invite abuse of the Law of Return and dilute the Jewish people with many who don’t really want to belong to it. But surely it is not just a small band of a certain brand of ultra-Orthodox rabbis who have the sole right to judge the sincerity and determination of potential converts.

Consult the genes and read therein the more sensible definitions we have had in the past. Insistence on this new law will only fragment and weaken the Jewish people at a moment when new threats, new jeopardy, require the utmost unity.