A song to ascend by

when God brought about our return to Zion we were dreaming...

oh how we will laugh with delight

oh how our tongues will sing...

Our youthful dream got old and stale

we dreamed that we would care for the land

we dreamed how we would make the people happy

we dreamed that we would heal from 2000 years of exile

we dreamed of equality and rectitude

we dreamed …

Alas—we did not dream of the human cost to our cousins.

Bloody and exhausted from the Holocaust we could not imagine ourselves except as in the role of victims. Our trust in the Balfour Declaration —subsequently shattered by the White Paper—redoubled our effort to secure the land of our dreams.

I was eleven years old in Vienna going around with a little box collecting for the Jewish National Fund. I was so proud to think that we rightfully owned every dunam of land because we bought it for our people with the money of our people.

I belonged to a Zionist youth group and watched 16mm movies of kibbutzim, danced the Hora, and began to pronounce Hebrew with a lot of ahh sounds.

I liked to think of Tel Aviv as an up-and-coming metropolitan city, of Jerusalem as a sacred place shared by all of the Abrahamic religions.

Every time I saw a picture of Theodore Herzl I walked straighter and held my head higher. I still remember the Herzl motto “Wir wollen von Judenjungen junge Juden machen” (literally, we want to turn Jew-youths into Young Jews). With fervent hopes I sang not only the Hatikvah but also the Techezakna, Artzah Alinu.

A pro-labor government established a healthcare system, Bikkur Cholim, which was the model for the rest of the world.

With great hope and delight I read about the Talmudbauer, a Talmud scholar who was also a farmer. I took delight in hearing about K’far Hassidim, and seeing the faces of Jews from Yemen.

I look with sadness at the groups that insisted on perpetuating their exilic ethnicity, creating enclaves so that they might continue in the style they brought from Europe without filtering out the psychic spam picked up in Europe under oppression. The Hasidim still want to be known by the towns in which they visited their masters: Amshinov, Belz, Ger, Karlin, Lubavitch, Vizhnitz, etc.

I am glad that some are practicing the Shmittah, a sabbatical year in Israel, and giving Terummah and Ma’asser of our produce. (But is this not to teach the lesson that is contained in these practices: to honor the natural land?)

Early on, I dreamed of an internationalized Jerusalem, headquarters of the United Nations.

I dreamed of an Israeli army that would be the core of the United Nations peacekeeping force. How proud I was of the term Taharat Haneshek, the ethical use of arms.

I dreamed of a union of states in the Middle East in which we would share our natural resources as well as our technical know-how.

I dreamed of the weekly concert of Levites who were recruited from all kinds of religious backgrounds to create the music for the House Of Prayer For All Peoples.

I wrote a proposal that we put aside a penny per gallon of gasoline to be used to resettle Palestinian refugees.

This was not only my personal dream. It was in the air; it was shared, it was the myth that we lived with and for. How we rejoiced the night we heard the UN agreeing to partition.

Each time the surrounding nations attacked Israel I felt personally under siege. Yes, we needed to defend ourselves; yes, we needed to arm (though I was not proud of the fact that Israel sold Uzis to repressive governments and helped organize their secret police forces).

Now the arms industry of Israel has taken plowshares and turned them into swords.

A planned economy has given way to free style capitalistic piracy in return for being allowed to feed from the U.S. taxpayers ’ feeding trough.

Each one of us, in his own way, laments his unfulfilled dreams.

It isn’t only Israel that is undergoing the decay of the myth. Everywhere we turn on the planet there is pain, destruction, waste and oppression; and our mother the Earth is reeling in delirium.

No fix will work if it only deals with an individual issue, country or people. Any solution that is not systemic, organismic, and global will fail.

Yet one has to begin somewhere.

It is not only on the conscious mundane level that the repair needs to be made. Clashing archetypes sit behind the rhetoric. We need to engage with the dreamers on both sides of the conflict to repair the image of the other, to see each other as human beings in the image of God and not as Apes and Pigs/Amalekite savages.

There has to be a separation of secular law and Halachah. We must show the world that Halachah and Shariah are not to be imposed on people who have not committed themselves to live under those rules; we must defend the respectful and separate domains of religion and the state.

Guest workers who come to help us in Israel deserve to be treated as welcome guests, not as beasts of burden to be exploited.

We have to devise and activate a healing way for soldiers to come back to their families after the army and yearly reserve duty.

We have to show the world that on our turf we have taken care of the homeless and hungry.

We have to show that taxes are not a burden, but the membership fee for participating in an open society.

We have to recover our ancient deep caring for the land itself: mitzvat yishuv ha-aretz.

We have to commit to sustainability and make that

commitment the reality in Eretz Yisrael.

If there is a ray of hope it is in the mothers who keep a vigilant humanitarian focus on checkpoints.

Below the radar there are clandestine meetings of peace seekers. Our Renewalists have in concert with others organized the Sulha and other meetings and celebrations. There are collaborations like the Dead Sea works, agriculture and water equity, the Path of Abraham and Rabbis for Human Rights.

I wish that we would truly and fully yearn and plan for a better world. We need to behave in such a way that sings on all octaves of sentient life: “we want a shared and global Mashiach (Messiah) now!” And only together can we constitute that Mashiach.

The only way to get it together is—together.