Perspective

During my pre-Israel trip appointment with my most beloved hair guru, the one and only Paul Timlin--who buy virtue of the many Jewish women he's dated is definitely an honorary MOT--I mentioned this would be my very first to Israel. Paul nearly dropped his shears, exclaiming, "But you're a JEW!!!".

Therein lies the rub. Most people who are not Jewish, and even some who are, think that if you are a Jew, you've naturally made the journey to the Homeland at some point in your life, and probably when you were young, doing the summer kibbutz thing, or, at the very least, when you graduated college.

In reality, the statistic is something like less than 25-30% of American Jews have set foot on Israeli soil. Ever. And many have no plans to go. The folks who's job it is to worry about American Jewish support for Israel know this all too well. That's why programs like Taglit Birthright exist. http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer

What was suddenly eye-opening to me having just returned, is that in conversations with some of my same-aged friends--some of them members of the vital organizations that raise awareness and funds--many of them have not been to Israel since their kid was a bar or bat mitzvah, and now their kids graduated law school, medical school and are years out of college.

Or some of my Orthodox friends went twenty-odd years ago to make the pilgrimage, almost, in one sense it seems, to get it over with and from now on go to Europe or the Caribbean. It's been years since they've seen Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and when I describe my trip, with everyone in Tel Aviv having a tattoo, and the amount of religious tension in Jerusalem, they shake their heads and mutter, "I suppose I should go again", with all the enthusiasm of someone scheduling their colonoscopy.

And yet, these are the people who have opinions about pretty much anything and everything Israel does or does not do, from the war in Gaza to building settlments to dividing Jerusalem. These are the activists who weigh in with their petitions and their phone calls and e-mails to the media outlets they perceive as anti-Israel, to the White House, and who keep Israel as their escape hatch should Obama turn out to be what many of them fear he secretly is: an anti-Israel President that stokes the fires against the Jews here at home.

None of this makes any sense on the ground when you are there. This is part of the wake-up call for me now that I have been back a few weeks and friends are asking how my trip was. My answer now is the same one they gave me when they found out I had not ever been before: "You should go."