Heart-Earned Wisdom: Back to the Future?

Last month during Passover vacation my almost 19-year-old son spent five days hiking through Jordan. He and six friends took taxis, slept outside, climbed through wadis, waded through rivers, and generally had the kind of adventure I would have liked to have had when I was his age.

When it was time to come home from their Jordanian adventure my son and his friends caught a taxi back to the Israeli border. The driver asked the kids where they were from. 

"Israel" they answered "Where are you from?"

"I'm from Jaffa," the driver answered.

My son was impressed. Here was this guy whose family had fled Jaffa in 1948.  He had no realistic chance of going back and he yet he still said he was from Jaffa.

"My friend Gershom," my son told me, "was thrown out of Gush Katif a couple of years ago, and if you ask  him where he's from he says Amatziya, where he lives in a trailer, not Katif where he grew up."

This jived with what I'd experienced when we at Camp Koby ran a summer camp for 10 year old kids from Gush Katif the first summer after the expulsion. When asked where they were from the children invariably responded with where they had moved to that summer, Nizzanim, or Amatziya or what have you. When I told them I meant where in Gush Katif, they seemed a little embarrassed and quietly voiced the name of their original community.

Many would contend that the taxi driver's attachment to his ancestral home somehow makes it more likely that he or his descendents would one day return. There are those leaders and educators in the Gush Katif community who still want their charges to relate to their original communities; leaders who continue to insist publicly that someday they will return to their original homes. And indeed the families of those killed and expelled from Gush Etzion would congregate on a mountaintop in Jerusalem and look out over the vista to the homes they were expelled from in 1948 vowing to return. In the end, their dream came true. Those youngsters on that hill were among the first to resettle Kfar Etzion, the first community to be re-established after the six-day war.

On the other hand there is something very healthy about the quintessential Israeli ability to move forward; to look ahead and not back. After all, during our long history Jews have been repeatedly uprooted and expelled. And in each new place they created something new and vibrant.  

Is it psychologically and emotionally beneficial for the individual to look back toward a place that now stands bulldozed and bereft, or to look forward to building something new? Is it better for the Jews as a people? Do we lose the will to return if we build new lives or do we loss the opportunity to build something new and vibrant if we continue to look back at a place that no longer exists but to which we may return in the distant future. 

Many of those Palestinians who left Israel during the War of Independence in 1948 or the Six Day War in 1967 are still in refugee camps. Whether from personal choice or the political decisions of their leaders, generations have remained rooted in the fantasy of returning to Haifa or Jaffa and hence, rooted, some would say stuck, in  crowded and squalid neighborhoods pining for their ancestral homes and unable to move forward in life politically, geographically or emotionally.

Those children at Camp Koby unconsciously rejected their leaders desire to focus on the past, and like children everywhere lived in the present and looked to the future. Perhaps if the Palestinians allowed their children the same choice this conflict would have been resolved long ago.