House or Home?

Welcome home was the phrase I heard repeatedly upon my arrival in Israel. Yet, every day I ask myself, what then is a home? Is it an address? Is it the house that my grandfather built? Is it nothing but concrete and wood? What if it is infested with termites? Would I still want to live there? Is it still my home? Or is it just an old house?

My six months in Israel have been one of the most confounding ordeals of my life. I was supposed to be coming home. And I would have to think that it meant more than a set of longitudinal and lattitudutinal quadrants on a map. I would think it implied something about values as well, Jewish values hopefully.

So why do I feel as though I am on Mars, living alongside Martians? There's a song from the 1970s called "New York's Not My Home" by Jim Croce. Jim was an easy-going Italian American from Philadelphia. He came to New York because that's where folk singers had to go to ply their trade, but the experience unnerved him. He wrote:

Well, things were spinning round me

And all my thoughts were cloudy

And I had begun to doubt all the things that were me

Been in so many places

You know I've run so many races

And looked into the empty faces of the people of the night

And something is just not right

Cause I know that I gotta get out of here

I'm so alone

Don't you know that I gotta get out of here

Cause, New York's not my home

The line "And I had begun to doubt all the things that were me" bounces around my head. I'm in my 50s now. I have an interesting life, full of ups and downs, and searching for an identity and a path. Over the years I have been able to identify many of my faults and to work on them. I was improving vastly before I came to Israel. I was learning finally to live with some faith and humility, to be a good neighbor, to be happy with my lot, to keep my opinions to myself, to praise others.

Believe it or not, those things were playing a stronger role in my personality as I suspect they were a part of me all along, just buried. And now I'm starting to doubt all the things that were becoming me because I'm in a culture that is the opposite of all that. I'm not trying to slander half the Jewish nation. It hurts to me express these thoughts but I must to hold on to the little bit of me that I built up over my life, that little bit of a little man that is rapidly slipping away.

I don't think that Jews are naturally arrogant, impatient, selfish, greedy, uncouth, heartless, and doctrinaire, but rather they can become that way if they don't channel their talents and energies through mitzvos, if they don't understand their blessings and hardships through the Torah. And that to me is the problem with Israel. Jews need the Torah. Without it, we become worse than the gentiles and so if we refuse to keep the Torah, we are sent to live with the gentiles because it's actually better for us. So what we have here is a secular state, ie Jews without Torah.

But I didn't come to Israel just for me. Actually, I came mostly because it was supposed to be better for my children. The future of the Jewish people is in Israel I was told. Yet, I believe that I have placed my children around people who I would never want them to emulate. Grow up in Israel, but don't be like the Israelis. That's the message I'll need to give them if I remain here.

Or I'll just let them become like Israelis and try to hold my breath when I'm around them, just as I do with Israelis. Doesn't sound like a workable plan to me.

I ask myself now, is humility an admirable trait? What about cooperation and compromise? I thought these were proper goals in life. What about concern for one's neighbors? What about a hundred virtues that in Israel are not virtues.

The primary virtues here seem to be power and sneakiness. But those of course are not real virtues. They are the sins of a massively corrupt society. That to me is Israel. How could I ever call such a place home? And what happens to me and my family if we stay?