Editorial: More important than a day of school

We’ve just celebrated the major Jewish holiday most American Jews have never heard of. If you live and work entirely within the confines of observant Jewry, that might never have come to your attention, but it’s true.

(What did you say the holiday is called? Interesting. I never heard of it.)

Research has shown the Seder to be the most universally observed ritual among American Jews. Chanukah is well known; Purim is recognized by secular Jews for its Halloween-like qualities; Tu B’shvat has gained a new following among left-leaning Jews for its tree-hugginess. However, Shavuot, when Moshe took delivery of the Torah, marking the true beginning of our nationhood — that often doesn’t ring a bell.

The explanation is easy. There’s some irony involved but no mean-spiritedness meant or implied. Simply put, people who observe the Torah know that it’s a big deal. Jews who, for whatever reason, were never offered that knowledge, couldn’t be expected to know that. And unfortunately, Jews who actively dispute the Torah’s primacy in Jewish life aren’t very likely to celebrate it. Too many Jews recognize the phrase ‘Saw you at Sinai’ only as an online dating site.

An essay in the New York Review of Books, “The failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” by Peter Beinart, references another gap in contemporary Jewish knowledge. While not as momentously tragic as a Jew who doesn’t know that G-d gave us His Torah, it’s still a big deal.

Beinart refers to a study carried out several years ago by a Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, that sought to answer the question why Jewish college students don’t more vigorously oppose anti-Israel views on campus. He “unwittingly” found what Beinart called, “the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.” To wit, he uncovered an indifference toward Israel, and a lack of connection with its people, that he attributes to the fact that, “most of the students, in other words, were liberals...[who] had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.”

Just to be clear, it is Beinart’s position that this is a good thing (two paragraphs later he writes, “Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled.”)

You can learn something from everyone, no matter how misguided, so we use this to make the following point: Just as observant Jews make certain that our children learn all about G-d’s great gift to us, they need to know just how big a deal it is to be able to visit or live in Israel today, something virtually impossible for previous generations.

The Salute to Israel Parade steps off on Sunday at 11 a.m. We encourage our readers to make a statement to their children, and tell them that Eretz Yisrael is vitally, deeply important to us — and that it’s vitally important to be at the parade, even at the expense of a day of school. Not because a parade is important by itself, but because it represents the support that our family in Israel needs from each of us, this year as much or more than ever.