When I was a child, weekday mornings at my Jewish day school followed the same routine. We’d recite the pledge of allegiance, sing Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, and then recite the Shacharit, Judaism’s morning prayer service. Like a sizable, although perhaps now shrinking, segment of American Jews, I grew up in a traditional community where Israel was the geographic and spiritual center of the universe.
We were an outpost of Israel in New Jersey’s north-west Bergen county. Identification with the state of Israel was total, even if it was an Israel frozen in time, roughly the 1970s, the years of our Israeli teachers’ youth. We observed Israeli civil holidays with an ardor we never showed for their American equivalents. On Israel’s Independence Day, we marched in the town’s quiet, tree-lined streets. On Israel’s Memorial Day, the entire school assembled to sing maudlin songs mourning the handsome young soldiers who gave their lives for Israel – for us.
