Today is Israel’s birthday, and I want to reflect on birthdays, birthday celebrations, and my own complicated relationship with both. Why? Because I am increasingly tired, frustrated, and sad about how much of the Israel-interested chattering class—Jewish and otherwise—mirrors the ever-deepening siloing of our culture, even as it bemoans that very process.
Smart people, people who really care, are increasingly in the point-scoring game when it comes to the topic of Israel, choosing to take down those with whom they disagree, and to prove why their position—whatever it is—is right. Perhaps most distressing to me, they do so based on what they call “Jewish values.” The first two efforts have little to no impact other than to rally the faithful, shoring up whatever position the audience already has. The Jewish values game is pointless at best and dangerously disingenuous at worst, as virtually every position could be supported by a Jewish-values-based argument.
We have values and wisdom that support everything from Meir Kahane to Jewish Voice for Peace. That is one of the great strengths of a tradition that has generally preferred an additive approach to truth over a reductive one. It also means that today, Israel’s birthday will mean many things to many people, including to many Jews. I wish we would stop debating who is right, opting instead to speak and write about how our lived experience has brought us to the position on which we have currently landed.
So instead, I want to focus on birthdays and my relationship to them, more than on Israel itself. But I do so because it is a way for me to reflect on Israel itself, and upon how we might all engage a little better around this topic.
Birthdays are wonderful. Birthdays are opportunities to celebrate the fact of someone or something’s existence, often in ways that blind us to more nuanced analyses of what we are celebrating. They are opportunities to gather people together who may rarely be together, to indulge in foods that we probably shouldn’t eat, to shower gifts upon the celebrated even if the gifts are a little over the top. Birthdays, at their best, are celebrations of unconditional love, and I believe in all that, especially today, on Israel’s birthday.
Birthdays are also uncomfortable. At least they often have been for me. They are moments that can, and maybe should, invite the kind of reflection that can drag me down. I feel that another year has gone by, that there is much I wanted to accomplish but failed to, and that I am not sure how much there really is to celebrate. This part reminds me to appreciate the difference between unconditional love, in which I deeply believe, and unconditional support, about which I have questions. There is room for that discomfort too, even today—or at least there should be for those who want and need it.
We need both of these relationships to birthdays. When we give up on either one of them, we lose out. I know that is true for me, and I dare say that my experience is far from unique.
I am the better for the times I give and receive unconditional love. It brings out the best in me and in others. I am better for allowing myself to feel worthy of celebration on my birthday, and others are certainly better for my ability to celebrate them, even when I do so with more abandon than they may, by some lights, deserve.
I am also better for the times I hold myself to the fire, embracing that even though I and others deserve unconditional love, I have plenty of work to do.
But here’s the thing: We need not take both of these postures toward birthdays simultaneously. In fact, I don’t think we can, or should even try, for many reasons, including that the most current neuroscience research tells us that there is no such thing as true multitasking. Instead, we do what they describe as “serial uni-tasking,” which means flipping between different tasks, as we accomplish each task, but not at exactly the same time.
I invite myself and each of us to give ourselves over to one posture or the other at any given moment, knowing that we will be our best only when we make room, in due course, for the other posture as well.
Happy Birthday, Israel, with love.