When my uncle was a teenager, he became enthralled by Japanese culture. Over the decades that followed, he became fluent in Japanese, practiced the Japanese art of Kendo, and married a Japanese-American woman, all before making a permanent home in his adoptive land. For years, he has been imploring my parents to visit, and they finally made the very long trip in December.
Listening to the stories of the grand adventure upon my parents’ return home, I was struck by the deeply ingrained social code that seemed to be shared by all inhabitants of the cities they visited. My parents remarked on the consistency of attire across the country, the way that trash was discarded with care and attention, and the protocols for respect and dignity that were ubiquitous in every situation in which they found themselves. According to their experience, this was a nation that understood what it meant to share space with one another and had created a shared cultural ethic by which all citizens would abide.
This was jarring in contrast to the often-belligerent obsession with freedom in the United States. While individual liberties can be incredibly empowering to the public, it can also make it very difficult to predict the behavior of anyone else with whom you might come into contact. When we don’t share the same values and ideologies, trust becomes a rare commodity, and can lead to a kind of “every man for himself” attitude that is very difficult to overcome, especially when it comes time to gather together to make important decisions.
Yet, upon hearing about the experience of my parents, I was also struck by the sense of deep Jewishness in a nation with a shared cultural language. After all, so much of Jewish text, both Torahitic and interpretative, is about how to bring our values and practices into alignment, and how to create a society that is thoughtful, compassionate, and protective of those in need of help. Alas, throughout most of Jewish history, we have not had the power or self-governance to be able to put those ideas into practice in any real way.
This is why the national identity afforded to us by the state of Israel has been such a powerful moment in Jewish cultural history. Israel was, conceptually, supposed to be the place where we could put our communal ethic into practice. This was a living embodiment of the thought experiment: what would it look like if Tikkun Olam was a national mandate? What would it mean to create a society crafted on marking Jewish time, both with Shabbat and with holiday observances? How would it feel to have menschlekite, the concept of being a good person, as fundamental to national identity?
Of course, in practice, things have been far more difficult. The entire history of Israel has demanded a national identity centered around self-preservation and defense, a tragically difficult way to live out our existence. Conflict with our neighbors and in-fighting amidst our political factions have made it almost impossible for us to test the theory regarding what it would look like to create a nation centered around Jewish values. Still, getting to see Jewish belief and practice integrated into language, calendar, and civil society has shown flashes of the beauty of what it means when a people comes together to create a shared sense of right and wrong, to create a culture in which we have a mutually-agreed upon set of standards for how we should behave.
My parents got to see a surface level view of Japanese culture and society. I have no doubt that there are unique challenges, shortcomings, and nuances to the reality that my uncle has made his own. And yet, seeing a powerful nation come together with a set of shared values and communal expectations, I can’t help but imagine a day when our people might just be able to live in peace long enough to install some of these same shared ideals, to be able to choose how we codify our morality, rather than to be so influenced by outside forces. After all, how beautiful would it be if the ideals we learned in synagogue were able to be the central ideology of an entire people, all striving to live in harmony and compassion?
Austin Zoot is the Rabbi Educator at Valley Temple in Wyoming, Ohio.
