Sacrifice

“They’re just babies….” I thought as I looked at the off-duty soldiers as they got off a bus in Tel Aviv. Unlike when I was here last at age 24 and Ziv was finishing his tour in the Navy at almost 21, I can see just how young these soldiers are.

No wonder this country takes its conflicts and issues so seriously. Peace couldn’t be dearer and the price of freedom and existence higher than the price of your children’s lives. In Israel, military service is mandatory – three years for men, one for women and in the state of emergency men can be drafted back up to age 40.

As I got on the El Al flight to Tel Aviv, it occurred to me as I looked at the faces of each of these people that probably all of them had risked their lives and defended their country. They personally have paid for their freedom and their country. How much more stake in your homeland can you have?

It’s a value fewer and fewer of us in America know. We see paying our taxes as our stake. Our businesses, our property, our potential for success are all things that tie us to our nation. Very few of us join the military and those who do choose to do so. We thank them and honor them, but we also feel they made a choice and received great benefits and compensation for their choice.

We are also not fighting for our very lives. We fight strategically, far away in events that are by and large optional and in which we as a society debate the validity of our actions.

Israel fights at its borders, on its soil and in its region. Threats are real. It relies on help. And it pays the price with what every parent holds most dear – the lives of their children.

I read that when Golda Mier was Prime Minister, she learned each lost soldier’s names and contacted each family herself. She felt that because of Israel’s small size (about 3.5 million people in her time) and the horrors of the millions of Jews lost in the holocaust that the loss of each soldier’s life was worth hundreds of soldiers to a larger country.

There is a value here that Americans have forgotten since my grandparents’ generation when everyone sacrificed for their country and truly the world as we know it. Since then, we have lived off the gifts we have been given. We are fortunate. And we live in a completely different paradigm than our elders or the people of Israel.

Walking down the streets of Tel Aviv, it’s clear that Israelis have something to fight for. A healthy first world society, every modern convenience, a great quality of life and the intangible and incredibly precious value of freely and easily being Jews.

The modern city has no pretension, no flash. It’s relaxed. People live in neighborhoods which feel like neighborhoods. There is connection within the society – the kind of connection we are increasingly losing in our country.

In America, Israel remains a very controversial topic. It’s politics are the focus of our own political discourse. It’s quandaries and predicaments are not as easily solves as a news anchor might like us to believe.

But to be here, to see it, there are the intangibles that one can only understand from direct contact with a society. It is much the same as when Europeans and Asians have criticized America to me. Our mistakes, our political discourse and our outlook can only be fully understood by someone who has seen and touched our unique society.

Like America, Israel has ideals and realities worth fighting for. And somehow, yesterday I understood Golda Meir a little better.

Sent from my iPad