RISHON LEZION, Israel — Daniel Gordis, an American who emigrated here, explains why he chooses to live in the Jewish state:
You live here, and you feel things that you don’t feel anywhere else. You just do. You’re part of things that you wouldn’t be part of anywhere else. You care about people you wouldn’t care about in the same way anywhere else. Other people’s stories are your stories in ways that they couldn’t be anywhere else. You cry, and you laugh, and you mourn and you celebrate, with people who elsewhere, might not matter to you at all.
You may not even be sure that we should make the trade to get [captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit] out [from Hamas captivity], but you cry when we can’t. And given the choice of living life this way, or not, there’s really only one question that matters:
Why would I think of living anywhere else?
The negative things about living in Israel are logical and easy for outsiders to understand: occasional war and terror, a tougher economy, and a lower standard of living. But the benefits are more emotional and harder to explain to someone who does not live here.
As I wrote in a prior post in my Letters from Israel series, living here makes a person feel like he is among family (albeit frequently a disfunctional one). Everyone cares about everyone; no one is a stranger. This was a welcome change following the years that I lived in American suburbs (southern Illinois) and cities (Boston).
As sociologist Robert Putnam famously noted in “Bowling Alone,” civil society in the United States seems to be dying. In the suburbs, people seclude themselves behind their white, picket fences and barely interact with their neighbors. In the cities, people can feel like islands even while among millions of people.
Regardless of where one lives in Israel, this does not happen. In fact, everyone can be in each other’s business so much — and this explains the immense popularity of this country’s version of the “Big Brother” television show — that sometimes you just want people to leave you alone and butt out!
