The Velveteen Rabbi's Birthday Card to Israel

Dear Israel,

Wow, you're turning 60. Incredible. Happy birthday to you!

I feel a little bit like I'm showing up at your birthday party without a gift. The truth is, you and I don't really know each other. I know we're related, but we don't have much of a relationship. That's been my choice, I realize. I wasn't sure how to feel about you, so I turned my attention elsewhere for a while.

I get frustrated sometimes by how much attention we lavish on you. I worry that an overfocus on you means we don't pay enough attention to Jewish education in the diaspora, or to the many other human dramas unfolding around the globe. Often it has seemed to me that American Jews perceive you're the only place that can be truly holy -- which does a disservice both to you and to us.

But this is a big birthday. And I've been feeling increasingly like it's time for me to reach out. As a rabbinic student and as a Jew, I need to know you better than I do. So here I am, saying hello. I'm even coming to spend the summer with you. I'm excited about that -- and nervous, too.

Many people I love tell me the moment they touched your soil they knew they'd come home. They tell me that one Shabbat in Jerusalem, one desert sunrise, one rousing round of "Hatikva" will be enough to bind me to you for life -- indeed, that we're already bound together, whether I know it or not.

Others look at me askance when I mention that I'd like to get to know you in a more nuanced way. They remind me about your insular religious establishment; they point to the security barrier, to the painful realities of Palestinian life, to your decisions that make me angry or sad.

I often feel caught between people I know and love who adore you, who support you without reservation -- and people I know and love who find your choices problematic at best. And, of course, everyone in between. I experience cognitive dissonance where you're concerned. To your detractors, I want to defend you fiercely; to your defenders, I want to point out every way in which you fail to live up to my hopes and dreams.

And maybe that complicated welter of mixed emotions is precisely how I know we do have a relationship after all. I wouldn't be so emotionally invested if we weren't family.

I suspect that the better I get to know you, the more I will love you -- and also the more I will question you and disagree with you. It's going to take work to make our relationship whole and holy. Maybe that's the gift I can offer: my desire to know you well enough to know what about you I want to celebrate, and what about you I want to work to change.

So hey, Israel, happy 60th birthday. I don't know what the years to come hold, but I look forward to finding out -- together.

Love, Cousin Rachel

Rachel Barenblat is a student in the ALEPH rabbinic program who blogs at Velveteen Rabbi. She's a contributing editor at Zeek, a Jewish journal of thought and culture, and author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently chaplainbook, a collection of poems arising out of hospital chaplaincy work (Laupe House Press, 2006.) She co-founded the Progressive Faith Blog Con, a gathering of bloggers of progressive faith that took place for the first time in the summer of 2006. She lives in western Massachusetts.