2 days. In 2 days we’re set to take off. This Sunday, over a dozen students from around the country will be leaving JFK for Tel Aviv, embarking on J Street U’s first trip to Israel: Engage with Israel: Peace, Democracy, and Social Justice. The trip is going to be an amazing experience, as we travel through Israel and the occupied territories meeting Israelis and Palestinians working on behalf of social justice and an end to conflict.
Personally, I’m incredibly excited that we’re taking this step as an organization. I came to J Street U as a result of my time living in Jerusalem during the summer of 2009. While in graduate school I had the opportunity to work as a fellow at the Israeli Religious Action Center (IRAC), learning about issues of religious pluralism in Israel. During that summer I was surprised to engage an Israeli society that I never knew existed: young men and women struggling on behalf of the soul of their country, fighting for the values of justice and democracy that I had always been taught were central to the Jewish tradition.
These young people – the activists at the weekly Sheik Jarrah demonstrations, the lawyers at IRAC, the human rights advocates of B’Tselem, the Rabbis for Human Rights, and many others – spoke a language that echoed the voices at the seder table around which my family gathered every year. They spoke a language of justice, and struggle, and lived out the words of the sage Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”
While these Israelis spoke a language I recognized as deeply Jewish, these voices had been absent in the conversation on Israel within the Jewish community in which I grew up. They were not the voices I heard at Talmud Torah Day School in St. Paul Minnesota, on campus at Pomona College, in my Conservative synagogue in Minneapolis. I was deeply inspired by their work, and their courage. In time, I came to see their cause – the struggle for an Israel that reflected values of democracy and justice and equality, an Israel that provided self-determination for Jews without denying self-determination to its neighbors – as my own. I left Israel with a deep sense of obligation. And a tremendous sense of opportunity.
I came to J Street U to act on that obligation, and to seize that opportunity. I knew that central to both was ensuring that we created opportunities for young American Jews to connect with the Israel that I had come to know and love. That was an an Israel that challenged, disrupted and inspired me, and that I knew that Israel would do the same for the many young people I knew were unwilling to set aside their values of justice and democracy when it came to their relationship to Israel.
We’ve worked to connect young people throughout the US to that Israel throughout this past year, through tours of Israelis who spoke on campus, through our conference, and through our work planning programs in Jerusalem for American students. But nothing can replace the experience of traveling the land over weeks, learning from its people, and getting to know and engage the many activists and advocates and lawyers and rabbis and politicians and journalists that are every day struggling to make the project of Jewish self-determination one that reflects our people’s values of justice.
It was these Israelis that so transformed my own life and my relationship to Israel, and it is one of the great joys of this position that I can invite other young people into the conversation and community and story they are writing every day in the Jewish homeland.
I know it’s going to be an amazing two weeks. I wish we could bring 500 people and not just 14. But I want you to come with us. So please do check back to this page – we’ll update it most days with photos and reflections and video from the journey. I promise you won’t want to miss it.
Daniel
Daniel May
Director, J Street U
June 10, 2011
