Leonard Fein on Peoplehood

from yesterday’s Forward:

We Are All Implicated in the World’s Repair

There’s considerable talk these days about Jewish peoplehood. Is the sense of it sustainable? For that matter, is it still alive? And on what foundation does it rest?

What is it that connects one Jew to another? And what connects the two largest communities of Jews, here in America and there in Israel, to one another? Is their bond merely the residue of an earlier time, a characteristic of people “of a certain age” whose lives began in a world without a Jewish state and who themselves witnessed the extraordinary transformation that the creation of Israel embodied? Is that bond significantly reciprocal, or does it come down to our dependence on them for psychic needs and theirs on us for financial and political contributions?

Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem

image courtesy: JAFI