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  • Seeing through the WallA life and film
  • Dov Taylor (bio)

Could i live a more authentic Jewish life in a "Jewish state"? Could there be a Jewish nation-state that would not succumb to the evils of the modern nation-state, but would organize its existence consistent with the classical Jewish values of justice and love? The questions are not new to me, but they are unfortunately still pressing.

With one year remaining before rabbinic ordination at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, I decided to take a year's leave of absence (1966-67) to explore these questions for myself at HUC-JIR's School of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem.

When I signed up to participate in the dig at Tel Gezer in the spring of 1967, it never occurred to me that archaeological excavation would become one more weapon in the ongoing struggle between Israel and Palestine for legitimacy in this ancient land; or that it would become a metaphor for the self-scrutiny many of us engage in as we try to sort out our Jewish identity from the un-Jewish policies of "the state of the Jewish people."

That year I read Toledot ha-Emuna ha-Yisre'eilit; Yechezkel Kaufmann's thesis was that Israelite monotheism began with Moses. He states, "It was absolutely different from anything the pagan world knew; its monotheistic world view has no antecedents in paganism."

Thanks in large part to archaeology, we now know that in all likelihood the Israelites were never in Egypt or the wilderness, didn't conquer the land or divide it among the twelve tribes of Israel, and adopted monotheism much later than Mount Sinai. Archaeological evidence doesn't support a Jewish claim to a Greater Israel.

On May 15, 1967 at the annual Israel Song Festival at Binyanei ha-Uma, I heard Shuli Natan sing for the first time a new song that had been commissioned by Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek—Naomi Shemer's "Jerusalem of Gold"—and the crowd went wild. The song lamented, "One can't go


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Officers in the Israeli Defense Force during the Six-Day War in 1967.

down to the Dead Sea by way of the Jericho Road" or "visit the Temple Mount in the Old City," expressing a bittersweet longing. At the time, no one knew that, in less than a month, the Jericho Road and the Temple Mount would be under Israeli control and the song lyrics would need to be changed to reflect the new reality.

Then came May 23rd and Nasser's threatened blockade of the Straits of Tiran and its effects on Israeli shipping. Everyone knew that a response was inevitable, and we were terrified that a war against three Arab countries could result in a massacre—and even the end of the State of Israel. Very quickly the country was on a war footing. All reserves were called on. We piled sandbags against the glass walls of the college that faced the Old City and donated blood in anticipation of what was to come. Most foreigners scrambled to get out of the country before war broke out, even if it meant flying east instead of west. My academic year had ended, and I had a reservation for a flight home in a few days. No one could have predicted Israel's stunning victory in what would come to be known as The Six-Day War.

Sometimes we discover what we really believe only when forced to make a decision. At home in America I felt like a Jew. In Israel, despite my facility with the language, I felt like an American. I was homesick for my family and my country—the country that had made me who I was and had given me everything I had, and was eager to get back to.

But I'd lived for nine months in Jerusalem, travelled the land, made Israeli friends, shopped in Israeli markets, encountered the beggars of Jerusalem made famous in Elie Wiesel's book of the same name. I could leave. But for them, this was the last stop. Had...

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