Was Addis Ababa Kept Open One Day Longer?

...Thank God," she said...

...Ethiopian Christians I have spoken to are invariably fascinated by the question of how the Israelis knew who was a Jew and who was not...

...For the Beta Yisrael are Jews who have forgotten Hebrew, who have never heard of the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition or, possibly, the destruction of the Temple...

...Yet now, but a few years later, if there were no Israel and no Law of Return, the sad spectacle of the 1930s would be repealed: More and more states close iheir doors precisely in proportion to the number of Russian Jews seeking refuge from antisemitism...

...The second Zionist pillar is Israel's law of Return, Some time ago a Brandeis University professor urged that the state should rescind that law—a move that might appease some Arabs—since anyhow few Jews were left to make aliyah...

...But in some deep and important way, I could not marry the gentile girl next door, unless she was a serious convert to Judaism, without causing a rupture in my consciousness...

...What history we have in common has been obscured by centuries of separation...

...This recovery and rediscovery are without precedent in the movement's turbulent history...

...Israeli sabras, generally a hard-boiled, contentious lot, were at one in their joy and their tears, with one of them putting it thus: The singing and clapping and pure joy was the kind of thing that makes you forget about all the trials of living in this country...

...One of them, this one a new arrival, bewildered and not knowing where she had landed, dropped to the ground to hug and kiss it when told it was Israel...

...So it was...

...For now we have the promise that our children will marry their children— and that is enough...

...As for the Ethiopians themselves, where shall one begin...

...They do not share our tradition of the Oral Torah, which binds Jews all over the world into one community of learning...

...Despite the differences between, for example, Polish and Iraqi Jews, it was still possible to speak in broad strokes of a collective Jewish historical experience...

...But in religious matters what counts more than the actual past is the past as relived, as renewed in the collective imagination and the collective memory—at least if these are powerful enough to generate a fidelity dominating present and future...

...our history has passed them by...

...Another, this one a "veteran" since in Israel all of three years, sat on a curb a few hundred meters from the Israel Air Force airfield...

...It was, however, not the first such event in recent Israeli history...

...This collective experience has been shattered by modernity...

...These are powerful ways of recent support for two of the Zionist pillars...

...Palestinian Jews—and in fact they knew' the Torah by heart and were versed in Mishnah, Talmud and Zohar...

...As for Jews the world over—nay, decent folk everywhere—the event was also something else: a recovery, a rediscovery of the Zionist impulse, the vitality of which, it had long been thought, was all dried up...

...So, we must judge, it ought to live in the memory of the whole Jewish people...

...The \femenites, in all their exotic beauty, looked exacdy like our collective mental image of first-century C.E...

...So it continues to be...

...Later, perhaps, we will discover that the assimilation of the Ethiopian Jews into the body of the Jewish people has created a vital link for us with Ethiopia, with Africa, with all the brown skinned people of the world who are rich in spirit but impoverished politically, technologically and materially...

...Without diminishing the significance of the history that Ethiopian Jews have lived through, it is not our history...

...Pacifists of the world should unite to celebrate that action in retrospect since, but for it, the world would now be in World War III, if not already in a post-war shambles...

...There are, of course, numerous theories about the origin and history of the Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Yisraet, all of them uncertain...

...Doesn't this feeling have its source in something as inexpressible and immediate as the special quality of light that we see emanating from the eyes of a person who is destined to become a lover or a friend...

...It's like watching a scene from the Bible...

...and the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether predicted the same in The Wrath of Jonah (Harper, 1989), her anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist diatribe...

...In Israel we seek to forge a modern Jewish identity to integrate these sherds of our vasdy different histories into a vessel that can hold up under the pressure of the present...

...But, as a metaphor, I find it strangely appropriate...

...Such, we may be sure, will be its continued life in the collective Israeli memory...

...Later, perhaps, Ethiopian Jewish spirituality will enrich the Jewish faith...

...We thank God for Israel...

...But I could have married an Ethiopian Jew—as several young Israelis I know have—and I could celebrate (as perhaps I will) if one of my children married one...

...Later, perhaps, we will understand Ethiopian Jewish history as part of the collective history of the Jewish people...

...At the center of the sense of wonder that the airlift of the Beta Yisrael has aroused in Jews around the world is the profound mystery of Jewish identity, which this story has revealed in a way no previous immigration has...

...For what ties us to the Beta Yisrael?—and it is my belief that our feeling of kinship with them is no less intense than our sense of connection with Soviet or Moroccan Jews...

...Even the left, liberal Western media, normally bent on cutting things wondrous, if Israeli, down to size, were astonished...

...as for an Israeli government that would rescind the Law of Return, it would fall overnight...

...Jewish history neighbors, so I who wore jeans, ate french fries and listened to Bruce Springsteen was just like the people next door to me in Los Angeles, California, where I grew up...

...We share common grandparents with the Russian Jews, and we can trace the political history of their alienation from Jewish practice with painful ease...

...At some point early in the conversation the Ethiopian Christians would almost always say: "You can tell by the eyes—isn't that right...

...Yet they pale in comparison with the current support of the third: the fulfillment of a more than bimillennial longing of the Ethiopian Jews for Jerusalem...

...The notion that the Jewish Agency knew who was a Jew by their eyes is silly, of course...

...Present-day Zionism has three pillars, three principles commanding an Israeli—a nearly universal Jewish— consensus...

...Fidelity to the first pillar, security for the state, was shown with exemplary courage in 1981 when the Menachem Begin government bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor...

...But the Ethiopian Jews do not look like any Jews we know or had imagined...

...Yet despite taxes, inflation, unemployment and other economic woes, Israel's doors are being kept open and refugees welcomed...

...What we see in Ethiopian Jewry is the stark oudine of what it means to be a Jew—belief in one God, the observance of Shabbat, kashrut and the family purity laws, dedication to the five books of Moses—set against a background of otherness just as stark...

...The origin of this theory is the widespread myth among gentile Ethiopians that the Jews possess the power of buda—or the evil eye...

...But in fusing two oppo-sites—first, the sense of otherness we cannot help but feel toward Ethiopian Jewry and, second, the even stronger and more passionate feeling of kinship and love for them—the ingathering of the Beta Yisrael has turned the direction of Jewish peoplehood from the past toward the future in a single stroke...

...The rescue and ingathering of the Ethiopian Jews has, it seems to me, radically redefined Jewish identity...

...Anyone who has traveled in the remote interior of Ethiopia, where these Jews made their homes, knows that their way of life and modes of technology have not changed in hundreds of years...