Long time, no see.
We, um, kind of have a little catching up to do.
(I’ll go first.)
Those of you who would proudly brand yourselves regular readers of my column (hi, Mom!) know that there has always been one great love in my life (excluding, of course, the Mom in question, the United States en masse , the Lone Star State in particular, the South in total, politics in part and journalistically inappropriate parenthetical asides in, well, excess): namely, former president — and the man never afraid to give ’em hell — Harry S. Truman.
Well.
Turns out that Harry wanted to return the favor.
The last time yours truly mentioned Mr. Truman, as it happens, was the last time yours truly mentioned anything at all — I was bound for a 10-day getaway in Israel courtesy of the fine folks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and, hence, in a reversal of the title for this follow-up, was shooting a “howdy” to the Holy Land and a “shalom” to y’all in our final reunion before summer break.
AIPAC, I explained, had chosen me to go on this once-in-a-lifetime trip because of my history with — and devotion to — pro-Israel activism, a trait I shared with all of the other 40-some students who would be making the trek with me. There was, I also noted, something else we all shared: not a one of us was Jewish.
That’s where the man from Missouri came in.
Like me, I wrote, our 33rd president was a Southern Baptist; like me, he believed that support for the Jewish state served not only his faith, but his country — that Israel would become and, with our help, could forever remain “an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.”
Like him, I was determined to keep it that way.
And that, Dear Readers (hi, Mom and Dad!), was pretty much where I left you, packed up and ready to head off to the place I had come to champion in no small part because of the example set by the man to whom I have earlier referred as my one great love.
So what do I have to report?
There are some who, in looking at Israel, wonder why those who live there, live there. They wonder what it is that drives them — is it the land? A religion? A longing for things past, a desire brought on by ancient words in ancient books? What could compel someone to risk life and limb, to put everything on the line, day after day, for a place so small in a world so big?
The answer, as I saw it in May and will see it forevermore, is simple, and it is one for which I will resolutely risk being labeled cliché: love.
This is not the answer I ever expected to find — or the piece I ever expected to write — when I tipped the Stetson to you that day a few months ago, wishing all of you a happy vacation and promising that I’d be back in the Fall to tell all. But that, as I discovered in Israel, is because I, like so many, had been asking the wrong question.
To think of Israel as simply a place is to miss the point. This is not how Israelis see Israel; a place is not what gets them out of bed in the morning, what gives their days meaning and themselves the strength to carry on when times get tough.
They live for love — love for God, for each other, for life itself.
We often hear the refrain that we should cherish the time we have on Earth, that we should live each day to the fullest because we can never know which will be our last. We often hear this, and we just as often ignore it.
Israelis do not.
It is tempting, therefore, to want to imagine the Israelis a special people, and there is something special about them, to be sure. But it is, they would say, the same thing that is special about all of us; some of us just allow ourselves to get too distracted — by school, by work, even, dare I say, by politics — to realize it.
“A true heart, a strong mind and a great deal of courage,” a certain Show-Me Stater, future president and personal hero of mine once wrote, “and I think a man will get through the world.”
He was right, and Israelis, I found, have all of these things. They simply remember what those of us who live where the stakes are not so high sometimes forget: nothing makes a heart truer, a mind stronger, a man more courageous, or the world more worth getting through than — yes — love.
If you want to know the meaning of life, that, as well as this Texan can discern it, is Israel’s answer.
It is, at the very least, my answer, and one to which I will hold — from here on out — as unshakably as the Florida sunflower I discovered whilst wandering the Israeli fields that inspired me almost as much as she does.
Her name is Julia, and it is to her that I dedicate both this commentary and the final journalistically inappropriate parenthetical aside within it.
(I love you.)
Methinks our friends on the Mediterranean would approve.
Mark Coombs is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu [1]. If You Can Keep It will appear alternate Wednesdays this semester.
Links:
[1] mailto:mpc39@cornell.edu