When I'm 64 (Israel Independence Day)

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now

Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

If you’d been out ‘til quarter to three, would you lock the door?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me—when I’m sixty-four?

-The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

As a young man, Paul McCartney pondered growing older and wondered if his lover would still care for him at the “ancient” age of 64. Now that he is on verge of turning 70, perhaps Sir Paul has an answer. But we all wrestle with this conundrum, which is at the heart of any committed relationship: how do we sustain love over time?

I’ve been thinking about this song and the question that it poses this week, which marks the sixty-fourth birthday of the nation of Israel.

Relationships between lovers change over time. In the beginning, we are smitten. We see the beloved through rose-colored glasses. She or he can do no wrong in our eyes. And then, as the years pass, the initial, hormone-driven infatuation wears off. We begin to see the blemishes and failings; the beloved becomes fallible—which is to say, human. Our challenge is to move from young lust to mature love, in which we recognize our beloved’s full humanity, warts and all—yet still give ourselves fully.

So, too, in our relationship, as American Jews, with the state of Israel. When I was a young person, Israel was also young. My peers and I viewed that land in a deeply romantic, idealized manner. We imagined kibbutzniks bringing the desert to life. We danced the folk dances, admired David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, mythologized the striking soldiers. And we believed that in the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict, Israel was always the uncontestably good guy and the Arabs were utterly evil.

As we mark Israel’s 64^th birthday this week, much has changed. Israel now divides American Jews at least as much as it unites us. The politics of the region have become morally ambiguous, drawn in shades of grey. Israel’s leaders have proven to be at least as corrupt as our own, and the proliferation of the ultra-Orthodox, both in the settlements and in Israel’s big cities, has promulgated a version of Judaism that is anathema to us—rigid, sexist, fundamentalist and opposed to the most basic principles of democracy.

And yet. . . Israel remains our home. In a sense, we have left behind our adolescent relationship with the Jewish state, which was never really based in reality anyway. Our challenge is to love Israel with an adult, mature love—seeing her failings (and, of course, our own as well), yet deepening our commitment to her welfare. Israel needs our vision of an open, tolerant liberal Judaism, and we need her energy and vitality. It is not incumbent upon us to agree with everything that her government and people do, but neither are we free, as committed Jews, to disengage with her. Now that she is turning 64, I hope that we will still need and feed her—as she needs and feeds us.