As we move on from cheering for Team Israel, we must internalize the powerful symbolism of North Americans playing for Israel. This team reminded us that we may be honorable and upstanding citizens in the most friendly countries throughout the Diaspora, but Israel is our home.
Let us act now and prove these government agencies wrong with a new wave of hundreds of thousands of Diaspora Jews standing up and not permitting this ideal to simply fall by the wayside.
Let us generate a new wave of identification with Israel in which those who cannot themselves make the move raise their children to do so – and in which schools make living in Israel a primary focus.
And, finally, let us return to a Judaism in which all Jewish children are inculcated with the ideal that while “I am at the end of the West,” libi bamizrach – “my heart is in the East.”
