A Free People in Our Land

The earliest physical artifact of my family history is a headstone at the top of the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem. The Hebrew inscription translates to:

“Here lies the righteous champion of Torah, our rabbi and teacher, Yekutiel Aharon, son of Rabbi Moshe Kozlovsky of blessed memory who served in the sanctified vocation of shochet [ritual slaughterer] in London for decades under the authority of the Rabbinical Court. Cherished for his faith and pure fear of God.”

Yekutiel Aharon, known as Aharon, was my great-grandfather. He was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1860. He married my great-grandmother Sarah and together with their three daughters, they immigrated to the United Kingdom, participants in the great westward migration of Eastern European Jewry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. For reasons unknown, Sarah and Aharon settled in Pennycraig, Wales, a small mining town in the middle of absolutely nowhere, where their fourth child, my grandfather Kenneth, was born. According to family lore, Sarah, “Momma Kozlovsky,” insisted that the family leave South Wales to raise the children in London, where my great-grandfather would spend his career serving the Jewish community as a shochet, a ritual slaughterer, and mohel, one who performs ritual circumcisions – hopefully not with the same knife.

Having successfully raised their four children, Aharon and Sarah decided in the last decade of their lives to fulfill their lifelong dream of immigrating to their ancestral homeland. Deeply religious, my great-grandparents longed to live, die, and be buried in the land of their forefathers. Shortly after my grandparents were married in 1932, Aharon and Sarah made aliyah to what was then Mandatory Palestine under British rule. Considering the hardships and costs associated with travel, Aaron and Sarah’s journey to Palestine was understood to be a one-way ticket.

Today, as a parent and hopefully future grandparent, I am struck by how strong a pull my great-grandparents must have felt to Palestine to bid farewell to their children, knowing they would likely never see them again nor see future grandchildren. Indeed, Aharon and Sarah would never meet their grandchildren, my father and his brother. The onset of World War II made travel between the UK and Palestine all but impossible. Aharon and Sarah lived the remainder of their lives in Tel Aviv and died in 1940 and 1943 respectively. They were buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, in the cemetery where, according to Jewish theology, the resurrection of the dead will begin when the Messiah arrives.

When Israel was established in 1948, Jerusalem, as is well known, was divided in two, and the Mount of Olives fell under Jordanian control. Only following the 1967 Six-Day War was Jerusalem reunified and Jews granted access to the now badly damaged cemetery. Aharon’s son, my grandfather, had long since changed his name from Kozlovsky to Cosgrove, and had spent his career as a congregational rabbi in Glasgow, Scotland. Shortly after the war, my grandfather, the first Rabbi Cosgrove, booked a trip to Israel in order to visit the graves of his parents.

I never knew my grandfather; my arrival in this world and his departure from it taking place around the same time. I can only imagine, which I have many times, what it must have felt like for him to pay his respects at the final resting place of his parents, to whom he had bid farewell some forty years earlier – a father and grandfather visiting the graves of his own parents. To see that they were buried on the holy Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem, the united capital of a sovereign State of Israel. How he must have stood there breathing in the fullness of his own personal history, and all of Jewish history. It may not have been the arrival of the Messiah, but as I imagine it for my grandfather, it must have been about as close as it comes – a profoundly redemptive moment.

As long as Jews have been Jews, we have been connected to the land of Israel. God’s initial promise to the patriarch Abraham is threefold – descendants (“like the stars of the sky”), blessing (“and you shall be a blessing”), and land (“the place that I will show you”). A connection to the land is woven into the fabric of our faith. The narratives of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs play out by way of their anxieties about leaving the land and their desire to return to it. My great-grandparents’ end-of-life aspiration to be buried in Israel finds precedent in the book of Genesis itself. Upon hearing the news that his beloved son Joseph is alive and well outside the land, Jacob descends to Egypt to be reunited with his son, living out the rest of his days in Egypt. Years later, on his deathbed, having blessed his family, Jacob asks of his children that he be buried in the land of Canaan, a commandment which they fulfill. Joseph similarly requests that his remains be brought to the Promised Land, a request that Moses and his successor Joshua fulfill following the hundreds of years of Israel’s enslavement and wilderness wanderings.

For two thousand years of exile following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the thoughts, prayers, and rituals of the Jewish people have been directed toward Israel. Our psalms of joy and lament (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem”), the ministries of our great prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) – all can be read as extended meditations on the Jewish connection to the land. The liturgy we pray, the direction in which we face to pray, the breaking of a glass at weddings to recall the destruction of the Temple, the pledge that ends the Passover seder, “Next year in Jerusalem” – all are rituals that tie us to the land. No matter where we have lived, the gaze of our eyes and the devotion of our hearts has always been directed toward Zion, the biblical designation for Jerusalem and God’s holy and eternal dwelling place. As our Torah reading K’doshim makes clear, Judaism is a faith – a system of beliefs, ethics, and ritual practice. But it more than that; it is a peoplehood and it is a connection to a place – a land, as our Torah reading states, “flowing with milk honey” – the land of Israel.

            The paradox is that for much of Jewish history, the vast majority of the Jewish people have lived outside of the land. Yet in good times and bad, be it from Babylonia, Lithuania, North Africa, or New York, our spiritual posture has always been directed toward Jerusalem. “My heart is in the east, and I am at the ends of the west,” wrote the twelfth-century poet Judah Halevi in Spain. We lived wherever we lived, but implicit in being a Jew was an understanding that our spiritual selves would find their greatest fulfillment in Israel. Whether we are Spanish Jews, British Jews, or American Jews, our connection to and hoped-for return to Zion is the most shared and persistent aspect of our multifaceted and multi-millennial journey. And while some Jews always lived in Palestine, and others, like my great-grandparents, chose to die and be buried there, all Jews held Zion in their hearts. Jewish identity has always been measured by way of geographical and theological proximity to the land, the irony being that a faith so anchored to the land was, historically speaking, developed outside the land – a land-centered faith for a stateless people – that is, until 1948.

When Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, established the State of Israel seventy-six years ago this week, on May 14, 1948, it was both a culmination of and break with the preceding thousands of years of Jewish history. It came about not by means of prayers, but by the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of Jews who, beginning in the 1880s, worked towards making the dream of Jewish sovereignty a reality: “To be a free people in our land,” as Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” declares. No longer second-class or persecuted residents of our host countries, the State of Israel provided Jews with the opportunity to be the subjects of their own sentence rather than the object of someone else’s.

If, as the adage goes, “One campaigns in poetry and governs in prose,” then all the more so, the realization of the Zionist dream. No longer a people of exile, with independence the work of statecraft began. What does a state look like if its military, healthcare system, and sanitation department are informed by Jewish values? How would Israel reconcile its commitments to being both a Jewish state and a liberal democracy? How would the Jewish experience of having lived as a minority in the countries of the diaspora inform Israel’s treatment of the Arab minority in its midst? How would Israel address the fact that its own claim to the land stands in conflict with another people’s claim to the self-same land? These were questions asked by Zionist thinkers long before 1948, dating back arguably to our Torah reading itself: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as your citizen,” demands our Torah reading. “You shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:34) The questions that Israel faces today, that define Israel’s tomorrow, are not new; they have been around for a very, very long time.

Reflecting on my own coming of age as a Jew, Israel played a foundational role in shaping my Jewish identity. My first international trip, taken at the age of eight, was significant both because it was to Israel and as treasured time for father-son bonding. I have such vivid memories of visiting Jerusalem, Masada, and the Dead Sea. I recall walking through the streets of Tel Aviv amazed at hearing spoken Hebrew, seeing Jewish soldiers, and savoring the possibility of a kosher hamburger (McDavid’s). I remember meeting members of my extended family and my parents’ friends, taken by the thought that I was connected to these people. I remember one night my father dropped me off to sleep over at my uncle’s apartment in Tel Aviv and when I woke up, his stunning, Hebrew-speaking girlfriend poured me a bowl of cereal. Jewish life in Los Angeles was pretty good, but in my impressionable mind, Israel represented an alternate universe of bold, Jewish empowerment.

And it was a feeling that only grew stronger in high school and college as I participated in one Israel engagement program after another. Navigating around Israel with my broken Hebrew, connecting with my Israeli aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, but more importantly, sensing that I was part of an extended family was thrilling. In feeling that I had an extended Israeli family together with my actual Israeli family, the secret ingredient of Jewish peoplehood came alive in my heart. The dots began to connect. Had the one-year visit my British parents made to America over fifty-years ago lasted only that one year, I would not have been born in the United States. Had my father taken the job he was offered in Israel, I would have grown up in the Mediterranean climate of Israel, not Southern California. Had my great-grandfather in Vilna not decided to go to Wales, then the Lithuanian Kozlovskys would never have become the Scottish Cosgroves. You get the idea. But for the vagaries of history, we could all be in each other’s shoes. “I could be you and you could be me.” It is the foundation of any feeling of kinship; in the case of the Jewish people, the essence of our peoplehood; and for me, the source of my connection to the people and State of Israel.

Indeed, once I was in college, it was not by way of ritual and observance that I engaged with Judaism, but through Israel activism. I led a campus mission to Washington, DC on behalf of Israel, I worked as a summer research intern for AIPAC in their DC office and very nearly took a job working there following graduation. My decision not to go to DC, but rather to live in Israel following college turned out to be the most important decision of my life. Not just for the love of Israel that year instilled in me, but also for finding the love of my life – my then girlfriend and now wife and mother to my four children. She too was in a post-college gap year. Part of the intensity of our courtship was our mutual identification with the land as we both wrestled with the question of whether to move to Israel. It is a conversation we began when we were both so young, and it continues implicitly and explicitly over thirty years later, to this day.

Growing up in our household, our children have endured repeated reminders that their parent’s love story is anchored in Israel. One day, they too might meet their beloved there. With cousins in Israel and as children of a congregational rabbi, they have been to Israel more times than they can count, forming memories, connections, and friendships of their own. Most of all, my children know that their parents have wrestled with and still wrestle with the question of whether or not to live in Israel. On multiple occasions, our family has openly asked whether we should move there – for principle, profession, or some combination of the two. My children know that should they decide to move to Israel, they have their parents’ full support.

This week the Jewish people will observe and celebrate Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day – the day on which David Ben-Gurion announced the State of Israel into being. In the hours that followed, the United States would recognize the Jewish state, Egypt would begin bombing Tel Aviv, and hostilities would break out between Israel and the Arab world. The world is a very different place today than it was seventy-six years ago, and yet there is something familiar, uncomfortably familiar, about the situation. The attacks of October 7, the plight of the hostages, the threats from the north, from Iran, the brave IDF soldiers securing Israel’s right to self-defense and self-determination. The continued antisemitism online, on campus and throughout the world. Who stands with us and who against us? More than during any other year of my life, the long-term viability of the millennia-long dream of Jewish sovereignty stands at risk. On Monday night, we will gather to mourn those who have fallen in defense of Israel. We will then rejoice in the existence of a sovereign Jewish state. And then, having acknowledged the sacrifice and affirmed our commitment, we will wake up the next day and the next day and the next day after that to work tirelessly as individuals and as a community to secure Israel’s future.

As for me, no different than for my great-grandparents in a bygone era, I believe that whatever the future holds for me and my wife, our story will ever be tied to Israel. I console myself with the thought that my present contributions to American Jewry provide modest recompense for my unrequited aspiration to live in Israel. Whatever our personal choices, our connection to the land endures and is unbreakable. From generation to generation, all the more so in our own, it is our relationship to the land of Israel that informs the heart of the Jewish people.

Lihiyot am hofshi b’artzeinu, Eretz tziyon viy’rushalayim. To be a free people in our land. The land of Zion and Jerusalem. Am Yisrael chai.