Be proud of who we are

The Expo exhibition in China drew to an end this week. Seemingly yet another trivial matter – what does it have to do with Judaism? However, this matter is not so minor, not so trivial, and certainly has to do with Judaism.

The Expo is considered one of the word’s most prestigious and important exhibitions. It is held once every few years in a different country; this year, it was held in China’s Shanghai. The countries of the world take part in the event and invest huge efforts, many years, and millions of dollars and Euros in preparing for it.

The exhibit in fact serves as each country’s display window. It highlights the state’s capabilities, desires, and vision. The event is held for about six months, and this year it drew the largest number of visitors ever, some 72 million!

Well, one of those 72 million visitors was me…I returned from China a few days ago with a delegation; what hurt all of us was the Israeli pavilion at the show. We all left it with great disappointment. What mediocrity, superficiality, and shallowness. Seventy two million people arrive at the exhibit, enter the Israeli pavilion, and see nothing. No Zionism, no Judaism, no Bible, no history, no roots and no achievements. Just a big fat nothing.

In the corridor at the entrance to the pavilion we had some Dead Sea photos, and maybe one or two others. A photograph of Albert Einstein too. The light show that lasted for eight minutes showed some kind of big bang, with a disk-on-key emerging out of it along with something agricultural or medical; we didn’t quite get what it was. And that’s it.

The Israeli pavilion is said to have cost more than $6 million. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, that’s a scandal. My own grandchildren can produce something worthier at kindergarten. And beyond the lack of creativity, where was the patriotism? The attachment to the Zionist and Jewish roots? One expects some kind of message – achievements, education, society, bible, Eretz Yisrael. Something. Yet that’s all we had to show at the world’s most prestigious show? A photo of Einstein and a disk-on-key?

Blurring our identity

And it wasn’t only me. All my delegation colleagues, as well as many other Israelis we met, left with the same stinging sense of embarrassment. For comparison’s sake, we entered other pavilions too. It hurt to see the pavilion created by Sri Lanka and other remote countries greatly outdoing Israel’s pavilion.

Anyone who visited the Chinese pavilion, for example, came out of it with their eyes shining, breathless, and amazed by the statement and vision. The US pavilion featured Obama, Clinton and basketball stars. The message was vision, correction and change, patriotism, environmentalism, the future generation, and so on. Yet those who left our pavilion came out with their heads hanging low and a sense of disgrace.

This has the do with Judaism, because after touring our pavilion I realized again, for the umpteenth time, our greatly misguided efforts on the public relations front. The world expects us to be what we are and show who we are – an ancient people, with the Bible, and with tradition; a wise, creative people of mercy and social justice; a people who managed to make the desert bloom. Instead, we constantly try to blur our identity, be something we’re not, hide our past, and evade our heritage. All we have to show is a disk-on-key and some unclear medical something?

We do not have successful PR because when we do not know what we need to showcase; we indeed fail to convince and don’t know how to do it. Once we return to speak in our authentic Jewish language, we’ll discover that we have something to say; we’ll also be supervised to discover that this is also what the world expects and wants to hear from us.

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