Lee Meyerhoff Hendler speaks and teaches about family philanthropy. The author of The Year Mom Got Religion, she is also the principal writer of Freedom’s Feast, a thanksgiving celebration for the American people, available at freedomsfeast.us. A co-chair of the Institute for Christian Jewish Studies, she serves on several of the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds.

Sometime near the turn of the 20th century I almost became a sabra. My great grandfather, Oscar Meyerhoff, traveled with three male relatives to what was then Palestine from his tiny village near Kiev. He hoped to become a settler, then send for the rest of the family. Oscar was not afraid of hard work. He could wield a scythe, butcher a cow, roll a barrel, manhandle a plow. But after traveling to Haifa, a city of “desolation, terrible swamps and primitive people” and considering Trans-Jordan, they returned to Rishon LeZion. a fledgling colony run with an iron fist by the Rothschilds. Then his strapping young brother-in-law caught typhus and died. His father-in-law, distraught and depressed, returned immediately to Russia. Oscar wanted to stay but his cousin found conditions so discouraging that he too argued to leave. “People are still making a living in Russia, and if it gets worse we can always go to America.” Besieged with letters from home once his father-in-law returned, Oscar acceded to family pressure. “What was the use in struggling there when we were still making a fine living…so their advice was that I come right back and later on we would see.” We would see….

Nearly 50 years later, my grandfather, Joseph Meyerhoff, returned one year after the founding of the state of Israel for his first trip to the newly established homeland of the Jewish people. What he saw began a 30 year long relationship with the Palestine Economic Corporation during which he invested and helped to raise millions of the infrastructure dollars the new nation so desperately needed. Grandpa, a first generation American, had become a successful real estate developer. Oscar and Hannah may have chosen America but they transmitted a love of Israel to my grandfather who participated proudly and resolutely in the holocaust to the founding of the state of Israel redemption drama of his and my parents’ generation. I imagine that the work was sanctifying after the Shoah. But I don’t know. I wasn’t even born yet.

Here’s what I do know. I am almost 60 ( like her) but I’ve had it easy by comparison. A privileged and relatively easy life. Not free from pain; but a relative stranger to strife. I am… the great-granddaughter of a Ukrainian Jew who went to Palestine but eventually chose America… the granddaughter of a successful real estate developer turned philanthropist for whom Israel was a consuming passion from the moment of her founding… the daughter of parents who continued to extend that legacy through libraries, cultural centers, educational programs, political and intellectual exchange programs… and the funder, along with my father, siblings and cousins, of numerous projects and programs that seek to educate others about her complexity and to foster learning, diversity, civility and a rich cultural life for all who live there.

They passed it on to us. This country matters. It must be there even if no one else wants it. There’s a difference between want and need. The world needs Israel and so do we. We need a home so that we can make the fullest contribution of which we are capable. We won’t always get it right but we’ll try. That’s what we do.

Jews choose life not death. Blessing not curse.

And in 60 years that’s mostly what we have done. Not all the time. Not every day. Not every year. But more often than most countries. And against greater odds.

I am proud of the endless lists of Israeli contributions in science, medicine, technology, agriculture, culture, literature. I am proud of the dissent we allow and the open press we encourage. I am proud of the ethical uneasiness we live with–the knowledge that we don’t always do the right thing and must deal with it when we don’t. I am proud of our anger, fear, creativity, anxiety, sorrow, joy, and our unabated restlessness. I am proud that we insist on living with it all instead of pretending that we are having a polite cocktail party where the goal is to make sure that everyone has a pleasant time and noone remembers anything.

I love the noise of Israel: the sing-song of the shuq, the babble on the streets of Tel Aviv, the raucous sound of three Jews with four opinions or, as Abba Eban once put it when speaking of the Knesset, “Everything has already been said, but not everybody has said it.” I love that I have the continuing privilege to be a part of the uneasiness and the noise.

I don’t have to live there to do it (although it’s easier and in some ways more legitimate to participate in the noise than the uneasiness as an episodic visitor.) I just have to believe in the privilege and the underlying premise. Choose life, not death. Blessing not curse. I am convinced that this belief and the conviction to act on it is the reason we are celebrating this moment. I believe that no matter what we must never forfeit this conviction, for it is what makes Israel the light she is always becoming.