I  love the State of Israel the same way I love the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Both are home to me: the one tribally, the other biologically. I visit each periodically, and choose to live in neither. My eyes are always drawn to news articles that mention Massachusetts and Israel, and my ears prick up when I hear someone reference them. I admire and study the sages of both: Hillel, Jesus, Akiva, Luria, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Dickinson. I thrill to the tales of their heroes overthrowing wicked occupiers: Greeks, Romans, British, and British again. I cringe at the madness of each: Salem and Hebron, to name but two. I feel blessed to be able to claim both states as my own. Yet I accept neither as the Promised Land.

I haven’t believed in a Promised Land since the tenth grade, and I find the idea of a Chosen People no less silly. I can ’t accept the idea that God chooses one people or one swath of ground over any other.

God for me is reality. I reject the idea of supernaturalism. God is what is, and so the word “God” is more of a grammatical ghost than a signifier of something “out there.” There is no “out there,” there is only the nondual reality manifest in wondrous diversity. This is what I suspect Torah is trying to say when it names God Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, the I am-ing that is the evolving universe.

God doesn’t choose the Jews; the Jews choose god, and, not surprisingly, the god they choose is a god who chooses them. That is to say, we Jews choose ourselves to be chosen, and invent a god who goes along with us so that we don ’t have to admit we are making the whole thing up. And while we’re making up a chosen people why not provide that people with a promised land as well?

I was never impressed by the logic of this, but there it is; and because so many people have died for this idea it is hard for me to dismiss it out of hand. But I do dismiss it out of hand just like I dismiss the claim that Jesus is the Son of God, that the Qur ’an is the only uncorrupted revelation of God, or that when we humans die our souls, or “thetans,” go to the planet Venus where we learn about our past and future lives.

Yet even if God didn’t promise Israel to us, we did live there, and have longed to return there for thousands of years. Our story, if not our god, says we have a right to a Jewish state in Israel. But do we? Does any people have a perpetual right to land? Indeed, can we even say that any people has a right to exist? What does “right” mean in this case?

History would suggest that a people’s existence isn’t inalienable, but is rather totally dependent on its capacity to defend itself against nonexistence. Did the Canaanites have a right to exist? Or the Hittites? Or the Navaho? How about the Palestinians? And what does “exist” mean, anyway? How many of a given people have the right to exist? And where? And at whose expense? There is no right to exist. There is just a people ’s ability to impose its existence on a world that is quite willing to let it become extinct.

So what do I do with the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish State?

I celebrate. I celebrate Israel’s history, tenacity, and future. I celebrate her achievements and her potential. I celebrate not only what she is, but what she can become.

And I weep. I weep because others must suffer that we might survive. I weep because the official Judaism of Israel is moribund and medieval. I weep because the byzantine politics of Israel seem designed to recycle old ideas rather than birth new ones.

And I hope. I hope that someday we humans will outgrow our need for promised lands, chosen peoples, and choosing gods; that we might stop soaking sand in blood, and realize there is only one Reality and one moral code: justice and compassion for all.