The moment Jonathan Pollard and his wife, Esther, kissed the ground in Israel will become the butt of jokes, but it was almost sacred.
Like Jews from Yemen and Ethiopia and other diasporas who disembarked from airplanes or ships and kissed the ground of the Land of Israel, our generation's "Joseph" – who in many senses had been left in a hole for 35 years – by kissing the asphalt when he arrived at Lod encapsulated not only his person hopes and dreams, but the famous 2,000-year-old hope and the longing "to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem," in the words of Israel's national anthem.
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Don't feel embarrassed. Don't squirm in your chairs. True, the gesture toward the earth of the Land of Israel is supposedly something from bygone days, the mythological time of Alexander Penn and Mordechai Zeira. But it also symbolizes something pure and innocent that many of us have lost over the years – the simple, unsophisticated love for the physical Land of Israel.
What luck that Pollard didn't stay in the US, as former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tactfully suggested. What luck that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not take the recommendation of his predecessor to "skip" the official welcome for Jonathan Pollard. Some of us are tremble with excitement at the sight of Palestinians, residents of this country, kissing the furrows of the earth and even explaining knowingly and with wonder that this is their form of "zumud" (close contact with the land and a strong stand for it), and we should respect it.
Well, there is also Jewish "zumud"! This isn't paganism. There is no religious commandment to kiss the earth, but in Judaism and the Zionist enterprise, feelings were always a form of expression. A strictly cerebral view of the Land of Israel is somewhat hampered. We kiss tefillin and prayer books and mezuzas and sometimes even the flag. So what? Is that "paganism"?
Welcome to the Land of Israel, brother Jonathan Pollard. Your kiss doesn't belong to any politician who might try to co-opt it. It was personal – yours, and public – all of ours: Left, Right, religious, and secular. It was like a renewed melody to words by a once-popular, now forgotten poet, David Shimoni: "And nevertheless, and in spite of everything – the Land of Israel." It refreshed something that has been neglected by so many. It's good you came home. It's good you reminded us.
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