Two weeks ago I wrote a column about the place of Israel in American-Jewish education and identity. I suggested, in the name of both honesty and pragmatism, that we adjust the balance so that we don’t rely on Israel as a way to solve the Diaspora’s problems.

Yes, love for and commitment to Israel is integral to a 21st-century Jewish identity. And yes, Jewish peoplehood demands that we dissolve artificial boundaries between “Israel” and “Diaspora.”

But inculcating these values alone is not likely to solve the “Why be Jewish?” dilemma for young American Jews. Free trips to Israel can light a spark of Jewish commitment, but for the overwhelming number of American Jews who will not make their homes there, the flame will continue to burn only if they are shown the possibilities for living a rich and proud Jewish life back home — their physical homes, not the “spiritual home” of Israel.

Even as I write it, I know the argument is superficial. Not wrong, necessarily, but superficial. If Israel is not the panacea for what ails American Jewry, it is not just a chapter in the Jewish curriculum either. Nor are Israel and Diaspora merely “two compelling Jewish choices,” as I described them in my previous column, as if I were talking about whether to spend time at our Hamptons summer cottage or Manhattan pied-a-terre.

I would have written a different column had I first read a recent “dispatch” by Rabbi Daniel Gordis, vice president of the Mandel Foundation and the author of two memoirs about living in Israel. His is a depressing essay on hope. Or perhaps a hopeful essay on depression. (You can find it at his Web site.)

Gordis writes of an Israel beset by problems — political corruption, international isolation, academic anti-Semitism — rooted most of all in last summer’s debacle in Lebanon. It was, suggests Gordis, the war that proved that Israel could not protect its own people. And if Israel loses the basic Zionist argument that it came into being as a means for Jewish self-preservation and self-determination, what’s to become of Zionism? “One hundred and ten years after the First Zionist Congress,” writes Gordis, “people are beginning to wonder if Zionism hasn’t begun to fail.”

To counter this malaise, Gordis writes, Israelis need to “rekindle one of the basic premises of Zionism, and take matters into our own hands.” Self-determination is synonymous with hope — the notion that Israel represents “life over death. Continuity instead of extermination. A homeland instead of exile. Rebirth instead of extinction.”

For Jews who found life and rebirth in Diaspora, this may seem like a historical, even quaint, assertion. But Gordis turns the question around, in a way that should shake the complacency of Jews confident in their exile:

Does anyone really imagine that American Jews could survive without Israel? Are people really naive enough to believe that if Israel stumbled so badly that it couldn’t recover, that American Jewish life would simply chug along? It would last a generation, maybe two. For there is a limit to how much hope a people can lose in the space of a century, and still bounce back. A people cannot long for sovereignty for two thousand years, find itself at the precipice of extinction, bounce back, get a state, and then lose that, too, and march on as if everything is OK. Nothing would be alright, and the optimism that now characterizes much of Diaspora Jewish life would disappear soon after the State did.

It is a sobering indictment of Diaspora self-satisfaction. Gordis doesn’t say we don’t have a right to our optimism about the possibilities for Jewish life in Diaspora. But he sounds a warning, by negative example, of what it would mean to take Israel for granted, and in so doing, lose it.

The challenge is to combine, not choose between, our identities as American Jews and Jews in history — a history that includes the waves of immigration that brought us to these shores, and the hopes, dreams, and tragedies that brought others to create a state of the Jews. We can’t expect young American Jews to relate to Israel as do those who were alive at its birth or were witnesses to the great military and cultural triumphs of its first 50 years. That doesn’t mean we stop telling the story — only that we tell it in new ways.