thinking jewish

There and Back Again

Months more pass, and again I find myself writing for the first time in forever. Life seems to so easily get in the way of living.

But it goes on.

The days pass, the seconds tick by. Days roll into seasons, into years. I find myself, hours before Shabbat arrives, in a cathartic moment of flipping through the pictures Facebook tells me I'm in. Nearly five years condense to a few websites of past memories.

Maybe I'm a little over-tired from two long days of travel around the north, prone to sentimentality and making something out of nothing. Perhaps I should ignore all the thoughts, excitements and regrets welling up inside as I trek through my own history. Maybe it's just been a long week, after an amazing few weeks with the family on the other side of the world.

I did take quite a trip recently.

If you take a globe and put one finger on Israel, then take a piece of string and find the exact opposite side of the planet, your finger would fall very close to French Polynesia.

This land is opposite from Israel in every way possible. Israel is the land of consonants, Polyneisa all vowels. Polynesians love pork, Jews here struggle to even let a swine touch the ground. Polynesians celebrate the natural world, spend their days in the sun on the beach, worship pearls and have dark, gleaming skin. Twelve hour time difference, night-to-day, the other side of this globe. Enough said.

I step off the plane after forty hours of travel and could not feel more alien to the space around me, more a foreigner, more upside down and backwards. What is this place?

There, I spent two weeks with family, full days of love and laughter and celebration. And as quickly as it happened, I'm back, again in Jerusalem, the pull of this place exerted its thrust. As amazing a time as I had, as beautiful as was the paradise-like scenery, as memorable as are all the smiles of so many people that I love so dear, I can't help but feel like maybe, just maybe, it never happened. Maybe I dreamed it up. Maybe, I'm right back where I started.

Physically, of course, I am. I sit in my room, with a view of South Jerusalem, as the sun dips near the tops of the mountains on the horizon, writing, just as I did two months ago, and six, and eight. Nothing changed. It's all the same.

To every season, turn, turn, turn.

Was I renewed as a person? Was my being altered by a two-week stint in heaven?

Probably not.

So then what is it for? Why the extravaganza?

If I wake up every morning and do the same thing all over again, if, despite all the pushing and tugging, exertion of all sorts I end up right back where I was a moment before, why try?

The truth, teaches Bilbo Baggins, is that the experience itself is the growth, that we come back to where we were to display, to exert, to be, the new person that we have become. Because after fights with goblins and trolls, humans, dwarves and elves, encounters with fire-breathing dragons and a poor halfling named Gollum. He comes back having an experience that no one of the Shire could even begin to understand. He comes back with more gold than he could ever spend, and a treasure more great and awful than he could ever imagine.

But all he can do with these memories is write a book to share with himself.

There and Back Again.

He went. Now he's back. The meaning is all hidden in the middle. But he keeps it all to himself in a selfish missed-opportunity for growth.

In a sense, I may be looking at my past travels backwards. Am I back now? Or really there? Or, perhaps, the whole title is wrong.

Because I can only be back again, if I was ever here in the first place. And that initial being, is only my being of now, if I let myself come back unchanged, unmoved. I'm here, again, but this here is now a new here entirely.

If I live in the then and the what-will-be, if I live in the pictures of past and longings of what was supposed to be, then I went there, and came back again.

So all there is to do, what there is to strive to do, is to live in the now, in the moment. To be here, be present, be now. It is a labor not easily achieved. But a fight worth fighting for sure.

And, as the moments call our the quick approach of Shabbat, it suddenly dawns on me that that is precisely what this day is for.

Stop. Be. Live.

Sunday to Friday I can go around the world, traversing the planet and doing all there is to do. But now this is the day that God gave as God's gift.

I went there. Now, I'm back. Again.

Shabbat shalom.

On Pork and Pagans

It starts in Ben Gurion International Airport, as any good story does. Already exhausted, daunted by the thirty six hours of travel still ahead, I wait in line to be interviewed by security personnel. Five minutes pass, then ten. Finally I reach the front.

English or Hebrew? She asks. Hebrew is fine, I reply. Or we could even try Spanish.

She begins the interview, and, as par for the course, the pre-flight screening seems oddly similar to a rabbinical school interview.

What is your home synagogue? Tell me about the last holiday you celebrated? How did you celebrate it? Your dad, Nir, does he speak Hebrew too?

I get caught on the mispronunciation of my father's name but quickly give up on trying to teach this Israeli "Neal". Natan, I respond.

What a nice Jewish name he has.

And then I look around. Plastered on the wall in front of me is a large add for Strauss foods, reminding me, in Hebrew, of course, of the amazing foods that can be made from the simplest of ingredients. Belgium for a waffle? it asks. Have one here!

Of course. Israel, the cosmopolitan center of all the world's gourmet foods.

After all, too my left stands a group of Indians, in front of me Russians, to my right Americans. I dare not look behind lest I be cut in line in the process.

So Natan my father, and Belgian waffles, and that Indian group still not being allowed to check in, comes full circle back to my own security interview.

You've learned all this Hebrew in a month and a half? she asks. Hardly. I've lived here before, and before that I studied at Berkeley. She is amazed that Hebrew is taught outside of the borders of this state.

So then when are you making Aliyah?

I'm not, I respond.

You like Los Angeles?

Of course.

I want to move there!

Of course.

And finally, I'm allowed to pass through, certified that I won't be a security threat on this flight, any more than on the other three round-trip stints I've made between Israel and the Promised Land in the last twelve months.

I'm sent off to parade through customs, past further security checks, past Chabad Hannukah checks, to my gate.

I sit down and begin to ponder how on Earth I'm going to jump out of this, the craziest of Jewish experiments in the world, and end up on a tropical Island on the exact opposite side of the Earth in a day and a half.

Was it all a dream? Did I make it all up?

What do I make of this place? What does it all mean?

But it's too soon to find answers. Not while I'm still inside the project, still navigating my way through the experience.

It doesn't make sense. I live in a nice apartment overlooking South Jerusalem. I can see Jordan from my window. And Mount Zion. I live at the intersection of three thousand years of Jewish history, two thousand years of world history. I spend my day in the middle of one of the world's bloodiest and most entrenched political conflicts, and spend my day worrying about how to get the best instant coffee available. I watch American TV, read Israeli newspapers, eat French-inspired foods on a street corner named after a Palestinian territory and a sixteenth century rabbi.

The conflation of so many interests and ideas, movements and motivations can leave one exhausted. And so, I run away.

Away to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to a place that has hardly seen a Jew, where people roast pigs for sport and dance tribal dances in celebration of their gods. Where people are relaxed, and wealth is flaunted, and carnal pleasures rule the day.

I run away from my life to find my life. And I know the second I get there, I'll miss it all incredibly.

No more Rashi and Rishonim, Natan and Netenyahu, tsnius and tsion.

But it all comes with me. It's here, in my pocket, ready to be introduced to the natives.

What's real? What's normal? What does it all mean?

Maybe there is no answer. It just is. It's my life, an conflation of cultures and identities and stories and ambitions. And this year it's especially international.

And that's just how it is.

So be it.

Close the Door Behind You

In any system of standards, rules and ordinances, it is to be expected that some people's red lines would we different than that of others. For example, for many, Health Care Reform without a public option is no reform at all.

His aversion to war makes him unpatriotic. Her support of that candidate makes her no longer a Liberal. A good brother would never do something like that.

In this complex, twenty-first century world of pluralities, it is a given that individuals will live their lives with differing expectations of others, different world views, and conflicting standards of behavior.

When these differences exist within a particular aggregation, conflict necessarily arises, as one's red lines excludes another individuals belonging in that group.

Take, for example, the Episcopal and Anglican church. The appointment of gay bishops in the United States has delegitimized the denomination in the eyes of its international body. Episcopalians, in the eyes of those opposed to homosexual recognition, are no longer Anglicans. They have left the bounds of acceptable behavior.

In a body-politic as complicated as the Jewish People, all this line-drawing becomes ever more labyrinthine.

One people, hopelessly divided.

Your kashrut standards are not strict enough for me. I won't pray in your minyan if you won't count women. You're a heretic. You're backwards. I'm closer with non-Jews than most of them.

At a point, I might just throw in the towel, go about my business, and not worry about all those other Yids out there. If I know that what I do is right and authentic for me, than what does it matter what other people think. It's there problem.

Pshita.

Lest we be so quick to brush off those Jews with whom it is most difficult to get along, the nagging voice of God chimes in. We are commended to love our fellow Jew. Every Jew is responsible for one another, the rabbis remind us time and again.

We stood together at Sinai, binding ourselves to a united fate. Like it or not, we are stuck together. We are not the Episcopal church.

Which is why, when I read articles like this, I get so red in the face.

A child, in Spain, dies. He had converted to Judaism. His conversion was overseen by a Conservative rabbi. The cemetery where he will be buried is Orthodox-controlled. The community turns to Shlomo Amar, cheif Sephardi Orthodox rabbi in Israel, to find out whether the boy is sufficiently Jewish to be buried in the cemetery.

On its face, I have no problem with any of these facts.

I would be hypocritical for criticizing one Jewish community's difficulty recognizing the status of another Jew. I myself would question the Jewish status of a convert who had not done mikvah, for example.

(I say this not to criticize those who converted without undergoing mikvah, or, for that matter, to say outright that they are not Jewish. Rather, I want to be upfront and affirm that I too, just like the Spanish community in question, have my own standards that are more stringent than the behaviors of other Jews.)

Every community has its standards and definitions. Every tradition evolves its own particular take on Jewish practice.

Fine.

I accept that, by and large, Orthodoxy does not recognize non-Orthodoxy (halakhic or not) as a valid or authentic take on the Jewish tradition. I disagree in the strongest of terms. But I do also recognize that Orthodoxy, by its own self-definition, cannot accept that which is non-Orthodox as legitimate. I am happy to engage with Jews even as they negate my authenticity. My pluralism allows for this paradox.

But theory in peoplehood hits a snag when we talk the real politic of actual people and actual circumstances and actual cemeteries, in this case, controlled by a particular Jewish sub-group.

Throw out my revulsion at the thought of a community responding to grieving parents by telling them their child needs to be buried on another side of a barrier. How we can find ways within halakha to respect people's dignity - or, a step further, how we are commanded to find ways to respect people's dignity - is the topic of another essay.

Let's set aside for a moment my wonderment that this Spanish community would have turned to an Israeli rabbi as their mara d'atra, their local authority. The Jewish people don't have a pope for a reason - different communities in different parts of the world have, for thousands of years, developed their own unique takes on the tradition in ways that only make sense for their locality. American Judaism will always, must always, look different from Judaism in Finland, Zimbabwe and Indonesia. That's how it always has been. But a treatise on this topic, beyond my brief introduction, will have to wait.

And let's not even get started about what I think about a person being written off entirely, not based on the particulars of his case or conversion, but, rather, the movemental label of his rabbi. This is politics, not halakha, let's be honest. But that, too, will await a later writing.

My real issue boils down to the following.

There must be a way for Jews to disagree on particulars of law and authenticity without entirely writing off other approaches entirely. It requires discomfort and flexibility and creativity, but the alternative means splitting the Jewish people. Literally.

In the case of our Spanish coreligionists, if a cemetery is controlled by Orthodox Jews who refuse not only to recognize non-Orthodox converts but also not to allow them to be buried with their Jewish family members, then non-Orthodox (the majority of world Jewry, I remind you) will have no choice other than to have their own cemeteries. A chasm splits the Jewish people apart.

And that outcome is at least better in the Diaspora than what happens here, in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Israeli citizens, flee organized Jewish religion entirely because here, unlike the rest of the world, if Orthodoxy doesn't accept you, or recognize you, or like you, you have no alternative. So they fly to Cyprus to get married in non-Jewish ceremonies, or cling to their pork in Nazareth Elite out of principle. We have lost so many Jewish souls in this country because of the inability of the Orthodox rabbinate to think creatively and put a love for the Jewish people above their desire to impose their singular take on halakha upon everyone else.

The Jewish people is a real thing. But God will not ensure its continued unity. We don't need to agree on everything - just the opposite, disagreement and plurality is a good thing. But we do need to find ways to live together, to not write each other off from the onset. That's a commandment.

Orthodoxy need not compromise on its ideas or ideals, its practices or beliefs. But the necessary result of cases like this one in Spain is the splitting of the Jewish people.

And it is Orthodoxy which history will record as taking the first step out the door.

The Hardest Medicine to Swallow

Seemingly overnight, the warm air of Jerusalem's perpetual summer gave way to the cool wetness of winter in the Judean Mountains. Sweaters were pulled of drawers, hot tea is replacing daily Ice Cafes, and scarfs are all in style in this city in the hills.

There's something very harsh about winter here. The cold chills you down to your bones, and it's nearly impossible to warm up enough until spring. The stones absorb the near-freezing temperatures and radiate the chill back into the limbs of everyone who lives here. There is no cure for the chill. You just shiver your way through March.

There is no medicine to cure this freeze.

Not that there aren't other things that need curing, other ills that afflict this nation that are so in need of the right antidote.

Like this.

I write this as a lover of Israel, whatever that means these days. I am deeply invested in the future of this country, its people, and its politics. I love (almost) every moment I spend here, and, though not a citizen, gain more from this country's being than I could ever fully tally.

I want Israel to thrive. I want the vision to come into being. I want this place to be all that it is supposed to be.

But, as the State Department will now remind us, Israel is an incredibly intolerant country. Or, rather, Israeli society is incredibly intolerant. If you are not an Ashkenazi, Orthodox Jewish man, more or less, you're screwed.

Not to say that it is any more intolerant than most the rest of the world, what with head-scarf bans in France, the illegality of homosexuality in the Arab world, and the mere existence of most of the U.S. South. But this country's existential faux-paxs, combined with its in-your-face, self-rightious attitude, makes being any "other" especially difficult.

Not because the law is necessarily against you, though it often is, but because Israeli culture and social norms demand that everyone tell you clearly just how wrong you are. You're unlikely to face violence for being different here, but you're likely to be told by every passer by just how awful you and what you do are.

Or, when the law is actually against you, you are degraded to a second-class citizen, and all the humiliation that that may entail.

What is so saddening about this fact, is not that there is intolerance in Israel. Rather, the sadness stems from the fact that the image this country presents of itself, an image based on the dreams of what this country was once supposed to become, is that of a vibrant, tolerant democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

This is the place where Jews and Arabs, people of any religious background, are supposed to be entitled to protected rights. This is the place where strangers dance the horah around orange groves, and sing on the streets while eating falafel and drinking coffee.

If only...

The Jewish homeland which is a light unto the nations, an example par excellence for the rest of the world, has a long way to go. That's an understatement.

Which is why such an honest assessment from the likes of the State Department is to be celebrated, not attacked. Anyone who kids themselves into believing that Israel is a mini-America, a land of refugees given inalienable rights, a tolerant pluralistic society in an otherwise hostile land, has their head in the sand. Anyone who declares that Israel's intolerance is a by-product of its sixty-years war and is, therefore, excusable, has some soul searching to do.

But anyone who sees this intolerance and uses it as an excuse, like any other, to throw up their hands and walk away, is being lazy, and taking the easy route out. My obligations to the Jewish people run to deep to not care when the Jewish state is missing its potential. My obligations to God are to important to give up on half of my people.

So I salute this report as a statement of truth shining light on an otherwise oft-ignored reality. Friends need to call each other out once in a while. This is one of those times.

Some may want to cry foul, but that's only because they know the truth, and cannot swallow it.

In Mishna Avot, Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel teaches, “On three things does the world stand: on justice, on truth, and on peace, as it is said, 'Execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates (Zech. 8:16),'”.

And didn't rabbi Hillel teach the non-Jew that our tradition could be summed up as "What is hurtful to you, do not do to your neighbor. All the rest is commentary, go and learn it,"?

Rabbi Hillel was right. So too was Simeon ben Gamaliel. These are not blind words. They actually mean something.

Now, as much as ever, it is time to take our tradition seriously.

The Awe With Which to Love This World

I have so much to write. The words fill my head each morning and bounce around until I sleep. I think of ideas and questions and reflections on all that I encounter.

And then night falls, and I've still committed nothing to paper. There is too much Torah to learn, to much out there to experience, so that the casualty by the wayside is my creative exercise.

In the meanwhile, I leave you, this Shabbat, with the glory of a simple mango tree.

One tree, providing mangos to all who come, on the outskirts of a small town in West Africa. This, too, is God's creation.

Shabbat shalom.

On Love

This place is exhausting. Absolutely exhausting.

The political situation is depressing, the government is half-the time out of its mind. And all that doesn't even begin to take into account all the other (perhaps bigger?) problems with this place: the wanton disregard for common decency in interpersonal relations, the degradation of the environment, the secular-religious divide, the utter lack of good drip-coffee.

So often I find myself wondering, "Was it worth it?" "Is this what Herzl wanted?" "So much work, for this?"

Or, worse, "Get me out of here!"

Please, let me leave. Let me have my Starbucks and Target, straight streets with traffic lights. Let me have my lines and rules, order above all.

So often I am depressed by the momentum and direction of this country, so ready to give it all up and stop worrying, to retreat back to my care-free life in Los Angeles, where I am many miles away from the poverty of Compton and the illegal immigrants of the Central Valley, so very far from Sacramento's political battles and the Death Row of San Quentin.

I want to run, to give it all up, but I can't. Something pulls me back. Despite all the pessimism and short-term depression, I cling on.

My exhaustion stems because I place on the Israeli state hopes and expectations that I would never hold for any country other than America. And, because I am so vested in the success of failure of this place, any deviation from perfection is necessarily a personal insult.

We just ended eight years of leadership by one of the more negligent, inflammatory and criminal governments in the world, I remind you. George Bush saddened me deeply. More than that, actually, he scared the hell out of me. But he made me love America - its ideals, its promise, what it is all about - no less. Rather, just the opposite. He made me care more - enough to do all the little I could to elect someone as amazing as our current President and Nobel Prize winner. He reminded me why it is that I believe in America, why I stand firm in support of the dream of one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

That's what love is. And I love America.

I also love Israel.

In reality, I don't actually think that I have the right to act on my exhaustion in any way other than to stay just as engaged as I've always been, if not more. Who am I to stop loving someone because it seems to scary or difficult?

It would be easier. It would certainly be a more relaxing way of being, to just disengage. But doing so would bring into question, I think, whether I actually ever loved Israel in the first place.

Israel is a real place with real people, onto which I graft lofty hopes and expectations. I know that, some day, these can be achieved. But history is messy. And the road to that perfection is long and hard. There will be turns down roads that terrify me, just as there are new avenues of hope opened.

That is reality.

I'd love it to be different. I would love an Israel that lives up to what it is supposed to be, that is not filled with racism or xenophobia, ecological degradation or petty thievery. I would especially love an Israel living in peace, which did everything, all the time, in the interest of peace, even when that interest conflicted with other desires of the State. But that's probably not real life. It's something more akin to Disneyland. (Or, to be more on-key, Mini Israel).

I love Israel because I believe in the Jewish People. I love Israel because it does invigorate American Judaism. I love Israel because my brethren, against all odds, have been able to create a mildly-functioning commonwealth in the land of my forefathers. And I love Israel because of all the people and places here in this country that I have come to personally know and love over the years.

This place drives me crazy. Not a week goes by without me wanting to throw up my hands. Not a day goes by without a moment where I would like nothing more than to cry over a dream unfulfilled.

But potential unmet is no reason to fall out of love. Rather, it is reason to fight even harder for what can and should be.

Love is the rallying cry to lead us through these moments of exhaustion.

So I will keep on loving.

----------------------

These ideas are an amalgamation of thoughts derived from a recent conversation with a friend who, having read this op-ed, was disturbed by its resonance with him. I recommend reading that opinion piece, followed by a direct response by Rabbi Daniel Gordis, here.

Valley of the Ghosts

Atonement Day came and went this year. The Jews pled their case before their Creator, begging for a line in the Book of Life. I am still breathing. I count my blessings, and move on.

Take a second, and zoom in on Yom Kippur afternoon. Walking the streets, one cannot help but notice the glaring absence. It comes in the form of an unsettled feeling in one's stomach.

No, it isn't the fast speaking. It may seem that the lack of food is playing tricks on the mind, but it is not.

In the middle of the day, in the center of the Israeli capital, there is not a moving car in sight. The silence is unsettling. Nothing. Literally, nothing, to be heard.

In place of cars are people, having taken over the roads entirely.

It feels like the end of the world. In the aftermath of some cataclysmic event, the people slowly come outside to see what has become of their planet. It is that odd to the eye. It just does not happen anywhere.

Nowhere but here.

And so, as I stepped down the main street of this German Colony that I call home, reveling in the serenity of peace and quiet, I wanted to grab onto the experience and never let go.

Because it made Emek Refaim feel so normal, so real.

It is anything but.

This street is first mentioned in the Book of Joshua. It is here that the Philistines took position, having been attacked by King David, many centuries later. It is here that, legend holds, a race of giants once dwelled.

Hence it's name, Emek Refaim, "Valley of the Ghosts".

I see these ghosts every morning when I board the bus. The stare at me every afternoon, as I pass shops and cafes on my walk home. They surround me every Friday as I buy groceries for Shabbat.

Look over there! That's where the German Templars first settled this area.

Psst. Just past that cafe, an evil man once murdered innocents, as part of some political game.

Get this: a little beyond that hill, look to the left of that big church. There your ancestors built a home for God.

Every inch of this place is seeped in these stories, history just waiting to be remembered. Like a soaked-through sponge, ready to be wrung out, every step feels full of the past.

The ghosts reach out to grab you; the giants want to catch your attention.

What is the meaning of this place? I ask the same question every day.

I want to pretend it has no meaning.

This is just a place. A place where Jews live. And I am one of them. I have an apartment, I wake up in the morning, and go about my business. I study, I pray, and try to save the world in the process. I watch some television. I go to bed.

But no!

Those Jews, over there, are speaking the language of my ancestors. Were it not for Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the dream would not have come true. That lintel, it has Arabic, because this neighborhood, after the Germans, was settled by Arabs, who fled in '48, the year my people was redeemed, just over there, around that corner.

Every morning, the sun rises over the Jordanian hills to my east. And if I squint just enough, I can make out the profile of Moses, looking here, into the Land of Israel, just before his death.

History comes alive at every moment, the ghosts grab at me continuously.

I tried to use Yom Kippur to shake myself of it all. Let it be. It is what it is. You can't figure it all out in one instant.

Another day passes. Still no answers. Lots more questions.

Not like it's actually a bad thing. We all strive for a life of meaning, infusing each moment with rich ideas and rituals and history. Sometimes, here, it can feel like too much though.

And so I let it be.

In the silent moments, the times no cars are passing, when there is no yelling or shoving or sirens or gunfire, I try to pause. To take in the beauty and love it all. To appreciate it for what it is, all that it has been, and all it strives to be.

Here in the Valley. The Land of the Giants.