thinking jewish

One Shabbat, on the Other Side of the World

This is a story about a wall - a wall of meaning and emotion, ideas, struggles and triumphs. It is a wall with history and a story, a wall of man - put together by human hands to stand the test of time.

And so it has.

No. Not that wall. Not the stacks of stones at the base of our Temple that-once-was. Not that tower of limestone that stretches as high as the eye can see, in front of a plaza of pilgrimage for generations. This is not a story about religion. This story is not about the Kotel.

I never made it there.

I went to Jerusalem for a Shabbat, flew to the other side of the world for little more than forty-eight hours of rest, imagination and meetings - meetings of ideas, meetings of people, meetings of planning.

I showed up at LAX, and within a few hours was whisked away to another country, to another land with a foreign language and foreign culture. That land, I call my own. But it is not the same.

It is not the land of the brave and the free. It is the land of the learned and bearded, of the biblical farmer and the longed-for pilgrimage. The land of congruent conflations of hypocrisy. The land of history and memory so in-your-face that sometimes it seems difficult to breath.

I went all the way there, all the way to the land of my birth right, the land that my father - a wandering Aramean - found his way to so long ago, and I not once found the time to get to the site of my ancient Temple. I flew 8,000 miles only to stay at a hotel less than one mile from the center of the Jewish world - only to never visit that site. I came within feet, but didn't go.

Not for lack of time. No, for lack of want.

It dawned on me during this visit that there is so much more to that land, to that country, than the binary lens through which so many of us have traditionally understood the Jewish state. There is more to Israel than cafe Aroma and the Kotel, more to it than Maccabees and Merkava tanks.

Israel is a dynamic place where six million Jews live, a troubled country stained in black and white, struggling to find room for the grays - for pluralism, for democracy, for tolerance.

And I think that the slow progress is OK. Israel is not America. It should not be. There is no one direct path, no singular end-place. the struggle is what it is all about.

Which is why I did not visit the Kotel. I didn't go there because I wanted to see more than the three sites we all visit every time we go. I wanted to open up my mind a little wider. I wanted to figure out more clearly what it means to be a Jew living in Los Angeles in the twenty-first century who can hop on a plane and spend a weekend in the only country on Earth where I can gain citizenship instantaneously because of my blood.

But that is not what this story is about. This is a story about a wall - a man-made construct that separates and divides. A structure which keeps some things on one side and some things on the other.

No. Not that wall. Not the barrier stretching hundreds of miles which only a few years ago divided, permanently, theoretically, Jew from Arab. Not the fence/path/monstrosity that tears through neighborhoods, farms and countryside.

This is not a story about politics.

But my few days on the east end of the Mediterranean were overwhelmed with political tensions nonstop. I flip the channels between BBC, and Sky News, and France 24 and Fox. Everywhere I turn I am reminded of the war that just ended. From the Israelis visiting from Sderot, to the banner at the entrance to Jerusalem expressing solidarity with "our brothers" in the South.

Another year, another war. And this time the world is crying fowl, again. There are declarations that war crimes have been committed. Capitals in Europe are calling for the arrest of Israeli politicians.

I am not so naive as to believe that Israel - that any country - is incapable of committing wrongs in the course of war. I am not so idealistic as to believe that the world is merely out to get Israelis, no matter what. It is entirely plausible that war crimes were committed. I have faith in legal systems to separate between hyperbole and facts and, in the end, bring justice where justice need be brought.

Yet I am increasingly saddened by the story that is Israel, as time marches on. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Israel was meant to be about the ingathering of the exiles, about the cultivation of a land separated for two-millenia from its inhabitants. Israel was supposed to be about a cultural renaissance, a religious explosion unseen in centuries.

All that it has been.

But the politics of hate and fighting continue. Israelis are made into soldiers. Israel's story is one of battle, not burekas, terrorism, not talmud torah.

Time marches on and I become more and more pessimistic. Elections are coming, and with them, I hope, a new path. Hope, these days, seems to be a uniquely American creation, even if it is the namesake of Israel's anthem.

But this is not a story about politics, just as it is not a story about religion. This is a story about a wall, the wall which I found myself face-to-face with on a cool Shabbat morning in Jerusalem.

In a synagogue within which I had never been, sitting next to a new friend with whom I shared so much and so little in common, I was a world away from home and yet firmly surrounded by things I knew. My people, my God, my tradition.

The scroll was unrolled and I heard the story of my ancestors in Egypt. Let my people go, God commanded. I had gone. I had come. Where was I?

I was scrunched up next to the wall of the building, three inches away from plaster and paint, supposed to - there, in that place - fulfill my morning's obligations.

But who were these people surrounding me? Eight thousand miles from home, things should not be so familiar - the words, the melodies, the struggles.

My row-mate was bored. We'd already been there for an hour and a half. The time was coming to leave. We wanted food, and Shabbat menucha.

We gave time for one more moment, one more stab at prayer. So there I was, stuck up against and facing a wall as I reached out towards the Divine.

And I could not help but smile in appreciation. There was so much to be sad and angry and anxious about. The world was in turmoil. Religious intolerance reigns. I had not yet had my morning coffee.

Such is the state of the world. There is always repair work to be done. Such is to be human.

But if I can come so very far away, if I can travel by automobile and airplane, travel through space and time and still come to that same twenty five our period of rest and timelessness, if there, against that plaster wall of some synagogue to which I will never again return I can still find the space for my people, for my God, for my optimism, then I am content.

It was a Shabbat buffered by exhaustion and travel, wandering through the world with little moments of rest.

Such is to be a Jew.

I bounce from one place to another and hope that I can improve things a little along the way - to bring light to places that are dark, to bring hope to people who have none.

Along the way, we all hit many walls. Walls of religion. Walls of politics. Walls aspirations unmet, intolerances not undone.

But if even in those spaces, in the inches between one's face and plaster or stone or concrete, if we can find the beauty in it all there - especially there, even there - then there is reason to move on.

We go forward. Continue to work. Continue to try. Continue to make sense of it all.

So few answers. So many questions.

Shabbat has come again.

Shalom.

Cast Lead

Walking down New York's Broadway, on a frigid January afternoon, I was disappointed to miss the light at 86th street. As I huddled there at the corner, shivering in the bitter wind, I listened in on the phone conversation of a woman to my left. She was well-dressed, had her hair neatly tucked under her trendy hat, and seemed, all things being equal, like a genuinely interesting person. Unsure what else I would do to pass the half-minute stranded at the corner of 86th and North Pole Place, I decided a little voyeurism was hardly criminal and, perhaps, even justified in this situation.

So quickly I was taken by surprise by this enigma breathing beside me. Here, on the Upper West Side, she was, against all odds, not white. Down the street from Temple Beth Jew and Congregation Hebrew, she, in fact, wasn't Jewish. And here, in the middle of yet another war between Israel and some non Hebrew-speaking people, in spite of all the hoopla and the misinformation and the hysteria, she seemed, crazy enough, well informed.

I followed her, two steps behind, one step in front, nearby at all times, for the next four blocks, listening to the conversation she had with some friend, somewhere, about Israel and the Palestinians.

And what struck me about the way she spoke, what pushed me to intrude on this woman's socializing, what amazed me so much about the words I was hearing, was just how well reasoned they were - how smart, how intelligent, how informed.

Frankly, for the last two weeks, I have not heard much of that at all.

Just this last Shabbat I nearly walked out of a synagogue during the rabbi's drash, I was so incensed by his words. Let's be clear - I've walked out of synagogues many a time before. I get bored, I get annoyed, I get distracted. I am a behavioral psychologist's wet dream. But never before have I walked out in protest of a sermon. Not even almost.

For twenty minutes this rabbi spoke. Twenty minutes they were, filled with poetic prose and moving imagery, researched ideas and informed conclusions. But in all this time, despite all his words, not once, not once, did this moral authority even mention the death of a single Palestinian. In fact, the word Palestinian did not even come out of his mouth.

Not that I disagreed so much with his politics. I, like he, see no alternative to this latest war, no opportunity, yet, for peace. But his radicalization to such a point that he could not even notice, that he could fail entirely to even mention, the severe - no, horrid - suffering of human beings, seemed to me to beyond the Pale.

There have been "pro-Israel" rallies in this city where people dance the horah. To show support for the bombing of another people back to the Stone Age, the Jewish community has been pushed to sing in praise, literally! Just or not, war is war. War inevitably means death. And be one liable or not for those deaths, people are still dying.

War is never good. It's just less bad than the alternative.

Not that the other side is any better. No, I'd say they're far worse. Hand-tying Israel into submission. Where was their outrage when missiles fell on Israeli cities for eight years? Where is their horror that the Palestinian government in Gaza is storing its weaponry in UN schools, mosques, and has taken to the area's local hospital as their Ministry of "Defense"? No country would act any differently than Israel. No country could. No country does.

Let us not forget how many tens of thousands of Afghanis the world's armies have killed in a UN-sanctioned war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Everything has a context. Everything has a history.

The name of this Israeli operation, too, comes from somewhere. A poem. A twentieth century poem written by Chaim Nachman Bialik about spinning tops for Chanukah.

מורי הביא כרכר לי
בן עופרת יצוקה
יודעים אתם לכבוד מה
לכבוד החנוכה

My teacher gave me a top
made from cast lead
Do you know the reason why?
In honor of Chanukah!

This war is being fought so that Jewish children can spin their dreidels on Chanukah.

Good.

Let life continue. Let holidays be celebrated again.

It does not feel like it today, on this cold cold day in Manhattan, but Spring is coming. A spring of warm weather, flowers, blossoms, and new celebrations. Ones free of rocket fire. We can only hope.

Because everyone, every human, deserves the right to live free - free of oppression and free of fear.

Isn't that what we learn from the Macabees, afterall?

No. They were a repressive group of leaders who forcibly converted people to Judaism and ruled Israel with an iron fist.

Then how do I still celebrate this festival of lights?

Because the truth - in all its forms - requires nuance. There is no such thing as black and white reality. This and this can both be true. These and these are the words of the living God.

And what saddens me the most about this war in Israel - beyond the mere tragedy of human suffering, death and hatred - is how much people, so many people, have taken refuge in the comfort of simplicity. They've become complicit in the dumbing-down of reality. They've handed over their intellects and reasoning skills.

That is the greatest threat of war. Beyond the bloodshed and the anger, it threatens to undermine the very ideals and foundations of a civilized society.

And that's why I was so interested in that woman's conversation, as she talked into her plastic speaking box, on a frigid corner of the Upper West Side, this cold cold winter afternoon.

The Turkey Prince, Revisited

Last year, while completing a unit of CPE at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I wrote an essay in which I tried to sort out the meaning of bikur holim. I wondered what it means to visit the sick, especially in the context of chaplaincy.

With the help of Reb Nachman of Bratslav's story about the Turkey Prince, I formulated a coherent theology of what Jewish chaplaincy is and why we do it.

The essay was published this week in PlainViews, the online journal published by the Healthcare Chaplaincy in New York. It will also appear in the the forthcoming issue of the Journal for Pastoral Care and Counseling.

It can be found by clicking here.