On the 29th November observer status was granted to the Palestinian Authority by the United Nations.

Israel’s government has strongly condemned this move, that unilaterally bypasses the already-battered Oslo Accords.

In turn, Israel’s responses to the move of the Palestinians and the United Nations have drawn unprecedented criticism, even from those who did not support the UN’s decision.

Israel now stands more isolated than ever – a phrase repeated so often in the past few years that it deserves further consideration.

What does it mean for our nation to be isolated among the other – seemingly united – nations?

Jewish tradition points us in at least two different directions.

The prophecy of Bilaam (Numbers 23:9), that presents the Hebrews as:

הֶן-עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן, וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב  

It is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.

And on the other hand the adjuration from Talmud Bavli (Ketubot 111a):

שהשביע הקדוש ברוך הוא את ישראל שלא ימרדו באומות העולם

The Holy One adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the world.

Which approach would seem to be more relevant and applicable today?

Is isolation our fate, or the result of our actions?

What are the existential costs or the benefits of such isolation?

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If you’re in a position of Jewish educational leadership, and it really doesn’t matter which one, invariably in the last week you have been asked by some of your educators about how they should be teaching about the current situation in Israel.

Unfortunately many of us have been in this situation before, and regretfully many of us will be there again. As in the past many organizations will create resource guides, curriculum and send out talking points.

Since Israel’s last “war” social media has taken off and so people’s Facebook accounts and Twitter feeds will also be filled with many links, downloads and sound bites. With all due respect to these organizations (some of which I acknowledge and link to below) I want to humbly suggest that all of these resources are actually of secondary importance and perhaps even irrelevant.

There is however one conversation that must be have and from experience we all know is in most cases completely neglected.

This essential conversation doesn’t take place in a classroom, and nor does it involve any students/campers/youth movement participants.

It is the conversation that you, the principal, education director, rabbi, executive director, camp director, president, chairperson, can and should be convening. It is the conversation that we most commonly avoid because we are sometimes under the misguided opinion that when it comes to education people’s personal opinions don’t actually matter.

The essential conversation only has 1-2 trigger questions.

• What is your personal relationship to Israel?

• How are you feeling about the current situation in Israel?

This conversation must be had (ideally in person, but also possible on the phone or on a webinar) because without it, anecdotal evidence has shown us time and time again, that nothing else matters.

Put a resource guide in the hands of an educator who has not had a chance to process and reflect about their own relationship with Israel is asking someone to distance themselves and to “read the script” at a time when learners most need authenticity and humanity.

Maybe after the personal processing is complete (or at least started) educators will feel more empowered to go and research about the current situation so that they don’t walk into a room full of learners ill-prepared.

But again, even in a moment of reacting to these current events, think carefully about what it is that you want your students to walk away with. Believe me, those that are so inclined to become political, be advocates, attend rallies, will undoubtedly find a way to do so. If you’re a Jewish educator all of these tactics should be secondary. Your primary responsibility is to allow your learners to navigate their own personal journeys through their individuals challenges and struggles.

These two questions might be ones that your educators want to ask their learners, but only after the educators themselves have had their own chance to dialogue and share.

No one is saying that this is simple. Yes, you might uncover some latent radical in your midst. You might discover tensions in your team that you never knew existed. You might have people raise their voices or shed a tear. And you might even need to give someone a hug, or ask to continue the conversation with them after this structured conversation.

If you’ve had an educator ask you for resources about how to handle the current situation in Israel, then this is the conversation that you need to convene. If none of your educators have asked you for these resources, then you have an even bigger problem, but luckily one that doesn’t need to be addressed immediately, in how to make Israel central to every Jewish educational process that you are engaged in.

To be a (Jewish) educator is to be human. It is to recognize that conflict is fundamentally not about facts or maps, or statuses or tweets. Conflict is raw and it is full of emotion.

Unless we provide opportunities for Jewish educators to ask these two questions right now, then I’m afraid nothing else matters.

First appeared at www.bryfy.net

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More than one of my politically and religiously liberal friends, when I told them I was converting to Judaism, gave as one of their first responses, “What about Israel?”

Good question. What about Israel?

I’ve understood all along that committing to the Jewish people and tradition also included coming into relationship with Israel—but the history and the issues seemed so complex that I have been reluctant to say much, to anyone, about anything related to the “Jewish State.”

Partly, this silence stemmed from a feeling that I didn’t know enough of the history, the politics, the people, and the issues to be able to speak with any authority. Partly, my place as a new Jew gave me pause. Partly, I saw how divisive the “Israel issue” is both within the American Jewish community and among people of other religious traditions, with whom I work. It is safer not to speak.

After spending two weeks in Israel, though, I’m looking at things a little differently. I traveled to Israel to participate in Siach, a program that brings Jewish social justice and environmental leaders from the U.S., Europe, and Israel together for learning, conversation, and collaboration.

 Photo taken by the writer, Yaira Robinson, in Hebron. 

During my time at Siach and in my travels before and after the 4-day program, I did my best to see, listen, and learn with open eyes and ears. I toured the city center of Hebron in the West Bank with a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier, who showed us main city streets now completely off-limits to Palestinians—and who ended our tour with an earnest plea for a path forward that ensures dignity for all people.

I heard a community leader from Nazareth Illit, a predominately Jewish town in the middle of a larger Arab population (the “Jewish hole in the middle of an Arab bagel,” he said) say that the biggest challenge his city faces is a rising Arab population and a declining Jewish one. “Our goal,” he said, “is to keep the city Jewish.”

I learned about an urban kibbutz in that same city, Nazareth Illit, that is creatively re-interpreting communal Jewish life. Each year, members of the community work together to create a new Haggadah for Passover; and part of their mission is to work for social justice, with a grounding in Jewish ethical teachings. I listened to one member of the aforementioned urban kibbutz say that “the fear and misunderstanding between groups in the city comes from a lack of acquaintance”—that is, from a lack of real relationships or knowing the “other.”

I learned that the Israeli social protest movement that started last summer, and that continues this summer, has spawned over 100 social justice organizations that are actively working for justice on a variety of issues within Israel.

I saw how the Lower Jordan River is dammed to ensure that there’s enough water for the Yardenit baptismal site, but how just downstream, the freshwater is replaced by salt water from saline springs and by raw, untreated sewage—and that’s what flows south from there. Our guide from Friends of the Earth Middle East showed us construction on a new water treatment plant that will handle the sewage; she told us that getting the plant built took years of community organizing effort, illustrating the power (and necessity) of community involvement and engagement.

I participated in part of a Rosh Chodesh (new month) service held by the Women of the Wall as part of a public call for religious pluralism and advocating for the place of women in religious life. Two days later over Shabbat lunch, I unexpectedly met the young woman who’d been detained after that Rosh Chodesh service for wearing her tallit (prayer shawl) at the Western Wall, and heard some of her story.

I attended a Friday night Shabbat service at a synagogue in Jerusalem that was focusing that evening on promoting the rights and acceptance of LGBT Jews in Israel.

I listened as one young woman, an American who’d moved to Israel years ago, spoke about her experience of working with Bedouin communities in the Negev Desert—and how seeing communities there get bulldozed felt like a betrayal of the Judaism she’d been taught in religious school.

I saw ancient synagogues… a Crusader castle… Roman ruins… the place where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount… the place where 16th-century Jewish mystics greeted Shabbat as the sun set each Friday evening… the Church of the Holy Sepulchre… the Dome of the Rock… people sunbathing on the beach in Tel Aviv… young Orthodox mothers with covered hair in Jerusalem… and many things in-between.

I saw a vibrant, striving, conflicted, and diverse community of very real people.

In a discussion about Israel’s challenges at the Siach program, one Israeli colleague summed things up this way: “The problem is the bubble.” What in the American Jewish community so often feels like a black and white, either/or choice about Israel—either full, unconditional support or total rejection—seems completely ridiculous in the face the small sliver of complexity I encountered on my trip.

If everyone waited to speak about Israel until they understood the “whole situation,” then no one, anywhere, would say anything. The history, the people, the politics, the religions, the land… it’s all so, so complex.

My friends were right: walking a Jewish path means being in relationship with Israel. I return from the “Holy Land” certain that there’s no way I or anyone else could ever fully understand everything—and yet, feeling that being in actual relationship with the land, the people and the state means speaking out, both in support and in criticism.

I don’t know yet exactly what “speaking out” about Israel means for me. For now, it means telling this story. It is only through the sharing of stories, the popping of our insular bubbles, the building of real relationships—and active engagement from a place of honest humility that progress will be made. So let’s speak to each other. More importantly, let’s listen.

Yaira is pursuing a Master of Theological Studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She is also the Coordinator of Texas Interfaith Power & Light, the environmental program of Texas Impact—and Jewish, married, and mother to two boys who make her laugh every day.

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Currently, the field of Jewish service-learning in Israel is characterized by a handful of programs that target young North American Jews and that are officially recognized and funded by Repair the World, an organization founded in 2009 to “make service a defining part of American Jewish life.”1

Although these programs are known for their high educational standards, many have struggled to fill their ranks and reach financial sustainability. Alongside these accredited programs are others, often larger and better endowed programs that include some aspects of volunteerism, but have yet to adopt the more stringent Standards of Practice for Immersive Jewish Service-Learning Programs developed by Repair the World (Repair the World, 2011).

Many—myself included—believe that the time has come for a concerted effort to build the field of Jewish service-learning (JSL) in Israel—exploring ways of expanding the smaller, high-quality, service-learning programs; adding necessary depth and authenticity to the larger, volunteer-oriented ones; and identifying additional program areas that can appeal to core concerns of young Jews not addressed by existing program offerings.

Yet before time and energy are devoted to the how of field-building in Israel, it is worthwhile to take a step back and explore the question of why. Why should Israel be the focus of a concerted effort to grow JSL programs?

Until now, we have allowed fluctuating forces of the marketplace, such as the relative cost and convenience of individual JSL programs, and humanitarian crises, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to dictate where most young North American Jews volunteer. There has not been a proactive effort to promote the focused growth of immersive JSL in any one particular geographic location. This laissez-faire approach has yielded the following results. When asked to describe their “primary volunteer responsibilities,” either intermittent or immersive, 92% of young North American Jews report working on domestic causes, locally or nationally. Only 4% address issues in the developing world, and an even smaller percentage, 3%, tackle issues in Israel (Chertok et al., 2011).

When it comes to participation in immersive JSL programs, which range in length from a week to a year, the picture is more balanced. The latest data, published in 2008, indicate that approximately half of participants served in the United States (51.3%), and the other half abroad (31.2% in Israel and 17.5% in the rest of the world; Irie & Blair, 2008). Yet even in immersive JSL programs, Israel attracts less than one third of participants.

Some may read these statistics with equanimity. “Charity begins at home,” they assert. Jews have a moral responsibility to redress ills and fight injustice in every society we call home and all the more so in the United States, which has enabled us to reach the highest levels of economic and political success.

Moreover, most young Jews are interested in “low-threshold activism,” which demands minimal time and monetary investment (Chertok et al., 2011). It is just not realistic to assume that the majority will set aside the necessary resources to serve abroad, at least not in the near future. And regarding those who serve abroad, can we do anything but respect the ones who go to the developing world, where the needs are acute and the suffering great?

These arguments—both idealistic and pragmatic—resonate and are but a few of the many reasons to support JSL programs in North America and the developing world. Yet if we continue to have a largely hands-off approach to field-building, we may be missing out on the huge opportunity that Israel presents as an ideal location for immersive JSL programs.

Israel: A Platform for Authentic Service

Repair the World’s 2011 Standards of Practice for Immersive Jewish Service-Learning Programs stipulate that programs must provide opportunities for “authentic service”—that is, “participants [must] engage in service that addresses genuine and unmet community needs.” By this standard, Israel is a great platform for authentic service. Despite its recent admission into the family of OECD countries and its popular image as a “start-up nation” populated by hi-tech entrepreneurs, Israel needs help. Israel has one of the highest income disparities in the Western world, and one of every three children lives under the poverty line (National Insurance Institute, 2010). Since its inception, Israel has struggled to overcome deep systemic and cultural barriers to creating an equitable society for all its citizens, Jew and Arab alike. Over the last three decades, Israel has absorbed staggering numbers of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, many of whom are elderly and infirm, placing a tremendous strain on its health care and welfare systems. More recently, it has provided a temporary reprieve for tens of thousands of refugees from war-torn Sudan and Eritrea, many with profound medical, psychological, and physical needs. These socioeconomic challenges would justify the establishment and expansion of service-learning initiatives in Israel, even if Israel was not “ours.”

Yet it is ours and we have “skin in the game.” If Israel succeeds in meeting these challenges, the entire Jewish world will benefit. If it fails, world Jewry, and not only Israelis, ought to be called to task.

Young North American Jews who possess some degree of Hebrew literacy and Jewish cultural competency are uniquely suited to help meet Israel’s needs and simultaneously build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with local communities—a linchpin of authentic service. From this vantage point, Israel is an ideal place to run immersive JSL programs. Its needs are real, and other than its own citizens, no one is better equipped with the skill set and knowledge to address these needs than world Jewry.

Israel: A Laboratory for Global Change

The challenges Israel faces are not its alone. Water shortages, environmental havoc, illegal immigration, ethnic-based tension, and terror confront much of the developing world. To meet some of its numerous environmental and social justice challenges, Israel has developed world-renowned expertise in the fields of sustainable agriculture, solar energy, and treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder among terror victims. It has also produced some very effective educational models, such as the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, featured in the Oscar-winning film Strangers No More (below), whose students hail from 48 different countries, many wracked by genocide, war, and famine.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Israel therefore is an ideal environment where North American Jews can gain exposure to and perhaps even further develop cutting-edge solutions to some of the world’s thorniest social problems. Situated at the crossroads of three continents and home to the three major monotheistic religions, Israel has always had a disproportionate influence on the world for a country of its small size. Israel also attracts an inordinate amount of media attention. As such, investing in social change in Israel—whether directly by funding local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or indirectly by providing JSL volunteers to support the ongoing work of local NGOs—has the potential to affect not only Israeli society but also the world at large. With some tweaking and necessary funding, homegrown Israeli expertise could be exported to countries around the globe, improving the lives of millions.

Israel: A Primer for Integrated Jewish Learning

In addition to requiring “authentic service,” Repair the World’s standards also insist that “the program has an educational framework that includes activities that (1) root the service … in Jewish learning and (2) deepen participants’ understanding about the social, economic, and historical context in which the service occurs.” What better primer is there for “integrated Jewish learning, contextual learning and reflection” than the living textbook of the modern State of Israel? It is hard to imagine a more fertile ground for holistic, Jewish service-learning experiences than a country where Hebrew is the spoken language, Jewish holidays are national holidays, and the biblical injunction to pursue justice, as well as many of its corollaries (i.e., the tithes, the sabbatical cycle, the Jubilee), first emerged. Not to mention the role that unmediated contact with young Israelis plays in fostering a sense of Jewish peoplehood and collective responsibility.

If We Build It, They Will Come

These arguments might be compelling, but the statistics seem to indicate that young North American Jews are not interested in volunteering in Israel. Even if there were to be a concerted effort to build the JSL field in Israel, would they come?

Young Jews are far more receptive to serving in Israel than first meets the eye. The Volunteering + Values report, commissioned by Repair the World, indicates that 9% of young North American Jews are excited by the prospect of volunteering on Israel-related issues, but only 1% actually volunteer (Chertok et al., 2011). This discrepancy implies that an untapped 8% would potentially be interested in volunteering in Israel or around Israel-related issues, if only given the chance. This is certainly encouraging news, but the potential numbers may actually be far higher than 8%.

The same report indicates that “Jewish young adults are most motivated to serve … when they can work on issues about which they care deeply.” It recommends the creation of “volunteer options that relate to core concerns,” such as the “environment, education, human rights, peace and conflict resolution, economic development, and victims of violence.” As mentioned earlier, these core concerns dovetail with the major issues Israel faces today.

Young Jews have not told us they do not want to volunteer in Israel—they have simply said that they want to volunteer on issues close to their hearts. Framing Israel as an “issue” may not resonate with those outside of the 8%, but framing it as a “platform for issues” may open a world of possibilities.

When asked whether they want to volunteer in the area of the environment or Israel, many young Jews prefer the environment. How might they respond, however, if they were asked about volunteering in the area of the environment in Israel?

We will not know until we try…

So why make a concerted effort to build the field of JSL in Israel? Because (1) Israel has genuine needs, which can be uniquely addressed by Jews from abroad; (2) Israel has world-renowned expertise in areas of social justice and environmental import, which can benefit both service-learning program participants and the world at large; and (3) Israel is a Jewish country, which makes it ideal for an integrated, Jewish conversation about justice. And because, if we shift our frame of reference and listen accordingly, young Jews may actually be telling us that this is precisely what they want.

REFERENCES

Chertok, F., Gerstein, J., Tobias, J., Rosin, S., & Boxer, M. (2011). Volunteering + values: A Repair the World report on Jewish young adults. New York: Repair the World.

Irie, Ellen, & Blair, Jill. (2008, May). Jewish service learning: What is and what could be: A summary of an analysis of the Jewish service learning landscape. Berkeley, CA: BTW Informing Change.

National Insurance Institute. (2010). Poverty and social gaps: Annual report 2010. Retrieved from http://www.btl.gov.il/Publications/oni_report/Documents/oni2010.pdf {Heb.).

Repair the World. (2011, November). Standards of practice for immersive Jewish service-learning programs. Retrieved from http://www.organizing20.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IJSL-Standards-of-Practice_final.pdf.

FOOTNOTES

1 As of November 2011, the Israel-based Jewish service-learning programs officially recognized and funded by Repair the World include B’Tzedek LIFE, Habonim Workshop in Israel (the “Kaveret” portion), JDC Service Corps and Short-Term Service, Jewish National Fund Alternative Spring Breaks, Livnot Galilee Fellowship, Ma’ase Olam, NISPED service-learning program, OTZMA, Tikkun Olam in Tel Aviv/Jaffa, Yahel Long-Term and Alternative Breaks, and Yeshiva University Center for the Jewish Future’s Counterpoint Israel. See www.werepair.org for more details.

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The problem with this approach lies in the assumption that students will simply get it if educators teach them the value of and the textual basis for the ties that bind the Jewish people. However, engendering an organic ‘group connection’ is not a didactic exercise but rather a highly internalized understanding built out of layered relationships and experiences.

As biblical commentator Aviva Zornberg puts it,”our sense of person is registered in wordless and diffuse ways, in body knowledge, in relationship. In other words, we develop who we are before we think about it.” So, if teaching about Jewish Peoplehood can only serve to provide a knowledge base, how can local educators enable young people to build this connection?

This article aims to highlight a program that offers a new paradigm for Jewish Peoplehood engagement locally in North America. Over the past five years I have been involved with and observed a small program grow in Toronto. The program, funded by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and the Jewish Agency for Israel, began as a capacity building exercise to strengthen synagogues by providing them with pre-army Israeli youth to run informal Jewish and Israel programming on a shared cost basis.

The UJA MAKOM Young Emissary Program in Toronto grew from two young emissaries reaching three participating institutions, to fourteen reaching twenty-five institutions: day schools, synagogues, youth groups and summer camps, creating some of the strongest and most vibrant relationships between Federation and its agencies – and agencies with each other – that exist today.

Structurally, each pair of young emissaries that come for a year at a time works in a day school and synagogue, as informal Israel educators, with the year culminating in their taking on counsellor positions at one of several Jewish summer camps. The young emissaries are hosted by families associated with their host institutions and each live with three families throughout the year.

This program, seemingly a simple Federation-JAFI shaliach endeavour, offers a model for a new kind of Jewish Peoplehood education.

Two anecdotes by way of illustration: Carol is a high profile genetic researcher in a downtown Toronto hospital. She has been a strong supporter of Federation and particularly the program. When I asked her to tell me a powerful story about its impact she was caught off guard having never reflected formally on the question. Later she remarked to me casually, “Before I knew the young emissaries I had never shared my religion with people at work. Only after experiencing the constant Jewish pride of these remarkable young Israelis did I begin to tell my colleagues at work I was Jewish.”

Joanne has long been a supporter of Israel but offered to host a young emissary primarily because of her love of hosting (the year before she had housed a Korean overseas student). Her husband, Mike, has been less engaged with Israel and generally inactive in the community. While hosting a Young Emissary, Operation Cast Lead happens and Joanne and Mike discover together, up close and personal in their own home, that this is no regular hosting experience as their houseguest’s older brother is called up for reserve duty. It is out of the interconnectedness with Israel and its collective destiny, forged through an ongoing relationship with a young Israeli, that Joanne and her husband are moved to action: to visit Israel and join Gadna for a short period, volunteering in the IDF.

Upon reflection she remarked, “I had to do it, I couldn’t sit by; Dan’s family is our family; we could not stand by and let them do it alone.”

An average young emissary engages with over 250 students around Israel and Jewish identity matters on a weekly basis. This involvement includes creative programming which is integrated into the teacher’s lesson plans, recess activities, student council projects and class or school ceremonies and celebrations. Beyond these organized encounters, each young emissary touches informally another 200 young people weekly.

One Young Emissary remarked to me recently that on the day Gilad Schalit was released he was unable to walk down the school corridor, as he was veritably bombarded with students who wanted to share their joy, ask their questions and touch the real Israel in their lives.

From Fantasy to Reality In Essays in Love, Alain De Botton observes that moving from the fantasy of a relationship to its reality

is comparable to composing a symphony in one’s head and then hearing it played in a concert hall by a full orchestra. Though we are impressed to find so many of our impressions confirmed in performance we cannot help but notice details that are not quite as we intended them to be. Is one of the violinists not a little off key? Is the flute not a little late coming in? … As the fantasy is played out, the angelic beings who floated through consciousness reveal themselves as material beings, laden with their own mental and physical history.

On many levels the young emissaries help young people transform their fantasy relationships with Israel to real ones. This cross-cultural encounter is layered and complex. Young Emissaries are in some ways similar to young Jewish Canadians, but they are also profoundly different.

For the child in a host family, this is evident when she discovers that her host sister turns the tap off during the time she brushes her teeth – thereby sharing through behaviour how much water means in a little Middle Eastern country called Israel.

For the teens this difference is driven home by the compelling discovery that Hebrew lives beyond the Jewish text but also in Hebrew slang or good Israeli music, or more painfully, that graduation from high school in Toronto is contrasted in Israel with mandatory conscription to the IDF.

Young adults outside of Israel today are growing up aware of and increasingly uncomfortable about Israel’s complexity. One of the reasons for this is because, as students, they were rarely exposed to the real Israel, in all its vivid multi-dimensionality. When the live orchestra ends up not sounding like the one you dreamed of or were taught to imagine for so long, disappointment and frustration are inevitable.

Young emissaries, who embody Israel in their DNA, allow that complexity to be honest but at the same time, positive and compelling; they are true human resources.  

This encounter, as with any genuine inter-personal meeting, is two sided. Two anecdotes for illustration: Danielle, a Young Emissary, never had a bat mitzvah. As a secular Israeli, growing up in the centre of Israel, organized religion never really bore that much meaning for her. One evening, she heard a sheepish knock on her bedroom door. Her host sister popped her head into her room and asked, “it is my bat-mitzvah in two months, you’re my sister, will you read part of the parsha?”

Danielle learnt her section religiously on her i-pod nightly and, engaged through the process, discovered the will to, not only partake in her sister’s celebration, but have her own bat mitzvah as well.

Yuval recently completed his army service, and as with many Israeli soldiers, the release itself was anti-climactic. He shared that, on the day when he walked out of his base to hitch a ride home, which took a while, he felt uniquely alone. He thought to himself, in Israel I am just a regular soldier who has completed the army, but I know that there is a whole community outside of Israel for whom I was on the front line – for whom I am Israel – and who are proud of who I am.

There is an unexpected reciprocity that develops out of this program. Young Emissaries come to give but end up receiving a whole lot too and, as a result, so does the State of Israel. By the summer of 2012 there will be 44 Toronto-based young emissary alumni in Israel with new and unique understandings about the Jewish People, about Judaism and about human potential markedly different from their Israeli peers.

CEO and President of UJA Federation, Ted Sokolsky has observed this dual impact, noting that Federation is on the cutting edge of participating in the evolution of a new kind of Israeli; one who has had a powerful self-realizing experience outside of Israel, recognizes the Jewish potential of communities there and is committed to the Jewish People in the future, having internalized the notion of peoplehood through experience.

A formalized track for these returning emissaries to leverage this experience for the good of Israeli society has yet to be created but we may not be far off: recognition of the potential is already a big step. Indeed if, as Rabbi Nachman of Breslav wrote, the whole world is a very narrow bridge, then we should find the most profound ways to traverse it together.

Sarah Mali is the Director of Israel Engagement at the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto.

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 Click here for downloadable pdf. 

“American Jews have begun to define themselves more and more religiously, whilst simultaneously developing less and less interest in having a cultural connection with Israel.  Should we be concerned that they appear to need traditional Torah much more than Amichai’s poetry to fulfill their own spiritual needs?

Philosopher’s Retreat, New York, September 2003)

 Achad Ha’Am conceived of Israel as a Jewish center that will serve to generate the emergence of a vibrant Hebrew culture. Is the reality in Israel today consistent with Achad Ha’Am’s dream? Can you and other North American Jews relate to Israeli literature? Does Israeli culture (and in particular, Israeli literature) play any role in North American Jewish life, specifically in mediating engagements with Israel? These questions and others will be explored further in this session.

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The success of Zionism has led to the crisis of Israel education.  Now that Israel is a modern state, now that we have “returned to history” with all the unpleasantness and difficult dilemmas that that entails – and now that in our modernization we have lost much of the substrate of tradition in which our Israel connection was rooted – we are left trying to create a new connection to Israel, based on the assumption of the Zionist revolution: that Judaism is a nationality, not a religion.

The difficulty that the modern or post-modern North American Jew has in defining his/her Jewish identity (religious?  ethnic?  national?  universalistic?) creates a parallel difficulty in defining his/her relationship to Israel – and this in turn leaves educators without clearly defined goals and outcomes.  This whole course is designed to help teachers grapple with this situation and formulate their own responses.  This first lesson is meant to articulate the problem, and start the deliberation process that will, hopefully, run throughout the course.

Click here for printable pdf.

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If the weather forecasts hold true, the nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av (9th of Av) will be unpleasantly hot. If not for air conditioning, the heat would be oppressive; appropriate conditions for the discomfort that is liturgically required.

Tisha B’Av marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples, which our historical memory (more than actual history) recalls as the beginnings of exile, losses of sovereignty, and as major disruptions to nationalized faith. Its themes are central to Jewish consciousness. To dismiss Tisha B’Av in light of the freedom we celebrate today would be to rewrite the Jewish present without its history.

To interpret Tisha B’Av as an unchanging lamentation about exilic Jewish condition is to miss the point of the classical theology that runs through Megillat Eichah (the Scroll of Lamentations). We may explain the rituals of Tisha B’Av in terms of mourning but it is more correct to view it as the fusion-experience of sitting shiva and observing Yom Kippur.

On the one hand, we mourn for and feel the suffering of our ancestors and, on the other hand, we are linked across time with the deepest forms of introspection that accompany and confront the greatest of tragedies. Midway through the plaintive chanting of Eichah, we are called into this awareness: “Let us search and examine our ways, and turn back to the Lord” (3:40).

Although I cannot see the direct Divine hand in human history as the author of Lamentations does, I am able to witness and consent to the correlative relationship between internal weakness and susceptibility to external threat that is implicit in his description of Jerusalem’s destruction, its causes and effects.

Discord and dissension tear apart the very civic associations that make a nation defendable; a society that no longer maintains a moral standard has lost its defensible reason for being.

On Monday evening I can sit on the floor in a dark synagogue in full acknowledgement of being blessed to live in an age when the earthly Jerusalem is accessible and by so many accounts flourishing.

I will think about the societal rifts and ethical ruptures today that make Tisha B’Av so painfully pertinent even twenty centuries after the second churban habayit (the Destruction of the Temple). Does Tisha B’Av single out Jerusalem for its present moral shortcomings more than it does New York city, Beijing, or Tel Aviv for that matter? Is Eichah a call to all people wherever they live or essentially a Hebrew poem whose national spirit is lost in translation?

My answer is conditioned by a world whose problems are not neatly contained in borders; the contour maps of each human entanglement will determine the necessity for sign-posts and directions in Hebrew or in translation.

Two and half millennia after Eichah, there are poets writing again in Hebrew, living in Jerusalem, and reflecting upon and challenging the world they see up close and the worlds they see when their gaze is far-reaching.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is that kind of transcendent poet; his Poems of Jerusalem reverberate Eichah’s echoes even as they begin new shouts to be heard across and beyond the Judean hills. When I get up from hearing Megillat Eichah, I will go home and reread these poems.

This excerpt from “Jerusalem 1967” is one such dialogue bridge, linking Jewish past and present, and keeping Tisha B’Av real for me:

I’ve come back to this city where names

are given to distances as if to human beings

and the numbers are not of bus-routes

but: 70 After, 1917, 500

B.C, Forty-Eight. These are the lines

you really travel on.

And already the demons of the past are meeting

with the demons of the future and negotiating about me

above me, their give-and-take neither giving nor taking,

in the high arches of shell-orbits above my head.

A man who comes back to Jerusalem is aware that the places

that used to hurt don’t hurt any more.

But a light warning remains in everything,

Like the movement of a light veil: warning.

 

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

The post Facing Tisha B’Av appeared first on Makom Israel.

Israel’s complexity, and the nature of the world’s response to it, is in danger of defeating us as a community.

How can we say when a fiery piece of theater is “anti-Semitic”, and when it is simply “courageous and challenging”? How do we know when a documentary film is “uplifting and inspirational”, and when “white-washing propaganda”? Where can we identify the dangerous enemy of Israel, and where the confused kid who could do with reading a book or two? Where the starry-eyed supporter of all things blue-and-white, and where the McCarthyite in the making?

It seems that throughout the Jewish world the nuances are becoming dangerously blurred, while the discourse has grown ever polarized. Makom is based in the heart of the Jewish Agency for Israel, working carefully at inspiring intelligent and complex learning about the place of Israel in Jewish life. As something of an ideological hybrid (some have called us “a government-funded underground”), we have amassed a large amount of experience in working with integrity while avoiding head-on conflicts.

Involved in education as we are, our team is delighted to recognize how Israel evokes the heat and commitment of conflict. Yet our fear is that the current arguments about Israel in the Jewish community are what John Dewey might call “mis-educative”, since they end up putting off people from ever touching the subject again!

We would like to suggest a way forward.

It may be that we have moved a little too far from the source. It may be that some of our arguments are more about Western values refracted through Israel, rather than about Israel itself. Our approach would be to look to what Israel says about itself, and aspires to be.

When the State was established, the penultimate line of the Hatikva anthem was rewritten. Instead of referring to a return to the land of our fathers, the line was altered to define our hope of two thousand years: “To be a free people in our land”.

It may be that this broad, generative, dialogical definition of our hope for Israel is far more useful to us than the seemingly-scientific language of “a Jewish and Democratic State”. The latter construction hints at paradox, feels painfully particularistic, and makes no reference to place. By contrast, the aspiration to be a free people in our land is lyrical, inviting, and most importantly: universal. What else was behind the world’s excitement at the Egyptian uprising, for example, if not the sight of Egyptians fighting to be a free people in their land?

Applied to Jews and Israel there is, woven into the phrase, a shared assumption (To be) and three-fold wish (Free People in Our Land):

To be – that the Jewish People know what it is to be threatened with destruction, and our continued existence is both a miracle and a value. At the same time, after millennia of struggling not just to establish but to justify our existence, might we not deserve the chance just “to be”?

Free – for Israel to be a place that allow Jews to be free to renew, to experiment and even to rebel, while at the same time free to take responsibility for its decisions.

People – for the Israel to be the place where the Jews can redevelop their nature as a collective: broader than a religion, richer than an ethnic tendency, and connected to Jews around the world.

In Our Land – for Israel to exist not in Uganda nor in Patagonia or Alaska, but in the area of land referred to in the bible and in our prayers. In this way our People may have its own landscape from which to engage with the world.

We would suggest that if one were looking for a litmus test of “who is pro-Israel”, asking someone’s attitude to this three-fold aspiration for the State of Israel would be extremely revealing and useful. Am Chofshi B’Artzenu (Free People In Our Land) should be the three pillars that define our communal “tent”, whose “roof” would be the assumption of our continued existence as a fundamental value – Lihiyot (To be).

All stripes of Israel-supporter can agree with this statement – and argue within it. We may not agree on the exact borders of “our Land”, nor may we agree to what extent we must share this land with others who also view it as “theirs”, but we do agree that the Jews’ State must be in that once-biblical Middle Eastern neck of the woods.

We may not agree exactly on our definition of who is a Jew, nor may we agree on our interpretation of halacha or its applications, but we can agree that the Jews are a people and as such deserve their own opportunity for self-determination.

Our understandings of “free” will be nuanced, too. Some Zionists cannot understand the liberation movement of the Jewish people without democracy: How can we free the Jewish People to control its own destiny without freeing the Jewish person to do the same? Others will engage in a heated discussion about the morality of enjoying freedom while restricting the freedom of others, while their interlocutors will argue how our freedom from terror should be our most important guide.

What we are pointing out is that this “holding form” for agreement is no strait-jacket. We would still have plenty of room to argue within this formulation. We are of course arguing for the parameters of a communal “tent” rather than a communal “tank”.

A tent is not a tank. In a tank we can be safe, we can fight back against our enemies, but life is pretty cramped and miserable inside a tank, everyone must follow orders, only the military exists, and everyone outside is a mortal enemy. Even the Reut Institute warns that this tank-like attitude “fails to differentiate between critics and delegitimizers, and thus, pushes the former into the arms of the latter.”

A tent allows us room to talk freely among ourselves, allows space to have fun occasionally(!) and appreciate that not all is a military compound, and – perhaps equally significant – can empower us to engage more confidently with those not inside the tent.

Like the tent of Abraham, the sides of this tent can be open for dialogue with those who sit outside it. There is clearly no point arguing the complexities of Israel’s immigration policy with someone who does not accept that Israel should have the right to decide any immigration policy! There is nothing to be gained discussing the desired borders of the State of Israel with someone who does not agree that the Jews have a connection to the land in the first place.

Yet we can debate the basics: Why we regard the Jews as a people, the rights of a people to freedom, and our connection to the land. As long as we keep our eyes on this three-pillared structure to our tent, instead of turning our backs to critics, we can learn to face them.

At the same time, if we reject the constrictions of a communal “tank”, and accept how “Am Chofshi b’Artzenu” defines the extent of our open-sided tent, we must not shirk the work to be done inside the tent. Within Israel and within the Jewish world we must talk and work at the areas where these different values clash, where our interpretations of these values clash, and where the connection between the values can be strengthened.

The way the Ketura solar panel fields will feed into the world’s first national network of electric cars, while also offering a fresh solution to the issue of Bedouin land rights, can serve as an example of how being a Free People In Our Land can better the world. On the other hand, Israeli policies towards African refugees, or women at the Kotel, indicate that not all will be harmonious inside the tent.

This three-pillared tent will allow us to differentiate between three kinds of people we are in danger of conflating. We will better defend ourselves against the malicious rejecter of Jewish rights in Israel, we will converse more fruitfully with principled dissenters, and we will be free to work with those who live inside this fascinating and compelling tent of Israel.

An edited version of this piece first appeared in www.jpost.com

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