Safe in Jerusalem

You have all seen the news about the Israeli Defense Force's operation in Gaza. I am writing to let you know that I am safe in Jerusalem, that HUC keeps informed of any security warnings and updates about the situation, and that I am not taking any unnecessary risks. The conflict is far enough from Jerusalem that we do not hear anything of it in our daily lives, save for the news and the worry of parents of soldiers in our community and in Jerusalem. I hope you will all pray for the safety and well-being of the soldiers, the citizens of Sderot who have been bombed, and the innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

On Christmas Eve, Here I Am

“We are not interested in converting you,” the abbot announced. “We are happy that we are Christians and you are Jews.”

Here I am, in an unlikely place at an unlikely time (the night before a Hebrew test). It is Christmas Eve in Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Two of my rabbinical school classmates (and close friends) joined me on a misty night, waiting outside the gates of the beautiful German Benedictine Church for over an hour to attend a midnight mass. Missing my family, who at that very moment was preparing to attend their own mass (and then, of course, to feast on a traditional Italian-American Christmas Eve meal), I wanted to hear some carols, to see what Christmas Eve in Jerusalem might be like, and to witness the pageantry of Catholicism as both an observer and a future clergy member. Here we are, future Jewish leaders learning about a religious tradition with a complex historical relation to Judaism—from “brother” faith to Judaism’s bitter persecutor.

When the abbot said the religious men of his order were happy that “you are Jews,” he meant it in a statistical sense: well over half the people crowded into the round chapel were secular Israeli Jews. Here we are, in this room together, and we are all about to make a negotiation: the clergy, about to perform a mysterious religious ritual without a community of faithful to perform it for; the gathered crowd, interested but detached. We all laughed at the ease with which the abbot accepted this strange occurrence: a major Catholic feast day, a solemn religious ritual, and an audience of Jews.

We were definitely an audience. Ambivalent about treating the mass as a show and concerned not to disrespect my own family’s devotion to their religion, I cringed at the number of cameras in the room—some even equipped with telephoto lenses—snapping away at the most solemn and, to the priests performing the rites, sacred moments of the mass. But the abbots seemed to take it all in stride. I guess this is what happens in Jerusalem on Christmas Eve.

As my friends made occasional, whispered comments on similarities to Jewish liturgy or historical concepts, or asked clarification questions about the symbols, actions and rituals, I watched the precise movements and actions of the priests from a new angle: the future clergy member. I couldn’t help but think about my own presence on the bima in future congregations where, I hope, I will work, leading Jewish prayer and teaching Torah to the Jewish people. I thought about body language and connection. I found myself—and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way—questioning the high drama of the mass, the extremely precise motions, the repetition of certain actions, the bowing. I wondered, too, at how the priests viewed their own actions in that particular context: before a room full of secular Israeli Jews and practicing Jews, how could these rehearsed motions seem anything other than a strange play, a performance, a parody, even?

In Jewish prayer, too, there is choreography, though (and this is particularly true in the Reform movement) it is not nearly so elaborate as in the Catholic mass. We Jews rock back and forth as we pray the Amida, the central prayer, we close our eyes when reciting Shema, we take steps toward God, bend our knees. These behaviors are both learned and spontaneous, communal and personal. Sometimes they distract from prayer, and sometimes they contribute to our prayerful mood. So, too, I hope, did the incense and the bowing and the pageantry contribute to a prayerful mood for the far-outnumbered Christians visiting Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem on Christmas Eve.

“All those things they prayed for,” my friend said to me quietly after the petitionary section of the mass, “those are good things.” These were prayers for healing and peace, for security and understanding. And they were prayed for in a room where most of the people did not repeat “Amen” with our voices, though I know that, in my own heart, I echoed their longing for a more just world. Here I am, thinking, “Od yavo shalom aleinu v’al kulam”—Let God yet bring peace upon us and upon all.

The abbey’s Christmas Eve celebration focused, as all Catholic masses do, on the liturgy of the eucharist, the central Catholic ritual. But for me, the central moment of that strange mass, performed nearly in absence of faithful Christians looking to partake in that particular rite, was the abbot’s sermon. Unsurprisingly, the priest discussed the notion of Jesus as divine figure; but, true to the evening’s early announcement that no attempt to convert us would be part of the prayer that night, he also discussed an over-arching theme: God’s longing for humans. In Torah, a text incorporated into Christian scripture, God constantly reaches out to God’s unique, sixth-day creation (human beings)—to us. The priest cited example after example: God searches for Adam in Eden, calls to Noah before the flood, makes a covenant with Abraham, leads Moses and Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Though I disagree with the abbot on the precise nature of God, I do believe that human beings are called into relationship with the Divine, and that we have an opportunity to answer, Hineni, Here I am.

So, here I am, writing to my Jewish community and to my Christian family, with the hope that we can all answer our God with a willing “Here I am.”

Saving Fishes

The father of this little family is a rabbi, head of a yeshiva (Jewish school). He is intense and serious; his day is filled with prayer, study, and teaching. One day, a student alerts him to an opportunity to fulfill a strange and counterintuitive commandment (mitzvah): “If you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, and the mother is sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go and take only the young” (Devarim 22:6).

Menachem, the rabbi’s young son, a sincere and loving boy but not an eager scholar, is interested in the mother bird and her young. He has watched the nesting process from the window of the yeshiva and smiles at the hatchlings’ daily developments. When he learns that his father has shooed the mother away, he worries. He does not understand why God would require anyone to separate the young from their mother.

His father’s answer is somewhat harsh, and it made me consider my own thoughts on God, commandments, and our responsibility to fulfill them. You must fulfill the commandment, he warns, without asking, “What is the reason?” He warns, too, that performing a seemingly merciful act that is not commanded in the Torah is simply doing an evil disguised as a good. It may seem merciful, in other words, to allow the mother to nurture her young, but God commanded the opposite, and what could possibly be more merciful than God?

Menachem has animals on his mind when he asks about the mother bird. A few days before, he saw a woman being taken from her apartment building in an ambulance, in critical condition. Her dog remains faithfully by her side, whimpering and crouching, obviously in distress. That night, Menachem asks his father whether dogs “have a soul.” They have nothing, his father answers, “no soul, no commandments, nothing.” When he and his father bathe at the Dead Sea later in the summer, Menachem again takes mercy on an animal, his wide eyes revealing the feelings in his heart. He has learned, of course, that there are no fish in the extremely salty Dead Sea, yet he is certain he has seen some. These fish, his father explains, swim in from the fresh springs and streams that feed the sea, but they quickly die. Menachem takes a plastic bag and sets about saving a fish , catching it in a stream before it reaches the harmful salt. But his plan goes awry, the knot in the bag loosens, the water spills, and the fish flounders on the muddy shore. An uncommanded merciful act gone awry, perhaps—just like his father the rabbi warned.

This family is the center of an Israeli film called Chufshat Kaitz (“Summer Vacation”). The film touches on many themes, but the question of commandedness lies at its center. The rabbi is certain of his actions; he performs mitzvot each day and says the proper blessings at the proper times. But his own certainty fails him when, in pursuit of the distressed fish, his son, unattended because his father is busy at prayer, wanders alone into the salty sea and drowns.

The notion that Menachem is punished for performing an act of mercy for an animal, an act not commanded by God, is ludicrous. The notion that it is the rabbi who is punished for his inability to see beyond the letter of the law is ludicrous. If one cannot believe in a God who commands us and then holds us, harshly, to those commandments, can we believe in a God at all? Why do we observe holidays and worry about the “repair of the world,” why do we go to synagogue, if we are not commanded to do so?

Talking about this at all already makes me feel a little uneasy. In many communities I belong to, “God” isn’t a usual topic of conversation. There’s an underlying suspicion about God. Are we talking about reward and punishment? Are we talking about hearing voices? Are we talking about denying evolution and enforcing fundamentalism on everyone?

I know I am in rabbinical school, but I am still ambivalent about answering questions about God, commandments, and my personal relationship to both. But just last week, I remembered the feeling I had when I was a child, and I believed in God though I didn’t think so much about it then. I remembered feeling comforted and relieved, not afraid and pressured. And when I re-watched the film Usshpizin, I found words to express that feeling: joy, gratitude, wonder, intimacy.

The couple in this film came to their religious practice later in life, and their prayers seem to have a more direct relationship to their daily lives than the scheduled prayers of Menachem’s father. Moshe and Mali are childless and poor; nothing seems to be going right for them, and Moshe assumes it is all a “test” from God. I don’t want to discuss the entire film here, but in a key scene, the couple receives a sum of money—well-timed, right before the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. When a man pushes the stuffed envelope under her door, Malki immediately sees this gift as a response to her prayer (“Give us a miracle.”). Dancing in her kitchen, Malki raises her arms and her eyes to God and sings: “For You are holy, and Your name is holy.”

I don’t want to argue that God does not command us, or that performing mitzvot isn’t important. But in my own mind and heart, I feel the mercy young Menachem yearns to demonstrate to the dog and to the young birds and to the fish to be God, to be the fulfillment of a commandment. I find God in moments like the one Malki responded to with such love and gratitude, and I don’t just mean “miracles.” I have never received an envelope full of money under my door, and I have rarely prayed directly for something that subsequently was granted, just the way I asked. But there have been times when I feel alone, in despair, left out, and weary. Suddenly, something happens that reminds me that I am not alone, and I am pulled back into the flow of the community. For example, on one of my first Shabbat evenings in Jerusalem, I went to an Orthodox synagogue for the first time, and I felt lost and conspicuous. And then the congregation sang a song I have always found comforting, in a familiar melody. It is the same song that Menachem’s community sings on the shores of the Dead Sea when a helicopter hovers above, looking for a sign of life that never comes: “Esa einai el he-harim. Me-ayin yavo ezri? Ezri me’im Adonai, oseh shamayim va-aretz,” “I lift my eyes to the mountains. From whence will my help come? My help is from Adonai, the maker of heaven and earth.”

I can remember moments when I felt certain of my relationship with God: crying in my childhood bedroom at the death of my grandmother, standing on a mountainside in Colorado looking at a faraway snow-covered peak, saying the words “I am gay” out loud to another human being for the first time, standing at the Kotel. Trying to decipher what these moments have in common, I think most of them point to a feeling of being called into relationship (with a family member, with a stranger, with the Jewish people) and of being called into that relationship truly and completely as myself—no pretenses, no lies, no adaptations to please others. And for me the notion of God and commandment means that, when a moment like this happens, the tears well up in my eyes, and my heart is full of passion, and I simply feel grateful.

In the song Malki uses to express her gratitude, the lyrics argue, “This culture is not for us, for there is fire in our hearts. […] And I am small, the last of the people, standing here excited, very excited.” Unlike Moshe and Malki, whose Haredi (Orthodox) lifestyle cordons them off from secular Jerusalem society, I don’t believe that this culture, a pluralistic world, is not for me, but sometimes I do feel like there is fire in my heart. And I do not think I am small or I am nothing, but I do acknowledge that the world does not begin and end with me. I want the fire in my heart to lead me to gratitude, like Malki’s joyful dance. And I want it to lead me to mercy, like Menachem’s compassion for the dog and his worry for the hatchlings. I want God and commandment and my own passionate response to lead me to scoop the fish up from danger, and to tie the knot stronger this time.

Against Disappearing

In his short story “Pipes,” Israeli author and screenwriter Etgar Keret offers a representation of his young self floundering through various job assignments in the Israeli army. But Etgar Keret does not simply write himself into his terse tales, penned in vernacular Hebrew, a tight but complex language whose roots link to the Bible. Instead, Keret writes his emotional experiences into different contexts—often everyday, even mundane, situations. In “Pipes,” the protagonist isn’t a soldier; he’s an unenthusiastic metalworker, day in and day out fashioning pipes for his well-credentialed engineer boss. He’s the kind of guy that just can’t seem to find a place to fit in. “I was pretty good at it,” he says of his profession, “but I didn’t really enjoy it. To tell the truth, I didn’t really enjoy anything in particular.”

Claiming complete and utter disinterest, the protagonist describes his habit of remaining at the pipe factory after hours to “make myself odd-shaped pipes” and “roll marbles through them.” But when he makes a “really complicated” pipe, rolls in the marble as usual, and it fails to “come out at the other end,” he discovers that the marble was not, as one might expect with such a twisted pipe, “stuck in the middle.” The marble had disappeared. “That was when I decided to make myself a bigger pipe, in the same shape, and to crawl into it until I disappeared.”

Keret’s sad and sardonic protagonist constructed an elaborate, winding pipe so that he could disappear in its twists and turns like so many marbles tossed into nothingness. Sometimes trying to navigate Israeli culture—and national and religious identity within it—can feel like falling through Keret’s fantastical pipe. The challenge is not to disappear.

Last week, our Israel Seminar explored Israeli secularism, a Jewish Israeli identity independent of movements and even politics, still influenced by the founding myths of Zionism and still grounded in Torah.

Any discussion of secular identity in Israel must begin with the caveat that it bears little resemblance to the American notion of “secular”—so, for that matter, do the words “Jewish” and “religion” mean differently here. In the US, “religious” and “secular” are opposites and one can fairly safely assume that “secular” identified people have little Biblical literacy and few traditions that stem from, for example, Christian theology. They may have Christmas trees, but they don’t quote Scripture. In Israel, the line between “religious” and “secular” is blurred in many ways—not simply because the separation between Church and State here is incomplete, leaving the Orthodox rabbinate in charge of all marriages and conversions, for example. In Israel, even secular-identified people have a deep knowledge of Jewish theology, text, and religious traditions. However, the Orthodox seem to have the monopoly on the word “religious,” and “Judaism” here is defined nearly entirely by the strict views and conservative interpretations of the Orthodox community.

I heard this very sharply when we visiting a secular Jerusalem high school to discuss Israeli Jewish identity and Reform Judaism with a group of 16-year-old Israelis. Frank and direct, the students certainly acted like “typical” Sabras: gruff, playful, independent, honest. They asked piercing questions, getting to the heart of our commonalities and our differences. They were skeptical of Reform Judaism’s relationship to personal choice. “You don’t believe you should do what it says in the Torah?” one young man asked, not with hostility, but with genuine surprise and interest. I responded by suggesting that perhaps it is not always so simple to discover “what it says in the Torah”—even its language, while infinitely more accessible to these Israeli students than it is to me, differs from contemporary Hebrew. While it’s easy for me, an American Reform Jew, to take sacred Jewish texts as open to interpretation, for these young Israelis, being Jewish means one of two things: living in the Land of Israel or observing all halakhah (Jewish law). Even the young woman who lights candles every Friday night reluctantly called herself “Masorati” (perhaps best translated as “traditional” but meaning, in Israel, not “Orthodox” and not “religious”) and in contrast referred to the ultra-Orthodox community surrounding the school as “religious.”

Etgar Keret argued that labels are always “dehumanizing,” but he also acknowledged that they are necessary. Think of the “Pipes” protagonist, seeking a way to fit in, a label to rally beneath. In Jerusalem, I am learning how crucial it is that Israel find a way, despite its founding Zionist myth, not simply to absorb (and to disappear) contradictory voices but to take the risk to allow those different voices to develop, to carry forth from an Israeli position. Keret argues that he writes as an “outsider,” from his own feeling of not fitting in. I am trying to pinpoint what is “Israeli” about his style, just as I tried to parse out the meanings of “Israeli,” “secular,” and “religious” for the young students who pressed me on the issues of Reform, choice, and halakhah. Keret argues that it is his language that is Israeli—the colloquial Hebrew that with ease “moves between registers,” from the street to the heavens, combining the vernacular with the Biblical. The students, too, demonstrated a deep grasp of Biblical concepts and halakhic ideas—striking given that several of them identified as “secular” and most at least called themselves “not religious.”

But I think there is something else in this strange “secular” identity—a secularism that holds Israeliness dear, clings to the Land, and demonstrates knowledge of halakhah and observance of so many Jewish customs and mitzvot that Americans would without hesitation label “religious.” With a high percentage of entrepreneurs, Israel seems to breed inventiveness. In his stories we can see how Keret takes “commonplace” emotions and even quotidian language and transforms them into something beautiful. Keret himself says, “People don’t just start writing because everything’s okay.”

Israel’s ambivalence, its constant need to deal with the influx of competing ideological claims and complicated origin myths for its national identity, is perhaps its greatest strength as well. Like Keret’s protagonist, the tension it lives with daily (if it is not reified and frozen by a monolithic national tale) can lead to invention—it was, after all, the young narrator who constructed the pipes, and it was he who was willing to enter, though he didn’t know what to expect in the end.

He finishes his giant, twisting pipe and looks at his creation: “When I saw it all in one piece, waiting for me, I remembered my social studies teacher who said once that the first human being to use a club wasn’t the strongest person in his tribe or the smartest. It’s just that the others didn’t need a club, while he did. He needed a club more than anyone, to survive and to make up for being weak. I don’t think there was another human being in the whole world who wanted to disappear more than I did, and that’s why it was me that invented the pipe. Me and not that
brilliant engineer with his technical college degree who runs the factory.”