K’sharim, Ahava (Relationships, Love)

So, I wrote this whole other sermon for this morning. It was something about Facebook and Twitter and how we speak to and about one another in public forums and via social media. Perhaps someday I’ll give a version of that sermon. But, this morning, I’m giving a different sermon. I’m giving a different sermon because I decided I couldn’t ignore two crucial facts: (one) the mounting tension between Israel and Palestine over the new “roadmap to peace”… and (two) you.

One: Israel and Palestine. Let me assure you that I’m completely uninterested in telling you what to think about the recent Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN, the merits of the proposed Quartet peace plan, Netanyahu’s position on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or any other aspect of what is known in the Middle East as “the conflict.” I’m not going to stand here and talk to you—many of you politics majors who know more about international relations than I do!—about the details of the peace plan itself. I want to talk about something related… but different. I want to talk about what our Jewish tradition teaches us about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to fact two: you. When I was here at Bates during Rosh Hashana, I learned a little bit about how some of you navigate expressing and exploring your Jewish identities on a campus with a relatively small Jewish presence. The choices you each make about your Jewishness, your faith, and your identity are not exactly parallel with the choices Israeli and Palestinian leaders face in figuring out how to express both their national identities. But Jewish Bates College students do make myriad decisions about how to relate to non-Jews and about how to relate to an institution that runs counter to the Jewish calendar. On the first day of the Jewish New Year, many of you faced the difficult choice of whether to attend services or go to class. Some of you had tests and assignments. Many of you wondered, what’s the point in going to services if I’m not even religious? Some of you may have felt disappointed that the services weren’t more “traditional” or familiar. Some of us, together, were chastised for performing the tashlich ritual in the Pond—something we might want to reimagine for next year! And then suddenly it was parents’ weekend—a raucous, joyful, and maybe even stressful time, smack in the middle of what was supposed to be, for Jews, a period of intense introspection and soul-searching.

What could I do with these two facts—the tenuous peace process in the Middle East and the decisions you make as Jewish students of Bates College?

I remember standing here on Erev Rosh Hashana, ready to pray the Aleinu at the end of the service, and panicking for a moment. Did I really want to say the line “she’lo asanu k’goyei ha’aratzot”—“that you have not made us like the other nations of the earth”? I was acutely aware of the fact that my hosts here at Bates include the Multifaith Chaplaincy Office and the Dean of Intercultural Education. I was acutely aware of the fact that, here at Bates, Jews and non-Jews explore one another’s culture and worship. And yet we pray in thanks to God for making “us” different from “them.”

What does Jewish tradition say about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews? To say the least… it’s complicated.

It’s really a shame we’re not going to hear the traditional Yom Kippur afternoon Torah reading. In it, we are charged to pursue justice and to eschew revenge, to share the fruits of our harvest and to deal kindly with the disadvantaged. How do we become holy? By providing food for the hungry. How do we become holy? By conducting our business honestly. How do we become holy? By judging the privileged and the poor equally. How do we become holy? By refusing to hold a grudge. How do we become holy? By letting go of hatred.

Sure, some of these guidelines to holiness refer only to how Jews must treat other Jews. But many of them are universal. We learn how to be holy in our interactions with others: K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Not only are we enjoined to treat the stranger as a citizen, but we are commanded to love the stranger as we love ourselves.

Is this really from the same Torah that also instructs, Rak me’arei ha’amim ha’eileh asher Adonai elohecha noten l’cha nachala, lo t’chyeh kol neshma, “But of the cities of these nations which the Eternal your God is giving to you as an inheritance, do not allow any soul to live” (Deuteronomy 20:16)?!

So, which is it? Are Jews the holy people who are supposed to love the stranger, welcome the disadvantaged, live peacefully with other nations? Or are Jews the people who are commanded by God to kill entire peoples—down to every last man, woman, and child?

The thing is, we can look to the Torah and to the broader field of sacred and rabbinic literature and argue either way. There are verses that support war and destruction and verses that urge justice and mercy. There are interpretations that restrict how we read inspiring passages like “Love your neighbor as yourself” to one meaning: Love your fellow (and I kinda do mean “fellow”) Jew as yourself. Whatever your personal political position on the conflict between Arabs and Jews in that tiny strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, you can probably cite a Bible verse or a passage from the Talmud in your favor.

So I’m not turning, this morning, to any of those passages about “us” and “them.” I’m not going to offer a comprehensive—if that were even possible!—overview of what “Jewish tradition”—as if there were such a monolith!—says about how Jews ought to relate to non-Jews. I’m turning to something much smaller in scale. I’m turning to something much more intimate. I’m turning to a relationship. I’m turning to the relationship between Abraham and Hagar.

On Rosh Hashana, didn’t read the traditional First Day Torah reading, the story many refer to as “the birth of Isaac”—a story chosen for the holiday because of its association with birth (Rosh Hashana as the birthday of the world) and with God’s remembering us (God remembers Sarah and gives her a son in her old age). But the Torah portion of Isaac’s birth is also the story of another boy, another son of Abraham. It is the story of Ishmael. And the tale of how God remembers Sarah is also the story of another woman, another beloved of Abraham. It is the story of Hagar.

Isaac and Ishmael have come to stand iconically for Judaism and Islam, for Jew and Arab. In the Biblical story, Ishmael is born first. He is the son of Abraham’s concubine and slave, Hagar. Ishmael is born because Abraham’s wife Sarah is barren and fears she will never be able to give Abraham children. And somehow, Abraham is to be the father of many nations. On the first day of Rosh Hashana, we read that, finally, Isaac is born to Sarah, in fulfillment of the promise of the two angels who visited Abraham and Sarah in their tent. In the span of one verse, Isaac grows up and is weaned, and Abraham throws a huge celebration. Suddenly, we read that Sarah “saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian whom she had borne to Abraham playing” (Genesis 21:9). We’re not precisely sure what the Torah means by “playing,” but Sarah certainly doesn’t think it’s a good thing. We read next, “And she said to Abraham, ‘Banish that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave-woman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac’” (21:10). The Torah says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes, because of the matter of his son”—that is, because Ishmael is his son and Abraham does not want to banish him (21:11). Despite that emotion, despite the bond between Abraham and Ishmael, God orders Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert. At the story’s end, Ishmael languishes in the desert, nearly dying of thirst. Hagar weeps some distance away so that she does not have to witness her son die, when suddenly “God heard the voice of the lad” and saved them by showing them a nearby well (21:17-19).

This complex story of a blended family gives just one tiny indication of how Abraham might have felt at the prospect of sending a woman with whom he had fathered a child, along with his first-born son, into the desert—never to see them again. The Torah only says, “This matter was very evil in Abraham’s eyes” (21:11) because of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son, his flesh and blood. But did Abraham weep over Hagar? Did he hesitate to send her into the desert? At the moment of banishment, the Torah tells us nothing whatsoever about the relationship between Abraham, father of the Jewish people, and “Hagar the Egyptian.”

For more than a thousand years, Jewish commentators have seen troubling gaps in this text. They have been troubled by the relationship between Abraham and Hagar, and troubled by Abraham’s apparent lack of concern for this woman with whom he shared a bed. Did Abraham really care so little for Hagar? Did the father of Judaism really treat as expendable the woman who would later become a beloved mother in Islam? Surely not! Despite the banishment, despite the fact that Abraham’s blessing is handed down only through the line of Isaac, despite Sarah’s suspicions about Ishmael—despite so many indications that Hagar was “only” a concubine, a slave-woman—Jewish tradition asserts that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar was marked by love.

In the Midrash, we find imaginative retellings of Biblical stories. In one expanded version of the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar saga, the author hints that the relationship between Abraham and Hagar exceeded the commercial bounds of an owner-slave arrangement. In this version of the story, when Sarah urges Abraham to exile Hagar, she says, “Write a get and send that slave-woman and her son away!” (Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer 30). What is a get? It is a bill of Jewish divorce—a document one gives not to a slave but to a wife.

Even further, this midrash imagines a lasting connection between Abraham and Hagar, even after the banishment to the desert. In the Torah story, Abraham places something on Hagar’s shoulders before sending her off as Sarah had ordered. What was it? It was a large barrel, says the Midrash, or a long, trailing piece of clothing. What is the significance of this? Abraham sent Hagar off into the desert dragging behind her an object that would leave a trail. A trail he could follow. A trail that would allow him to see his beloved Hagar and Ishmael again.

In the Torah, at several crucial points in Abraham’s life, Hagar and Ishmael are absent. Perhaps they don’t matter very much to Abraham. The Midrash disagrees. Hagar and Ishamel are never far from Abraham’s heart. At the moment when God asks Abraham to make the ultimate sacrifice—to kill his son—the Torah reports God’s words thus: “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him up as a sacrifice” (Genesis 22:2). Your only son!? The Midrash imagines instead a conversation between God and Abraham: “‘Take, please your son.’ But he replied, ‘I have two sons.’ So [God] said, ‘Your only one.’ But he replied, ‘This one is the only child of his mother, and the other one is the only child of his mother.’ So [God] said, ‘The one whom you love.’ But he replied, ‘I love both of them.’ And God said, ‘Isaac’” (Bereshit Rabbah 45:7).

In the Midrash, the relationship between Abraham and Hagar does not end in the desert. After the story of the binding of Isaac, when Sarah has died, Abraham busies himself with the burial and with trying to find a proper wife for Isaac. But Isaac himself wanders out in the field, pouring out his fears and his grief in prayer. And where has Isaac been all this time, after his ordeal on the mountain? We read in the Torah that Isaac was returning from a place called “Be’er Le’hai Ro’ee” (Genesis 24:62)—the very same place where Hagar and Ishmael heard the voice of an angel of God, rescuing them from their thirst in the desert. And why did Isaac travel there? To find Hagar and bring her to his father Abraham so that they could be married (Bereshit Rabbah 60:14).

And indeed, just a few verses later in the Torah, we read that Abraham did remarry: “And Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah” (Genesis 25:1). The rabbis link the name “Keturah” to precious incense, katoret. And they link the name “Keturah” to the verb katar, to tie up. Keturah, says the Midrash, is none other than Hagar (Bereshit Rabbah 61:5). Hagar is “Keturah” because, like incense, she is pleasing. Hagar is “Keturah” because she “tied herself” only to Abraham—keeping chaste all those years between her banishment and her reunion with her beloved.

In Hebrew, the word for “relationship” is kesher—linked to a verb that also means to tie or to bind. Abraham tied a burden to Hagar’s shoulders so that she would leave him a trail to follow. Hagar tied her faithfulness to Abraham, despite the fact that he sent her and her son into the desert alone. To tie oneself to another demonstrates devotion and, indeed, love.

As we think about the relationship between Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and non-Jews, it can be all too easy to look only at the level of institutions and nations and generalizations. And yet, when the rabbis of our Jewish tradition looked at the iconic rivalry between Isaac and Ishmael—between Sarah and Hagar—they saw more than the struggle between one nation and another. Admittedly, our tradition includes some pretty disturbing instructions on how to maintain the division between “us” and “them.” But Judaism also includes the Midrash: stories that reconcile the divide between Isaac and Ishmael, Sarah and Hagar, by looking for those relationships where there had to have been love.

We do not relate to one another solely as representatives of big categories. When Abraham banished Hagar into the desert, he might have been acting as “Father of the Jews” toward “a Mother of Islam.” But he was also a man who loved a woman. Imagine his anguish, standing at the opening of his tent, watching them enter the desert with just a loaf of bread and a canteen of water.

And, though we don’t necessarily face life-and-death consequences, it’s like that for us, too. Our daily lives are not, when it comes down to it, about “Bates College” and “Jewish students,” but about you and your professor, the one who was willing to give you some extra time on that assignment because you told her about the conflict between the academic calendar and the Jewish holiday. And, when you think about it, “Israel” and “Palestine”—symbolic and overdetermined as those categories have become—are really just collections of relationships, one person to another.

We will achieve nothing of peace and mutual understanding by thinking and strategizing only at the level of the nation, the icon, the generalization. We will achieve peace only if we look to individual relationships. The authors of the Midrash knew, in their heart of hearts, that banishments and birthrights and blessings were not the only story. There was also the tugging pull of love, the trail cut deep across the desert, leading one person to his beloved.



[I gave this as the Yom Kippur sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there for a wonderful experience! I thank my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen, for his reflections on the Midrashim about Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar in his Introduction to Midrash course at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.]

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.”

Raining Down

When it rained on Noah and his family, it rained for forty days and forty nights. This was no mere case of scattered showers: “All the fountains of the great deep burst apart, and the floodgates of the sky burst open” (Bereshit 7.11).

Last Wednesday, the Jewish calendar turned over to the winter season, the rainy season. In our daily prayers, we stop calling on God as the one who “brings down the dew” and instead address God as the one who “brings down the rain.”

Right on cue, the rains fell in Jerusalem. Friday afternoon, as I rushed home to dress for Shabbat, the Jerusalem sky became dotted with grey rain clouds, low and patchy, leaving swaths of blue sky and rays of yellow sunlight. I thought, if I were a deer, I could jump gracefully between the rainy spots and avoid getting wet. It was the kind of sky and rain and mood a photographer relishes—all shadow and contrast.

I don’t really like the rain. Perhaps I should rephrase. I don’t like going about my daily chores and activities in the rain. If I could sit by my window and look wistfully at the interplay of grey and blue in the sky and imagine stories from the forms of the clouds, I would love the rain. But I don’t like umbrellas or wet cuffs or ugly waterproof shoes or feeling cold and clammy.

It’s raining in Jerusalem, and it will be on and off for the next few days. And, from what I hear, this is what winter in Jerusalem is, or at least, this is how it begins. It is the season of the rains.

And even though I don’t really like the rain, the rain in Jerusalem is different. In Israel, there’s really no fall (I do miss the drama of the leaves’ changing in Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, in the Hudson Valley, and in Prospect Park). But the change of seasons here happened, and happened noticeably. During the summer, I almost never saw a single cloud in Jerusalem. Now, clouds and rains are becoming an expected part of the horizon. It’s making me think about rains and seasons differently, in a more agricultural way. These are the rains that will nourish the crops I will purchase at the shuk later in the year. These are the rains that will determine the success or failure of much of the economic life of Israel and her citizens and residents.

Of course I know that rain everywhere is crucial to human sustenance. But I am simply more aware of this fact in Jerusalem, where I cannot readily find every type of fruit or vegetable in the local market, where my dinner table follows more closely the seasons of the year.

Rains can also be floods, of course, but even the flood we read about this coming Shabbat in the story of Noah ends with a promise, a covenant. Part of that promise is God’s reassurance to us that the rhythm of the world will continue: “So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease” (Bereshit 8.22).

For the first time in my life, I am praying for rain. I don’t mean that I am engaging in some kind of “rain dance”; I don’t believe that I need to ask God for rain else we face a drought. Rather, I am including in my daily prayers an acknowledgement of the importance of the rhythm of the seasons—even the seasons I don’t enjoy. I am grateful for the rain. I am grateful that the year has a rhythm we can at least in part predict, that the seasons repeat and endure. There’s something comforting about the rains in Jerusalem, and something comforting about the fact that they rolled in right on cue.

In Joel, the prophet urges us to be glad: “Rejoice in the Lord your God, for [God] has given you the early rain in kindness, and now makes the rain fall as before—the early rain and the late—and threshing floors shall be piled with grain, and vats shall overflow with new wine and oil” (Joel 2.23).

Perhaps this is the wine I’ll drink at Passover, at my table in Jerusalem, the Holy City, in Israel, an ancient land of deserts and mountains—a thirsty land that needs the rain falling outside my window.

Turning and Returning

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, doesn’t come like a bolt out of the blue. The entire preceding month offers opportunities—personal and communal, formal and impromptu—for teshuva, often translated as “repentance” and related to the word “return.” Some Jews pray for forgiveness in the synagogue, pouring out emotion, crying, throwing up their hands. Some ask others for forgiveness, initiating honest conversations about wrongdoings of the past year. Yom Kippur itself, the day of judgement, begins with Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur, and ends at Neila, the closing of the gates, when Jews ask God to forgive us as an entire community, acknowledging our own small existence relative to God’s power.

In Brooklyn, I would walk to shul on Kol Nidre among the diversity of people in my neighborhood. Some, observing the custom of not wearing leather on Yom Kippur, I could spot straightaway as Jews walking to synagogue—dressed in fancy clothing but donning flip-flops, for example. Most were on their way to the park if it were a warm night, or headed to dinner, or coming home from work, relieved. In Jerusalem, I walked out of my apartment building to find dozens of people in the street, many wearing either the white kittel (a garment worn most by Orthodox men, resembling the garment that will cover them in death and burial) or wearing white clothing more generally—both serving as reminders of the unique and awesome significance of this day, the day on which God decides our ultimate fate. It seemed like everyone was headed to the same place, for the same purpose. This turning felt nearly automatic, not even a conscious choice.

Walking to shul on streets empty of cars, with traffic lights taking a rest for the entire day, in a community and a city where most of the other people on the streets were also headed to pray, I started to ask myself about turns and returns. What happens next year, when the walk to shul on Kol Nidre again becomes a choice I make? If my decision to pray on Kol Nidre, to fast and spend the entire day in shul on Yom Kippur, is challenged, how will I respond? What kind of turns will I take?

In many ways—and these ways are complicated by the fact that I am a Reform convert, a woman, and a lesbian—being a Jew and not living a Jewish life in Israel would be impossible. On Shabbat in Jerusalem, buses stop running and businesses shut down. There is practically a shul on every corner and people walk around the city dressed in their finest, celebrating and gathering with friends. I have a community of people to share Shabbat dinner with every week. The school year and the work year here run according to the Jewish calendar. The entire country, in one way or another, observes Yom Kippur (whether in synagogue or not). On Kol Nidre, after services were over, I walked with my friends to a nearby neighborhood. We must have seen hundreds of others dressed in white, walking, in the middle of the street, past closed shops and restaurants.

Teshuva for me begins this year and carries into the next. I hope that I can turn my own Jewish practice back in Brooklyn a bit towards Jerusalem. Just as we face East, face Jerusalem, face the Temple, face the Holy of Holies when we pray, I want to turn my “home” observance toward this place, where Judaism infuses nearly every aspect of life.

The Hidden Cave

If you’re sick of reading about contradictions and tensions and thought-provoking juxtapositions, you might want to visit another blog. Today, we began our Israel Seminar, a year-long exploration of Jewish and Israeli society, culture, and identity that will include both text and field study. The course will examine the stated and unstated aims of Zionism and the tensions inherent in actualizing those aims in Israel, given its complicated history and vastly diverse population. The course will also give us an opportunity to consider how we will teach about Israel, Israeli identity, and the relationship between Jews and this land when we are serving in congregations (or elsewhere) some day.

“Tale tale is told of an old man,” we read in S.Y. Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat,” “who groaned from his heart.” The only thing that comforted the sickly man was the amazingly sweet milk of a goat that he had bought and raised in his home. Curious as to why she provided “milk that was sweeter than honey and whose taste was the taste of Eden,” the man remarked to his son that he would like to know the daily whereabouts of the goat. The son willingly investigates, devising a complicated scheme to follow the goat and discover the origins of the Edenic milk.

What does he find? The goat leads him through a cave; the journey took “an hour or two, or maybe even a day or two.” And the young man found himself near “lofty mountains, and hills full of the choicest fruit, and a fountain of living waters”—a veritable Eden, a Paradise. And he asked some people there for the name of the beautiful place. They replied, “The Land of Israel.”

The story progresses, with gorgeous references to Biblical texts and other Jewish literature, in perhaps an unexpected direction, with the son remaining in Israel and attempting, in a very indirect way, to bring his parents there, too. He hides a note about his experience in the goat’s ear and sends her on her way. But the father does not find the note, and assumes his beloved son is dead, and mourns and weeps, and eventually, because he can no longer bear the sight of the goat who reminds him of his son, slaughters the goat.

And of course he finds the note. But the goat is dead and she cannot lead him to the cave. The weeping father mourns a triple loss: the goat with her comforting milk, his beloved and irreplaceable son, and a missed opportunity to enter the Land of Israel.

“Since that time,” Agnon writes, “the mouth of the cave has been hidden from the eye, and there is no longer a short way.”

For me, this year is an opportunity to find a way into Israel—not a short way, and along many hidden paths, through caves that will require me to grope in the dark, to squeeze through narrow passages. But these will be caves that will also reveal unknown beauty beneath the surface, great, expansive halls of stone carved by the mere action of water and time. I am willing to take the long way, and I am willing, too, to look for the hidden mouth of the cave.

And when I emerge, what Land of Israel will I discover? Will I be in Eden? Is Israel a Paradise? Should Israel be a Paradise? Can Israel be made a Paradise by human action, through tikkun olam, the repair of the world? Or will be Israel become a Paradise only through the intervention and will of God?

These are questions, I am learning, that have occupied Jews since the days of the Babylonian Exile—questions that lay beneath the rhetoric of early Zionists, questions that continue to spark controversy and argument between secular Israelis and ultra-Orthodox Jews who lament the existence of an Israeli nation-state.

For me, and hopefully for the Jewish people I will serve as a rabbi, the relationship between Jews (and I mean, of course, Jews of all kinds) and the Land of Israel is an ever-unfolding one. It has never been static, and I am grateful for that complexity, that movement, that layering. I am not sure whether this place is essential to my soul as a Jew, but I do know that, once you’ve tasted the sweet milk of Torah, ancient history, and Jewish rhythm that flows uniquely in and from this place, you want to know more about its source.

Holy Land

“Most people in this room don’t believe that Moses—or even God—wrote the entire Torah. So, what gives these five books their holiness?”

I am paraphrasing a question posed at shul this past Friday night. An Israeli rabbinic student invited the members (and guests, myself included) at Tzur Hadassah’s Reform synagogue to share their thoughts. Some argued that the Torah is holy because it contains the story of the Jewish people; it is our history and our strength. Others felt that the Torah is holy because it provides a connection to all the generations that came before; and others, that the Torah’s holiness stems from its role in the origin and development of Jewish ethics.

I have been wondering about holiness, “kedushah” in Hebrew, here in Jerusalem, “Ir HaKodesh,” the holy city. I have been wondering about HUC’s requirement that we spend this first year of school in Jerusalem, in Israel. Do I find this to be a holy land? How? Why?

A few days ago, we traveled with our Biblical History professor, Dr. Joel Duman, to several sites important to the Philistine culture. The Philistines are portrayed in the Torah as a cruel and relentless enemy, though a closer reading, combined with archaeological evidence and our own critical eye, suggests that the story is more complicated. Isn’t it always…

You probably know at least one story about one particular Philistine: Goliath. “Then a champion came out from the armies of the Philistines named Goliath, from Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span” (1 Samuel 17:4). Goliath famously challenges the Israelites to put forward one man to fight him in single combat, determining the outcome of the entire confrontation. Of course, Israel puts forward no giant of its own to match this Philistine giant; instead, young David volunteers himself, with religious rhetoric and a bit of bravado. With a slingshot and a pebble from a nearby stream, David miraculously defeats Goliath and proves his fitness for the eventual kingship over all Israel and all Judea.


Last week, I was in Gath (check out the pictures from the “Philistine Tiyyul” album on my pictures site). Nearby to Tel Gath (the hill-site of the major Philistine city from around 1200 BCE), our class went to another hill overlooking the valley of Elah. Located in a geographical transition area at the start of the foothills (the Shphelah), where the Philistines dominated, and the Judean hills, where the Israelites dominated, this valley is a very likely candidate for the landscape described in the battle between the giant Goliath and the boy David.

But we can’t prove it precisely.

And that’s the thing about being here, in Israel. There is historical and archaeological evidence to corroborate much of what appears in Tanakh, but there are some stories that go unconfirmed. Much of what is left to us could well be political propaganda or legend just as easily as it could be objective historical truth.

Is this a holy land? Does it matter that I stood on a hill overlooking the field where perhaps David killed Goliath with a tiny rock to the massive forehead?

No. And yes.

Praying with a group of Reform, and mostly Israeli, Jews last night, and eating with a gracious host family in Tzur Hadassah after the service, I heard many views about the importance of the land of Israel, the state of Israel, Israel’s Defense army. My hosts discussed and debated the origin of the feeling of connection Jews feel to one another: does it come from citizenship in Israel? Is it a dangerous feeling? Will it lead eventually and always to conflict with the Other, the Arab, the non-Jew?

These are questions that cannot be answered in the abstract, but person-to-person. What choices will an individual make when he is faced with a giant? How do I, for example, connect to this land rich in history and marred with war and hatred?

For me, the holiness of Israel has no one source. This is a holy place because of history and legend, God and politics, generations past and future. It is holy because it provides a way to connect to Jewish time, Jewish culture, Jewish thought. It is holy because it enabled me to sit at a table with a young woman about to enter the Israeli army, to look her in the eyes and discuss conversion, Christianity, military service, and New York City.

When I looked at the valley of Elah, I could imagine the perspective of young David, walking to the stream bed you could barely make out among the trees. But I could imagine the perspective of the Philistines, too, trying to make a living—just like the Israelites—in a harsh landscape with limited resources (particularly water, a crisis emerging in the present as well). I saw both sides, Philistinian shphelah and Judean hills. And that,too, is holiness.

Go Forth

Before we even know anything about Avram, the man who will become Avraham the Patriarch, we learn about God’s command: “Go forth [or, get yourself going] from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Bereshit 12: 1). In this land, Avram will become “a great nation,” blessed, and a blessing to all peoples (12:2-3). Avram did not hesitate but “went forth as God had commanded him” (12:4).

By no means am I Avram. But I’ve been thinking about him often as I pack up my belongings and fly to Israel. What does it mean to go forth, to leave your land, your birthplace, your father’s house?

While I’m hesitant and apprehensive and anxious, I am perfectly willing to go forth to a new land, to live by a Jewish rhythm under a Jewish calendar, to immerse myself in the Hebrew language, to learn new customs and explore the beauty of Jerusalem, an ancient city with a vibrant, modern life. I’m perfectly willing to leave Brooklyn (my land)—for a time—and travel around Israel, walking on the land of the Tanakh (Jewish Bible), climbing the high points, floating in Yam HaMelach (the Dead Sea).

But leaving my birthplace, leaving my father’s house… ?

My Dad jokes that I’ve converted in more ways than one: lesbian, Jew, New Yorker. As long as I don’t become a Yankees fan, though, I haven’t traveled too far.

I left my birthplace a few times, depending on how you count it. The night before I started college, just twenty minutes from my childhood home, I felt like I was leaving my birthplace forever. And when I moved from the Boston area to Washington, DC, I learned to live outside New England, away from the familiar accent, the good pizza dough in the supermarket, the cobblestone streets and Colonial history. Then I moved to New York, to Brooklyn, and found a new land that began, quickly, to feel like home, hopefully the birthplace of some future Kramer-DeBlosi children.

Maybe leaving my father’s house simply means making a house of my own, creating an adult life. I did this years ago, Rachel and I confirmed it in 2004 when we met under the chupah and committed ourselves to establishing our own Jewish home.

But, when you’re a convert to Judaism, the notion of leaving “your birthplace and your father’s house” is more complicated than striking out on your own to live in a different building, in a different city.

For Avram, leaving his father’s house meant moving, sure, but it also meant leaving the religion of his family—a religion he was skeptical of all along, say the Sages. For Avram, that leaving was seemingly simple, as easy as smashing the powerless idols sold in his father’s store, gods of wood and stone who cannot see, cannot hear, cannot smell, cannot eat.

When I left the religion of my family, I did not do it with the simplistic surety that my parents are wrong and I am right, that their Christianity is tantamount to bowing to false idols while my Judaism is Truth. For me, Judaism is true and right; it enriches my life and provides me with a way to connect to others, to challenge myself to live ethically, to experience joy and wonder and gratitude. But I never want to imply that, in becoming Jewish, I have smashed the religion of my parents into so many splinters, so much dust. I left, yes—completely, sincerely. But I left as an individual, and my family continues to practice Christianity, completely, sincerely.

As I leave my land, my birthplace, and my father’s house—places one never leaves completely and leaves over and over again—I want to think about this going forth as a continuing challenge to learn the meaning of and eventually to enact the call God made to Avram: to be a source of blessing for all peoples. It’s not an abandonment but a crossing. Avram is, after all, “Avram Ha-Ivri,” Avram the Hebrew, the one who crosses over to a new land, a new way of life. I hope to do so without cutting off the past, to do so as an act of connection.