Jerusalem Day

Yom Yerushalayim, which was observed this week, celebrates the reunification of the old city of Jerusalem under Jewish control in 1967, after 19 years in which the city was divided between Jewish and Arab control. Unsurprisingly, given the historical, political and moral complexity of the events it commemorates, Yom Yerushalayim is not a universally beloved holiday even among Jews in this country, and remains a holiday primarily of the Dati Le’umi (Religious Nationalist) community. Even among religious Jews there are questions about how it should be celebrated, whether it merits recitation of a full Hallel (collection of psalms recited on holidays and moments of national celebration), and if so, if the Hallel should be preceded by a blessing (implying that the recitation is statutory).

Left-winger that I am, when I prayed at home in the morning, I didn’t recite Hallel, and I made no plans to visit the Old City, a place where I often feel claustrophobic and alienated. But mid afternoon, after running into a friend on his way back from the Old City, I had second thoughts. After all, for all the politcal, historical and humanitarian consequences, the return of the Temple Mount to Jewish sovereignty after a 2,000 years of hiatus, is a moment worthy of commemoration. So I hopped on a bus headed downtown, and got off next to Yemin Moshe, one of the first Jewish neighborhoods built outside the walls of the Old City in the 19th century. I crossed the valley and climbed up to the old city, imagining what this place looked and felt like 44, 100, 2000 years ago.

I was suprised when I got to the kotel (the “wailing wall”), to find that it wasn’t actually that crowded. There, inconsistently, I grabbed a prayerbook and recited Hallel (with a blessing!) before joining a minyan for mincha (afternoon prayers). By that point, they had started blasting religious and Jerusalem-themed dance songs on the plaza, and it was almost impossible to hear the shaliach tzibbur (service leader) over the music. I made sure to include everyone who ever suffered and died on all sides of the struggle for this holy site in my prayers, but to be honest, it wasn’t a terribly powerful or intentional prayer experience.

***

In Israel, when crowds of religious, patriotic young men have an occasion to celebrate, they put their arms around each other and dance. If I try to imagine their American cultural analogs (flag waving, beer-drinking, church-going sports fans) doing the same, it’s laughable, but in Israel, it seems quite normal.

In America, I would never go anywhere near such a rowdy, flag-waving crowd, and to the extent that I feel like Israel is my country, I find such displays totally offensive and unappealing here as well, but to the extent that it is not my country, I feel like I can enjoy the experience as an outsider, part-observer, part-participant. And so, when I took leave of the kotel, I hestitated for a moment before joining one of the many rings of dancing men weaving in and out among the crowds of flag-bearers.

I selected the only circle where I wouldn’t have been the oldest person in the group, an incomplete circle of mostly senior citizens dancing slowly. Suddenly, a man looking to be in his 70s wearing a black suit and a black velvet kipah, stepped into the center of the circle, and began whirling about, waving his arms this way and that, his face radiating joy, every movement manifesting grace and dignity. He was so clearly being moved by a spirit and a moment greater than himself, everyone in the circle seemed aware that we were witnesses to a something special. Then the old man left the circle and was replaced in the center of our circle by an overexuberant, rhythmless young man who demonstrated some breakdancing moves with no real skill or grace before grabbing my arm and dragging me into the circle with him. We danced together very awkwardly for a moment, but I quickly ducked back out and follwed after the old dancer, who was strolling about, clapping, looking perfectly pleased with everything.

I joined a chaotic, spiraling conga line, my hands on the back of a very sweaty dwarf. Then I noticed that we were circling a giant blue and orange banner, whose slogan I didn’t understand, but which I suspected was something politically reprehensible. As I absented myself from the dancing, I ran into a friend who pointed out a few orange “Eretz Yisrael l’Am Yisrael” (roughly, “Israel for the Jews”) flags. The fact that I was surrounded by, even dancing with thousands of right-wing nationalists suddenly hit home, and I became ashamed of myself.

It was time to go. I was running late for dinner with liberal, Anglo friends in undisputed territory in South Jerusalem.

Five minutes for Shalit

Living in Israel, it’s impossible to escape the national preoccupation with the plight of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was abducted by Hamas in 2006, and continues to be held hostage today.

Today, advocates for Shalit’s release called for people all over Israel to come outside at exactly eleven o’clock and block traffic for 5 minutes to demonstrate support for his immediate release. I didn’t hear anything about it until about 10:30 this morning, when someone in my Talmud class asked if we were going to participate as a class. We went outside at eleven, and found a gathering crowd of people tentatively easing their way into traffic. It wasn’t long before one car and then another pulled over to help obstruct traffic a little more. With each new stopped car, the crowd of pedestrians would applaud. At one point a big Coca-Cola delivery truck stopped in the middle of an intersections to really gum things up. Amazingly, through all this, I saw no expression of anger or frustration more serious than a grimace.

And then, just as things were getting really snarled, on no signal that I could discern, everyone left the road and started strolling back to their offices and shops. One woman cheered, in Hebrew “Good job, Ministry of Health!”, as she and her coworkers left their positions in the middle of the road to return to their government desk jobs.

In a week of difficult news regionally and globally, it was heartening to see people being so positive, even as they tried to call attention to such an upsetting issue.

Shabbat in the Settlements

First of all, I love visiting the settlements. I say this as someone who, a couple of years ago, thought of settlement as a dirty word, and would have had a hard time imagining being friends with anyone who would live there. In the last couple of years, my political perspective has not shifted so drastically, but the company I keep has. I now have teachers and friends who live in places that I used to have moral qualms about even setting foot. Okay, so I still have moral qualms about setting foot there, but I choose to set them aside for the sake of these relationships.

I’ve learned living here that the majority of settlements, certainly the settlements where the majority of Jews in the West Bank live, are socioligically, culturally and geographically suburbs of Jerusalem, and not isolated outposts. People live there for the same reason Americans move to the suburbs (cleaner air, cheaper real estate, smaller family-oriented communities) as well as for a more uniquely Jewish reason – neighborhoods where there aren’t cars on the streets on shabbat. The fact is, I really love spending Shabbat in a place like that, where kids congregate in the middle of the street on Friday night to chat with their friends, where neighbors look out for each other and take care of each other, where the air on Saturday mornings smells sweet, and not like car exhaust.

Every time I’ve spent shabbat in the settlements, however, inevitably the conversation turns to politics at some point, and that’s where I get uncomfortable. Someone at the table, sometimes everyone at the table, turns out to hold views that are not only counter to my own, but outright racist, and I have to bite my tongue lest I say something that will cause offense or at least a big fight.

The current political hulabaloo here is that a group of rabbis have published a letter claiming that Jewish law forbids Jews to sell or rent apartments to non-Jews and that anyone who does so should be ostracized while other rabbis and public figures have come out against this letter. At my school the debate was, while we all acknowledge that the letter is halachically, morally and politically in the wrong, are the rabbis who signed it blinded by xenophobia, or are they motivated by other political and sociological concerns that might have some validity to them?

Among the family I spent this past Shabbat with, however, the debate was just the opposite – they all agreed about the halachic, moral and political rightness of the letter, the only question was whether it should have been phrased in a more politic manner in order to avoid offending people.

I was thankful that the argument was being carried on in Hebrew so that I could plead linguistic incompetence as the excuse for my awkward silence.

He Makes the Wind Blow and the Rain Fall

Israel is in serious drought mode, so much so that the Rabbinate has already declared two fast days to petition for rain in the last month, and religious Jews are inserted extra requests for rain into their daily prayers. Leaving aside the theological questions of whether our prayers and fasting have any effect on the weather patterns, it’s been really powerful to feel united in our fasting and praying for this thing the country needs so bady.

I’m generally pretty concientious about water use (e.g. turning the water off when I’m soaping up in the shower, not leaving the water running while I wash dishes, wearing shirts and pants several times before throwing them in the laundry), but I’ve tried to step it up another notch in recent weeks, reducing my number of showers per week from five to four, while joining in all the religious measures as well.

Meanwhile, winter has seemed far off in Jerusalem, as the days have remained hot and skies have remained dry. In the north, they’ve even had fires. I was starting to wonder what would happen if the rain never showed up this year. Then finally today, I woke up and there were clouds, and then on my way back from synagogue, I actually felt drops of rain. It’s not a lot so far, but I’m really hoping it means that at least up north they’re getting a real soak.

It’s exciting enough just because we need rain and because I love rain, but having been fasting and praying together with the whole country for weeks in the hopes of this rain, I’m getting giddy at the thought that it might finally be here.

Severe Butter Shortage

When I went to the supermarket and found nothing but margarine where the butter should have been, aside from being mildly annoyed that I’d have to go to another store in order to get ingredients for my Thankgiving baking, I was charmed by the thought that I’m living in a country where a large supermarket could manage to run out of something as basic as butter.

When I went to the shuk, and found only a limited supply of butter there, it occured to me that the problem might be more widespread than I’d realized. As it turns out, Israel is in the midst of a severe butter shortage. Not surprisingly, climate change plays a role, as unusually warm weather has caused cows to produce lower-fat milk, resulting in less cream available for butter-making. While it’s frightening to wonder what other shortages might be coming our way as the earth continues to warm, I feel gratified to be living in a country where supply chains are short enough that the retail consumer feels the impact of what’s going on with farmers.

The Ministry of the Interior

This week, I had my first first-hand experience of the dreaded Misrad haPanim, the Ministry of the Interior. I had an appointment to get a new student visa, since my old one expires in a month and a half. All the horror-stories I’d heard about this place proved to be well founded. There were seven of us from Pardes who had appointments that morning, and at the end of the morning, after more than one of us had been brought to the point of tears, only one student walked out of the office with a new visa.

In the meantime, in the course of having our visas refused, we were subjected to the following indignities:

• One student had her sanity called in to question by the clerk processing her visa application, who told her that Israel doesn’t want to give visas to people who are mentally unbalanced.
• One agent refused to admit the existence of the country where the applicant’s mother was born (it’s a country you’ve all heard of).
• One student was told she needs to produce a certificate proving that she has never been married (I’m pretty sure that there is no such thing).
• One student was told that even though he has a letter from his Rabbi in the U.S. affirming his Jewish status, he needs a letter from a Rabbi in the other country where he has lived recently affirming his Jewish status.
• Another student was told that even though she has conversion documents signed by three rabbis affirming that she is a Jew, because she doesn’t have a letter from her rabbi to the same effect her application could not be processed. Never mind that the rabbi they want a letter from is one of the rabbis whose signature is on her conversion documents.
• I was refused a visa because I couldn’t provide my original conversion documents, even though the fact that my father is Jewish was enough to get me a student visa last year. The clerk actually looked me in the eye and said “we don’t give visas to non-Jews to study at yeshiva.”

Anyway, it looks like I might need to leave the country briefley before my student visa expires in December. I’m thinking this is a good excuse to spend my Hanukah vacation in Istanbul.

Sukkot in the City Part 1: Birkat HaCohanim

Each day during morning services in Israel, and on major Jewish festivals in the Diaspora, Cohanim, the putative descendants of the priests who served in the Temple in Jerusalem, stand up and bless the congregation. They use the same words that were instructed to Aaron and his sons in the bible, thousands of years ago, and they use the same sacred hand gesture that Cohanim have been using to bless Jews from time immemorial. The gesture resembles a two-handed Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign from Star Trek.

While this ritual is enacted daily in synagogues and minyanim throughout Israel, two times a year, during the intermediate days of the Passover and Sukkot festivals, hundreds of Cohanim gather at the Kotel for a mass Birkat Cohanim, not far from the spot where this ritual would have been performed in the days when the temple still stood. Normally I avoid the Kotel, since I find the crowds, the heat, the tourists and the unwelcoming Charedi minyanim to be less than conducive to spiritual uplift, but I was curious to experience this ritual at such a large scale and so close to the site where it was performed thousands of years ago.

So on Sunday morning, I arrived at the Kotel at about 8 a.m. while the large plaza was still in the shade. Those who’d arrived in time for early services were on their way out, but the real crowds of religious enthusiasts, tourists and the idly curious were just beginning to gather, etrogim and lulavim in hand, for the big service.

With such a crowd, things were naturally disorganized. There were any number of small minyanim, each clustered around a table with a torah on it, each starting at its own time and proceding at its own pace. Eventually the shliach tzibbur (service leader) for official event started davening over a p.a. system that was just loud enough to make it hard to hear anyone else, while still being hard to hear himself over the other noise on the kotel plaza. Occasionally a second voice would interrupt the prayers to request (in Hebrew) that the women in the Women’s Section please respect the sanctity of the place, in other words- “please dress according to our standards of female modesty or else get the hell out.”

When the shaliach tzibbur on the p.a. got to the point in the service for the Priestly Blessing, all the other minyanim paused immediately where they were, or else were “shushhed” by their neighbors until they did. The priests en masse made the blesssing over the act of blessing (that’s right even their blessings have blessings), and then, as the crowd stood with our eyes closed or our faces covered by prayer shawls, they began to pronounce the ancient blessing, repeating one word at a time after the service leader.

May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord shine his face upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his face to you and grant you peace.

Standing there, united across space and time with Jews there from every continent and with the countless generations who have stood in the same place to receive the same blessing, I almost started to cry. But then, just as I was getting transported into an ecstatic religious state, three press photographers literally shoved me aside as they rushed to get a good shot of the scene. I was so angry, I almost yelled at them, and spent the rest of the blessing stewing over what I ought to have said to them. Fortunately, by the time we came back to the blessing for the second time, during the Musaf service, most of the professional photographers seemed to have dispersed, and I was able to get my kavanah on.

At the end of the service, after some closing blessings from rabbinical dignitaries in attendance, people started dancing. After having stood in the baking sun together for more than two hours, many of us, reluctant for the experience to end, spent several minutes singing and dancing in a big circle. I love nothing more than those moments of togetherness and connection over whatever little we share, with people whom I normally would have absolutely nothing to do with, and who normally would have absolutely nothing to do with me.

Overheard at Camp / Overheard in the City

Overheard at a Jewish Summer Camp:

Five Year Old Boy (to Five Year Old Girl): It’s mostly about penises.

(Pause)

Five Year Old Boy (to no one in particular): Don’t listen to me!

Seven Year Old Boy: What the F*ck!?

Overheard in the City

SUV Driver: F*cking drive!

Taxi Driver: Watch your language, my friend!

SUV Driver: F*cking drive…c*nt!

Taxi Driver: Stupid! Idiot!

Overheard in a Brooklyn Cafe

Israeli Guy: Give me a latte.

Barista (not moving): Please?

Israeli Guy: Please.

Barista makes coffee.

Texans love Jews

Last month I traveled to Texas, because of a death in my family. I’m not sure this blog is the proper forum in which to meditate on death and mourning, but it is definitely the proper forum in which to recall awkward and amusing annecdotes from one’s travels.

It was my first time back in the states since I became a full-time kipah wearer, and what better place place to jump into the deep end of being a visibly religious Jew in America than in small-town Texas?

Everywhere I went in my travels through South Texas, total strangers approached me to talk about their connections to Jews or Judaism. These ranged from the retired protestant minister who approached me in line at a supermarket in Houston, wanting to know if I knew Rabbi Such-and-Such from Galveston, to my non-Jewish second cousin who made a point of telling be about an ancestor of hers who, when he immigrated to America two or three hundred years ago, wrote his name in Hebrew under his signature in the ship’s manifest.

Some of the interactions were bizarre. There was the woman who called to me across an empty Kohl’s parking lot at ten o’clock at night, asking if I was Jewish. It turned out she had a question about Passover, that she was hoping I could answer. A casual acquaintance told me in complete seriousness that she’d heard a rumor that in fact I was Muslim, not Jewish. I guess I understand how the rumor started, I mean I showed up from the Middle East with a funny hat and a big beard. What other conclusion could one draw?

One elderly acquaintance, after confirming me that I was Jewish, said hopefully “but you’re one of those believes in Jesus?” When I replied that I wasn’t, she responded with an air of confusion and disappointment, “well, what in the world is wrong with you?!”

Of course, small-town Texas being small-town Texas, there are always going to be bizarre run-ins with local culture, religion aside. On Shabbat afternoon as I was strolling around the town where I was staying, a yellow Jeep convertible playing “Cherry Pie” by Warrant at top volume slowed down as it passed me. The driver was a bald, goateed man in his forties, and the rest of the jeep was filled with obese women somewhat younger than he. They waved, and I waved back, and they drove on.

After a week and a half in Texas, I have to say that Israel feels a little less like a foreign country.