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.

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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.

You’re all wrong but you’re alright

One of the things I love about Pardes is that within this one very small, close-knit institution, between the students and faculty, you have the full spectrum of political positions with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from fairly far right to fairly far left, and that somehow we all get along. Studying so intimately together, we are all forced to realize that there are thoughtful, decent people who have come to radically different conclusions about these issues than we have.

Tody, when my new Talmud teacher, who lives in Gush Etzion (a group of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, maybe 10 minutes from Jerusalem), told us as a matter of course that if anyone in our class has a problem crossing the Green Line for a class party at his home, he’d be happy to find an alternative location in Jerusalem. It might seem like a very small thing, but it startled me to hear someone so cheerfully offer to accommodate those who would seem to regard him and his basic life choices as deeply wrong. As someone who grew up with the assumption that everyone on the other side of the political spectrum was either stupid or evil, I don’t take that kind of good-natured tolerance for granted.

The Crime of Wearing a Tallit

The Jewish Daily Forward has published a letter from Nofrat Frenkel, the woman who was arrested last week for wearing a tallis and carrying a sefer Torah at the Kotel.

Woman arrested for praying

A lot of my classmates from Pardes were at the Kotel this morning when a woman got arrested for wearing a talis and carrying a Torah scroll. It’s a sobering reminder that this country does not cherish the civil liberties we hold so dear back home in the U.S.

The Jerusalem Post has the story.