Lag BaOmer: BBQs, Bonfires and Freedom

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in Israel. Controversy over the state budget, premonitions of doom ahead of the Bibi – Obama meeting in Washington, and the 33rd (Lag) day of the Omer, which traditionally marks the Bar Kochba rebellion, the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (the Rashbi) and the end of the plague / war that caused the death of 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students.

Lag Ba’Omer is one of those festivals that really emphasizes the difference between Israel and the rest of the Jewish world. There it’s more or less a regular day. Here meanwhile it’s a pyromaniac and carnivore’s heaven, with bonfires and barbeques (literally) filling the Jerusalem skyline (apparently air pollution is five times larger than on any other day).

Yet despite the celebrations, this year I struggled with the significance of the three aspects this day traditionally marks. While I’m perfectly happy to celebrate the end of a plague (especially if I get to eat), the other two components struck me as strange.

Despite being a renowned scholar, Rabbi Shimon’s story is problematic. After fleeing from the Romans (in an episode which always reminds me of this scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian) and learning in a cave for twelve years, Rashbi was unable to interact with his fellow humans, burning one man to death with his eyes for engaging in the ‘trivial’ matter of farming. A Heavenly voice ultimately demands he returns to his cave and stops ‘destroying God’s world.’

The rebellion meanwhile – inspired by messianic drive which ignored Roman strength and power – ended in disaster, with half a million Jews murdered and the loss of sovereignty for nearly 2000 years.

And while it didnt stop me eating two chickens, four sausages and an entrecote I did wonder whether there was more to Lag Ba'Omer than a zealous mystic and a failed rebellion…

Then I began to think about what these two stories signify – the inability to maintain the difficult balance between rights and realpolitik, between how the world should be and how it currently is.

And about the dangers of ignoring the latter in favor of the former.

And I remembered that Rashbi's story doesn’t end with the farmer’s immolation. It continues with his re-emergence from the cave a year later as a more complete, integrated, communally oriented Rabbi.

The Bar Kochba story meanwhile gets downplayed by the Rabbis of the Talmud, who understood the dangers of unrestrained messianism, of ignoring the geo-strategic situation in the name of nationalism.

Lag Ba’Omer falls sometime in the middle of the long walk to freedom we undertake between Pesach (freedom from slavery) and Shavuot (freedom to realize our potential). And maybe it comes to remind us of the learning steps required for mature freedom –that unwillingness to compromise on what we feel is rightfully ours can be catastrophic, that seeking to mould the world in our image can sometimes destroy it.

And I wonder – faced as we are with an unprecedented economic crisis and an international community unsympathetic to our territorial wishes – whether our elected leaders realize what it takes to preserve our newly acquired freedom.

Yom Hashoah 5769: In the Presence of Burning Children

I just spent the last hour with my Reut Institute colleagues listening to and sharing stories about our families during the Holocaust; how they survived (or didn’t), how they mustered the strength to rebuilt their lives anew; how these memories (or lack of them) continue to affect us and our identity today.

Part of me feels that in the face of unfathomable evil, the only appropriate response is silence; that written words are unable to capture the enormity of what happened…that as Irving Greenberg says, “no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that is not credible in the presence of burning children."

Yet despite this, I wanted to share an article I wrote in the spring of 2002 regarding different theological responses to the Shoah. It is based on the format of a book called Yosl Rakover Talks to God in which author Zvi Kolitz imagines a moving letter written by Yosl Rakover hours before the Warsaw Ghetto is liquidated by the Nazis. Yet rather than ultimately affirming his faith in his Creator as Yosl does, the article suggests that our understanding of God can not remain the same after such an event.

The article can be accessed here.

Wishing everyone a meaningful Yom Hashoah.

Pesach Thoughts 5769: Refugees in a Jewish State

It’s simultaneously strange and uplifting to have lived in a city for years yet still discover new and unexplored places. And while hardly being the Tel Avivian socialite around town, I still felt I had the city pretty much down pat. Yet the Friday before Pesach brought me to Lewinsky Park near the New Central Bus Station in southern Tel Aviv for a ‘refugee seder’ – and forced me to throw yet another illusion out the window.

The seder, organized by Amnesty International and Israel Activisits among others, sought to draw attention to the situation of approximately 17,000 African refugees seeking a safe haven in the Jewish state.

And while I arrived after the music and service had already ended, what struck me was the lack of Israelis in the crowd…and how the park in our first Hebrew city had become transformed into another world, filled with a colourful mix of Eritreans, Sudanese and Thai.

I hadn’t been to the Central Bus Station or the areas surrounding it that much since my year off in Israel a decade ago. To be honest the station is not the most attractive of Tel Aviv’s landmarks – it’s large and disorienting, and ever since I saw the ‘please don’t pee here’ sign in one of the station’s corridors I tried to keep my distance.

But the area also represents something else - the side to our city people don’t (or would rather not) see; the underclass, the stranger in our midst, the other…

Later that evening over dinner, I thought about two extracts from Amos Oz’s beautiful autobiography A Tale of Love and Darkness that are especially pertinent to celebrating the Jewish festival of freedom in our own independent state.

One bears a striking resemblance to Herzl’s Political Zionism (Israel as a safe haven), the second to Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionism (Israel as a spiritual centre);

The first, narrated by Oz’s father, reminds me of Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty (freedom from); the second, by his aunt, is similar to Berlin’s positive liberty (freedom to realize our fundamental purpose).

One describes the meaning of the Hebrew word Chofesh; the second, the term Cherut.

And both discuss situations that state’s establishment sought to alleviate – the consequences of our lack of homelessness.

Then he [my father] told me in a whisper, without once calling me Your Highness or Your Honour, what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down on the paving stones and removed his trousers too in the middle of the playground, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.

And still in a voice of darkness with his hand still losing its way in my hair (because he was not used to stroking my hair) my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of the thirtieth of November 1947, ‘Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school some day. They may do it precisely because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. For ever’

- - - - -

"A thousand times it was hammered in to the head of every Jewish child that we must not irritate them, or hold our heads up, and we must only speak to them quietly, with a smile, so they shouldn’t say we were noisy, and we must always speak to them in good correct Polish, so they couldn’t say we were defiling the language, but we must speak in Polish that was too high, so they couldn’t say we had ambitions above our station and Heaven forbid they should say we had stains on our skirts.

In short, we had to try very hard to make a good impression…You who were born here in Israel can never understand how this constant drip drip distorts all your feelings, how it corrodes your human dignity like rust…"

In many ways, freedom is the ability to live one’s life without fear and without emotional or physical filters.

But it also comes with responsibility.

And I wonder – when we sit down with family and friends for Seder to discuss, sing and be merry - how we can ensure we’re fulfilling our responsibility to those who don’t yet have freedom or independence?

That when we claim that everyone is welcome at our table we don’t close our heart to those invisible thousands who found their way to our shores fleeing the same persecution that we experienced so many generations ago...

Because like us, there are strangers living in a land not their own.

And one shouldn’t need to go to Lewinsky Park to notice their plight.