Thanksgiving, Partition and Showing Gratitude

Tonight I'm off to my maiden Thanksgiving Party courtesy of the lovely Maayan and Susi. Meriting as I did to grow up in the north-western suburbs of London, the Thanksgiving experience is new to me.

Yet no one needs an excuse for a party. And giving thanks is something we probably don't do often enough.

In fact, the Talmudic Rabbis teach us an important lesson on this issue in a discussion over how much one needs to eat before reciting grace after meals. Whereas the Torah in Devarim suggests we only need to 'Bensch' after being satisfied (ככתוב ואכלת ושבעת וברכת ) the Rabbis conclude that Jews should say 'grace' after only eating a Kezayit (about 30 grams.)

In other words, one doesn’t need to be full to express thanks for food.

Falling as it does on the 4th Thursday of November, Thanksgiving weekend always comes around the same time as the anniversary of the UN Partition Plan that promised a sovereign part of Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people for the first time in two millenia. Next week on the 29th November we mark its 60th anniversary.

And like the declaration of independence, the words 'The Temple Mount is in our hands' or Hatikva sung in a full football stadium, hearing the British accent announcing how those votes were cast in the UN General Assembly is one of those things that send shivers down my spine;

"Afghanistan…no.
Argentina…Argentina? abstention.
Australia…yes.
Belgium…yes.
Bolivia…yes…
Yugoslavia…abstain.
The resolution was adopted for 33 votes 13 against with 10 abstentions".

As I wrote last year, the Partition Plan wasn’t ideal by any means - it didn’t even include Jerusalem as part of the proposed State.

But in many ways, I think its acceptance by the Yishuv is what Zionism is about – being satisfied with something less than our dreams – and making reasoned decisions of what is achievable at any particular time given the circumstances.

At its core, Zionism and Rabbinic Judaism teach us that life is about giving thanks even when we aren't completely satisfied, when we eat yet aren't full, when we dream yet experience only partial ful-fillment.

At last years Thanksgiving, President Bush declared that "We give thanks to the Author of Life who granted our forefathers safe passage to this land, who gives every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth the gift of freedom, and who watches over our nation every day."

We celebrate this year in the lead up to a peace Summit in Annapolis that will inevitably lead to concessions over what many Israelis believe is rightfully theirs.

Yet perhaps we should be happy for the sovereign recognized State we do have, for the safe passage to places generations of Jews could only dream; give thanks, even if the compromises we will need to make (to provide another people their freedom) aren't necessarily what we would have ideally wanted.

And pray that the Author of Life continues to watch over our nation every day.

Of Borders, Identity and Hard Decisions

Parshat Chayeh Sarah is also known as Shabbat Chevron in commemoration of Avraham buying the Cave of Machpelah to bury his wife. The Cave ultimately 'houses' three generations of our forefathers and mothers and turned Hebron into an important religious and historical site for the Jewish people. Based on Biblical stories (and the fact the places were bought for their full market price), the Talmud mentions that there are three locations which are indisputably the legal property of the Jewish people; Hebron, Shechem (modern day Nablus) and Jerusalem.

It was this religious reasoning mixed with the continuation of pre-State strategy, coalitional sensitivities and Arab intransigence that allowed governments of the day (both left and right) to ambivalently acquiesce to the settler movement after the 6 Day War, ignoring warnings by some politicians and foreign ministry lawyers that in an era of decolonization the world would never tolerate such fait-accompli's. 40 years later, over 200,000 Israelis live in the West Bank. And by encouraging continued settlement on the one hand while emphasizing Israel's readiness to withdraw on the other, no government has ever formulated a clear position on their future…

That Talmudic statement always makes me smile – after all, how ironic (or prophetic) that the three most controversial areas Israel captured in 1967 are Nablus (the most populous city in the West Bank) Hebron (where several hundred Jews live among 170,000 Palestinians) and Jerusalem (which the world still refuses to recognize as Israel’s capital).

The 1967 War constituted a great victory for Israel. Not only did we survive, but the temporary disappearance of the armistice lines between Israel and Jordan “erased the difference between the State of Israel and the land of Israel” in the words of poet Nathan Alterman. Yet perhaps smiling is not the correct response. As a side effect, the fruits of victory and settlement growth artificially created a Bosnia scenario violently locking Jews and Palestinian Arabs into a Gordian ethnic embrace.

The future of the settlements is one issue to be discussed at the Annapolis Summit in Maryland later this month. At Reut, we've been working on the prospects for the Summit (not great) and the potential consequences for their failure (very serious). Due to the changing geo-political reality, failure may be the straw that causes the end of Abu Mazen’s political career, a Hamas take over in the West Bank and a third Intifada. Moreover, it may further erode the already weakening consensus that a Jewish Israel alongside a Palestinian state is the correct paradigm to solve our conflict. If we’re not careful, if we don’t decide the future of the West Bank soon, the international community may be tempted to support a bi-national state.

Deciding on the future of the liberated / occupied territories has haunted Israeli governments since the immediate aftermath of the war. In a conversation between President Johnson and PM Eshkol, the Prime Minister is unable to answer a simple question posed to him by the leader of the free world – “What Israel would you like to see?” Forty years and many administrations later, we’re still unable to genuinely decide what type of country we want Israel to become, what its border will be, how its identity will be defined.

No one suggests it's easy to determine a border, and not just because of emotional attachment to areas of biblical significance. Israeli author A.B Yehoshua discusses the interconnection between boundaries and identity explaining that Jews have traditionally been unrestricted by national borders, used to crossing boundaries and moving between cultures. Setting a border in some way restricts our identity - it permanently fixes what is inside and belongs to us, and what is outside and doesn’t. Like choosing one option yet closing the door to others, determining a border is necessary, but inevitably leads to loss.

Continued indecision meanwhile, will endanger the whole Zionist project. Unless we finally decide what parts of our identity are central to us and which are not, unless we succeed in once again separating the State of Israel from the Land, we may be in danger of losing both. We can't keep putting it off. Johnson's question has gone unanswered long enough.

On Religion, Rabin and Easy Solutions

In addition to discussions over politics, Israeli Friday night dinners also have their fair share of arguments about religion. While I am never one to shy away from a bit of theological banter, and enjoy bating religious dogmatists with controversial statements as much as the next person, what I really dislike is the type of simplistic question that punctuated my relaxing Succot Friday night dinner in Caesarea last month; "I’m surprised you're religious – I mean, religion is the cause of so many wars around the world."

Its instructive to note how many Israelis relate religion to two main sectors of the population – the Charedim, perceived as misogynist parasites who control marriage and conversion, and the national religious ‘settlers’ who are connected with an uncompromising extremism of ‘not one inch.’ When these straw men are complemented by traditional secular Zionism’s view of the galut Jew as the weak, cowardly religious type as expressed by Bialik and Berdichevski, it's unsurprising so many Israelis see religion as an anachronism. Add into the mix a few bigoted or cruel comments from Israeli rabbis, and you have a pretty strong recipe that fuels anti – religious feeling.

That same week, the Ha’aretz supplement reviewed a book by Chanoch Daum, a formerly religious journalist and writer living in Efrat who discusses a religious upbringing he describes as loveless and unempathetic and the theological and emotional scars it has caused. Divided into four parts, the book is comprised of different personal letters Daub writes to God, his father, his community and his wife.

Strangely enough, the Talmudic rabbis themselves were aware of the potentially destructive power of organized religion, as well as the dissonance between God’s words and the actions of those who purport to speak in His name. Long before the ideas of Marx, Spinoza and Freud or modern complaints about religious coercion, the Midrash suggests that Abel's murder by his brother Cain was due to an argument over either property, religion or women. Another commentary on a verse in Ecclesiastes (which we read on Succot) (4.1) suggests a dissonance between the religious authorities of the day (who interpret God's law without mercy) and what God actually wants.

Secularism in Israel meanwhile, has its own problems. I recently heard Uzi Dayan describe the process of secular Zionism (of which he considers himself a part) detailing the jump from the Tanach to the Palmach and the ambivalence to skipping towards 2,000 years of Jewish civilization in between. From dreaming of creating a new Jew from the ashes of the diaspora, many secular leaders in Israel feel that instead of a generation of heretics, they have raised a generation of ignoramus.

I would have thought that everyone in Israel with all its complexities would realize that generalizing our problems into a bumper sticker soundbites of good and bad, of fanatical religious or immoral secular, of kapo left wing or fascist right would do little good. Yet it seems that surprisingly few understand Isaiah Berlin’s comment that its not religion or secularism or capitalism or communism that is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals. Instead, it’s the belief that somewhere in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker…there is a final solution, one utopian ideology that will solve all our problems.

Similar to JFK, most Jews my age remember where they were the night Yitzchak Rabin was assasinated. 12 years ago this week, I was at a party of a friend of a friend in Elstree, old enough to realize that what happened was bad, but too naïve to realize the danger of those who feel their religion or ideology justifies murdering elected officials.

As we mark the Yahrzeit of our former Prime Minister, Israeli society remains divided as ever. And while its difficult to help people understand there’s no magic wand or absolute solution to our problems, part of me feels that those like Chanoch Daum, Uzi Dayan and the Rabbis of the Talmud give us a clue – the need to critique our own community and to rid ourselves of the self righteousness that we are in the position of the absolute truth.

And perhaps most importantly, in a country where there isn’t even a word for subtlety, to start a conversation to help us understand one another better.

Avraham, the Palmach and the issue of Blindness

Last month, Reut took us to the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv commemorating the pre state Yishuv's underground military organization and its national institutions. Apart from it always being a bit embarrassing to be British in these places, it was an extremely interesting morning.

And while, there wasn’t any overly patriotic statements, one come's away with an appreciation and admiration for the sacrifices people made for a cause in which they believed.

I grew up in this type of atmosphere - the importance of living one’s life according to ideals, of being prepared to sacrifice for the greater good. And while I still believe in those values, still feel that if nothing's worth dying for, then nothing's worth living for, a lot of nationalist and ideological values now seem a bit hollow.

While I'm an ideological person myself, I'm simultaneously suspicious of ideology, of the sacrifices it often demands from its adherents.

Next week we read about the Akeida, a story I’ve had difficulty with for years. How can we praise Avraham for being willing to sacrifice his son? Does he act as an example for us? How can someone who so strongly argues against God to save the city of Sdom so readily acquiesce in something immoral?

Although all ends well and Yitzchak stays alive, his relationship with his father is destroyed (they never have a conversation again) and the Rabbis explain that this experience ‘blinds’ him, a disability that later causes his inability to choose between blessings for his two sons, Esav and Yaakov.

One of the best commentaries I’ve read comes from an Israeli educator name Shai Zarchi who argues that Avraham and Yitzchak represent two different generations;

Avraham is reminiscent of great innovators, those who sacrifice everything on the altar of a revolutionary idea. Yitzchak meanwhile, reminds him of his own generation.

Like Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s children who weren’t allowed to interact with other kids because they spoke Yiddish and not Hebrew (he once bought his children a pet dog and cat to help them practice their masculine and feminine tenses); like the chalutzim who closed their eyes (or were ‘blinded’) to their cultural roots to completely dedicate themselves to the Zionist project; like Mohinder Seresh’s father in Heroes, ‘Avrahams’ follow the logic of ‘either / or,’ either family or reviving an ancient language, either European comfort or malaria in a nascent State; either the love of God or the life of children…

Having seen the painful price paid for either / or, Yitzchak is blinded by his emotions and isn’t prepared to choose between his children – he wants both. Yitzchak prefers what Zarchi terms, ‘gam vegam’ or ‘both one and the other.'

This indeed is our generation. We no longer want to have to choose.

Its not that we've given up on ideology - after all views like those of Bar Refaeli or Jacko Eisenberg are still marginal, and most of us do see a difference between Israel and Uganda. It’s something more subtle.

It’s getting drafted, but not leaving political views at home.

It’s a film like 'Walk on Water' in which a successful Mossad agent experiences moral soul searching.

It’s stopping an important operation because soldiers get injured or the political echelon is too sensitive to casualties.

Our generation is still prepared to sacrifice, just not too much.

I find Avraham’s actions alien because he belongs to a different generation… And while I believe its impossible to build a State without them, I want Gam veGam, veGam veGam, to have a western European quality of life but in the Middle East.

To be a part of the first sovereign Jewish experiment in 2000 years but to earn a good English salary.

To see our soldiers protect us from those celebrating death but maintain their sanity and gentleness…

According to Zarchi, both Avraham and Yitzchak are ‘blinded.’ Yet in many ways we are all 'blind' to some things, all forced to ignore parts of reality that cause us too much pain or dissonance, whether that be ignoring the plight of our neighbours 40 minutes drive from the coffee shops of Tel Aviv or in our personal relationships with friends and partners.

Yet the real question - for those who live in an era where Palmach fighters are slowly dying out and believing its good to die for your country is passé - is whether our generation’s ideology is enough to maintain our sovereign presence in this area?

Of Towers and Totalitarianism

This is an abridged version of an article I wrote in November 2001 for a Bnei Akiva magazine (should I have admitted that?) on the topic of Pluralism. It is based on the Netziv’s commentary on the story of the tower of Bavel, that appears in the end of this week’s sedrah.

Once upon a time, in a beautiful land far, far away called Babylon, a group of ingenious people grouped together in a valley and decided to build a huge tower. This tower would be higher than anything else in the world. Having just discovered the revolutionary secret of making cement they decided to put their new found knowledge to constructive use.

The king of the people lived in a big palace full of gold and jewels. He was a very wicked man, whom nobody liked and was known to decree very harsh rules, that all his subjects were forced to obey or risk death! One fine day the ruler decided that every one in the village had to think exactly like him. No one was allowed to think differently. Anyone who dared give a dissenting opinion or who strayed from the norm was to be burnt! The people were not too happy about this but had to obey. From then on, there were no arguments amongst the people as everyone thought the same and the tower continued to be built at a faster pace than ever. This pleased the king greatly and he congratulated himself on the unity (a rare thing) which was apparent in his subjects.

God looked down at the people diligently working on their masterpiece and was both upset and worried. "they are one, and this is what they attempt to do....if things go on like this then anything is possible!!" He didn't fear the fact they were building a tower to fight Him, after all, everyone knows that God can look after Himself. Man throughout the ages has always wished to do battle with the Divine, attempting to replace God as the ultimate being with himself.

God was worried because in a society where there is no room for other opinions or opposition, tragedies can happen. He saw that where individuals do not have the inherent right to disagree, where no one can be a conscientious observer, atrocities can and will take place with no one to prevent them. Individuality is something to be embraced, not restricted. When it is, and people lose their innate uniqueness, they are replaced in importance by bricks. He looked through His books that spanned the whole of time and saw that in the future, there would be systems in the twentieth century that denied the individual his freedom of thought, and also saw that it often led to mass murder in the name of progress.

In his great mercy God therefore decided that it would be much better if there was a diversity of opinion. After all, without argument and discussion, how could these people ever hope to refine their beliefs, He thought. As Nietzsche commented many years later, "rather than making oneself uniform, we may find greater value for the enrichment of knowledge by listening to that soft voice of different life situations, each brings its own views with it. Thus we acknowledge and share the life and nature of many by not treating ourselves like rigid invariable, single individuals."

God concluded that each person has much to learn from the other's unique experience and that it was therefore a positive thing to be open to others' opinions, even if one believes them to be wrong or misplaced. He decreed a Bracha to be made on seeing 600,000 Jews together, because 'just as everyone made in the image of God is unique and no two people look the same, similarly their views are unique and this is something to be thankful for'. He agreed that with Moshe's plea that a leader of the Jewish people should be tolerant towards all the different sets of people in Am Yisrael, talking to each one according to their understanding. He remembered that no two humans see the same event in the same way, and to force them into a rigid framework of belief would be ultimately self defeating, after all ‘only an autonomous morality is worthwhile for a person.’

God therefore decided, in the best interests of the people building the tower, to separate them by changing their language, thus making it impossible for one to understand his neighbour. It is true that never again were they so united as in those early days, but uniformity of thought and action was seen as an even greater evil than the potential divisiveness that their separation caused.

In this way, the people separated, thus destroying the king's evil decree and they began to build individual lives for themselves in different places in the world and all lived happily ever after.

Rosh Hashana 5768 - a Message against Despair

Sometimes the best laid plans go to waste. Sometimes we miss opportunities. Sometimes we feel we simply don’t control our lives. Sometimes, or perhaps once a year, we need to think about where we're headed, whether we're going in the right direction, and whether we're where we want to be.

In a speech last April, David Grossman describes the emotional desensitization caused by living in a war zone, the dangers of becoming ‘nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.' He talks about the void growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent and chaotic situation he lives in and which is being filled with apathy, cynicism and despair: Despair of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it.

On a similar theme but set in a completely different time and place, Amos Oz describes his aunt’s feelings of growing up amongst the Gentiles in 1930s Poland.

"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…"

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what country people live in. To paraphrase that 1980s Bonnie Tyler song, every now and then we all experience a partial eclipse of the heart, a clogging up of our feelings, like the sticky goo in the British anti smoking adverts that somehow blocks our emotional arteries, prevents us from truly feeling…from truly becoming who we are meant to be.

Rosh Hashana for me, is about trying to unclog the muck, to purify our hearts to allow us to feel, to rid the void within us of despair and apathy and fill it with hope, to ignore those aspects of our environment that impede us from becoming who we really are, to overcome the ‘corrosion of human dignity’ and the ‘void of despair and apathy.’

In short to do Teshuva, to ‘return’ to ourselves, to who we are supposed to be.

Grossman and Oz raise a challenge that we should be answering – how to face a painful reality yet continue to feel, how to face a world that rejects us yet remain true to ourselves. How to experience disappointment yet not become apathetic to the suffering of others. How to find enough room in our hearts to care about domestic violence in Lod and road accidents in Rahat, to feel for the children of Sderot and Bet Hanoun...to find the courage to ignore what the goyim may think.

Yet the message of Rosh Hashana is the opposite of Grossman’s ‘despair of ever changing our prevailing state of affairs’. Instead it teaches us that if we’re not happy with the type of person we are, we have the power to change. If we’re not satisfied with the society in which we live, we have the power to make a difference.

On the anniversary of humanity’s creation when each person and nation needs to answer God’s everlasting question of איכה – where are you, let me wish anyone that still visits this site after 5 weeks without a fresh post a happy new year filled with renewed ability to return to ourselves, to unclog our arteries and to believe the radical idea that if our lives or society or country or world aren’t the way we would like, the power lies within us to effect change.

Shana Tova

(for anyone interested in seeing how my writing has regressed in the past year, click here to check out my 2 Rosh Hashana posts from last year)

The Fear of Collapse - Some Thoughts on Tisha Be'Av

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond describes different processes that lead to the destruction of civilizations. Giving examples stretching hundreds of years from Easter Islanders to Rwandans, Diamond shows how different factors – environmental and climactic changes, the loss of supporting allies and the presence of hostile neighbours – often coalesce together to bring ruin to societies.

The 5th reason the author brings – how each society responded to the changes it faced - is particularly apropos to discuss on Tisha Be’Av, the fast day that commemorates many tragedies that befell the Jewish people, not least, the destruction of our temples and loss of sovereignty only recently regained.

While Diamond concludes that it’s a society’s inability to adapt itself and its values to new situations, (sometimes, it’s those same values that had strengthened a society in the past that ultimately led to their disappearance) Jewish tradition has its own explanations for collapse. Our Rabbis teach that the destruction of the temple and subsequent exiles were caused by our sins – idolatry, murder, incest and baseless hatred. More secular commentators meanwhile, emphasize the people’s political mistakes and their inability to accept the limits of Jewish power and embrace compromise.

Whether social anthropologists, secular Israelis or Talmudic Rabbis, the underlying message seems to be that the future of any society (including our modern day Israeli one) is not guaranteed. Instead, it depends on the political choices we make, the type of society we create and perhaps most importantly, on the ability of our leaders to help us adapt to our changing environment and decide which of our values to maintain and which to forego.

I spent the night of Tisha Be’Av by Rabin Square in Tel Aviv at a ceremony entitled ‘Tonight we don’t learn Torah’ which brought Israeli religious and secular MKs, journalists and jurists together to discuss the contemporary meaning of the day. The theme of the evening was leadership and for good reason – most people in the country have given up on finding a leader they respect or admire, a personality not compromised by sexual indiscretion, financial corruption, or political incompetence.

The speakers discussed their own personal Jewish heroes; Moshe for his strong identification with his enslaved brothers, Yochanan Ben Zakai for his subtle understanding of Israel’s geo strategic position and ability to adapt Judaism to a changing (post Temple) reality, Ben Gurion for his political courage and foresight. The implied message by all speakers was the absence of similar personalities nowadays to steer us through these difficult times.

Tisha Be'av teaches us that our future hangs in the balance. And if indeed bloodshed, sexual indiscretion and hatred is rife in our country, if we lack inspiring respected leaders who can help us adapt to the painful changes we will need to make if we want to live in peace and security here, then our future here really is not guaranteed. As Yossi Sarid writes; “ TheThird Temple is in imminent danger, if we judge by the precedents.”

No Israeli needs to be reminded of the presence of hostile neighbours, nor our fear that our allies might one day abandon us. And deep down, there is a primordial fear that our experiment of reviving a nation in its ancient land will collapse due to internal fissures and external threats.

Yet I also feel that among the prophets of doom, sometimes we need to focus on the perspective of a Jewish leader who wasn’t mentioned that night at the square, a Rabbi who can see a fox walking in the Holy of Holies yet laugh, who can experience disaster but imagine a better future;

Perhaps sometimes we should act like Rabbi Akiva and try and see past our petty and self interested leadership to the bigger picture, the return of our sovereignty after 2000 years, the good things that occur on a daily basis…the fact that regardless of what may happen to us now, at least our fate is in our own hands.

And imagine a time when Tisha Be’Av will no longer be a time for self-introspection, but a time for joy and celebration instead.