Obama, Hasidism and the Search for Authenticity

I know it’s been a while.

But just because nothing has been written doesn’t mean nothing’s been done.

There was the Maccabiah Games opening ceremony starring 7,000 Jews from around the globe, in which the Prime Minister (in true Zionist style) told everyone that Israel was their home and that they should make Aliyah

There are the Kiddushim and BBQs celebrating a new batch of Olim, which often nudge me into clarifying what this country means to me, and why I’m here.

There are the after-work runs along the beach and sunset dips in the ocean, which I like to refer to as mini Bi-Athlons, although I fear 2km followed by 5 minutes chilling in the sea doesn’t really count.

And there’s also been the ‘Spoken Word’ event organized by Farrah and hosted in the infamous Spinoza 6 apartment.

Spoken word was a new experience for me (isn’t every thing said out loud a ‘spoken word’?)

But it was a real eye opener and hugely enjoyable.

The lineup headlined with the Hebrew Mamita – the sexy oi-veh chutzpah-having non-cheaping, non-conspiracizing, always questioning, hip-hop listening, Torah-scroll reading, all-people loving, pride-filled Jewish girl.

Also featured were the lovely Farrah (torn between her lover New York and mistress Israel), the Puerto Rican, Panamanian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Lithuanian first generation American Ruby (Pujerican for short) and Yael - too Jewish for the black girls and too black for the Jews.

And what struck me was despite the different topics, they all touched on the underlying question of what being Jewish means.

Or what comprises authenticity in this multi- layered 21st Century reality we live in.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m currently working my way through 2 books – Obama’s ‘Dreams of my Father’ and 'The Quest for Authenticity', which discusses the Przysucha (pronounced Pshishka) Hasidism – a group that focused on personal authenticity above all else.

Abhorring routine and imitation, the Przysucha promoted serving God rather than the Shulchan Aruch, preached genuine self analysis rather than self indulgence;

And it made me wonder about how one achieves genuine authenticity.

With our friends.

In relationships.

With God.

And those things that make it harder – the society we live in, our fear of what people may think of us.

And in this context, an extract from Obama’s book describing his first visit to Kenya, leapt out at me;

For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as its supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway.

You could read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate.

Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.

And his prose reminded me of my early visits to Israel, how amazed and excited I was that among the palm trees of the airport were people like me, a land filled with Jews.

And without meaning to be too old skool Zionist a la Bibi, it made me think whether there’s something about this place that facilitates the search for authenticity.

Not that all Jews should move to Israel – Heaven forbid.

But that it’s a place where one can walk the streets without feeling self conscious about the silly hat we wear on our heads.

Without the fear of having a penny thrown at us;

Where one can read about Benny Sela without worrying how it reflects on us;

Where, to paraphrase Obama, ‘the world is Jewish and so you were just you’

Where, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, Jews don’t have to be more German than the Germans.

A place where we can just be ourselves.

Because when all the ceremonies and barbeques are over, maybe this is what life is really about.

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.

Pesach Thoughts 5769: Freedom in Every Generation

בכל דור ודור עומדים עלינו לכלותינו

In every generation they arise to destroy us…

בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים

In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as though he actually left Egypt.

I remember a primary school project in which we had to make our own Hagaddah. I’d never been particularly artistic, but with help from creative parents managed to win the school prize. Looking back, the only section I remember was the page discussing how enemies rise up to destroy us in every generation, and the big wall we drew with different bricks representing different enemies.

It was an all star team of baddies – the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, the Cossacks, the Nazis.

And to add some contemporary meaning to the proceedings – and to remain true to the meaning of the text that we have enemies in every generation - we also added the PLO, the latest in a line of villains to step up to the plate and try their luck with us.

Yet thinking about it now, I wonder if our focus on enemies old and new may undermine our ability to fulfil the second ‘in every generation’ that of personally liberating ourselves from slavery.

- - - - - - -

The British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks questions why before the people of Israel left Egypt they had to ask their neighbours for gold and silver. The whole scenario sounds a bit like an anti – Semitic joke; you hear the one about the stingy Jews? They were in such a rush to leave they didn’t even have time to bake bread…but still found the time to demand cash.

The Chief compares this issue to the case of giving presents to redeemed slaves and explains that it allows the former slave to leave without anger and a sense of humiliation, that it facilitates emotional closure.

Because one who has received gifts finds it hard to hate.

And in order to be truly free, a people need to let go of hate.

- - - - - - -

If in every generation we are commanded to liberate ourselves from slavery, then surely we're also obligated to relieve ourselves of any hate (and fear) towards those who wronged us.

And while there’s no question that for so much of Jewish history the first ‘in every generation’ was very tangible, perhaps celebrating the festival of freedom in Israel – that independent powerful sovereign state of ours - its time to focus more on the 2nd ‘in every generation’ – liberating ourselves from hate, freeing ourselves from fear, ceasing to be traumatised by the past.

This is not to suggest that utopia has arrived, that weekend trips to Teheran beckon and that disbanding the IDF is only a matter of time. But I’ve been around enough Friday night dinner table discussions to understand that our vision of the world is often coloured by Shoah tinted spectacles - that the world is out to get the Jews; that the goyim can’t be trusted, that Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler...

And I wonder whether despite being physically free, we’re still emotionally enslaved or traumatised by the past, whether the first ‘in every generation’ undermines our ability to fully experience the second.

And whether true freedom is remembering the past, but refusing to let it rule us in the present.

Relationships and Rationality (Speech at Sheva Brachot)

Elad and I met properly in the context of a fortnightly Tel Aviv Shiur that our lovely hostess Susie organized a couple of years ago. That shiur – in which each member of the small group of people would present on a Jewish topic of interest while the others sipped wine and interjected in generally relevant places – is actually still going strong two and a half years later.

In fact, I’m missing it tonight to be here.

So in memory of this relationship grounded in Jewish theology, I’m glad I have the opportunity to share some ideas based on the thought the people we spent many an evening in Susie’s old apartment discussing.

- - - - - -

Martin Buber is a famous Jewish theologian of the past century who is perhaps best known for his ‘I-Thou’ (I – You singular for the less posh) thesis. Its main proposition is that we may address existence or relationships in two ways:

The first he calls ‘I-It’ which is when one relates to an object (or person) functionally, in the context of its output or what it ‘gives’ us. It could be anything from our relationship to a table or a bank clerk (or a spouse). These relationships aren’t necessarily bad, often they are even necessary. But they are a lower form of relationship.

The second type Buber terms ‘I-Thou’ which refers to placing ourselves completely into a relationship, truly being with another person, without masks or pretenses. It’s the genuine sharing of our truest selves without masks or pretenses.

This is what we should all be striving for with the people we genuinely love and care for.

Buber explains that these I-Thou relationships help to bring us into relationship with the ‘Eternal Thou’ i.e. God.

If this reading is correct, then it seems Buber believes that we should use our experience with people to better understand the relationship we’re supposed to create with the Divine.

But I wonder if perhaps things are supposed to be the other way round – that our relationship with God and Torah ultimately helps us to achieve a better relationship with people.

- - - - - -

Last week we read about the red heifer, a law whose logic even King Solomon couldn’t fathom. The ashes of this heifer are used to purify, but they simultaneously make the Cohen performing the action impure.

The law seems completely irrational and non-sensical. In Jewish sources, it’s known as the ultimate chok, a biblical law for which there is no apparent reason.

And it reminds me of a beautiful passage by Abraham Joshua Heschel on rationality (more than any other Jewish thinker, Heschel helps me to pray, and sometimes even helps to believe that my prayers are heard);

He writes that “The search of reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh.”

- - - - - -

Elad – one of the things I always liked about you in our discussions was that we were both very rational (we were the guys after all). We value intellect and logic; we trust things we can measure. Maybe we even feel that if reason and emotion clash, then reason comes out trumps. But I wonder if at a certain stage, perhaps when it comes to trying to create an ‘I-Thou’ love with another individual we may need to de-emphasize it.

I wonder whether love is ineffable, part of the immense expanse beyond the shore of reason which can’t be weighed or measured.

- - - - - -

And I wonder whether the concept of an illogical or irrational command we simply can’t fathom is highly relevant not just when serving God, but in loving people.

Because some things (like relationships) simply ‘are,’ without being logically measurable or easily classified.

And what’s fantastic about your relationship is that even though 2 years ago no one would have put you two together (on paper), in practice, your relationship just ‘works,’ and everyone who meets you sees how much it works.

And it’s very very wonderful to see…

Mazal Tov

Working at Reut: What I Actually Do All Day

(I was asked by Global Politics Magazine to write about what its like working for the Reut Institute. The piece was published last week and hopefully explains (better than I am able to do verbally) what I actually do every day.

When I first moved to Israel from my native London three years ago, I was hoping to find a job that would merge two of my main professional interests; academic research and practical political involvement (but without the 'politics'). As it turned out, the Reut Institute proved to be a good match.

Reut was founded in January 2004 by Gidi Grinstein who had previously worked in the Prime Minister's Office during Ehud Barak's premiership (1999-2001) and had been part of the Israeli delegation which experienced the collapse of the Camp David Summit in 2000 with the Palestinians.

Many people involved in the Summit such as Shlomo Ben Ami, Gilead Sher, Dennis Ross and Clayton Swisher used their experiences to write books. Gidi, meanwhile, founded a non-partisan policy group whose purpose was to fill what he understood as the 'systemic gap' plaguing the Israel Government – that those responsible for strategic decisions affecting the country's future have meager tools at their disposal with no agency able to provide them with real-time strategic decision support. He felt that Israel suffers from a structural mismatch:

On the one hand, the complexity and number of challenges - security, economic and social - it faces require it to think and act strategically, substantively and long term. On the other hand, its political system - with unstable coalitions and fragmentation between Parliament and Government - often generates short term, populist and sectarian conduct. The current system frequently leads to situations in which two out of three senior ministers in a given government are the Prime Minister's political rivals. Israel has had 31 different governments since its establishment and has held six elections in the last 12 years. The average term length of each government is two years; for a minister, it is only 12 months.

It is not surprising that this severely limits the State's ability to design and implement long-term policies.

Reut attempts to fill this mismatch by providing an address for decision-makers and helping them to think more 'strategically'. The world view of decision-makers is based on a combination of implicit and explicit assumptions. Yet when reality changes without these assumptions being updated, it creates a 'relevancy gap' (the gap between original assumptions and the divergent reality) which can lead to 'strategic surprises'. Historical examples of such surprises range from the 1973 Yom Kippur war (where despite possessing all the information warning of a surprise joint Egyptian Syrian attack, Israeli leaders were surprised) to Kodak's failure to identify the revolution of the digital camera.

Through Reut's structure and methodology based on tools from an organization called Praxis, we specialize in identifying these potential strategic surprises. Using experts and texts to carry out focused research on the topic and create new knowledge, we then try and help decision-makers close the gap.

In the longer term, Reut aims to train future strategists who will ultimately enter the government or public sector after their time at the institute. An oft-heard phrase is that we hope our staff's email address at their next job will end with 'dot gov' or 'dot org' (rather than a 'dot com').

Although I tell people I work in a 'political think tank' (my one line answer to the question of what I do), the truth is that Reut is very different from traditional research institutions.
Most think tanks operate on the assumption that the central problem is lack of information and so deal with research. Reut, meanwhile, believes that the central problem facing governments lies with the conceptual understanding of the problem. We thus deal with evaluating basic working assumptions.

While other organizations employ 'content' experts (such as an 'Iranian expert' who has spent 30 years studying the issue and is supported by a younger research assistant), Reut utilizes 'process' experts (analysts trained in the methodology of identifying relevancy gaps) while using content experts on an ad hoc basis.

A 'typical' day at Reut is a bit of an oxymoron – it doesn’t really exist.

It generally includes team meetings in which we discuss our current research and try to clarify what issues we should focus on. My policy team (which includes a team leader and three analysts) splits its time between writing about the Palestinian issue, Israel's National Security Strategy and how to turn the Arab sector into an economic engine of growth for the whole country.

The day might also include preparing presentations for decision-makers, meetings with outside experts or grass-roots organizations, attending conferences or updating our new organizational blog http://www.reut-blog.org/ with analysis on relevant topics to our work.

In addition to my role as an analyst, I am also responsible for our website http://www.reut-institute.org/ and part of a team creating Reut's 'Impact Theory' which incorporates insights from books on leadership such as Harvard lecturers Ron Heifetz and Dean Williams and integrating them into our work of helping decision-makers close their relevancy gaps.

Yet none of these things are actually what I enjoy most about Reut. Instead, it’s the training and the people.

The material we have read and discussed over the past two years on business, strategy, leadership, networks, globalization, Web 2.0 and political judgment have hugely enriched my understanding of the type of world we all live in (and in my opinion are just as valuable as a degree in Strategic Thinking).

I also feel blessed to share my professional life with other young and ideologically motivated people from around the world who have chosen to make Israel their home. The intellectual richness and openness in our discussions (during meetings and over lunch) have immeasurably benefited my professional and personal development.