Of Limmud and Long Tails

Even working on Christmas day doesn’t make me miss being Jewish in England. And while its neither good manners nor fair to bite that hand that raised you, the 'shul Judaism' of the motherland - mainly bland and uninspiring (for both religious and secular) - is not a great advertisement for religion.

Yet for one week a year, between Christmas and New Year, Anglo Jewry provides what remains one of the most amazing occasions of diverse Judaism I have ever experienced; the Limmud Conference.

Over 2000 Jews from different continents and denominations meeting in Nottingham to enjoy Shiurim on Gemara, discuss philosophy, debate social issues, dance to Jewish rap, experience Torah yoga…14 sessions a day, each with over 20 options.

And while there's many I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, the overall diversity, dynamism, and feeling that one is engaging in a 'live religion' has no parallel.

A book I recently read called the Long Tail describes how the rise of the internet and ensuing option of infinite choice has shifted us from a mass to a niche culture.

If the search for popularity previously required looking for the lowest common denominator - 'dumming down' in order to appeal to the masses, creating a 'one size fits all' product - the new situation has shattered the mainstream into a 'zillion different cultural shards'.

And when more choice and more opportunities are offered, the most exciting, inspiring and intellectually attractive choices rise to the top.

Jewish life in some areas of Israel reminds me of the Long Tail. If in England, Judaism needed to be 'one size fits all' in order to appeal, the critical mass of Jews in Israel provide an opportunity to move into 'niche Judaism'. Take the issue of minyanim in the Katamon neighbourhood as an example; Whether its Bratslav, Carlebach, Sefardi or Ashkenazi, traditional, egalitarian, or kinda egalitarian - whether the mechitza looks like the entrance to a medieval castle, a gallery, transparent or invisible, whether it goes between front and back or down the middle, its all here - somewhere in the infinitesimal sea of opportunity and options of Judaism.

Outside those few square miles of Katamon, Baka and Rehavia however, religious tolerance and diversity are not a highlight of Israeli life. And even many secular Israelis believe that the only legitimate shul they don’t go to is an Orthodox one.

The return of sovereignty has given us many challenges, not all of which we are able to solve. But it would be a shame to miss this opportunity for utilising the critical mass of Jews to create a long Jewish tail, a Judaism of different shades and sizes, in which the cream rises to the top to the benefit of all of us.

And in this context, there's actually a lot we could learn from those who are spending this 'festive' week locked in thought and discussion in the good ol' English countryside.

Aliya: Two Years On

Two Fridays ago, on a sun-drenched November morning in Jerusalem, I had one of those untypical 'typical Israeli moments'.

On one side of Emek Refaim stood 40 crimson clad protesters of all ages whistling loudly and calling on drivers to hoot their horn in support of better conditions for teachers who have been striking for the last 2 months.

100 yards down the road opposite Café Hillel the noise of car horns persisted, but this time due to a traffic jam caused by a chefetz chashud, a suspect package.

In many ways, that scene is Israeli society in a nutshell. Two problems – one social, the other security; Both central to our future and ability to live prosperous and happy lives. Neither with simple answers.

And in the background, regular Israelis trying to maneuver between the noise and enjoy a relaxing day off in a café.

The first night of Chanukah marked two years since my arrival in Israel. And while I’m sure I’ll be told by those Israelis who disagree with my political views that I haven’t been here long enough to ‘really understand’, time has undoubtedly eroded the ‘chadash’ part of being an ‘oleh’.

In many ways, my Aliya has been a process from ideological fervor and excitement – appreciating the grocer's Shabbat Shalom wishes, Shai Agnon's Nobel Prize speech on the 5o Shekel bill and countless other small things Israelis take for granted - to simply living life, with all its disappointments and excitements, its ups and downs.

If new immigrants get off the boat feeling Israel is their oyster and that the country offers a wealth of possibilities, a 'veteran oleh's' experience is generally more sober, maybe even more jaded.

Two years on, life in Israel is normal, regular. Like a long-term relationship, it's often harder to maintain constant romance. One doesn’t necessarily start every morning excited. Faults become more apparent.

Yet every now and then, things happen to remind you why you are still in love, why you choose to stay.

And when all the thrills are taken away, the commitment remains as strong as ever.

Despite all the changes, most of my thoughts regarding this country remain the same. I still don’t enjoy being asked why the hell I moved here. I continue to be excited by the uniqueness of how religious festivals are marked as national holidays, or amazed by the opportunities, challenges and responsibilities that power and sovereignty provide us, the Jewish people, with.

And despite the issues whose solutions remain somewhere over the beautiful Mediterranean horizon – of territory and terror, of education and economics, of settlements and society – I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be.

Because whether we like it or not, here is where things of importance to the Jewish people are being played out. This is the front line in shaping all of our futures. And why wouldn’t I want to be a part of that?

And even for those who find ideology and idealism passé, there's always the attraction of relaxing with some toasted bagels and coffee in the November Jerusalem sunshine.

Hanukkah 5768 - Between Judaism, Hellenism and Peace

Hanukkah is always a wonderful time to be in Israel – the doughnuts in the bakeries, the lights in peoples' houses, the sense that this is a national holiday, shared by the majority of the country. (Where as Adam Sandler sings, you don’t need to feel like the only kid in town without a Christmas tree) The festival celebrates both the military victory of the Hasmoneans over the powerful Greeks as well as the ideological victory of the Jewish way of life over the alien culture of Hellenism. If on Purim we were saved from physical destruction, Hanukkah marks our victory over the evils of spiritual assimilation (something I was taught in primary school was much much worse, although I'm still not convinced).

Last weekend’s Jerusalem Shabbat table discussions were filled with debates over the Annapolis Summit and the political process. While I find these conversations often go round in circles (and it’s uncomfortable to disagree with people you happen to personally like) one comment really stuck in my head: That bearing in mind both keeping the territories and giving them up have risks, the best option is to be ‘Torah true’, i.e. to continue to hold onto the land of our forefathers.

I’m still unsure exactly what ‘Torah true’ means. Are human rights and sympathy for the ‘other’ alien, non Torah values? Is worrying about the moral and physical toll soldiers pay by controlling a belligerent civilian population un-Jewish? Is feeling Israel can’t survive without the support of the international community assimilationist? Is modern day Hellenism reflected in those who call for an Israeli withdrawal to the armistice lines, as Avigdor Lieberman recently quipped?

In his laws on Hanukkah, Rambam describes the importance attached to publicising the miracle of a military victory of the few against the many; "the commandment to light is an exceedingly precious one…even if one has no food to eat except what he receives from charity he should beg, or sell clothes to buy oil and lamps" Yet despite this, someone who only has enough money to either buy a Shabbat candle or a Hanukkah one should choose Shabbat because of what Maimonides terms ‘Shalom Bayit’ between husband and wife.

As the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes "The implication is simple. Even the smallest peace (between husband and wife) takes priority over the greatest victory in war."

The debate about peace with the Palestinians will go on for a few more Shabbat meals yet. And while Abbas is weak, the sides remain far apart on core issues, and no one particularly fancies evacuating 80,000 Jews from their homes, perhaps we should be more careful deciding what actions constitute Jewish values.

Here's to hoping that this Hanukkah takes us away from spiritual assimilation and closer to true Torah values, (whatever they may be) and to achieving Shalom – both with our neighbours and between ourselves.

Chag Sameach

Kaf Tet Be'November: 60 Years On

60 years after the UN voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states, it's not uncommon for questions to be raised over the relevancy of a Jewish State. In this context, I'd like to share a beautiful piece of literature from Amos Oz that reminds us of the inherent problems statelessness brings and why, as Israeli commentator Amnon Rubenstein writes, "I prefer the dangers that face us in Israel to the humiliation of being a Jewish minority even in the enlightened West."

And very late, at a time when this child had never been allowed not to be fast asleep in bed, maybe at three or four o clock, I crawled under my blanket fully dressed. And after a while Father’s hand lifted my blanket in the dark, not to be angry with me because I’d got into bed with my clothes on, but to get in and to lie down next to me, and he was in his clothes too, that were drenched in sweat from the crush of the crowds, just like mine (and we had an iron rule; you must never, for any reason whatsoever, get between the sheets in your outdoor clothes). My father lay besides me for a few minutes and said nothing, although normally he detested silence and hurried to banish it. But this time he did not touch the silence that was there between us but shared in it, with his hand just lightly stroking my head. As though in this darkness my father had turned into my mother.

Then he 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’

I reached out sleepily to touch his face, just below his high forehead, and all of a sudden instead of his glasses my fingers met tears. Never in my life, before or after that night, not even when my mother died, did I see my father cry. And in fact I didn’t see him cry that night either. Only my left hand saw. (A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz p346)

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.