Vayiqra 5771 - Israel: the Mundane Made Miraculous

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel, 3/12/2011.)

When I was 17, during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent two months in Israel on the Alexander Muss High School in Israel (HSI) program. To this day, HSI takes high school students all over Israel while they learn Jewish history from Genesis to the present.

That summer, I was transformed - I knew immediately upon returning that I was no longer an ordinary American Jewish teenager from a small town in rural Massachusetts. I had been “turned on” to Israel and all that she offers.

I had hiked through wadis (dry river beds) in the desert, climbed Masada, learned to identify a Herodian stone at 10 paces, marveled at the ancient sites of Jerusalem and crawled the beaches of Tel Aviv, walked the Bahai gardens of Haifa and got lost in the alleyways of Tzfat.

(In retrospect, they gave us a stunning amount of freedom - we were given almost every weekend free to travel about the country in pairs or in groups. Somehow we always came back to our campus in Hod Hasharon, perhaps despite our youth and naivete and raging hormones. In retrospect, I wonder if my parents knew that we had such freedom? I don’t think I spoke with them by phone for the whole 8 weeks that I was in Israel, something which seems almost impossible today.)

But the coursework was demanding - names, dates, places, concepts, peoples, movements, and so forth. It was a college-level course for which credit was offered, and as such there were classes and exams and study sessions and grades. And it was wonderful. I’ll never forget our first tiyyul, to the archaeological excavations at the undeveloped Solomonic city, Tel Gezer, where for thousands of years the upright stone monoliths have stood guard over their idolatrous High Place.

And I’ll never forget my first trip to the Kotel, where the tears welled up instantly, from nowhere, as I reached out to touch the warm, ancient stone.

And I’ll never forget the ½ hour bus ride to downtown Tel Aviv, where pavement-based urban pleasures could be found in abundance for American kids with a few spare shekels.

I learned to judge the quality of falafel, the aroma of spices that complemented the mashed chick peas and the freshness of the salad offerings. I learned to haggle in the shuk. I learned to identify the best Israeli chocolate. I even learned a smattering of spoken Hebrew, despite being around Americans all the time.

And I fell in love with those ancient rocks, the holy city of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the place where our ancestors came to offer up their finest of their flocks in service to God.

And I swooned to the spiritual hum of the cemetery in Tzfat where the 16th-century Spanish kabbalists are buried.

And I looked out from the top of what was then the tallest building in the Middle East, the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv, to see the extent of the greatest Jewish city on Earth.

There are two things that my 8-week academic experience did NOT do for me, two things which our Youth House trip did in fact accomplish in its 10 short days. I’ll come back to that.

There is an astronomical difference between two months in Israel and 10 days. Our group of 39 teens was challenged to pack in a whole lot more in 10 days than is really possible. We covered an impressive range of the things that I’d seen on my first visit in 1987. We woke up early every morning and had long days - so long that the staff was exhausted.

But even though these kids had given up the luxury of sleeping late for a week of winter vacation back home, or in some cases sleeping late on Caribbean vacations with the family, there were rarely complaints about being awoken at 6 AM (or occasionally 5) or being pushed with programming until 10 PM. On the contrary, they learned quickly that every hour was precious, that every time they got onto the bus there was another marvel to behold.

There were for me two particularly holy moments during the course of this trip. One occurred on the southern steps of the Beit HaMiqdash, the Temple Mount complex, in the Ophel Archaeological Park that contains some of the most impressive excavations. On that morning, we got out of our hotel early, saw other parts of the park, and davened late; it was already 9 AM when we were wrapping our tefillin on the steps, facing the southern wall and the now-blocked entrance where our ancestors actually ascended to enter the Temple complex while it was still functioning, 2000 years ago. (The steps have been largely reconstructed, but in places you can actually see and walk on the originals.)

We paused right before we sang Psalm 150, the last Psalm of Pesuqei Dezimra (the introductory morning psalms), the last one in the book of Tehillim, the one that identifies all the instruments that were used in service to God when the Temple was functioning. I asked everybody to picture themselves in the shoes of our ancestors, climbing these steps for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the very same sacrifices described in Parashat Vayiqra that we read about today, while the Levitical choir chanted and played the very instruments identified in the Psalm.

הַלְלוּהוּ, בְּתֵקַע שׁוֹפָר; הַלְלוּהוּ, בְּנֵבֶל וְכִנּוֹר.
Halleluhu beteqa shofar, halleluhu benevel vekhinor
Praise God with the blast of the shofar; praise God with the harp and the lute. (Psalm 150:3)

And perhaps for a moment we felt it, because there is nowhere else on earth that you can feel the presence of our history, the lingering buzz of God’s presence, even though the Temple itself has been gone for two millennia, and the Shekhinah, the lowest sefirah of God’s mystical emanations, has long since departed the precincts of the Temple Mount.

That was the first holy moment.

The other one came six long days later and in a place that was effectively two thousand years away. On our second Shabbat afternoon, in the coastal city of Ashkelon, where we were graciously hosted by Israeli families who identify with the Masorti movement (that’s what the rest of the world calls Conservative Judaism), and after lunch we took a short walk to the beach.

We relaxed, we dipped into the Mediterranean waves, we played games, and we watched as our guide Amos collected fragments of ancient Ashkelon that were casually sitting on the beach, and he told us what they were and from which period: a Byzantine plate, a Roman sewer pipe, miscellaneous jug handles, and so forth. It was the moment that brought together ancient and modern, in the context of an actual contemporary community of Jews like us that live in a real Israeli city that is somewhat off the beaten path. It was the nexus of the Israelite past and the Israeli present; the culmination of a week and a half of history in its modern guise. (As an added bonus, some of us even got a tan.)

On the beach, my mind flickered back over the length of the trip, and I recalled the moment on the southern steps of the Beit HaMiqdash. And I remembered the words of the poem called Tourists, by Yehuda Amichai, which we had read together as we wrapped up our tefillin. It’s short, and I’ll recite the whole thing for you right now:

Visits of condolence are all we get from them.
They squat at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Western Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker.
"You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head."
"But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

That is what Israel does like no other place - it brings together the ancient and modern, and makes the mundane miraculous.

There are two things that we did in Israel two weeks ago that I did not do when I was there 24 years ago:

We prayed as a group, honestly and transformatively. And we lived with actual Israelis, if only for a Shabbat. Those are the things that made this trip a success.

Join us after qiddush and hear from the students themselves what they experienced, because this was their trip, not mine.

Shabbat shalom.

Tuesday Morning Kavvanah, 3/1/2011 - The Best Moment in Israel

Before shaharit (the morning service) today, Marty asked me if I could identify the absolute highlight of the trip. After thinking about this throughout the tefillot, I decided that the high point for me was probably different from that of the teenage participants. They might pick the walk through Hezekiah's Tunnel or the climbing of Masada to see the sunrise over the mountains of Moab or the night in the Bedouin tent or the Dead Sea or maybe praying at the Kotel for the first time.

But I would pick the Shabbat we spent in Ashkelon at a Masorti/Conservative congregation, hosted by Israeli families with teenage peers of our participants. And all the more so because this was at the end of our trip, after we had experienced the history of Israel through ancient, medieval and modern lenses. The final stage, as it were, was to spend time with actual Israelis, in their homes, as a part of their contemporary existence. Because Israel is not just history, it is also modern, thriving, complicated society, an essential part of Jewish civilization, and (following Dr. Kenneth Stein) the last major development of Judaism. Most tourist experience the sites listed above; few spend time off the beaten path in Israeli living rooms. This is invaluable.

Final Israel Trip Update

By now, everybody is home and exhausted, but no doubt still reeling from our packed 10-day jaunt.

The dramatic finish to our trip began with Friday's visit to the museum of illegal immigration to Israel during the British mandate period in Atlit, just south of Haifa. After driving down the coast to Ashkelon, we had a fabulous Israeli-style lunch at a wonderful grill restaurant called HaGehalim ("the coals"). We met our host families and split up for a few hours to prepare for Shabbat.

As the sun set, we welcomed the Shabbat Queen for the second time in Israel with the Masorti (the international name for what North Americans call Conservative) congregation in Ashkelon, Kehillat Netzach Yisrael. This is the synagogue where (our Religious Activities Director) Itamar's father had been the rabbi for many years. They were very happy to host us, and we all had a huge Shabbat dinner together at the synagogue, after which we sang boisterous Shabbat songs with the help of the local chapter of the Noam youth group (the Israeli equivalent of USY). We went home to our host families simply buzzing with the excitement of Shabbat evening, and slept well.

Shabbat morning we davened again with the Netzach Yisrael community, and then enjoyed a program facilitated by Itamar's older brother Alon, a current resident of Ashkelon, about our different impressions of Israel. After lunch we took a walk to the beach, and enjoyed the sun and the sand, and a few of us even got a little wet; Amos found for us a selection of Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader stone fragments on the beach. When we returned, the Noam group ran another program for us, and we concluded Shabbat with havdalah under the stars, holding hands and singing together as we reflected on the long roster of experiences of the last 10 days.

In my mind, the Shabbat in Ashkelon brought all of our experiences together. After following the steps of our ancestors in Jerusalem, tracing a path through Jewish history in the medieval period and the roots of the modern State of Israel, visiting the homes of and socializing with actual Israeli peers brought together the past and the present in a way that only Israel can do. As Moji remarked to me at one point, we had to start in Jerusalem and end up in Ashkelon, because that is the only way it makes sense. As the modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai captured so well in his poem, Tourists (Tayyarim), which we read on the steps leading up to the southern entrance to the Second Temple, Israel is not just a pile of ancient rocks; the real story is just as much the people who live there today.

While we waited for our pizza delivery Saturday night, each and every one of us had the opportunity to talk about our experiences, and the results were wonderful. It was quite apparent to the staff, and perhaps to the participants as well, how much all of our teens had grown in a mere 10 days by addressing issues of Jewish history and identity, by experiencing the Jewish state and exploring their relationship to it, and by immersing ourselves in the prayerful moments of Jewish life in the land of our ancient forebears and modern cousins. And, of course there was the social component - we all made new friends, learned to share and participate in the group, and gained new perspectives on respect. And then there was the ice cream...

Also, I hope to organize a couple of things in the upcoming weeks: (1) another group aliyah on Shabbat morning at Temple Israel, when we can all recite the "gomel" prayer for returning safely from a long journey; (2) an opportunity for trip participants to share their experiences with other Youth House kids; and (3) a trip reunion party. Keep an eye out for these.

One final note: many of the teens donated money that had been given to them as tzedakah to individuals, but we also took up a group collection on the bus. We collected a total of $326.70 (after all the shekels had been converted back to dollars), which we voted as a group to donate to Alyn Pediatric Rehabilitation hospital (www.alyn.org) in Jerusalem. As a special request, a fraction of the money will also be given to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (www.fidf.org). Kol HaKavod!

Thanks again to the Khorshid Dina Harounian Israel Education Fund and our other donors who made this trip unforgettable.

Let me once again thank you for the opportunity to give your teens an Israel experience that they will never forget.