Lend Your Voice in Song - Rosh Hashanah 5775

Take a deep breath. In. Hold. Now let it go. Out. Release.

Let’s face it. 5774 was a rough year, particularly for the Jews.

This summer, as Rabbi Stecker was in Jerusalem and in and out of bomb shelters, the Israel Defense Forces entered Gaza with the stated objective of stopping the barrage of rockets by Hamas. While Israelis ran for cover, most of us here in America were struggling with the following question: How do we respond? How do we show our support? (Some things we did here at TIGN: We held a fundraiser for our sister congregation in Ashkelon; we sent them a video greeting; we held an info session for our college students, many of whom will confront anti-Israel activism on campus.)

Those of us who use Facebook (if we’re not friends on Facebook, we should be. Friend me!) were subjected to a barrage of articles, analysis, blog posts, status updates, body counts, anti-Israel and sometimes even anti-Semitic postings by people we thought were friends. Or even worse, people who really are friends but are unaware of how they are propagating canards, stereotypes, and sometimes outright lies.  Social media became a battleground that was not as physically bloody as Gaza but very nearly as emotionally taxing.

But I think the worst of it was the anti-Semitic mobs that surfaced all over the world to protest Israel’s incursion in Gaza. The hooligans in France who held a Parisian synagogue under siege. The protesters in Boston and LA who attacked supporters of Israel. The mob in Germany heard chanting, “Gas the Jews.”

A sign displayed at an anti-Israel rally in Minneapolis in July.

As was mentioned in a very timely piece in the New York Times this week, just two weeks ago in Brussels, on the European Day of Jewish Culture, as Belgian Jews gathered to dedicate a Shoah memorial, youths threw stones and bottles at them; a few days later, a suspicious fire broke out at a synagogue in the same city. This follows the killing of four at the Jewish museum in Brussels earlier this summer, even before the Middle East erupted.

Take another deep breath.

I spoke this past summer about the current surge of anti-Semitism, and my message went something like this: It is shocking and disgusting and deeply troubling. But our obligation in the face of it is to look past the hatred, as our ancestors have always done, to hold onto our traditions and our heritage.

 

But that’s not so easy, right? Especially when that hatred is staring you in the face from your computer screen.

Some of you know that my wife, the daughter of two Hungarian Shoah survivors, still has relatives in Budapest, and that we have been to visit a few times. I was in Hungary last year, and at a Masorti (Conservative) minyan that meets in an apartment in Budapest, I met an attendee named Tamás whose parents had hidden from him that he was Jewish. Tamás grew up Christian, and it was not until he was in his 40s that he discovered he was Jewish, and committed himself to learning about Judaism and to living a Jewish life. He also told me that he is not alone; there are perhaps thousands like him. After World War II, many European Jews chose to hide their Jewish identity. That was an understandable response to the horror of the Shoah. For some, it guaranteed, if you will, the objective of, “Never again” - that is, it can’t happen to me and my family again if we just stop being Jewish.

A leading Hungarian politician from the Jobbik party, which is right-wing, nationalist, and openly anti-Semitic, Csanád Szegedi, discovered two years ago that he himself was a Jew. He has since sought out his Jewish heritage, and was even circumcised, just to prove that he is seriously repentant. This is a man who has done some serious teshuvah.

What led the parents of these Hungarians to conceal their Jewish roots was hatred and fear. But what has driven people like Tamás and Mr. Szegedi to learn about Judaism and commit themselves to a Jewish life? Is it the desire to stick together in the face of hatred? In Mr. Szegedi’s case, he did not have much of a choice - his political career was destroyed and none of his old nationalist buddies will speak to him any more.

But maybe these returnees to Judaism have a more positive motivation: an ancient yearning for the richness of Jewish life and tradition. A desire to be a part of their people, Am Yisrael. Perhaps their motivation is even more simple: curiosity about their heritage, leading to a desire to learn more. Like a paleontologist unearthing fossils, the more dust she removes, the more she reveals the form of the ancient creature. The more that is revealed, the more there is to learn.

In America, the Jews have lived for decades now in relative safety, largely removed from the anti-Jewish sentiments that permeate much of the world. The ADL, which keeps track of these things, has noted that while anti-Semitic activity in America has declined in recent years, it has been on the rise everywhere else. Our member Steve Markowitz, who is the Chairman of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, recently described this country as a “Jewish Disneyland” in comparison to the rest of the world.

After all, we have made it. Jews are accepted throughout American life and society. About a year ago, the Pew Research Center released a study on American Jews that found 58% of self-identified Jews who got married in the last decade or so are married to non-Jews. (The figure is much lower for those identified with Orthodoxy and the Conservative movement.) A couple of generations ago, few gentiles would marry us. Now we are desirable life partners; the daughter of a president married a Jew. We have arrived. (Not that this is a measuring-stick of which we are proud, but it is an indicator of our acceptance. It is also a challenge to Conservative rabbis and communities, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Some in this room might remember a time when anti-Semitism was much more visible in America. But while American Jews in the middle of the 20th century were more likely to be subtle about their Judaism, today I have no fear about walking down the street wearing a kippah. (Despite the recent incident in Manhattan where a visibly-Jewish couple was attacked by thugs displaying Palestinian flags.)

And yet, here is the irony: as Jews have come to be more accepted in wider American culture, as we have been welcomed into formerly exclusive clubs, and intermarried with non-Jewish Americans, our commitment to Judaism per se has waned. And all the polling data backs up that assessment. Free entry into the wider society has bred a lessening devotion to Jewish life.

Once again, another deep breath.

Rosh Hashanah is a time of transition. This is a liminal moment - that is, one that marks a separation. Like lighting the Shabbat candles on Friday night or the havdalah candle on Saturday night, separating the mundanity, the ordinariness of the week from the holiness of Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah is perched on a fault line between the year that was and the year that will be. On this day, we look back to 5774, and all the ways that we succeeded or failed to meet our goals, and we look forward to 5775, a blank slate on which we hope to write a better story.

But leaving our own deeds aside, whether we all treated each other well or did what God expects of us or otherwise met our own expectations for ourselves, this past year has left a foul taste in my mouth. Commercial airplanes shot down and disappeared. Russian rebels in Ukraine. A bloody civil war in Syria. Ebola in Africa. ISIS. The death of Joan Rivers and Robin Williams, who have left us a much-less-funny planet. And, of course, there is that troubling worldwide rise in anti-Semitism.

The good news: we have a new year in front of us, and we can hope that this year will be better. And that is exactly what Rosh Hashanah is all about.

And really, it’s not just about hope. It has long been observed that Judaism is not about belief; it is about action. What we do matters. We have the potential to change our lives and the lives of others. That is why we keep coming back here every year, to these Ten Days of Repentance, when we scour our souls to bring out the shine, and recommit ourselves to making this world a better place. I might even argue that this is the central message of Judaism; each of us has the ability to effect real change. Each of us is called to tiqqun olam, repairing this very broken world.

We will invoke this same principle when we sing, deeper into the Musaf service, the great Aleinu. Yes, it is the same Aleinu that we all know and love, the one that indicates that services are coming to an end and we can go eat, but this is its original location. It is somewhat more glorified on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when the custom is to actually prostrate ourselves, signifying our bodily commitment to being God’s hands on Earth.

But the call to action is buried in the second paragraph, which is almost never sung out loud; rather, we usually mumble through it at breakneck speed. If you want to see it, open your mahzor to p. 156, top of the page. This is the beginning of the Malkhuyot section of verses about God’s kingship/sovereignty, one of the three themed sections of the RH Musaf service:

עַל כֵּן נְקַוֶּה לְּךָ ה' אֱלהֵינוּ לִרְאות מְהֵרָה בְּתִפְאֶרֶת עֻזֶּךָ. לְהַעֲבִיר גִּלּוּלִים מִן הָאָרֶץ. וְהָאֱלִילִים כָּרות יִכָּרֵתוּן. לְתַקֵּן עולָם בְּמַלְכוּת שַׁדַּי.

And so, Adonai our God, we await You, that soon we may behold Your strength revealed in full glory, sweeping away the abominations of the earth, obliterating idols, establishing in the world the sovereignty of the Almighty.

It is our duty, says the ancient composer of this prayer, to act in building a world in which our actions echo the holiness to which God calls us. In ancient language, that meant sweeping away idolatry, but to us today it means to work hard, to put actual elbow grease into making this world a better place, free of hatred, free of oppression, free of suffering and war and all types of destruction.

To that end, I would like to propose a call to action, a response to the anti-Semites of this world: We will not let you drive us further away from Judaism. Rather, we will embrace wholeheartedly our tradition, our community. We will maintain our pride in who we are, in our values, in our heritage of learning and practice.  

While the aftermath of the Holocaust may have driven the hatred of Jews underground for a time, it has emerged once again. This is an unfortunate reality that we will have to accept. But that does not mean that we should retreat, or be any less Jewish. Hiding will only embolden those who hate us.

Rather, now is the time to take pride in our culture, our history, and our heritage. Now is the time to renew our covenant with God, to refresh our communal ties, to strengthen our identity. Just as the best response to anti-Israel activists is to arm ourselves with knowledge about the complexity of Israel’s position, the best response to anti-Semitism is to be not merely comfortable, but downright exultant in knowing who we are and what we stand for.  The best response to anti-Semitism is to arm ourselves with knowledge: where we came from, what our sages have shared with us across the ages, how and why we maintain our traditions and pursue our spirituality, what we have given to the world.

You may ask, “How might I do that, Rabbi?” I’ll tell you:  

1. Learn something new about Judaism. Most of us have not considered terribly deeply all of the richness of Jewish tradition since our benei Mitzvah. It’s not just about matzah and apples and honey and potato latkes. Now might be the time to get back into the game: Read a book, take a class, come learn with me. I will offer to lead a discussion for you and any group of friends you can assemble. Just call my office (or email, or find me on Facebook or Twitter).

2. Re-connect to Jewish life. You have a great opportunity in the Great Neck Shabbat Project, Oct. 23-25:

But of course we are here with plenty of Jewish offerings every day of the year.

You can start small - merely by typing a few keywords into a search engine. Here is a list of reliable online resources:

For taking a break on the seventh day: sabbathmanifesto.org

For learning about all aspects of Judaism: myjewishlearning.com

For issues about Jewish parenting: kveller.com

For current events and analysis: forward.com and tabletmag.com

For figuring out what time services are at Temple Israel: tign.org

But the final suggestion is as follows: Lend your voice in song.

I recall one of my first Hebrew School teachers, maybe when I was in first or second grade, Mrs. Bashevkin, explaining to us that when in hot water, Jews stick together. OK, so I was like, 7 years old, and this was a very confusing image. I figured out a few years later what she meant: We stand together, we support each other, we think and act as a community.

As a teenager, my family attended Shabbat morning services every weekend. Occasionally, when my mind would wander in synagogue (nothing has changed!), I used to think about all the Jews that were in other synagogues at the same time, all up and down the Eastern time zone. Were they all on the same page in the siddur? Could it be possible that we are all singing “Aleinu” at exactly the same time?

The image is a powerful one. One of the ways that we stand together as a people is that we literally stand in prayer together, all around the world. And we sing together.

And we need your voice. The voice of every single person in this room. Not necessarily to be in synagogue every Shabbat, or to take upon yourself all 613 mitzvot at once, but to contribute to the great Jewish chorus any way you can.

My friend Michael Goldwasser, a music producer, R&B songwriter and performer, pointed out to me recently that he was invited to join an organization called Creative Community for Peace, which features members of the performing arts community who are supporters of Israel. Among the boldface-names who have signed on to their ads are Paul MacCartney, Madonna, Elton John, Lady Gaga, and Justin Bieber; there are many more. Many of the celebrities who have lent their names to the campaign are not Jewish. Most are probably not too familiar with all the political complexity surrounding Israel, Gaza, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and so forth, or for that matter the long and complicated history of anti-Semitism. But all are willing to figuratively lend their voices in support of Israel.

And you can too - not just in support of Israel, but in support of Jews, Judaism, Jewish life, and Jewish identity. Find a way to lend your voice - by learning (the highest mitzvah of all of the 613!), by showing up and committing time to your community, by seeking to understand Jewish values and implement them in your own life, by traveling to Israel (if not outright making aliyah), by representing your people well in the public sphere.

The true response to anti-Semitism is not to retreat. The true response is rally together as a community and lend your voice. Our ancestors survived two millennia of persecution, of oppression, of dispersion, of moving from one place to another as they were alternately welcomed and then kicked out of places all over the world. Did they give up on being Jewish? A few did, here and there. But the vast majority of us did not, and that there are so many of us gathered in synagogues on this day around the world is a testament to our historic victory over anti-Semitism.

The greatest threat to Judaism is not hatred. It’s not Hamas or ISIS or al-Qaeda. The greatest threat to Judaism is apathy.

So take another deep breath, and lend your voice, so that we may work together in repairing this world. Your people need you now.

Shanah tovah. A healthy, satisfying, and peaceful 5775.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Rosh Hashanah 5775, September 25, 2014.)

Engaging with the Earthly Israel - Eqev 5773 (Summer Sermon Series #5)

Today we will be talking about Israel, the land, the fable, and the reality. This is especially appropriate today, since we read in Parashat Eqev about the Seven Species that are identified as being symbolic of the land (Deut. 8:7-9):

כִּי ה' אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ, מְבִיאֲךָ אֶל-אֶרֶץ טוֹבָה:  אֶרֶץ, נַחֲלֵי מָיִם--עֲיָנֹת וּתְהֹמֹת, יֹצְאִים בַּבִּקְעָה וּבָהָר.  אֶרֶץ חִטָּה וּשְׂעֹרָה, וְגֶפֶן וּתְאֵנָה וְרִמּוֹן; אֶרֶץ-זֵית שֶׁמֶן, וּדְבָשׁ.  אֶרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר לֹא בְמִסְכֵּנֻת תֹּאכַל-בָּהּ לֶחֶם--לֹא-תֶחְסַר כֹּל, בָּהּ; אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲבָנֶיהָ בַרְזֶל, וּמֵהֲרָרֶיהָ תַּחְצֹב נְחֹשֶׁת.  

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper.

This is such a gorgeous image; one which, I suppose, colors our understanding of the land of Israel today. I will come back to this.

One advantage to being on Facebook is that you get to join others on their vacations. So this summer, while Rabbi Stecker is on sabbatical and I have been mostly in the office, I have had the pleasure of viewing photos from vacations abroad. And the ones from Israel are always the most captivating. Many of you know that I fly to Israel at least twice a year, and I have been to all of the major tourist sites numerous times, and I have visited most of the minor sites as well. In fact, I am often surprised and pleased when I am able to find someplace new to visit.

But watching others go to places that I know well is also fascinating, because it is kind of like experiencing it again for the first time, through the eyes of the tourist. It is a reminder of the many things that I love about Israel, about the special place it occupies in my life as a Jewish American.

There is a cryptic Talmudic passage about two Jerusalems, the earthly one and the heavenly one (BT Ta’anit 5a):

ואמר ליה רב נחמן לרבי יצחק: מאי דכתיב (הושע י״א) בקרבך קדוש ולא אבוא בעיר, משום דבקרבך קדוש לא אבוא בעיר?

אמר ליה, הכי אמר רבי יוחנן: אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא לא אבוא בירושלים של מעלה עד שאבוא לירושלים של מטה. ומי איכא ירושלים למעלה? ־ אין, דכתיב (תהלים קכ״ב) ירושלים הבנויה כעיר שחברה לה יחדו.

R. Nahman said to R. Isaac: What is the meaning of the scriptural verse (Hosea 11:9), “The Holy One is in your midst, and I will not come in to the city”? [Surely it cannot be that] because the Holy One is in your midst I shall not come into the city!

He replied: Thus said R. Johanan: The Holy One, blessed be God, said, ‘I will not enter the heavenly Jerusalem until I can enter the earthly Jerusalem’. Is there then a heavenly Jerusalem?-Yes; for it is written (Psalm 122:3), “Jerusalem, you are built as the city that is your companion.”

One rabbinic take on this idea is that Yerushalayim shel ma’alah, the heavenly Jerusalem, mimics Yerushalayim shel matah, its earthly counterpart, but while the city on high is fully built and hence infused with a particular holiness that is worthy of the presence of God, the lower one is incomplete. We might read from this that it is upon us to finish the project of making Yerushalayim shel matah worthy of God’s presence.

But all the more so, this image suggests something for Israel at large. Too many of us in the Diaspora, when we visit Israel, or even when we consider Israel from the comfort of our living rooms, think that we are dealing with Yisrael shel ma’alah, the heavenly Israel, and lose sight of the fact that Medinat Yisrael, the modern State of Israel, is built in Yisrael shel matah. It is indeed special, and possesses a fundamentally different resonance to us than France or India or New Zealand. But it is decidedly earthly, where people have to make a living, garbage needs to be collected, and students need to do their homework.

As such, the State of Israel as we know her and love her fulfills not the ancient vision of the Holy Land, not the mythical place of messianic vision, but a whole new offshoot of modern Jewish expression. It is, after all, a land built primarily by secular Zionists, even though a large chunk of the money donated to build that land was contributed by religious Jews. And we at Temple Israel have been committed to that vision of Yisrael shel matah for more than six decades. Even so, it is sometimes very easy for us to forget that Israel is not just about politics, about conflict, about our image in the international sphere. As with every other mundane nation in the world, the Israeli experience is about the palette of interpersonal relationships that characterize human existence.

Two alumnae of Temple Israel's Hebrew High School, Zoe Oppenheimer and Jessye Waxman, each spent a semester studying in Israel this past spring. Zoe studied Hebrew in a program at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva. Not only was she in Hebrew classes all day, but was also required to speak Hebrew outside of class, even with her American friends. Jessye spent a semester at an international environmental program at Kibbutz Ketura, not far from Eilat, where she learned with people from all over the world: Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the US, Europe, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, etc.

Their experiences were quite different from one another. However, something that both Zoe and Jessye came home with was, in my mind, the primary reason that Diaspora Jews should try to spend more time in Israel than the typical ten-day-to-two-week vacation jaunt allows. They both spent time with a variety of Israelis, and were able to get an on-the-ground picture of what everyday life is like while Israelis work, study, have fun, commiserate, argue, and generally live. And that is not the picture of Israel that most of us have.

On the contrary, our view, the one most often seen from the comfort of an air-conditioned coach bus, is more about our ancient stories than it is about modern realities of the Jewish state. The tourist trip to Israel generally includes a good deal of time in ruins, particularly in Jerusalem, and a hefty dose of Jewish history. This is, of course, very important – it is, in some sense, our history that connects us to the land. Without the biblical, rabbinic, and linguistic connections to the land of Israel, the one identified today by the Seven Species, or the one yearned for by Isaiah in the haftarah, the Zionist case for building the Jewish state in that land becomes much weaker.

But the real Israel, the actual, modern state is not the Israel of the Torah, nor is it the ideal of the messianic redemption to which the ancient rabbis pointed. Israel is a very complicated place, plagued by deep political, economic, and social divides (and fortunately, a recently-discovered, sizeable natural gas reserve in her territorial waters).

But even though Medinat Yisrael is not a fulfillment of any kind of messianic ideal, the lion laying down with the lamb and Lo Yisa Goi, full-on Isaiah-type stuff, it is, as we refer to it in multiple places in our liturgy, “reishit tzemihat geulateinu,” the dawn of the flowering of our redemption.

And indeed, as the Jewish population of Israel is now the largest in the world, as Israel becomes ever more influential in producing teachers and professors and what you might call “Jewish content,” as Israel's economic power continues to grow, and furthermore as Diaspora Judaism continues to struggle with maintaining itself, it seems that we may indeed see a glimpse of the Jewish future in Israel.

Some of you may know about studies that have shown that younger American Jews are not nearly as attached to Israel as their parents and grandparents.  That might have something to do with what we learn (or do not learn) about Israel. I am often saddened by the fact that generally the only news we hear out of Israel is the bad news. (Even the optimistic news this week about Secretary of State Kerry’s minor success in bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the table for peace talks was muted.)

But the solution to this is not to lecture our teens about why they should appreciate Israel, and may not necessarily be to send them on free 10-day trips to Israel where they can have a full-on tourist experience in five-star hotels, a la Birthright. Rather, the real solution is to encourage our young people to go and live there for a while - to spend a semester in an Israeli university, to figure out how to pay the rent on your Jerusalem flat, or to manage renewing your visa at Misrad Hapenim, the Interior Ministry (which can, at times, resemble an auto-da-fé), or navigate the Tel Aviv bus system, or haggle over the the price of a bag of za’atar in the shuq. The real Israel is not Yisrael shel ma’alah, but is alive and vital and very, very human.

And it is our duty to present an honest picture, and to engage our young people with that picture, and not just through Facebook.

I had a buddy in college, a guy who lived in my freshman dorm at Cornell, who was an American of Thai parentage. He was preparing for medical school, but he knew that some time in his 20s, he was expected to spend a year living as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, a family tradition that would help instill within him a greater sense of connection to his ancestral home and his faith. We lost touch after school; as far as I know, he went, and he is now practicing emergency medicine in Florida.

But would it not be a wonderful idea for us to expect our own children to spend a year in Israel, engaging with Yisrael shel matah? I think this would be a much better use of our collective financial support for Israel than Birthright.

Today’s haftarah, the so-called Second Haftarah of Consolation, speaks of the hope of national restoration in the wake of destruction. Isaiah paints a bleak picture of his reality, in exile in Babylon, but hints that redemption might come if we return to our roots (51:1):

שמעו אלי רודפי צדק מבקשי ה' הביתו אל צור חוצבתם ואל מקבת בור נוקרתם

Listen to Me, you who pursue justice,

You who seek the Lord:

Look to the rock you were hewn from,

To the quarry you were dug from.

We too can take from Isaiah a piece of this hope, the hope that Yisrael shel matah will continue to strive to reach toward Yisrael shel ma’alah, that all we have to do is invest ourselves personally with the earthly Israel to help raise her heavenward: to engage personally with her people, to commit ourselves to supporting those institutions that are working for peace between all of the disparate groups living on that small strip of land, to help cultivate the figurative Seven Species so that all may reap that harvest.

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 7/27/2013.) 

This is the fifth installment of my first-ever Summer Sermon Series - a seven-part discussion of the most essential values in Temple Israel of Great Neck’s vision of Jewish life. The first four topics were as follows:

1. Telling our story

2. Being a welcoming congregation

3. Engaging with Torah

4. Egalitarianism 

Tent City TLV - The revolution will not be on Facebook

Much of what you might read on this blog about Israel is perhaps overly complacent - fawning over the concept and culture of the Jewish state, with only occasional light criticism of the current Israeli government's seeming reluctance to engage with the Palestinians or the two-state solution. Having lived here for more than a year, now nearly a decade ago, I have some sense of the complexity of Israeli society and politics, and long ago lost the uncritical, honeymoon-ish devotion that often afflicts tourists and new immigrants (briefly, until they have to spend a day at Misrad Ha-Penim / Ministry of the Interior office). Perhaps that has not been so obvious in this forum.

Today as I walked through Tel Aviv, I made it a point to stroll through the "tent city" demonstration on Rothschild Street. This is a protest that began just last week, beginning with a Facebook call to action, largely in opposition to high housing prices, but also an assault on what the protesters see as the government's devotion to special interests (corporate buddies, new immigrants, right-wing religious groups, even foreign visitors like me). What precipitated this protest is a real estate bill before the Kenesset that many believe to favor wealthy developers with strong government ties over average Israelis. There are now similar tent cities all over Israel.

Israeli politics is quite complex, so much so that I cannot possibly describe it adequately here. But this particular protest is notable for two reasons. First, it follows a recent nationwide protest, also initiated on Facebook, over the increase in the price of cottage cheese. Second, it has captured the attention of the nation. News outlets have heavily featured the protests, and a large rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night attracted tens of thousands of people, and Prime Minister Netanyahu canceled a trip to Poland to address the issue at home.

As I walked through the tent city, reading the signs of protest, the political slogans, the quotes from biblical and rabbinic sources about fair treatment for all, I was struck by the tremendous resentment that these "average Israelis" feel, and the strong sentiment of neglect felt by the central demographic pillar of Israeli society. Housing, education, health care, and more - their message is that these items are being passed over in favor of helping everybody else.

(Faux ad: "A find! Tent divided into four wonderful residential units, not renovated, 5 minutes from the beach. 2800 sheqel per month [equals about US$820])

I took a detour and headed off to the shuk, but the following slogan from one of the signs in the tent city echoed in my head:

המהפכה לא יפוסבק
Ha-mahapekhah lo tefusbak
The revolution will not be on Facebook

This is striking not only because of the clever hebraization of the name of a popular Internet site, nor the cultural reference to the 1970 song by Gil Scott-Heron (ז"ל), but because of the presence of mind of the anonymous wag who penned it. Real people in the streets, full of venom for their government - this is the way that revolutions happen. Not in digital form, or on paper, or even by telephone.

Leaving aside the imminent debacle that will erupt when the Palestinians ask the UN for statehood in September, I am not concerned about the stability of Israel or its government. Nonetheless, this is a movement with legs.


(The above photos are mine; you can see more pictures via this virtual tour.)