(Originally delivered at Temple Israel, 12/25/2010.)
Two weeks ago today, Shabbat morning, the day after I returned from Israel, I was awake at 4 AM. Zev woke up and cried briefly, but I managed to get him to go back to sleep. But I was wide awake. So I picked up the Jewish Week, and started to read it from cover to cover. Not far into the newspaper, I found myself crying.
Now, I have found that jetlag does tend to destabilize me somewhat, emotionally. But I found myself weeping over the stunning list of all the nations that provided support to Israel during the fire that took place a few weeks back.
Most notably, Bulgaria sent 92 firefighters and a plane. Greece, Spain, the US, and Russia all sent significant personnel and material. OK, not too surprising there. But the names on the list that really brought up the tears were Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the Palestinian Authority.
I cried not because of the tragedy itself; since I had actually been in Israel when it happened, and as such had long since recovered from the shock over the extent of the damage and the loss of life. No, I was crying because it was just so tragically beautiful that all of these nations, including some who are not necessarily on good terms with Israel right now, overlooked their differences, put the lives of their own sons and equipment in danger, and placed a higher priority on saving lives and trees and property than on political squabbling. I cried because, when it came down to it, these people, these nations, came to aid the modern Jewish nation.
Let’s take a step back for a moment.
We began reading the book of Shemot / Exodus this week, having just finished the book of Bereshit / Genesis.
So here’s a question: Considering the narratives of each book, what is it that differentiates Bereshit from Shemot?
Bereshit is about Creation, of course. But it is also about the establishment of the Israelite line, from Abraham to Joseph, and the individual relationship that each of these characters, the Avot / Patriarchs, the Imahot / Matriarchs, and Jacob’s children have with God.
Meanwhile, Shemot begins with a recap of this line, listing the family members that came down to live in Egypt with Joseph - his brothers and their families. But almost immediately, this group of 70 people, each of whom has a name and a distinct identity, becomes an ‘am, a nation. (Here is one small irony of this book - Shemot means "names," referring to those identified in the opening verses; from that point forward, not a single Israelite is identified by name until Moshe comes along.)
And who, officially declares the Israelites a nation? It is none other than the Par’oh / Pharaoh, the new king “who did not know Joseph,” as we read in the first aliyah this morning. It is, in fact, the only occurrence in the entire Tanakh of the phrase, “‘am benei yisrael,” literally, the nation of the children of Israel. Par’oh gives us this name.
And it is a nation that the Egyptians must reckon with. The rest of that story we know well because we retell it every Pesah, with all of its nationalist implications for ancient Israelites and modern Jews.
Our parashah today stands at this cusp, at the nexus of the personal and the national. It is the threshold of nationhood. And the rest of the Torah speaks of that nation’s relationship with God.
Now let’s return to the present, or at least to the late 19th century. (It is remarkable that the difference between 1860 and the present is tiny on the scale on which we are measuring.)
Modern Israel fuses the personal and the national. That was, in fact, the primary goal of Zionism, the political movements that emerged in Central and Eastern Europe in the latter half of the 1800s.
Partly in response to the Russian state-sponsored pogroms of 1881-84, and partly due to the growing Jewish intelligentsia in Eastern Europe, the first Zionist groups appeared in the 1880s in Russia. These groups were established to arouse a new, modern national consciousness among the oppressed Jews of Russia, shuddering from fear and cold in their shtetlakh (little Jewish towns). Some of those so aroused actually made it to Ottoman Palestine and established towns and agricultural collectives. Among them is the town where my son lives, Nes Tziyyona, established in 1887.
The goal of this new consciousness was to give the disenfranchised, unenlightened, ghetto-confined Jew hope for the future, an optimism that some day they might leave the troubled lands in which they dwelt and become, in the words of Hatiqvah, “‘Am hofshi be-artzeinu.” A free people in our own land. Naftali Herz Imber penned those words in 1878, in response to the establishment of the new Jewish settlement of Petah Tiqvah (literally, “the opening of hope”), now a major suburb of Tel Aviv.
The Jews of Russia began their transition from individuals to nationhood, not unlike the transition seen in Parashat Shemot.
Over the next few decades, other groups began to advocate for their own variations on the Zionist dream, culminating with the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.
113 years later, today’s Israel is a complex, multi-faceted, staunchly democratic society that still reflects the Zionist attempt to fuse the personal and the national.
For example, when I was there, the newspapers reported a kick-off party celebrating the establishment, in Jerusalem, of a new, secular yeshiva. The goal of this yeshiva is to encourage non-religious Israeli young people to wrestle with their Jewish identity by studying the great works of secular Jewish and Zionist thinkers as well as the non-halakhic portions of rabbinic literature. One of the founders, a young man named Ariel Levinson, identified this as “an experiment in Judaism.”
Another example: during my two-week visit, the winter rains were long overdue. (These are the same rains that we mentioned in this morning’s Shaharit Amidah, and will do so again in a few minutes, with the line “mashiv haruah umorid hagashem.”) This lack of rain is partly to blame for the great fire, but also has caused the water level of the Kinneret to descend past the “red line,” the point at which the salt content of the water is too high, to the “black line,” below which water can no longer be pumped from it for fear of damaging the water infrastructure.
To help ameliorate the situation (or at least to raise awareness), the Chief Rabbis of Israel wrote a new prayer for rain, and while I was there held special ceremonies at the Kotel to pray for the advent of rain.
What do these example point to? That Zionism and medinat yisrael, the modern State of Israel, as Dr. Kenneth Stein of Emory University put it, are the newest plank in Judaism. Zionism fundamentally changed the nature of the Jewish religion, because we now relate to God and other nations once again as a people, and not merely as individuals davening in a minyan, scattered about the world. That the modern Jewish nation-state is the completion not only of “hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim,” the hope that comes from 2000 years of yearning, but also, in effect, the transition to modern nationhood that began with the Israelites’ descent into Egypt detailed in today’s parashah.
As further evidence, I’ll point out a new tool I discovered this past week. It’s an application in Google Books called the Ngram Viewer, and it instantly searches the 5.6 million books that Google Books has scanned to date for any search terms that you want. It also graphs the data, so that you can compare the number of occurrences of one term against another.
So a couple of days ago I tried this with the terms “Zionism” and “Jewish nation.” “Zionism,” of course, did not occur in English-language books before the 1880s, because the concept had not reached fruition. The term, “Jewish nation,” prior to late 19th c., always appeared in a Biblical context. There was no contemporary concept of the Jewish nation outside of our ancient texts, both for the Jews and the non-Jews. The Zionist movement changed that.
Every time I come back from Israel, I am reminded that, although I love Great Neck and I love my work here at TI, and I am as American as the next guy, on some level Israel is my home. It’s the home of all of us. In some ways, I am aware of a fundamental yearning, the aforementioned “hatiqvah bat shenot alpayim” - “the hope of 2000 years,” that tells me to pick up and go. And maybe someday I will. For good. (Judy and I often fantasize about the newly-gentrified and very cool Neve Tsedeq neighborhood, in the oldest part of Tel Aviv.)
And so, as I wept over the Jewish Week two weeks back, I reflected (in my jetlagged haze) on the power of nationhood, on the transformation of a largely powerless, dispersed people into a unified political force. (Well, somewhat unified, anyway.) We may not be on good terms with everybody, but we are literally and figuratively on the map. That should never be taken lightly, nor should it ever be taken for granted.
Showing posts with label ken stein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ken stein. Show all posts
Friday, December 24, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Vayishlah 5771 - Judaism 2.0
My daughter Hannah loves to read books. Of course, she’s three and cannot actually read by herself, but she loves having books read to her, and will sit by herself for long stretches with a book in her lap, thumbing through the pages as though she were actually reading.
Within perhaps two years, God willing, she will learn to read. And then she will have no more need for books.
We are in the midst of what can only be described as a paradigm shift; we are being molded by technology more so than ever before, and this is taking place quite rapidly. The question that I would like to put before you today is this: What will we be able to hold onto in the future that will maintain our roots as the People of the Book? What will continue our distinctiveness as a literate tradition?
I would like to paraphrase for you the opening passage of today’s parashah, based on the way I think it might be retold today, if it were taking place in 2010:
Vayishlah Yaaqov - Jacob sent a text message to his brother Esau on his Blackberry. He said, “sending gifts. what do u think?” He hit the “send” key.
A text message came back to him. “am coming 2 meet u with 400 men.”
Jacob was so upset that he nearly dropped his phone. But then, realizing that without it he was helpless, he gathered his senses and googled “how to escape from your angry murderous brother and 400 soldiers.” Wikipedia’s entry on biblical military tactics suggested that he split up into two groups, so that at least half of his family and cattle would get away. Then he searched for an appropriate prayer, and found something on ritualwell.org:
May it be Your will, God of our Fathers and our Mothers, God of Abraham, Sarah, Rebecca, and Isaac, God of me and my wives Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, that we all make it through this without ...
Then his phone rang, he answered it, and promptly forgot the whole thing.
* * *
Here are a few pieces of information that I need to share with you:
1. I was speaking to a handful of 7th graders at the Youth House a couple of weeks ago, and asked about their favorite books. One of them replied to me, “Who reads books any more?”
2. In other news, a shocked and disappointed mother told me last week that her sixth grader cannot spell the word “soup” (or even come close).
3. Also last week, another mother told me that her daughter does, in fact, still have textbooks, even though all of her course materials are online. Lugging all of them home in a big bag, her 5th grader told her that the heavy books are only for when the power is out.
4. I teach many classes in and around this building to young people. One of the biggest challenges that I face when I am teaching tefillah, Jewish prayer, is simply getting children to open the siddur (prayerbook) and try to follow along with me.
Ladies and gentlemen, the era of print is over. We are in a transitional time, the cusp of a new world, a world in which our relationship to the word is entirely different. Not that this brave, new world does not read, merely that all of the reading that we will do in the near future will be on LCD screens. It is already largely that way for those under the age of 18.
Is this, as every Jewish newspaper editor in history has asked over and over, good for the Jews? We in the Jewish world risk being stuck behind, forever clinging to our beloved print with all the affection and foolhardiness that we demonstrate for our prized material possessions. I love my books; in every Bar/Bat Mitzvah workshop that I teach, I present a historical overview of the Jewish bookshelf, complete with bound examples of the wealth of Jewish literary tradition. I pass around the room volumes of the Mishnah, Talmud, Miqra-ot Gedolot (Torah with standard rabbinic commentaries), Maimonides, the Shulhan Arukh (the standard 16th-century codification of Jewish law), and so forth, relics of centuries of Jewish printing and millennia of commentary.
Our tradition of stories and ideas is print-based, and prior to that, it was manuscript-based. Starting with the Torah. To this day, we make our sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls) the way that our pre-print ancestors did, writing them by hand with all-natural materials.
Muslims call us ‘ahl al-kittab, the People of the Book, a phrase coined by Mohammed in the Qur’an, and we have proudly adopted this moniker, in Hebrew Am Ha-Sefer. What will we be when books are no more?
What can we hold onto?
What will root us in our history?
What can ensure that our story is not lost in the digital sea, archived like so many old email messages by a world that has moved to the eternal present of the question “What are you doing right now?”
I attended a lecture this week by Dr. Ken Stein, professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History and Israeli Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. He is presenting a three-lecture seminar for rabbis entitled “Wrestling with Israel,” in which we are learning strategies to respond to the nascent movement to delegitimize the Jewish state. I am going to generalize his strategy beyond this issue in particular.
In the course of his talk, Dr. Stein pointed to a couple of important trends:
1. Students arriving at university today have trouble grasping the big picture of history. They can find very detailed, very deep information using all of the electronic tools available to them. But they have difficulty synthesizing larger stories.
2. History today is taught in terms of narratives. When I was in high school in the 1980s, for the first time American history was being taught as a general story with several sub-stories - the story of women in America, or African Americans. Or Jews. This narrative principle has overtaken, in some ways, the overarching picture. And it is this narrative method that has enabled the adversaries of Israel to fashion multiple narratives. And they are, of course, contradictory.
3. The major difficulty with the competing narrative problem is that most of us are not equipped with the ability to apply the relevant source material against the non-academic, ahistorical spin that the deniers of Israel use to ply their trade.
We have in fact aided and abetted this by maintaining the canard that the establishment of the State of Israel was a direct consequence of the Holocaust. The wheels of Zionism were set in motion far before 1945. It is short-term thinking such as this that has enabled some academics to claim, as one did recently in an Intro to Government and International Studies course at University of South Carolina, that it is the United States’ support for Israel that caused the terrorist attack on 9/11.
4. We have failed to find the right way to teach our story adequately, regarding Israel or anything else. And we cannot rely on our nifty gadgets to do so by themselves.
Dr. Stein charged us with finding a new way.
As he was speaking about Israel in particular, I found myself reflecting upon my own journey through Judaism, my own learning process, and my attempts to share what I have learned with others, and it occurred to me that the new informational paradigm requires finding a new way to connect Torah to tefillin to peoplehood.
Or, put another way, Jewish learning to Jewish practice to the overarching Jewish story. To understand the details of Jewish life within the big picture.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we want Israel to exist in the future, if we want Judaism to exist in the future (and particularly our non-coercive, decisively modern and yet historically-based brand of Conservative / Masorti Judaism), we must make sure that our narrative is first learned and understood by all of us, and that we make sure that the rest of the world hears it as well.
I think that the greatest gift that Temple Israel, or for that matter all of North American Jewry could give to the future would be a multi-million dollar project. Let’s call it the Jewish Story Project. This money could be invested in developing a new technology that would capture the attention of all young Jews, through their mobile devices, laptops, iPads, whatever, and teach them the fundamentals not just of the story of the modern Jewish political expression called Zionism, but also the stories of the Torah and Talmud. I think we need to be thinking BIG. We need to think on the top shelf, and not just in terms of what is “good enough.” It has to have all the appeal of Facebook or Twitter or Angry Birds (which I have never played), and all the depth and clarity of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.
We have to co-opt the information revolution before it turns around and bites us back. We have to fight back: pixel for pixel, byte for byte. We need to make Judaism a part of that eternal present, to rephrase the question for our people from “Is it good for the Jews?” to “What are you doing Jewishly right now?”
And while there are many Jewish electronic resources available for our consumption (the Torah, the Talmud, commentaries, halakha, philosophy, etc.), nobody can yet lay claim to revolutionizing the relating of the Jewish story through electronic means. And that is precisely what we need: a Jewish digital revolution.
We need to migrate to Judaism 2.0. At stake is nothing less than our future as the People of the Book.
Shabbat shalom!
~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Although I wrote this to deliver at Temple Israel on November 20, 2010, I contracted a stomach flu the night before and therefore was not able to do so.)
Within perhaps two years, God willing, she will learn to read. And then she will have no more need for books.
We are in the midst of what can only be described as a paradigm shift; we are being molded by technology more so than ever before, and this is taking place quite rapidly. The question that I would like to put before you today is this: What will we be able to hold onto in the future that will maintain our roots as the People of the Book? What will continue our distinctiveness as a literate tradition?
I would like to paraphrase for you the opening passage of today’s parashah, based on the way I think it might be retold today, if it were taking place in 2010:
Vayishlah Yaaqov - Jacob sent a text message to his brother Esau on his Blackberry. He said, “sending gifts. what do u think?” He hit the “send” key.
A text message came back to him. “am coming 2 meet u with 400 men.”
Jacob was so upset that he nearly dropped his phone. But then, realizing that without it he was helpless, he gathered his senses and googled “how to escape from your angry murderous brother and 400 soldiers.” Wikipedia’s entry on biblical military tactics suggested that he split up into two groups, so that at least half of his family and cattle would get away. Then he searched for an appropriate prayer, and found something on ritualwell.org:
May it be Your will, God of our Fathers and our Mothers, God of Abraham, Sarah, Rebecca, and Isaac, God of me and my wives Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, that we all make it through this without ...
Then his phone rang, he answered it, and promptly forgot the whole thing.
* * *
Here are a few pieces of information that I need to share with you:
1. I was speaking to a handful of 7th graders at the Youth House a couple of weeks ago, and asked about their favorite books. One of them replied to me, “Who reads books any more?”
2. In other news, a shocked and disappointed mother told me last week that her sixth grader cannot spell the word “soup” (or even come close).
3. Also last week, another mother told me that her daughter does, in fact, still have textbooks, even though all of her course materials are online. Lugging all of them home in a big bag, her 5th grader told her that the heavy books are only for when the power is out.
4. I teach many classes in and around this building to young people. One of the biggest challenges that I face when I am teaching tefillah, Jewish prayer, is simply getting children to open the siddur (prayerbook) and try to follow along with me.
Ladies and gentlemen, the era of print is over. We are in a transitional time, the cusp of a new world, a world in which our relationship to the word is entirely different. Not that this brave, new world does not read, merely that all of the reading that we will do in the near future will be on LCD screens. It is already largely that way for those under the age of 18.
Is this, as every Jewish newspaper editor in history has asked over and over, good for the Jews? We in the Jewish world risk being stuck behind, forever clinging to our beloved print with all the affection and foolhardiness that we demonstrate for our prized material possessions. I love my books; in every Bar/Bat Mitzvah workshop that I teach, I present a historical overview of the Jewish bookshelf, complete with bound examples of the wealth of Jewish literary tradition. I pass around the room volumes of the Mishnah, Talmud, Miqra-ot Gedolot (Torah with standard rabbinic commentaries), Maimonides, the Shulhan Arukh (the standard 16th-century codification of Jewish law), and so forth, relics of centuries of Jewish printing and millennia of commentary.
Our tradition of stories and ideas is print-based, and prior to that, it was manuscript-based. Starting with the Torah. To this day, we make our sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls) the way that our pre-print ancestors did, writing them by hand with all-natural materials.
Muslims call us ‘ahl al-kittab, the People of the Book, a phrase coined by Mohammed in the Qur’an, and we have proudly adopted this moniker, in Hebrew Am Ha-Sefer. What will we be when books are no more?
What can we hold onto?
What will root us in our history?
What can ensure that our story is not lost in the digital sea, archived like so many old email messages by a world that has moved to the eternal present of the question “What are you doing right now?”
I attended a lecture this week by Dr. Ken Stein, professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History and Israeli Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. He is presenting a three-lecture seminar for rabbis entitled “Wrestling with Israel,” in which we are learning strategies to respond to the nascent movement to delegitimize the Jewish state. I am going to generalize his strategy beyond this issue in particular.
In the course of his talk, Dr. Stein pointed to a couple of important trends:
1. Students arriving at university today have trouble grasping the big picture of history. They can find very detailed, very deep information using all of the electronic tools available to them. But they have difficulty synthesizing larger stories.
2. History today is taught in terms of narratives. When I was in high school in the 1980s, for the first time American history was being taught as a general story with several sub-stories - the story of women in America, or African Americans. Or Jews. This narrative principle has overtaken, in some ways, the overarching picture. And it is this narrative method that has enabled the adversaries of Israel to fashion multiple narratives. And they are, of course, contradictory.
3. The major difficulty with the competing narrative problem is that most of us are not equipped with the ability to apply the relevant source material against the non-academic, ahistorical spin that the deniers of Israel use to ply their trade.
We have in fact aided and abetted this by maintaining the canard that the establishment of the State of Israel was a direct consequence of the Holocaust. The wheels of Zionism were set in motion far before 1945. It is short-term thinking such as this that has enabled some academics to claim, as one did recently in an Intro to Government and International Studies course at University of South Carolina, that it is the United States’ support for Israel that caused the terrorist attack on 9/11.
4. We have failed to find the right way to teach our story adequately, regarding Israel or anything else. And we cannot rely on our nifty gadgets to do so by themselves.
Dr. Stein charged us with finding a new way.
As he was speaking about Israel in particular, I found myself reflecting upon my own journey through Judaism, my own learning process, and my attempts to share what I have learned with others, and it occurred to me that the new informational paradigm requires finding a new way to connect Torah to tefillin to peoplehood.
Or, put another way, Jewish learning to Jewish practice to the overarching Jewish story. To understand the details of Jewish life within the big picture.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we want Israel to exist in the future, if we want Judaism to exist in the future (and particularly our non-coercive, decisively modern and yet historically-based brand of Conservative / Masorti Judaism), we must make sure that our narrative is first learned and understood by all of us, and that we make sure that the rest of the world hears it as well.
I think that the greatest gift that Temple Israel, or for that matter all of North American Jewry could give to the future would be a multi-million dollar project. Let’s call it the Jewish Story Project. This money could be invested in developing a new technology that would capture the attention of all young Jews, through their mobile devices, laptops, iPads, whatever, and teach them the fundamentals not just of the story of the modern Jewish political expression called Zionism, but also the stories of the Torah and Talmud. I think we need to be thinking BIG. We need to think on the top shelf, and not just in terms of what is “good enough.” It has to have all the appeal of Facebook or Twitter or Angry Birds (which I have never played), and all the depth and clarity of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.
We have to co-opt the information revolution before it turns around and bites us back. We have to fight back: pixel for pixel, byte for byte. We need to make Judaism a part of that eternal present, to rephrase the question for our people from “Is it good for the Jews?” to “What are you doing Jewishly right now?”
And while there are many Jewish electronic resources available for our consumption (the Torah, the Talmud, commentaries, halakha, philosophy, etc.), nobody can yet lay claim to revolutionizing the relating of the Jewish story through electronic means. And that is precisely what we need: a Jewish digital revolution.
We need to migrate to Judaism 2.0. At stake is nothing less than our future as the People of the Book.
Shabbat shalom!
~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Although I wrote this to deliver at Temple Israel on November 20, 2010, I contracted a stomach flu the night before and therefore was not able to do so.)
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