Why You Should Vote MERCAZ

As you know, I am strongly attached to the land, the people, and the State of Israel; last year I was there no less than four times. In my late 20s, I was so close to making aliyah that I was interviewing for full-time jobs in Israel. When I decided instead to go to cantorial school, and realized that there was no way to make a living in Israel as a hazzan, I opted to remain here in the Diaspora, although Judy and I are still keeping an eye out for that ideal retirement apartment in Tel Aviv.

As an American Jew, I can’t vote in Israeli elections, and the internal workings of Israeli politics are one degree removed from my immediate sphere of political awareness. However, Israel is different from every other nation in that we Jews who choose to live in Diaspora still have a voice in some of the operations of the ongoing endeavor of building the Jewish state. Our voice is the World Zionist Congress, which will convene next fall in Jerusalem, and the interests of the Conservative movement are represented by our party, MERCAZ (literally, “center”).

First, a crash course on the World Zionist Congress: This is the same body that was first convened by Theodor Herzl in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. There will be 500 delegates from around the world, and 145 of them will be sent from the United States. Any person that belongs to one of the member organizations of the WZO, and that includes the Conservative movement and hence Temple Israel, may vote. The last vote was held in 2010, and we were allotted 33 seats, as compared with 56 for the Reform movement and 35 for the Religious Zionist (Orthodox) slate. It is notable that Reform’s ARZA claims that Reform-affiliated programs in Israel received $4.3 million in World Zionist Organization funding in 2013, as a direct result of those 56 seats.

Second, why you should vote for MERCAZ: Our platform is available at votemercaz.org, but the major points include support for religious pluralism and freedom in Israel, ties between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, peace and security in Israel, environmental progress, and of course Masorti and Conservative-affiliated programs and institutions. These are all things that we stand for, in Israel and here in Great Neck, and as such it is imperative that we Conservative Jews turn out the vote.

Voting is through April 15th at votemercaz.org. It costs $10, but the potential return for Israel and the Conservative/Masorti movement is much more valuable. (Added bonus: TIGN member Marty Werber is 35th on the slate of delegates. If MERCAZ receives enough votes, he goes to Jerusalem in October to represent us.) If you need a paper ballot, please contact me at Temple Israel. I am a member of MERCAZ and have already voted. Have you?

~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally published in the Temple Israel Voice, March 12, 2015.)

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 

Live from Tel Aviv Beach, Part II

This evening, as the sun set, I swam. Israel, like New York, is in the midst of a heat wave, and even as the evening breezes rolled in off the Mediterranean, the water was warm and soothing. There were only a few other bathers near me - a family tossing a frisbee, a couple chattering in Russian, a guy with an underwater metal detector working his way patiently back and forth in the shallow water. A man was davening minhah (reciting the afternoon prayer service) in a bathing suit, t-shirt and black kippah alone, next to the now-empty lifeguard station - I must confess that I've never seen THAT before on the beach. I watched Tel Aviv light up, floating in the salty, draining day.

Out of nowhere in a particular, a song popped into my head: Cantor Charles Osborne's "Samahti Be-omrim Li," (here is a performance featuring Cantor Osborne on piano; although not a perfect recording, it gives you an idea of how moving this piece is; song starts at 1:52). The text is Psalm 122:

שָׂמַחְתִּי, בְּאֹמְרִים לִי בֵּית יְהוָה נֵלֵךְ
עֹמְדוֹת, הָיוּ רַגְלֵינוּ בִּשְׁעָרַיִךְ, יְרוּשָׁלִָם
Samahti be-omrim li, beit Adonai nelekh
Omedot hayu ragleinu, bish'arayikh Yerushalayim
I rejoiced when they said to me: Let us go up to the House of God.
Now we stand within your gates, O Jerusalem!

The psalm speaks of the peace that enables the author to enter the Temple in Jerusalem; Osborne's setting speaks to me of the ancient yearnings that led late 19th-century pioneers to start building the modern State of Israel in this land, which the Romans re-named Palestine two millennia ago to further dishonor the defeated Jews. Those yearnings are still with us, and yet peace is not.

Tel Aviv is not Jerusalem, but I am beginning to understand that it is almost as holy. "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem," says the psalm. And so we do, even on the beach.

Live from Tel Aviv Beach

There is really no time that I feel as overwhelmingly happy as when I land at Ben Gurion Airport. I'm not a clapper - the spontaneous applause that always breaks out when the plane touches down does not draw me in. But walking with my suitcase from baggage pickup out into the arrival hall is always a big thrill. A short time later, armed with my first kafeh hafukh (the distinctly Israeli cousin of cappucino) and a rented Daihatsu, I saunter forth onto the highway with rinnah (joyous song) in my heart and Reshet Gimmel (the only radio station that plays exclusively Hebrew-language music) on the stereo.

The beach is, of course, gorgeous at night. Looking out over the water, I see slowly=moving lights in the distance - Jewish guardians of this corner of the Mediterranean perhaps, or maybe the merchant marine hauling bananas to European markets. Mellow Israeli music floats out from the bar, and as I nurse a half-liter (of Stella Artois, unfortunately; the only Goldstar in sight is the label on the stein), I consider and reconsider the wonder that is the Jewish state.

I belong here; these are my people. I am reminded of the sentiment in Joel Engel's well-known art song, "Shenei Mikhtavim" (Two Letters), featuring the lyrics of Avigdor Hameiri:

לא אזוז מפה לעד!
Lo azuz mipo la-ad!
I will not move from here forever!

Of course, I'm returning to galut (the Diaspora) on Thursday night. But the yearning of 2000 years remains with me always. These are my people; I belong here.

Wednesday Morning Kavvanah, 12/29/2010 - Secular Vacations

I was in Israel during Hanukkah. It is a time when children are on vacation from school, and along with Sukkot and Pesah, it is one of the three week-long vacations that Israeli schoolchildren can count on.

One of the things that makes Judaism work better in the Jewish state than in the Diaspora is that the public calendar reflects the Jewish calendar. So the opportunity to celebrate Hanukkah or any other holiday can be suitably joyous or solemn.

But even completely secular Jews in Israel (perhaps accounting for 40% of the country) are tuned into the Jewish calendar for precisely this reason.

Just one of the reasons that I am a Zionist.

Shemot 5771 - The Nexus of the Personal and the National

(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.

Re-eh 5769 - Crazy land - Is this what God intended?

(originally delivered on August 15, 2009)

Some of you know that I just returned from Israel a week and a half ago, and will be going back for a few more days this coming week. I go there at least twice a year (in fact, 2009 will be a record for me- four trips), and I like to think of myself as being as connected to Israel as any American can be.

Israel is for me a nation of paradoxes. On the one hand, I feel a strong connection to it theologically, the kind of divinely-inspired attachment that simply jumps off of the pages of the humash when we read about the land in the Torah. But on the other hand, my connections to Israel are modern and secular: my family ties there, my love of the culture and the people and the modern revival of the Hebrew language, my admiration for the successes of the modern state in many fields, and my neverending appreciation for the complex, textured fabric of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious Israeli society.

I am very much attached to the notion of the Jewish state's having perhaps fulfilled the vision of Ezekiel, when the dry bones knitted themselves together; but at the same time I am disheartened by the infighting that naturally occurs when Jews gather.

I am drawn to the land itself, and yet anxious about how that land will be parceled out in the future to accommodate the nascent reality of a Palestinian state.

I lived there long enough to appreciate the high points of Israeli culture: music, dance, visual arts, academics, and yet often cringe at the crass reality of Israeli television, consumerism, and of course, politics.

I am also continuously struck by the ever-lessening tension between the tradition of historical Zionism vs. today's mild nationalism which sees making aliyah to NY as the highest sabra ideal.

I could go on. Israel is a complicated place: beautiful, moving, seductive, even. But also fraught. The internal politics are always exceedingly complex and fragile because of the coalition system and the need for any coalition to include the religious parties. Meanwhile, the precariousness of Israel's relations with her neighbors never fails to inspire supporters and critics, journalists, authors, and commentators of all stripes.

Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel when it was founded. Einstein declined, claiming that he had no time to take on such a task, although that was a weak excuse. He was not a religious man, but he was quite prescient when he stated the following in a 1938 speech entitled "Our Debt to Zionism".

He said: "My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. ... If external necessity should after all compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with tact and patience."

Tact and patience have, since 1938, been in short supply between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Anyone who has lived there will tell you that even without the political complexities of the greater region, Israel is an impatient place. But recent events have inflamed internal tensions, or at least it seems that way from my perspective as an outsider who is sensitive to the ebb and flow of Israeli life.

1. There is a brand new outdoor mall adjacent to the Jaffa Gate of the Old City, a beautiful structure that honors the traditional architecture of Jlem and also creates a lively new space with lovely cafes with great views, in addition to all the regular Israeli chain stores.

Below the mall is a new indoor parking lot with hundreds of spaces, something which the Jlem municipality desperately needs. Until this summer, the parking lot had been closed on Shabbat, but Jlem's new mayor, Nir Barkat, a secular Jew and entrepreneur, lobbied to have it opened, due to the great need for parking. This infuriated the Haredi population of Jlem, and so there have been violent protests against it every Friday evening since the beginning of July, as Haredim of all stripes have surged into the streets of the Holy City to express their outrage of what they perceive to be a violation of the sanctity of Shabbat in the Holy City.

2. In another incident that provoked violent street protests, a Haredi woman who belongs to one of the far-right, anti-Zionist groups within the Haredi community was found to be apparently deliberately starving her 3-yr-old, who was in Hadassah hospital and at the time of the incident weighed 15 pounds. A hidden camera showed the mother repeatedly removing the feeding tube from her son's mouth. The mother was arrested and diagnosed with Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, a curiously-named psychological condition that causes women to fabricate or induce symptoms in their children to get medical attention.

A rabbi from the woman's sect declared this incident a modern blood libel, and the Haredi street erupted in protest. Street protests turned violent, and hordes of marauding haredim destroyed the state welfare and social services office in the Meah Shearim neighborhood, storming in and smashing computers and equipment, and then setting the building on fire.

3. The Israeli media was ablaze a couple of weeks ago with another sensational story. At a parking garage in Jlem, a young, promising rabbinical student who is also the son of the Chief Sephardic rabbi of Hadera, tried to get out of the garage without paying. The attendant, a 30-year-old Ethiopian Israeli woman, stood in front of the car to prevent him from leaving, whereupon, he accelerated into her, carried her on the hood of the car for a ways, and dumped her on a sidewalk. The incident was captured by a security camera, and you can see it yourself online.

To make matters worse, the Jerusalem District judge, after speaking with the young man's father, gave him effectively a slap on the wrist, perhaps because the young man was slated to become a "dayyan," a rabbinic judge, and a criminal record would have prevented this. After extensive public outrage, the judge's ruling was overturned by a higher court, and the judge himself was censured, such that he will no longer be considered for a position on the Israeli Supreme Court.

And one more small item that hit the news in Israel - the New Jersey corruption scandal that implicated five rabbis from the insular Syrian community in America; their money laundering and kidney trafficking connected them with the Promised Land.

What's a Zionist rabbi like me to do?

Despite all of these items, the reality on the ground is not what it might seem. On my last night in Israel, I attended an annual art festival in Jerusalem that saw the best turnout in many years. A friend of mine, an Illinois native turned Jerusalemite, told me that since the security situation has improved dramatically due to the building of the separation fence, Jerusalem's streets are alive once again.

As Marcus pointed out earlier, we read in today's parashah about blessings and curses attached to our heritage of the Land of Israel. Now, of course, these are premised on whether or not we fulfill the commandments given by God. I am not going to get into a theological discussion right now about whether or not God really works this way; that discussion is for another forum. In a couple of weeks, in Parashat Ki Tavo, we will read in detail the Torah's list of these blessings and curses. However, I'd like to propose a modern take on this, given the current state of the Jewish state (with apologies to God for rewriting the Torah):

God: If you behave well, like the true inheritors of the Torah,

This land shall be a gathering place to which Jews spread all over the world shall return.

You shall eat the finest falafel the New Israeli Shekel can buy. Plus, you shall have the most fantastic selection of eating establishments in your major cities, restaurants that rival the haute cuisine found in Europe or America. Some of these restaurants will even be kosher!

You shall build fantastic infrastructure: highways that are sometimes not clogged with traffic, utilities that provide all the comforts of the most modern nations. You shall provide free wireless internet access for the benefit of Conservative rabbis who are visiting from overseas.

You shall be tremendously successful in high-tech enterprises, medical devices, international trade, and so forth. You shall assemble world-class universities, wherein students from all over the world will come to learn.

You shall build wonderful tourist infrastructure, whereby Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Baha'i will come from all over the world to see the holy sites of the ancient world, and pay handsomely to stay in the finest hotels and visit the most exciting tourist traps.

You shall thrive as a nation economically, such that Israel shall be a major force in international trade.

Most importantly, you shall have peace.


But if you are outwardly pious and yet continue to do nefarious things on the sly or even on video:

You shall be surrounded by hostile nations with whom you shall be eternally at war.

You shall elect representatives who are always caught up in one kind of of scandal or another: tax evasion, bribery, corruption, making unwanted advances on female staff, and so forth.

You shall be divided on all kinds of political issues: social, economic, foreign relations, etc. Your political system will, as a result, will be so unstable that virtually every government will fall before the end of its official term.

You shall argue with each other over religious issues; who has control over "who is a Jew," for example, and who controls issues of marriage and divorce and death. Your miraculous infrastructure will serve as flashpoints for interior disputes.

You shall absorb immigrants from all over the world, Jewish and non-Jewish (and questionably so), who will be attracted to the thriving economy, but will also contribute to a variety of social ills.

Your negotiations over issues of boundaries and security will always be problematic, and any such disputes will drain on your economy and damage your image abroad.

The Sfat Emet, also known as Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, the Gerer hasidic rabbi (and grandfather of our Rabbi Isaac) who lived in Poland in the late 19th and early 20th c., asks why Moses devotes so much of the book of Deuteronomy warning the Israelites about future misdeeds. After all, the perpetrators of many of the sins that he warns about had already died in the Desert. The Sefat Emet answers that it is the task of each generation to correct the failings of preceding generations and that requires knowing those failings.

Well, my friends, the HH are just a month away, and we should be asking ourselves some difficult questions about current Jewish realities. We have much to atone for. Let's hope that 5770 is a better year for the Jewish state and the Jewish world.