Unpacked: A Walker Returns Home

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (In case the title of this piece wasn’t clear enough).

A crazy thing, life.

So I know, it’s been a long time since posting last. Gee whiz- I miss writing for Unpacked!

My sister Liron just got married and well things have been more than a bit nutty around here. Happy as ever, but a good lot nutty, too. But it sure is nice to see my little “Write a Post” screen in front of me.

I’d like to link you to a post I wrote for Climate of Change, our Jewish Climate Initiative blog, entitled Calling all Voices. I’ll give you a little chunk of it here, but give a visit to our site to read the whole thing (not that long, don’t you worry).

So a very major Congratulations and Mazal Tov and Happy Happy to Liron (and her husband, Eliyah), much love to you, and I hope to be in touch very soon!

Here’s some music with which to Unpack the week and a peaceful soundtrack for the Climate piece: The Be Good Tanyas, and their MySpace page.

And here’s the start of Calling All Voices:

“For the Jewish community to make a difference on environmental issues, we need brutal honesty to begin with. Jews are now roughly 0.2% of the world’s population; less than the margin of error on the Indian census. If all the Jews in the world recycle their newspapers it will make… pretty much no difference whatsoever. Nor if we put a solar-powered ner tamid in every synagogue, nor, more radically, if every Jew in the world swapped their existing car for a hybrid.”

-Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon.

“Our home planet Earth is undergoing rapid and sustained destruction of its eco-systems… Muslims comprise at least one fifth of the human community and they can contribute much to the thinking that is vital to re-evaluate the future direction of the human community and save its home for itself and other life forms.”

- The Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES)

What a difference one fifth of the world could make!

And us Jews? We sure are a little nation, but as history tells us, we have tremendous power to inspire ethical behavior, mobilize social change and spearhead the technology with which to bring that change about.

Click Here for the Full Article

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I think I felt the night before last why God us gave the Torah.

That sounds kinda presumptuous. Maybe I mean more like “I think it’s pretty cool that He gave us the Torah.”

Yesterday and yesterday evening, we celebrated Shavuot and our receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. To mark the day, we spent the entire night learning, in order to properly receive the Torah in the morning.

The evening began, for us, at a dinner with friends, among them a very brilliant young man who told us about the metaphysics of Facebook and social networking on the Internet, how Facebook signifies our leaving time-space limitations to experience a world based on pure data (Ok I’ll be honest- I think that’s what he said. Just believe me when I tell you it was impressive).

When dinner was over, we stopped in at friends who were hosting a “Habura,” a learning group made up of religious people, not religious people, men, women, all sitting around, learning ancient and modern texts and having discussions on the tension between the freedom to choose being bound by a system of morality and having one imposed on us.

Also enjoying the party was downtown Jerusalem, which held an all-night learning-fest with groups and classes going on right in the street.

In general, the “Tikkun Leil Shavuot,” or “Fixing of Shavuot Night” has become somewhat of a mainstream activity in Israel, singled-out as a time for people to check-in with the Torah and learn a little something more. It’s un-become a religious thing, and more a national one. It’s an important phenomenon, I think, because traditional wisdom and culture shouldn’t only be the property of people that keep the traditions.

Amidst all of this and holding my own Tikkun Leil Shavuot at my bedroom desk, my thoughts took me to wonder if we received the Torah in order to take ownership over it. God gave it us because growing and exploring and asking questions excites us. It must have been boring to be up there with angels who did everything right, without humans to take Torah and stumble and bumble along with it. (Traditionally, the angels objected to God giving us the Torah. Imagine the look of “I told you so” that God sends the angels during Tikkun Leil Shavuot).

Only humans would look at massive pop-Internet trends and explain them in light of Godly wisdom. We would see differences in background as a contribution to a learning circle. We’d realize the center of Jerusalem to be the obvious place to make Shavuot and Torah accessible for everyone.

I really hope that we take Torah to be the gift that it is and that we treasure it. It’s a major challenge to sustain the excitement of Shavuot night over the course of the year. I really pray that I’ll accept the Torah and mean it.

But I guess I take a lot of strength from the fact that God knew what He was getting into when he gave the Torah to us. So if we have the Torah, it means we have the potential to really accept it and maybe even to fix the world with it. Good luck to us!

This afternoon, I left my office in the center of Jerusalem to the following scene:

(If you cannot see this image, click here)

More than a thousand teens dancing through Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in the Rikudegalim, the Dance of the Flags, in honor of Jerusalem Day and the 40th anniversary of our capital’s reunification.

I wait every year for Rikudegalim. As a matter of fact, it is one of the reasons I’m in Israel in the first place:

When I was in 12th grade, I went with my senior class to visit Poland and the Holocaust. Following Poland, we spent a week in Israel, and were in Jerusalem for Jerusalem Day.

I remember seeing kids my age dancing with such love for their homeland, celebrating so happily and passionately to honor their capital city (I imagine that I was thinking, “Washington DC is very nice, but I don’t think I’d ever dance for it”). To watch them be so alive just days after I looked down at the probable death sites of their grandparents was perhaps the most moving experience of my life.

I had wanted to live in Israel for a while then, but I also wanted to live in the Canadian Rockies and Jamaica. Rikudegalim put Israel over the top. This passion was something I wanted to be part of.

I like to think of myself as a deep thinker: someone who chooses to believe that reality is complicated. That things are not that simple.

But Jerusalem Day reminds me that sometimes, things really are that simple. That there is a level in this world that is very perfect and very pure and that doesn’t need to be argued with or over-analyzed. For my nation, that level exists in our being in Jerusalem today. After a billion years of praying a billion times everyday to return to Jerusalem, we’re actually back. Home, after such a long, usually dreadful journey abroad.

I write this because Jerusalem gets clouded in complex political discourse. I guess that’s okay and important, but the arguments are for naught if we cannot tap into the simple narrative, too. Whether we judge it best to keep the whole city for ourselves, to divide it with our neighbors or to give the whole thing over to someone else, it’s the same miracle that we’re here to make the choice. Just like the politics of Jerusalem demand that we learn to value our neighbors, they require that we learn to value Jerusalem.

In order not to give you the wrong idea about why we celebrate Jerusalem Day, I’ll say quickly that it is not about expressing how powerful we are. If our celebration reflects the dream of Jerusalem, at least, then our dancing is a prayer for something different, entirely:

The word Jerusalem is derived from the phrase “Inheritance of Peace (Yerushat Shalom).” It’s ironic to think, but Jerusalem’s religious significance has little to do with religious people fighting over it.

Crusaders who traveled halfway across the world to kill the “wrong” caretakers of Jerusalem, the Mufti (Muslim Chieftain) of Jerusalem who aligned himself with Hitler, the Jordanian WAQF that doesn’t allow us to pray on The Temple Mount today- they miss the point. Same goes for us if we think that Jerusalem is to be an exclusively Jewish city. In our tradition, inviting everyone to pray in Jerusalem is not a matter of tolerance but religious imperative. And prophecy.

The dream of Jerusalem is the happiest, most hopeful dream there could possibly be, because it represents a reality where we realize that there really is no fight.

Okay so maybe I did start to over-analyze on Jerusalem Day. But that’s me. The point is, that we have so much to be thankful for today.

So what a blessing to celebrate Jerusalem Day!

What a blessing for heaven to watch Jewish teens dancing through Jerusalem! What a blessing to watch Rikudegalim on the way home from work! What a blessing to be here, to see a dream so simple and pure, and want so badly to achieve it no matter how complex its fulfillment has proven to be.

What a blessing.