Unpacked: A Walker Returns Home

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!

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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.

I live in an amazing place.

Israel is a whole to do. But when it comes down to it, it’s just an amazing place.

I imagine that over the course of the year, as they watch us stumble and bumble along, six million souls can’t help but look down at us here in Israel and ask each other sheepishly, “Is this is the best we can do?”

And like our ancestors in heaven, many of us six million souls still living and residing in Israel can’t help but ask, “Is this the best we can do?” (more…)

There are a handful of jobs out there in which the exchange “Have a nice day”- “Thank You” take place, hundreds of times per day.

Markets, toll booths, drug stores- When we talk about “Have a nice day”- “Thank You,” we are, I think, talking about places and moments in which this world might actually be perfect. (more…)

Shock to Sadness, sadness to fear, fear to anger.

Anger to despair, despair to feeling tired, feeling tired to going back to work on Sunday.

This has been my general process, in relating to Thursday night’s attack in Jerusalem.

What are we doing in this nutty land in the first place?

Following the attack, I read an article by Dr. Daniel Gordis, that asks this very question. Dr. Gordis contends that revisiting the question is the most important work for us right now.

According to Dr. Gordis, the tragedy from which we suffer as Israelis, is that we don’t remember the reason Jews created the State of Israel: to solve a history of suffering. We no longer connect to our dream to change the condition of the Jew from the powerless hunted to one who fights his hunter.

In general, I love Mr. Gordis’s work. He writes through eyes of an Israeli, a Jew, an academic and a worried parent. In doing so, he touches upon the true intensity that is the Israel experience.

That being said…

I would like to disagree. In the process, I wish to address Dr. Gordis’s question, and explain, maybe to you, maybe to me, what I think the Jewish People are doing in this nutty Land in the first place.

Dr. Gordis questions the strategy of Israel’s founders- disconnecting from traditional Jewish discourse. I wish to question the original dream. To me, that dream is the root of our problems.

If I exist so that I can defend myself, then my independence is contingent upon my subjugation. If I am independent in order to avoid being dependent- then I am still very much dependent. (Kind of like the non-conformists back at school, that always have an eye on the conformists so that they will make sure not to conform.).

I believe it very sad, if from the position of being hunted, my ultimate goal is to fight my hunter. Even as I fight back, I am still a victim. If I grow up with a vision of redemption that ends with attacking my hunter, then I will make sure to look for my hunter even when he is not there.

If before the State of Israel our nation often lived from sadness and fear, then in order to fight back and create our state, we moved on to anger.

Sadness to fear, fear to anger, anger to despair, despair to feeling tired, feeling tired to going to work on Sunday.

And that’s where we find Israel today- just trying to get to work on Sunday.

Dr. Gordis speaks of our current lack of historical awareness. It’s not that our generation of Jews and Israelis are unaware. It’s that we are tired. Anger and hope can hold up a burden with the help of adrenaline, but adrenaline runs out.

The answer is not to rekindle the fight of 1948.

The answer, I believe, is to try and figure out who we were, or why we were, before our fights began.

I want to be very clear: I don’t blame the founders of the State for anything. Of course they created a state out of being victims. They were victims. Of Holocausts, pogroms, persecution in Arab countries. True heroes translated their anger into this wonderful place where I live today and to them I am eternally grateful.

But their situation was not ideal. This country would not be fixed if we just became them.

There is a lot of discourse about the Zionism of old: if only we had their fervor, their dedication, their love of Israel.

Many critics say that we now take our existence for granted. I say to them, that their mistake is that they don’t take their existence for granted. Or at the very least, they can’t fathom our existence without seeing an enemy somewhere in the background.

I think it a grave mistake to suggest that we recapture the spirit of Israel’s founders. We can be inspired by it, but God forbid should we become it. I will defend myself because I exist- not vice versa. Israel is more than just a refuge for Jews.

Long before we were suffering Jews, we were Israel- a nation whose destiny was to create a Kingdom of kindness and truth and justice and peace, who reveals the Divinity that hides itself in every pocket and corner of everyone and everywhere.

It is not for naught that our country lies exactly on the cusp of East and West, western medicine and eastern medicine, Monotheistic worship and pagan, the gifts of ancient history and the advantages of modernity. We were created to be inspired by the world, to pick up the scattered lights all around it, and discover the fact that the scatter is really One.

We are in Israel in order to ask questions. We exist, so that we can find ourselves with an entire other nation to care for, to feel their pain at being occupied, and to figure out how to deal with it. Israel does not mean pretending that those people do not exist, and Israel is also not disengaging from our responsibility that they do.

We are sovereign over Jerusalem because our potential is to make space for everyone, within a limited space. We did not suffer so that we would feel deserving of the world’s sympathy. We suffered so that we could sympathize with the world when it suffers.

We are a proud and brilliant and wonderful people. We are fine for who we are, and don’t need to prove it to anyone, nor fight everyone who suggests otherwise. We just need to be us. When we generate that sense of integrity in the world, the world will see us as such.

This Sunday, I enter a month of reserve duty in the Israeli army. I am not going because I feel the need to defend. I don’t really feel that privilege anymore. I honestly just want to be home with my wife.

But I am going, because I want to be an active member of this country whose plight is so real to me. I want to be part of it and stand in the middle, so that one day, I will be there when we learn to value our existence for its own Infinite sake.

Although I am not yet a worried parent, I begin to think about the reality in which my children, God willing, will live.

I hope that the dream they grow up with does not include their fighting for my pain. I hope that they can appreciate our history without having to drag it around. I hope I never ask them to drag it around.

May they not be victims, either to hunters or to an existence founded upon fighting hunters. If they must defend themselves, may it never be in order “to defend their right to defend themselves.” May that never be a question for them.

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, it was a hard weekend for us in Israel. A gunman, named Ala Abu Dhaim, entered a Yeshiva- a Jewish house of study, and killed 8 boys while they were learning Torah.

I just wanted to share a story that was sent to me by my friend Sharon:

Every morning I take the 35 bus to work. It’s a quick ride and usually takes no more than 12 minutes. The third stop after I get on is directly in front of Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav (where the shooting took place). This morning I found myself a bit anxious, unsure of what I was going to see as we passed by.

As I looked around, I saw death notices pasted all over the street and flowers that had been brought lined the entrance to the Yeshiva. When the bus pulled up to the stop, the driver shut off the engine and stood.

With tears in his eyes he told everyone sitting on the bus that one of the boys killed on Thursday night was his nephew. He asked if everyone on the bus would mind if he spoke for a few minutes in memory of his nephew and the other boys that were killed. After seeing heads nod all over the bus he began to speak.

With a clear and proud voice, he spoke beautifully about his nephew and said that he was a person who was constantly on the lookout for how to help out anyone in need. He was always searching for a way to make things better. He loved learning, and had a passion for working out the intricacies of the Talmud. He was excited to join the army in a few years, and wanted to eventually work in informal education.

As he continued to speak, I noticed that the elderly woman sitting next to me was crying. I looked into my bag, reached for a tissue and passed it to her. She looked at me and told me that she too had lost someone she knew in the attack. Her neighbor’s child was another one of the boys killed. As she held my hand tightly, she stood up and asked if she too could say a few words in memory of her neighbor.

She spoke of a young man filled with a zest for life. Every Friday he would visit her with a few flowers for Shabbat and a short word of Torah that he had learned that week in Yeshiva.”
______________

…Just some notes from a country where we’re all family.

May listening merit us peace.

Yannai