Why a Palestinian state is essential for Jewish nationalism

As part of our Israel education seminar yesterday, run through Makom , we heard from Israel Kimhi of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (I found it amusing that Kimhi works on Radak Street, named after the medieval Biblical commentator, Rabbi David Kimhi). We then participated in a tour along the separation fence/barrier/wall (choose your favorite narrative) with Ir Amim,  an organization which seeks "actively [to] engage in those issues impacting on Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem and on the political future of the city.  Ir Amim seeks to render Jerusalem a more viable and equitable city, while generating and promoting a more politically sustainable future."

Kimhi provided statistics, anecdotes and long-term trends during the course of his talk. Among them, in explaining how Jerusalem is largely a taboo topic in governmental circles, he remembered how Yitzhak Rabin z"l once ate an entire plate of biscuits because he was nervous that people would hear that they were talking about the future of Jerusalem. 

Kimhi also illustrated the demographic trends of Arabs and Jews in the city:

In 1967, there was a 74/26 Jewish/Arab majority in Jerusalem.
Today, it is a 65/35 Jewish/Arab majority.
In 2035, following these demographic trends it will be 50/50.

With these demographics in mind, our Israeli guide from Ir Amim said that the notion of a Democratic Jewish State is gravely in danger if there are not negotiations which lead to a Palestinian state.

If there is not a Jewish majority within the Israeli borders, then the country will either not be Jewish or it will not be a democracy.

Taking that a step further, one can posit that ensuring the reality of a Palestinian state is one of the most pro-Zionist acts one can take: Without a Palestinian state, Jewish Autonomous Democracy dies.

I certainly had never considered this perspective before. 

Haik U Glenn Beck

Recently Glenn Beck said : "I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice are code words [for Communism and Nazism]. Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

Jewish Funds for Justice decided to respond to the attack on religion and social justice by initiating the following website dedicated to responding to Beck through haikus.

I'm a fan of this — respond in positive and emphatic terms. Acknowledging total insanity as such and elevate the discourse, in turn. Plus spark some creativity in the process.


A crack at my own:

Love neighbor as self
Some say it is golden rule
Thus Jews support it

In every generation — Thoughts on Erev Pesah

Some reflections on the haggadah as we approach the time to explore our narratives. Also see this source sheet which accompanies the writing below.

The Seder is my favorite holiday event of the year. When I was younger, it was because I loved the food, the family and all of the rituals attached to it. As I have gotten older, I look forward each year to engaging the tradition and the people who sit around me about issues of both particularistic Jewish relevance and universal tales about freedom stories in all traditions. Like the Sabbath, the seder is a Jewish institution which quite literally keeps the Jewish people; it is a pedagogic lesson, centered around food, which involves people of all ages and backgrounds, and moreover, at its best, challenges people to advance their relationships with their fellow humans and God. At the center of this religious universe, stands the verse בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים.

I am so attached to this central verse because it manifests in one line a connection to the entire course of Jewish history. David Moss's Haggadah perhaps illustrates this better than any other Haggadah text I know of, using mirrors placed in the center of various scenes of Jewish communities throughout history, literally placing the individual amongst the freedom narratives of the nation throughout time. While it is not my personal stance, I would go as far to say that one need not believe that the actual Exodus occurred in order to fulfill the mitzvah of seeing oneself כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים, and this would be an honest reading of the line.  As someone who has always been attached to the rational elements of life and particularly to history, this passage tangibly connects me with my ancestors and gives me a halachic imperative to connect with their stories. As Isaac Abravanel states in his commentary to the haggadah: 

For it is impossible that a person living in our age of exile will not experience [in his life] some type of suffering... For not only was it our forefathers that He redeemed in that all-encompassing redemption, but us as well He redeems and saves every day from different troubles, just as He did for them. And therefore Scripture says, “and us He took out from there” (Deut. 6:23). It did not say “them” but “us” — because each one of us is redeemed innumerable times in his lifetime in the course of having to live in exile. 

The line בכל דור ודור in the haggadah, indeed the entire maggid section of the seder itself, originates from a central commandment in the Exodus narrative — והגדת לבנך ביום ההוא לאמור, זה עשה לי בצאתי ממצרים (Exodus 13:8). 

But of course I wasn't there. You weren't either. How do I fulfill this mitzvah? 

The seder itself explores this very thesis when it comes to explaining the zeroa on the seder plate. We purposefully do not raise it, because this was not the pesah sacrifice that our ancestors conducted. Rather it is a symbol of such (see Bavli Pesahim 116b, specifically commentary of Rashbam). 

But we come to a drastically different conclusion with reciting and examining the Passover story with our children — we say that story, and we act it out as if we were there. But there's another step which we add to the symbol of the "capital E" Exodus. In one word, keilu, we transfer the experience from one event which is by definition impossible to remember personally, to a continuing narrative of escaping each of the straights in the overflowing narratives of the Jewish people. 

This word reinforces even more the human agency that is necessary in telling the story of Passover. What is the correct way to do it? There necessarily is not one way. More emphatically, it is specifically not enough to say words of the Haggadah, but one must expand on the text in her own personal way. Questions are at the center of this experience, not the four that are scripted, but the ones which the parent provokes from the child, that we bring out of each other (Bavli Pesachim, 116a). Only by doing this, will one fulfill the mitzvah of doing so keilu she left Egypt. In a tradition that has a series of codified liturgies and texts, בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים mandates that the words of the Haggadah are important, but are not enough on their own. In the words of the Rambam in his comments about the mitzvah of conducting a seder (Sefer HaMitzvot, 157th Mitzvah, commentary on Exodus 13:8): 

...וכל מי שיוסיף במאמר ויאריך הדברים בהגדלת מה שעשה לנו השם ומה שעשו עמנו המצרים מעול וחמס  ואיך לקח השם נקמתינו מהם ובהודות לו ית' על מה שגמלנו מחסדיו יהיה יותר טוב. כמו שאמרו כל המאריך לספר ביציאת מצרים הרי זה משובח.

Expounding about the Exodus, both the original story and subsequent ones is praiseworthy. 

The story of the Exodus has served as a central theme for liberation movements across generations and ethnicities. For twentieth and twenty-first century Jews, בכל דור ודור literally serves as a bumper sticker slogan across our t-shirts (because after all, what's a Jewish cause without a t-shirt?) In every generation, each year, we must remember that we were slaves, and collectively act to bring ourselves out of both our personal and collective Egypts. The story is ongoing, and there is an obligation to apply it to the contemporary situation each and every year. As Michael Walzer states: 

"The story is more important than the events, and the story has grown more and more important as it has been repeated and reflected upon, cited in arguments, elaborated in folklore. Perhaps that was the intention of the authors: certainly, they urge the repetition often enough. The Exodus belongs to a genre of religious and legal texts designed for public reading and rereading and for analogical application." (Exodus and Revolution, (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 8-9) 

The Exodus narrative has resonance both for the Jewish people and for anyone that claims the Bible as a Holy text. Indeed, monotheistic religions across society see themselves as if they personally left Egypt, and utter a pedagogic challenge to their children to engage in such introspection, as well. 

Rabbi Rockstar

It gets my attention when people pack a synagogue to the brim. When there literally is a case of standing room only to listen to a sermon. When people arrive half an hour early to get a seat.

Yesterday we headed to Beit Knesset Ramban to hear Rav Benny Lau give his Shabbat HaGadol drasha (sermon). Traditionally Shabbat HaGadol (the Shabbat before Pesah) features the main sermon of the season, and signs around Jerusalem advertised various rabbis and the topics of their talk. Katamon turned out en-masse for Rav Benny's drash.

The Peaceful Lion received a written copy of the talk in his e-mail today, which truly boggles my mind. From the way he spoke, it seemed like he didn't have any written text in front of him. Scanning it, he clearly read from the text only at select opinions. But here it is, what was sent to the Ramban listserv. Print it out, read it in a few sittings. It's worth it (n.b.: it's in Hebrew).

The central theme is the importance of asking questions as a model for a pedagogy of freedom. We must encourage students to ask as many questions as they can muster, and push them to ask further questions than they already think of.

His concluding political umph doesn't appear in the written copy, as far as I can tell from a quick scan. It lambasted those who silence the questions, pointing to particularly disappointing decisions by the Chief Rabbinate regarding the nullification of conversions. To a once courageous Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef for his halakhic decisions who in the introduction of his first teshuva (see the text above) placed himself as a sage who could innovate decisions and now is part of a Rabbanut establishment behind such decisions as the recent debacle in Ashkelon.

For religion to survive into the future, he implored, the educators in the room — pointing to each and every individual — had to encourage questions. Without it, religious life in Israel might as well close its bags.

I'll say that I was the choir in this audience and he was preaching directly to me. Ask questions, hold tensions in balance, learn as much as I can. Check, check, check. Doing the best I can.

More than that though, the message was couched in deep learning, an eloquent use of texts and such passion for a nation and land. I hope this trop echoes on into the Israeli landscape from a voice that must be heard more.

Learning about Israeli society through a haircut

With Pesah quickly approaching, on Tuesday I headed back to my trusted hair-cutter Micha (next to the new Marzipan on Rahel Imeinu, for those keeping track at home). As I've noted before, Micha sometimes insults me without meaning to, but always inspires a good conversation, usually based on what's on the radio, and gets a laugh to go along with that.

There's a fierce give and take around the Ashkelon hospital right now, a fight which manifests the larger tensions between the Haredi influence on government society and everyone else. After discovering ancient graves where the Barzilai Hospital was planning to build its new emergency room (which had been bombed by kassam missiles coming from Gaza), Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman demanded that the new building not be built adjacent to the hospital, but rather in a new location, away from the main building, and not over the (to-be) former graves. While the hospital would have moved the bodies, the United Torah Judaism (a Haredi political party) appointee would not budge on the decision, and the Netanyahu cabinet essentially chose to keep the coalition over overturning Lizan's decision. The project will delay the building for two years, according to all sources make it tougher for doctors to do their jobs. For more information on the events over the past week see here and here.

When this news item came across the radio while I was getting my hair cut, Micha went on a bit of a tyrade against the decision and religion in general. I noted that this was more politics than religion, but it's hard not be furious about the decision, I'll give him that. He also acknowledged the political supertext of the decisions at play.

After finishing the cut, I paid him, gave him a "todah achi" (literally, thanks, my brother, but doesn't really translate as such) put on my kippah. He pointed to it and said, "Keep wearing that kippah (a knitted one). Don't wear a black one."

On one hand it was an amusing comment. As the hit show Srugim (Hebrew for knit kippah) illustrates (among other things), how one wears this head garment reflects deep sociological realities in Israel. But really it's just depressing -- you're religion is fine. Just don't become like THEM.

In a state of 7 million and a nation of about 14 million, there sure is a lot of finger pointing. With good reason many times. But in wears on all of us.

(Thanks to the Peaceful lion for this insight)
In his dvar torah this past week, Rav Benny Lau of Ramban synagogue in Katamon (among one of his many titles) presented the concept of Takkanat HaShavim to illustrate the tremendous gulf between the law in its ideal state and that in its actual State, manifest by the Ashkelon controversy. The Tosefta (Bava Kamma 10:2) offers two opinions for the penalty of how one must repay a situation where a person steals a brick and subsequently builds a house with that brick. According to Beit Shammai, the individual must deconstruct the entire house and return the actual brick. Beit Hillel says that the individual must pay a monetary penalty, an enactment which becomes known as Takkanat HaShavim. If the individual were required to tear down his house, Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgedah argues (Mishna Gittin 5:5) according to Hillel's logic, the thief would be crippled monetarily and spiritually from doing the needed teshuva that is required of him.

Such is the case here, argued R. Lau. The decision by UTJ and the deputy health minister continues a crippling of peoples' relationship to religion, it highjacks the law and returns it to the strictest interpretation which was rejected centuries ago by civil and religious discourse.

The comments in the barber shop were tinged with anger. And with good reason.

It is more than a political party that comes out looking like the other with a case like this. It is tradition, crede, even God which are shaded black. R. Benny's words ring strongly in my ears. May his leadership and those like him be an inspiration for those in Israel and inded around the world.

And with that, the blog is back in action. It's good to be back.

And we're back in action — from the Middle Kingdom to the Middle East

For now, I give you pictures from our (Laura and my) extravaganzas throughout China.

In a bit, I'll add some words (1,000 each, of course) to said pictures.

Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization to be republished

It's not often these days that Mordecai Kaplan gets press in a major newspaper. The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed discussing the forthcoming re-publishing of his epic Judaism as a Civilization, first published in 1934. The Jewish Publication Society and the Reconstructionist Press will join forces to publish the new edition, including a new introduction by Kaplan biographer and hassid, Mel Scult. 

Current JTS chancellor Arnie Eisen once dubbed the book "the single most influential book of its generation" — for an investigation of the influence of Judaism as a Civilization  see the articles from the  2004 conference that Eisen chaired at Stanford in honor of the book's seventieth anniversary.

My own article on the excommunication of Kaplan and the burning of his siddur is set to hit news stands everywhere  this summer. Stay tuned for details.

See below for the article:

Invented the Bat Mitzvah, Rejected a Supernatural God

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and his Reconstructionist ideas

By DIANE COLE

In June of 1945, with memories of Nazi book-burning still vivid, a group called the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada excommunicated Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, after which they burned his newly published Sabbath Prayer Book. Although Kaplan is less known (and less read) today than his contemporaries Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, he was in many ways the most radical Jewish philosopher or theologian of his era. So it is good to see that his first book, the influential "Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life," has just returned to print. Published by Rabbi Kaplan in 1934, it is a masterpiece of 20th-century Jewish thought.

Although Kaplan grew up in an Orthodox home (he was born in Lithuania and arrived with his family in New York when he was 8) and served as a rabbi at Orthodox congregations, his increasingly un-Orthodox thinking led him in 1922 to found his own congregation in New York, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ). There, and at the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was a senior (and sometimes controversial) faculty member for more than 50 years, Kaplan continued to refine the ideas set out in his 1934 work.

As its title implies, "Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life" reflects Kaplan's effort to redefine how modern American Jewry thinks of itself. Judaism is not only a religion, Kaplan stated; it is a people with its own history, identity, culture and civilization. Moreover, like any civilization, to remain vital it must continue to evolve to meet and adapt to the challenges and needs of each new generation. It must be reconstructed, so to speak—or else risk losing its purpose.

Kaplan practiced what he preached at Sabbath and holiday services at his synagogue, SAJ (where I am an active member and am teaching a course on Kaplan's thought this winter). Seeking to reinvest traditional ritual and liturgy with relevance to contemporary Jews, he emphasized modern interpretations while also revising or discarding prayers (like the traditional prayer for rain) he thought incompatible with the progressive, rational-minded, science-oriented world of 20th-century America.

A believer in gender equality long before the term political correctness became a cliché, Kapan in 1922 "invented" the modern-day bat mitzvah—in which 12-year-old girls (like their male counterparts, 13-year-old boys, at their bar mitzvahs) symbolically accept the religious responsibilities of adulthood—when, at Sabbath services one Saturday morning, he called his oldest daughter to the pulpit and had her read from the Torah scroll. Since then, of course, this then-unheard-of custom has become an accepted, even expected rite-of-passage among Jews in all but the Orthodox branch of the faith.

Indeed, Kaplan held the goals and ethics of democracy and equality so high that he declared anachronistic the idea of Jews being the Chosen people—and changed or deleted the wording of traditional prayers that implied that belief from his 1945 Sabbath Prayer Book. Nor would worshipers find in that volume a rote acceptance of the literal belief of every word and letter of the Bible (modern archaeological findings having put its historicity in question), but rather a view of Torah as a source of spiritual truths and ethical aspirations. Most controversial of all, he rejected the supernatural concept of God in favor of a naturalistic view of a transcendent power behind nature and within us that helps us aspire to the highest level of moral action and ethical behavior. Kaplan was no atheist (as his critics asserted), but his definition of God as "the power that makes for salvation" allows for a broader interpretation of the potential for goodness that lies within each individual.

Such, in sum, was the "heresy" reflected in the Sabbath Prayer Book that so outraged the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada in 1945—and the essence of controversy that surrounded Kaplan's ideas throughout his professional life. After his retirement from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1963, Kaplan helped formalize a separate Reconstructionist denomination with its own rabbinical college, one that teaches the progressive Judaism that Kaplan espoused and that is distinct from the other branches of American Judaism. Even the Reform movement, which generally observes fewer ritual customs than the Orthodox and Conservative branches of the faith, maintains a more traditional view of God than does Reconstructionism.

And today?

Although many of Kaplan's ideas permeate contemporary American Judaism (most prominently, the concept of the bat mitzvah and his promoting of the synagogue as a community center as well as a house of worship), his movement remains the smallest of the four. To contemporary ears, I think, all those "Reconstruction"-based words can sound clunky, even if, for the sociologically minded Kaplan, in the scientifically minded early 20th century, the term spoke to the seriousness of the endeavor he outlined in his seminal 1934 work. And while "Judaism as a Civilization" swells with fresh ideas, there are passages that even to an admirer like me can feel hobbled by stilted language.

Nonetheless, I was shocked when, this past summer, I looked for a copy of this acknowledged classic and discovered not only that it was out of print but that used copies were hard to find. (Thanks to Alibris on the Internet, I did track down a slightly marked-up copy from Goodwill of Greater Washington.) That will no longer be a problem now that "Judaism as a Civilization" has been republished as a joint venture of the Jewish Publication Society and the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, with a new introduction by the Kaplan scholar and biographer Mel Scult.

Certainly, readers can learn much from Kaplan's later and in some ways more accessible books, especially "The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion" and "The Future of the American Jew." But they were built on the foundation that Kaplan first laid out here, and without the attention accorded "Judaism as a Civilization," I wonder if Kaplan, whose diaries attest to a surprising insecurity, would have faltered in furthering his ideas. Its return to print reassures me that Kaplan's voice will continue to call out like the traditional shofar, or ram's horn, awakening new readers to his ever-relevant philosophy.