Where Else?

I had an “aha” experience last week. I think I finally get it. Having just spent Rosh Hashanah in Israel for the first time, I can better appreciate the Christmas experience most Americans enjoy. For me Christmas has always seemed a time of pretty lights, nice music, and commercial scenes of Clydesdale horses pulling sleighs filled with laughing people on a sparkling winter day along a rural picket-fence lined road. People greeting each other during this season with the warmth and niceness typically reserved exclusively for Disney World; with “Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas” completing each conversation. But I was never really a part of it. I never felt like I was in the club.

In Israel I am a charter member. Walking down the street a young man is hurrying someplace, as he passes he looks at me and smiles saying “shanah tovah” wishing me a “good year” as he races on. In the shopping mall the security guard at the supermarket, typically a pretty surly sort of guy, greets each incoming and outgoing customer with a steady stream; “shanah tovah,” and “chag sameach (happy holiday).” At the Druze village in the north we stop for lunch at the hummus restaurant, “shanah tovah u’metukah” (a good and sweet year) says the owner and his wife as our meal is delivered. Every conversation, every advertisement, every interaction is laced with the sentiment of the possibility and opportunity that new years bring.

My dad turns 80 in a couple of weeks. He likes to tell a story about me as a kid growing up in suburban Chicago. The way he tells it, he and I were taking a walk around our neighborhood on an unusually warm December day when I was 4 or 5. As we walked past houses decked out in Christmas splendor, I am said to have remarked; “we’re Hanukah people, aren’t we daddy?” In Israel, Hanukkah people are everywhere, and during the High Holiday season there is a sense of connectedness that I have never felt before.

For the past 15 years at Agudath Israel in Caldwell, NJ, the High Holidays found us in the choir, on the bimah, in the pews, walking through the neighborhoods on breaks, sharing dinners and break-fasts with friends. We’re not only members of a shul, we are part of a community. We know most people and most people know us and it feels comfortable and nice and like home.

So when people asked me “aren’t you excited to be spending the Holidays in Israel this year” my reply was simple, “I am thrilled about the prospect of spending a year in Israel, but I think I will miss being at home at Agudath for the Holidays.” So after Rosh Hashanah I can say I was right and I was wrong.

I was right because it is true, I do miss being at Agudath. I miss knowing everyone, and sharing the experience with people I have known for a long time. I miss my Rabbi’s sermons, my Cantor’s melodies, the familiarity of our space, and my seat in the choir.

But I was wrong, I am part of a community. Four Rosh Hashanah meals, eight invitations to people’s homes for our family. Attending services in an intimate setting where for the first time in my life, I understood the power of the shofar. I had always experienced the shofar from afar, and from a sort of anachronistic perspective. The ancient Jews blew the shofar from mountain to mountain to alert those in the neighboring towns of the coming holiday. I know it sounds a little hokey, but this year, the shofar sounds felt like they were aimed at me, calling me personally to heed the messages of renewal and selflessness that are thematic of the High Holidays.

As we prepare for Kol Nidre tonight I am filled with awe of the opportunity and blessing our family has been given to experience living in Israel. As we meet people who are here from America, the UK, South Africa, most of whom came on a six-month or one-year adventure five to fifteen years ago, I ask them all the same question; “why did you decide to come here?” The answers are all so similar and all so powerful:

“We have had a Jewish homeland for only the past 62 years after more than 2000 years without one. Given those odds where else would I be.”

I am grateful to be here in Israel this year, experiencing the adventure and possibility that is the Jewish homeland. I wish everyone who reads this a Shanah Tovah U’Metukah (May We Each Have a Good and Sweet New Year), and G’mar Chatimah Tovah (May We Each be Inscribed for Blessing in the Book of Life).

Will It Be Different This Time

I had been thinking about writing this posting all week. I was going to describe my impressions of the coming peace talks from my new Israeli lens. I was going to talk about complexity and complication. And then last night, sitting here in Israel on the eve of the first meaningful direct peace talks between Jews and Palestinians in years, terrorists murdered four Jews while they were driving their car near Hebron.

A terrorist attack. Four innocent lives stolen in an instant. There have been so many over the years. But being in Israel, being here with my family, it just felt different this time.

I spent all morning reading and rereading the responses from the various parties:

Israel’s leadership declared their anger at attempts to derail the peace talks, and further declare the IDF’s and Shin Bet’s commitment to “get their hands on those who perpetrated the attack.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged settlers in the West Bank to show restraint and respect the rule of law in Israel in the wake of the fatal attack that took place near Hebron on Tuesday that left four Israelis dead.

The Palestinian Authority expressed their “outrage over the attack and accused Hamas of attempting to thwart the negotiations.” Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister, said measures would be taken to prevent further attacks. “We condemn this operation, which goes against Palestinian interests,” he said in a statement.

Hamas issued its remarks drenched in the evil of its own complicity with this barbarous act; “we praise the attack and consider it a natural response to the crimes of occupation.”

Those on the right described their insistence that; “the leaders of Israel wake up from their delusions of an imaginary peace...Netanyahu must at once freeze the talks and concentrate on securing peace for the citizens of Israel.”

While the left reasoned, “The shooting attack in the Hebron Hills yesterday could not have been a surprise. Palestinian opposition groups, especially Hamas, were highly motivated to embarrass the Palestinian Authority on the eve of the start of direct talks in Washington.”

President Obama said, “I want everybody to be very clear: The United States is going to be unwavering in its support of Israel’s security and we are going to push back against these kinds of terrorist activities.”

And, I saved the most pernicious response for last;

The US State Department, whose spokesperson P.J. Crowley offered the following remark; “Any time one human being takes out a weapon and fires and kills other human beings, it’s a tragedy. We just don’t know the circumstances under which this occurred.”

As I read and thought about all of these reactions it jumped out at me; not one reflected on the individuals whose lives had been stolen. Not one mentioned the families whose brother, sister, mother, father, daughter, son, and grandparent had been erased from the earth. The replies are all so banal and predictable. The claims are all so hollow. Has politics dehumanized us so far that no one even bothers to mention the individuals who were slaughtered?

At the end of the first chapter of the Torah, Bereshit 1:27 it says:

“And God created man in his image (B’tselem Elohim), in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them...”

There are no political sides in the Torah. There are human beings, male and female, each created in God’s image. Four images of God had their lives taken from them yesterday. Yitzhak and Tali Ames, parents of 6 children from ages 5 to 24 and grandparents for just six months. The other two have not yet been named though one was said to have been a pregnant woman.

As these direct talks begin, my prayer is that the individuals responsible for leadership accept each other as B’tselem Elohim, as being in the image of God. That way, this time it really will be different.