Our Name is Israel

Great teachers challenge our perceptions. As the Chagim (the holidays) have closed, and after two months here in Israel, I found myself reflecting on a class I took almost 20 years ago. “The question is not who is a Jew?” said Rabbi Herb Friedman in his booming bass voice with characteristic intensity, “the question is What is a Jew?” Herb was an impassioned teacher and Jewish leader. He was the inspiration for, and the founding President of, the Wexner Heritage Foundation - a two-year program of rigorous Jewish learning for community leaders that has had a major impact on Jewish communal life in the Diaspora and in Israel.

What is a Jew? I remember wondering as I sat in that class. Who asks such a thing. It’s obvious isn’t it?! But it is not obvious. Like most things important; it is complex, it is subtle and it is a question with which we must wrestle.

As Rabbi Friedman fielded the Wexner students’ responses, his goal and the answer became clearer. One said, being Jewish means practicing Judaism, it is participation in a religious community. Another said, being a Jew means belonging to a cultural community, a people that has contributed the Torah and the ethical precepts that have been taught by our rabbis over the millennia. Still another said, it means being permanently connected to the land of Israel as a kind of biblical inheritance. “You’re all right,” he said with emphasis, “to be Jewish is to be part of a sacred religious community, to be Jewish is to live by, and share with the world, the ethical code bequeathed to us, and to be Jewish means to settle this particular land; Israel. To be Jewish is all of these things.”

Living in Israel for the Jewish Holidays, the feeling of “being Jewish” in all three respects could not be more powerful. No matter where we are, Kol Nidre is an evening of intensity. The sea of people. The dominance of the color white in our clothes; kippot, tallitot (prayer shawls), dresses, and kittels (white robes). The seriousness of the prayers. Here in Israel everything felt magnified.

Then we left shul and began our walk home. The real power of Yom Kippur for me this year happened outside shul, after the services were over. We had been advised that no one drives on Yom Kippur, not even the most secular person, but we could not have prepared for the experience of walking home that evening. On Kol Nidre, all of Israel celebrates together. And I mean all of Israel.

Walking home we took the long way; through the adjacent town of Kfar Saba and then through Ra’anana. People poured out of their homes, out of their apartments and into the city streets, into the town squares and parks. Kids riding their bicycles and tricycles, teens walking and laughing together as if they had just completed the last day of school, adults smiling, talking, and greeting one another as if at a giant family reunion. There was a buzz of unrestrained joy in the air, coupled with an absolute sense of quiet and peace. I know it sounds like an odd juxtaposition, but it was real.

Road 4, one of the main north-south highways in the center of the country, was a perfect setting for a stroll, a bike ride, or an impromptu soccer game. Yet the absence of automation produced a natural quiet. Israel’s democracy was on full display that evening. Each individual was welcoming the New Year with the sense of hope, renewal and opportunity that each year offers, in a way most meaningful to them.

Then came Sukkot; always my favorite holiday. The physical and the spiritual seem perfectly blended on Sukkot. We build little huts in our yards, decorate them brightly, invite our friends and family over to share meals, and at times even sleep in them. This precarious little structure, physically reminding us of the uncertain nature of our lives, imploring us to look for meaning inside the sukkah; to our friends, to our family, and to God.

Sukkot started differently this year. We went to the Ra’anana Sukkot Street Market (shuk) to buy the necessary items for the holiday; the four minim (species) made up of palm, myrtle, willow, and etrog (a cousin of the lemon). The town square was alive with lulav and etrog salesmen, each offering us stories of why their table of goods was the best. Josh, Amy and I went with our neighbors and new friends the Maimon family. Josh and his buddy JoJo each received 100 shekels (about $25). Their mission was made clear to them; purchase your 4 species for less than 100 shekel and you can use the remainder to buy candies and goodies, also on sale in the square. It was a memorable evening, and Josh was proud to have completed his goal with plenty of cotton candy to spare! For Amy and me it was a wonderful first taste of Sukkot in the Jewish State.

And looking back now, Sukkot was my favorite Holiday again, fulfilling that emotional and spiritual need at the close of Yom Kippur. We were joined by both new and longtime friends in our sukkah. We were welcomed as guests by others. And, by the end of the week, we felt that the community we have entered is but a continuation of the one we have always been in.

The closing of Sukkot comes with Simchat Torah (literally; Rejoicing of the Torah). As Jews, we complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah in celebration, just as we begin the New Year with a renewed sense of purpose and hope that we can improve upon ourselves. We will read the same stories in the Torah again in the coming year, and we celebrate; hoping that we will glean just a little more in the coming year both from the Torah and from our lives. So as we danced with Torahs in one shul near our house, we went outside and danced in the street, meeting the community from another shul dancing in the streets.

The Holidays in Israel are a remarkable time. Life’s rhythms are altered, offering us space to engage ourselves and each other on a more spiritual plane, giving us a chance to remeasure and re-gauge. Looking back, I think we timed coming to Israel perfectly, arriving here just before the beginning, giving us a chance to engage in our own remeasuring and re-gauging.

In a little over a month we will read Parashat Va-Yishlach, during which we will read about Jacob wrestling with an angel and because he does so his name is changed to Israel, “for (he has) striven with beings divine and human, and has prevailed.” (Gen. 32:29) As I remember Rabbi Friedman’s class, now I understand even better his question, “What is a Jew?” Yes it is the religion, yes it is the culture and values, and yes it is the geography, but even more so, it is the engagement in all of it that makes us Jews. We wrestle with it all and because of that our name is Israel.