Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Hands and Words across the Sea...

Im eshkacheich y’rushalayim, tishkach y’mini. Tidbak l’shoni l’chiki im lo ez’k’reichi.

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand fail.  May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you.                                                                                                                     Psalm 137:5b-6a

 

    In last month’s column, I anticipated my trip to Israel for the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ convention at the end of February.  If you want to learn about the details of the trip journaled as they happened, please go to sholomrav.blogspot.com.  Here, I hope to give some more general impressions, now that I have returned.

 

    As I said last month, as a commitment to the State of Israel and our brothers and sisters who live there, the CCAR has made a commitment to hold its convention there at least every seven years.  In addition, Hebrew Union College, the seminary that trains Reform rabbis, cantors and educators, requires those students to spend their first year studying on its Jerusalem campus.  When I was there in 1993-4, exciting things were happening in Israel.  There was almost another invasion of Lebanon; the Oslo Peace Accords came out of nowhere; Madonna gave a concert in Tel Aviv.  Personally it was exciting, as I not only met my wife, Michelle, but also came to understand Israelis and the land of Israel in a much more real and intimate way.

 

    Why is it that we Jews so encourage travel to Israel?  A main reason is that the questions of Judaism and its universality or parochialness are approached in a completely different way.  In the United States, to be Jewish is to be different – to stake out an ethnic, cultural and/or religious claim in contradistinction to most of one’s neighbors.  In Israel, being Jewish is the easy thing – the government pays the rabbis, a horn blows in Jerusalem to signal Shabbat, and everyone comes to a standstill when the air raid siren blows commemorating Israel’s Memorial Day – Yom haZikaron.  (Our Director of Education, Michelle Shapiro Abraham created a book, My Cousin Tamar Lives in Israel, to show some of the differences in the celebrations of Jews in the United States and abroad.)  But more than that ritual difference, the basic approach of Jews to their self-identity is fundamentally different.  For many Israeli Jews, it is enough to live in the land of Israel to be Jewish.  The religion of Judaism, say these secular (or chiloni) Jews is what was created after the destruction of the Temple to keep the hope alive to return one day to the land of Zion.  Now that we have returned, there is no longer a need for such ad hoc practices.  Judaism is the culture and life of everyone living together, doing the same things at the same time.

 

    On the other hand, one of the geniuses of Reform Judaism is the definition as above, of Judaism as something that sets us apart.  Whether we speak of being chosen or not, our children certainly feel the differences of being Jewish year round.  Reform Judaism tells us that being different is better than ok, it is the point of our prophetic calling.  We cannot allow ourselves to follow the crowd, to fall to the level of the least common denominator. Instead, we must strive to live up to our values, to make the world a better place.

 

    Israel struggles with these questions too.  In dealing with humanitarian refugees, foreign workers, economic minorities and recent immigrants, Israelis are challenged to live up to those values we hold in common.  Truly, it is the interplay between our embracing of difference and the Israeli desire to build a common society that creates the narrative of Judaism in modern times.

 

    The reason to remember Jerusalem is not solely to cling to a long-distant past, but rather to reach outside of ourselves and to find commonality in our unique approaches.  If not, it is as if we cannot speak, as if our hands have lost their strength.

 

Rabbi Joel N. Abraham