It’s Not Just a Bus, It’s Israel

If you have ever flown El Al to Israel, as I did last week and will do again this evening, then you are familiar with its marketing motto, “It’s not just an airline, it’s Israel.” As the six Cosgroves piled into our seats, I reflected on the motto, “How very true – truer I bet than their marketing team intended.” Right before my eyes, the lady in the row ahead of me removed my luggage from the overhead bin and placed it on the floor in the aisle. I watched incredulously, and asked her in Hebrew, “Excuse me, what do you think you are doing?!” She replied with unflinching moral clarity, “Well, I need a place for my bag.” And yet, 30,000 feet, six hours and many cranky kids later, an altogether different sense of family emerges. People are holding each other’s children, playing Jewish geography and schmoozing with each other in a way that would be inconceivable on any other airline. For better and for worse, an El Al flight to Israel does represent more than just an airline – it represents Israel, with all its quirks, its blessings and its flaws.

Sometimes an airline is not just an airline, and from the news coming out of Israel daily, sometimes a bus is not just a bus. Over 50 years after Rosa Parks, Ashdod resident Tania Rosenblit set off a national debate on gender-segregated public transportation when she refused to sit at the back of the bus despite the demands of ultra-Orthodox passengers. And while she continues to receive death threats, last week an IDF soldier, Doron Matalon, faced abusive sexual harassment when she similarly refused to move to the back of a Jerusalem bus. As we know from our own American history, in these cases, the bus is not just a bus, but an insight into Israel, its quirks, its blessings and its deeply troubling flaws.

Israel is one country that does not lack for problems. Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, the elections in Egypt and the altogether troubling rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are massive and rapid shifts taking place when it comes to Israel’s external existential security in response to which I believe we must all, as American Jews, be vigilant and active advocates. At the same time, I am hard pressed to think of a time when I can list so many internal existential concerns affecting the future health of the Jewish state. The bus segregation issue is but one of many. Last week, Rabbi Moshe Ravad, the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Air Force, resigned, partially owing to new IDF instructions that religious cadets must attend ceremonies that feature women singing, which is prohibited according to the ultra-Orthodox community. Earlier in December, a group of right-wing activists attacked IDF soldiers in the West Bank, a shocking instance of Jew turning against Jew. Probably most public was last week’s eruption in Beit Shemesh, when 10,000 people demonstrated in response to news of an eight-year-old Orthodox girl being spat on and verbally abused by Haredi Jews for walking to school in clothing deemed insufficiently “modest.” This was followed by a despicable counter-protest, in which a group of over 1000 ultra-Orthodox gathered dressed in yellow stars and striped pajamas (images intended to evoke the concentration camps) equating the Israeli response to religious intimidation with the actions of the Nazis.

The list goes on and on, from the seemingly small – a debate over whether a woman may eulogize a loved one at a funeral, or a religious man being asked to take off his kippah before entering a Tel-Aviv internet café – to abhorrent acts of violence. These incidents, which have all occurred over the past month, are remarkable because they are happening within Israel, between Jews, and are all about the existential internal, not external, threats Israel faces.

You, like me, have watched these incidents and the reactions of the Jewish world, and have heard the range of outrage and indignation at the misogyny, the ignorance, and the medievalism of the ultra-Orthodox. It is tempting, especially as a non-Orthodox Diaspora rabbi, to weigh in with my own sensibility and to wish that Israel could somehow be recast as the Upper East Side. It is all too easy to project onto others our fears of an obscurantist orthodoxy, to make the Haredim the Jews we love to hate. But we must, as our tradition teaches, be metunim ba-din, careful in our judgment, wary of efforts to classify the entire world according to our own categories. It is as myopic and misdirected to wish for the Judaism of Beit Shemesh to look like ours as the other way around.

We should also be careful not – as I have done for rhetorical effect – to throw all these incidents together, as if they are all the same. It is tempting, dangerously so, to try to conjure up some grand theory on what this all means and why it is happening. But there is a difference between an IDF officer standing up for a religious principle, whether it is to have a kosher meal or to not be asked to listen to a woman’s singing voice – both equally valid Jewish legal categories – and a Jewish terrorist attacking the very army defending the Jewish nation. There is a difference between a community internally and collectively creating a standard of observance and that same community insisting that their practice hold sway for everyone else. Each incident must be understood on its own terms and we must caution against efforts to impose an ill-fitting monolithic explanation.

Finally, we need to be absolutely unyielding in calling out barbaric behavior when we see it. Spitting on someone is spitting on someone, whether the spitter is in a Hasidic streimel with long payos or not; thuggishness is thuggishness no matter who you are. Violence against an IDF soldier is terrorism, whether performed by a Palestinian or a West Bank settler, and wearing a yellow star on your arm to draw an equivalence between your own condition and the six million men, women and children murdered in the Shoah, is a desecration of the highest degree, no matter what your cause is. For all our efforts to understand the other – and believe me, I give my brothers and sisters far more rope than most, more than I myself sometimes think they deserve – we can not and should not stop expressing our outrage. Don’t forget that when Jacob blesses his twelve children in this week’s parashah, the first three children are redressed as much as they are blessed. Neither a father’s love nor a brother’s loyalty asks us to overlook outrageous and terrible things. Being Jewish, or Israeli, or religious does not grant you a free pass, even and especially not from members of your own Jewish family.

The challenge Israel faces is not so different from the challenge that Jacob understood as he blessed his children in this morning’s Torah reading. How do you create a collective and united sense of what it is to be a child of Israel, brothers to each other, and at the same time acknowledge that each sibling, each tribe, is wired differently and aspires to different things. “Come together that I may tell you,” Jacob says to the twelve children at his deathbed. Then he proceeds to give each child a blessing, and at the end, the text concludes, “And this is what their father said to them, each one their blessing.” The medieval commentator Saadia Gaon picks up on the poetry of the verse, expanding it to “Each one, according to the blessing appropriate to him.” Like the words of Torah at Mount Sinai, Jacob’s final testament to his children, though it came from a single source, was received according to the capacity of each listener. It required them to recognize their shared ancestry and destiny, their common fraternity, and their differences at one and the same time. It is an incredibly difficult message to communicate and infinitely more difficult to absorb and to actualize, but Jacob knew that the future health of Israel would be found in the brothers' ability to see themselves as individuals all the while respecting each other and working towards a greater unity.

This is exactly the challenge that Israel faces today. The state of Israel is the grandest experiment of all – realizing the dream of creating a Jewish nation capable of housing multiple expressions of Judaism, and yet, in the words of the Prime Minister this past week, also “a Western liberal democracy.” Neither a theocracy nor a wholly secular state, Israel has a responsibility to allow for freedom of Jewish expression – liberal, Haredi or none at all – and to see to it that these multiple and competing expressions are able to exist side-by-side supporting a common nation.

The fulfillment of this dream would be difficult enough on a good day. It is made all the more difficult due to a toxic political and religious system that enables particular tribes, at one and the same time, both to separate themselves from the Zionist whole and to exercise a coercive and thuggish sway over others. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it is not surprising that in such an environment, secular Israelis have found themselves being distanced from the Jewishness of the Jewish state. I recently read that the well-known Israeli novelist Yoran Kaniuk successfully petitioned the Israeli Interior Ministry to change his religion status from “Jewish” to “no religion.” Kaniuk’s petition was approved and he is now considered a Jew by nationality, but not by religion. Other are following his move, even giving rise to a new verb, l’hitkaniuk, “to Kaniuk oneself,” that is, to separate oneself from the Jewish religion. The non-religious are becoming anti-religious; the non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, and whether it is coming from faith or from fear, the modern day tribes of Israeli society are failing to sit down at a table to call each other brothers and sisters, children of the same Israel.

The future does not bode well. If present trends continue, there will be a demographic/democratic point of no return. Some people think we have already passed it. Being wired the way I am, I would rather think we need to recognize this moment for what it is. A Ben Gurion moment of big decisions and bold compromises that asks all of Israel to address the domestic, social, political, educational and religious issues that are being exacerbated with each passing day. The goal is not to create a secular state; the goal is not to create a theocracy. The goal is to create a place where in the words of the prophet Micah, “Each person will sit under their own vine knowing no fear.” Our plucky little “start up” nation needs to turn all that ingenuity on to itself and take the bold steps that will enable us to continue to be a light unto nations.

When we landed in Israel this past week, as many of you may have experienced, a particularly grating version of “Heiveinu Shalom Aleichem” began to play through the loudspeakers of the airplane. My daughter turned to me and complained, “Daddy, why are they playing this song, its so annoying, can’t someone turn it off?” I responded by asking, “How many Jewish countries are there in the world?”
“One.”
“And is there any other country or airline in the world that plays “Heiveinu Shalom Aleichem” when you land?”
“No.”
“So I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We are all going to listen to this music until they let us off the plane and we are going to be grateful that we get to live in a time that Israel exists and however obnoxious the background noise is, we will be grateful that we get to listen to it.”

And that is exactly what we did, and that is exactly what we, on this cramped and bumpy airplane ride of being proud Jews and proud Zionists need to do. We are going to work out a way to sit on this plane together and support the efforts of those with the same goals. We are going to accept the fact that we don’t always like the background music, but remember each and every day that for all our objections, we are privileged to live in the presence of the modern state of Israel. The goal is not to create a Jewish State that mirrors your precise sensibility. The goal is to create a place where brothers and sisters can sit and live and flourish side by side, in all their differences, enjoying the blessings and shared responsibility of what it means to be a child of Israel.