Something to Talk About

It is not often that the line at the salad bar launches a sermon – but for the purposes of this morning I need to set the scene. It was just about two weeks ago that I was standing in line at the salad bar in an all-inclusive holiday resort in the Dominican Republic when a bathing suit clad man in front of me bellowed at his son, Yuval, atah honek et ha-tur, “Yuval, you are holding up  the line.” We have all been in the situation before; on vacation or traveling abroad we overhear a bit of Hebrew: the discovery of a surreptitious Israeli in our midst. Whether we speak a lot of Hebrew, or not very much at all, the Israeli’s linguistic “tell” triggers a sense of kinship in the Diaspora Jew. Who knew? Right here in the Dominican Republic! My daughter looked up at me smiling. She knew that we knew what he didn’t know yet – that we all belong to the same people. I am a friendly guy, he seemed to be a friendly guy. His children were bugging him, my children bug me. Neither of us had anywhere to go other than our beach chairs. Why not strike up a conversation with my Israeli kinsman?

The most interesting part about the whole incident, what I want to talk to you about this morning, is not what happened, but rather what didn’t happen. Despite the incredibly low barrier of entry for sociability, despite all the reasons to do or say something, the truth is I did and said absolutely nothing. We stood there next to each other in line, the moment passed and life continued as normal. He never knew that I knew. For him there was no incident to reflect on. As for me, as you can tell, I have thought about it often, about the conversation that never occurred.

I am deeply worried that American Jews and secular Israelis have nothing to talk about. I can speak a fumbling Hebrew, I have visited Israel more times than I can count, even lived there for extended periods. I privately and publicly advocate on Israel’s behalf and, by dint of my day job, can pick up the phone and call or exchange emails with a number of not insignificant representatives of the Jewish state. But put me in a bathing suit and stand me next to a 40-something secular Israeli, and I am not exactly sure what we have in common beyond watching our receding hairlines and cholesterol levels. What exactly is the Jewish conversation that I can engage him in? Are you interested in who will be the next head of UJA? Do you even know what UJA is? What about the future of Conservative Judaism? Have you read the Pew study, or even this week’s parashah? Even were we to talk about Israel, I wonder if we would have anything to say? Do you follow what is happening on college campuses regarding the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue? Are you concerned that American academic associations are boycotting Israeli academics? Do you care that I care about religious pluralism and Women of the Wall? Are any of your concerns mine? Or mine yours? Besides, had I “outed” myself as a Jew that day standing in line, would you feel any kinship? How do you – if you do at all – connect to the global Jewish people? I get it. You speak fluent Hebrew, served in the Israeli army and fulfilled the mitzvah of living in the land of Israel – no small things. But you don’t go to synagogue, aren’t involved in Jewish communal life, and show no indication of being a stakeholder in Diaspora Jewry. And while I work hard to support you politically and economically, to the best that I can tell, were North American Jewry, God forbid, to melt away like the polar ice cap, you would continue to go about your business as if nothing had happened. Despite my tone, my point is not to make judgments. God bless secular Israelis, especially the atheists. I am simply trying to paint the demographic situation as I see it. Six million Jews here, six million Jews there; many of the Israelis are secular. None of us really have much to say to other as Jews.

In order to understand how we got here, I need to pull the camera back to a wide angle, both philosophically and historically. First, philosophically. Precisely eighty years ago, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan stated a thesis in a now-famous book called Judaism as a Civilization. He wasn’t the first to state this thesis, but he said it best and said it often, and so we think of him when we cite it. Kaplan contended that Judaism takes shape according to the context in which it functions. Jewish ritual, theology, music, group identity – everything – is informed by the Jewish community practicing that Judaism. And Jews, necessarily, are products of the time and place in which they live. So the Judaism of Alexandrian Jewry was different from the Judaism of the Middle Ages, different from that of the Spanish Golden Age, eighteenth-century Ashkenaz, twentieth-century Iraq and so on and so forth. All these Jews were Jewish, but their “Judaisms” looked very different, because they functioned in different contexts. The soil if you will, in which the Jewish neshama took root, inevitably nurtured and determined the Jewish expression that blossomed.

The thesis is clear, pretty straightforward and even a bit obvious, but you can see why it is important in order to understand me and my proverbial (or actual) Israeli counterpart. We are both Jews, but I have grown up in this place called America and he in Israel and so naturally – our “Judaisms” will be very different.

Here is where it gets very interesting – and historical. My new friend and colleague Dr. Einat Wilf recently brought to my attention some articles by Dr. Shlomo Fischer of the Jewish People Policy Institute (http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/shlomo-fischer/). Dr. Fischer explains that ever since the Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom, America’s DNA has encouraged the ideals of freedom of expression and religious pluralism. With the exception of a few Tea Party types, the Protestant brand of American religion, for the most part, has understood that while religious values may or even must inform the public square (think Martin Luther King, Jr.), the separation of church and state ensures that Catholic or Jew, majority or minority, all of us, may practice our faith in any way we choose, if we choose to do so at all. From this American soil, as it were, grew American Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal, Jubus, Debbie Friedman Jews, Carlebach Jews, all sorts of Jews. The promise of America is the promise that you can practice your Judaism as you see fit. In fact, as Americans we will “go to the mat” to protect that very right.

The forces that shaped Jewish life in Israel could not have been more different. First of all, we need to remember that at its core, political Zionism was a secular answer to the problem of being a Jew in the modern world. The secular Zionism of Theodore Herzl, though it was a fulfillment of a multi-millennial Jewish longing was also a rupture with everything that came before. Israel meant that a Jew could be a Jew without being “Jew-ish,” a national identity replacing a religious one. Were there religious Zionists? Of course there were. Lots of them. But in many respects, the establishment of the State of Israel was a rejection of the Diaspora religious Jew. In a story told in many histories of Israel, for reasons of political expediency, at the founding of the State, Ben-Gurion farmed out the religious ministries to a chief rabbinate whose religious sensibility represented neither his own nor that of the vast majority of Israeli society. Ever since, according to Fischer, for secular Israelis, the chief rabbinate and its functionaries are there merely to provide sherutei dat, “religious services” – public utilities supported by taxes akin to the electric or gas company. “Let them,” the thinking goes, “officiate at the wedding or funeral; then give the rabbi a tip and file it away as an annoyance equal to paying the public television tax.” The point is that your typical secular Israeli neither cares about the chief rabbinate, nor for that matter, understands why Diaspora Jews are so upset about it. They just want to get on with living their lives; that was, after all, the whole point of Zionism in the first place.

To put it even more provocatively, according to this line of thinking, even suggesting that the Judaism of American Jews and that of secular Israelis are drifting apart is going one step too far. Secular Israelis may be Jewish in a technical sense, but their identities are national, not religious. I am not sure if I totally agree, but it does explain why when secular Israelis leave Israel they don’t understand or associate with conventional expressions of Diaspora Jewish life. Sometimes they walk into my office when they fall in love with a non-Jew, but for the most part, aside from the chance of bumping into them in the East Village or at a David Broza concert at the 92nd St Y, odds are that secular Israelis in the Diaspora are totally disconnected from American Judaism. My Jewish concerns are not their concerns, nor are theirs mine. There was a time that we shared the responsibility to memorialize the Shoah, but that memory has been internalized differently by us, and with every passing year, recedes as a common point of reference.

Lest American Jews think we get a free pass, there is much soul-searching we need to do. Going to an AIPAC or J Street convention, important as it is – and it is – is for far too many a compensatory act to make up for not having an actual relationship with Israelis or a substantive Jewish identity. Start Up Nation may be a terrific a book, but there is something terribly wrong if we think focusing on Israel’s hi-tech industry is an act of Jewish identity building. Downloading Waze onto your iPhone because it is an Israeli start-up doth not ensure Jewish continuity ! Somewhere along the way, American Jews have come to believe that their important and often critical work on behalf of Israel is the same as having relationships with Israelis or even worse, with Judaism itself.

And so we are back to where we started: American Jews and secular Israelis with nothing to say to one another. If you are wondering why I am leaving religious Israelis out of it, it is because I picked on them last week. But just because we are eyes wide open to the Jewish world as it is, doesn’t mean we should, for one second, abdicate our commitment to the Jewish world as it ought to be. Any vision of a robust Jewish peoplehood must include a dialogue between the two major centers of the Jewish people. We can and should continue to send as many people to Israel as possible, young and old, and Israelis can and should create similar opportunities to engage with and understand Diaspora Jewry. Bridges must be built, new Birthrights imagined, exchanges and cultural projects undertaken. In an internet/skype era there is no excuse not to have dialogue. Locally, there is so much we can do. We talk all the time about outreach to the unaffiliated. You would think that a synagogue with an Israeli Hazzan might come up with one or two ideas to tap into the reservoir of Israeli expats running around New York City. How amazing would it be if Park Avenue Synagogue didn’t just have an interfaith trialogue with Muslims and Christians, but also had an “intra-Jewish dialogue” with Israelis living in New York City? There is so much we can do, so many ways to build bridges, and so few reasons why we wouldn’t at least give it a try.

The first, and for that matter, the only time Jewish identity took expression in a vacuum was in this week’s parashah, when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai. The midrash famously asks why God gave the Jewish people the Torah neither in the Egyptian diaspora, nor in the Land of Israel. Why was it given in the midbar, the wilderness? The answer is that the Torah – or, if you will, Judaism – is not contingent on geography. It belongs to all Jews no matter where they may be. Since Mount Sinai we have all been very busy with the Torah, and done different things with it, no one expression better than the other. The test for authenticity and legitimacy is found in the ability of Jews in one context to give Judaism vibrancy while encouraging other Jews to do the same on terms of their own. All the while, in all its variations, we remember we are am ehad, one people, in dialogue and partnership, equal and passionate stakeholders in a shared destiny.