The debate about whether Israel is, or is not the center of the Jewish world is hereby declared over. The good news for Israel is that it won: it is indeed the center of the Jewish world. The bad news is that it doesn't matter anymore.
Israel's victory was sealed in the midst of the intifada. It happened in the most subtle ways – when Diaspora Jews who were otherwise uninvolved in Jewish life were asked for their opinions on the conflict by work colleagues; when CNN forced us to ask complex questions about the nature of our Jewishness simply by beaming images of Israel into our living rooms; when new books about Israel – like Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel – had a habit of finding their way into our lives. Today, for good or for bad, Israel has a way of impacting the life of Diaspora Jews.
And yet, wider sociological trends have simultaneously made the whole notion of centrality completely obsolete. However we may wish to construct the Jewish world in our hearts and minds, the sociological changes of the past decade are forcing us to redefine the very way in which we see it. Globalization has created a radically different world to the one we are used to, and in this new era the very duality of Israel/Diaspora ceases to make sense.
In a global world, Israel can no longer be in the center. It can no longer even be primus inter pares. In a global world, nothing holds center stage. Instead, all places, all people are linked to one another in cyberspace, and all vie with one another for attention. No single place holds more significance or value than another. The potential for creativity and innovation exists everywhere and in everyone. In the new technological age, nothing is central and everything is central simultaneously. In short, today Israel is both as extraordinary and as extraneous as everything else.
In policy terms, this forces us to think in new ways. If every Jew and every Jewish community now has the potential to influence and be influenced by others, we have to develop new methodologies to really benefit from this. We have to find ways to maximize the unique qualities of individual Jewish communities, educators and thinkers and allow as many Jews as possible access to them. Conceptually, we need to reconstruct our understanding of Israel as medina (state) or eretz (land) – a place, a resource, a classroom – to include the notion of Israel as am (people).
What does this mean in reality? When we think about Israel Experience programs, we should move beyond the Diaspora notion of sending kids to Israel to get their injection of Jewishness to bring back home, or the Israeli notion of bringing Diaspora kids to Israel to bolster tourism or aliyah. Instead, we have to think about how to bring Jews together from Israel and the Diaspora, in Israel or the Diaspora, in order to learn from one another, and to work together to strengthen the Jewish People.
When we think about shlichut, the emissaries Israel traditionally sends to Diaspora communities, we should no longer simply think of Israeli educators in the Diaspora teaching about Israel and encouraging aliyah. Instead, we have to start seeing shlichim as Jewish educators who come from any Jewish community, and go to any other Jewish community. Shlichim could be American Jews in England and vice-versa, Canadian Jews in France and vice-versa, and Israeli Jews in the Diaspora, and, dare I say it, vice versa too.
And when we think about organizational partnerships, we have to reach beyond our immediate community and beyond Israel, and strategize how our institution – our synagogue, JCC, seminary, school, etc. – can both enhance, and be enhanced by individuals, institutions and communities throughout the Jewish world. The overarching principle is that every Jew matters, and every Jew – wherever he or she happens to live – has something to learn from and to teach to others.
This is the new paradigm. It no longer positions the land or the State of Israel at the center of the Jewish world, because, sociologically at least, that notion is becoming increasingly meaningless. It rather positions the people of Israel – the social capital of the Jewish People as a whole – at the heart of the Jewish world, and asks all of us to strive to learn from, and contribute to the collective task of strengthening the Jewish People. In this way, we will encourage a global cross-fertilization of ideas and build a real sense of commonality, not simply for the benefit of Israel, but for the benefit of Jews everywhere.
(Also published on ynet.com in July 2005
- see: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3120533,00.html,
in the November 2005 edition of the KolDor Review
- see: http://www.koldor.org/imagez/1132069125.pdf, p.10),
and originally in Sh'ma Magazine in December 2004)
Monday, August 1, 2005
Friday, April 22, 2005
Acharei Mot: Struggling With Difficult Texts
Homosexuality is an "abomination". Homosexuals "shall be cut off from among their people". So states this week's parsha, Acharei Mot, in Leviticus 18, verses 22 and 29.
Is this true? If it is, should we understand it literally? If it's not, what does that say about the Torah – traditionally understood as the word of God dictated to Moses? How should we deal with such challenging components of our heritage?
In modern times at least, there have been three typical responses. The first has been to read the text literally – to shun, reject and demean Jewish homosexuals, and to turn their lives into the kind of living hell that Sandi Simcha Dubowski managed to capture so well in his ground-breaking film, Trembling Before God. The second has been to effectively remove the text from the living tradition – to exclude it from the sections of Torah that are read in the synagogue on the grounds that it is obscurantist and immoral, and simply doesn't square with western liberal sensibilities. The third has been to continue to include it within the tradition, but not to talk about it too much because it's one of those tricky parts of Torah that, frankly, feels slightly unpleasant.
All three responses are problematic. If we always read Jewish texts literally, and blindly follow the letter of the law, Judaism becomes wooden and inflexible, a series of ideas frozen in the past and imposed on the present. Halacha becomes like the actor who rigidly follows stage instructions without putting anything of him or herself into the performance. At its worst, it turns into fundamentalism, rejecting anything other than itself as falsehood. However, if we always reject those Jewish texts that are problematic or foolish to the contemporary heart and mind, Judaism becomes disconnected from reality, a series of moral or intellectual ideals which have no Jewish means of being actualized through regular collective ritual. In this context, bowdlerized Judaism starts to feel perfect, ethereal, and almost other-worldly, and, as it spiritually elevates itself, it loses contact with the complexities, struggles and veracity of day-to-day existence. But then again, if we continue to include difficult texts but try not to talk about them too much, we become dishonest both with ourselves and with Judaism. The metaphorical elephant sits in the centre of our world, and is ignored until it eventually and inevitably stampedes its ways through everything we hold to be important.
There is a fourth option. It is neither to embrace the difficult texts within Judaism as absolute truth, nor to reject them as absolute falsehood, nor to ignore them as absolute taboo. Rather it is to regard them as life-enhancing elements within our rich, complex and challenging living tradition. In the same way that our lives are often beset with difficulties and problems which, confronted constructively, help us to grow and develop as human beings, so the more problematic elements of Judaism can serve to ennoble us too. We needed slavery to understand freedom; we needed exile to understand statehood; we needed dependence to understand independence. Ultimately the challenge of contemporary Judaism may be less about the question of what to include or exclude from our tradition, and more about how we continually grapple with, and respond to what actually exists. Only through that struggle will we grow, both as Jews and as human beings.
(Also published at www.limmud.org)
Is this true? If it is, should we understand it literally? If it's not, what does that say about the Torah – traditionally understood as the word of God dictated to Moses? How should we deal with such challenging components of our heritage?
In modern times at least, there have been three typical responses. The first has been to read the text literally – to shun, reject and demean Jewish homosexuals, and to turn their lives into the kind of living hell that Sandi Simcha Dubowski managed to capture so well in his ground-breaking film, Trembling Before God. The second has been to effectively remove the text from the living tradition – to exclude it from the sections of Torah that are read in the synagogue on the grounds that it is obscurantist and immoral, and simply doesn't square with western liberal sensibilities. The third has been to continue to include it within the tradition, but not to talk about it too much because it's one of those tricky parts of Torah that, frankly, feels slightly unpleasant.
All three responses are problematic. If we always read Jewish texts literally, and blindly follow the letter of the law, Judaism becomes wooden and inflexible, a series of ideas frozen in the past and imposed on the present. Halacha becomes like the actor who rigidly follows stage instructions without putting anything of him or herself into the performance. At its worst, it turns into fundamentalism, rejecting anything other than itself as falsehood. However, if we always reject those Jewish texts that are problematic or foolish to the contemporary heart and mind, Judaism becomes disconnected from reality, a series of moral or intellectual ideals which have no Jewish means of being actualized through regular collective ritual. In this context, bowdlerized Judaism starts to feel perfect, ethereal, and almost other-worldly, and, as it spiritually elevates itself, it loses contact with the complexities, struggles and veracity of day-to-day existence. But then again, if we continue to include difficult texts but try not to talk about them too much, we become dishonest both with ourselves and with Judaism. The metaphorical elephant sits in the centre of our world, and is ignored until it eventually and inevitably stampedes its ways through everything we hold to be important.
There is a fourth option. It is neither to embrace the difficult texts within Judaism as absolute truth, nor to reject them as absolute falsehood, nor to ignore them as absolute taboo. Rather it is to regard them as life-enhancing elements within our rich, complex and challenging living tradition. In the same way that our lives are often beset with difficulties and problems which, confronted constructively, help us to grow and develop as human beings, so the more problematic elements of Judaism can serve to ennoble us too. We needed slavery to understand freedom; we needed exile to understand statehood; we needed dependence to understand independence. Ultimately the challenge of contemporary Judaism may be less about the question of what to include or exclude from our tradition, and more about how we continually grapple with, and respond to what actually exists. Only through that struggle will we grow, both as Jews and as human beings.
(Also published at www.limmud.org)
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