Rabbi Vicki Tuckman
Temple Micah/Erev Rosh Hashanah/ 2014
“Being in a Deep & Meaningful Relationship with Israel” (Part 1)
It was almost 20 years ago that I moved to Israel for the first year of my rabbinical school program. It was a requirement of Hebrew Union College that I was more than happy to fulfill. I had been married for exactly 1 year and Rob and I looked at our year abroad in the Jewish homeland as an adventure. Rob finished his master’s degree at Rider, we somehow moved all of our belongings out of our apartment, and – perhaps most important – we signed up for this new thing called “e-mail” and set up an account with AOL, to enhance the parentallyrequired, once-a-week Sunday phone call, that was quite expensive to make.
And… we found a loving (and tuna-fish filled) home for our two cats, Samson and
Delilah.
So off we went to live in Israel, a place I had first visited with my family when I was 15 years old and absolutely in love with every dark-haired, oliveskinned Israeli soldier we passed on every street corner. I had fallen in love. Not just with the soldiers, but with this amazing Jewish country. To me it was a land of history and miracles, sunshine and sweat to make the dessert bloom. I was raised on stories of this astounding place, a land flowing with milk and honey. My mother presented me with a narrative that made me feel like the luckiest girl in the world, because I had 2 homelands to live in, 2 places to offer me safety and security as a Jew. In the same breath I heard that some of her cousins were not lucky to have escaped Nazi Germany and that this further necessitated a safe and sovereign Jewish state. It was only when I was in Rabbinical school did I learn that
Theodore Herzl, the father of modern-day political Zionism, believed the exact same thing at the end of the 19 th Century.
The modern-state of Israel, Medinat Yisrael, came into being as a modern sovereign state in 1948. This birthing process actually began well over 3,000 years ago with our patriarch and matriarch, Abraham and Sarah. We are taught in
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our sacred text that Abraham heard a voice; a voice which he believed to be the voice of God. The belief that was put forth that day, monotheism, is still the heart and soul of Judaism. This voice said “Lech L’cha… Go forth from your father’s house, go forth from the land and the place that you have always known, and carve a new existence for yourself, based on the idea of Divine Unity, a belief in 1
God. Cease the making of idols and worshipping inanimate objects. Believe in what you cannot see, but what you know in your heart is right.
But politics and Bible lessons is not what greeted me that very first day living in Jerusalem back in the summer of ‘96. Like Abraham, I heard a voice. It was calling Rob. Over and over again. Rob. It was the very first day and Rob and I had allowed ourselves to sleep in after our 12 hour flight, with an amazing 7-hour layover in Amsterdam. So around 2 in the afternoon, squinting into the sun and stepping into a wall of dry desert heat, we walked down our street, which was strangely named Rechov Washington. As we rounded the corner towards a busy intersection, heading our schluffy caffeine-deprived heads towards Ben Yehuda
Street, we heard “Rob”. At first – I pretended not to hear it, but by the third time a man was moving towards us. Within minutes there were hugs and I greetings, from a colleague of Rob’s from a school they worked at together in New Jersey.
And then, because this is so Israel, he invited us to his wedding. I kid you not.
Now I knew beyond any reasonable doubt that I was not in America. For if I had bumped into some random friend on the street and invited him or her to my
Black Tie affair, my mother would have plotzed.
But I was in Israel. And in Israel – everyone is family. The way many Jews feel in America when they see unexpectedly see someone or something Jewish…
Imagine that Israel is a country of Jews, that it lives with a Jewish rhythm, acknowledges Jewish time, celebrates Jewish holidays, speaks a Jewish language, and operates with Jewish values at its very core. Clearly there are tremendous drawbacks; can you imagine an entire country filled with Jewish grandmothers?
Oy! Can you imagine if you got on a bus with your school-age child on a slightly cool day and they didn’t have a sweater? I won’t go on or some of you will have to call your therapist this week for an extra session.
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Israel is family. Israel is familiar. Israel feels to me like the most natural place to be in the world. But like any family there is imperfection and disagreement. There is strife between brothers and sisters; cousins that always threaten to ruin the family gathering, which sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t.
It is complicated to love Israel. I have given this a great of thought. It is hard to be an outsider and an insider at the same time. I think this is confusing to us as individuals, and it is certainly a difficult thing to explain to those of other religions.
I find myself stumbling over words and thoughts, because I don’t want to come off as someone who appears to have a blind love affair with Israel.
I do feel it is my duty, a sacred obligation, to teach American Jews to love
Israel. Here is an excerpt from a book authored by Lisa Grant and Ezra Kopelowitz titled “Israel Education Matters: A 21 st Century Paradigm for Jewish Education”.
“Ask a Jewish educator what the purpose of teaching Israel ought to be, and you are likely to get an answer something like, “to teach them to love Israel.”
Yet, can we really teach love? Doesn’t one have to have first-hand experience of someone or something in order to fall in love? Love is hardly a rational experience, at least at first. Amos Oz states in an oft-quoted poem that you cannot “educate to love.” Perhaps, he continues, you can “infect” someone with love, and there is ample evidence that this occurs, at least for the short-term, especially for many participants on organized trips to Israel.” He goes on to say that “love can be awakened, but not with a strong hand, not with an outstretched arm, and not with burning anger – rather through an approach of mutuality.” (Oz,
1981) Myth and miracle may have their place in igniting passion, but an enduring relationship is fostered through mutuality, through constant care, attention, including learning to adapt and compromise.
Lisa Grant goes on to state that “unfortuneately, the teaching of Israel in North
American Jewish education has been much more about myth and miracle that it has been about the work of creating a relatiuonship of mutuality based on deep knowing and rich understanding.” Teaching about Israel has been about
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promoting Israel’s survival. Furthermore, Israel becomes an instrument or tool to reinforce American Jewish identity and facilitate group cohesiveness. Jonathan
Sarna says that we educate American youth (and adults) in an overly rosy sort of way, that primary focus on the symbolic level so that our view of Israel is through rose-colored glasses of “Zion as it ought to be.” (Sarna, 1996). We create largerthan-life representations of Israel through episodic and rather superficial encounters. We – and I have to confess, by that I mean me as an Educator if I am taking full responsibility – “avoid problematizing or over-complicating in order to ensure a love of Israel. But by doing so, we are left without addressing the core question of why Israel is or should be significant in American Jewish life.” (p. 64)
There is not one person in this room who would disagree with the premise that we want to seek in ourselves, our children, our students – to be thoughtful and complex in their approach to Israel. Asking questions, examining issues from multiple perspectives, hearing various opinions – we must take this approach in our Israel education. I can teel you first-hand that this will complicate your relationship with Israel, but make no mistake, I am never fickle, and not should you be, in my commitment to Israel as a country and Israel as an emotional and spiritual homeland.
In some ways it is not like marriage. I am not the same person as my husband. There are times we disagree, take different approaches, hold tight to different values. But I never consider withholding my love, because I disagree with a conversation or action. I might get pouty, or throw some nasty words around, but then I go back to the drawing board because I am committed to the relationship. It is the relationship, and the energy that goes into it, that is sacred.
The model of Israel education that Lisa Grant and Ezra Kopelowitz propose in their book “proposes that love should not be the starting point, but rather the ultimate goal. And, it should not be a naïve and unreflective love, but rather a mature love that can endure even in the face of missteps and imperfection.
Cultivating mature love requires deep engagement with the complex and rich dimensions of Israel as a Land, People, and State. More importantly, mature love requires a commitment to the Jewish collective enterprise of building a shared
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future that recognizes our diversity of stories, experiences, beliefs, practices, and contributes to a thriving Jewish People and a better world. (p. 67)
Sum: It is said that Judaism stands on 3 pillars: God, Torah, Israel. Like a carefully-balanced stool, if one of the legs did not exist, we would topple over.
"To tell you that I am not anxious would be a lie. Any sound that slightly resembles a boom or a siren makes me jumpy. Yes, rockets are being targeted toward our area almost daily but once the rockets are intercepted life almost returns to normal.
The day after I experienced my first siren, I witnessed a dance recital in an open plaza. Toddlers struggled to remember the right order of the steps, distracted by the tulle of their tutus. Parents smiled at the efforts of their children, while other children ran around playing. I was shocked. During the ten minute walk from the IRAC office to the plaza, my heart was pounding with fear of being caught outside during a siren with nowhere to take cover. And these children were dancing.
Every time I freak out a little, I calm myself by remembering the sight of these children dancing. My heart is with those in southern Israel and Gaza whose daily lifes have been interrupted so severely. I long for the day that all children will once again be able to dance under the sun, fearing only a stain on their costume and not the shrapnel from a rocket."
Martina Fouquet is from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. She is a rising junior pursuing a politics degree at Princeton
University.
"The rockets are meant to terrorize the population, to disrupt normal life.
I'm in a crowded bomb shelter in the basement of my apartment building. The shelter is filled with bicycles, winter clothes, and people joking about the awkwardness of the situation and commenting on each other's choice of pajamas.
For me, Israel has always been a place of complexity and contradiction. Returning for the summer to intern at IRAC, where issues of religion and state are confronted through legal and social activism, this has never felt more apparent.
The two weeks since I’ve been here have been full of reunions with friends and family, visits to the desert, to the
Mediterranean, to the shuk for my groceries. These have also been weeks of riots, radicals, governmental threats, and sirens. Rockets collide with rock ets. And it all feels weirdly normal. Such is life. But this life is not the one I’m used to, and I’m just as afraid of the rockets as I am of becoming accustomed to the sirens that warn of their arrival.
This shouldn’t be the reality in Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, Ashkelon, the West Bank, Gaza, or anywhere. This shouldn’t be something we have to get used to, to normalize in order not to feel fear."
Laina Pauker is from New Haven, Connecticut. She is a senior at Clark University studying psychology and international development and social change.
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