Thoughts during Eicha

I'm home from Israel now, but here and there I might continue to use this blog to post Judaism and Israel related musings. On that note, here's something I wrote yesterday during the fast day of Tisha B'Av, commemorating the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temples.

I’ve never really connected to Tisha B’Av. The first time I observed it was the summer in high school when I was in Jerusalem. I sat listening to Eicha with my bare feet on the Jerusalem stones at the Kotel, and I thought, “Here we all are, a giant community at the Kotel, what are we crying about?” That same year, my Haredi cousin Yaakov gave a d’var on why we mourn for the Temple—it’s not the just the physical Beis HaMigdash we mourn and want to return to, he said, but the harmonious community and perfect observance that existed in the times of the Temple. But I knew that things weren’t so great during Temple times, like Yaakov described—weren’t Jews participating in idol worship and sacrificing their children to Molech? The most I ever related to Tisha B’Av was the summer I was in Tanzania, the only Jew in a place where most people didn’t even know what a Jew was.

So this year, I was surprised that as I sat on the floor to listen to Eicha last night, I suddenly connected on a powerful level. Maybe it’s because of Israel’s growing international isolation, or because I just spent a year in Israel becoming acutely aware of intrareligious tensions and the frictions and fissures in Jewish society, I don’t know. I’m pretty skeptical of mashiach and the rebuilding of the Temple—but if there is a mashiach, I don’t think we’ll merit his or her visit any time soon. Imagine the Temple rebuilt—what sort of prayer service would we hold there? (The mechitza question barely scratches the surface.) The idea of all Jews coming to worship in the same place sounds like a joke, a recipe for fighting and violence.

While I don’t believe that my cousin’s picture-perfect description of Temple times ever existed, I realized last night that it represents the ideal, God’s original vision for what could have happened. And so Tisha B’Av became, for me, a way of mourning just how far we’ve fallen short.

Our tradition teaches us that Jerusalem was destroyed because of sinat chinam (baseless hatred) among Jews. This Tisha B’Av, when I think about sinat chinam and the destruction of Jerusalem, I fast because:

· a conversion bill is currently under consideration in Israel that delegitimizes thousands of Jews-by-choice and non-Orthodox Jews, denies them rights in Israel, and threatens to alienate Diaspora Jewry

· a woman was attacked in a Tel Aviv bus station this past May by another Jew for having marks from tefillin on her arm

· of all of the women (and men) who are victims of mevasseret get (agunot)

· 30% of Jews and over 60% of Arabs in Jerusalem live under the poverty line

· 2 women have been arrested for carrying a Torah at the Kotel, and women praying out loud as a group at the Kotel have met verbal abuse and chairs thrown at them

· of the increasing isolation and criticism of Israel from the rest of the world, and Israel’s actions which have led to that isolation and criticism

· some Jews think it’s ok to kick Palestinians out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem

· of all of the frustrations my Peace and Conflict classmates expressed on Yom Yerushalayim; how even as we celebrate a “united Jerusalem,” it is so far from being reunited (there’s segregated bus lines, only half of the city gets trash pickup, residents of different faiths don’t interact, etc etc…)

· Jews in Hebron can teach their children to throw rocks at non-Jewish children, and be respected by some other Jews

· Israel is a top participant in human tracking and sex trade

· many Jews today reject Judaism without learning enough to know what they’re rejecting—not that I think every Jew should embrace Judaism necessarily, but I do believe people should make informed decisions

· of the amount of scorn, anger, and hatred expressed by Jews of all denominations towards Jews of other denominations

No religion or people is perfect, but there are a lot of places we as the Jewish people need to improve. I’m sure you may have more issues to add to my list. So last night, when I said the words, “Turn toward us, O Lord, and we will turn to you; Renew our days as in days of old” at the end of Eicha, I thought not of returning to the times of the Temple, but of working to improve the shortcomings of our own communities and the Jewish people as a whole.

The Jerusalem "Miss List"

[Random fun fact I just discovered: the Brussels airport has Greek Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic chapels, a mosque, a synagogue (complete with an ark and a full set of Talmud Bavli!), and a Humanist counselor. :-)]

Every time I leave a place, I come up with a list of the things I’ll miss, and the things I won’t. I start doing it subconsciously as I’m mentally preparing to leave, and then once I realize I’m doing it I sit down and consciously add to the list. To end my blog, I thought I’d share the list for Jerusalem that I’ve come up with over the past couple weeks:

What I will miss
• The falafel—where else can I grab a yummy and sort-of healthy lunch for only 10 shekels (<$3)?
• The prayer options—approximately 12 synagogues/minyanim within a 15 minute walk
• Being in a place where even the security guard at the bank is saying psalms/learning the Torah portion (I couldn’t tell which) on a Friday morning
• The sense of כלל ישראל(community of the Jewish people); the feeling that complete strangers genuinely care about my well being
• Having so such easy access to so much Jewish knowledge
• The tomatoes, and the peppers, and the hummus
• The mangos, passionfruit and plums in the summer; the pomellos in the winter
• Speaking Hebrew
• My hevrutas (study partners)/hevruta learning in general
• The view from the Tayelet (a park by my home)

What I won’t miss
• The cats—the ones that jump out of dumpsters as I walk by, and especially the wailing and yowling ones who are fighting/mating at night
• The lack of diversity—I rarely interact with non-Jews
• Doing sponga (mopping, Israeli-style, with a squeegee and rags)— it’s so labor intensive!
• The friction between haredim and datim and hilonim
• Being instantly labeled by what I wear (I try not to wear hats and skirts on the same day lest I appear modern Orthodox and married)
• The bureaucracy and inefficiency— “Hello, welcome to our 24 hour service; we are now closed” (true story), how bills don’t come regularly and everything takes forever
• Living in a (self-)segregated city; separate bus lines, separate neighborhoods
• Waiting in line at the grocery store

--------
I've now just posted these last two posts (written in the Ben Gurion and Brussels airports) from the Jet Blue terminal in JFK, where I'm waiting for my flight to Syracuse in another 2 hours. It's really hard to believe I'm in New York. But on the other hand, I look around at the people in the airport, and I know instantly that I'm not in Israel (it's some combination of diversity, style of dress, and lack of Hebrew that does it, I think). Hello, USA.

Bethlehem

I’m writing this from the Ben Gurion airport, where duty-free prices are in dollars, almost everyone speaks to me in English, and (except for a disproportionate number of seminary girls), it already feels like I’m not in Israel any more.

-------------------------------------
Yesterday, my friend Yael and I went to Bethlehem. I’d been there when my dad visited a few weeks ago and wanted some more time to explore; Yael wanted a chance to visit Bethlehem before she makes aliyah (becomes an Israeli citizen) and is prohibited from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank.

We took a Palestinian bus ten minutes south from my apartment, where we got off and walked through the checkpoint into Bethlehem. Immediately on the other side, it feels like another country—cab drivers accosted us and vendors shouted about their wares in Arabic. We stop to ask directions and are greeted with, “Welcome to Palestine.”

First, we walk along the separation/security/apartheid wall/fence/barrier (pick your choice of words, though here it was most definitely a concrete wall). The checkpoint where we entered Bethlehem is right next to Rachel (the matriarch)’s Tomb, a Jewish holy site, so the wall here makes an indented bubble into the city in order that Jews can visit the tomb and still be on the Israeli side. We walk along the Bethlehem side, which is covered graffiti—some of it beautiful, some of it mundane, some of it profound and moving. One restaurant directly across from the wall has taken advantage of its location by spraypainting its menu on the wall. I observe how that the wall goes right up against Palestinian homes, but not against the Israeli settlements we see in the distance. A man driving by with his daughter sees us photographing the wall, and asks us what we think of it and where we’re from. He responds, “I’m from here, from Bethlehem. We are caged; they caged us with this wall.”

We made our way to the Old City of Bethlehem, next to the Church of the Nativity, where we wandered around for a bit before entering the church. We pushed our way into the hot and crowded underground grotto where Jesus was born in a manger. I am struck by the peaceful quiet inside the church—even in the crowded grotto, people are quiet and respectful of one another and of the space.

Back outside, we see several posters of militant-looking men holding guns. They remind me of the photographs I’ve heard that suicide bombers take (though I haven’t verified that this is actually done) before they go blow themselves up. We ask a few people about them—and are told that they are pictures of Bethlehem residents who were killed when Israeli troops entered Bethlehem. After they were killed, posters were put up of them looking militant to raise public opinion that they were martyrs who were fighting for the Palestinian people. I’m not sure what to think.

We take a cab back to the checkpoint, where this time we wait in line for probably a half an hour before being ushered through with our American passports. Back on the Israeli side, we decide to visit Rachel’s tomb. We're not allowed in on foot, but catch a tremp (hitchhike) with an ultra-orthodox couple. After passing through the gate, we drive for a few minutes on a road that is surrounded on both sides by concrete walls (no graffiti on this side); I feel incredibly uncomfortable. Inside the tomb building, Yael points out that women are praying facing the grave, despite the clear marker on the wall indicating the direction to Jerusalem. I decide to pray, and take out my siddur (prayerbook), but I stare at the words without reading them. I think about the concrete wall on either side of me and the people who live on the other side of it; about the women who seem (to me) to be praying directly to Rachel herself. The tradition tells us that Rachel is crying because her children (the Jews) have been expelled from Israel; I wonder if now she is crying because of how her children and their neighbors have failed to get along. This doesn’t feel like a place in which to pray. I stare blankly at my siddur again and then put it back in my bag.

Throughout the afternoon, Yael and I discussed how close Bethlehem is to Jerusalem (less than 2 miles, or about twice as far from my apartment as I am from Yael’s), and how far away it feels. A combination of factors—that there’s a concrete wall in between, that separate Arab buses go there, and that Israelis don’t and can’t visit there—set up a mental barrier in addition to the physical one that makes Bethlehem seem much further away than it really is.

סגירה Closing

The more of my friends who leave, the more it's finally sinking in that I'm leaving.

Yesterday morning, I closed my bank account. As corny as it sounds, it made me surprisingly sad. I remember how opening a bank account at the beginning of the year was so exciting, and felt like a real, concrete step towards living here. Closing it made it really feel like the end.

It's especially hard to leave Israel, a place that so many people believe is the Jewish homeland. In the same way that at the beginning of the year, my bank teller (a complete stranger) wanted to make sure I was settling in ok and that my apartment-mates were nice and that I had where to go for Shabbat meals, complete strangers are genuinely sad to hear that I'm leaving. Every time I mention to an Israeli that I'm going back to the States, I have to justify why I'm leaving and why I don't want to make aliyah (become an Israeli citizen).

All three bank tellers I talked to yesterday morning said it's חבל (a waste/shame) that I'm leaving and asked if I'm coming back.

And "אם אשכחך" is still my brain's background music, for the past week and a half. Only two more days.

Only in Jerusalem

Some anecdotes of my past few weeks:

1. Shavuot. This is the holiday in which we celebrate and commemorate God's giving of the Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai. It's also one of three holidays (Pesach/Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot) on which Jews were obligated to visit and bring offerings to the Temple before it was destroyed. It's traditional to stay up all night studying Torah, and then between 4 and 5am, thousands of Jews pour into the Old City to go to the Kotel/Western Wall. I headed there too, but a little late--unfortunately by the time I got close to the Old City around 5:45, few people were still heading in, and some were even heading out. It was kind of impressive to see so many people at the Kotel, but not exactly the best environment to pray in (not to mention on the women's side it was impossible to be part of a prayer group or to hear the megillah read). So, I prayed the first part of morning services there, and then headed to Robinson's arch nearby where there was an egalitarian group and I could actually be part of a community.

2. I stop to ask an older, religious-looking lady on the street for directions. She doesn't know, but she asks:
"את מתחתנת? Are you getting married?"
Me: "לא. No."
"למה לא? Why not?"
"Because I haven't found anyone to marry yet."
"Do you want me to find you someone to marry?"
"No, thanks."
"How old are you, 25?"
"No, 23."
"Oh, that's ok then. You still have time." (pause) "Are you sure you don't want me to look for someone for you?"
"No, that's ok. I'll look for a husband on my own, thanks."

3. Yesterday morning, on the bus, the man across from me is holding an adorable 6-month-old baby. A woman in the aisle stops to berate him for taking a baby that age on a bus without a stroller, or something like that, I don't completely understand. He smiles, and thanks her for the advice, she moves on. Moments like this are common in Israeli society, and I never quite know what to make of them. Is it that Israelis are pushy and nosy and interfering? (Taboo personal questions in the States, such as "how much do you pay for rent?" are completely commonplace here.) Or is it just that Israelis genuinely care for each other and want to look out for one another? Probably its a bit of both.

----------------------
In other news, Pardes has ended, both of my roommates have left, and I myself leave a week from today. There've been a lot of goodbyes in the past few days. I wish I had something profound, or at least interesting, to say about the end of the year, but I don't really. Somehow it still hasn't hit me yet...though every so often I'm able to realize it a tiny bit, and "אם אשכחך" (Psalm 137:5, "If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither") has been going around my head a lot recently.

Cohanim to the Left, Women to the Right: Tzfat/Mt. Meron on Lag B'Omer

Have you ever...

Sung Shabbat songs in a old, empty cistern with incredible acoustics?
Ridden on a crowded bus full of charedim, with yeshiva bachors drinking vodka and singing niggunim the whole way?
Been somewhere where there were separate sidewalks for men, women, and cohanim?
Ridden on a segregated bus (women in the back)?

These are some of the highlights of my weekend in Tzfat. Unfortunately my camera and my computer are currently in an fight and not speaking to one another, so I can't upload pictures--hopefully I'll be able to put them up another time. This post is full of Jew-jargon, so I'm putting a glossary at the bottom.

On Thursday night, I went with about 20 other Pardes students to a program at Livnot, in Tzfat (Safed in English). On Friday afternoon, we saw a parade with an ancient Torah in honor of the holiday of Lag B'Omer (more on that later.) A crowd of people surrounded the Torah and slowly danced it down the street, with musicians and a car blaring music. People would go up to the Torah and tie scarves onto it--I have no idea why--and so the Torah was completely covered in scarves.

Friday night, I was looking forward to Kabbalat Shabbat in Tzfat, the city in which the Kabbalat Shabbat service was written, but I was disappointed. We were staying in the Old City, which was overflowing with charedim (especially hasidim) who had come for Lag B'Omer. I've never seen so many streimels in my life. A few of us went to an outdoor Kabbalat Shabbat service happening in the square. It was exciting to be praying communally with the largest group of Jews I've ever prayed with...except that on the women's side, not a lot of praying was happening. Most women were talking, I couldn't hear the shaliach tzibur (prayer leader), and it was getting too dark to see my siddur (prayer book). So, after Kabbalat Shabbat, I gave up, wandered around in a futile attempt to find a synagogue that didn't have people spilling out into the streets, and finally went back to Livnot to finish praying on my own.

Saturday I synagogue-hopped. I went to shacharit at the Berav ("Carlebach") shul, and then met up with a couple of girls to walk to the Hungarian shul in a different part of the city where we were meeting our lunch host family, where I prayed musaf. Our lunch was nice and our hosts were very sweet. They had a fun family custom of eating ice cream and dessert first, then completely switching over the table to serve the meat meal. (Having dairy after meat isn't kosher, but dairy before meat as fine as long as its not the same meal.) That afternoon I went to mincha at a famous Sephardi synagogue, which was beautiful.

Saturday afternoon I went for a walk with several friends to the Tzfat forest and around the city. We visited the citadel, which had a great view. There was a grate in the ground, and the sounds of men singing in the cistern below were rising up from it. We went down into the cistern, and sang, too. The accoustics were amazing (it reminded me of singing in the dome of St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal and into the well in San Gimignano, Italy with the Ithaca Children's Choir). On our way out of the cistern, there was a whole group of teenage boys in long black coat-robes and short pants with white tights (kneesocks?) who asked if there were any other women inside before they entered--many ultra-orthodox men follow kol isha, the prohibition against hearing women (other than their wives) singing.

Saturday night was Lag B'Omer. Literally, it means the 33rd (the letters ל"ג, lag, stand for the number 33) day of the Omer, which is a count of 50 days between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot (the "Festival of Weeks" in English). The 33rd day of the Omer is celebrated for two reasons--according to the Talmud, it is the day a divine plague that had been killing Rabbi Akiva's students stopped, and it is also observed as the anniversary of the RaShBI's death (RaShBI is an acronym for Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai). The RaShBi is buried on Mt Meron, and thousands of Charadim visit his grave on Lag B'Omer. It is also customary to light bonfires--as the story goes, the RaShBI was hiding from the Romans in a cave, learning Torah by a bonfire. In order to keep his location hidden from the Romans, local kids lit fires in all of the caves, so the Romans couldn't tell which cave was the RaShBI's.

I went to Mt. Meron. Even the bus ride there was crazy--it was packed with people, and a group of American yeshiva guys were passing around shots of vodka and singing songs the whole way. Some pretty non-traditional nigguns (melodies), too: one that sounded like a Russian drinking song, one to the tune of the French national anthem, and my favorite, to the tune of "She'll be comin' round the mountain,"--"We'll be goin' to the Beis HaMigdash when Mashiach comes!"

Mt. Meron itself felt like a giant music festival, except where everyone was Charedi. According to news sources, there were 300,000 people there between the end of Shabbat and 3am, and a total 500,000 by the end of Lag B'Omer the next day. And yes, there were separate sidewalks for men, women, and Cohanim (to avoid the gravesite). There were giant bleachers set up of men watching the bonfire--entire rows of men dancing arm-in-arm on bleachers. I didn't go into the grave itself (too crowded for me), but a friend who was on the men's side said he had to cross his arms out in front of his chest so as to be able to breathe.

That night, back at Livnot, I could see the whole top of the mountain from a distance, all lit up by bonfires.

The next day, I had planned to take the bus from Tzfat to Jerusalem, but there weren't any buses; the roads were closed to everything but Meron traffic. Instead I had to go back to Meron (in jeans this time), where I took a Haredi bus to Jerusalem. The bus was a segregated bus, with men in front and women in back. I ended up sitting on the border of the men's and women's sections, and it turned out that the last person who needed a seat was a man and the only seat open was next to me. To my surprise, (instead of rearranging the men's section to put a kid next to me,) he took the seat. To my even greater surprise, he started a conversation with me. He was an American yeshiva student about my age; we talked about how I like learning gemarra (in very Orthodox circles, women don't study it), what I think of Obama's health care plan, and Obama himself (Yehuda liked him better than Bush, but wouldn't elaborate). Halfway to Jerusalem, the bus stopped in an open field-turned-rest stop that was filled with busloads of Charedim--an ordinary rest stop would not have been capable of supporting all of the Meron-bound traffic.

All-in-all, quite a surreal experience. After my 3.5 hour bus ride, it took a couple hours to adjust back to non-charedi Jerusalem life.

-------------------
Glossary:
Kabbalat Shabbat: a special service on Friday night to welcome Shabbat, before the regular evening service
charedim: Ultra-Orthodox Jews
hassidim: one part of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, with many sects
streimel: a type of fur hat some Haredim wear (see the wickepedia link here)
shacharit: the morning prayer service
mussaf: an additional service for Shabbat after the morning service
mincha: afternoon service
Sephardi: branch of Judaism from primarily Spanish and Arabic speaking countries; as opposed to Ashkenazim (like me and most American Jews), whose families came from Eastern Europe.
Beis (or Beit) haMigdash: the Temple, as in the Temple in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount; in this case referring to the 3rd Temple which will supposedly be rebuilt when the Messiah comes.
Mashiach: the Messiah
Cohanim: Jewish priests, descendants of Aaron, Moses's brother in the Bible. They still have some special functions in the Jewish community today, and are supposed to avoid dead bodies/graves.

Some (very) random reflections

I still need to write about the second half of my Passover break, but I wanted to share with you some very brief and very random reflections I've had over the past few weeks.
-----------------------------------------------
A few days after Passover break, my hevruta Naomi and I got through a relatively easy amud (one side of a page of gemarra) in one 3.5 hour study session, and pretty much understood most of it. We felt very proud and accomplished...until we realized that if we were to do Daf Yomi,* it would be a full time job. (And, we were using a Steinzaltz.**)
*Daf Yomi is a practice of studying one daf (a full page of gemarra, front and back) every day. A person doing Daf Yomi takes 7 years to complete the entire Talmud.
**the Steinzaltz is sort of a beginner's edition of the Talmud, with vowels and punctuation, extra commentary, and translations into Hebrew when the Aramaic gets tricky.
----------------------------------------------
A couple weeks ago, there was a duststorm, or maybe a sandstorm, I don't know. Outside, it was hot and windy, and the wind was hot. It felt pretty uncanny to have this wind blowing and have it not cool me off in the slightest. From the Pardes Bet Midrash on the third floor (4th if you count floors American-style) everything outside looked white. Like fog, except you could tell it wasn't fog.
Just another reminder that we're practically in the desert.
----------------------------------------------
Every time I walk into a mall or supermarket and the security guard checking my bag asks "יש לך נשק?" "Do you have a weapon?", my initial reaction is still to snort and think, "And if I had one, would I tell you?" As an American, my association with security checks is limited to airports, and a person attempting to carry a gun into a mall is probably concealing it--so it seemed to me that the security guard's question was a weird one. Until one day I realized that in this country, a lot of people carry guns; mostly soldiers in uniform with their uzzis, but every so often you see a random civilian with a gun on his belt. As strange as it seems to me, "Yes, and here's my ID" is probably a perfectly legitimate response to "יש לך נשק?"
---------------------------------------------
Two weeks ago, I went with my friend Miriam to her volunteer placement, an Ethiopian absorption community in Mevaseret Zion. Ethiopian immigrants live in the absorption community for the first two years that they are in Israel; after that they are expected to integrate into Israeli society. They often face discrimination, have low employment rates and high school dropout rates.
It is also interesting to note that because of concern about their Jewish status, Ethiopian immigrants are required to convert upon moving to Israel. Because conversions in Israel are controlled by the (Orthodox) Israeli Rabbinate, the Ethiopian immigrants are expected to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and their children must attend Orthodox religious schools. It was also interesting, as Miriam put it, "to see who reaches out to this community" (and who doesn't). The majority of the volunteers--aside from a few Pardes students and some Hebrew Union College students--are from religious youth movements.
I had a good time playing with 3 of the kids from Miriam's "family." It turns out that my Hebrew is basically pretty sufficient when talking to 5-year olds, at least. I even got my hair braided and tried my first injera.