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Yom Haatzmaut 5765 - May 13, 2003

It was Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day yesterday and my Israel fever has officially set in. Its just 6 short weeks until our Temple Emanuel mission leaves and I am jumping out of my skin with excitement. So to channel all of this wonderful energy, I have been very hard at work preparing. It's a sacred pilgrimage when a Jew visits our Holy Land. So in addition to combing through the itinerary and putting the finishing touches on it with our travel agents, this Shabbat I will break out my conversational Hebrew tapes and begin listening to them in my car. There is nothing like hearing the language of a place to take one's mind and heart across miles of land and ocean. Just listen to these words of poetess Rachel Bluvstein, written between 1911 and 1913 about her passionate love of the scenery and landscape of the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings.
(Read V'ulai Lo Hayu Ha-Devarim)

I resonate with Rachel's intimacy with the land of Israel. Whereas her connection is like a passionate love affair, mine is a warm, but complicated long distance relationship. In anticipation of seeing Israel, she feels to me like an old friend I haven't seen for a while. And I am trying to recall how I felt when last we were together. How she treated me when I visited, how she had grown and changed from years past. What was different about her and what had stayed the same. And what surprised me about who she was now. Its only natural to feel I have to do my homework and prepare myself about what to expect this visit. After all, we have been apart for five years. And during that time, so much has happened. I have enjoyed the relative safety and security of life in America, moved to a brand new city, became a mother. I am certainly different. And Israel, she is just now emerging from a dark night of the soul, and beginning to recover, if one ever does, from the torture of a prolonged period of terror. The gulf between our experiences of the last five years is characterized by a popular sign from a couple of years ago which read, "America 9/11, Israel 24/7."

The rabbi, the guide, the teacher in me began my preparations months ago, with reading. First I chose 'Walking the Bible' by Bruce Feiler, a book about the sites in Israel which bring to life the stories we know so well from Jewish scripture. One who visits cannot escape the sense of history that Israel carries in its bowels. Yes, there are old things here in America, too- dinosaur fossils and ancient native petroglyphs out west, but the oldest history we relate to as our own and as Americans resides in Philadelphia or New England and is only a few centuries old. Israel is, as James Michener portrays brilliantly in his historical novel, 'The Source', a place whose ancient story is told over and over through the objects a researcher can discover in the layers and layers of an archeological tel. But history, while it may inform the present, resides in the past. And relationships, while they are strengthened by a rich past, must also grow and continue to be built on a present and presume a future. So I have turned my reading for the trip to Donna Rosenthal's 'The Israelis', a word portrait of the people that now inhabit our sacred land in the modern State of Israel: their trials and tribulations, the way they blow off steam, their world outlook, their simple hopes and desires, their quirks and their handicaps.

I was fascinated to learn that one of the fronts of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is being waged in cyberspace, hacker wars. In this 'Inter-fada', the weapons are viruses, worms, and words. For example, an Israeli flag appeared on a Hezbollah site. Porn replaced a Palestinian newspaper's home page. Palestinians have hit Israeli commercial and governmental websites as well. These soldiers call themselves hacktivists. In my reading, I also learned that deep rifts still divide the Mizrachi community, Jews of Middle Eastern descent and Ashkenazi community, Jews of European ancestry. That even in second or third generation Israelis, cultural barriers prevent the mixing of heritages. But who ever said Israel would aspire to be the great melting pot equivalent of our American dream? And the army, while it was established as a People's Army, and is the only one in the world with a mandatory draft for eighteen year old women as well as men, still struggles with sexual harassment of female soldiers by their male peers and supervisors. Officers still freely admit that "having fun with the women is just part of the deal." (Pg 43, The Israelis)

Sometimes I wonder if some things in Israel will ever change. The struggles between the Orthodox establishment and the Progressive movements of all stripes, political and religious, permeates Israeli life. Certainly, the Orthodox, by definition, are trying not to change. And according to an article I recently read, about young Rabbi Nosson Slifkin, they are succeeding. He is an ultra-orthodox scholar and science writer whose books have been banned and who has been personally condemned by his community for trying to reconcile science with religion. That has the chutzpah to assert that tree rings, ice layers and riverbed sediments are clear proof the world is millions of years old, that the Big Bang parallels the Spanish Jewish Sage Nachmanides' account of the universe's creation, and that there may be contradictions in the biology in animals halachah claims are kosher are all taken as threats to the delicate society of ultra-traditionalist who have built a wall around their community and all forms of modernity. What has changed in Israel is the new territory being forged by Progressive Jews. Last month, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled conclusively that Ministry of Interior must recognize the conversions of 14 Reform and Conservative converts who studied in Israel but whose conversions took place abroad.

In recognizing the conversions, the Court was also ruling that they must be granted citizenship on the basis of the Law of Return, which guarantees all Jews will be welcomed as immigrants to Israel. The good news does not end here. While these converts had to travel outside of Israel to convert in order to better their chances of being granted recognition by Israel, this ruling sets the precedent that the State of Israel must recognize any Jew from abroad who has been accepted into our midst by any Jewish stream. Moreover, the Chief justice noted in the Court's decision that "the government is not authorized to determine under its general authority that only a conversion conducted in [an Orthodox] framework will be recognized according to the Law of Return". In other words, while the Court was not asked to address the validity of non-Orthodox conversions conducted within Israel, this last note by the Chief Justice paves the way for such a decision to return before the Court, perhaps to a new conclusion than in years past. As I have recounted before, when I went to Israel in 1991 as a first year HUC student, Israelis really had no point of reference to understand that I was religious but not Orthodox, let alone the inherent contradiction in their mind that I was a woman studying to be a rabbi.

A decade and half have passed, and even in the absence of true civil law and separation of Synagogue and State, Israel has a very different religious landscape, looking more and more akin to our own. A diverse religious scenery isn't the only way Israeli society and adopted some of our own forms. Now that reality TV is all the rage here, Israel, too, has its own version. The only difference is that I would actually watch Israel's The Ambassador, which was a mixture of The Apprentice, Survivor, and American Idol. In it, fourteen young Israelis competed to win a year in New York working for the Israel advocacy organization, 'Israel at Heart', alongside the foundation's founder, Joey Low. Low brings Israelis to America to broaden an understanding of Israel through human interaction. Unlike Survivor, instead of perilous jungles the contestants on The Ambassador traveled to New York, London, Paris and Budapest, Hungary, interacting with university students, CNN journalists, PR executives and strangers on the street. Like Survivor, contestants in The Ambassador voted each other off the show. Like American Idol, the candidates were subject to a panel of tough-talking judges made up of the former Israel Army spokesman, a Shin Bet Security Chief, and a well known television correspondent, critiquing each encounter for the contestant's effectiveness in presenting a pro-Israel message with charm. Instead of being fired, like The Apprentice, each week, one person was asked to surrender her brief. More than just the suspense of who ultimately won the opportunity to be an Ambassador of good will for Israel, which turned out interestingly enough to be American born Eitan Schwartz, the show explored many issues of contemporary Israeli life. First, can an immigrant represent the country in the same way as an Israeli born citizen? In a world that feeds on media frenzy and high drama, what are the most effective tools to portray Israel positively to the world?

Unfortunately The Ambassador is a reality show, in that it reflects a real matzav, an unresolved situation regarding co-existence with her Arab neighbors that is fraught on both sides with deep hatred and mistrust. Until recently, the left wing peace movement had all but despaired and dismantled as a credible force in Israeli society as bomb after bomb killed hundreds of citizens.

Now, in the relative quiet and calm that has once again allowed Israelis and tourists to grab a taste of Israel's grandeur and vitality, we Jews cautiously waits to see what the Palestinians will do with the ownership of democracy in a Post-Arafat reality, and what effect the pull-out from Gaza and the dismantling of settlements there will have. Israel is the spiritual capital of our faith. This week of Yom Ha'atzmaut is for us a reminder that we all have a long distance relationship with Eretz Yisrael, even those of us who have never met her. Israelis are members of our extended families and may it be that our knowledge of her comes from sources other than the media but from real encounters. And may we be inspired to continue our prayers that peace may soon descend in Israel, among her people and around her borders.

Amen.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri