Number our Days

Today is the 45th day of the Omer - six weeks and three days into the Omer. It is also Rosh Chodesh Sivan, four short days away from Shavuot. The Omer is a period that heightens our consciousness about living on two planes - in the physical world of daily time which is filled with demands of deadlines and routines, and in the metaphysical world of sacred timelessness where each year we count up from the Exodus from Egypt to the Revelation at Sinai. This year, my concsiousness of the Omer is all the more intense because as I've been counting up towards Shavuot, I've also been counting down towards my imminent and inevitable departure back to the U.S. on Saturday night at the end of this week. This is my last Sunday in Israel, my last week, time to wrap up, pack up and return to old ryhthms and schedules. Time to leave one part of my family and reunite with another.

I arrived during Hanukkah the week of Parshat Miketz - the 3rd to last parsha in the Book of Bereshit. I'm leaving just as we begin Beha'alotecha, the third parasha in the Book of Numbers. During my 23 weeks, here, I experienced two complete Books of the Torah and an equal part of two others. Yet, the symmetry is off because here in Israel we only celebrate one day of Shavuot (Friday), while the holiday is two days in the Diaspora. So, this coming Shabbat in the Diaspora (or at least the Orthodox and Conservative worlds), the Torah reading is for Shavuot and not the weekly parasha. This means the Jewish world is out of sync for six weeks until we join up again at Parshat Balak. And that's an accurate reflection of how I'm feeling right now - out of sync - not sure of whether I'm coming home or leaving home.

My time here has been filled with gifts and the satisfaction of doing good work. I have savored rich conversations with many colleagues in an assortment of cafes and other meeting spots. I've forged new professional relationships and strengthened old ones. I've begun new projects and continued to work on some ongoing ones. I've taught in two languages to four different groups of people - Russian-speakers, Israelis, British, and Americans. I've given presentations at three different universities (London, Jerusalem and Haifa) outside of my own. I've had the delightful company of my daughter on a regular basis. Billy was here for almost 9 weeks in two separate visits. My parents came for 3 weeks, Nate for 10 days. Throughout, friends have been generous in welcoming me in their homes and sharing their Shabbat and holiday tables. I've been to the symphony twice, to the theatre twice, and to five movies. I've eaten in each of my favorite restaurants at least twice, and have had four different groups of students over for dinner at different points along the semester. I've hiked in the Galilee, the Negev, and the hills of Jerusalem. I've been to services in 13 different prayer communities - 7 in Jerusalem, 3 elsewhere in Israel, 1 in Istanbul, 1 in London, and 1 in Kiev. I've grappled with the politics and tried to understand the contours of this many-sided social, religious, and historical puzzle. I've been touched in the deepest recesses of my being by so many encounters with people, places, memories, and moments. I've been angry and frustrated, joyful and charmed by this place that is so very real and so very complex - where even the mundane is remarkable just because the ordinary is so extraordinary here. In some ways I've stepped outside of myself to try to understand or at least accept what's different. But in most ways, I have felt myself totally and completely whole.

There were things I had hoped to do while here that I didn't get to - learning some Russian, finding a regular place to study, joining a gym, going to the beach, but all in all, I feel I numbered my days well, making each one count and as the Psalmist says, searching for that heart of wisdom.

Boundaries and Border Crossings

Around 3 am Monday morning I arrived back from 4.5 days in Kiev. I was there to teach at a seminar for about 35 Reform Jewish educators from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Unlike my Project Kesher experiences where no one spoke English, here there were a few who had excellent English and even some with passable Hebrew so I could connect more directly with them without the need of a translator. Overall, these educators are new learners. Most are barely a step or two ahead of the students they teach. In some ways, their enthusaism and dedication compensate for their developing literacy, but I really was impressed with how challenging it is to provide them opportunities for Jewish learning and professional development. Nonetheless, with even the few resources they have, they are beginning to find their voice and develop a professional identity, largely through their contacts with us in the West. I had a powerful sense of the overlap of our worlds as I sat in a Soviet-style rest house/conference center and heard the kahal singing familiar American tunes while praying out of the Israeli Reform siddur. One educator told me how she had met an American rabbi who gave her a $150 piece of software and how guilty she felt for accepting such an expensive present. And I was particularly struck by the utter excitement of each community receiving a gift box filled with Jewish toys and games for their Sunday schools. These flotsam and jetsam of American Jewish family life become precious commodities here.

So, I was thinking alot about the permeability of boundaries already when I was asked to give the closing benediction/charge at our Founders' day ceremony back at HUC on Monday afternoon. This is an annual event that celebrates the founders of the Jerusalem campus through a bit of teaching and speechifying. My instructions from the Dean were to: "Start in Hebrew and then go to English. Do something that will give us a feeling of unity. And be brief!" My natural inclination in these instances is to go to the texts to find inspiration. The immediate and obvious choice was Psalm 122, one of the 15 "Songs of Ascent" that were part of the processionals in ancient days during the three pilgrimage festivals. The psalm is all about the power of Jerusalem in bringing us together. It begins "I rejoiced when they said to me, 'We are going up to the House of the Lord.'" The rejoicing part fits with how happy I felt (still feel) to have had this opportunity to sojourn in Jerusalem. The first part of the next phrase is what is on the electronic clock on the main road just as you enter the city: "Our feet stood inside your gates, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem build up, a city knit together, to which tribes would make pilgrimage"

The rabbinic commentators make much of this line as well - both for the fact that Jerusalem is repeated twice and for the phrase "a city knit together," perfect for our theme of unity. My favorite midrash on this is that God says "I will not enter into heavenly Jerusalem until I can enter the earthly Jerusalem, for it is said, Until the holy one is built in your midst, I will not enter the city (Hosea 11:9)." So that gave us a context for thinking about the work we need to do to make the earthly Jerusalem a city worthy of God's presence. The midrash closes with the statement that "Jerusalem is a city which makes all Israel into a fellowship." And that allowed me to talk about the fact that as Jews, we share much in common no matter on what side of the ocean we chose to make our home.

That was the gist of what I planned to say when I jotted down some notes an hour or so before the program began. But, when I got to the podium, I decided to begin with a personal story. When Hannah and I came back from Istanbul last February, the clerk at Passport control asked me a question I have never been asked before in all of my 35 years of coming to Israel. "Are you a citizen?" he said. "No." I replied. "But you have an identity number," he said. I told him I had been a temporary resident here more than 30 years ago, but was not a citizen. "You still have an id number. If you ever decide to make aliyah, that will be your number." And he proceeded to write the number down in my passport above the stamp.

Since that trip, I have left and returned to Israel twice - first to London and then again to Kiev. Both times now, the security checkers and passport control people ask me if I have an Israeli passport. It does feel somehow that they are sending me a message.

I began with that story to talk about how connected I feel to this place and how I hope that our American students began at least to understand how powerful that connection can be. I asked them to look for the small signs that connect past to present, make the ordinary sacred here and the sacred sometimes ordinary. And, I asked them to make connections not just to the space, but the people within it.

Just as I was about to go to bed that night, I got a frantic call from Hannah who was due to return home from playing in an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Copenhagen. She was at the gate and being barred from boarding the plane because the clerk said she had neither a valid visa to Israel (since when do US citizens need a visa to Israel?) nor proof of a return ticket from Israel to the US. The clerk wouldn't budge and Hannah ended up spending an extra night and paying another $200 to get out of Copenhagen (once we faxed the airline proof of her return ticket) - not the most horrible place to be a temporary refugee, but a strange and unsettling experience, nonetheless.

All kinds of messages about boundaries and belonging are embedded in these tales. Who am I? Where do I belong? How much of oneself can cross a "border", how much stays behind? What's the difference between nationality and citizenship? How much is imposed on us by outside forces that dictate what passport we hold and where we can or cannot go? And how much is imposed on us by our own histories, families, and lines of connection that bound and bind us as well?

Memorial Road

It has been a difficult stretch. Last Shabbat, I learned of the death of a much respected friend, colleague, and teacher from home, Bob Cohen. Two weeks earlier, another friend, Bonnie Silverman succumbed to her five year battle with ovarian cancer. Also in the past few weeks, three friends lost a parent, and four others are coping with parents who seem to be coming to the end of their time. It has been hard to be away while all of this is taking place in my community. In fact, for a short while last Shabbat, I thought about getting on a plane so I could be in Hartford for Bob’s funeral. Work obligations aside, I think the fact that we marked the Israeli national holidays of Yom Hazikaron and Independence Day this week, made the decision to remain the right thing to do.

Yom Hazikaron began on Monday evening, but we started earlier at HUC with a joint service between the American and Israeli students. Early on, the student rabbi asked us to reflect on whether any of the blessings had any special significance to us at this point in our communal calendar. I didn’t get past the blessing "sh'asani Yisrael", thanking God for making me a Jew. That was where I stayed for the rest of the service. First, I thought about how at home and how complete I feel here, warts and all, and how I can’t understand myself as a Jew without wrestling with this all the dimensions of this place – land, people, Torah, and State. And then I thought about the power of history and the pull of memory and how that is a force that both binds us together as a people, but sometimes can be abused and distorted in a way that is altogether unhealthy both for us and for others. And finally, I thought about the absences – how this place has drawn and repelled my own loved ones, and the price we have had to pay as a people to hold on here and try to build a society worthy of blessing.

I suppose my own personal and private sorrows spilled over into my feelings and connections to these somber days. Monday night, I went to a memorial service at Kol Haneshama, led by high school seniors in Noar Telem, the Reform movement’s youth group. Standing on the edge of graduation here has an altogether different meaning than it does for our carefree American kids.


Tuesday, the commemorations continued. I went to a ceremony at one of the oldest high schools in Jerusalem that was marking the memory of 138 of its students and teachers who had fallen as soldiers or as victims of terror since the founding of the State in 1948. The open courtyard was filled with students, parents, and alumni, well over 1,000 strong. The ceremony began at 11:00 am just as a two-minute siren blew throughout the country. One of the parents of a soldier killed in action recited Kaddish and then the ceremony continued with a recitation of the names interspersed with songs, and readings of poems, and letters written by those whom we were remembering.

Later that evening, I went to another ceremony – this one marking the transition from sorrow to celebration. We began in one room with a group sing-along (another Israeli cultural phenomenon) of mournful tunes. After dark, we moved into another room to daven ma'ariv and begin the celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut, complete with falafel and more singing, this time of a lighter and more hopeful tone.

The next day, I went with my friend Dennie to the Galilee for two exquisite days of hiking, reading, relaxing, and restoring the spirit. My kibbutz cousins Eitan and Shula live about 40 minutes from where we were, so I called them and they said let’s meet for lunch!! This began a wonderful afternoon that started in a restaurant in a gas station (delicious!) in an half Christian/half Muslim Arab village called Jish (or Gush Halav). Eitan is in charge of the water systems in the north and he seems to know just about every village and road in the region. After lunch, he took us to look at the three different churches in the village. We meandered through these steep and winding roads and came to a tiny little alley way that led to an ancient mausoleum that was discovered when someone started building a house on top of it!! Hardly on the tourist trail.

We continued our not-touristy tour out of Jish, heading towards a Druze village called Horfish, but soon turned off into a narrow lane that could have been easily overlooked. We drove a couple of kilometers through olive trees along this road, passing a few picnickers, stopping for a shepherd and his goats that were crossing the road, and eventually came to a stop at a memorial, far from any habitation. The site had large memorial stone and a plaque with a long list of names. In 1997, two army helicopters collided, one coming out of Lebanon, the other going in. It was the worst military accident in Israeli history and 73 soldiers were killed. One of them was a Druze from Horfish. For years, the Druze community in Horfish and their neighboring village of Beit Jahn tried to get permission to pave a road between the two villages to help them get to their fields, but were refused by the Israel Lands Authority. When one of their boys was killed in this crash, the community decided to erect a memorial stone. They chose not just to note his death, but to include all those who lost their lives in this tragedy. And that got them their road.

We will Remember

With the end of the Pesach break followed quickly by Billy's departure back to the States, life shifted gears dramatically this week. For the most part, it was a week filled with work - teaching, grading papers, meetings, presentations, and general catch-up --certainly different from the social scene of the previous two weeks of friends, food, and fun. I also had to deal with a household plumbing emergency - a side of Israel that few tourists encounter. It was good that I hadn't yet returned the rental car because I had to drive around the Talpiot Industrial zone for about 45 minutes looking for a hardware store that stocked the part I needed! (The best part of that was the name of the store, once I finally found it, was Tubol, kind of a play on words on the biblical character, Tubal-cain, great-grandson of Adam and the inventor of metal work).

All of this was quite ordinary and routine, something of a rarity in this complicated place. But of course, this week we also commemorated Yom Hashoah, something far from ordinary and routine. Starting on Monday evening, the city shut down. Restaurants and movie theatres closed, virtually every school in the city had some kind of program, the radio stations' play lists became somber and subdued, and every tv channel had Holocaust related programming. The official State ceremony took place Monday night at Yad Va'Shem, the Holocaust Memorial site. Tuesday was a work day but of a different tenor. At HUC, we began the day with a joint service between the American and Israeli students. The sanctuary was darkened; an Israeli flag with black ribbons attached hung next to the ark. Six memorial candles were lit and a selection of extra readings and mournful tunes shaped the service. When that concluded, we gathered along with our colleagues from the World Union for Progressive Judaism in the main courtyard of the campus for a memorial ceremony that began promptly at 10:00 (events in Israel are rarely ever this prompt) when a siren went off throughout the country. This is a classic expression of Israeli national culture - everything stops for two minutes of national silence. People get out of their cars and stand at attention (not everyone these days, which is also a sign of the times. They don't keep driving, but I suppose staying in their car is a kind of silent protest that maybe we have taken this commemoration a bit too far...).

Our HUC/WUPJ ceremony began with a set of songs and readings (in Hebrew, English, and Russian) both classic and contemporary and concluded with the traditional El Malei Rachamim and Kaddish. The most moving part was the recitation of names. Here, everyone from the community - students, faculty, staff - who had a personal connection to loss in the Shoah was invited to come forward and recite their names. Well over 50 people lined up with Israelis outnumbering Americans 4 or 5 to 1. I was powerfully struck both by that skewed distribution and also by the fact that most of the Israelis reciting names had lists of whole families and they knew their home towns and full names, while the Americans mostly only listed one person or a family name without naming individuals. Within 3 years of the founding of the State, 1/4 of the Jewish population in Israel was made up of Holocaust survivors. The fact is that far fewer Americans were directly touched by this horror. Few of these American students know a Holocaust survivor or even a child of survivors. The Shoah is more a subject of study than it is a personal memory, even once or twice removed. For Israelis, collective memory is much more powerful because it is so personal.

Maybe some Israelis are tired of this national focus on Holocaust remembrance. I for one, am not ready to let it go. Yes, there are many more contemporary atrocities that warrant our attention and action. But, we still need a day to mourn our own loss, our own tragedy, our own rupture. It's part of the healing I think to keep remembering the pain.

Musings on Freedom

We’re at the mid-point of Pesach. The week has been filled with all kinds of peaks and valleys and bizarro twists that make me laugh and also cry.

We celebrated the Seder with our kibbutz cousins from the north, plus the requisite extras – an American student studying at Hebrew University, and our West Hartford friends the Rosen-Browns’ daughter Elana. It was a bi-lingual delight, filled with rich musings on home and homelessness, on identity and politics, on breaking with tradition and reclaiming tradition anew. For the Israeli family (yes, that’s their name – when Eitan’s socialist parents came to Israel in the 1930s they cast off their galut name and reinvented themselves as true pioneers of the Yishuv. The irony is that Moshe, Eitan’s father, never became an Israeli citizen because of his communist proclivities) this was their first Seder “k’hilchato” – according to law and custom. Yet, both generations of parents and adult children, comfortably jumped into the flow – knowing most of the songs and engaging fully in the process. It didn’t hurt that I served hefty hors d’ouevres after Carpas to stave off hunger.

The next day was peaceful and calm. After shul, friends from Tel Aviv came up for lunch and we had a lovely afternoon stroll along the tayelet/promenade – a broad park that offers sweeping views of the city.

Friday morning, we set off to visit our friends Samar and Amin, who live in an East Jerusalem neighborhood called Bir Nabala (see my blog “Road Works” from 13 February 2006). Getting there two months ago was already a challenge – but that paled relative to the situation today. Since the elections, dramatic changes have begun to “transfer” Jerusalem’s Arab populations without physically moving them – just by moving the borders. The checkpoint that we crossed in February to get to Bir Nabala was still there, but the partially built wall that allowed us to drive up the unpaved avenue to get to their house was now virtually closed in. A small opening remained, but that was blocked by a small group of soldiers and a very large mass of barbed wire. The soldiers said we had to go to Kalandia – the main crossing point into Ramallah – a few more kilometers along the wall. So we called Amin and he said he’d meet us there in 15 minutes (even though he lives less than 5 minutes from the barbed and blocked gate). When he finally arrived at the check point, he led us through a long and twisted trail back to his home – a neighborhood where everyone is either an Israeli citizen or carries a Jerusalem identity card and where all of the cars have yellow Israeli license plates and not the Palestinian green. Yet, this neighborhood, and several others of the wrong kind of citizens, is now cut off from jobs and schools and community – ultimately to be ceded to a bankrupt, impoverished, and subjugated Palestine.

Well, Samar and Amin are the lucky ones in this strange drama. They are Israeli citizens and have the means to move. So, they are abandoning their lovely and spacious home in a building where two of Amin’s brothers also live, and moving later this week to a cramped apartment in Beit Safafa – once an Arab village, and now part of municipal Jerusalem, that at least for now, remains open to free entry and egress. They are refugees in their own land, citizens with few rights and broken hearts. Not the happy tale of freedom that we Jews savor at this time of year.

On the drive back to Jerusalem, the soldiers at the barbed wired crossing let us through for some unknown reason so we didn’t have to retrace our tracks to Ramallah, but getting back into the city was eventful nonetheless. A short while after we passed Hebrew University, the main road was blocked by police cars, so we had to take a winding detour to continue. Apparently, the blockage was due to rioting in Meah Shearim, one of the major ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of the city. Earlier that week, a young father from the community confessed to murdering his infant son. But, now the residents were rioting, accusing the State of blood libel in arresting this man. Here, we have an example of civil rights run amok.

Once we got through that tangle, we came upon throngs of buses and foot traffic around the Old City. At first, we were puzzled and couldn’t figure out the reason for the crowds. But then Billy remembered it was Good Friday – time for the Christians to assert their presence as well.

Well, Shabbat peace descended and had its salving effect, for the moment at least.

An amusingly bizarre coda to this strange week was our attendance at the Jerusalem Symphony last night. The program on this Easter Eve was Bach’s St. John’s Passion, played to a highly appreciative and almost entirely Jewish audience, including many kippah clad men – a bold assertion of our universalism in the concert hall, but hardly replicated on the streets.

Oh Jerusalem, beloved city, filled with irony, beauty, and pain.

"Song of the Valley"

The lower Galilee and Jezreel Valley are the heartland of Zionist mythmaking. The first kibbutzim were founded here, where Socialist idealists from Eastern Europe came in the early part of the 20th century to drain the swamps by day and dance the hora by night, or so the story goes. They certainly did break with Jewish tradition and social conventions to create a new society, based on collective ownership of property and communal living. Today, most kibbutzim are radically different places than their founders imagined them to be. Few if any, rely on agriculture as their main source of income. Most have gone through at least some form of privatization where people choose their own professions, earn their own salaries and pay bills according to their patterns of consumption, just like us city-dwellers. Many kibbutzim have gone into the tourism business and provide guest houses and resort facilities. Many also rent housing to people who just want to live in a rural community and have no interest at all in being a member of a collective, no matter how loosely configured.

Even in the early days before Israel became a State, there were many who realized that this kind of intense communal living wasn't for them. The moshav emerged out of this impulse, as a kind of hybrid between complete sharing of resources and preserving personal autonomy. Nahalal, the first moshav, was founded in 1921, in the Jezreel Valley of course. Moshe Dayan's father was one of the original members. Nahalal features in one of my favorite songs "The Song of the Valley" of that period. It's a lyric paean to nature, to the pioneers, to the upbuilding of the land - all part of the grand myth that shaped Israeli identity for 3 generations or more:

"Rest has come to the weary and calm for the worker...Dew below and moon above, from Beit Alpha to Nahalal...Sleep, oh valley, glorious land. We shall watch over you." (It sounds much better in Hebrew...)

The land really is glorious, especially on a spring day when the hills are still green from the winter rains and blanketed with wild flowers. Quite a lot has changed since those first pioneers came with their vision, their dreams and their commitment to physcial labor and nation-building. Their old dreams may no longer fit with the times, but it still does seem to be a place where new ideas incubate and begin to flourish.

We spent last Shabbat on Nahalal where we attended services at Niggun Ha'lev. This community is just a few years old and grew out of the work of several educators from HaMidrasha, a program of Jewish studies for secular Israelis at Oranim College, just a few kilometers down the road from Nahalal. Niggun Ha'lev is a kind of havurah, not affiliated with a particular movement and intent on charting its own path. It's a multi-generational group with lots of kids, young and old. Most of the 60 or so members are former kibbutzniks, with a smattering of Americans added to the mix. These are people who grew up with a distrust, if not antipathy towards religious practice. Yet, the more they studied Judaism, the more they began to think and ultimately act on how to make Jewish expression a part of their lives.

The service at Niggun Ha'lev was lyrical and heartfelt. They have created their own kind of worhsip experience - classical liturgy interwoven with modern Hebrew poetry; a bit of Carlebach mixed with Israeli tunes; guitar and Torah study; a closing circle of community announcements instead of the traditional Friday night Amidah. It was a familiar and strange assortment that somehow came together into a warm and authentic whole.

The service takes place in the moshav's clubhouse whose walls are adorned with a ring of photographs from the founding days of the community. When I told my mother that we were going to Nahalal Shabbat services, she wrly commented: "Moshe Dayan must be turning in his grave". Indeed, I wondered how those founding fathers and mothers would look on at this new experiment. Though they themselves rejected the religion of their fathers for their own "religion" of Zionism, I'd like to think that they would approve of the creative and sincere efforts of this group to define a home for themselves within Jewish tradition - not as Orthodox returnees, but as Israeli Jews looking to build a new kind of community that makes room for Judaism in a way their ancestors could never have imagined.

Desperately Seeking Holiness

The rhythms of life can be so odd. My quiet, sedentary, Jerualem-centered life of the past month came to an abrupt halt shortly after my last blog entry. First I was with a group of educators from the Former Soviet Union who came for a 5 day seminar. A day after they left, I flew to London for 3 days of teaching (and 2 days of playing). After a six week separation, Billy joined me and returned with me to Israel for another 3 weeks. My parents are in Israel too. They came just before the elections to vote and are staying through Pesach. Our friends the Stiers are in town, as is my close colleague Diane and her husband Jack. So we've had a nice round of dinners this week! And then of course, there's teaching and meetings, and writing and cleaning and cooking for Pesach to squeeze into all of that. All of a sudden, life got very full!!

Given that frenzied pace, rather than write a new entry, I'm posting an abbreviated version of the sermon I gave on Parshat Vayikra (the opening of the book of Leviticus) at a synagogue in London last Shabbat. This book transitions away from sacred space and time that are the focus of most of the last third of the Book of Exodus, and moves us to consider that crucial third ingredient - the holiness of the soul.

To my mind, there’s no better place on earth to experience the sanctity of time and space as in Jerusalem. The rhythm of the week begins with a mad intensity on Yom Rishon - Sunday (just try taking an inter-city bus first thing Sunday morning, packed with soldiers returning to base after a Shabbat at home). And then, it grinds to an almost complete stop on Friday afternoon. At candle-lighting time, a long, low whistle blows throughout the city as a not so subtle reminder that Shabbat has come. Not long after that, you begin to feel the zig zag flow of foot traffic through the neighborhoods of Jerusalem as people make their way to any one of the multitude of choices for Kabbalat Shabbat.

And then of course, there’s space – the vistas, the hills, the walls, the Golden dome, the graves – the heaviness of history is inescapable, but the stones bathed in the morning light can’t help but lift your spirits.As the poet Yehuda Amichai says: “The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams.” But, the poem continues by saying that it “is like air over industrial cities; it’s hard to breathe.”

What makes the air in Jerusalem hard to breathe is not the holiness of time and space. They are in abundance. What is far more ambiguous and complex is the holiness of the soul -- human interactions and behaviors that are endowed with dignity and purpose; Holiness is when people act out of balanced sense of din v’rachamim, justice and compassion – imitating those two qualities of God that we invoke on the High Holy days when we pray for our lives.

And that brings us to the Book of Leviticus, the book that lays out in obsessive and sometimes troublesome detail the code of holiness by which the Israelites are enjoined to live. But even before those details, we spend the opening chapters learning the laws of sacrifice and purification, the prerequisites to the sanctification of the soul. Most of the parshah focuses on the various kinds of offerings individuals and groups of people should sacrifice in the event that they sin. The system was quite egalitarian. Everyone is included from the high priest to the lowliest peasant. There’s even a sliding scale delineated so that if you can’t afford a large animal, you can offer a pigeon; if you didn’t have even the means for a pigeon, a simple meal offering would suffice. The text presumes we will sin and gives us an outlet for the expiation of that sin. Later in the book, we will learn the details of how to create a holy society, but first we learn the process for regaining a sense of closeness to God. Perhaps this is trying to teach us that the desire for the closeness forms the basis for our motivation to attain holiness – that before we can elevate our behavior, we must recognize our sin and undertake a ritual of absolution.That’s the plan at least as mapped out in an idealized, heavenly way.

How do we measure up in our earthly Jerusalem? Not so well, I’m afraid. Perhaps that’s why Amichai says the air is so hard to breathe.Here are a few of the issues that have been needling at me in recent weeks.

· The rash of corruption among government officials
· Ever-widening gap between rich and poor
· Miserable state of schools
· Increasing violence among the young
· Seemingly arbitrary “fences” in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem that turn 5 minute drives into 45 minute ones and that’s when they are allowed to pass through. On other days, small school children must walk across the checkpoint alone in order to pick up a bus on the other side
· Lockdowns in the territories that cause massive shortages of bread and sugar and other staples of life
· Prohibiting an Israeli Arab author, traveling on behalf of the Israeli government, to wander freely in the airport while awaiting his flight
· A recent poll that said 68% of Israeli Jews wouldn’t want to live in the same building as an Arab
· The fact that Arabs make up 20% of Israeli citizenry but own only 3.5% of the land (within the pre-67 borders).

I’m not a political analyst and I am well aware that there are serious, substantive, and enduring concerns about security that drive many of these behaviors, benign and deliberate. But, nonetheless, the overriding sense I get is that we are cultivating an atmosphere of racism and hatred.

There are many small gestures to break this cycle within Israel and I am encouraged by some of the initiatives I’ve heard about in the last few weeks, and I am especially encouraged to hear that many of the mainstream North American Jewish communal agencies are also beginning to recognize and lend financial support to efforts to create a more just society for all of Israel’s citizens. But, still the impact of these activities is still tiny against the much stronger tide of opposition and apathy (evidenced just recently by the pathetically low voter turnout for the elections especially among the young). Israelis are rightly tired of fighting an endless battle to assure their security and rightness of place. But, I worry deeply about the inability to see the face of the other; to acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of innocent people are denied basic civil rights; and that most of us don’t really care.

In ancient times, sacrifice was the tangible act of contrition – The system was designed for everyone because everyone sins. But, the first step, before making the sacrifice was to accept our guilt.

This is not easy to say. Our cause is just. We deserve to live in dignity and safety; to preserve the integrity of the Jewish state and help it to flourish. But we cannot and must not let our own right to live in peace and security, allow us to act in ways that deny the right of others to live in human dignity. And as we stand on this first Shabbat of Nisan, the month when we celebrate our freedom from bondage and mark the beginnings of the Jewish people, can we truly revel in our own freedoms while we bear the responsibility of denying that freedom to others? Can we fully relish the holiness of time and space without a willingness to share a bit of it with others? Serving our own interests alone are not enough to create a just and merciful society. We need to act with holy intentions towards each other and even towards our enemies. And we cannot achieve this without deep sacrifice. This requires offering up that part of us that demonizes and discredits any point of view other than our own, that puts blinders on the suffering, hopelessness, and fear of those we oppress. Only when we fully commit to this process can we hope to draw close to God and that’s the essence of holiness.