This week and next, our Israeli
Bronfman Fellows (or Amitim,
as we call them) are visiting New York and Boston. This “reverse-Birthright” is
a powerful experience for the seventeen year old Israelis as they explore what
it means to be Jewish in America, and what that inspires in them regarding
Israeli Judaism.
In this week’s parasha,
VaYeshev, another seventeen year old, Joseph, is sent down to Egypt as a prisoner.
He will quickly turn into a prince and beckon his family to leave the land of
Israel and join him in the goldene-medine of Egypt.
With all the hullabaloo around the
Israeli Government’s advertisement campaign guilting Israelis who left for “Egypt”
to come home, I was especially curious to see how the Israelis would respond to
visiting America around Christmas-time. Today, as they visited Rockefeller
Center (to discuss New York City as a “modernist project” through Jose
Maria Sert murals and the Atlas statue),
they were totally taken in by the charm of Salvation Army bell-ringing and
mid-town Christmas Markets. Standing by the Christmas tree, a religious amit
began arguing with his secular counterpart who was jumping up and down to the
music: “You see, this is why secular identity doesn’t stand a chance outside
Israel: One Christmas song and you’re a goy.”
The secular amit stopped dancing, looked his religious friend in the face and
said: “I speak Hebrew, so I’m safe. It’s the Americans who should worry.”
Their
argument reminded me of a passage in a book by Fania Oz-Salzberger, Israeli
author Amos Oz’s daughter and a scholar in her own right. She wrote a
fascinating book about the experience of
Israelis in Berlin, and writes insightfully about the Israeli yearning for
Europe (or “hutz la-aretz” – anywhere outside Israel) and the charm of
Christmas. Like the secular Amit, her reflections bring her to suggest that
Hebrew is enough to sustain a Jewish identity:
There is something misleading about our [=secular
Israelis'] Mediterranean yearnings to the north-European winter. Europe was
always described to us in a foresty-green color, wet with rain, with all kinds
of red and purple berries and spotted mushrooms. Or dressed in soft snow and
stillness under a distant blue sky.
But no: It's grey here, and wet. No colors either…
And maybe because of that their Christmas is so
assertive, so colorful and protestful. In the market along Berlin’s
Unter-Den-Linden, one of the many markets that is filled with holiday
decorations, sweets and tiny Christmas trees, over a cup of mulled wine, I
suddenly find myself thinking about my fathers-fathers and my mothers-mothers -
stiff necked and stubborn in the European winter. How did those generations and
generations of Jews survive these sad northern winters, passing by the holiday
markets on a daily basis, with their finely decorated evergreen trees; passing by
those candies and sweets; walking, with their children holding their hands,
past the Goyim's holidays and banquets… and not be tempted?
Only at the very end of that long road, the Berlin
Jews gave in. Gershom Scholem's family already celebrated Christmas, with a
nice "roast duck or a rabbit", and a decorated tree taken from the
market by the Church. A German folk holiday, which you celebrate not as Jews
but as Germans.
But that wasn't
the end of it, because Scholem spoke clearly on a different matter. Maybe he
didn't mean to, but he and Bialik and Agnon made sure that lost Jews like
myself can never just get swallowed and disappear, never to return again.
Because Scholem and Bialik and Agnon cast this wicked spell on us heretics, so
that even after our mistaken ways have led us back to this European world, and
we were tempted towards those Christmas markets and ski trails and beaches, and
after we became pagans and "Canaanites" and "stam Hilonim"
– simply secularist – we still will never be able to get rid of the book-bag
on our backs. For even after we cast out the Yiddish, we are still
prisoners of the Hebrew language, and through our Hebrew we will forever be the
prisoners of memory. And through memory we will be prisoners of the
duality, of multiple worlds…
Because we'll
always be carrying those books on our backs.
Fania
Oz-Salzberger, "Israelis in Berlin" | Keter 2001 (Hebrew), pg. 74-77
What is that wicked spell of Hebrew? Does it really need to be Hebrew literacy, or is being literate in Jewish texts enough to become a “prisoner of the duality” that Oz-Salzberger claims to be the essence of a Jewish identity. Couldn't this “book bag” vision of Jewish identity work be being an English speaking Jew who is equally connected to Jewish texts and learning, or is the language necessary for the spell to work? What building blocks are required to create a robust Jewish identity when “Jingle Bells” and “Noel” are playing in my ears? (yes, I’m writing this sitting in a Starbucks café…)
I have no answers, only questions. Yet as much as I happen to love prayer, a synagogue community and talk of God, my hunch is that it is a rich cultural Judaism, a "book bag" Judaism, which secular and religious alike can enjoy, that holds the key to the spell binding nature of Jewish identity. But it'll take a whole lot more work...
With Joseph in the parsha and Christmas cheer all around me there is no better time to ponder the secret to creating a spell-binding Jewish existence in Israel and in America. At least this is an advantage to being a Diaspora Jew – as one of the Amitim put it today: In Israel I never have to actively give meaning to my Judaism – here I do.
