"Love the Questions": The Burning Bush and the Western Myth of the Hero

Western culture loves it heroes. As Freud’s student Otto Rank showed in his classic “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero” (1914) Western culture is deeply founded on the myth of the hero (from Oedipus and Jesus to Harry Potter and most Hollywood films). A child (male) with special powers, born in dangerous circumstances, returns to receive his deeper calling and consequently conquers evil and redeems the world. Having been bred on those stories as children (whether it is through canonical sacred texts or the incessant reading of hero-centered fantasy books), we learn to identify ourselves as the “heroes of our own lives”, holders of unique powers and a solid destiny. We learn to expect that we have an answer to the world’s question.

Moshe’s life is the defining Biblical hero journey, and the burning bush is the canonical Western text of a person who receives a divine destiny, moving from refusal and denial to embrace and action. In contemporary leadership talk Moshe is committed to a vision and exists to turn that vision into a reality.

Unless you are the reader Yehuda Amichai.

Yehuda Amichai, in a short poem that spans Moshe’s entire life, draws a an anti-hero, a person not motivated by the mission God provides him at the bush as much as by a deeper longing, an unanswered question in his soul.

Amichai notices that at the moment of God’s revelation to Moshe at the burning bush, Moshe does something very strange: he hides his face, afraid to gaze upon God. This leads him to offer the following reading of Moshe’s journey:

Moses, our teacher, only once saw God’s face And forgot.  He did not want to see the wilderness Nor, even the promised land, but only God’s face. He struck the rock in the fury of his longings He climbed Mt. Sinai and descended; he shattered the two Tablets and made a Golden calf; he searched In fire and cloud; but all he could remember was God’s strong hand and his outstretched arm But not his face; and he became like a person who yearns To remember the face of their beloved, but cannot. He made for himself a ‘mug shot’ taking from the face Of God, the face of the burning bush, and the face of Pharaoh’s daughter leaning over him as an infant in the basket And he circulated the picture among all the tribes of Israel And throughout the wilderness. But no one had seen And no one recognized.  And only at the end of his life, On Mt. Nebo he saw and died in a kiss from the face of God.  Yehuda Amichai | Patuach, Sagur, Patuach translated by Steve Sager p.29, #5

משה רבנו ראה רק פעם אחת את פני האלוהים ושכח. הוא לא רצה לראות את המדבר ואפלו לא את הארץ המבטחת, אלא רק את פני האלהים. הוא הכה בסלע בזעם געגועיו הוא עלה להר סיני וירד, הוא שבר את שני לוחות הברית ועשה עגל זהב, הוא חפש באש ובעשן, אבל הוא זכר רק את יד האלהים החזקה ואת זרועו הנטויה ולא את פניו והיה כמו אדם שרוצה לזכר את פני מי שאהב ולא יוכל. הוא עשה לעצמו קלסתרון מפני האלהים ופני הסנה הבוער ופני בת פרעה שנרכנה מעליו כשהיה תינוק בתבה, והפיץ את התמונה בכל שבטי ישראל ובכל המדבר, אבל איש לא ראה ואיש לא הכיר. ורק בסוף חייו, על הר נבו ראה ומת בנשיקת פני האלהים. יהודה עמיחי, "פתוח סגור פתוח"

Moshe can be seen here as a tragic figure, oblivious of the great achievements of his life as he is caught up in his own existential search. But perhaps Amichai’s Moshe is not an anti-hero, but rather an inspiration to a deeper type of leadership. Amichai is suggesting that a deeper motivator for our action in the world is not the belief in some aggrandized calling, but rather a longing, a broken heart, an embrace of our existential journey.

I hear this same troupe in the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke.  Writing to a young impatient wannabe poet in his “Letters to a Young Artist”, Rilke writes:

July 16, 1903

My dear Mr. Kappus: I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; … As I read it now, in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life…
I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Reading the burning bush in light of Rilke and Amichai, the inextinguishable flame of God’s burning bush becomes the inextinguishable devotion to questions, journey and yearning. Stay attuned to the yearning, not the heroic calling, says Amichai. This is perhaps the key to Moshe’s humble leadership, which got him known in the tradition as the “faithful shepherd.” It might even be the key to a new, meek but committed, Western heroism. “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Yaakov Never Died, and Some Gospel: Two Generations, Two Songs

This week’s Parsha is all about Yaakov’s passing away in Egypt. I always enjoy the moment when Yaakov, the namesake of Israel, is mummified by the Egyptian doctors, and all of Egypt comes out to lament his passing. It’s a great reminder of the way Judaism bounces back and forth between its unique rituals and the rituals of the cultures in which they lived. The Talmud quips about Yaakov’s death:

Rav Nachman and Rav Yitzhak were dining together. Said Rav Nachman to Rav Yitzhak: Say something meaningful! Rav Yitzhak said: Rabbi Yohanan taught: “Yaakov Avinu (our father) didn’t die!” Said Rav Nachman to Rav Yitzchak: What? Was it for naught that the eulogizers eulogized and the mummifiers mummified and the buriers buried? He responded: We are simply expounding from scripture, for Jeremiah (30:10) says: “Do not fear, my servant Yaakov… for I will redeem you from afar and your offspring from the lands of their captivity” – Yaakov is analogized to his offspring. As long as his offspring are alive, he too is alive. (Babylonian Talmud Taanit 5b)

רב נחמן ור' יצחק היו יושבים בסעודה. א"ל רב נחמן לר' יצחק: יאמר לנו אדוני מילה!... אמר לו: הכי אמר רבי יוחנן: יעקב אבינו לא מת. אמר לו: וכי בכדי ספדו ספדנייא וחנטו חנטייא וקברו קברייא? אמר לו: מקרא אני דורש שנאמר (ירמיהו ל) "ואתה אל תירא עבדי יעקב נאם ה' ואל תחת ישראל כי הנני מושיעך מרחוק ואת זרעך מארץ שבים" - מקיש הוא לזרעו, מה זרעו בחיים אף הוא בחיים (תלמוד בבלי תענית ה:)

This Talmudic text is the inspiration to a Jewish song that captured the imagination of an entire Jewish generation: “Am Yisrael Chai, Od Avinu Chai! The Jewish People are alive, Our Father is still alive!” sang Shlomo Carlebach in the 60’s and 70’s. It was a brilliant song: Taking Joseph’s urgent question to his brothers from last week’s Parsha: “העוד אבינו חי?” – “Is our father still alive?” (Gen 45:3), Shlomo turned the question into an answer: “Yes! Our father is still alive, WE are still alive!”

For many Jews of the boomer generation, the song encapsulates a pivotal aspect of their Jewish identity. The song resonated so powerfully in the 1960’s and 1970’s because it was constantly edified by current events: When Shlomo sang this song about Soviet Jews who experienced Communist identity effacement, it became the anthem of the Soviet Jewry movement across the Jewish world. For the children of Holocaust survivors, it was a real question: so many of us have been killed, will we really survive? In the months before 1967 everyone was sure that Israel was surely to be destroyed, with citizens digging preparatory graves in Jerusalem’s Sacher park and jokes about how “the last Israeli Jew should turn off the light when he leaves”. When the existential threat turned into a miraculous, earth-shattering victory, young Jews could rally and sing: “Am Yisrael Chai!”

For me, this song is kitsch. With all due respect to the enormously significant, painful and dramatic moments of 20^th century Jewish history, for most of my generation, singing “Am Yisrael Chai” is a tacky, overstated, and even self-indulgent thing to do. I’m over simplifying things, but while I’m not ignoring the fragility of Jewish existence, I am trying to point to a sociological reality that no amount of Holocaust education can overturn: the reality of the 60’s and 70’s was not the reality of the 80’s and 90’s. Shlomo’s song doesn’t have the same psychological effect, because the crisis was never one we experienced in the first person: “Am Yisrael Chai” was never a question, only an answer.

For the previous generation Jewish existence was primarily about, well, existence. Being alive, being allowed to freely – and sovereignly – celebrate our identities, rituals and communities. But for the next generation, mere continuity is not enough. We want to be about something. My teacher David Hartman called this “Auschwitz or Sinai”. Are we going to be simply about existing (Auschwitz), or are we going to give content to our existence (Sinai). Sinai is about the idea ofmitzva, of action, that redeems us from the egocentricity of our own existence and propels us towards having a mission in the world (what that mission is, we can argue some other day).

Some lament this generational divide. I’d rather be productive: If we can’t sing “Od Avinu Chai”, what song about “Our Father” can we sing? This brings me to a lesser known Shlomo Carlebach tune, a rare recording of him singing the great American spiritual “I’m on my way to Canaan land.” It too is highly relevant to this week’s parsha:

Yaakov, dying in Egypt, forces his sons to swear they’ll bury him in Canaan, the land that was promised to his ancestors. Yaakov is the only patriarch to have spent most of his life outside the land of Canaan: His best years are wasted in Lavan’s house, his last days in Egypt. His life story is about someone who is constantly on the way, not there yet, but adamant that he’ll get there. His dying wish is to arrive.

This in itself is a message worth learning from Yaakov: the ability to see that even when life takes me to very different destinations, I won’t lose sight of the promised land.

Which brings me to the spiritual. Shlomo recorded this in the ‘60’s, and I love it for its simplicity, but also for its tenacity: “I’m on my way to Canaan’s land!” goes the spiritual. And if that doesn’t sound Jewish enough to you, there’s a stiff necked part that follows: “If sister don’t go, won’t hinder me; If sister don’t go, won’t hinder me… I’m on the way, yes my Lord, I’m on the way!”. Those are the words, but you really want to listen to the song (unfortunately, I couldn’t find my copy of Shlomo’s recording, but better yet, here’s a link to the great blue-grass gospel duo Flatt and Scruggs’s rendition).

There is no solution here to the larger questions of Jewish identity and Jewish continuity. But there is a strong statement about process. For a younger generation, Jewish existence cannot be about mere existence. It must be about a commandment (Lech Lecha!), a journey, a meaningful transformation. This shouldn’t be a self-indulgent personal journey, but rather one that starts with the self and grows out to community, society, and the world. To paraphrase the Talmudic saying we started off with: “As long as his offspring are on their way, Yaakov is on his way", or in the words of the song: "Sweet Lord, we're on our way...

Light, Darkness and other Religions: Thoughts on the 8th Night of Hanukkah

Driving down the streets of Manhattan after Shabbat, I was struck by the sight of hundreds of Protestants walking towards the Cathedral for Midnight Mass. I returned home to discover Catholics had lined the sidewalks outside my house waiting to enter a local church. There’s something very moving about seeing people go to shul.

With Chanukah candles in some windows, and Christmas trees in others, December in America lends itself to mushy ecumenical statements of “hey, we’re not so different after all”. I believe the differences between religions and identities are critical, but pointing out the shared moments is just as important.

This week, as the pope bemoaned the fact that “the superficial glitter” hides the real meaning of the religion and its values, I too was nodding: "Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God's humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity." The Pope was calling it the way it is: out of the legitimate desire to turn Christmas into a less religious day and more of a “one size fits all” December holiday, the deeper meanings of the day are often lost. It’s good to have a day to celebrate family, and exchanging gifts is a great way to strengthen relationships. I also find value in families of diverse religious backgrounds finding creative ways to showcase their complex identities in their homes. But rituals and holidays have deeper meanings and statements that can easily be lost if there is nothing but glitter and gift wrapping, and it is up to us to infuse our rituals with the deeper meaning, values and narratives we wish to give as a gift to ourselves this year.

Agreeing with the pope and being inspired by people of other religions as they pray, reminded me that while as a Jew I have a strong coalition with Jews of all practices and beliefs, Jews are not my only coalition. As a religious person in the modern world, I have a coalition with religious people of other faiths, as we claim together that living a spiritual life of humility and observance is a value in this secular age we live in. Watching the news from Beit Shemesh this week, where extremist Ultra-Orthodox men have pushed all boundaries in their misogynistic ways, I was reminded that religious extremists have their own coalition, with communities of various religions reacting to modernity in similar fundamentalist ways. In response to them I belong to a third coalition, of people who promote liberal and humanistic values, beyond and within categories of religiosity or faith. But that deserves its own post…
So how do I hold a complex identity that shares values across political and religious boundaries, and yet retains its unique authenticity? Hanukkah offers us the ability to celebrate both within our Jewish identity, alongside celebrating a deeper human phenomenon that is shared across cultures. People love to point out the “ancient pagan” origins of certain holidays, but for the non-historicists among us this is just another word for “ancient human” origins. Hannukah, like many other winter holidays, is a festival of lights which arrives around the darkest night of the year. The Talmud itself retells the Hanukkah story as a humanistic holiday. In this version, from Tractate Avodah Zara (as part of a discussion of what distinguishes Jewish from pagan!) Hanukkah is described as having been enstated by Adam, the first human being. The language of the Adam Hanukkah myth mimics, almost parodies, the story of the Maccabees’ Hannukah:
Our Rabbis taught: When Adam [the first human] noticed that the days were getting shorter, he said: "Shame on me, the world is perhaps becoming darker because of my sins, and will soon return to chaos! Is this what the heavens meant when they punished me with mortality?" For eight days he prayed and fasted. When the period of Tevet [the month after Kislev] arrived and he saw that the days were now growing longer, he realized: "This is the way of the world."  Adam then made eight days of celebration. The following year he instated these and those as holidays. Talmud Bavli Avodah Zara 8b	תנו רבנן  [שנו רבותינו]: לפי שראה אדם הראשון יום שמתמעט והולך, אמר: "אוי לי, שמא בשביל שסרחתי עולם חשוך בעדי וחוזר לתוהו ובוהו, וזו היא מיתה שנקנסה עלי מן השמים", עמד וישב ח' ימים בתענית [ובתפלה], כיון שראה תקופת טבת וראה יום שמאריך והולך, אמר: "מנהגו של עולם הוא", הלך ועשה שמונה ימים טובים, לשנה האחרת עשאן לאלו ולאלו ימים טובים (תלמוד בבלי מסכת עבודה זרה דף ח עמוד ב)
The admittance of the Talmud that Hanukkah did not start with the Maccabees holds a critical lesson for living in a world of multiple narratives. It allows me to celebrate my story, the Maccabean Hanukkah, alongside recognizing the universal elements of the holiday, and rejoicing in those as well. We could rewind all the holidays into a humanitrian unitarian mush, or fast forward them into a bland commercial festivus, but I personally am invested in each group celebrating their own narrative, while recognizing and rejoicing those other narratives as well. It bears the danger of becoming hyper-particularistic, but it also retains the rich authenticity of unique traditions, that each hold their own recipe for a better world.
Before leaving Hanukkah and this Talmudic passage, on this night of 8 candles it is worth pointing out that this story also makes a very moving statement about the human reaction to darkness. When Adam first realizes that sunlight is diminishing and the nights are getting longer, he immediately turns to blame himself for this suffering. But once he realizes that this darkness is not about him, his guilt or even his repentance, but rather that this is “the way of the world”, he then CELEBRATES it. In this story, Hanukkah is a celebration of the fact that there are times in which darkness happens, and yet it is followed by times of increased light. Human beings lighting candles during the darkest nights is perhaps part of a divine-human covenant: when God’s world (tragically?) provides more darkness, we human beings promise to step up and provide more light. Mortality is not a “fall of man”, it is “the way of the world”, and it requires a certain response from us – lighting candles. I was reminded of this story last week when the father of an alumnus told me how he left in the middle of a pivotal conference attended by the President, in order to sit at the deathbed of his best friend. The suffering of death is unfortunately the way of the world. The candles we light through our own acts of compassion are what will help us get through the darkness and the cold, until spring arrives again.
Hanukkah Sameach and have a warm winter,
Mishael

Single Malt Scotch for Feminists: A Book Review

The Masculine Dilemmas of the Partnership Minyan

Published in the Forward, 30 December 2011, this is my review of:

The Men’s Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World
By Elana Maryles Sztokman

Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/148302

A few years ago, a friend announced that he intended to start a “Kiddush club” at our synagogue. “Our shul needs more of a social scene,” he declared, “and some high-quality single malt whisky!” he added jokingly. I was vehemently opposed. Our synagogue is a “partnership minyan,” which seeks to maximize women’s participation in the prayer service within the bounds of Halacha and the Orthodox community. A Kiddush club smacked to me of a classic patriarchal construction, a complete contradiction of our attempt at re-aligning the gender dynamic of Orthodox synagogue life.

I was thinking of this exchange as I was reading Elana Sztokman’s new book, “The Men’s Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World,” an ethnography of men in partnership minyanim. Sztokman asks a fascinating question: What do the men get from it?

As Sztokman describes at the beginning of the book, the partnership minyan phenomenon started in 2001 with two small minyanim in Jerusalem (Shira Chadasha) and New York (Darkhei Noam). Those two are now regularly attended by hundreds every Shabbat and have prompted 25 other such minyanim in places as far flung as Melbourne and Beersheva and as traditional as Skokie, Ill., and Englewood, N.J. At these minyanim, women and men share equally in Torah reading and speaking before the community, and women lead some parts of the service — but men and women are separated by a mechitzah, the barrier between the genders that is the hallmark of an Orthodox synagogue. While still considered anomalous in the eyes of most of the Orthodox community, partnership minyanim are no longer beyond the pale.

Read the rest of the review at: http://www.forward.com/articles/148302

Hanukkah and the Battle for Re-Interpretation

Boris Shatz (bottom) with his Matityahu in the background Oh, the joy of Hanukkah. Such a popular holiday, yet with no clear message or meaning. There seem to be more interpretations to the holiday of lights and Maccabees than the calorie count of a latke. Indeed, every few years a media fistfight breaks out about the meaning of the holiday. In 2009 David Brooks wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes about Hanukkah, pointing out the zealous actions of the Maccabees. Many liberal dreidel-spinners were horrified to be reminded that their beloved holiday of religious freedom was based on the acts of violent religious zealots. I found Brooks’ piece disheartening not because of the questionable actions of the Maccabees, but rather because he ended up denying the right to creatively interpret the holiday. Brooks’ expectation that holidays must be confined by a historicist representation of their original context revealed a deep misunderstanding of how Judaism works.  Judaism is a “community of interpretation,” and it is those interpretations that make Judaism an interesting, vibrant and moral tradition, that walks the line between adhering to its authentic calling and being continually relevant. No Jewish ritual exemplifies this “community of interpretation” more than the way Hanukkah was interpreted by Jews in the modern era. Travel among Jewish homes as they light their menorahs, asking what the meaning of Hanukkah is, and you’ll discover extremely divergent stories: In many an American home, Hanukkah is a battle of a minority against those who deny it religious freedom. In Orthodox homes Hanukkah is about a civil war against hyper-free assimilated Jews who gave in to their neighbors’ Hellenized ways.  In secular Israeli Zionist homes God and the oil lamp were summarily evicted and the battle of the Maccabees was re-christened a battle for national political freedom. In the home of a Habad family near you the Maccabees wear black hats and battle to ignite a Jewish spark within their fellow Jews.  (If you’ll excuse the product placement - you can read more about these interpretations in my father, Noam Zion’s Hannukah anthology). Each community uses the rituals and metaphors of Hanukkah in order to shape and celebrate their ideological world view – and this is exactly as it should be! In 1907 a wild Hanukkah party rocked the world of the early Zionist settlement in Jerusalem. Betzalel, the heady Zionist art school of Jerusalem had just opened its doors, and its founder, Boris Shatz, had place his baroque-like sculpture of Matthias, the first Maccabean zealot, at the center. The polemic that followed on the OpEd pages of the Israeli Zionist newspapers of the time rivals was immortalized in Israeli Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s novel “Tmol Shilshom”:
When Professor Boris Shatz founded his Betzalel, he was struck by Hanukkah, the holy day that people started calling the Holiday of the Maccabees. They went and turned it into a lusty party. They placed a large statue of Matityahu the High Priest, with a sword in hand ready to stab the villain who dared sacrifice a pig on the altar placed in honor of evil Antiochus. They danced the night away in revelry and excess. The next day [Eliezer] Ben Yehuda wrote in his newspaper good words about the party, but he was disturbed on account of that statue that they had placed in the ballroom: For Matityahu was a zealous for his religion – his  religion and not his country. As long as the Greeks controlled our country, and stole, robbed, murdered, killed and destroyed cities and villages, Matityahu and his sons stayed in their city Modi'in and didn't do a thing, but the second the Greeks began harming the religion… he jumped up like a lion, he and his heroic sons… And now, says Ben Yehuda in his essay, now I have no doubt that when we gathered yesterday in his honor, if the statue would have come to life, or if Matityahu was alive today - that he would have stabbed us all in one go with the sword in his hand! Wouldn't he have sacrificed us on top of that altar?!	כשעשה הפרופסור בוריס שץ את הבצלאל שלו, פגע בו חנוכה, חג קדוש זה שהתחילו קוראים לו חג המכבים. הלכו ועשאוהו נשף חשק. העמידו פסל של מתתיהו כהן גדול, כשהוא אוחז חרב בידו לדקור את הפריץ שהקריב חזיר על גבי המזבח שעשו לשם אנטיוכוס הרשע. עשו כל הלילה בהוללות ובזוללות. למחר כתב בן יהודה בעיתונו דברים של חיבה על הנשף, אלא שדעתו לא היתה נוחה בשל אותו פסל שהעמידו באולם, שהרי מתתיהו זה קנאי לדתו היה, לדתו ולא לארצו, שהרי כל הזמן שפשטו היוונים על ארצנו וגזלו וחמסו ורצחו והרגו והחריבו ערים וכפרים ישבו לו מתתיהו ובניו במודיעין עירם ולא נקפו אצבע, אלא משהתחילו היוונים לפגוע בדת... קפץ כארי הוא ובניו הגיבורים... ועתה, אומר בן יהודה במאמרו, ועתה אין אני מסופק שבשעה שנתאספנו אמש לכבודו, אילו היו נופחים רוח חיים בפסל, או אילו היה הוא עצמו חי, כלום לא היה דוקר אותנו כולנו כאחד בחרב שבידו?! כלום לא היה מעלה אותנו על גבי המזבח?! ש"י עגנון, "תמול שלשום", עמ' 386
I love how the polemics of a century ago continue to be relevant today. Schatz's Matityahu 1894 The irony of inviting Matityahu to a secular artists rave, surrounded by idols and sculptures, is awesome, and it reminds us to always be a little tongue in cheek about our reinterpretations. I hear Ben Yehuda’s criticism, but I would side with Boris Shatz here. We have the right, in fact, we have the need, to be reinterpreting our holidays for ourselves and our communities in ways that are relevant, that charge our lives and our Judaism with a content that is fresh and motivating. When we weave Jewish narratives back into our lives, we galvanize our focus towards greater meaning and action. These reinterpretations need to resonate within Jewish values and narratives authentically, but they must also be renegotiated so as to be a response to the needs and vision of our communities. What is the meaning of Hanukkah in 2011? What do the Maccabees tell us this year? Is it the continuous call to let the affluence of the American Jewish community spill into the public realm, as symbolized by Jewish lights in the window lighting the public streets, or is it about our need to light candles inwardly, reminding ourselves of the light of our heritage in a time of existential darkness? Are today’s Hellenists those who are mimicking European neo-fascist sentiments in the land of Israel, and it is time for Maccabean democracy fighters to “banish the darkness,” or are the Hellenists those who blindly accept a post-ethnic mentality and are ashamed to call the Jewish people their family? I hope you’ll see that I am not claiming that Hannukah is any one of these stories, rather that within the spectrum of stories that can be told within Jewish narratives and values, we must take ownership of this story, redeem it from its “original historical” significance (a Greek idea if ever there was one!) and reinterpret the holiday, placing a big Matityahu in the center of our Hanukkah parties and actively choosing how we are telling the story of his battle. This is what the Zionists and American Jews of previous generations did so effectively. We must not feel alienated from these rituals because of their historical underpinnings, but rather retell them creatively, turning them into tools as we encounter the greater challenges of our own existence. Perhaps that is the ironic fate of Matityahu the Zealot: to hear widely divergent explanations of his heroism and have people wolf down fatty foods espousing narratives he would scarcely recognize. That too must be symbolized somehow through the narrative of Hanukkah.

Joseph in Egypt, Israelis in New York: Christmas and “Book-bag Judaism”

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.