האשה צנועה

Wonderful, amazing, absolutely thrilling news! With not so much connection to Israel, but definitely important on the Jewish feminist front.

First, an explanation of terms:

An agunah (עגונה) is a woman whose husband has run off without giving her a get, a Jewish divorce. Though civically divorced, she cannot remarry by Jewish law, and the civic courts won't interfere because it's a religious issue. In many cases, the man is holding out for lots of money, or sometimes just ruining her life because he can. Fine. 

Though the plight of the agunot has been becoming more and more publicized recently, the rabbis really have not done all that they can to help these women. They announce that he's shunned by the community, and sometimes get him thrown in jail, but more often than not, do nothing. And we all know that where there's a rabbinic will there's a halachic way. I mean, they found a way for elevators to run on shabbat but they can't find a way for these women to reclaim their lives?!!?!?!!

In Straight Talk, a book by Sally Berkovic, I read the most wonderful thing. Just like in Aristophanes' play Lysistrata, where the women all stop sleeping with the men until the men stop fighting, in a community in Canada all the women refused to go to the mikvah until an agunah in the community was given a get. 

Now, in Judaism in order to be allowed to sleep with your husband, you must first wait seven days after your period and then dunk in the mikvah, a ritual bath. When the women in the Canadian community refused to go to the mikvah, they were in effect withholding sex from their husbands until such time as the agunah would be free to continue her life. Instead of one lonely, powerless woman trying to convince the rabbis to exert pressure on her husband, an entire community of horny men applied leverage to the shmuck so that he would give his wife a get. Awesome, aye?

Happy Birthday Israel!

In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles. –Ben-Gurion

Today is Israel’s 60th anniversary of Independence Day. Sixty years ago, Ben-Gurion and a group of pioneers together signed their name to the Declaration of the State of Israel. Among other things, the Declaration states:

“THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Has it kept its promises? Is Israel just and equal to all its inhabitants? What about the arsim, the Ethiopian immigrants who are greatly discriminated against in the school system and professional arena? The Russian immigrants who join gangs and push drugs? Does Israel really give religious freedom to all? Atheists have a hard time practicing in the Holy Land. The Israeli government has definitely not safeguarded the holy places of all religions, though perhaps that’s not its fault: Maarat Hamachpela is divided in half, Arab graves desecrate the side of the Temple Mount, and Har Zeitim is practically under siege. Women are pushed to the backs of government-owned buses in religious neighborhoods, and barred from holding prayer services at the kotel. IDF soldiers have killed Palestinian civilians during terrorist-targeting missions. The gay pride parade was cancelled last year due to fear of violence. Justice was not served when Sharon ran for PM on a basis of not giving away land at any cost and then tossed away Israelis’ homes without the referendum that the country was screaming for. The government members have suffered an embarrassing barrage of personal scandals this past year.

Yet, with all this (u’vchol zot… do you hear me G-d?) Israel is doing wonderfully for a country only sixty years out of the shell. It is a refuge for Jews from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, France, Morocco, etc. It is trying to iron out the kinks of a secular government running a religious country. Women have it better in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East: they are free to vote, work, and wear what they will, and the speaker of parliament, president of the supreme court, and foreign minister are all female. Israeli soldiers follow a fifteen-step process before even being allowed to load their guns when they are in an area with civilians. Homosexuals from Arab countries and from Nablus and the West Bank flee to Israel for safety. Young Israelis fired with passionate idealism and love for the country are working even now to resurrect integrity in Israeli politics.

Tomorrow in Israel, families will pack the parks and grassy lawns with their mangalim (grills). There will be flag dances and children’s performances, singing and drinking. Like any other country celebrating Independence Day, Israelis will party. Unlike any other country, Israelis will ask themselves whether their State still has the right to exist. For the first time since its creation, Israelis and Jews worldwide are losing their certainty that Israel will be around for the rest of their lifetimes. Like a young teenage girl growing in a world surrounded with sick body images in the media, Israel is being swayed by the constant barrage against it. Yet it must remain confident if it is to continue as a strong nation for the next sixty years.

The Silver Platter

"And his blood was crying out from the ground." -Amir Gilboa

Tonight is Yom Hazikaron. Memorial Day.

One day a year it’s okay to cry for those who gave their lives for Israel. So on Yom Hazikaron we press pieces of tissues to our aching eyes, and dutifully count off the names of friends and relatives, and dream of peace. And the rest of the time, the 364 days that are not Yom Hazikaron, we try not to think of the cost in young lives, the tremendous blood payment that has been made. But then someone mentions how Gal would have loved this, he always loved playing scrabble on shabbos afternoons, and someone else says their fence hasn’t been painted since Ariel… and those pictures of Doron keep cropping up on youtube and one cannot always keep one’s eyes lowered when one passes the piano to skirt the basket of memorial packets put together by friends and family of the loved ones and nobody can hear a bar of Mah Avarech without leaking teardrops a bit and neither can we hear an ambulance siren without flinching or look a hijab in the face without ducking and the pain is constant but in this country it must be pushed aside because who will understand that we all have someone who has died, that we are bound to even the dead we don’t know because they died for us, and after all what is our pain compared to that of the mother who will never hold her boy again? The girlfriend who will never wink at her lover again? The toddler who will grow up with Abba’s picture on the mantelpiece and the knowledge that his father died for his country.

Don’t give me that crap about war being kind. Nor the silver platter nonsense. Dulce et—I don’t believe it. I believe in children growing up, growing old, growing… Do whatever you have to do. Funkthewar, Fuckthewar, just end the war.

דע לפני מי אתה עומד

For the first time ever, the Israeli government is funding the building of a Reform synagogue. It may be a difficult thing for Americans firmly convinced of the sanctity of separation between Church and State to grasp, but this is actually a step towards religious equality.

The Religious Affairs Ministry controls funding for the building of synagogues. In the past, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, an orthodox institution, has not acknowledged the validity of liberal Judaism. Jews in Israel who were not comfortable with orthodoxy generally had nowhere else to go, and drifted away from religion entirely. Though it’s common knowledge that secular Israelis often know Tanach better than dedicated Diasporic Jews.

The current schism between religious and nonreligious Jews has deep roots. Modern Israel was built by secular Zionists who established socialist communities called kibbutzim. At the time of the creation of the State, many religious Jews worldwide protested its creation because they wanted to wait for mashiach (messiah) and thought a secular government had no place in eretz hakadosh. Patriotic secular Israelis hated religious Israelis who refused to do army service and protested that they did their share for Israel by sitting and learning all day. During the hitnatkut, the schism widened as some secular Israelis saw nothing wrong with giving away land (besides the obvious military imbecility of it) and religious Israelis saw their homes destroyed by a secular government. Just recently over Passover, an intense debate raged about whether or not to legally allow the public sale of leavened food during the holiday.

Nowadays there is a mass exodus of secular Israelis from Israel. America is the dreamland that they flee to. In any city in the States one can find a cynical community of expat Israelis living the good life. In Israel, the religious Zionists are putting their all into the country. They compete to get into the most elite units in the army. Religious Zionism holds the future of Israel.

The divide between religious and secular Israelis is more pronounced to a visitor from the United States. Last year, I noticed how towns and neighborhoods were divided by religious observance, effectively segregating the religious and nonreligious. Some Israelis are making efforts to merge the two worlds- programs like Gesher and Tzohar, and individual dati leumi couples who live in secular neighborhoods, attempt to bridge the gap. But it’s difficult when the mindset of one group is to try to become as American as possible, and the other believes “higiya zmah hageeulah” –the time of the redemption is arriving.

The government’s decision to fund a Reform synagogue shows a new willingness to embrace alternative paths of Judaism. Although certain things must remain under the control of the orthodox rabbinate if they are to have any credibility for the orthodox population (eg: marriage), spiritual outlet for secular Jews is an absolute must if Israel is to have any future of reconciliation between chilonim and datiim. We may be as different as apples and oranges, but in the end we’re all juice.

לא קלה היא דרכנו

As the bus rolled past farmland and little groves of forest, it dawned upon me how much the countryside looked like Columbus. Then I shivered and shook the thought from my mind. Poland and Ohio could not have anything in common if I was to have any peace when I returned.

We’d been in Poland five days, and had three more to go. Our group of seminary girls, in Israel for a year of post-high school Torah study, had taken advantage of the Heritage program’s pre-Passover Poland tour to both learn about the Holocaust and affirm that we remember.

After only half a day, I wanted nothing less than to return to Israel already. I felt dirtied by Poland. Driving through its pretty landscape I sat glued to the windows of the bus, intrigued by the phantom blood that I saw running alongside the roads. I hadn’t wanted to go. I’d felt that a trip to Poland would merely be outlet for histrionics and somehow unfairly appropriate the Holocaust for myself, using those who died in an emotional game. But my own idiocies couldn’t let me keep from respecting the memories of those who perished there, nor from making the statement to the world that yet another person would never forget, so I found myself on a bus filled with Orot, Migdal Oz, Shaalvot, and MMY girls intent on capturing Poland on their cameras already filled with photos of a happy year spent learning in Israel.

We trundled along from cemetery to concentration camp, abandoned synagogue to derelict ghetto. The mud squelched into the boots we’d bought specially for this trip (who packs boots when they’re going to Israel for the year?) and clung to the Israeli flags dangling damply from our backpacks. Exhausted by a max of three hours of sleep a night and even more by the emotional barrage thrown at us, we marched along in a sort of numbness from horror to horror, subsisting solely on mapah chamahs and the knowledge that at the end of the week we’d be on a flight back to beautiful Israel.

Belzec left me gasping: too much death thrown in my face on a sunny day. Majdanek left me disgusted: it looked like my summer camp, except for the smiling empty gas chambers. Birkenau resembled the University of Maryland with its brick dormitories, a comparison I still try not to make whenever I notice the chimneys on the buildings here. Auschwitz II was too massive: I couldn’t see the end of it from the entrance, nor comprehend its enormity until four days after returning to Israel, when I woke gasping one night in my bed in Elqana, my mind reeling from suddenly being hit with all of Auschwitz.

The cemeteries were friendlier. Many of them pre-war, they marked my ancestors’ remains beneath mossy stones inscribed with the legend “Isha tznuah” –a modest woman. Often I wished that the engravers had left more of a record; besides modesty, who the hell was she? But modesty was all I got. Something that has survived Hitler’s purge to this day.

The eight days I spent in Poland were mostly spent yearning to get back to Israel. Never had I felt so strongly my position as a Diasporic Jew. My most terrifying moment was awakening alone in a grassy cemetery on a small hill where I’d sat down for “just a moment” to regain some energy. I assumed that everyone was at the top of the cemetery, and only upon gaining the crest did I realize that they’d left me behind, and the bus was nowhere in sight. I flew over the Polish potato fields, mentally running over all the Polish words I knew: “jenkuya,” thank you, and “rynik,” marketplace. I cursed myself for not having rented a phone that would work internationally instead of only in Israel. Strangely, the fear that I started to give great gasping sobs for was that I might dehydrate. Obviously I’d spent too much time hiking in the Holy Land.

If I am stuck in Poland… If I am stuck in Poland… Forever. Of course if I could have thought about it rationally I would have foreseen the bus’ return up the hill, the wiry Israeli security guard flying out and shouting “ayfoh hayit, Chanahleh?” as my friends poured out to hug me. But at the moment, I thought I was facing a very real sojourn in Poland for possibly the rest of my life, or at least until I learned enough Polish to tell someone I wanted to go home. To Israel.

Three days later, when the plane touched down in Tel Aviv and its hatch disgorged us onto the hot pavement, I finally did what I’ve wanted to do for years and never dared to, since my first trip to Israel at the age of ten; I knelt down and kissed the tarmac. Home at last.

Before we entered Auschwitz II, walking down the railroad tracks with a sefer Torah in front of us, the wrinkled survivor with us told us “komemiyut. Walk komemiyut.” Upright, he said. Enter the murder-grounds of your ancestors with heads held high. I wanted to shout to him that he was wrong. That’s not the context! It’s from bentching, the prayer after the meal, and the word is slipped in thus: “V’Hu yolichanu komemiyut l’arzaynu” –“He (G-d) will bring us upright to our land.” I walked into Auschwitz painfully erect when all I really wanted was to curl into a fetal position, but I strode into Ben Gurion Airport with my head held high and glad. Komemiyut.

Israel is coming up on its 60th birthday this week. It’s hard to go from the terrible misery of remembering the Holocaust, to joyous celebration of Israel’s birth, and within the same week mourn Israel’s fallen on Yom Hazikaron, the national Day of Remembrance. But it is also fitting. Israel stands a country young in age but old in memory: born out of the ashes of European Jewry it now exists a safe haven of refuge to Jews worldwide. So that if ever Maryland or Ohio begin to resemble Poland in more than appearance, there is somewhere to go.

לזכר

In memory of the six million.


Thou shall not be a victim. Thou shall not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. -USHMM plaque