May article for Temple bulletin

It’s amazing to me that almost an entire year has gone by. Ten months went like that – POOF and they’re gone. I leave for the United States in five weeks, and I find myself musing on what lessons I will take from my time here.

- Buying shwarma in pita for lunch from an Arab vendor, I remind myself that Israel is culturally Middle Eastern, not simply Ashkenazi.

- Listening to my Philipino neighbors argue in Tagalog, I remind myself that not everyone is Middle Eastern, or even Jewish.

- Watching a young Orthodox mother struggle to corral her payos-bedecked children into car seats, I look down at my spaghetti with meatballs and parmesan, and remind myself that even amongst all the Jews in this country, not all Jews are the same.

It’s hard to remember these things in a city of black hats and ghost-town Shabbats, a city that looks down upon women with kippot and sees Reformi as uniquely odd. Tel Aviv is familiar in its secularity, comforting in the fact that it feels just like home. Jerusalem is messy in its religious divisions.

And then I think about it – Jerusalem will never be uniform, for it is, in a sense, a microcosm of Judaism. Jerusalem contains so many different types of people and nationalities (Jews, Arabs, Russians, etc), so many types of Jews, and so many political viewpoints that it’s bursting at the seams. To the tourist, the city seems both ideal and idyllic, but underneath the surface, the city is fraught with tension.

Judaism, too, is similarly divided. The Conservative movement is weakening, Reform is becoming increasingly assimilated through intermarriage, and Orthodoxy is on the rise. In Reform Judaism alone, questions abound: should we include more Hebrew in services, how do we deal with issues of kashrut, what do we do to even the gender gap and bring boys back into camps and youth groups. Who hasn’t heard the joke that when there are three Jews in the room, you get four opinions? Or the one about two Jews stranded on the desert island? They built three shuls: one that Person A goes to, one that Person B goes to, and one that neither of them would be caught dead in. To a Jew, the separations are clear; to the non-Jew, the tensions are minimal, and denominations and divisions are blurred and indistinct.

Luckily for us, Jerusalem is Judaism in miniature not merely because it is split into many factions yet presents a united front: in addition, both the city and the religion also contain a sense of solidarity and spirituality. No other religion in the world incorporates a sense of cultural belonging in its very bylaws; no other city dresses all in white and smiles on Yom Kippur. All Jews worldwide ate some form of matzah this Pesach, and every Yerushalmite in every corner of the city mourned the loss of its children in the last Lebanese war. Judaism is wrapped up in the history, the land, and the people of Jerusalem… and I count myself lucky, and proud, to have been able to live among them.

Have a wonderful month, and I will see you all at services and oneg on May 25^th!

Tales of a divided Israel: A kosher McDonald’s in a secular area, and a sign requesting modesty outside ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim.