The Cancer of Ignorance

Yesterday morning I awoke in a fit of rage. It took about an hour and a half and a strong cup of coffee for the cause to reach the surface but finally it did and the tears of frustration started rolling down my cheeks. A conversation about an upcoming field trip to the Arab-Israeli city of Umm al-Fahem with a religious couple that I know was received with the, perhaps, expected response of -- aren't you afraid? shouldn't you have security? shouldn't you .....?

And in my defensive knee-jerk reaction, I retorted, "'They are people too." Arabs, that is.

Toward the end of the visit, the religious couple mentioned that of course Arabs are people too but "we" Jews/Israelis don't kill people like they do. They, we, do, don't, us, them, versus, bad, better, good.

In the moment, I never know why these comments bother me. I need time to process what doesn't sit well with me. But then it comes.

Today, the State of Israel has a Jewish majority with a valid sense of historic and current victimhood, and a belief that survival by all means necessary is justified. Please make no mistake. Today, there is plenty of anti-Semitism. There is a constant call for the destruction of the State of Israel in Iran, in Yemen, in Indonesia, in Gaza, in so many places. These threats are not to be undermined and they are not to be overlooked or ignored. Rockets continue to fall on Ashkelon, Ashdod, Sderot. Same story, different year.

Living in Israel, I understand the need for a security apparatus on steroids. Really, I do. I understand the history and the mistrust and the effects on the baggage that a history of persecution has on a society, pretending to be normal, with their Juicy Couture, Uggs, BMWs and reality t.v. shows, a shameful import from the United States.

However, what alarms me, and will continue to alarm me is the ignorance that the majority of the Jewish-Israeli population has toward its collective ability to support and promote and engage in structural violence, cruelty, torture, killings, murders, etc....all those things that "we" don't do.

It is very dangerous when a people becomes convinced that it has no dark side.

Unlike the Arabs, in Jewish Israel we have secret service agencies, police, army, navy, and so on and so forth. They do the dirty work for us. We don't have to randomly kill out of frustration, we have a system that takes care of the "enemy" for us. We don't need bulldozers gone awry in the streets of Jerusalem, we have government funded ones that tear down homes in neighborhoods where Jews decide they are the ones who should inhabit the streets of East Jerusalem instead of the Arab families living there. We don't put bombs on children passing through checkpoints because we have teenagers who shoot suspicious people from rooftops, snipers unseen.

I hear the voices of protest. The voices of you don't know what "they" are like. You don't know, you aren't from here, you don't....

But I can see, feel, read and hear. And I can see how the collective society of Jewish-Israel takes no responsibility and makes no connection between action and reaction. I read how an influx of African refugees, Filipino caregivers, Thai construction workers are accused of threatening the character of the State. How Ethiopian Jewish children are bullied out of public schools by parents who don't want that color going to school with their kids.

No country is perfect, but no country in the world is so self-convinced that it is something that it so isn't, at the popular level. Just because you look it doesn't mean you are "it".

But we have a free press....

So we have a free press, and the journalists are screaming through their printed words that this place is insane, that we are bigots, racists, that Zionism is dead, that we forgot where we came from, that the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the Courts and the system are being violated time and again. And nearly no one responds. So what good is a free press if people aren't inspired to action by it? So it's a confessional? A dumping ground for those "leftists"? Lovely. Again, if it looks like a democracy on paper, it must be so. Apparently the memo that democracy doesn't exist anywhere and is always in process did not arrive on the desk of any decisionmaker ever to roam the halls of the Israeli Knesset.

In my humble opinion, it has become too easy in Israel to write off the other as just that. Broad generalizations, stereotyping, racial profiling....

My grandfather (may his memory be for a blessing) survived the Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. In the last twenty years of his life, he sacrificed his own mental health to speak to youth about the horrors and the lessons of the Holocaust. The man wasn't perfect and he had his issues. Who doesn't? But from him more than anyone else, I learned that underneath the skin we all have the same red blood. We all behave badly. But we also have the strength to question those feelings, to put them in perspective, to understand how threat and scarcity can make us like animals. We have a choice in how we behave and sometimes, authority does NOT know best, and we have to question it and ourselves at all times. We are all capable of committing genocide, of shutting the other out when we perceive that the other threatens who we are and the system which we accept by habit, or by force, or by igorance. We are so weak in the face of hatred. It is unsettling.

You'd think after 2,000 years of exile and centuries of persecution, the Jewish people would get it, that they aren't going to fall into the dust, forgotten by history. No, the Jewish people persist and thrive against all odds. But today, I feel that in the context of the State of Israel, the means employed to survive do not justify the end. This society is sick, it is permeated with a cancer characterized by ignorance. It needs medicine, attention, and an honest look in the mirror. Because all I see are worms, decay, filth, and debris, beneath a thin veneer of Tommy Hilfiger and H&M. And I don't think it's sustainable. In fact, I hope it's not. No, I'm not calling for an end to the state. I'm just begging for a serious and meaningful overhaul from the inside, before someone on the outside forces it upon us.

Leave to Love It

It may very well be impossible to acclimate to the humid summers of Tel Aviv. Each year, around spring, which in Israel lasts approximately three to three and a half weeks, I try to imagine what it feels like at 2am on any night in August on Ben Yehuda Street only two blocks east of the Mediterranean Sea. The sensation of swimming through the air, sweating from the backs of my knees, the creases of my elbows, the temples, the upper lip, even from the sweat glands I didn't know about, located on my wrists. In those cool mornings of March, where the breeze is heavenly and the sun still delicate, the amnesia is the strongest and I think to myself, "this year I'll handle it better, this year the heat probably won't get to me."

Well, this year I reached a new low. After a summer of kicking taxis insensitive to pedestrians (mostly after very centering yoga lessons), throwing popcorn at a woman who physically assaulted me at the movie theater, and yelling at library security guards and bathroom maintenance women at Tel Aviv University for getting up in my business, I was itching to board that plane on August 15th, regardless of the nearly 8,000 miles that would separate me and my new husband for nearly three weeks. I had reached the point where hearing the Hebrew language itself made my heart beat faster, my already tense jaw clench tighter, and my blood boil a little hotter. I needed a break -- from the buses, from the news, from the religious, from the ways in which Israel is foreign to me -- an American by birth, an Israeli by choice, an alien by happenstance.

Waiting in line to go through customs at LAX, I experienced another episode of the experimentation with base behavior that I am currently trying out. A young woman standing behind me, holding her purse with an extended arm so that the leather mass kept banging against my ankles, brought out the inner monster in me. In a quick movement, I kicked up my heel, forcibly removing the purse from my range, just as the customs officer motioned for me to approach his podium. I didn't look back, I didn't care if I had scared the woman or received a look colored with disbelief or with disgust. Nothing could shame me out of the rage I'd been feeling in the six weeks of an increasingly scorching Tel Aviv summer, and the unshakable sense of entitlement to lash out against anyone who dared to get in my way.

From the safety and serenity of my parents' home, I have had the opportunity to explore this rage, this anger, this coming to the end of my rope, and what I have discovered is something much deeper than: it's just the heat that gets to me.

I think it became clear the morning that the story of the Israeli soldier posing demurely and provocatively with blindfolded Palestinian prisoners broke. As I read with horror the details of the photographs' content and the crass response of the young woman to whom they belonged, I felt the gravity and the despair that becoming a part of Israeli society has imparted upon me. And then, strangely, a moment of clarity and hope inflated my spirits the next moment after.

Israel is a place of myth and fantasy juxtaposed next to a despicable and inhumane reality. It is a place of innocence and the darkest forms of premeditated injustice, it is a place of survival, it is a place of human beings thrashing about trying to exist in a very ugly world, that is often indescribably beautiful as well.

It is challenging to explain what I mean.

It is disorientating to live in Israel. To do so one is constantly asked to live in a state of somewhere in between the past and the present. History is constantly being rewritten and reexamined, as though doing so will bring about greater understanding and an end to dispute. But as so many histories, so many truths are propagated, debated and published, it is difficult to keep track of what was, what is and what was wished would have been, that simply never was and probably never can or will be.

For many Jews who move to Israel, young and old alike, pioneers or those reuniting with family, the act of making aliyah is something of a rebirth and a chance to give purpose to one's life simply by paying the rent and taxes. To take one's place in a historical moment in which the Jews reclaimed a land that was promised and lost, regained and squandered, confiscated, and finally reconquered.

I believe that the realization of that dream seemed so surreal, so unbelievable and larger than anyone's imagination that, in coming to fruition, an assumption, perhaps fashioned out of gratitude and awe, was made or taught, that the inheritors of this part of Earth would be special, would be different, would know right from wrong, and when faced with moral dilemma, would always side with truth and justice. But it turns out they were and are just humans, capable of feeling hatred, bigotry, prejudice, xenophobia and every other blemish of the human psyche, particularly when every direction in which they turned and still revolve, they were and are met by the demons of human demise.

To the outsider thinking she wants in, what could be more devastating than waking up to the fact that the dream was only ever just that?

Bizarrely, that is where the hope sneaks in --- through the acknowledgment of rock bottom and the Knowing (and perhaps foolish, stubborn believing) that it could be better. That an army unit stationed at a check point in the West Bank has implemented a protocol involving morning greetings in Arabic language and direct eye contact with passersby, diminishing the incidence of hostile confrontations and smoother passage from morning until night at that particular checkpoint. That racism against Ethiopian citizens and African refugees finds itself as the headlines of the country's newspapers, becoming a national issue overnight. Isn't the first step to fixing a problem admitting that there is a problem needing to be dealt with in the first place? And while the time it takes to see change happen seems interminable, what else do we have in such abundance, but time itself?

Civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, welfare rights -- the movements for these rights didn't succeed in the matter of days or weeks, but rather after decades of violence, passive resistance -- decades of injustice, decades of hypocrisy that contributed to the articulation of the desire of the visionaries and the leaders for something different, something better, something that would honor human dignity.

I hate Israel. I love Israel. It's miserable. It's wonderful. It's a cesspool. It's a paradise. It is this and it is that and everything in between. It is the beginning and it is the end of understanding the glorious and the infamous human condition. And if only I knew the humidity would disappear by September 3rd, I'd be itching to get back.

Freedom Flotilla Turns Deadly

Helicopters and airplanes in unusual numbers and loudness flew over the nearby coast this morning as I sat translating an Arabic article about the anticipation of war in the Middle East this summer. Always a pleasure to see how the media enjoys heating things up when negotiations and processes are at a standstill. As though an absence of activity could only signify the calm before the storm.

Amidst the roaring choppers and plane engines in the nearby distance I received a phone call from a friend and she wondered if I had heard what happened.

No, now what?

Ten killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the Freedom Flotilla that has been heading toward Gaza with seven boatloads of humanitarian aide and nearly 700 international passengers. Ok.

And so began the search on the internet. Haaretz, New York Times and the BBC. The reaction and the thoughts followed.

Both a feature and a flaw, I aspire to view events and the stories of the people involved from as many angles as possible. Having lived in Israel for a little more than three years now, it is always true that the real understanding of a situation can be found in the grey area. However, regardless of whether the grey area illuminates motives and rationale that assist in comprehending the way things go down, the end result usually is that Israel finds itself in an unconscionable mess.

So I'll just start listing my problems and questions as they come to mind.

First, the blockade on Gaza. An act of collective punishment? Yes. Recently I read a list of permitted and forbidden items that can or cannot traverse the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, which was published by an Israeli NGO by the name of Gisha. Rice and beans and lentils, for example, are all permissible for entry into the Gaza Strip. However, cinammon and coriander seeds are not. Certain learning materials are able to be collected, others are not. My conclusion from reading the list is that the blockade seeks to severely lower the quality of life of the Citizens of Gaza. To make their life so bland and boring and difficult that they will collectively do something against their leaders. The blockade is not in place to merely monitor and prevent the smuggling of weapons that could be used against the State of Israel. The seige on Gaza serves to frustrate, intimidate and to control the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It has little to no affect on the strength of its leaders in Hamas.

On the issue of humanitarian aide sailing in from distant ports of Cyprus, Turkey, Greece and so on. These missions do not help the people of Gaza. They are publicity stunts to provoke a response from Israel that will only serve to harm Israel's already sullied reputation as well as to illustrate to the Israeli people how ill-equipped its military forces and its leaders are in making decisions in a perceived crisis. Moreover, when I read dispatches through listservs of the people aboard these ships, I get the sense that they are living in a fantasy world in which they star as Robin Hood, Indiana Jones, or any other savior-hero type that is swooping in to save the day, in their very own choose-your-own-adventure novel. They have no idea what they are getting into when they board those ships and from what happened this morning, it is clear that their approach to humanitarian aide and how they represent themselves to the international audience is rather muddled.

What do I mean?

An informed person would know that when the Israeli Defense Forces makes a statement that your flotilla should not approach the coastal waters of its territory (occupied or otherwise), they are not joking. Moreover, if you are aboard a ship of humanitarian aide and you claim to be doing so for the sake of nonviolence and/or the rescue of the Palestinian people, you do not attack soldiers with knives and sticks or try to steal their guns (as mentioned in the BBC). Also, if you are an informed person, you would know that not too many months ago, the Israeli Navy intercepted a ship on its way to Gaza from Cyprus whose cargo, unbeknownst to its crew, consisted entirely of weapons from Iran, destined for Gaza. If your charge, as is that of the Israeli Defense Forces, is to protect your citizens, knowing that ships heading for Gaza are not necessarily just carrying humanitarian aide, why on earth would you allow your unit to permit the passage of these ships without, at least, a thorough search of content? What, Israel is supposed to take these people at their word? That would be the day...

From my point of view, in reality, it's all about the stardom and the glory. If it weren't, another outcome to this incident would have been possible. Israel offered to the Freedom Flotilla safe harbor in Ashdod. All the materials of the ships would have been inspected and granted passage to the Palestinians in accordance with the lists of permissible items. The participants would be processed and sent back to their respective countries. In this scenario, Israel would still be the asshole, the Gazans would get at least some of the aide, and the participants could return home, proud of their resistance and defiance of the seige against Gaza and tell all their friends and family how they stood up to the Israeli war machine.

But no, it didn't work out like that. In the end what has happened? No one has won.

14 people are dead. Tens of others are hurt. Soldiers and commanders are wounded. Everyone is being treated at the Tel Shomer hospital just outside of Tel Aviv. The Gazans do not receive the aid. Israel has yet another already lost public relations battle to fight. And Netanyahu meets with Obama tomorrow, supposedly. Wonder how that will go?

And meanwhile, the warmongers of the media are probably salivating over the rise in the mercury of socio-political tensions.

Me? No false pretentions here folks. I'll be praying that, at least, for the next 16 to 17 days, people will hold it together so that I can get married, as planned.

** As of June 2, 2010, I understand that nine deaths resulted in the aboard ship battle between activists on the Mavi Marmarra and the Israeli Navy. Not 10 and not 14. As of yet the identities of these deceased individuals have not been released. I do not know if they were bystanders or were in fact those who participated in attacking the Israeli soldiers that descended upon the ship. As per the information now available, as well as the feedback from certain individuals, I am deleting the value of "innocent" that I originally placed next to the number of deadly casualties in this event. As deeming them innocent is as premature a judgment as calling them guilty. Gil, I stand corrected. Thank you for your feedback and criticism. It made me do some critical thinking, which is always necessary in times like these.

The Black Sheep Son

A couple Saturdays ago Eitan and I attended the screening of a film made by a woman that is part of the synagogue community to which we belong. The film's name is "HaBen HaSorer," which, literally translated, means the black sheep son. I knew little more about the film than that it was about a family whose son decided to become more religious. Wondering how such a topic would be addressed in a documentary showed at a progressive Orthodox synagogue in North Tel Aviv, I thought it would be an interesting experience at the very least.

Eitan and I paid the 25 shekels ticket price and took our seats in the makeshift screening room that is also our synagogue's sanctuary, as well as its banquet hall, as well as its study center. With 50 other members of the community, some familiar others not, after dealing with technical difficulties, the viewing got underway.

HaBen HaSorer opened with a scene of young men, noticeably religious with their tzitzit and peis hanging down from hips and sideburns, being asked what they wanted most in life. Here the viewer was introduced to two important characters of the film, Yaakov and Itzik, the former being the film maker's cousin and the latter her brother.

After ten minutes of viewing, I suddenly realized that this story, mainly focusing on Yaakov, was following him on a spiritual journey of sorts. A quest to find himself and what was important to him. But I couldn't concentrate on this aspect because it was clear to me that the way in which he chose to do this was by joining what is known in Israel as "Noar HaHarim" (The Youth of the Hills). As bucolic and and innocuous as that title may sound, it masks what has actually become a great point of concern, contempt and frustration for those of us in Israel who would like work toward some sort of workable peace between Israelis and our neighbors the Palestinians. The Youth of the Hills, whether out of religious inspiration, zealous ideology or soul-searching, build and inhabit the outposts and far out settlements of the West Bank. These are the young men and women who believe it is their right to reclaim the biblical lands of the Hebrews by working the soil and shepherding sheep and goats on the rolling hills of what I certainly believe and hope will one day be Palestine.

Once I understood what it was that I was watching: Yaakov inhabiting a ramshackle dwelling, Yaakov scrambling himself some eggs on a makeshift stove, Yaakov sitting with his sheep out on the green and rocky hillsides of South Hebron, I started to fidget and wondered if I should have paid the 25 shekels that supported this film on that evening. Quite viscerally, I felt as though a war was going on in my brain. Mass confusion, anger, disgust, curiosity. Why had I come on this night and why hadn't I been informed that this young man becoming more religious was actually a lunatic settler boy living in proximity to the Palestinian village of Sousia, where I helped families pick their olives two years ago without fear of retribution by the nearby settlers, only to have their trees chopped down three weeks later by those very settlers? Why was I being asked to listen to this story of a quest for self-definition in internationally disputed territory, which no one in the film seemed not consider as a major problem? I thought to myself, "who makes a film about Jews in the West Bank without a political agenda?" Or something along those lines...

After about ten minutes of befuddlement, I realized that instead of fighting what I was seeing, I had been given an unique opportunity. The opportunity to see, through the eyes of Israelis and the reactions of an Israeli presumably religious audience, an internal issue and phenomenon to which people living on the outside are not privy, and probably wouldn't have the patience to witness. And furthermore, I somehow understood that if I could just turn off my brain's judgment mechanism, I might learn something about another point of view. Another truth among the many truths that battle for position of dominant reality in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

From that mindset, I was able to enter the world of this family. A religious Israeli family who sought to abide by the laws and rules which they believe God commanded them to uphold. Along the way, their son felt lost, as though his life had not enough meaning and he set out on a spiritual quest appropriate for his social and religious milieu. Like many other young men and women of his community, he followed the courageous youth into the hills of Judea and Samaria. His family was not supportive, they called him all sorts of crazy. Throughout the film, in clips showing Yaakov and his mother, she would nag at him, "Why can't you just be normal? Find a wife, live in a house, why do you have to go live out there, alone?"

The documentary follows Yaakov to the Gaza Strip, in the nomenclature of his social group, Gush Katif. The family is filmed while making preparations before Shabbat, inhabiting an abandoned beach shack on the coastline of Gaza. Seemingly, this Shabbat was just before the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. From the perspective of the inhabitants of Gush Katif, the filmmaker takes the viewer there to see. Portraying a way of life that may seem idyllic for those who could relate to life there or did live there. One scene shows a young person going from shack to shack delivering a bouquet of flowers to make the Shabbat special and beautiful, a community service of sorts.

Another impressionable scene takes place is one in a synagogue, where a rabbi is imploring his congregants not to fight the soldiers who would take them out of their houses. That violence is not the answer and that everything would be fine. From the upstairs gallery a man screamed that Jews shouldn't exile Jews, that they had to raise arms, that they had kick and scream and fight to stay in their homes. The camera follows the man out into the street where he continues his tirade against the government, against the army, against the state. In all of this Yaakov is sitting by, watching with his friends the scenes unfolding -- I.D.F. soldiers carrying individuals who have refused to leave their homes to buses, babies crying, mothers with agonized faces. The Israeli Border Police dressed in heavy black uniforms with riot gear marching through the street. In the audience people were shifting their weight and sighing in their seats.

Later on when Eitan and I discussed the movie, he recalled his experiences of patrolling homes in Gaza after people were evacuated in 2005. He was in his officer's training course and his particular unit had to make sure that no one reentered and re-inhabited their homes in the middle of the night. He doesn't know what disengagement helped, for him it's difficult to see any benefits in light of everything that has happened since and everything that hasn't happened since. He remembers very clearly when he and another female soldier were on duty. He made her laugh at some joke and while enjoying the positive attention from this girl, a woman walked by and commented, "Oh yeah, laugh, really funny, I'm being taken out my home, but you, laugh..."

Eitan also remembers a commander who was religious. This guy's superior decided to make an example of him and took him to evacuate people from their homes before the soldiers. Not long after going in, this religious commander came out of a house with tears streaming down his face and was excused from the duty he was supposed to carry out.

From these stories I understand that it's all very complicated. It's your point of view. It's your upbringing. It's what you have been taught is right and wrong. It's about who you believe is in charge and what truths such faith requires you to uphold.

The issue of the army arises in the film as well. Yaakov's family insists that he enlist. They are a religious family but they are also a Zionistic one. One prominent scene with the filmmaker's grandmother, "Safta-le," as she is lovingly called by her grandkids, tells that when her family left Germany most of them went straight to the United States. But she was a Zionist, she believed in Israel and that just like all other peoples of the world, the Jews needed a country of their own as well. So she stayed to make a life for herself and raised a family and clearly cherished what had developed from nothing into a dream come true.

It is clear that Yaakov had mixed feelings about the draft. He had his ideas of roaming the hills with his sheep, living the simple life. And all his mother wanted him to do was get married already.

Another interesting scene was one in which Yaakov's father was working on his farm with a few cows. One can assume that the place is near to Jerusalem but it is unclear if it is a settlement of the Jerusalem area or what. Nevertheless, it becomes more evident when Mahmoud and Khalil enter the scene. Two Arab men who work with Yaakov's father. It is clear that these men are on good terms. Mahmoud's wife and her children are filmed visiting with Yaakov's family. It is difficult not to see the similarities between these two families, one Arab and Muslim, the other Israeli and Jewish. Both women have their hair covered, their tasks are to care for children and to serve the food. The men also have the tops of their heads covered and they talk about God and the similarities of their traditions. I wondered if I was meant to understand that not all settler families hate Arabs and vice versa. Or if it was just a fact of these two families lives, that they work, live, eat and play together.

Toward the end of the film Yaakov does join the army, but a scene of him walking along a road between the grassy hills, once again, only this time in full army gear, gun and rucksack, seemed foreboding and ominous. My fear was that the next scene would show how Yaakov had been attacked by Palestinians in the West Bank, walking alone in soldier's uniform, alone, in the land that he felt belonged to him.

Surprisingly, it is the filmmaker's brother whose funeral the viewers are unprepared to witness. Itzik, the brother who wanted to see his wife smile in the beginning of the film, had fallen in battle in the Second Lebanon War.

The film ended shortly after and I still felt a little confused. On the one hand, I felt like I had just watched an extremely intimate family home video. The stories depicted were of a boy coming of age, of a grandmother aging gracefully and happily , basking in the love of her children and grandchildren, the life cycle process as Itzik's wedding and the brit milah of his first child were filmed as well. But I couldn't get out of my mind the backdrop upon which all of these colorful life stories were developing. Settlements, outposts, Gaza, disengagement, the Second Lebanon War. The interplay of religion and nationalism, Zionism and idealism. And as the viewer, I was being asked to identify with all of these story lines as a fellow human being, as a member of a family who could relate to general themes, even though the specifics did not fit.

I think that if I knew Yaakov in his days as a youth of the hills, I would have insisted that he take his flock to the wide empty spaces between Herzilya and Netanya, and that he get the hell out of the hills of South or North Hebron. If I could sit down with his mother and father, I would ask if they knew that the biggest issues on their hands with regard to Yaakov living in the hills shouldn't have been whether or not he would get married or join the army, but rather that his youthful journey quest, and those of however many other youth of the hills there are roaming around the West Bank, directly contribute to the continuing deterioration of my safety and security in Israel proper. And if I could sit down with Safta, I would ask her if we could talk to her kids and grandkids about the wonder and miracle of Zionism and how we all have to get on the same page if we want to keep living here enjoying our state of the Jews.

I tried to turn off my political mind. But after this film, I think I became reacquainted with that awareness that how we live our lives does matter. What we believe to be our God-given rights, or, exercising our conception of entitlement, can contribute to another's enduring of an infernal hell. And our ignorance to the effect that our lives can have on another's, eventually leads to the destruction of us all. Because in the context of Israel and Palestine, the hills in which one may choose to go and find themselves, time and again, only too quickly turn into bloody battlefields.

Hope Beneath a Black Hat?

Rabbi Landau is a one man band. Sitting around the Shabbat table at a community dinner, throughout the Shabbat zmirot (songs) and sharing the sound of a trumpet, kazoo and a variety of drum beats emanated from Rabbi Landau's table corner into the upstairs women's gallery serving as a dining room, of the Beit-El Synagogue on Frishman Street in Tel Aviv. During introductions he told of his six children and two grandchildren, his service in the I.D.F. and his time spent in Irvine, California, as a rabbi and teacher. Not even fifty years old, Rabbi Landau's blue eyes sparkled from beneath his tall, stiff black hat, announcing his Haredi Jewish practice.

Due to my horrifying and scarring experience of having to prove myself a Jew to the Rabbinic Authority of Israel over the past year and a half (a saga for future entries when I am ready to write), the moment I see any man in a black hat and black suit,I assume the worst. Misogynist, sexist, bigot, racist, Ayatollah, etc...So when Rabbi Landau began to speak of the Divine in terms of energies, positive and negative, I was intrigued, yet still suspicious. Perhaps he was "different"?

Dinner progressed nicely, all English speakers from South Africa, England, the United States, Israel and Venezuela. The new rabbi at Beit-El is from Long Island and his wife grew up in Los Angeles. If she and I played a short round of Jewish geography I have no doubt we would have found acquaintances and friends in common. Between two married couples and another woman who works at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, there were nearly ten children running around the table and up and down the stairs, to and from the sanctuary with its high ceilings and dripping glass-bead chandeliers.

At the close of dinner and the blessings after the meal, the group returned to the sanctuary to listen to an after-dinner talk given by Rabbi Landau, before dessert.

Rabbi Landau ascended to the slightly elevated pulpit, introduced himself and the topic of his talk, an organization by the name of Kemach, the Hebrew word for flour..."Without flour there is no Torah," he told me later.

In Israel, amidst the myriad of problems with which this society wrestles, there is the issue of religious men, Haredim, who are not part of the work force, collect child allowances from social security, receive a stipend for all day learning, and who expect their wives to raise one dozen children as well as earn an income that attempts to make ends meet. This dynamic is problematic for a number of reasons. The amount of shekels spent each year on these studious (I have other adjectives to express but won't) religious men is astonishing, enough to be a serious concern to the state. The number of enrolled yeshiva students has reached such high numbers that the State of Israel knows now, that the system as it exists will cause great financial hardship, that is already unjust and unacceptable, to the rest of the population, and will only worsen in the next decade or so.

While it seems as though no one is doing anything about this except for the government, which has thus far failed to make much of a difference through incentive programs for work-study and/or professional training of these masses of yeshiva students, members of the Haredi community, in fact, are coming up with solutions themselves. Baruch HaShem.

According to Rabbi Landau, and to Jewish Law, it is not and never was the norm for Jewish men to study all day and all night, not earning or contributing to the livelihood of the family. Every great Jewish scholar or mystic had some profession -- carpentry, astronomy, medicine, banking etc...If one reads any aspect of Jewish marriage law it becomes very clear very quickly that the onus for providing food, clothing, shelter, and a general standard of living for the family falls upon the male, the husband. In the event of divorce, the husband is also responsible for maintaining the lifestyle of his now former wife, preserving the standard of living to which she and their children were accustomed during the marriage. Thus, the trend that prevails in Israel today amongst Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and also probably in the Diaspora is not only an historical anomaly, it is also not in keeping with Jewish law.

Well I'll be damned. So what happened?

Rabbi Landau recounted that all of this started in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Six million Jews perished. Rabbis, teachers, scholars, texts, traditions, and so on were destroyed and imperiled. The Jewish world had to respond to the crisis of losing the faith, the tradition and the scholarly study of Judaism, and quickly. Thus came the yeshivas, the all-day study, the exclusive concentration on advancing the Jewish world from near extinction to landing back on its feet.

Over the past sixty years and change, the method worked. There are more Jewish scholars, learners of Torah, rabbis, etc., than there have ever been in Jewish history. However, with this reality has also come the reality of an impoverished population that is detached from the understanding of how a state operates, functions and provides for its citizens.

Rabbi Landau offered an example of a young man living in B'nai Brak (a religious city second only to Jerusalem, perhaps). Landau asked, let's call him Yossi -- how Yossi thought electricity was paid for to provide light in the street lamps of B'nai Brak at night. Yossi replied, "The city provides the electricity."

To which Rabbi Landau responded, "And where does the city get the funding to pay for the electricity?"

"From the government," exclaimed an exasperated Yossi.

"And from where does the government get the money to provide the city with the funds to generate electricity?," asked Landau.

To this question Yossi shrugged his shoulders in reply, allowing for Rabbi Landau to explain to Yossi that the money comes from the people, who pay taxes, who work -- all of which Yossi didn't do, and moreover, his study stipend came from these people as well.

In Judaism there is a concept of parnassah b'kavod, making a living in a dignified way. Kemach is an organization that works gently and carefully within the Haredi community to encourage professional education and training that leads to job placement in viable markets such as computer software, engineering and law, to name but a few. Providing 85% of tuition costs to Kemach participants, those who receive funding are tracked by the organization to ensure that the money is going to the appropriate institution of learning. If the participant fails to finish whatever academic or skills-training program they started, they are held accountable for every shekel of the grant they were given by the organization. Landau boasted that out of 3,000 participants thus far, only forty-something students dropped out, and they were made to pay back what funds they had taken.

In addition to Kemach's placing and funding scores of young to middle-aged men in education programs, they also assist in the job search, marketing responsible and "moral" workers to companies throughout Israel.

Of course there are numerous problems and potential glitches with this. First of all, no Haredi rabbi or religious Knesset member has or will publicly endorse the work of Kemach lest they be accused of supporting the secularization of the men of their community. Furthermore, the men who sign up for these grants have to sometimes hide it from their families or break the news to them after a certain amount of time, for fear of shaming and disgracing the family.

Imagine, a 20th century, fabricated crisis-management mechanism -- that of intensive no-work yeshiva learning -- has actually become more powerful and influential upon rabbis and their disciples than thousands of years of historical precedence of balance between religion and livelihood. This pressure exists to such an extent that Landau retold conversations with rabbis who feared bodily harm if they openly supported such a venture that will put the Haredim amidst the hilonim (secular people).

From another angle, one of my problems with the ultra-Orthodox is their lack of respect for my choices and my lifestyle, "my" meaning a secular way of life. Israel has yet to become a theocracy, it is still a pluralistic state and quite simply, the demographic targeted by Kemach is made up of people who are hostile and sometimes violent toward secular society as evidenced in the recent and ongoing attacks against a software firm in Jerusalem that decided to open for business on Shabbat, as well as a parking lot that decided to accept payment and cars on Friday nights and Saturdays.

While Landau was extremely enthusiastic and positive, hopeful and charismatic, and I too found my heart beating a little faster at the prospect of a brighter future, I couldn't help but think how far could this actually go if religious leaders aren't willing to condone these sorts of ventures publicly? Moreover, if Haredi men come into the secular, non-segregated workforce of Israel where men and women interact freely, "modest" dress codes are not enforced and people of all levels of observance from much to none share the same space, what will happen? Will the workplace start to accommodate them or vice versa? And what happens if some men do start to secularize a bit, exposed to new information and alternative ways of life, with the freedom to think for themselves in an environment completely different than that in which they were raised? Will the program prove itself stronger than the force of the fear of change?

Although Rabbi Landau, even with his millions of dollars-strong budget, has a seemingly insurmountable uphill battle to fight, and the extent of his work is curtailed by the very leaders of the people he's trying to reach, after his talk I couldn't help but feel uplifted.

There is no doubt that having more people contributing to the Israeli economy versus sucking it dry would help the state greatly. Also, trying to bridge the gap between secular and religious people maybe helpful to more (Jewish) citizens of Israel feeling that that is exactly what they are, citizens of a country with a common cause and interest in long-term survival, and not just until the Messiah comes.