From Beirut to Jerusalem

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman
Excerpt, pages 312-321;

The last stop on my journey of spiritual discovery in Israel began at the bar mitzvah of my gentle Israeli cousin Giora. The ceremony was held at a small synagogue in the coastal city of Ashkelon, not far from the secular, Labor Party-supported collective farm where he was born and raised. Following the bar mitzvah, my aunt and uncle invited the immediate family to lunch at a nearby restaurant known for its hearty country-style fare. When the waitress came by to take our orders, I was anxious to see what the bar mitzvah boy would choose on this special occasion. A sirloin steak? Fried chicken heaped with french fries? Maybe a pizza with all the toppings? Giora would have none of these. He knew what he wanted and when the waitress turned his way he did not hesitate over the menu. 

“I want white steak,” he declared, using the Hebrew euphemism for pork chops.

I couldn’t help but chuckle. We hadn’t been out of the synagogue more than fifteen minutes before the bar mitzvah boy was sinking his teeth into pig meat, strictly forbidden by Jewish dietary law. I wasn’t offended. I don’t keep kosher myself. I was simply struck by the irony of the moment. I thought about the meaning of Giora’s pork chops for several days. They seemed to contain a larger message, and in order to decipher what it was, I consulted my own rabbi, David Hartman, founder and director of the Shalom Hartman Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, whom I have quoted elsewhere in this book.

It is a short drive from the Ohr Somayach yeshiva to the Shalom Hartman Institute, but don’t look for a shuttle bus to take you. David Hartman and Nota Schiller actually attended the same yeshiva high school in Brooklyn, Chaim Berlin. Hartman was a basketball legend in his day, and Schiller often used to watch him play. Today basketball may be all the two of them have left in common. Although they are both Brooklyn-born, American-trained Orthodox rabbis- Hartman studied for ten years with Talmudist- they were attracted to Israel by radically different visions of what the place was, and should be, about. Hartman is viewed by Israel’s Orthodox establishment as a dangerous radical- far more dangerous than any Reform or Conservative rabbi- because he comes out of the very heart of the Orthodox yeshiva tradition. He was a prominent Orthodox rabbi in Montreal from 1960 to 1971, during which time he also obtained a doctorate in philosophy from McGill University. He emigrated to Israel with his family in 1971 and opened a center for advanced Jewish studies, which aimed to produce a new cadre of Jewish thinkers and educators who would integrate the best of Western thought with the classical Jewish talmudic tradition. The institute attempts to discover innovative way for Judiasim to renew itself and to establish foundations for pluralism within the Jewish community and sources of tolerance among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The institute’s motto, in effect, is: Not only must Jews physically leave the ghetto, but their whole intellectual and spiritual heritage must leave as well. 

I often discussed anomalies I came across in Israel with Hartman, so it was natural for me to go to him to make sense of Giora’s pork chops. In answering my question, he laid out the vision which he, a religious Zionist, felt Israel should represent. It is a vision shared by many of those who came to Israel because they were observant Jews, but at the same time wanted to play an equal part in the secular Zionist state- without claiming to be redeeming the world. 

I began our discussion by observing that Israelis were constantly telling me that in two more generations all American Jews were going to assimilate and disappear, so they had better move to Israel to save themselves as Jews. But, I wondered aloud, if emigrating to Israel means eating pork chops after bar mitzvahs, how will immigration deter assimilation?

“Let me answer your question with a question: Can you assimilate speaking Hebrew? The answer is yes,” said Hartman. “In America, most Jews want to be Jewish at least three days of the year- two days on Rosh Hashanah, one on Yom Kippur; many Israelis don’t even want that. The secular Zionists who founded this country were rebelling against their grandfathers and the whole universe of Eastern European ghetto Judaism. They wanted to make building the nation, serving the state, flying an Israeli flag, joining the army, and speaking Hebrew substitutes for any conventional spiritual identification. This was their Judaism. A bar mitzvah for them was not a religious affair but an expression of national affiliation- like some tribal headdress you put on- but it is an expression devoid of any Jewish religious content or significance.

“Have you ever been to a wedding at a kibbutz? Like all Israeli weddings they are officiated over by the state Orthodox rabbinate. The state sends a rabbi, and he says all the prayers and fills out all the forms, and through the whole ceremony all the guests just stand around and talk to each other, or joke or eat from the smorgasbord. There is no sense of sacredness, no sense that this is a moment for spiritual reflection. The rabbi might as well be a justice of the peace, for all the Jewish content he provides. There is a spiritual emptiness, an alienation from the Jewish tradition. If the actual Jewish content of the average Israeli’s personal life were transplanted to Los Angeles, or anywhere else in the Diaspora, it would never sustain the Jewish people. What your pork chop story shows is that no matter how we would like to project ourselves to the outside world, no matter how spiritually central we would like to feel we are for the future of Judaism, this is how most Israelis, who are nonobservant, really live. This is how many Israelis really relate to Judaism: I will go into the army. I will serve. I will make heroic sacrifices in battle. But that’s it. 

“The Labor Zionists built a country with a Judaic void in its heart,” Hartman continued. “Ben-Gurion thought that having a Weizmann Institute of Science would sustain the excitement of the pioneer era. I have enormous respect for the creative achievements of those who built this state. The kibbutz is a marvelous experiment in social justice and communal living. The growth of Hebrew literature and culture is a profound revolution. The transformation of the Jew from student to soldier and farmer cannot be underestimated. But I deeply believe that the Jewish people cannot be sustained by literature and science alone. You can’t build a Jewish state on the basis of national pride alone. The Jewish soul requires spiritual nourishment. Any political leader in Israel who thinks he will capture the imagination of the Jewish people by promising to make Israel the Silicon Valley of the Middle East is gravely mistaken. People need significance in their personal lives. They need to feel that their families and lives are built around a Judaism that can live with the modern world.”

What you are saying, I remarked to Hartman, is that the secular Zionists built a nationalism without reclaiming Judaism. They simply abandoned religion to the Haredim. A friend of mine once told me about an Israeli woman she knew who lived on Kibbutz Yodfata, near Eilat, at the southern tip of the Negev Desert. After the Six-Day War, the kibbutznik took her seven-year-old daughter to Jerusalem to see the Western Wall. It was her daughter’s first trip to Jerusalem. While they were standing near the wall, they were naturally surrounded by Haredim dressed in their long black coats and fur hats. This Israeli woman’s daughter tugged at her mother’s sleeve and exclaimed, “Look, Mom, there’s a Jew.” It was the first time she had ever seen a Haredi, and for her that was a real Jew. 

“I’m not surprised,” answered Hartman. “Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists thought they could build a state and turn over the question of Judaism to the last remnants of their grandfathers- to the Haredim and the Orthodox rabbinical establishment, which had the narrowest, most retrogressive Eastern European view of religion. It was like building a house and leaving a little room in the basement for Grandpa, where he can read and walk his dog and be quiet. Then one day, forty years later, Grandpa comes up from the basement, resurrected. It turns out he has not been walking his dog but has been busy having children, and he starts telling you that he wants to set the rules for the house. He wants to take over the kitchen and the bedroom and, above all, tell you how you are to use your leisure time. Because the Labor Zionists themselves had not bothered to build an interpretation of Judaism that could live with the modern world, they had no alternative spiritual vision to offer Israelis.”

So Gush Emunim and the Haredim are right that draining the swamps is not enough, that carrying an Israeli passport is not enough. Many Israelis are hungry for some spiritual content. Isn’t that what they are giving them?

“I may agree with some of their diagnosis about the spiritual emptiness here, but not with their prescriptions for what to do about it,” said Hartman. “Gush Emunim say there is an emptiness here, so let’s take a messianic trip into the future. The Haredim say there is an emptiness here, so let’s not worry about the state and the national framework, let’s go back to a passion we once had when we were all living like Fiddlers on the Roof in the ghettos of Eastern Europe- nice and isolated from the goyim. One offers a politics of fantasy and the other offers a politics of regression.

“What I say is, I am not living in the future, and I don’t want to live in the past. I want to offer Israelis a present- a now- that gives relevance to daily life.”

But how? Is there an interpretation of Orthodox Judaism that can appeal to the many nonobservant Israelis, without losing the traditional, truly observant Jew?

“Let’s start at the beginning,” said Hartman. “First of all, I am a religious Zionist. What does that mean? It means I have made my commitment to live and interpret my Judaism in a state in which many Jews do not share my religious ideology. I have chosen to build my spiritual life together with Jews who totally disagree with me as to the meaning of God and what the Jewish people should be. It is not that I accept the secular person’s position as equally valid to my own, but I have accepted the permanence of our differences. I don’t look at them as potential converts waiting to be brought back to their heritage. I see them as dignified people who have a different perception of what it means to be a Jew. Therefore, I believe religious pluralism must be a permanent value for Israeli society- because spiritual diversity will be forever part of the political landscape here. Furthermore, because I have chosen to place my existence within a collective framework called the state of Israel, I have an obligation to that framework. I have no right to say that secular women have to serve in the army and my daughters, who are observant, don’t have to. Because what I have said is that you and I share parasitically off you. To be a religious Zionist is to share in all aspects of this enterprise.”

But how can you ask Orthodox Jews to be so tolerant of secular Jews? Or vise versa? The Haredim say that there is only one legitimate way of life and that is theirs.

“What I say to them is that there is a level of mutual commitment that is more important than our differences,” said Hartman. “There is a sense of my being part of a Jewist nation that comes before my having received the Torah. My point- Soloveitchik’s point- is that we share a common Egypt. We were all together as Jews in Egypt before Moses led us out into the desert to receive the Torah from Mount Sinai. The Jews in Egypt were pagans. They were not a religious community, but the sojourn in Egypt is still an essential part of our history and memory because it was there we became a nation. We shared a common yearning for political freedom, we shared a common sense of suffering, we shared a common sense of peoplehood, we shared a common political fate- before we discussed the content of our religious community. Never forget, Egypt precedes Sinai. Passover precedes Shavuot [the anniversary of the giving of the Torah by God to Moses at Mount Sinai]. The Haredim often forget this. For them the world begins and ends with Sinai- and their own interpretation of Sinai. It defines everything for them. When they ask, Who is my brother? The answer is, The one who shares my covenant and form of observance. They know Jewish law says that a nonobservant Jew is still a Jew, but they don’t know how to relate to him, because they have no concept of the Jewish people without Sinai. My view is that first you have to become a people before you can come to Sinai. No one would have made it to Sinai alone.”

Fine, but how does this relate to Israel today?

“It means I am ready to accept that despite the diversity of religious views here, we are a nation,” answered Hartman. “Now who are the players in this nation? Who’s on this team? Everyone who lined up with me in Egypt, everyone who lined up with me in Auschwitz, everyone who says, I want Jewish history to continue, no matter how vague his or her commitment or how different an interpretation he gives to that history. That’s my team. I’m playing on that Jewish team. Okay, next. Now, how are we going to play the game? What are the rules going to be? That’s Sinai. Sinai is where we established the rules.”

But from what I have seen of Orthodox Judaism in Israel, the official interpretation of the rules doesn’t mix too well with the modern world. How does your interpretation of what happened at Sinai differ from that of the Haredim or Gush Emunim?

“Let me begin by saying I believe we are still battling about what we heard at Sinai,” Hartman responded. “Sinai symbolizes for me that the Jewish people have to ask content questions. Shared destiny and shared suffering and shared oppression without a content are not enough to sustain a community. That is what the secular Zionists did not understand. The secular Jews who founded the state of Israel cared only about the experience in Egypt that made us a nation, and they ignored the content offered at Sinai. For me Judaism should be a way of life not just for the individual, but should offer some deeper values guidelines for politics, economics, and social policy, and in all the issues that surface in the collective life of a nation. What does that mean? It means I have to interpret my tradition in a way which can flourish in a political sovereign state. Now what kind of state do I want? I want a political sovereign state that respects freedom of conscience. How do I know that? Does Judaism say that? Some Orthodox rabbis here say democracy is not a Jewish value. I say I don’t care if Judaism says democracy is a value. This is a new political value that I have acquired. Liberty is an important political value. Autonomy and personal conscience, too, are important values which America has taught me. I see the work of our institute as trying to find ways in which classical Orthodox Judaism can absorb these new very important political values into itself without destroying itself.

“In our institute we have Christians coming to study, some of the best New Testament scholars in the world,” Hartman added. “We read each other's texts together. Why? Because I haven’t got it all. I have left the ghetto. In the ghetto, I had it all, because I didn’t see anything else and I didn’t read anything else. When the Jews finally left the ghetto, some of them thought the goyim had it all, so they gave up their Jewish identity. My view is: Wait, I’ve got a home. I have an identity. I have roots. I have a family. I have a history. I have a Torah. I don’t deny any of that. I love it, but my history, my family, my roots, and my Torah are not the only show in town. My Sinai is not a closed book. My Torah lives in dialogue with the world. I learn from Aristotle. I learn from Kant. I say all the wisdom of the world was not found in Sinai. Sinai is my point of departure, but I don’t remain there. From Sinai I learn from the world and I absorb the world into Sinai. That is the difference between modern religious Zionists and the Haredim. They say, ‘Everything is in the Torah. I have nothing to learn from the world. It has nothing to offer me. I don’t have to rethink my position on Torah because of what Kant wrote or Kierkegaard or Freud. What do the goyim have to teach me? They are goyim.’ That is how I see it. For me Israel, and Judaism, should be the foundation from which Jews can absorb the best values of the world and learn from them- without losing their particularity. We can’t afford to give the keys of our tradition to people who repudiate modernity. Otherwise the ghetto will take over Israel. You can never forget the past living in Israel. It haunts you from the ground, from every street corner. That is why if you don’t reclaim your past, if you don’t reinterpret it in a way that makes it compatible with the modern world, it will claim your future.”

You mentioned Egypt and you mentioned Sinai, but after Sinai there was the Promised Land- Israel. What do you see as the significance of the land?

“The significance of the land is that it allows you to see Judaism as a way of life. Coming back to the land of Israel is a way of saying that Judaism was never meant to be just a synagogue-based framework, centered around prayer and the holidays, which is what some Haredim seem to feel. Judaism was to be a total way of life that could provide answers for how to deal with hospital strikes and with the exercise of power. In other words, for me you come back to the land in order to implement Sinai. I came back to the land not to rebuild the synagogue Judaism of European ghettos. I came back to the land to get back to the beginning- Judaism as a total way of life, not just ritual.”

So you see the land as a corrective to the Haredim and their obsession with ritual. But what about Gush Emunim and their mystical interpretation of the role of the land in redeeming the Jewish people and the world?

“The land, in my view, is also a corrective to Gush Emunim,” said Hartman. “The land says that Judaism is not about salvation and redemption of the soul, which is central to Christianity It is not a religion trying to get you to heaven. The land says that the crucial place you have to be is on earth. You have to build a national existence in the present. That is why even when we did not live on the land, the land was an important symbol. We kept on saying, ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ because that was the definition of Judaism. Judaism was never supposed to turn into some sort of faith salvation. It was always meant to be a way of life for a people. It was always a stepping-stone to today, not to another world. This is what Gush Emunim fails to understand. For them the land is a stepping-stone to redemption and a messianic kingdom, which will be run according to Torah. I say to Gush Emunim that I have no blueprint as to how the Lord is going to redeem Israel or the world. The significance of Israel is not that it is going to lead to grandiose mythology which I reject. It overblows the whole role of Israel and the Jewish people for world history.

“For me, the land, the stones, are not what will create the redemptive quality for this society,” said Hartman. “The important thing is what kind of human love and what kind of daily life I live. Gush Emunim believe that if they redeem the land then God will redeem the people. My view is that you have to redeem the people, period. Where the redemption of the people will lead I don’t know, but it can’t be bad. I believe tomorrow will be better than today if today I treat my barber and my grocer and my taxi driver better, not because I sit on a hill in hebron. I believe tomorrow will be better than today if I expand ethics, expand morality, expand coexistence among people of diverse cultures, expand the quality of life- but not by expanding boundaries. I can’t bring the Messiah by abusing 2 million Palestinian Arabs today. I can’t say that what I am doing now is going to bring universal redemption. That is what Stalin said, so he killed 20 million people. All people who think they are redeeming the world don’t see the evil that they are doing every day. If your eyes are on eternity you can be blind to the person sitting next to you.

“Remember,” concluded Hartman, “the holiness of the people precedes the holiness of the land. There is no mystical significance to land. There is only a significance to what human beings do. Holiness in Judaism does not come from stones or books. It comes from you and me and how we live here and now.”