“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion… religion is institutionalized spirituality.”
Moez Masoud delivers an inspiring speech on my favorite suras in the Quran.
Sura 49:13:
“O people, we created you from the same male and female, and rendered you distinct peoples and tribes, that you may know one another. The best among you in the sight of GOD is the most righteous.”
The music at the end is cheesy, but the speech is sincere and spot on.
From PresenTense, my article on Israelis liviing in the United States. Here is an excerpt:
For a long time, Jews who immigrated out of Israel were viewed in a negative light. By leaving Israel, they physically rejected and negated what the Jewish state stood for—an ingathering of exiles. Given that Israel as a democracy could not bar its citizens from leaving, its only tool was to bludgeon their Zionist superego with guilt.
The stigmatization was evident in the language itself. The very Hebrew word for the people who left the country is “yordim” —literally, those who descend or go down. This stood in stark contrast with “olim”—literally those who ascend or go up. In 1976, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously described yordim as “leftover weaklings” and “lowliest of parasites.” Rabin later retracted his statement, but for a long time afterwards, the notion stuck in the collective consciousness of most Israelis.
In recent years, the Israeli government has taken a different and softer approach to the phenomenon of yordim. Instead of shaming them into returning, the government has attempted to entice (some would say bribe) them back.
To read more, click here.
Every few weeks, the public intellectual Irshad Manji features people who she calls agents of moral courage: “Those who brave the disapproval of their own communities for the sake of a greater good.” Today, much to my surprise, Irshad included me among those selected. The occasion - My “tough-love letter” to Israel. I am touched and inspired by this honor.
Have a read:
Agent of moral courage: Roi Ben-Yehuda
It’s Israel’s 60th birthday, and not every Jew is celebrating unconditionally.
Witness Roi Ben-Yehuda. He’s no party pooper. The boy knows how to have a good time. (Last year, he introduced me to the obnoxious Sacha Baron Cohen character known as Borat, and still imitates this clown at the most absurd moments in an otherwise serious conversation…)
Instead, Roi is an agent of moral courage, speaking truth to power not only when necessary, but also when inconvenient — on a landmark anniversary. A rising journalist and public thinker, he’s just published a “tough love letter” to his country of Israel. Here’s a passage:
“At sixty years young, you are an amazing success story and we are your grateful children. But grateful does not mean blind. When you shine a light on an object, you are also bound to get its shadow. And there is no escaping the fact that your shadow is Palestine.”
He goes on to write words that some will consider harsh. I consider them humane in that Roi sees the shared humanity of Palestinians and Israelis. So he also sees their destiny as shared. That’s why, elsewhere in his extraordinary letter to Israel, Roi writes that “the greatest gift you can give for your birthday is to lend a hand in creating a birthday for the Palestinian state. Don’t settle for just removing yourself; help construct a positive future for your sister nation.”
Imagine: a patriot who believes in giving rather than receiving on his country’s birthday, not as an act of charity but as a statement of national renewal. It’s what I’ve come to expect from these odd individuals whom I call agents of moral courage.
From the rest of the world, I’ve come to expect allegations of racism. Recently, I received several emails accusing me of anti-Semitism when I pointed out that secular Jewish women in Israel must still go to rabbinical courts for divorces. Even then, they often wind up with the shaft. Israel, in short, isn’t a perfect democracy for Israeli Jews, let alone for Israeli Arabs.
Finding this “shadow,” I suppose, makes me an anti-Semite. What a shame not just for Israel, but for democracy itself.
Democracy demands dissent — not to undermine its ideals but precisely to help realize them.
Roi Ben-Yehuda is one who gets it. He embodies a sentiment prominently showcased at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC: “Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”
Lisa has written an excellent entry on Israel @ 60. As always, her writing express a real love for Tel-Aviv.
Here is an excerpt:
If we are going to talk about Zionism (and mostly I don’t, because “isms” make me nervous), then Tel Aviv is, for me, the great Zionist success story. I don’t feel any particular emotion when I look at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. I would certainly never put a note in its cracks - makes me feel as though I’m performing a voodoo ritual. I love to visit the Hurva Synagogue, because the story of the arch is so fascinating, but I do not feel a desire to pray there.
But I have been known to get a little misty when I look at Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture and tree-lined boulevards; at the posters advertising dozens of plays, concerts and club events; the theaters and the publishing houses and the art galleries, the stock exchange and the fashionable boutiques. Tel Aviv is the city where the first school with a curriculum taught entirely in modern Hebrew was established. It is where all three of Israel’s major daily newspapers were founded and still exist today, in their original locations. It is the home of the national opera, the national symphony orchestra and more than half-a-dozen theaters. It’s a place where homosexual couples and ultra-Orthodox families live peacefully in the same neighbourhood - even in the same building.
Tel Aviv is also a noisy city with a lot of air pollution. There’s dog shit everywhere. Rents are insanely high. And it is not uncommon to hear of landlords that find excuses to avoid renting to Arabs in Tel Aviv, too.
Yup, good stuff and bad stuff. Tomorrow night we mark 60 years since the establishment of the state. It might not be what Ben-Gurion had in mind, but that’s what there is.
To read more, click here.
As everyone knows, Israel is turning sixty tomorrow. For the occasion I published over at Jewcy.com a (tough) love letter to my country. As you will read, the letter is more of a creative piece than my standard articles. Hope you enjoy it:
Dear Israel,
Your son, the poet Yehuda Amichai, once described you as a land divided into two districts: memory and hope. The residents of each district mingle with each other; they are, Amichai tells us, either returning from a funeral or a wedding.
Contemplating you at sixty I find myself planting my feet in both of your districts of memory and hope – a man simultaneously returning from a funeral and a wedding.
To read more, please click here. As always, I encourage you to leave your insightful remarks at the end of the article.
Over at The Kvetcher, David Kelsey has the following to say about my defense of Messianic Jews:
Roi Ben-Yehuda is hand-wringing over on Jewcy about the way Jews for Jesus are being treated in Israel. He is upset that the Jews for Jesus are not being accepted as Jews, and notes,
“If we are going to say that Hitler and not Halacha determines who is a Jew, then we need to make room for Jews who also believe in Jesus — as Hitler would have done.”
Ben-Yehuda has a good point, and I would note that when the Zionist Entity first decided that Hitler was the ultimate authority on who is a Jew, no one could have predicted this problem specifically, or that there would be problems generally. After all, why should there be problems when the Zionists reasonably decided to express their Jewish pride both religiously and as a nation by embracing Hitler as grand posek? Clearly, for their time, the Zionist Entity did the right thing, just…Jewish history took an unpredictable turn, and this ostensibly reasonable choice for an ultimate Jewish authority proved to have shortcomings…but you can’t blame the impeccable reasoning of the Zionists for its time.
In the Jerusalem Post, Sarah Kreimer turns our attention to the challenge of Zionism today - the creation of a Jewish homeland that will be the state of ALL its citizens.
As we celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday, we need to make a paradigm shift, and to re-envision our society. Sixty years after the founding of the state, we must declare an end to stage one of Zionism - state-building - and move to stage two of society-building. We need to redefine our Israeli civic enterprise, not as a Jewish State, but as a Jewish Homeland, in a state with shared citizenship. Otherwise, in clinging to the visions that have guided Israel in the past, we will destroy what has been built.
To read more, click here.
