“The stranger who resides in your midst….”

Perhaps the most familiar instance of God saying “because I say so” in the Torah is in this week’s parsha, Kedoshim. The portion includes God’s detailed prescriptions for ritual and ethical behavior that have come to be known as the “Holiness Code” because of the opening line: “You shall be holy, because I, Adonai your God, am holy (Leviticus 19:2). God commands the Israelites to do right because that’s what it means to be holy.

The woman who gave the d’var Torah at services today focused on one particular line in the portion: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I am Adonai your God” (Leviticus 19:34). She spoke in gentle but eloquent terms about how casual language often dehumanizes foreign workers in Israel. She offered a few examples such as someone who talks about “my Fillipini” instead of “the Fillipini helper who cares for my elderly father” or “the Thais who live over there”” instead of “the Thai workers who live over there,” (since obviously at least a few Thai people are left in Thailand).

It was a good talk and an important subject. The Israeli government estimates that there are approximately 250,000 foreign workers in Israel today, about half of them illegal. They work in construction, as housecleaners, caregivers, and other menial jobs, and come from over sixty different countries including Romania, Russia, Nigeria, the Phillipines, Thailand, and Ukraine. They have been part of the social landscape of Israel since the early 1990s, replacing what had been a Palestinian workforce who were no longer welcome or trusted to work in Israel. Indeed, there were years when their numbers were even higher, but the government has been more vigilant with expulsions in recent years, including at times, Israeli born children of foreign workers. Though last year, an organization called Hotline for Migrant Workers, mounted a successful media and grassroots campaign that resulted in the government’s suspension of its plan to expel hundreds of children and refugees who have spent most of their lives in Israel.

Many foreign workers in Israel start out legally but overstay once their visa expires or they lose the job that first brought them here. Most work for low pay, under difficult and often dangerous conditions, with no benefits and few protections. Those are problems common throughout the developed world, often exacerbated by racism and xenophobia (note a recent bill passed by the state of Arizona that cracks down on illegal immigrants and people who hire them). But, there’s an extra twist that makes the situation all the more troublesome in Israel. Those who argue for strict limits on these economic migrants not only say they bring illiteracy and disease but that they are a dire threat to the Jewish character of the state.

Such attitudes make it easy to reduce the foreign workers to a sub-human category that allows their nationality to serve as a stand-in for their task and erase any sense of individual identity. “Filipini” means caretaker. “Thailandi” means farm-worker. They serve a necessary but somewhat distasteful service and that’s the end of it. Parshat Kedoshim teaches us it should be otherwise. The “stranger in our midst” deserves rights and protections equal to the citizenry because we too were strangers in Egypt, in Spain, in Britain, and Poland, and Russia, and Algeria, and Iraq. If we violate this basic precept that God commands with no explanation other than because “I am Adonai your God”, then what exactly is the Jewish character of the state we are trying to preserve?

Now I know this is a highly complex and difficult issue that many states confront and few deal with well. States have a paramount obligation to protect their own citizenry first and foremost. But at what point does the line blur between protection and xenophobia, between human rights and Jewish rights?

The drash called attention to common speech that either inadvertently or intentionally diminishes another person’s humanity. Certainly the relationship between foreign workers in Israel and Israeli citizens is a topic worthy of more than one sermon, since foreign workers are clearly an underclass at risk in many ways beyond the threat of deportation. But their presence in Israel is in some large measure due to a deeper root cause – the separation, de-legitimization, and even demoninization of Palestinians as an entire people. Indeed, that was the big glaring elephant in the sanctuary for me this morning. I know it’s easier to talk about foreign “others” whose only agenda is to find an economic opportunity that will help support their family, than it is to talk about the native “others” who are viewed and experienced as enemy. But that’s the sermon I would have liked to hear. That one would have taken a lot more courage and a lot more risk, which is exactly what seems to be needed in these challenging times.

“Song of the Valley”

The lower Galilee and Jezreel Valley are the heartland of Zionist mythmaking. The first kibbutzim were founded here, where Socialist idealists from Eastern Europe came in the early part of the 20th century to drain the swamps by day and dance the hora by night, or so the story goes. They certainly did break with Jewish tradition and social conventions to create a new society, based on collective ownership of property and communal living. Today, most kibbutzim are radically different places than their founders imagined them to be. Few if any, rely on agriculture as their main source of income. Most have gone through at least some form of privatization where people choose their own professions, earn their own salaries and pay bills according to their patterns of consumption, just like us city-dwellers. Many kibbutzim have gone into the tourism business and provide guest houses and resort facilities. Many also have gone into the housing development business, turning some of their agricultural land into sub-divisions for people who want to live in a rural community but have no interest at all in being a member of a collective, no matter how loosely configured.

Even in the early days before Israel became a state, there were many who realized that this kind of intense communal living wasn't for them. The moshav emerged out of this impulse, as a kind of hybrid between complete sharing of resources and preserving personal autonomy. Nahalal, the first moshav, was founded in 1921, in the Jezreel Valley of course. Moshe Dayan's father was one of the original members. Nahalal features in one of my favorite songs "The Song of the Valley" of that period. It's a lyric paean to nature, to the pioneers, to the up-building of the land - all part of the grand myth that shaped Israeli identity for 3 generations or more:

"Rest has come to the weary and calm for the worker...Dew below and moon above, from Beit Alpha to Nahalal...Sleep, oh valley, glorious land. We shall watch over you." (It sounds much better in Hebrew...)

The land really is glorious, especially on a spring day when the hills are still green from the winter rains and blanketed with wild flowers. Quite a lot has changed since those first pioneers came with their vision, their dreams and their commitment to physical labor and nation-building. Their old dreams may no longer fit with the times, but it still does seem to be a place where new ideas incubate and begin to flourish.

Last Shabbat I went to Nahalal where I attended services at Niggun Ha'lev (song of the heart) This community is one of the first of what is now a growing phenomenon of secular Israeli worship communities. It grew out of the work of several educators from HaMidrasha, a program of Jewish studies for secular Israelis at Oranim College, just a few kilometers down the road from Nahalal. One of these educators recently became a rabbi ordained by HUC in Jerusalem. But Niggun Ha'lev is deliberately not affiliated with any particular movement, intent on charting its own path. It's a multi-generational group with lots of kids, young and old. Many of the 60 or so members are former kibbutzniks but there's an assortment of former urban dwellers and even a few Americans in the mix. These are people who grew up with a distrust, if not antipathy towards religious practice. Yet, the more they studied Judaism, the more they began to think and ultimately act on how to make Jewish expression a part of their lives.

The service at Niggun Ha'lev was filled with joyful music and heartfelt. They have created their own kind of worship experience - classical liturgy interwoven with modern Hebrew poetry; a bit of Carlebach mixed with Israeli tunes; guitar and Torah study; a closing circle of community announcements instead of the traditional Friday night Amidah. It was a familiar and strange assortment that somehow came together into a warm and authentic whole.

The service takes place in the moshav's clubhouse whose walls are adorned with a ring of photographs from the founding days of the community. Indeed, I wondered how those founding fathers and mothers would look on at this new initiative. Though they themselves rejected the religion of their fathers for their own "religion" of Zionism, I'd like to think that they would approve of the creative and sincere efforts of this group to define a home for themselves within Jewish tradition - not as Orthodox returnees, but as Israeli Jews looking to build a new kind of community that makes room for Judaism in a way their ancestors could never have imagined.

What We Saw in Hebron

About 10 years ago, I saw an Israeli film called “What I Saw in Hebron.” a powerful film made by a descendant of a Jewish family that had lived in Hebron for generations until they fled after the riots in 1929. One layer of the film were the reminiscences of Jewish survivors of the massacre, people who were young children at the time. The other layer was a cinema verité style documentation of the intertwined lives of the few hundred current Jewish settlers and the almost as many soldiers who guarded them from the more than 40,000 Palestinian residents of the city. One of the most powerful moments of the film for me was when the filmmaker asked a young Jewish woman who lives in tiny Jewish enclave surrounded by Palestinians and soldiers what she thought about the Palestinians. “I don’t really see them,” was her reply.

Until 1929, a small, pious community of Sephardic Jews had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence with their Arab neighbors in Hebron for hundreds of years. The late 1920s was a period of unrest between Arabs and Jews that began in Jerusalem and spilled out to other areas, including Hebron. In August of that year, Arabs murdered 67 Jews and injured several hundred others in several days of rioting. After the riots were quelled, the survivors left Hebron and settled elsewhere in the Yishuv. Hebron is in the West Bank and was beyond the 1949 armistice line after the War of Independence. It was re-taken in the 1967 Six Day War and Jews began to resettle Hebron in 1970s. But, it was not the descendants of these original families who came back. Rather, the new settlers who chose to renew the Jewish presence in Hebron were among the most right wing of the Ashkenazi religious Zionists. Perhaps most notorious of them was Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a member of Meir Kahane’s extremist Kach party that openly advocated the expulsion of Arabs. In February 1994 on the Jewish holiday of Purim that was also during the month of Ramadan that year, Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers, and wounded dozens of others. Today, his grave is in the Meir Kahane memorial park of Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement that overlooks Hebron. The park was built and is maintained by Israeli tax shekels.

Hebron is an ancient and sacred site to Muslims and Jews because of the Cave of the Patriarchs that Abraham purchased as a burial site for his wife Sara, the first real estate transaction in the Bible. According to Jewish tradition, all of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and three of the four Matriarch, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, are buried there. The only one not, is Rachel, who died in childbirth on the road, and is said to be buried just outside of Bethlehem. Today, Rachel’s tomb is virtually encased by the security barrier that creates a kind of giant cul-de-sac to allow Jewish access and prevent any Palestinian threat. Of course, the barrier also includes a few Palestinian households and land that is cut off from the rest of their community.

But, that’s small potatoes when compared to Hebron. During the Second Intifada, Hebron was a particularly hot spot. Arabs regularly shot at Jewish settlements, and Jews were killed. Jewish settlers often responded in kind. As a result, the military establishment decided the best way to deal with this ongoing cycle of struggle and violence between Arab and Jew was to “cleanse” the city center of Arabs. Today, what was once a bustling market place, filled with merchants and residents, is now virtually a ghost town. There are long stretches of main thoroughfares where Palestinians are forbidden to walk or drive. Streets are barricaded by concrete blocks. Homes are closed in by heavy metal sheets bolted onto the front doors. Balconies are lined with wire-mesh cages to protect against stones and bullets. The only access and egress for the few remaining Palestinian families on this main corridor, is by ladder up and over the rooftops.

One of the most unsettling parts of this Kafkaesque place is a stretch of road leading away from the Cave of the Patriarchs that is divided by jersey barriers. The wider expanse is for Jewish foot and vehicular traffic. The narrower band is for Palestinian pedestrians. Indeed, Jew and Arab can walk side-by-side on this separate and not at all equal road.

“What I saw in Hebron” stayed with me over the last decade, but last week I decided not to rely on my memory of the film but to actually see Hebron for myself. I went on a tour with Breaking the Silence (http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp), an organization founded by IDF veterans who served in the occupied territories during the Second Intifada. Breaking the Silence’s principal mission is to collect and publish testimony from former and current soldiers who are witness to and participate in acts of abuse and violence towards Palestinian people and property. As they say on their website, they do this try to force greater accountability regarding Israel’s military actions in the occupied territories and “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.”

In 2009, Breaking the Silence brought over 8,000 people (mostly Israelis) to Hebron and to a Palestinian village in the South Hebron hills. About two-thirds of the people on the bus the day I went, were high school students from a youth group in Petach Tikva. The other 15 or so people had signed up as individuals. They were mostly young adults. Indeed, there were several times during our tour that hugs were exchanged between one of the members of our tour group and a friend in uniform, doing military service in Hebron. Another irony of this place.

I often think about that young woman in the film who said she just “erases” the Palestinians from her landscape. The remark is stunning especially when you think about the unnatural life led by these tiny numbers of Jews constantly guarded by soldiers so that they can live among such a large Arab minority. I want to distance myself from this woman in all ways, but I can’t completely. In some ways, she isn’t so different from the majority of Jewish Israelis who live in Modi'in, Tel Aviv, Petach Tikva or Jerusalem who go about their daily lives ignoring the Palestinians in their midst. I do it too much of the time. Life is rich and good here for the Jews (well, not all the time as I’ve noted elsewhere). It’s natural to want to preserve that goodness and easy to say the best thing we can hope for is peace and quiet – keeping the Palestinians out of sight and out of mind.

Breaking the Silence says that price for the peace and quiet is too high if it means denying the basic civil rights of our enemy and neighbor, the ability to drive home with groceries, to walk into the front door of your home, to move freely in your own community without fear of being detained or beaten while the authorities look the other way. And they say we have to look, to witness, and to act.

As part of our tour, we met with a Palestinian activist who works with Breaking the Silence. He told us a bit of his own story and then gave us a long list of accounts of the daily abuses Palestinians receive from both the Jewish police and Jewish civilians. Most hurtful was a short video clip of Jewish school children shouting vicious slurs at Palestinian school children as they walked home from school. Before we left, he said despite how bad things are for his people, he is actually feeling optimistic these days. There’s growing momentum for non-violent resistance among the Palestinians and that, he said, is what will bring about change. I hope and pray that his optimism is warranted and that both sides open their eyes, give witness and start acting so that what we saw in Hebron last week doesn’t continue for another decade and another decade beyond that as well.

Pesach on the Mediterranean

Pesach came to close on Monday night, though the holiday spirit seems to be going on for a bit longer given the number of tourists still strolling through the neighborhood. Much of the vacation felt like a Mediterranean get-away. The weather was perfect almost the entire week – sunny, low 70s with a light spring breeze. Given the fact that most of the country was on holiday, we were lucky to get stuck in relatively few traffic jams and had a totally delightful time out and about. We went sailing with friends and picnicked on their boat in the Tel Aviv harbor; We spent a night at another friends’ beach house north of Netanya where we took a sunset walk along the cliffs, ate a delicious fish dinner in their garden, and went for an early morning bike ride through the countryside. We continued north and toured a winery, lunched with friends at their hilltop vacation home, and the next day, had another lovely meal on the garden patio of a restaurant in the restored “old city” of Rosh Pina, one of the first two “new” Jewish settlements of the Yishuv.

Overall, it was a calm, peaceful and fun-filled week, as any holiday should be. Other than the fact that almost all of Israel and several tens of thousands of other tourists were traveling the length and breadth of the country, there was little else to suggest that it was Pesach once we left Jerusalem. Throughout our wanderings in Tel Aviv and the north, we saw (but didn’t eat of course) far more bread than matzah in restaurants. And these non-kosher restaurants (as well as the kosher ones) were packed!

I imagine that many of our fellow tourists and travelers were happy to leave it at that – enjoying the landscape, the spring air, the relaxed pace of being with family and friends. Indeed, Israel has many of the attractions and pleasures of other Mediterranean holiday spots - the rich colors of the landscape, expansive beaches, an abundance of olive oil and fresh produce, relaxed social conventions, and a host of other cultural markers.

And yet, when you turn away from the coastline, and look to the other edges and borders, it doesn’t take long at all to remember that this Mediterranean country is also in the Middle East.

My first border crossing during the holiday took place on a sherut (shared taxi) to Tel Aviv. Because of the traffic snarls, the driver decided to go the “back” way, on a new highway that cuts across part of the West Bank. This means we had to go through a checkpoint on the way back into Israel proper. We stopped and a young soldier got on the van. She wished us all chag sameach, apologized for the interruption in the journey and then asked us for our identity documents. Apparently, the man sitting next to me was Palestinian. He was told to get off the van and we were told to continue on our way. He wasn’t carrying anything and certainly didn’t have anything concealed under his short-sleeved polo shirt. I kept wondering why he was detained and if and when he would get to his destination.

The next boundary wasn’t crossed but was still very much part of the landscape on one of our days in the north, when we drove up to the Golan Heights. Near the Syrian border, there are three feuding Druze villages that seem to be united mainly in their disdain for and reluctant acceptance of Israeli occupation. We stood at an overlook in the northernmost village and could easily see the Syrian outpost marking the border. Indeed, there were even tour buses and quite a number of people at the fence, simply gawking at the other side, just as we were doing from Israel. My cousin Noam who grew up in the north said even though Damascus is less than a hour’s drive from the border, it might as well be on the moon. We wandered through a little farmer’s market, bought olives, honey, and fresh almonds, and saw throngs of families setting up picnic barbeques for lunch. Apparently, even the Druze were enjoying the Pesach holiday or so it seemed.

Finally, back in Jerusalem we decided to interrupt our holiday enjoyment with a bus tour of the “Jerusalem envelope”, the official name for the 168-kilometer separation barrier surrounding Jerusalem and the Ma'ale Adumim settlement-city. The tour is sponsored and guided by staff from Ir Amim (City of Nations or Peoples), an Israeli NGO that works to “render Jerusalem a more viable and equitable city, while generating and promoting a more politically sustainable future” (for more info see their website at http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/?CategoryID=151). The tour took us to several key edges of greater Jerusalem to better understand the jumbled and jagged geography of Jewish expansion and how the separation barrier closes off Palestinians from their land and from each other within the municipal borders and just outside of them. As Ir Amim describes on their website, “the tour outlines current developments in Jerusalem in relation to the policies of the Israeli governments and its consequences for a future political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The organization itself walks along a tricky edge – trying both to preserve the security of Jewish Israel and at the same time, work towards a future for Jerusalem that everyone can live in and with. I did this tour two years ago with a group of students and even then, it was virtually impossible to see a way to more equitably share this holy city with its diverse populace. Today, the situation is even more charged with political challenges from abroad and local policies that continue to promote Jewish development and encroachment into Arab communities.

There is no small irony that the Mediterranean is on the western border of Israel, where you can look to the open sea and imagine a free, just, relaxed, comfortable, and secure existence. It’s a wonderful picture and we certainly had a taste of it this past week. But, it’s sadly fleeting just like our holiday escape. Even our friends with the sailboat and vacation home ultimately confront the jagged edges when their children serve in the army and when they themselves work to smooth out some of the jagged edges between Jew and Jew and between Arab and Jew. It’s great to have the Mediterranean at our backs, but we also have to remember that the Middle East is all around us and not just on the edges.