Tel Aviv

As a religious Jew, I feel a deep connection to the land of Israel. It is the land where my forefathers lived, stretching back through the era of King David and Solomon, the time that Yehoshua bin Nun took the people of Israel into the land following the exodus from Egypt, all the way to the days when Avraham was challenged by God to "go for yourself," leave his father's home and head to this, his true home. While I grew up in England and will forever be grateful for the education and relative security I was afforded in my time there, Israel has always been my real home.

For hundreds of years, Jews around the world have dreamed of making Aliyah and moving back to this holy land. Only in recent years has this dream become a real possibility, what with the resurrection of a Jewish state coupled with such innovations as mass air travel. I am incredibly lucky in that I never really had to put much thought into my own Aliyah; when I was in my mid-teens I knew that I wanted to move here and once I finished my schooling there, that's exactly what I did. No fuss. Compare that to the quite literally life-threatening journeys some people made in order to arrive here in the Holy Land. In times gone by, people made real sacrifices in order to set up a home here.

Given this long-held affection and yearning for the land by generation after generation of Jews, I can understand why some feel so upset and detached from Tel Aviv. It is cliched to describe Tel Aviv as a city quite unlike the rest of Israel, but it really is hard not to note this; it's even earned itself the nickname "HaBuah", the bubble, for it seems to be relatively unaffected by the convulsions the rest of the country goes through. While wars have gone on and the rest of the country has been operating in a state of semi-shock, it has been observed that Tel Aviv continues as if nothing is happening. The lights of the White City, as it is known, are lit up all night, every night. While other parts of the country remain deeply connected to tradition and religion, Tel Aviv is proudly secular, modern and forward-looking. After all the years waiting for our return to the promised land, I can understand the dismay of many religious Jews that Tel Aviv seems less a Jewish city than an identikit, soul-free metropolis.

But I don't think that's the case. Just now I saw this wondeful street sign on Facebook. A quick google map search showed me that it's the only of it's kind in all of Israel.

Am Yisrael Chai - The People of Israel Live

True, Tel Aviv is no Jerusalem, but the overwhelming majority of the people of Tel Aviv don't for one second deny their Jewish identity. Many are indeed secular and practise next to nothing of the religious traditions that the dozens of generations that preceded them had so vigourously and attentively safeguarded. But these people do not despise Judaism. Far from it. They are proud of who they are. If there's one thing I've learned and am trying to pursue, it is that we have to look for the common ground between us. I subscribe to a Torah-guided way of life and, as a religious Orthodox Jew, would dearly love all other Jews to do the same. But I know that such a dream is far-fetched. Instead of becoming frustrated with reality, I have to learn to accept it for what it is and look for the positives. There are plenty, if only we look for them.



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In case you're interested, the street is located here.

Final thoughts on Yom HaShoah

Today was Holocaust Memorial Day. I don't think I need, or can, say much about the horrors of the Holocaust here; they are well documented and any attempt by me to compress such events into a short blog post would be futile. In any case, I'm sure you are well aware of what happened at that terrible time.

Instead, the point of this entry is to try to marshal and share some of my thoughts here. Over the last few years, I've done a lot of thinking about the way we relate to the Holocaust and think it would be nice to put them out into the open and hear what other people think of my beliefs. Please note that my views are far from finalised; there's plenty for me to absorb yet and if you have any input at all, I'd be only too glad to listen.

Although I've spent a few years in Israel now, I'd never really felt the spirit of the day. Holocaust Memorial day is marked all around the globe; but in Israel it takes on an entirely different meaning. Here, it is so much more personal, so much more relevant, so much more palpable.

For those of you who haven't experienced it; it's an unbelievable sight; the whole country shuts down in a way that happens on only one other date on the calendar -- Yom HaZikaron; the memorial day for fallen soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces. Not even Yom Kippur is this eerie; people stop in the street as the siren sounds and bow their heads in respect to the dead. Even cars cruising on motorways pull to a halt as the siren goes off. (Watch this video to see what I mean.) Like I said, the observance of the day is so deeply moving that it verges on the palpable.

The first year I was here I was in yeshiva and nobody actually heard the siren go off at 10am. I was dismayed that such a thing had been allowed to happen, but couldn't do much about it. The following two years I observed the day in the army, once with a relatively brief ceremony of about ten minutes. I can't remember what happened the following year. And the year after, last year, I was back in England. So this was my first real Yom HaShoah experience. I had volunteered to take part in one of the Hebrew University's ceremonies. At 11, the siren went off and the audience rose as one. We stood in total silence for two minutes and then quietly listened to the ceremony over the next hour or so.

Over the course of that two minute silence, my mind dwelt for some time on words that I often see and hear in connection with the Holocaust. Never again. At once, I feel both tremendously connected to that sentiment, but at the same time, I also feel that such a statement of defiance is whollry foolish. Of course such an evil must be stopped from ever occurring again, but how? We can call the Nazis the most despicable criminals to have ever existed on this blood-soaked world of ours, but I don't that we can do that. It is my belief that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were aided by the technological advances of the time. In an age where guns could be mass produced and where propaganda could be spread by radio and newspapers to turn an unsuspecting and trusting public into supporters of genocide, who's to say that the Nazis weren't simply anti-Semites in the mould of those who massacred Jews in the middle ages but with the crucial difference of having the right tools at their disposal to take their hatred for Jews to unprecedented proportions? Some say that they will "Never forgive, never forget", but isn't that irrational? Who hates the English or the French for their medieval brutalities to the Jews? The Germans just had the ability to transform their hatred for Jews into a genocide.

More importantly, why weren't the Nazis rejected internally and externally, by the people of Germany and by other countries, who should have realised well before the Holocaust started that the Nazis were up to no good? I don't know if there's a good or simple explanation for this, but I do know that this kind of situation could easily arrive again. We say "Never again", but who are we saying these words to? I only learned this year that the Hebrew name for the day is not merely Yom HaShoah, Holocaust day, but rather Yom HaZikaron laShoah v'laGvurah; Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. As I wrote above, in Israel, this day takes on an entirely different meaning. Here, an important part of the fabric of the day is to remember the heroism of those who saved lives and those who fought back. I must make clear that I completely respect and identify with this. Much as Israel is accused of "being caught up and stuck in the memory of the Holocaust", it should be entirely understandable that this is a country that will never, ever move on completely from such a horrendous tragedy. On this day, Israelis remind themselves that no longer will be weak or pushed around by other nations, and that from now on we will be the masters of our own fate.

If I may be slightly controversial, I disagree with this approach. In the time when countries had many dominions and rulers, and when villages and towns were isolated polities, the resident Jewish population were subject to the whims of the provincial authorities. As national governments began to form and replace local princes, knights or whoever else happened to be in charge, the Jews found themselves targeted on a wider scale, leading in numerous instances to Jews being ejected from their host country. As the age of statehood was being born, Theodore Herzl had a vision, a solution; the Jewish state. But now that we live in this age of statehood, we can see that the Jews are now being targeted on a national level. On each and every step of the journey, the persecution of the Jews has been accepted as logical and correct. With the benefit of hindsight though, we can see that every single time there was no justification at all for the atrocities that took place. Never again? I don't want to call it a silly, meaningless, cliched slogan because it clearly isn't. Not when it helps bring strength to a people who need unity and a community spirit to survive. But who can truly say that such a fate does not lie in wait for us in the future?

In an article published in today's Haaretz, Professor Robert Wistrich, who heads Hebrew University's International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, is quoted as saying: "Sixty-four years after Auschwitz, the politics of genocidal anti-Semitism and the indifference that made it possible are still with us." He later adds: "It is almost certainly unrealistic to imagine that we could eradicate anti-Semitism." Although there have been periods during which Jew-hatred has seemed to be relatively dormant, "it's always there beneath the surface."

As if to underline the point I'm trying to make, I just saw today's Dry Bones political cartoon. It hit the spot perfectly.

Saw this in an email I recently received

I saw this quote in an email I recently received. I find it absolutely incredible.

"All the nations are one day going to come together and start talking peace amongst themselves. This talk of peace will have one underlying goal: to destroy Israel. And their rationale shall be: because they [the Jews] established for themselves their own government; and though the Jews will be in tremendous danger at that time, nevertheless they will not be destroyed; in fact, from that very situation they will be saved."

Written approximately 500 years ago, by Rabbi Moshe Cordevero ("The Ramak") on Zohar Bereishis, 199.

A cause for hope (Part II)

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, (yes, I do realise that I have posted since then, but I wanted to keep things in chronological order,) I was invited out to lunch at a friend's house about two minutes away from where I live. Unfortunately, for me, I had to walk about 30 minutes instead, as I was staying at my old yeshiva, Yeshivat Hakotel in the Old City for chag.

On the way back to the Old City, at around 5 'o clock, I walked through Ben Yehuda, which would normally be buzzing at any other time of year apart from Shabbat and the other chagim. There were a few people milling around who didn't seem to be observing the day in accordance to Jewish law, but really it was very quiet. As I approached the square at the bottom where Ben Yehuda and Yafo meet, I noticed a man blowing a Shofar. Not so unusual, I thought to myself - I'd been at the Kotel earlier in the day and heard and saw people come with their own Shofarim and blow them, almost for fun. I particularly remember seeing one twenty-something man, around my own age, who had brought his own Shofar with him, and who seemed intent on making quite a show of himself. So to see a few Haredi men standing in the square in town didn't seem to be much to take notice of.

But as I came closer, I realised that they weren't blowing "for fun," but were blowing for an elderly irreligious man. It made me smile to see the dedication these men have, to take time out on Rosh Hashana to hit the streets and do something for their follow Jews. All too often, we are bothered by the Haredis begging for money. In Jerusalem, there have been umpteen stories over the last few years of Haredis who have forced separation of the sexes on the street and on buses, and other stories of how Haredi men have rioted against Shabbat desecration. As a "dati leumi" (this term literally means national religious, but also encompasses a lot of Modern Orthodoxy) Jew, I despair when I hear how Haredi Jews use strict and dogmatic methods to make a point. And at the same time, when I see how important it is to them that every last Jew hears the Shofar, I find cause for hope.


These people knew that on Rosh Hashanah they wouldn't receive payment or a donation to their cause, but they went out anyway because they cared. Trying to scare other Jews into following the Torah will never persuade them to reconsider a change in their lifestyle, but doing things like this out of love, and without demands can.

I was reminded of how I was in a pub in downtown Jerusalem with a friend a couple of years ago on Chanukah. The pub had Christmas lights and decorations up, and there was no indication that any of the patrons of the pub cared that this was Chanukah and that to an observer, this could have been a pub in a Christian country. But in the middle of my visit, a Haredi man walked in and asked the pub staff if they wouldn't mind turning down the blaring music for a minute. They complied, and as the entire pub looked at the incongruous man in the strange clothes, he took out a menorah and candles, set them down on the side of the pub counter and started to recite the blessings aloud.

Immediately the atmosphere changed, and everyone started singing along with him. When he reached the end of each of the brachot, an almost-fierce "Amen" was heard from all around me. While most people in that pub would never have lit candles by themselves, they really, genuinely cared to see somebody come in and light for them. I only hope that the Haredi world adopts this approach more often and shares it's brand of Judaism with others rather than shunning them and criticising them for not complying.

A cause for hope

Although I blog fairly regularly, I don't think I've ever posted an entry of a personal nature here. Last week, I attended the Nefesh b'Nefesh International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem (read my report for the Jerusalem Post here) and one of the speakers mentioned that while blogs often have specific topics, it's still nice to write those "slice of life" entries and share your experiences with others. The speaker went on to explain that for a person living in Efrat, for example, it might not seem all too interesting at first to describe one's daily commute, but to someone living on the other side of the world the idea of waking up and facing the Judaean hills, driving through biblical landscape on the way to work in the knowledge that the only traffic jam one might encounter would be from a wayward flock of sheep - well, that might be almost exotic to some. With this in mind, I've decided that it's high time that I share some of my experiences.

The first thing I want to relate is an event that occured last Monday. I had locked my bike outside the Shuk and after retrieving it, noticed that somebody had touched my gears, as they had been reset from 21st gear (3 and 7) to something like 8, as the numbers were lower around 2 and 4. I was a little bit annoyed, but I soon became genuinely irritated when I saw that the gear chain had been knocked off, too. For those readers who haven't had to put a bike's chain back on the gears, I should explain that you get your hands dirty and oily from touching the greasy chain. After realising that I had no option, I set about fixing the bike.

Just as I was about to get started, an elderly man stopped to ask me if I could help him by taking his heavy bags as he walked to the bus stop on the other side of the road. I told him that I needed to fix my bike, but that I would be with him in a second. The man was rather insistent, but I explained that I would need a little time first.

Putting a bicycle chain back in place (illustrative)

After fidgeting with the bike's chain for a few seconds to no avail, an Arab teenager, almost certainly one of the many Arab workers in the Shuk, strode towards my bike, took it from me gently and in a split-second had the chain back on. Hugely impressed and appreciative of his kindness, I thanked him and shook his hand. It was truly heartening to see that despite what the media makes out to be total disharmony between Jews and Arabs, there's still co-operation between the two groups and away from the media spotlight, there are still instances like this that give you hope. But the boy, unaware of my goofy smile, then turned round to the old man, took his bags and walked him across the road. If there's one thing I can take from this it is that while we can never work with extremists, there will definitely be people "on the other side" who are not extreme and who want peace too. It is up to us to find a way of working with them and alienating terrorists and those who incite hatred and violence against us.

Incredible video clip

A friend posted a link to this on facebook, and I simply had to share it here.


Members of the Stermer family talk about how they hid in caves for nearly a year during World War II to avoid discovery by the Nazis.

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A quick joke I saw online

I read this recently and loved it, hope you do too...

A story is told of a Jewish man who was on the underground reading an Arab newspaper. A friend of his, who happened to be in the same carriage, noticed this strange phenomenon.

Curious as he was, he approached the newspaper reader. "Moshe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading an Arab newspaper?"

Moshe replied, "I used to read the Jewish newspaper, but what did I find? Jews being persecuted; Israel being attacked; Jews disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage; Jews living in poverty. So I switched to the Arab newspaper. Now what do I find? Jews own all the banks; Jews control the media; Jews are all rich and powerful; Jews rule the world. The news is so much better!"