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Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
Israel
at Fifty
Entering Israel's Second Yovel
By Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
from Tikkun Magazine, Vol.13,
No.2
Let
me share with you some reflections as Medinat Israel, on the
threshold of the new century-millennium, is entering her fiftieth
year, her first Jubilee or Yovel.
When
our Prophets spoke of the future, they gave us a vision of
Zion and Jerusalem that is yet to be fulfilled, saying: "My
house shall be a house of prayer for all people," (Isaiah
56:7); "Even from them [the non-Jews] shall I [God] take
priests and Levites," (Isaiah 66:21); and, "Out
of Zion shall come forth Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem,"
(Micah 4:2). This served as a wonderful vision of Israel as
a flowing fountain, from which would come forth inspiration
and a light that would proceed to the whole world.
Unfortunately,
although the people who traditionally prayed every day for
the return to Zion, as well as the secular early Zionists,
hoped and planned and worked for a good future, they were
not futurists. They thought of the future by looking through
a rear-view mirror, and pursued a kind of nostalgic future.
"There will be a time when there will be a kingdom greater
than that of King Solomon," they thought, but that was
the problem: they were taking King Solomon's realm as their
reference point. Now that the Zionist ideal has found its
realization in the State, what can we look forward to? Any
move from an ideal to reality entails a certain amount of
degradation; more shadow energy, what we call klippah in Jewish
mysticism, begins to adhere. As long as a Jewish state was
a dream, a myth, a hope, we saw the good and it looked to
us that it could be sustained out of Justice. But now that
we meet it in palpable reality - Oy, does it need mercy.
The
myth that sustained us throughout our Diaspora was that of
the return. Now that we have returned and have a sovereign
country, we have little to propel us into the future. We are
scared - mythless. It will take poets, dreamers, and mystics
to reach into a yet unrealized future to dream the next story
of our people. Without an active myth, a dynamic transpersonal
story, Israel will be bereft of the invisible means of sustenance
and support.
Herzl was more a futurist than many others. He wrote a novel,
AltNeuLand, which was his tab at science fiction. In it he
explored a European capitalist democracy and made room for
non-Jewish Zionists. He still lacked, however, a forward-looking
vision of what an Israel seated in the heart of the bridge
between Asia and Africa could become in the global village.
The hopeful believer in me is not willing to give up. Seeing
the hand of God in history, I trust that we will be led through
these transitions: the dreams and visions will come, yet the
labor and contractions are painful.
Without having an attractive vision of what is yet to come,
we have created an Israel which now must face a daunting situation.
Jerusalem is becoming more and more dominated by the ultra-Orthodox,
to the point that some secular Jews are fleeing to other parts
of the country. People in one enclave feel less connected
with those of others, and even more at odds with each other
in the same milieu. The haredim believe in an ultimate future
in which they will triumph and prevail as a result of their
mesirat nefesh, their tenacious sacrificial devotion.
Our Palestinian cousins have their own triumphalists as tenaciously
contending that Allah has promised them that they will prevail.
Both the haredim and the Palestinians have little understanding
of the compromises necessary for a negotiated peace. So we
have two kinds of triumphalists confronting each other, unable
to recognize that Israel is an experiment that cannot be called
off. Providence has seen to it that the most difficult partners
that could be involved in this struggle had to wrestle with
one another. When we have learned how to collaborate in peace
at least as well as we collaborate in creating strife, we
will have a model for others. The people in Rwanda and Bosnia
and others all over the globe are waiting for the results
of our experiment. The messiah we are waiting for is us: Israelis
and Palestinians.
Unfortunately, the mental and spiritual capacities to work
toward peace are not available to many of the people involved.
You can feel this in Israel. Even in Lod - Tel Aviv - from
the moment you step off the plane, you can feel the tone of
the language raised up to a more nervous and strident pitch.
You speak to the taxi cab drivers or to people on the street
and you can feel that you are in the nervous system of a reptilian
brain, a kind of Jurassic Park. Everything has to do with
turf. Even among the various groups in B'nai B'raq and Me'ah
She'arim there are turf wars. The splinters of political parties
in the Knesset are no better. The country is attuned more
to the reptilian brain than to the cortex; to even speak of
spirituality, the brain would have to be attuned to a yet
still higher level, the soul level, where intuition resides.
The Palestinians are not more advanced. As I read the Koran,
for all my respect for this Ishmaelean Midrash on Torah, I
feel pain over the references to Shaitan ar-rag'im, "Satan
who is to be stoned." A phrase that occurs in the "Salaat"
prayer recited five times a day. Israel has been identified
as Shaitan and Israelis are to be stoned. So on both sides
we have images of the demonized "Other" that are
rooted in the present and in the past but not in the desirable
future. What a handicap to irenic dialogue. At the moment,
neither side recognizes that we need to live in a post-triumphalist
era.
How can we move beyond this current situation? Imagine an
Israel with a halachic government. I shudder in my kishkes
when I think of what this would be like in the short run,
with attempts to impose the most reactionary religious practice
on so many people who describe themselves either as secular
or as other than right-wing orthodox. But when I take a longer
view, through this next yovel, I realize that such a halachic
government would have to work out for itself many of the things
that Jewish Renewal communities have already tried to work
out: namely, how to live in this modern world according to
values and mitzvot. Right now, right-wing religious can always
say, "Someone else, who is not religious, is in charge,
and we are the opposition, and in the meantime we have to
employ Shabbos goyim, non-Jews who do work which we must not
do on the Sabbath." But if they had to work out every
bit of Halacha for a Jewish state and keep the air force,
fire brigades, hospitals and ambulances doing their jobs,
it could be a laboratory for bringing halachic Judaism up
to date.
As to Eretz Yisrael, the land, the ecology: we need matriots,
not patriots, who will care for the environment, rooted in
the commands of bal tash'chit (the Torah tradition teachings
about not destroying the earth). Orthodox people have not
done their theological or even halachic homework, and for
that matter neither have the secularists or Reform or Conservative
Jews. We have never had a decent statement accepted by the
various denominations of Jews concerning what we think the
Holocaust was all about. We need a theological statement about
the State of Israel, including how we should relate to the
Abrahamic peoples who formed Christianity and Islam (and hence
are really in a very different condition from those who are
merely accepting the seven commandments designed for the Children
of Noah).
We need an Israel committed to diversity in the Jewish religious
community, an Israel which allows the individual to live an
autonomous moral, ethical, and halachic life rather than a
heteronomous order that is directed by a spiritually constipated
elite. There is not yet a mussar in Israel that recognizes
who the other is - namely, that the other is a precious spark
of the Living God.
So all this is the dark side.
But if we could take Isaiah's future vision into the present,
we could begin to think in very different terms: about a United
States of the Middle East. I draw a certain kind of hope from
the collaboration that is already taking place between some
groups in Jordan and Israel on the level of commerce. In hope,
I extend that vision to other domains.
We have to move away from nationalism to an organ-based understanding
- what I call an organismic understanding - of our place on
the planet. We need some of each of the organs of the whole
body of the Jewish people in Israel. It makes sense that we
need the B'nai Yisrael from India and the Falashas from Ethiopia
in Israel along with the Edot Hamizrach and the Ashkenazim.
We must be prepared to give up the idea that the Northern
Hemisphere is the only decent place from which to learn, as
if the Ashkenazim have the corner on wisdom. At the same time,
I don't think it's useful to think of Israel as our homeland
as if we all were ever to live there. If we, who are in the
Diaspora, form a good part of the body of the Jewish people,
then Israel is our heart. There are so many people who go
to live in Israel and then come back to live in the Diaspora.
If we made a census of the yordim, Israelis who live and work
abroad, as well as of the olim, the immigrants, and add to
this the number of us who periodically visit and sojourn in
Israel, we would get a more realistic picture of the Jewish
people. If you have an organismic understanding, you can see
that we in the Diaspora bring nourishment to the heart and
we get nourishment from the heart. We are vitally important
and necessary. The flow of vigor from us to Israel and from
Israel to us can be seen like a circulation system.
The Palestinians in the Diaspora could also bring the wisdom
of their experience to their community in the Holy Land. Among
the Palestinians there are yordim emigres all over the globe.
They too visit their home from time to time and need a way
to keep their identity in their diaspora. So it is not an
issue of Lebensraum for either of us. Both sides need to recognize
that we are not talking about land, but about cultural centers
to which we and they could come, and then it would not make
so much of a difference exactly where the territorial line
is being drawn.
Once we realize that the Holy Land is about getting to our
deepest heart place, then we should institute social practices
in accord with this insight. If we got to the Holy Land, we
should spiritually prepare for that moment in our lives. Perhaps
after we come off the ship or the airplane to Israel, each
person should go through a one-day preparation process that
would raise the spiritual vibrations of people coming to the
Land. If you need a driver's license to qualify to drive on
the road, then anyone making aliyah should have to prepare
to live in that country on a higher moral level.
These are solutions that our cortex and our intuition propose.
However, we cannot totally deny the reptilian brain, even
if we wanted to. Every human being needs that part, even though
we need the higher brain functions as well. The reptilian
brain connects us to the soil, and so we need Eretz Yisrael.
The chtonic power issuing from the dark places in our being
that connect us to the voice of the earth cannot be denied,
as the Jungians well understood. There is some way in which
the land itself nourishes our being, and we cannot abandon
that connection. We cannot remain Jews for many generations
without a connection to that particular piece of land.
Mythically we, as Jews, are tied into this land, and our very
understanding of how we should live and be as Jews in the
universe is organically tied into our connection to the Land
of Israel. The calendar of Judaism is the most organismic
one I know: it connects us both to the moon and the sun, it
honors time and it honors the seasons. This connection came
to us because we lived in a land that "flowed with milk
and honey" - to live in a land that was not particularly
great for agriculture, we had to learn certain ecological
lessons that the whole planet now needs to learn.
The Diaspora consciousness helped us to think in universal
terms. Theology is the afterthought of the believer. First
comes an experience, and then later we try to make sense of
that experience through a theological insight. We made a theology
to fit our Diaspora situation. But we always retained the
prayer in which we called for "hamachzir shecheenato
leTziyon ," that God will return the Shechinah, His Presence,
to dwell in the holy land. We prayed for the transcendent
God to become immanent in the holy land in Her feminine aspect
(as the Shechinah). In this vision, God would honor all of
Her children (not just Jews), and thus "Eym habanim s'meycha,"
"the mother of many children is made happy," honoring
all the people - not just Jews - who live in the land. God
as the transcendent Being is not the whole story. If we want
God to be immanent with us, we have to say "our Shechinah
of the Holy Land," just as we may say "our Shechinah
of the Rocky Mountains," that is, God as the Shechinah
embodied and manifested in and through this particular place
(wherever that is).
There is a different God-feel in the South Sea Islands than
in Alaska. If we are like nerve cells of the global organism,
then the particular location in which we find ourselves in
Earth's body has some powerful impact on how we experience
our reality. So, we as Jews, have a special connection to
the Land of Israel, provided we understand that connection
in a Shechinah way.
We always place God outside of ourselves, and we don't see
clearly enough how we swim in God. From an organismic point
of view, we are like blood corpuscles swimming in the big
God body. To serve God is to serve the totality of which I
am part. We have to honor the organic connection between everything
that is. I don't want to think of God transcendent as something
divorced from me, because I swim in that God transcendent,
and inside me swims God immanent. What separates God transcendent
from God immanent is only the thin veil of my consciousness.
If I allow that to become transparent, then we have the Yichud
(unity) of Echad (the oneness), and there the transcendent
and immanent are One.
According to the Kabbalistic roadmap, the first fifty years
is governed by God's attribute of forgiving lovingkindness
(chesed), while the second Yovel is governed by limit-setting
severity (gevurah).
The next Yovel is the Yovel of gevurah, demanding a certain
amount of self-control and a certain amount of t'shuvah. The
mistakes that we made in Israel over all these past fifty
years came into being in the context of a very forgiving matrix
- that is part of what I mean by saying that the first Yovel
was chesed. We didn't get slapped by instant karma when we
did something wrong - we were in a forgiving environment.
I don't think that is going to remain the case in the next
fifty years. I think we are going to get some very quick karmic
response - and that is gevurah. I think that we are going
to face some harsh realities in the next fifty years that
will massage us into being a better people (and that's the
hopefulness in gevurah).
To envision this future, we will need nurturing womb-men and
women. The way to overcome the difficulties of gevurah is
through rachamim, compassion (from rechem, womb). We need
to nurture the place of compassion in our dealings with the
problems of the State of Israel. The key is to really validate
the pain of whoever is on the other side. For Israel, that
may be a nobler way to relate to the Palestinians. (Wouldn't
it be wonderful if Jews could prepare food for Moslems during
Ramadan, when they fast to honor their traditions, wouldn't
it be wonderful if we could go to each other's circumcision
ceremonies, sharing the legacy of Abraham as we do?) Any negotiation
process must begin by recognizing the other and validating
them for who they are. We must honor the other person first
before anything that is to happen at the negotiating table
is to work.
We could, in the near future, take one small step toward solving
some of our problems, a step that would bring us nearer to
the prophetic vision: we should take the space to the south
of the Temple Mount (currently undeveloped) and use it to
create a space to serve as a House of Prayer for All People,
an ecumenical plaza in which people of all faiths can pray
together, and Jews of all denominations could pray, each in
their own way. Let this be a place where Moslems, Buddhists,
Christians, Jews all gather for prayer. We should have a weekly
concert by the Levites' orchestra and choir to be broadcast
to the entire world - and let the Levites be chosen from all
the different religions - to sing with us their sacred songs
and to create "a new song" to God.
An other step: Israelis have to spend much time serving in
the army as reserves and regular soldiers. If they immediately
enter civilian life without shedding that "attitude"
our civic life becomes more and more tense. We need a virtual
mikveh, an experiential immersion pool for cleansing, for
the people coming out of the army that allows them to ritually
separate themselves from the consciousness that they had to
develop while serving in that war-charged adversarial context.
For the last few years I have worked on the issues of aging
and have written a book called From Age-ing to Sage-ing: Dealing
with Spiritual Eldering. In this work I proposed that an elder
corps be formed by people who have become elders, by people
who have done their inner work in a way that they could become
Wisdom keepers, peace makers, whistle blowers, and ombudspeople
serving as stewards for the next seven generations. I believe
that an elder corps composed of people who have done their
inner work, taken not only from Jews but from all who seek
the peace of Jerusalem, could meet with Israeli and Palestinian
grandparents and with those who have lost their loved ones
and propose ways to sort out our differences.
These and many other ideas are steps issuing from the vision
of Jewish Renewal. A vital Jewish renewal could attract many
people in Israel to a spiritual, ecological, ethical, and
moral tradition that could help them in the coming Yovel of
gevurah.
As Herzl said a century ago, "Im tirtzu eyn zu aggadah"
- "If you will it, it is not just a legend." May
we see it in our day. Blessings to you in hope for the world's
tikkun.
Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
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