Category: Nationalism

Out of the Sky

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Book Review, Crisis, Diaspora, Feminism, Gender, Hebrew, Heroism, Holocaust, Israel, Jewish Identity, Leadership, Nationalism, Religion, Review, Tragedy, War, Western Civilization, ZionismLeave a comment

“To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”

This review was published in this week’s Jewish Journal

Hannah Senesh occupies a unique place in Israeli history and memory. Only 19 years old on the eve of World War II, she left her hometown of Budapest to build the land of Israel with her young Zionist peers. At 23, she made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe. The mission ultimately failed in its stated purpose and resulted in Senesh’s execution. But it left the fledgling Jewish State with a national hero, whose poetry and diary entries still reverberate today. Senesh wasn’t alone, she was one among a small group of Jewish members of the yishuv who donned British army uniforms in an implausible bid to try to save Jewish lives from the German killing machine, often their own families included. A few of these figures, such as Enzo Sereni and Haviva Reik, also entered the national consciousness, with streets and settlements named in their honor. Others are less well-known. For a story that is this iconic, one would imagine that its details would be more or less widely understood. Yet as Matti Friedman demonstrates in his riveting new book “Out of the Sky,” one of Israel’s greatest legends is also riddled with mysteries and open questions.

The heroic operation was the result of a collaboration between the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah and British intelligence. The idea, at least as the British understood it, was for a group of Jewish men and women, almost all of them recent refugees from Europe, to join the British army and leverage their skill in their native languages in order to assist British POWs and local resistance fighters behind enemy lines. On the Jewish end, motivations were more multifaceted. The Jewish conscripts sought British military training, which would help them when the time came for their own inevitable war of independence. Even more so, they desperately wanted to try to help the Jewish communities of Europe in some way. A total of 250 men and women were recruited to take part in this unusual mission, but only 37 of them completed the training. Of this number, 12 were captured and seven did not make it home.

Friedman lays out the extent to which this improbable mission, rooted in the loftiest ideals, never really had a chance of succeeding. Firstly, by the time it took place in 1944, most Jews in Europe had already been murdered. No allied powers, including the British commanders overseeing this secret mission, seemed to prioritize saving their lives. Even the safety of the Jewish volunteers was not viewed as urgent. Enzo Sereni, the brilliant Italian Labor Zionist and polymath, who Ben-Gurion tried to prevent from jumping because “there wasn’t another man like him,” was carelessly dropped atop a German army installation in Northern Italy.  As Friedman notes in an interesting aside, the Mossad unit operating out of Istanbul at the time had been infiltrated by German double agents, who likely knew about the parachutists’ missions before they even landed.

A visitor could walk through the entire Hannah Senesh House in Sdot Yam — a beautifully renovated museum in the kibbutz where she lived for two years before setting out on her perilous mission — without seeing any mention of a seemingly important fact: that her mission was doomed from the start. Yet Friedman’s aim is not to diminish Senesh’s extraordinary bravery, or that of her fellow operatives. Rather, he seeks to understand their courage in a new light.

In recent years, Friedman has become one of the most compelling English-language chroniclers of Israeli history and society. What distinguishes his work — whether he is examining the brilliant letters of a young Israeli soldier on a Lebanese outpost or recounting Leonard Cohen’s sojourn in Israel after the Yom Kippur War — is his tendency to frame Israel’s turbulent history through a literary lens. While the canon of modern Hebrew wartime literature remains relatively sparse — perhaps because most writers keep their distance from the battlefield — Israel has never lacked for fighters with poetic souls in the state’s early years or today.

Throughout the book, Friedman explores the intellectual worlds of his unusually thoughtful protagonists, suggesting that “if they showed up at a military recruiting office now, they’d probably be turned away.” Senesh, the daughter of a well-known Hungarian-Jewish playwright, dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps and wrote poems of startling quality as early as age 15. Sereni held a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rome. Friedman recounts how, in addition to having already written a novel and novella, he dreamed of writing a great Italian novel which would depict the conflicts and controversies of his time through the lens of his own Jewish family.

In this sense both Senesh and Sereni follow in the path of other great Zionist leaders, like Herzl and Jabotinsky, who began their careers as journalists and writers of fiction, eventually putting aside their universalistic literary ambitions for the more particularistic cause of Jewish sovereignty. Friedman makes the terrific observation that this is no coincidence: “To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”

Part of the book’s premise is that the exquisite literary sensibilities of these proto-Israeli heroes helps explain why they made the jump. Friedman writes: “The parachutists aren’t commandos. They’re storytellers. They’ve been sent to write, with their lives, a Zionist story about the war – a story that will lead others not to despair but to action.” Senesh’s military achievements may have been miniscule – hardly any time passed from the beginning of her mission until her execution in a Hungarian prison, only three months before liberation.

Yet we remember Senesh because of her literary achievements: among them the diary she wrote vividly portraying her transition from a precocious, assimilated 13-year-old girl into a fervent Zionist activist. At every major juncture in her short life Senesh seemed to find the time to quickly craft a phenomenal poem. She handed her fellow fighter “blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame” right before entering occupied Hungary. Shortly before her execution she managed to pen a short lyric poem: “I gambled on what mattered most/The dice were cast. I lost.” While Senesh failed in saving other Jews, and even herself, she succeeded in her larger objective. As Friedman summarizes it: “The mission isn’t military, it’s literary, and she’s the best writer.”

In writing “Out of the Sky” — a book equally about a remarkable episode in history as it is the act of crafting and telling stories — Friedman certainly crafts his own. While many fascinating and heretofore little-known stories about Senesh and her fellow parachuters make it into the book, others do not. Friedman leans toward a portrait of Senesh as a clever, cosmopolitan European. He reminds us of her youth and her theatrical family. In her precocious diary entries, Zionism feels like a role she has chosen to play. He clearly admires her heroism but does not exaggerate it. Yet alternative accounts remain.

In his introduction to the first edition of Senesh’s collected writings, Abba Eban wrote, “all the definitions of giant courage come together in Senesh’s life.” Joel Palgi, another parachutist who followed a similar path to Senesh but inexplicably managed to survive, wrote about her in his memoirs as a force of nature, the undisputed leader of their group, fiercely admired by fellow resistance comrades as she transformed from a poet into a fighter. Even the Gestapo, in Palgi’s telling, were in awe of Senesh. He describes the sadistic prison warden who used to visit Senesh’s cell every day to argue about politics. Senesh’s mother Katherine, in her own memoir, describes the mesmerizing power Senesh held over guards and fellow prisoners alike. Children gravitated toward her, fellow prisoners drew strength from Senesh’s whispered encouragement, her Zionist education campaign, and her ingenious secret broadcasts from the window of her cell. One SS guard told Senesh, “I’ve never known a woman as brave as you.”

“Out of the Sky” does not contradict these remarkable testimonies, which contain a whiff of hagiography, though surely have some grounding in truth. It’s not really a book about superheroes, unusual people with uniquely phenomenal qualities who changed the course of history. Rather, it’s a book about regular people, highly intelligent and talented to be sure, who met the challenges of their age with bravery and foresight.  What distinguished them as heroes was that they understood, both in their lives and their deaths, they could contribute to the writing of a story much larger than themselves.

For the original article see this week’s Jewish Journal

From Meitzarim to the Strait of Hormuz: Living the Bible in Real Time

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Bereishit, Biblical Geography, Classics, Diaspora, Grief, Hebrew, Israel, Jerusalem, Jewish Holidays, Jewish Identity, Leadership, Nationalism, October 7, Passover, Purim, Redemption, Religion, Simchat Torah, Tanakh, Western Civilization, ZionismLeave a comment

On the seventh morning of this past holiday of Passover in Israel I walked gingerly to synagogue, still groggy from a 3:00 am siren, wondering what had come of President Trump’s ultimatum to Iran issued before I turned off my phone for the final day of the holiday. When I arrived, I saw a friend sitting outside with a weary look – common among parents of five young kids who have been jumping off the walls for nearly six weeks at home during a war. Her youngest lay at her feet on his belly whacking a stick into a muddy puddle leftover from the previous day’s rainstorm. “How are you?” I asked, “actually now I’m great!” she smiled, “did you hear the news? There’s been a ceasefire. They opened the Straits of Hormuz.”

I hadn’t heard, but as I entered the synagogue, the congregation had just risen to hear the Song of the Sea, the chapter of Exodus depicting the splitting of the Red Sea, which is read on the final day of Passover each year when our tradition believes the event took place. Of course, I thought, Trump’s warning had to be issued on the eve of this miraculous commemoration, of course it involved another body of water being opened up to free passage. Of course, if the ceasefire holds, this would mean that the war had run for a course of 40 days more or less, a time period associated with transformation in the Bible. The Hebrew word for Egypt is “Mitzrayim,” which in Jewish thought is often read as “meitzarim,” or “narrow straits.” Could it just be a coincidence that a Strait is at the center of the current conflict? Even my friend’s toddler with his grubby stick started to take on cosmic significance – a mini Moses raising his staff before the splitting of the sea.

Pharaoh and His Army Drown in the Sea. Isfahan, Iran. 19th Century. Property of the Israel Museum

Personally, I have never been one for modern miracle stories, for Bible codes or hidden predictions embedded in numerical patterns in the Torah. I teach literature, so naturally I love stories and myths. But I understand them as just that, human attempts to find patterns in the world in which we live and imbue it with meaning and significance. Yet, at some point since I moved to Israel, my mindset has begun to shift. There is something about being in a land with so much Biblical significance that makes a person start to feel like she is living in the Bible herself.

Take the start of this recent conflagration with Iran, on the morning of the Shabbat before Purim commonly known as “Shabbat Zachor,” “the Sabbath of Remembering.” On this Shabbat we are required to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt” (Deut. 25:17). Amalek has been having a bit of a moment lately in the American anti-semite camp. Despite the fact that the injunction to remember Amalek is mentioned in the same Bible that both Jews and Christians cherish, Tucker Carlson and others have been latching onto it as yet another example of Israeli and Jewish treachery. This despite the straightforward nature of the commandment – to destroy an evil nation that, if given the chance, would gladly murder us first, with a particularly malicious focus on abusing the weak, elderly, infirm, etc. In truth, the commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek” has never really made it to the rotation of practical commandments for religious Jews. We recall it every year as a kind of symbolic reminder of the limits of moral relativism – that we are commanded to wipe out evil as best as we can.

This past Shabbat Zachor was the most memorable one of my life. Synagogues all around the country closed early as sirens rang out, and it was clear that most Israeli Jews would not be able to hear the biblically mandated passage read aloud from a Torah scroll in its proper context. In my case, word got out that it was going to be read on a nearby street corner, and at noon sharp dozens of neighbors emerged from their homes and safe rooms as if out of nowhere. Just as the Torah reader unfurled his scroll and began to chant, an early missile warning rang out. I assumed everyone would run home but one older man shouted “just keep going,” and the biblical verses were read out in a clear and precise fashion. Upon completion, the actual oncoming missile siren blared and everyone listening disappeared almost as suddenly as they had emerged. Later that evening we would discover the improbable news that the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his senior leadership had been killed that same morning by an Israeli strike. Of course, this occurred right around the same time Zachor is normally read in synagogue.

The Purim which followed was a constrained one as the war with Iran increased in intensity and rockets rained down all across Israel. Celebrations were cancelled, public readings of the Scroll of Esther were curtailed, children across the country were devastated that they would not be able to show off their costumes to their teachers and friends. Purim in the Bible takes place not in the Land of Israel but in Persia, the ancient forerunner of Iran. Purim celebrates the improbable overturning of the plot of Haman, the evil advisor to the Persian King Ahashverosh, to destroy the Jewish people. The catchphrase of the holiday is “v’nahafoch hu,” “and it was reversed.” And indeed, what we experienced was the great reversal of a terrible lot that had been cast against the Jews by the neo-Persian Islamist empire. Decades of Iranian sponsored terrorism, money and training funneled to Hamas and Hezbollah and other terror groups, all for the purpose of strangling Israel and murdering its Jews. Finally, our fortunes were reversed, thanks in significant part to the assistance of a great world power and friend (Esther and Mordechai didn’t do it alone either). Now, the sovereign Jewish state directed and influenced the sort of situation in which we previously found ourselves the victim.

One Funny Meme Among Many

Since we were stuck inside for a great deal of that Purim, humorous memes circulated like wildfire. Khamenei contains the same letters as Haman, Trump likened to Ahashverosh (in addition to his relative Cyrus the Great), Benjamin Netanyahu to the righteous Mordechai (who the Bible says is from the tribe of Benjamin). Who then is Esther? Ivanka Trump? Miriam Adelson? At a certain point the analogies turned into Purim parody but no one could doubt that something remarkable was happening. Legends of the past were turning into reality, past and present mingling. One friend said “Purim may have been cancelled but this was the truest Purim we’ve ever had.”

For many of us, these feelings have been gestating since the breakout of October 7th, for some of us even longer. While Hamas chose the timing of their assault to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, it was left to us to parse the significance of it occurring at the climax of the Jewish holiday and yearly Torah reading cycle. Precisely two years later, the anticipation toward the freeing of the final batch of hostages during Sukkot, also known by its Rabbinic name “the time of our joy,” made for one of the most joyous Sukkot celebrations many of us have ever experienced. This idea isn’t a new one in Judaism. The requirement to remember the Exodus from Egypt is a case in point. We don’t only remember the details of the story, or relay the miracles wrought by God. At the Passover seder we say, “in every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he has personally left Egypt.” Jewish tradition supposes a kind of reliving, not only a remembering, of the events of the Bible in every subsequent generation.

This past year I bought my myth and fantasy loving son a beautiful book called The Mythmakers, a graphic novel by John Hendrix which depicts the famed literary friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book aims, among other things, to get to the heart of what myth is – stories for which the category of “fact” or “fiction” is irrelevant because they explore the way a culture understands itself and its history. A true myth, the book’s wise Gandalf-line narrator explains, “takes place in a ‘time out of time’ and a ‘place out of place’ – separated from our reachable world.” This is part of the magic of myth, that something so completely distant and foreign can also feel so incredibly familiar. The book contains an entertaining visual romp through examples of ancient myths that include among them the book of Genesis and Jonath and the Whale.

What I’ve realized, I suppose, after the events of the last few years, is that moving to Israel means that the events of the Bible stop being myths and start to be something else, maybe something closer to prophecy – or a blueprint, a pattern, for the world we live in. This is different from the relationship that Jews outside of Israel have to the weekly Torah portion, which they read, find personal connections in, or use to generate a wise insight that connects to life in some meaningful way. That sort of reading treats the text essentially as myth, even if you happen to believe the myth is true even on a literal level. What’s going on now in Israel is actually a bit more prosaic than myth, maybe even less intellectually exciting. We don’t need to perform convoluted hermeneutic somersaults to see the connections between the Jewish story here in Israel and our foundational texts – rather the connection is simple and palpable. As sophisticated readers, we shouldn’t need the current war against Iran to be completely geographically aligned with our ancient Persian struggle in order to draw parallels (though it happens to be). The terrorists of Hamas don’t have to be actually located in ancient Philistine territory in order to be associated with those enemies (though they are). They don’t have to voluntarily call themselves Palestinians in order to recall those bloodthirsty adversaries of the biblical Israelites (though they do). We know how to read texts and draw subtle inferences, create complicated analogies, and find meaning where it isn’t obvious. But what is there to say when the parallels are so simple and present?

Another Biblical text we read over the Passover holiday is Ezekiel 37, the vision of the dry bones. The vision takes place after the first destruction of the Jewish temple, when the Jewish people are in the Babylonian exile. God places the prophet Ezekiel in a valley full of bones and asks him “O human being, can these bones live again.” We all know the answer, on a symbolic level. Old ideas can be refreshed; a once vanquished people can be reborn. Ezekiel probably has a sense of where God is going with this and starts prophesying. In the midst of his prophecy he is startled by a strange sound, “suddenly there was a sound of rattling, and the bones came together, bone to matching bone.” To Ezekiel’s surprise this rich and literary parable has taken a literal turn: the breath of God enters the bones and they actually come to life. God does not say “as if.” He tells the people of Israel: “I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil.”

Ezekiel Sees the Dry Bones (Dura Europos Synagogue, 244 CE)

The nice thing about myth is that, with enough exposure, you learn to read between the lines- to recognize where a narrative is heading and what it asks of us. Living the story in medias res (in the middle of things) is never as clear. Does this current ceasefire spell some kind of meaningful turning point for the Jewish people or is it just one pause in a long grind of missiles and war? Which of today’s leaders, like an aging and delusional Saul, is nearing his end—and who, if anyone, might emerge as a Davidic alternative? Living the Bible in real time doesn’t give us unique prophetic access to what the future holds. It doesn’t immunize us from mistakes, nor does it make our pain or grief over loss any less acute. But it assures us that what’s taking place now is far from random: that God’s magnificent plan for the Jewish people is still unfolding, and that the center of the Jewish story remains where it’s always been, here in the Land of Israel.

Kuma: The Story of the Jewish People

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Art, Bereishit, Crisis, Diaspora, Grief, Hebrew, Heroism, Holocaust, Israel, Jewish Identity, Leadership, Midrash, Mourning, Nationalism, October 7, Politics, Redemption, Religion, War, Western Civilization, ZionismLeave a comment

The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem is known for its collection of Near Eastern antiquities from the Biblical period. Yet amidst its galleries stands a startling cultural artifact of far more recent origin.

Kuma—meaning “Rise”—is a nearly ten-foot-long scroll depicting a dense, vivid, intellectually rich, and aesthetically stunning account of Jewish history. Its full title, “Kuma, Mei Afatzim ve-Kankantum,” refers to the materials used to prepare ink for Torah scrolls and other sacred texts. Evoking an unfurled Torah scroll, Kuma is the high-school senior project of a brilliant young yeshiva student, artist and poet named Eitan Rosenzweig הי”ד. Staff Sgt. Rosenzweig, an Alon Shvut native and student in the Yerucham Yeshivat Hesder, served in the Givati brigade and was killed in Gaza in November 2023, at the age of 21.

Kuma weaves together Jungian theories of the unconscious, the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of the heroic journey, and imagery drawn from Western art and Jewish history—some of which appear elsewhere in the Bible Lands Museum. Kuma also incorporates literary allusions to the Bible, Talmud, modern Hebrew literature, Eastern and Western general philosophy, and more. It is a work of art that one must study rather than merely observe.

The full essay can be read at Tradition Online.

Ribbons of Hope

On By SarahIn Crisis, Ethics, Grief, Hebrew, Heroism, Israel, Joshua, Language, Leadership, Morality, Music, Nationalism, October 7, Pop Culture, Prayer, Religion, Tragedy, Zionism4 Comments

Last week when President Trump announced his intention to clean out and rebuild the Gaza Strip, I don’t think I was alone in feeling something I had not felt in a long time. It was not the elation of giving it to ones enemies, or the smug satisfaction of political validation.  It was a rather fragile feeling, somewhat tentative, one might even say naive. Throughout the war we have experienced crushing blows but also astounding, miraculous, successes. Yet  in these victories there is often a cyclical dynamic: we conquer territory only to withdraw weeks later, we kill terrorists only for their ranks to be replenished by a seemingly infinite supply of hateful young jihadists. Even our genuine exhilaration at the return of a few of our hostages is marred by our fear of what’s to come from from the murderous and unrepentant terrorists who are being released in turn. As always, we trust in God and our military and wish for the best, but common sense tells us that, in good measure, the problems we face today aren’t going anyway time soon. 

For real hope to blossom, we need to understand that change is on the horizon. Trump’s proposal, whether or not its likely to materialize, offers a rare vision that could potentially break the cycle in which we find ourselves. I was therefore surprised to notice a few American Rabbis and “Jewish professionals” pontificating on the matter with critical accusations of ethnic cleansing and the like. On second thought I suppose it’s not that surprising. Only someone who is not particularly starved for hope could look such a gift horse in the mouth. If Trump’s Gaza proposal leaves you ethically outraged, or even indifferent, this  simply demonstrates your own removal from the pit of despair in which Israelis find ourselves since October 7th. In the days following his announcement, I have not spoken to any Israeli, on the right or the left, who does not feel just a little bit hopeful, or at least tickled, that a world leader finally has the courage to propose a way out of our current morass. 

I don’t know if it is providence or simply an all-knowing algorithm, but last week a new song popped into my Spotify playlist called “Ribbon of Hope,” “Chut shel Tikvah,” written by the popular Israeli singer-songwriter Aaron Razel and his wife Efrat. The song was actually composed about a year ago, around the time of the first hostage release, when Razel and his wife were enjoying a beautiful day together on the Tel Aviv boardwalk. I understand those kinds of days as I’ve experienced many of them myself since October 7th. A lovely day when you have the chance to appreciate the beauty and wonder of daily life in Israel, with the sickening knowledge that all around us families are grieving, soldiers are fighting for their lives (and ours) on the battlefield and that dozens of our brethren are wasting away in the depths of Hamas torture dens. Yet this day was different, as Razel sings, there was a sense that something monumental is about to change. 

Soon the gates will open

and soon

the sun will rise again

the wild flowers will fill the fields 

with colors anew

until they do

we won’t forget the pain. 

The song has a kind of 1960s, folksy feel, amplified by harmonica interludes by the famous Israeli musician Ehud Banai. Although it owes a debt to peace anthems from the past, there’s a difference here, a respect for the necessity of war and also, I think, a kind of underlying ambiguity that is not necessarily apparent on first listen. 

Above in the skies

are the voices of war

while in our hearts 

we long for comfort

And I, like a captured child

tie to my window

a ribbon of hope

Two allusions here may be familiar to listeners. One is the “ribbon of hope,” which likely references the Book of Joshua’s story of the harlot Rachav, who saves the Israelite spies in Jericho and hangs a red string from her window. Interestingly, in Joshua the Hebrew word tikvah means cord – but hints at the hope that Rachav and her family can ultimately be saved from the wicked society on whose edge they dwell.   The ribbon in the song also is reminiscent of the yellow ribbon that has morphed into the ubiquitous symbol of the Israeli hostages imprisoned by Hamas. 

The phrase “captured child,” is a translation of “tinok shenishba,” a Rabbinic term that refers to a Jew who was kidnapped by gentiles as a child and as a result cannot be Halakhically held responsible for his lack of Jewish observance. It could be that the Razels chose “tinok shenishba,” just for its associations with innocence and captivity, though I wonder if something else is being suggested here. The term “captured child” is used in Rabbinic literature in reference to sin, it allows us to relieve responsibility from adults who simply don’t know better.  

Perhaps some of the implication here is that a certain kind of hope is indeed naive, and perhaps even wrong. We hope and pray for the safe release of our hostages, even if we know that under the current parameters it comes at a cost that is unforgivable. We dream of an end to the war, even if we know that ending it prematurely means passing on the baton to the next generation, that is to our own children and grandchildren. Yellow ribbons have become mixed symbols in our divisive national context. We all long for the return of our hostages alive and in good health. But the cars that sport yellow ribbons often have washed out anti-Bibi bumper stickers as well. Hostage Square is just around the corner from Kaplan Street, and despite many many fine efforts to steer things differently, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum is hopelessly politicized and pointed often in the precise direction of its potential allies. 

Finding shared sources of hope and consolation in this environment can be challenging. Which perhaps is why the Razels chose to newly rededicate the song to Agam Berger, a 19 year old observation soldier and gifted violinist who was released in a recent prisoner exchange. Reports about Agam have captivated the Israeli public since they filtered out after the first hostage deal, how she refused to eat unkosher meat or clean or cook for her captors on Shabbat, how she lovingly braided the hair of female hostages before they were released, even though she was forced to remain. Her first message to the world upon her release (in exchange for 50 craven terrorists) was “I chose the path of faith and in the path of faith I returned.” 

Amidst all the protests, uproar at the Knesset, burning trashcans on the Ayalon, we are presented with the image of one brave young woman clinging to her faith, using it to hold up herself and others, and in doing so uplifting her nation as well. This also is a version of hope because it presents us with another path. If the hostage crisis has been used as yet another wedge to pointlessly drive us apart, perhaps the purity and heroism of these individuals can also help us find a way to move forward together.  

The new addition of the song includes an added stanza that honors Agam. The line “who is this coming up from the desert” is a quote from the Song of Songs, and can just as easily be applied to the Jewish people leaving their Egyptian captivity. In the song it also refers to Agam:

And I ask

who is she

who is she

who rises up out of the desert

And I hear

I am she

I am she

clear as a lake (agam) of rivers.

Both Agam the person and also the sparkling water imagery with which she is associated,  adds the presence of something refreshing and new. A new shot at national unity, at spiritual consciousness, and for her and her family, a new chance at life – it is not a coincidence that the Hebrew words mikvah and tikvah are related. And now, “on the horizon/ are days of hope/the waves whisper their faith.” 

Personally I don’t know anything about what the coming years, months, or even days will bring. None of us do. But we can be grateful for the mere chance to  be a teeny bit closer to breaking away from a rotten paradigm that has brought so much bloodshed and destruction – toward something new, “rising up from the desert.” Maybe things won’t exactly pan out in the way that the American president, and all of us, dream (there may also be some differences there). As for me, I’m still going to cling to ribbons of hope. 

Between Heroism and Grief: One Day in October

On By SarahIn Book Review, Crisis, Ethics, Grief, Hebrew, Heroism, Israel, Jewish Identity, Leadership, Morality, Nationalism, October 7, Politics, Redemption, Religion, Review, Simchat Torah, Tragedy, ZionismLeave a comment

It was an honor to review Koren Press’s outstanding new book One Day in October for the Jerusalem Post Magazine this past week. While the book is not necessarily “literary” in nature, it is brilliantly written and edited, and moved me in a way that few books have. This piece is actually an abbreviated version of a longer review essay that will hopefully appear in the Jerusalem Report in the coming weeks. Grateful to be part of this “עם של אריות,” “nation of lions,” whose incredible bravery continues to exhibit itself each and every day.

The Secret Miracle

On By SarahIn Grief, Israel, Mourning, Nationalism, October 7, Politics, Prayer, Religion, War, Zionism2 Comments

It’s now been two weeks since we heard the news of the murdered hostages – six holy souls who were executed in cold blood after enduring eleven months of torture at the hands of their Islamist captors. The news hit everyone in Israel quite hard, and it cast a shadow over the normally hopeful first day of school. Since then quite a few more innocent Israelis have been murdered or killed, including a policeman whose own daughter was killed defending the Sderot police station on October 7th. Yet even as a society that has been completely bombarded with tragedy over the past year, the uniquely cruel nature of these deaths, compounded by newly released footage of the horrific conditions in which they are kept, has left many of us struggling to find the conceptual vocabulary to reflect on the events unfolding around us. 

Almog Sarusi H”YD

Since everyone in Israel is separated only a few short degrees, one name that particularly seared me on September 1st was of the hostage Almog Sarusi, a handsome 27 year old who was abducted from the Nova festival. Almog’s father Yigal owns an electrical shop in Ra’anana, around the corner from where I live. Almog was a charming, thoughtful, engineering student who loved nothing more than to explore Israel, play guitar, and spend quality time with his family and friends. He attended the music festival with his longtime girlfriend Shachar and stayed behind to help her when she was shot and severely wounded (she later died.) Since his abduction, his parents fought tirelessly on his behalf, exhausting every political and spiritual resource they could muster. The Sarusis don’t define themselves as “dati,” or religious. Yet Yigal nobly stood nearly every Friday on the corner outside his electrical shop requesting passers by say a tefilla or a bracha in the merit of his son Almog’s safe return. My friend Tamar accompanied him and provided home-baked cookies and boundless energy to find recruits on the sidewalk.  Unlike some of the other hostages, there were no videos released of Almog during his captivity, and we didn’t know with any certainty the status of the young man for whom we prayed. My first thoughts when I heard the news on September 1st was that perhaps these prayers did keep Almog and the others alive for 11 grueling months. My subsequent thoughts, of course, threw me into a theological rut from which it was harder to emerge. 

Canvassing for tefillot on Ostrovsky Street

The 1943 short story “The Secret Miracle” by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges depicts a Jewish man named Jaromir Hladik, a moderately well-known author and playwright, who is earmarked for execution by the Nazis. Hladik is terrified by the prospect of death, but he is also terrified that he will not have the chance to finish his magnum opus, a verse drama called The Enemies. In the darkness of jail cell he prays to God ,“Thou who art the centuries and time itself,” to give him some extra time. And indeed, in a “secret miracle,” God gives him a year to complete his play in the privacy of his own mind: “the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.” The story raises interesting questions about whether there’s such a thing as a perfect work of art, even if it is entirely disconnected from an audience or context. By extension, it also explores the meaning of consciousness, and celebrates the value of life, of perception, and of artistic creativity for its own sake. These lofty concepts contrast with the Nazis for whom all of this could be snuffed out for the most shallow of reasons. At the end of the story, Hladik is murdered like countless other Holocaust victims. In an act of magical realism, he experiences a secret miracle that allows him to observe, feel, and create, albeit unbeknownst to anyone else, for a precious additional year’s time. 

The six recently murdered hostages survived nearly a year under the most horrific conditions and are now dead. Recalling the  “secret miracle” of the Borges story, what did those 11 months mean for Almog, Hersh, Eden, Ori, Alex and Carmel? What kind of torture did they endure? Amidst their suffering, what sort of sanctuary did they find, in their thoughts, in their environment, and with each other? What gave them strength, and what sort of discoveries did they make, about themselves and each other, about life, and about God? 

Almog’s family sat shiva in a park next to pastoral green walking paths in Ra’anana. Many people from all walks of life came to pay their respects. We sat for a bit with Almog’s father Yigal, who spoke with remarkable composure, deftly balancing sensitivity to the various parties in front of him: two bashful seminary-age girls, another pair of women with tall head coverings who had driven in from the Shomron, and Noam Tibon, the retired army general turned October 7th hero who is firmly on the left politically. Yigal spoke about Almog’s love for the land of Israel, his sensitivity for others, how his army friends call him “Abba,” because he was the sort to always take care of those around him. He also spoke about the complexities of his own efforts to free his son. He did not believe in a hostage deal “at any cost,” but he believed that in the absence of complete victory over Hamas then the hostages had to be prioritized. His comments kept drifting to the 6 martyrs, the 6 “kedoshim” he called them. He said that Almog loved to have deep conversations, and he imagined what sorts of things they spoke about together. In his better moments, he thought of Carmel Gat doing yoga exercises with them, of how they must have given each other strength and solace until the end. 

He also spoke about how even in this most devastating of circumstances, “miracles” had occurred. It’s a miracle his family could bury Almog with his body intact. That only several short days after he was killed they could stand at his gravesite and give him a proper funeral that paid tribute to his many wonderful qualities. And maybe other miracles too, he wondered aloud. I thought of his weekly efforts to canvas for tefillot near his shop on Ostrovsky Street. 

It’s hard to say what constitutes a miracle and what is precisely the opposite. Even in the Borges story, one can dwell on the “miracle” experienced by the protagonist, or the pure and unadulterated evil that led to his predicament in the first place and ultimately his murder. I have heard so many wonderful October 7 miracle stories and it is hard not to be moved by them. But then there are the “non-miracles,” the Nova escapee who survived hours in the woods only to be killed by a fresh wave of terrorists, the hostages who were killed just hours before their rescuers arrived. In these circumstances we are left looking for more modest sources of consolation. Maybe this is the meaning of a “secret miracle,” not only a miracle that happens in secret, but a miracle that we manage to see or experience even when everything else seems to have gone wrong. Moments of strength, courage and love in a dark and claustrophobic tunnel. Even the sheer miracle or life itself, sustained for so long in an environment so hostile to it. Or the miracle of the resilience of the Jewish people. A father in immeasurable pain who raises his eyes to God and also to others, managing to transcend an impossible circumstance with an expansiveness of spirit that itself is also a kind of a miracle. 

From the Book of Ruth to Swords of Iron: Malkhut in Our Time

On By SarahIn Chesed, Crisis, Grief, Israel, Jewish Holidays, Jewish Identity, Leadership, Mourning, Nationalism, October 7, Politics, Redemption, Religion, Ruth, Shavuot, Tragedy, War, Zionism4 Comments

The upcoming holiday of Shavuot evokes the receiving of the Torah on Har Sinai, flowers and greenery, and of course delicious dairy food. It is also the holiday of “malkhut,” or kingship, when we read the book of Ruth, which recounts the backstory behind the emergence of the royal house of David. Shavuot  is  the culmination of 49 days of counting the Omer, a seasonal agricultural offering in the Temple wherein each week of seven weeks is categorized by one of the Kabbalistic “sefirot”. The final one of these sefirot is Malkhut, described by the Zohar as “having nothing of her own.” Notwithstanding its connotations of royalty, Malkhut is understood to be a void that receives all of the preceding weeks’ sefirot. While Passover celebrates the miracle of liberation from Egypt, Shavuot emphasizes groundedness in the Land of Israel.  In contrast to hastily baked matzot, Shavuot features the wheat harvest and the bread and first fruits (“bikkurim”) offerings in the Temple. Its theme of malkhut prompts us to think about the nature of leadership in our own time – that which we have and that which we lack. It prompts us to question what true kingship might look like in a modern era. 

In the early days after October 7th, for many of us here in Israel, our feelings of shock, horror and grief were also accompanied by a sense of having been set adrift. With greater urgency than ever, we asked- the question of who, if anyone, was steering our national ship. One didn’t have to be a member of the anti-Bibi camp to feel that our leadership had failed us. Moreover, it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, might be able to lead us out of this morass. A friend commented that “this was the first time in my life that I realized we had a problem that even a group of the most brilliant Jews in the world together in a room couldn’t solve.” In the months since the massacre, these questions have in many ways been exacerbated, as Israel finds itself mired in an even deeper set of conflicts – balancing international pressure with achieving its military goals in Gaza and of course the question of how best to go about retrieving the hostages, to the extent that our efforts may yield any fruits at all. It’s not that these issues don’t have solutions per se, it’s that the leaders needed to implement these solutions, who can rally their nation, unify factions, leverage diplomatic relationships, inspire trust and move forward with confidence, often seem to be missing from the room. 

Counterintuitively, as our politicians continue to bicker and the international picture looks bleaker by the day, we find ourselves surrounded by heroes. It wasn’t only the countless tales of heroism from the day itself:  the brothers Elhanan Hy”d and Menahem Kalmanson who jumped into their cars on October 7 and drove from the settlement of Otniel to battle terrorists and evacuate dozens of survivors of kibbutz border communities. Aner Shapira Hy”d, who caught and threw back seven explosive grenades while hiding in a shelter near Re’im with two dozen others until he was killed by the eighth. Or Amit Mann Hy”d, the paramedic with an angelic voice who was killed treating patients in the makeshift clinic she refused to abandon in Be’eri on that day. In December of this year, Hanukkah time, the singer Ruchama ben Yosef released a wonderful song called “VaYehi Or,” “Let There be Light,” where she addresses the theological implications of October 7th for a person of faith:  “a great miracle did not occur, we did not find the jar of oil.” Instead of discovering a miracle from above, ben Yosef sings, “we discovered ourselves.” 

News reports out of Israel are, more often than not, depressing. Yet the closer in you stand to events the more you can see how in many ways the days since October 7th have demonstrated a national love affair with our soldiers. These young men and women, representatives of every single sector of Israeli society, jumped into action on October 7th and have not since stopped sacrificing to protect our beloved country. Included in this category are their families who also sacrifice and in the most tragic cases mourn, all also in the name of duty to our country and nation. Israeli civil society has also been roused into activity, supporting the many populations left vulnerable by the ongoing threats from Hamas and Hezbollah. When you evaluate it top-down, the picture in Israel does not look great. But from the bottom-up we have a society that continues to be strong, resilient and for the most part united. 

This dichotomy is one that we have seen before in Jewish history, and it is nowhere better exemplified than in the book of Ruth. Ruth is a story about two brave women who transcend tragic circumstances in order to make a lasting contribution to the Jewish people. The Book of Ruth is also, as mentioned above, a story of malkhut. It depicts the transition from the Book of Judges,  wherein centralized leadership is lacking – “in those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did as he pleased” – to the Book of Samuel, which depicts the beginning of the Davidic Monarchy. 

In his wonderful book Rising Moon (previously reviewed here) Rabbi Moshe Miller explores the nature of malkhut as it manifests itself in the Book of Ruth. True kingship, according to Miller, is not the exercise of power by a single individual. “Rather,” he writes, “it must emerge from society in ways that are infinitely complex, entirely unpredictable, and almost impossible to trace.” Miller suggests that the best way to understand malkhut is by drawing on the philosophical and scientific category of “emergence,” which describes complex systems, like beehives or ant colonies, that are not reducible to the sum of their parts: 

“Individual bees or ants are incapable of functioning alone; they cannot reproduce; they cannot find food. They exist only as units within a larger whole. Put these units together, and suddenly, as if by magic, they begin differentiating, each individual performing a specific task according to the needs of the integrated system, the super-organism. When a hive attacks a person, it comes after him like a single organism; when ants go on a march, their relentless miles-long movement is that of a unified power, an army. Malkhut is the name we use to describe a system in which components work synergistically to produce a whole that is greater than its components.” 

Miller points to the statement in the Talmud, Bava Batra 15B, “Whoever says that Malkhat Sheva (lit. Queen of Sheba) refers to a woman is mistaken. Rather it means the Kingdom of Sheba.” The implication here is that malkhut does not refer to the reign of an individual king or queen, rather, malkhut is what enables a nation to act in a united and cohesive fashion. 

This particular vision of kingship as a kind of emergent collective phenomenon is not necessarily characteristic of the institution and reign of historical kings generally, or even in Israel in particular. Not every melekh represents malkhut in this sense of the word. The reign of Israel’s first king Saul, for example, was initiated by the urging of a frustrated nation, tired of Philistine abuse, against the better instincts of its prophet Samuel. Despite Samuel’s warnings about the potential pitfalls of monarchy the people insist “we must have a king over us, that we may be like all the other nations: Let our king rule over us and go out at our head and fight our battles.”  (1 Sam. 8:19-20). Note the language here: to be “like all the other nations” with a top-down authority figure to “fight our battles.” Saul, from the powerful and clannish tribe of Benjamin, is genuinely a remarkable figure – the best ancient Israel has to offer in some ways – and he does end up succeeding in many battles. His great failure is when he spares King Agag of Amalek and his flocks, a lethal combination of misplaced pity and eagerness to draw short term approval from his own troops. Saul is like many leaders we know: genuinely impressive and talented, but ultimately representing a paradigm of leadership that does not emerge organically and thus could not withstand the test of shifting generations. 

David the Judean, on the other hand, represents a different model. He emerges, not from a position of prominence, but seemingly out of nowhere. He attracts the admiration of all who encounter him, but he elicits love rather than intimidation. While the first physical description of Saul is that he “was a head taller than anyone else in the nation,” (1 Sam. 9:2) one of our first visual encounters with David is as a miniature shepherd standing up to a giant. David defeats the Philistine ubermensch Goliath without a sword or spear or javelin – for these the Israelites were dependent on Philistine metalsmiths who forbade the transfer of advanced weaponry to the subjected populations of Israel. Instead he attributes his success to God and nothing else. David will also make his own share of mistakes, which are in some ways even more serious than those made by Saul. But his kingship endures because it is not reducible to him as an individual or even the Judeans as a tribe. As a leader he embodies the spirit of his nation. In contrast with Saul, he is the embodiment of the bottom-up form of leadership we see incubating in Israel today. And while a feature of true malkhut is that it seemingly emerges out of the ether, the Bible does provide us with a prequel of sorts, and that is contained in the book of Ruth. 

The book of Ruth provides a genealogy for the Davidic line, rooted in the union of Boaz, a wealthy Judean landowner, and Ruth, a Moabite convert. The circumstances in the early verses of the Book of Ruth are rather bleak – they depict famine, intermarriage, and the premature death of Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, and their two sons Machlon and Kilyon. The Rabbis of the Talmud detect another layer of discord in this time period, reading the book’s opening line of “it happened in the days when the judges judged” as “this was a generation that judged its judges” (Bava Batra 15b).  That is, even the nominal forms of leadership at this time were unsteady and up for debate.  This reading of course evokes the postmodern erosion of institutional authority across the West, or perhaps the recent debates about judicial reform that rocked Israel until more pressing concerns arose. Yet even more evocatively, the context from which Ruth and Naomi emerge is one of grief and suffering. Having lost nearly everything, they leave Moab in a state of poverty and degradation. Naomi urges her daughters-in-law Ruth and Orphah, whom Jewish tradition describes as Moabite princesses, to turn back – “My lot is far more bitter than yours, for the hand of the Lord has struck out against me.” (1:13)

The Book of Ruth records several moments of chesed, lovingkindness, which ultimately serve to transform this situation of atomization and hopelessness into one of transcendence. The first such act is when Ruth chooses, despite their reversal of circumstances, to stand with Naomi:  “for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (1:16) Ruth’s bravery here, which will ultimately produce the crowning glory of the Jewish people, begins with an act of love for and solidarity with Naomi. Ruth’s behavior forms both a parallel to and contrast with the previous actions of Elimelech who left his ancestral home in order to seek his fortune in Moab. Both figures leave their homelands, but for Elimelech it’s in order to improve his economic situation, whereas Ruth at this point is stepping into the abyss. All she knows is that she stands with Naomi, and this simple, visceral act of loyalty, it turns out, will have more of an impact on the course of Jewish history than the battles and treaties of far more senior figures in positions of leadership. 

Next, in the barley fields of Bethlehem, it’s Boaz’s turn to shine. He sees Ruth gleaning on behalf of her mother-in-law, his own distant relative, and is moved by her story, “I have been told of all that you did for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and came to a people you had not known before.” (2:11). Boaz makes sure Ruth is treated with dignity and generosity – he even invites her to share a meal. Boaz is willing to forgo the conventional status hierarchies and sees glowing virtue in a person that others are bound to ignore. The fact that this takes place in the grain fields is significant. Whereas as others look up to the skies, or to regents or kings for inspiration, Boaz looks down and it’s there that he finds Ruth, bent to the ground but driven by something noble and profound.  

The climactic moment of chesed in the book is one in which it’s not quite clear which character is doing the giving and which is receiving. Ruth, following Naomi’s suggestion, lays at Boaz’s feet in the middle of night and in a position of great vulnerability, asks him to fulfill his role as a “redeeming kinsman.” (3:9) That is, as a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz is asked to marry childless widow Ruth and thus rescue their family name from oblivion. This is complicated by various factors. For one, Ruth is far younger than him, and far lower in stature. She is also a Moabite, a nation whose members Israelites are forbidden to marry by Torah law. Yet Boaz’s reacts to Ruth’s unusual entreaty with gratitude, “Be blessed of the Lord, daughter!” he exclaims, “your latest deed of loyalty is greater than the first.” Like the starry eyed couple at the end of O’ Henry’s famous story “The Gift of the Magi,” the dichotomy between giver and receiver collapses in this nighttime scene. This moment of generosity and the erasure of ego will eventually result in the overturning of a legal paradigm in Ruth’s case. Boaz’s heartfelt antinomianism will ultimately usher in the birth of the David, the beginning of true kingship, which also points toward the eventual messianic age. 

So what do these collected moments of chesed have to do with Jewish leadership and with the difficult times we live in today? In all of these cases it’s the loyalty, heroism and ingenuity of regular people, rooted to their land and to each other, that manages to change the course of history. Elimelech and Naomi’s original flight from Bethlehem, the tragic deaths of Elimelech and his sons, Naomi and Ruth’s downward spiral into penury, all of these things should have served to dissolve their family bonds and separate the characters in the book from one another. Instead, something marvelous happens. In their pain they grow closer, and the bonds they build together, some of which existed previously (like  Boaz and Naomi’s familial ties) some of which are forged anew, end up forming the matrix from which malkhut will eventually emerge. Still it will take several generations for David to be born. And perhaps, even now, we are only in the early or midway stages of this process of forging a context from which a truly enduring paradigm of Jewish sovereignty, malkhut in its loftiest sense, may emerge. 

In recent months, there’s hardly anyone here in Israel who hasn’t been touched by loss. Attending funerals or visiting shiva houses of bereaved families of IDF soldiers, even those we do not personally know, is a new national pastime. We show up to demonstrate that we share in the suffering of these families, we are grateful for the heroism of their sons, husbands and fathers, and we would like to think that maybe one more visitor or attendee might ease their burden just an infinitesimal bit. In such circumstances it’s often difficult to find the right words to say. One of the handful of lines that repeats itself is “we should be worthy of their sacrifice.” It’s possible to interpret this phrase along the lines of what we see in the book of Ruth. When confronted with tragedy that hits too close to home, all of us in a society, not only those directly affected, may take one of two paths. We can sink into feelings of despair and hopelessness, which are, admittedly, justifiable. Or we can use this painful opportunity to strengthen our bonds and form a kind of web that connects us with those we have lost, with each other, and with future generations yet to come. This latter movement characterizes the modality of malkhut, whether it may one day manifest itself in a David-like leader, or whether it’s already manifesting all around us. As Naomi blesses Boaz halfway through the book, “Blessed be he of the Lord, who has not failed in His kindness to the living or to the dead” (2:20). The emergence of malkhut will not bring back those we have lost, but it ensures that their contributions are embedded within a larger living organism that allows them, in a sense, to still be with us.

A moving new rendition of Naomi Shemer’s “Shiro Shel Aba,” sung by the students of Yeshivat Har Etzion high school in memory of their beloved teacher Shai Pizem H”YD who fell in battle in Gaza in December. Note the new additional lyrics added by Rabbi Amichai Gordon and Rabbi Chaim Navon. This is an eloquent expression of the relationship between malkhut and loss that I was trying to articulate above:

“אם בקרב נפלת רע, רע יקר מפז,
אם בקרב נפלת רע, רע יקר מפז,
לא לשווא אחי נפלת בין נהר לים,
כי מן הדמים האלה ייבנה העם
ייבנה, ייבנה, ייבנה העם”

If, my friend, you fell in battle – a friend dearer than gold
If, my friend, you fell in battle – a friend dearer than gold
You did not fall in vain my brother – between river and sea
For it is this blood that will build the nation
May the Nation be rebuilt
May the Nation be rebuilt

One Life to Live: Torah U-Madda Today

On By SarahIn Classics, Corona, Covid-19, Crisis, Diaspora, Ethics, Law, Leadership, Modernism, Morality, Nationalism, Politics, Religion, Torah u-Madda, Western Civilization2 Comments

In a new symposium at The Lehrhaus entitled “Reclaiming Torah u-Madda,” I was given the chance to reflect on the state of “Torah U-Madda” (the relationship between Torah and Western culture) in the Modern Orthodox community today. I sought to address this topic on a philosophical level, through an analysis of a wonderful story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, as well as through some “real-world” examples of how these ideas might play out in practice. My latter comments generated more controversy than I would have liked. I would like to emphasize that my account of what has challenged me personally about my native community is not meant to constitute a comprehensive indictment of all that is wrong with Modern Orthodoxy. My goal in the essay is to introduce a philosophical framework and then briefly suggest how this framework might cohere in real-life scenarios. I don’t mind disagreement about the relevance of these scenarios but I am even more interested in discussing the worldview that underlies them.

Please see here for the full article. And I recommend perusing all of the terrific contributions to this forum.

Tom Stoppard and Theodor Herzl in Jerusalem

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Diaspora, Drama, Hebrew, Israel, Jerusalem, Jewish Identity, Nationalism, Redemption, Theater, Western Civilization, ZionismLeave a comment

This past February 14th marked the 116th anniversary of the publication of Theodor Herzl’s manifesto The Jewish State, which lay the groundwork for the modern Zionist movement and the state of Israel. That same evening a special event took place in the Jerusalem Theater: a performance of Herzl’s play The New Ghetto, written in 1894, just a few short weeks before he began composing The Jewish State. It is commonly understood that the turning point for Herzl—the moment he realized there was no escaping from anti-Semitism even in enlightened Western Europe—was the Dreyfus Affair that began in the fall of 1894. Yet The New Ghetto, written shortly beforehand, is proof that, as some scholars have argued, a proto-Zionist sensibility had already been roiling in Herzl’s mind.

Last month’s production was a historic privilege for those who attended it: it was the first time the play has ever been performed in Israel. 

For more about this wonderful performance, as well as an intriguing parallel with Tom Stoppard’s newest play Leopoldstadt, please see my new essay in Mosaic Magazine.

My Body in the East, My Heart in the West

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Corona, Crisis, Family, Hebrew, Holy Sites, Israel, Jerusalem, Jewish Identity, Nationalism, Religion, Yom Yerushalayim, ZionismLeave a comment

Earlier this year, our family left a suburban Jewish community in New Jersey that we loved in order to fulfill a dream of making aliyah to Israel. In the years leading up to our move, we frequently discussed the merits and drawbacks of life in Israel versus the US. We discussed matters like the dangers of living in an isolated enclave surrounded by enemy states versus our seemingly comfortable and secure  American lives. My husband often pointed out the spiritual dangers of life in the diaspora as well as the potential for established ways of life to degenerate rapidly, even in advanced Western societies. We boarded our aliyah flight against the backdrop of a common web of excitement, anticipation, and doubt.

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Once in Israel, however, our commonplace constellation of concerns was complicated, perhaps overshadowed, by a new set of events. A wave of antisemitic incidents in the New York City area in late 2019 left us to glued to American news sources for updates. I grew up in the idyllic religious community of Monsey; in my mind it was the peaceful foil to whatever uncertainty we encountered in Israel. Yet the  attack on a local Hanukkah party  by a machete-wielding lunatic revealed that this place was hardly immune from hatred and violence.  Sitting in Israel with rockets from Gaza falling in the distance, my heart was nevertheless in New York and New Jersey, concerned about family members and friends.  I had the  stomach-churning sense that the problem was unlikely to dissipate anytime soon….

For the full essay (which includes a discussion of Yehuda Halevi and Yehuda Amichai) see The Lehrhaus.