Shabbat Bemidbar

5766, 6th June 2006
The Diaspora and Israel

I used to think that Biblical genealogies were boring. These were parts I skipped. Just a lot of boring names, I thought. Then things began to change, First of all I learned that one or two characters in the lists had interesting stories of their own. They came alive as people, and once one or two of them were people to me, then all of them were. But something else changed too. I came to see that these genealogies, these records of who we were, have enormous symbolic power. The book of Bemidbar is known in English as the book of Numbers. The numbers are names, names and numbers, since only the tribal heads are listed, together with their thousands of members. It’s easier to relate to people in our ones and twos, in their individual stories, but can the thousands too have meaning for us?

I’ve just come back from, Israel. Three weeks in the sun, and in the middle of a different political reality. It was a wonderful chance to be close to some of the issues there, and also to look back at the political climate here in the UK, to read about what is going on here through the lens of the Israeli press. I also arrived in the middle of a national debate. The writer A.B. Yehoshua, had just come back from an explosive appearance at the Conference of the American Jewish Committee, an umbrella association of American Jewish Organisations. In his keynote address, Yehoshua saw no value in life in the Diaspora. A life he saw as filled with an empty spirituality. A life spent in the futile battle with assimilation. A dying culture seduced by the comforts of the West. The only real Jewish expression, the only powerful way of living, he said, was in Israel. Since being in Israel means shaping a new Jewish reality.

We would disagree. Most of us would protest, straight way, that here we are in London, living Jewish lives and creating, too, a new reality, a Jewish reality. He would reply that we make this reality with only a small part of our lives, that the majority of our lives are embedded in the emptiness and meaningless of the Western culture we find ourselves in. That our Jewish experience is but a token twinge of resistance, which, in the long run, won’t add up to much.

The newspaper threw the debate open. Writers responded, particularly from America. The emptiness of Jewish life in Israel was mentioned again and again. An emptiness created by the stranglehold of a conservative orthodoxy and a secular rebellion. Israel needs the Diaspora, too, they wrote, to show them the real chance for vibrant new and powerful ways of being Jewish. They should look to us not for money but for our experience, in reinventing spiritual possibilities for Judaism today. Michael Lerner, a leading figure within the politicised the Jewish Renewal movement, protested that the real meaning of Jewishness must be our impact on the world, our capacity to lead the way to a peaceful just future, and that without this any sense of ‘Jewishness, in Israel or the Diaspora means nothing. Michael Lerner is saying nothing new. He is repeating the thoughts of the very founders of progressive Judaism, who saw, in the 19th century a new way of thinking about Jewish being. Not just a special people, but a people with a message that dwells in the future of all the peoples of the world.

Most of us would agree. Yet something niggled away at me during my trip, A creeping sense that in some way, there is apart of me that says that A.B. Yehoshua is right. I do not think we should all go to Israel. Or that the ultimate expression of Jewish identity is paying taxes to a Jewish tax department in a Jewish government department, which follows laws enforced by a Jewish police force. But I do think that there is emptiness here. Most of us are searchers, and most of us are somehow sitting alone at the great banquet of religious and spiritual possibility, choosing a piece from this and from that. Some of us, if we are lucky, will have moments of fulfilment, here and there, for minutes or hours. None of us are compelled to live with the difficult agonising questions of survival that the State of Israel encounters everyday. None of us are forced to think about the moral consequences of the terrible situation there. The political mess. The so called separation fence. The relationship with the Palestinian leadership. The painful uncertain creeping forward of a complex interplay between the futures of two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian. And the hundreds of thousands of impacts small and large, on the daily lives of the two peoples living there. So we have it easy, here in the West. We can open the newspaper or close the newspaper. Switch off the television or go in the internet. Block it out and make up whole new interpretations to salve our feelings.

And we miss, too, the incredible beauty. The birdsong on a Jerusalem morning. The throng of religious people of the three great Abrahamic faiths rushing to prayer. Or even just a coffee in down town Tel Aviv. Mostly, for me, it is again the people. So many of them have been forced to respond in ways that brings out the very best. A woman who goes each week to stand at the check points in the West bank to safeguard Palestinians rights. People who manage despite the fear, to be open to each other as human beings, to hold out hope.

We can’t know any of this since our life here is in some ways safe and slightly sterile. Lived away from the tangle of human life and the great and agonising cry for a new future and a piece of hope.

Yet we to have our problems. Enormous problems that won’t go away. The latest threatened academic boycott, which is affecting the lives of people in this and every other Jewish community. The increasing sense of anti-Semitism here and in the rest of Europe.

I believe that there is nothing to be gained by setting life in Israel and the Diaspora apart of two poles. I think, instead, that we in the Diaspora have much to gain, when we go there, when we see and when we listen. And when we allow ourselves to feel the impact of the complex and painful reality of Israel and its future. And I think, also that we have so much to bring. We have this gift of incredible freedom, and space for growth. A freedom that might, perhaps, endanger us, and threatens our continuity, but a freedom which is nonetheless giving rise to new and powerful forms of Jewish expression. We might be able to draw on the Israeli experience in finding a response to the anti-Semitism we face here. And we might be able to bring new insights and new courage to the quest for a more hopeful Israeli and Palestinian future. I think we need to go there, although our home is here. We need to see it and hear it and feel it for ourselves. Not as silent witnesses, but as open advocates for a better future.

Perhaps, in a year to eighteen months we will visit Israel as a group from our own community. Seeing, listening, and experiencing it together. And at the same time allowing it to form us, to shape our own, shared lives. Like our ancestors in the book of Numbers, going as a people and being counted together.

© Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu 2nd June 2006, Sivan 6 5766