A Week for Zionism

As much fun as making fun of Israeli society is, there's only so much of that you can do before you start making the same jokes over and over again. So with that said, I think the tone of my posts might change a little bit. Ah, maturity. So with that little disclaimer, let me tell you about my week and the questions it raised about what exactly am I doing in this God-forsaken country?

First for a little background. MASA is an organization which sponsors programs and provides grants to Jewish youth living in the diaspora in order to bring them to Israel. For example, MASA gave me a $1000 scholarship to come to Israel, and in return I need to attend 3-4 MASA events over the course of the nine months that I'm here. They are a relatively right-wing organization - a few months ago they launched a controversial campaign against intermarriage - but they bring about 8000 Jewish kids to Israel every year on a variety of programs.

Last Sunday, October 25th, we had the pleasure of attending our first MASA event. It was a concert featuring Idan Raichel (a fairly prominent Israeli musician) which was held at the event center in Jerusalem and attended by roughly 3000 of these diaspora youth from all parts of the globe. The event began with several short speeches made by a few of Israel's right-wing politicians, all echoing similar messages of "Ignore what you see in the media! Immigrate to Israel! Make Aliyah!" We all found this very funny and did our best to make fun of not only MASA but all the other naive Jewish kids there who bought their message.

When the concert began, Miriam and I decided that in order to entertain ourselves, we were going to do our very best to get to the stage. Now, we started out in the balcony of this massive auditorium, so getting to the stage involved considerable effort. We had to lie to the ushers guarding the main floor that we had left our tickets at our seats, and then push our way through a giant crowd of people who all had a similar idea. Along the way I spotted a number of people I know, which illustrated to me how small the North American Jewish Community really was. I ran into friends of mine from home who were on other programs in Israel for the year, their friends that I had met when visiting a few weekends ago, a girl who knew people on my program from a dance class back home, and I even spotted the cute boy who had been on our airplane to Israel (reference my second post). Eventually we managed to push our way all to the stage, where Miriam spent an uncomfortable half hour pushed against the security guard who was running crowd control. So all in all, we won the MASA event.

The week of Zionism continued as the theme of our classes was "Jews in North America." We read texts about assimilation and discussed whether or not you could really be a Zionist while living in North America, or anywhere in the Diaspora for that matter. We also talked about how the Jewish communities in North America are weakening significantly. This rung true with me because I know that, at least in Portland, something like 60 percent of the Jewish population is completely unaffiliated with any Jewish organizations or activities. This disengagement is a large part of the problem of assimilation, which could eventually lead to the complete disappearance of Jews in North America. An especially interesting question that was raised was what held our communities together. In the shtetls of Eastern Europe, it was the constant threat of being persecuted, so Jews had to be a cohesive, self-sufficient group. Now that Jews have achieved relative success in North America (think Albert Einstein, Natalie Portman, and even Bernie Madoff), we no longer have this mentality of being victims, and therefore we depend on each other less and less. Instead we focus on our individual educations and professional career goals. Is being victims such a significant part of our identity that we can't thrive as Jews without it? Is assimilation the only way we can be successful in the North American community at large? And if our Judaism is becoming less and less a part of our identity, what's the point of having a Jewish state?

Then, to top the week off, on Friday morning we headed to the Yitzhak Rabin Seminar. To explain seminars, they are programs anywhere from a weekend to a week long which are held by Habonim and consist of a series of peulot addressing a specific issues. THey're also usually attended by Habos not only from North America but from all over the world. At the seminar this past weekend, there were Habos from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, UK, Holland, Australia, South Africa, and of course North America - about 160 people in total. The focus of the seminar was Yitzchak Rabin, one of Israel's former prime ministers who was assassinated in November of 1995. Rabin was a leading figure in the signing of the Oslo Accords, and at the time of his assssination, he was preparing to trade land to the surrounding Arab countries in return for peace. Rabin's willingness to negotiate with the Arabs in order to achieve peace infuriated the right-wing, and on November 11th, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing activist, at a peace rally in Zion Square in Tel Aviv, which has since been renamed Rabin Square (Kikar Rabin).

Though the point of the seminar was allegedly to talk about Rabin and prepare for the Rabin rally which is held every year in Kikar Rabin, we spent most of the time discussing the problems that exist in Israeli society, which include (but are not limited to) problems with democracy, problems with Zionism, and problems with Jewish versus Israeli identity. Here are some questions I came away from the seminar with:

Is the idea of a Jewish state inherently undemocratic? Is there a sort of built-in racism in that?
Is there a difference between a Jewish state and a State for the Jews?
Now that we have a Jewish state, what purpose should Zionism serve? Does it serve any purpose? Should it be dismantled?
What responsibilities do Diaspora Jews have to Israel? What responsibilities do Israeli Jews have to Jews in the Diaspora?
What does it mean to be an Israeli as opposed to being Jewish? How do we reconcile these identities to live in a Jewish Israeli state?

So after that torrent of questions, let me elaborate a little. We read several texts during the seminar which had different ideas of how to deal with the problems that Israel faces, the largest of which being not the conflict with the Palestinians but rather a national apathy towards the democratic process. Or rather what can be more accurately described as a lack of faith. One of the more inflammatory texts we read and discussed was an 2007 interview with Avrum Burg, the former head of the Knesset (the Israeli cabinet), who has now become completely disillusioned by Zionism and the state of the State of Israel. He said,"Zionism is like scaffolding - now that the Jewish state has been built, [Zionism] should be dismantled." He also said, "Israel is a body without a soul." In saying this, he was pointing to the fact that Israel, which was initially designed in the days before Israel existed to be a "light unto the nations," now seems to exist only to defend itself, and a nation which exists only to exist is worthless. He further elaborated to say that of the three main parts of his identity - human, Jew, and Israeli - the Israeli part of his identity undermines the other two. In essence, he said that his Israeliness undermines his humanity and does nothing to serve his Judaism. He demonstrated his disillusionment with the state by using his French passport to vote in the French elections, because he felt that voting against Sarkozy served the world better than anything he could do in Israel. He even went a step further and suggested that Israel is a failed experiment, and every Israeli who has a foreign passport should leave the country.

Burg's solution was to abandon Zionism and the "dying state" it created, but is that the only way? A South African in my group likened Burg's response to the way Jews reacted to the Spanish Inquisition - just leave. He called it the "Jewish Solution." We are a people that can never have a home.

After that depressing text, we read another which was written in the 70's by Abba Eben discussion Labor Zionism. Labor Zionism, as opposed to more right-wing theories of Zionism, has as its central tennant not only the "What" of a Jewish state - that is, the belief in a Jewish state - but also the "How". In other words, we, as Zionists, must constantly be striving towards creating an ideal society, which is, I suppose, based on Jewish values. The state should not only exist but be a cultural and spiritual center, a just and fair society which should serve as an example to all other nations. Therefore, a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not only be valuable in and of itself, but also as an example to the rest of the world that peace can exist even between two peoples who are so deeply routed in their opposing beliefs.

The educational part of our weekend was concluded by reading a speech made by Yitzchak Rabin about the responsibility of the youth to improve Israeli society. Made in 1994, the speech was strangely similar to the message that Obama recently used to win the presidency - that is, change. Oppose convention not for the sake of rebellion, but rather to accomplish something greater than what we had before.

And with that they sent us back out into the world as newly formed activists. The countdown until when we actually take to the streets has begun; only six weeks left until we leave kibbutz and begin volunteering. I'm already beginning to miss it here. The mud, the gourmet food, the hostile environment... You know what they say - there's no place like home. In order to take advantage of our time left here - and also because we were at the seminar for Halloween - we're going all out for our Halloween party this weekend. There's even an event on Facebook; the description reads "I decided it was important to make a facebook group to hype this epic rager. Sometimes it's hard to get word around when you live within a thirty foot radius of everyone you know... " Unfortunately, there are no Diaspora Jews allowed.

Until next time!