Last week, I spent the week learning at Eretz Hemdah (www.eretzhemdah.org). Eretz Hemdah is a post-ordination kollel where the students learn for over 7 years in training to be Dayanim (Rabbinical Judges). A small group of 5 American Rabbis spent the week learning there with the current students and attending specific lectures on Jewish law related to Batei Din (religious courts). The learning was on a very high level and the classes were excellent.
Eretz Hemdah is unique for a Dayanut kollel in that almost all the students there have served in the army. Furthermore, they also have opportunities to study material that other dayanim would never typically learn. For example, while we were there, there were 2 guest lectures by Shalom Rosenberg, a philosophy professor at Hebrew University. Most dayanut kollels would never present a university professor to teach there and likely not philosophy.
Eretz Hemdah is also unique in that they publish a tremendous amount of material on halachic issues that are really contemporary and practical -- including several volumes in English.
It was really a pleasure and honor to learn there for a week (I also forgot how exhausting learning full time is).
Today is Tisha B'Av. It is a difficult day to be here and one with conflicting emotions. I had never been in Israel for Tisha B'Av before and it is a very powerful experience. It is a day of mixed emotions. On the one hand mourning the destruction of Jerusalem is very real when you can see so many remnants of ancient Jerusalem around you. It is also really powerful to be in a state of sadness with so many thousands of other people around you. Yet, it is somewhat difficult to be sad when you have the ability to mourn the destruction and exile as you walk freely in the streets of a rebuilt Jerusalem.
There is, however, something that I am seeing that has been bringing me great sadness. Our sages teach us that the second temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred. This week has been one of the most divisive in recent history for the different streams in Judaism here in Israel.
Beginning last week, Anat Hoffman, the head of Women of the Wall, was arrested at the Kotel for carrying a Sefer Torah. However one feels about whether a woman should carry a sefer Torah at the kotel (there is no halachic prohibition), I think as my colleague Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld pointed out -- if any Jew man or woman were arrested by another foreign government for worshiping Judaism was s/he saw fit, there would be tremendous outrage.
I also witnessed the harassment of Progressive Jews at the kotel last night by a large group of Hareidim and Yeshivish people. What was more frightening is how much some of them seemed to enjoy harassing the Reform group and were yelling how Reform Jews need to be kicked out the country altogether.
This is against the backdrop of a fierce debate in the Knesset over a bill sponsored by Yisrael Beiteinu MK David Rotem. The bill is intended to ease the process for conversion for more than 300,000 Russian Jews living in Israel that are not halachically Jewish. As such, the bill is tremendously important for their integration into Israeli society. However, the bill contains several provisions that are insulting to the more liberal denominations in the US and abroad and they have been in Israel lobbying hard for its defeat.
Through the International Rabbinic Fellowship, which I have the pleasure of serving as its Executive Director, I and several colleagues have been working hard to bridge the gap between the 2 sides and come up with a solution that will help these 300,000 Russians while not harming the unity of the Jewish people. It is only with God's help that a compromise can be reached.
All of this, however, sends the message that the sins we committed that led us to Tisha B'Av -- we are still doing.
I only pray that this Tisha B'Av, we learn our lesson.
May God comfort all who mourn for Zion and Jerusalem and merit them to see its rebuilding and the reuniting of Klal Yisrael with true Ahavat Chinam (free flowing love)
Thank you, Jason, for this beautiful post. Having spent two years (and summers) in Jerusalem which were really formative for my observance, it is difficult to be away from The Holy Land today. At the same time, it is extremely saddening and frustrating and frightening for me, as a liberal, observant, Jewish woman, the daughter of a convert, to see the Jewish people tearing ourselves apart in the very place where senseless hatred brought about the destruction of our holiest site, and our sovereignty.
ReplyDeleteIt's deeply upsetting that I have become so lovingly connected to a place which, more and more every year, seems to be rejecting me and those like me... a place where I came to feel so at home, a place where I came to really understand what it meant to love all Jews, which has helped me to work toward having love for all people. I feel that, perhaps more than ever, there is real reason to fast this year, to weep and to pray for an end to sinat chinam.
This year I am hearing all over my Jewish world the all-too-palpable connections being made between the 9 days and the extremism which threatens us as a people and a nation, and which has already turned so many of us cynical and bitter. "Fast for the Jewish people," I keep hearing, "even if you haven't fasted before, even if you don't believe in fasting for the destruction of the Temple. Fast for what we are doing to ourselves and to each other, and pray that we learn our lesson before we destroy ourselves from within."
This day is, and must be, about love. The Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam. Tisha B’Av is the day on which we remember what happens when we forget how to love. And so we fast and mourn, and we remember that we must love each other… because lack of love brings about destruction, heartbreak, unbearable pain.
May we learn the lesson soon.