Shavua Tov! (Happy New Week!)
I write this sitting in Jerusalem, looking out my window as the Sabbath has ended and the city is coming back to life after the 25 hours of quiet and calm that mark Shabbat in Israel. My family and I are here for six weeks as I complete the final summer of an incredible fellowship with the Shalom Hartman Institute.
As an American Jew, Israel is a strange combination of the intensely familiar and the deeply foreign. Familiar, in that unlike anywhere else in the world, here Jewish culture and civilization are the norm. In Israel the national holidays aren’t Thanksgiving and Christmas, but Passover and Rosh Hashanah (the New Year); here, Saturday is the Sabbath and Sunday is just the first day of the work week. But Israel also feels at times deeply foreign, for Israelis are a kaleidoscope of Jews from different cultures and countries throughout the world.
In America, Judaism is often thought of as being a religion, analogous to Christianity or Islam. But when you come to Israel, it becomes clear that what binds Jews together isn’t a religion but instead peoplehood. Israel is not a theocratic state for the adherents of a faith but instead a homeland for a people. Much as France is home to the French people and England is home to the British people, Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people.
Israelis don’t look like our stereotype of American Jews. Whereas most Jewish Americans can trace their heritage back to Eastern European refugees who came to the States in the early 20th century seeking a better life, Israel is an emerging democracy made up of Jewish refugees from all over the world. In the 1950s and ‘60s Israel absorbed almost a million Arab-Jews who were kicked out of the cities that they had called home for over 2,500 years; in the 1980s and ‘90s a million Jewish refugees arrived on the shores of the Mediterranean from the former Soviet Union; and no one can forget the dramatic rescue of almost 100,000 Ethiopian Jews in the early 1990s.
Walking through the streets of Jerusalem, the diversity of the Jewish people becomes clear. You pass Ultra-Orthodox men dressed in suits straight out of 19th century Poland, who are walking next to bikini clad women with tattoos covering their bodies. You hear Hebrew spoken with Russian accents, Arabic accents and recently due to the rising tide of anti-Semitism there, more and more French accents.
Like many American Jews, I am often frustrated with what feels like the slow pace of change here in Israel. I become despondent, feeling that Israeli democracy can and should do better. But this misses the bigger picture: Israel isn’t an established Western European democracy, and it isn’t made up of Western Europeans or North Americans. Israel is instead an incredible success story of how a democracy can emerge in a place with almost no democratic tradition and from a hodgepodge population of refugees coming from lands that themselves have very little democratic tradition. When Israel is judged by what it is, a country that is only 67 years old and is still experiencing the growing pains of meshing cultures and individuals, it becomes clear: Israel is perhaps the greatest democratic success story of our time.
Rabbi Daniel Bogard, along with his wife Rabbi Karen Bogard, are at Congregation Anshai Emeth, the oldest and largest Jewish community in the Peoria area.