Zionism, what once for me was a clear cut discussion, becomes a prevailing debacle and inner dialogue. Concluding an important research report about the assimilation of American Jews and paradigm shifts, that affect the decline of the Jewish population, it is apparent that the state of Israel is providing a scapegoat for assimilation. American Jews see this new group of Bal Tuva Jews moving to Israel. This allows the American psyche to assimilate into modern pop-culture and evade the discussion of Jewish assimilation within the Diaspora altogether.

Pre-Holocaust, Jews separated themselves and seemed to maintain numbers in population. It is within the 1930’s-1970’s where Jews found assimilation to be the response to persecution. A decade later [1980s], Hitler’s “solution to the Jewish problem” still impacted population numbers. In the 21^st century numbers are still on the decline and at an ever rapid pace.

The major concern is if Jews in the Diaspora rely only on Jews within the country of Israel, the near future of the Jewish faith will become a closing chapter. Yes, intermarriage and the Holocaust have a large part in this ideological decline, but I urge the public to open their eyes as to what the idea of Zionism does psychologically for the Jewish community. We cannot focus solely on “the right of return”. We as a community must discuss how we cannot depend on Jews overseas to create the identity of the Jew within the Diaspora nor can we use this “right” as a crutch for not being active in Jewish communities.

Likewise, the average Israeli feels less of a need to do “Jewish” because going to the market is a Jewish event in it of itself. The confusion between faith and nationalism does not stem from Zionism, but does allow itself to blur the lines all that much more. Nationalism is important on many levels, the Torah even mentions that, but it also is important to practice and value traditions and rituals as our ancestors have done for centuries.

It is imperative that the public understand that Zionism is not potent, but potentially dangerous. The paradigm needs to shift. No longer can we depend on another Jew to be Jewish. The numbers in the population are too small. It is absolutely fine to subscribe to Zionism, but when educating people or when in a discussion about the topic, it is important to address that as Jews of the Diaspora, we play an integral role in the success of our future. Without buy-in for this paradigm shift, cultural and religious traditions of the Jewish faith will be masked in Israeli nationalism, risking a much larger decline in Jewish population.

Be true to the streets-

Yentapunker

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Stand up! Let your voice be heard! Ani veAtah Neshane et HaOlam! You and I will change the world!

-Michael and Patrick

(From the Jewish Federation of North America Website)

Issue Background:

As you know, The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) has articulated concern about a proposed bill in Israel’s Knesset amending Israel’s Law of Return. One proposed change could affect those who convert to Judaism after spending time in Israel, and potentially prevent them from immigrating under the Law of Return and gaining automatic Israeli citizenship. The bill also, for the very first time, gives the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate authority over conversions in Israel, something that could well alienate the 85% of North American Jews who are not Orthodox.

Representatives from JFNA and the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) met this winter in the Knesset with the bill’s sponsor, MK David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, and delivered a concerted and forceful message that, as Diaspora Jewry’s representatives, we wish to engage in discussions on any such initiatives before the law is changed.

MK Rotem pledged no changes would occur without our consultation. Rotem and former Israel Ambassador to the U.S. Danny Ayalon later met with Diaspora Jewish groups in the U.S., including Ayalon with JFNA, to reiterate these promises.

This past week Rotem suddenly advanced a new, even more troubling amendment, without consulting with JFNA or JAFI. The new changes would give “authority” to the Orthodox-run Chief Rabbinate in Israel to carry out all conversions and says a convert can only be recognized if one “accepts the yoke of mitzvot according to halacha” (as defined by the Chief Rabbinate).

Since these developments occurred, our leadership told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset leaders, and Rotem that these latest proposed changes would “drive a wedge” between Israel and the Diaspora and cause “significant damage” to the Diaspora-Israel relationship. JFNA and JAFI have delivered a strongly worded letter to this effect to the prime minister and have met with Knesset members this week to underscore that message.

These changes would potentially affect a broad swath of Diaspora Jewry, and also make a theological and ideological statement about the more liberal Jewish movements to which most Diaspora Jews belong. JFNA and JAFI have issued public statements to this effect and spoken out to the Israeli press.

While our leadership has been advocating in the halls of the Knesset, we need your help to send an even louder message to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

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Mike Knight, the father of Punk Islam said that since you can’t hold an ideology, a worldview in the palm of your hand how can you even start to say what it is? Islam. Punk. Judaism. Zionism. When no person can hold it, how can one person own it?

It’s the things that can’t be held that are usually the most fervently grasped after and back in Vancouver, in the diaspora, Zionism is viewed less as any broad intellectual tradition than an arena of violent polemics. It’s hard to be a Zionist on the Left there. I don’t know how I feel about Jewish statehood in the abstract but I strongly support the existence of this Jewish state. I’d fight and die for this place in a just cause. I want to move here in a few months. At the same time, I wholeheartedly believe Israel is the primary, though not sole, cause and sustainer of a people’s suffering and exile. Most folks back home who agree with me, that Palestinians are entitled to sustenance, rights and sovereignty, see Zionism as a racist colonial monolith. Those who disagree with me say I cant be a Zionist because I don’t practice Zionism like a racist colonial monolith. As a Zionist who feels support for Palestinian rights is integral to my belief in a just Jewish State, I am forced to choose between the label and the content.

The other night we attended a Gala of the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem.

On the bus ride to Jerusalem I listened to Matisyahu with my friend Sam and felt the same chill entering the city that I had felt when I was here for the first time two years ago. That’s my Zionism. No one can take that feeling from me. But it is a connection, not a claim. It gets murkier when you try to translate feelings into exclusionary politics.

When we got to the Congress I wandered around the photo displays of Halutzim draining swamps, of bright eyed, bronzy soldiers. The standard images of a pinup Zionism. I collected all the brochures and pamphlets I could find. I found a big coffee table magazine Haaretz did on Herzl that I look forward to reading. I met briefly with the head of the MERCAZ delegation, representing Conservative and Masorti Judaism. My Persian friend there got a dirty look from some Haredim. He thinks it was racism. I wouldn’t be surprising given that 100,000 Haredim just rallied for school segregation.

Eventually we picked up translating headsets, filed into the auditorium, filed back out when the headsets wouldn’t function and finally filed back in, took our seats.

Israeli President, Shimon Peres, keynote of the evening missed his first curtain call but eventually showed.

Early in his speech Peres referred to the establishment of Israel as Jewry’s “step back into history”. Such an understanding at once attempts to erase the exilic experience and makes pointed ideological use of it. Thus Peres can, as he did, speak of an unceasing Antisemitism in history, prevalent enough to define 2000 years of Jewish history while at the same time saying “we never listened to” the gentiles, we remained unchanged, pure from antiquity. Zionism commands us to both blot out the exile and remember it constantly, just as Torah asks us to treat the memory of Amalek. By erasing Exile from history, we dehistoricize its tropes, we make them a constant reality. Torquemada or Hitler, like Amalek cease to be historically grounded personalities and become constant shades, lurking around every corner, in the words of all who oppose us. This is not to suggest that Israel does not have enemies and that antisemitism does not play a role sometimes in those animosities. Helen Thomas’ comments a couple weeks ago demanding that Israeli Jews return to the graveyards of Poland and Germany were antisemitic, not to mention ignorant of Israeli demographics where the majority of Jews are Mizrachi. When the IHH tells Israelis to go back to Auschwitz or when the Left focuses disproportionately on Israel’s crimes while ignoring those of other states; there is antisemitism here. But awareness of hatred, vigilance against it’s manifestation is the opposite of paranoia. One calls us to live and guard ourselves in the muck of reality, the other exalts ourselves as the world’s blameless victim and divides the world into uncritical friends, of which ultimately there are none, and enemies, of which there are many. Peres can therefore say that “if you delegitamize Israel, you legitimize terrorism” because such fine distinctions disappear when we mentally depart from reality and enter the discourse of eternal truth. Then we begin to make statements like “the war never ends here”. We begin to believe them. We begin to resign ourselves and to excuse ourselves from moral commitment. We unchoose ourselves as Jews. This realm of ideas is what Peres called “the order of existence” which Zionism claims to understand. What we don’t understand, according to the President is “who is a human being”, that is, who is a real person in history and who is a shade, a face of the eternal anti-Semite. These are the “warmongers”, the “fanatics who threaten us”. We have to “get rid of them”. But we can’t. Because they’re not real.

By erasing exile, Zionism is able to present itself as the manifestation of a pure mytho-antiquity that is simultaneously on the cutting edge of hypermodernity. This antiquity extends into time immemorial and is a statement of political confrontation; Peres can make statements like: “we were here before anyone else” and “ours is the oldest legitimacy in the region”; neither of which are, technically speaking, true. The erasure of exile is confirmed by the delusion that the “we” and the “ours” have not changed in 2000 years of exile. “The language of the prophets” remains the “language of our children”. Zionism has a special place in this sacred recast of history. It is the step “from exile to redemption”.

Redemption is characterized in deeply Modernist language, in talk of “construction and democracy” as if human rights were synonymous with factories. Zionism’s Israel has to strive after both the “ten commandments” and the cutting edge expansion of scientific research. Zionism may have begun as a “horizontal expansion” across Palestine, Peres recounted; now its goals were vertical, building upwards into skyscrapers and forward unto the restless horizon. I’m reminded of the words of Levi Eshkol: “When can we finish building the state and go home to rest?” Phrases like “value of modernity”, “awareness of modernity” and “orientation to the future” were interspersed with vague and unelaborated references to the example of the Prophets. The only figures mentioned explicitly as prophets however were Marx and Herzl.

We all rose to attention as he walked off stage and was replaced by Nir Barkat, Mayor of Jerusalem. As critical as I am of Peres’ speech, I liked it. I might problematize the narrative he presents but it is a story of idealism, of a people who spoke for justice in suffering and must still strive for justice in power. He called on Israel to become more than a refuge of a fearful Jewry but a beacon, a Light unto the Nations. We are not there yet. But we can be. Statehood is not the ends but the means.

I did not like Barkat’s speech. Here was the other conclusion of the Zionist narrative, not the open ended idealism that Peres and I each in our own way held to but the terrifying triumphalism of an ideology that is too busy marching forward to see who it’s marching over. Statehood as an end. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to share this triumphalism. For once in 2000 years, we’re the ones with the guns and the tanks and the borders. But when we allow the arrogance of power and the desperation of an imagined imperilment to cause us to forget the humanity of the other, we embark upon the road to Fascism.

Barkat is a main force behind the expansion of Jewish building in East Jerusalem. He began by quoting Herzl, declaring that “with Jerusalem, you can make a diamond”, rather than the traditional belief that Jerusalem is a diamond regardless. There’s not much I have to say about Barkat’s tirade for development. Jerusalem has to “become a more attractive city for tourists and investors”, he said since such parties have “shares in the city, no less than its residents”.

Investment, development, resources.

He called for “Jerusalem to be taken out of poverty” and said nothing about taking poverty out of Jerusalem. Barkat’s image of Jerusalem is a rosy and attractive one. But it is not a real one. Jerusalem is not the “strong and united city” he claimed it to be. It is a deeply divided place where identities build over, dig under and war after each other. Freedom of religion is not a Zionist innovation in this place. It existed for most of the history of Muslim Jerusalem, if not its final decades. Jerusalem is not perfect now, it was not so terrible before.

That doesn’t mean Jerusalem is not a diamond. But it has been tainted by suffering and hatred, by true believers as much as by greedy hypocrites; it has been crusted over by tears and blood. But the only way we’re ever going to see that diamond is by working to uncover each of its infinite faces, not by building skyscrapers on top of it.

So that’s it. In other news, we went to the Tel Aviv Pride Parade last week where I got pamphlet-ed by Messianic Jews.

Crazy Place.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di5coZUGg0Y

Kirtan is a part of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. It is done in call-and-response format, and is used to bring the chanter into and altered state of consciousness, “at once ecstatic, contemplative and — most of all — playfully improvised”. In kirtan, the goal is to chant to G-d and to develop an ecstatic state of awareness that brings insight and peace, so that we merge with the Beloved through devotion, hence the moniker “the yoga of devotion”. Borrowing certain ideas and instruments from Hindu tradition and basing them solidly in a Jewish framework, the Kirtan Rabbi, Rabbi Andrew Hahn, Ph.D. uses Hebrew texts as a basis with the lyrics “drawn from the Hebrew Bible and the siddur (the traditional Jewish prayerbook), as well as from the language of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism)”. At first I was skeptical, but it works, and it works very well.

On the newest album, Achat Sha’alti (One Thing I Seek), Rabbi Hahn has delivered a very well produced album full of affecting chants. The call and response format works very well and allows the listener to connect with the rhythm of the music and the patterns of the chanting. I found myself chanting along in the car and while working, giving me a nice respite in the middle of the day. Using the chants drawn from the bible and the siddur brought a unique insight to them, and in some cases it was as if I had heard them for the first time. On the previous Kirtan Rabbi album, Live! the music and chanting was just as engaging, though not as fresh. The production values on Achat Sha’alti are a refreshing step forward. The lush instrumentals add to the atmospheric chanting from the melodious opening Kaddish to a trance Lecha Dodi medley. The droning harmonium makes an incredible background to the traditional niggunim used as melodies and inspiration for the different tracks. As a tool for personal worship or meditation, I can highly recommend this album, especially to those familiar with other kirtan artists like Krishna Das or Jai Uttal and who want to be able to use kirtan and the bhakti yoga system as a devotional tool in service to Hashem. Or if you just like cool music!

Achat Sha’alti (One Thing I Seek) and Kirtan Rabbi Live! are available at iTunes and on the Kirtan Rabbi website.

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By Jeremy Wood

Al-Ramla was built in the beginning of the 8th century on dunes and sometimes I like to think you can feel that here, that there is nothing under this place but sand, that there are no hungry zombie hands of history. Yehuda Amichai said that the air above Jerusalem is thick with prayers like the smog over a factory town. I don’t feel that here. There is a lightness. Al-Ramla translates, loosely as “Queen of the Desert”.

This is not a place without history. In ’48, 10s of thousands of its inhabitants were exiled, by Israeli intimidation, by the hope of refuge and revenge in the Jordanian camp. Leaflets were dropped, promising death if they did not leave. There is a deadness in the south of the city. In a couple weeks will be the anniversary of that exodus. I hope to sit in the Muslim cemetery that sits under the old Mamluk minaret in the centre of town and say Kaddish or Fatiha or something to commemorate. They say there are sahabas buried in that cemetery. They call the Minaret, the Tower of the 40 Martyrs. 40 is lowballing it.

Many stayed though. I saw a woman in Niqqab today. I don’t know if she gets hassled or not. I assume it’s not easy and I respect her. This is not an easy country to live in for everyone but it feels often like a harder country to leave.

This is a country where past and present are, like Jews, always screaming over eachother. Right now the tension is fresh. Soon, maybe in a week, maybe less, Iran intends to send two aid ships past the Gaza blockade with partial military escort. It seems nothing but a ploy for primacy in the region that, once again, uses the people of Palestine as an empty reference like others in the neighborhood use “history” or “G-d”. Politics mask Religion mask history mask everything and I am reminded of what Declan de Barra, an Irish rebel singer once told me that sometimes the only way to sing about any of those is by singing about love. Irish poets saw their country as a beautiful and tormented woman. So did the Prophets. There are some things that can only be spoken of, as they are, to a point. Sometimes we are not prepared to see things as darkly as they can be. There is poetry after Auschwitz because there has to be.

I hope Ahmadinejad reconsiders. I am hopeful. Egypt has opened Rafah indefinitely, even though a year ago Al-Azhar declared any suggestion at doing so “unIslamic”. There is talk in the government here of lightening the Israeli blockade. It feels like the Rachel Corrie finally called Bibi’s bluff. Barukh Hashem.

All that heavy end of the world stuff aside, we’ve been planning ways out of this town. In the next few months are Jazz Festivals in Eilat, Klezmer Hasidic Acid Rock in Tzfat and Theatre in Akko. Next week is the World Zionist Congress and I’m excited. We’re invited to some sort of Gala. I hope Mimi will get me an invite from Meimad to sit in on some of the real stuff. Being in this place, reading Haaretz every day again, makes me more comfortable in calling myself a Zionist, knowing more precisely what I mean by it and not having to listen to people tell me I’m wrong.

I still haven’t been to Shul here. I bought an Artscroll in Mea Sharim and I’ve davvened Shabes Maariv with Lindsay and a few Shacharits on my own. I’m nervous. Some of the shuls here don’t even have Mechitza. They simply don’t allow women. I am worried I’ll feel nothing in a place my sisters are kept out of. But do I respond by excluding my less feminist brothers? I don’t know. Is inclusivity anything more than neutrality here? I didn’t feel much at the kotel this time around. I just pictured women being handcuffed in Tallis. My religion is not an old boy’s club. Apparently the hookah bar here is. What does that say?

Our coordinator in this place is Nir. I like him alot. His grandfather was Etzel so I’ve steered clear of politics. I do respect Etzel’s willingness to take action against the British. I like to think I would have picked up a gun for that. I can’t forgive the rest. But past is past and Jews are Jews and sometimes that’s enough for me.

Nir set me making Shnitzel tonight and I fell into the kitchen dance though I did spill oil all over my foot.

And with that,

Shalom, salaam, peace

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On August 1 2009, a gunman entered the “Aguda” building in Tel Aviv where an Israeli Gay Youth event was being held and opened fire on the crowd, killing two LGBT activists, one of them just 17 years old. The gunman has been suspected to be ultra orthodox; regardless the ultra orthodox press in Israel was quick to blame the victim, calling them depraved and stating that any blame for the murders lay solely with the owners of the club who put minors in danger of incurring the wrath of G-d.

And yet half the time we give these guys our Torah. We assume they’re right about the Pasuks they use to hate. We assume that to reject the interpretation requires that we reject the text.

However, my tradition teaches that every word of the Tanakh, has value and I believe this—so if you’ll allow me I’d rather deconstruct than reject. I don’t have the Christian privilege to simply say “and then Jesus came and it was all better.” Judaism teaches that we need to weed through the garbage, including homophobic manipulations of scripture and pull out the light for there is light in everything. Here’s an example: Vayikra 18:22 reads “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.” Many of us have let ourselves be convinced by bigots that this simply refers to sex between men (the Bible never references sex between women, silencing female sexuality but not forbidding its queer expression) whether in a pagan temple or anywhere else as a crime. But if we read it carefully, there is more going on here. What does “as one lies with a woman” mean? In a heteronormative society that placed a high priority on fertility the central act of heterosexual sex, the way in which one “lay with a woman” was vaginal penetration, taken here to extend to anal penetration. To the biblical writer penetration was a show of dominance. In the patriarchal context of the bible, vaginal penetration is a show of men’s dominance over women. To penetrate a man is to dominate him, just as the people of Sodom threatened to penetrate the guests of Lot.

Penetration only becomes domination in a context that conceives of sex as a field of power relations. If we recognize that no sex act is inherently dominant or submissive then we are forced to read the line from Leviticus as referring not to the sexual act so much as to a context of domination. The official position of my own denomination, Conservative Judaism, does not make this inference. It supports marriage equality elsewhere, gay ordination elsewhere but insists that this verse must be taken to forbid one act, that of anal penetration between men. Yet the Bible states that “a man shall cleave unto his wife and become one flesh [through penetrative contact].” My tradition recognizes that penetration is not simply an act of pleasure and is not an act inherently of dominance but rather one that strives to unite two bodies into one. I refuse to deny such union to same sex couples.

To forbid a man to dominate a man as they would a woman still relies of course on a deeply misogynist assumption that women are to be sexually subservient, below men. If we come to the verse rather with an understanding that women and men are entitled to the same sexual respect, we can understand it to command that you shall not have sex with anyone (men, women or intersex persons) with an intent to dominate.

There are real scraps of queer love that made it into the texts and these texts are of course empowering but as long as we let the homophobes monopolize other passages like the line in Vayikra we will be saying to queer Jews that they cannot have this line. They will have to bite their tongue and leave it alone. We will be inferring that in their community they will have to stay in the closet or leave the community.

A Judaism that intends to remain meaningful to all Jews requires that Jewish communities, queer, ally and otherwise reform the way they treat sexual and gender diversity. It is incumbent upon all Jews that we make new space for queer people, their partners and the families they form rather than compelling them to inhabit tired closets. At its truest heart Judaism teaches that humanity is made to love, including in bed, in whatever way G-d has led them to see fit and that such love, straight or queer and the families that such love creates are the most important foundation of Jewish peoplehood.

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By Patrick Aleph

I was thrilled when my friend Russell from the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival told me about an Israeli hip hop/reggae group he was helping called Axum (named after the Ethiopian city which folklore says holds the Ark of the Covenant).

The duo features two MCs, Tedros (of Ethiopian descent) and Judah, whose family is from Yemen. And their music is just as diverse. The dancehall goes techno filtered through a hip hop pop aesthetic is electric.

America has been good to Axum. A tour with Soulico (JDub Records), and a residency in Georgia sponsored by Emory University’s Hillel. Atlanta has given them the opportunity to collaborate with Slade da Monsta and Mr. Fish, hip hop artists Jarrod and Rusky, reggae/dub artists Dubconscious, and rockers Nick Edelstein and Darin Seldes. They’ve also spent several nights at the Apache Cafe, performing with Dubconscious and their local band, attending open mic nights and hanging out.

When I asked the group about their connection to Judaism and Israel, their reply was, “[We] live an Israeli experience, not a Jewish one in particular.  Like many Israeli’s…religion is not a point of emphasis. [The] main tie to Judaism is the language, not the content.”

What you will hear is the bigger message of Axum: a peaceful, “One World” view through the eyes of the global hip hop community. The power of music to unite people, all people, under one banner.

Axum did have an opportunity to jump into America’s Jewish space. Emory Hillel hosted the band at their Passover seder. Congregation Bet Haverim, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Decatur, Georgia, asked the duo to perform at a Shabbat service. The guys were uncomfortable as they approached the stage to perform a few sacred songs with CBH’s lay cantor and choir, but enjoyed seeing the “new forms of worship” that congregations like this have.

There’s no rest for Axum. The group performs the evening they land and have shows in the following weeks in Tel Aviv.  They are currently working on new material for their second album produced by the Soulico family.

Check out Axum at www.myspace.com/axumisrael

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-Patrick and Michael

Dear Friends of IRAC,

We write to you today because of a very serious situation that developed here in Israel last night.

We have learned that the Knesset may vote during the coming week on legislation that would make important changes to conversion authorities in Israel and to the Law of Return.

This new law would roll back the clock on all the achievements we have made for Reform and Conservative conversion rights in Israel: not only losing recognition for Reform and Conservative conversions in Israel, but even completely redefining who is a Jew. From now on the power to perform conversions would rest solely with the Chief Rabbinate – which only recognizes Orthodox conversions.

At your next Jewish gathering, take a look at the people around you: chances are good that you are sitting next to someone who would no longer be considered a Jew in Israel.

This decision, which impacts the very definition of who is a Jew for all of Klal Yisrael, is being made by a few politicians who happen to be in power during the 18th Knesset. They are not at all in conversation with world Jewry, on whom this decision will have a major impact.

There are millions of Jews in the Diaspora, and the current Israeli leadership needs to hear from all of you – and right away – if we are going to stop this.

The various arms of our Movement are asking you to send urgent messages of protest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and your local ambassador.

IRAC is working intensively on lobbying efforts with Members of Knesset, but we need the strength of your numbers to remind those who promote this bill that Israel and Judaism is not theirs alone.

Please send the attached letter right now to the Prime Minister and your ambassador, and forward this urgent call to your friends and family.

For more information on the conversion bill, click here
Please click here for the Union of Reform Judaism’s press release.

Prime Minister Netanyahu: Prime.Minister’sOffice@it.

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