The last sunset of 2012 is descending on the land of Israel, but it does not get much notice. Secular "New Years Day" is not an official holiday in a country that celebrates Rosh HaShanah as the first day of the year.

The Gregorian January First is observed as a bit of a joke in Israel. Israelis call the day "Sylvester." Depending on whom you ask (for all Israelis have opinions), the name is either just a nonsense term or it is a tongue-in-cheek reference to St. Sylvester, a fourth century pope whose feast day is January 1.

In recent years, "Sylvester Parties" have become more popular in Israel, mostly at nightclubs that attract a younger clientele. Of course, there are many cries of complaint from religious Jews in Israel against the practice. That's the way things go in Israel; a nightclub publicity theme can cause a national debate pitting religious and secular Jews against each other.

We're not planning any Sylvester celebration tonight. We'll be in Jerusalem, in which the change from 2012 to 2013 will gain little more notice than the first day of any other month on the secular calendar.

Time works differently in Israel. Today, we spent much of the day digging through the dirt at the archeological site at Beit Guvrin Maresha. There, we picked up broken pieces of pottery out of the earth that literally had not touched human hands since the time of the Maccabees. We casually tossed the shards into plastic buckets and let them travel in an instant from the second century b.c.e. to the 21st century c.e.

It's hard to compare the arbitrary designation of a day for switching calendars to the experience of physically touching the passage of 2,300 years. Time moves differently in Israel.

Happy Sylvester.


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Masada is not what it used to be. The desert fortress on the Dead Sea brought to grandeur by King Herod in the first century b.c.e. has seen better days. Not so long ago, it was a symbol of Israeli character. The Jewish zealots in the second century c.e. who committed mass suicide here rather than be defeated by the Romans were seen as a model of determination to be free.

Nowadays, Israelis are not so sure that this is the model they want their children to admire. In an Israel after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, this society is less willing to venerate zealots than it used to be.

Israel used to hold induction ceremonies for its most elite military units on top of Masada. No more. Those units now have their ceremonies at the Western Wall, a symbol of a holy place that was lost with mourning, not a suicide pact.

And that, really, is a better reflection of Judaism's attitude toward life and death. When the Temple in Jerusalem was under siege by the Romans in 69 c.e., Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of the doomed city to negotiate with the Roman general Vespasian for the survival of the rabbinic academy at Yavna. Rabbi Yochanan recognized that the survival of Torah and the saving of many lives outweighed the loss of even the Temple and acceptance of Roman rule.

That perspective has reasserted itself in a more mature state of Israel. Masada still has power as a symbol for Israelis and the line of tourists waiting for the cable cars to ride up to the top still is long. However, the symbol is tempered by an awareness that ours is a tradition of life, not death, and that we have more to live for than we have to die for.


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If the Israel imagined by American Jews sometimes seems like a fantasy that could not ever exist in reality, there is a reason for it. In many way, this country was founded as an impossible dream. On Friday, I visited two sites that remind me of the unlikely origins of the modern Jewish state. Israel was founded upon events that stir both the imagination and the deepest horror.

The first of our two stops was Mount Herzl where we visited the grave of its namesake, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism. Events subsequent to Herzl's death have made him seem like a visionary genius. Had things turned out otherwise, he might have been remembered instead as a zealous snake oil salesman who sold the desperate Jews of Europe a promise with no substance.

European Jews in the nineteenth century lived with a contradiction. On the one hand, they enjoyed an emancipation from past legal subjugation. For the first time, they were citizens of the countries in which they lived. They were permitted to attend university, to own land, to work in professions and to enter normal, middle-class European society.

On the other hand, they continued to live in a society in which antisemitism was constant and normal. Slurs against Jews were heard in the street, in the cafes, and in every corner of so-called "polite" society. Jews were regarded with suspicion, scorn and, often enough, the accusation that they were displacing "real" Germans, "real" Frenchman, "real" Austrians, or whatever other flavor of Christian European they lived amongst.

The incongruity felt by the new middle-class Jews was palpable, heartbreaking and daily. They wondered if they had won anything in emancipation. They began to feel that they never really would be accepted as free people in Europe under any set of circumstances. 

That was the situation that Herzl tried to address. He told these middle-class European Jews that they needed to pursue a different solution to "the Jewish problem," and the solution he proposed was extraordinary.

Herzl said that the Jews needed to seek a land of their own where they could be sovereign and set the standards for their own society. He imagined this country as a semi-paradise, in which Jews would create a truly just society in which everyone would be treated as equals. 

Herzl's true innovation in pursuing this dream was in the way he sought to achieve it. Herzl was not a religious man. He had no interest in appealing to God for help in returning the Jewish people to their land—as Jews had been praying daily for nearly two thousand years. He sought to achieve his Jewish state, instead, through the tools of diplomacy, deal-making, negotiation and political leverage. For all the practicality of his approach, however, he never saw any real progress. Herzl spent his short life traveling the globe, meeting with any political leader who would talk to him, but he got nowhere. 

In many ways, Herzl was not unlike the Back-to-Africa idealist, Marcus Garvey, who sought to create a homeland in Africa for Black people whose ancestors had been taken to the Americas as slaves. Today, Garvey is regarded as a great leader by some, but his 1920 declaration in which he named himself the "Provisional President of Africa" seems ridiculous. Yet it is nearly parallel to Herzl's 1897 diary entry, "At Basel, I founded the Jewish State." Herzl's statement is regarded today as prophetic, but only because Israel eventually did come to exist, even if it was not through the strategy Herzl favored.

Herzl inspired thousands to emigrate to Israel and to lay the foundations for the Jewish State. He did create a broad and diverse coalition of Jews who supported the Zionist idea. Those were real and vitally important achievements, but it is as horrifying as it is undeniable that the dream of the Jewish state would never have been realized without the Holocaust.

That brings me to Friday's second stop—the Holocaust museum and memorial, Yad VaShem on the western slope of Mount Herzl. It reminds us that the reality, not the fantasy, of Israel is a response to the horror of six million murders. Without the deluge of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and the sympathies (which is not to say the guilt) of the world, Israel would not have come to be.

The Jewish State does not make up for the Holocaust, and, in any case, nobody just gave this land to the Jewish people as a cosmic consolation prize. There are not enough grains of sand in the world to contain the agony of the Holocaust, but some 20,000 square kilometers on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea are what the Jewish people fought for, bled for, and died for after the destruction of their civilization in Europe.

Israel is not the semi-paradise Herzl dreamed about. It's not even close. The unresolved conflicts between Israel and the displaced Palestinian Arabs, and between Israel and its surrounding neighbors, is the great sorrow of Israel, even 64 years after its founding. The dream has not yet been fulfilled.

Still, we venerate Herzl. We recognize him as someone who had the chutzpah to think beyond the limitations of his reality and to set events into motion. If he could not see how those events would play out, so what? Who ever knows such things?

The genius of Israel has never been in predicting the future. Her leaders have gotten such predictions wrong plenty of times. Rather, the genius has been in dreaming boldly, improvising creatively, and pursuing relentlessly.

A thirteen-year-old Jewish girl is standing in front of a wall her ancestors built two thousand years earlier, which was destroyed and rebuilt a dozen times before she was born. She holds a piece of cloth in her hands, made in Israel, purchased in America, and now brought back to Israel for this moment.

On the corners of the garment are the symbols of the ancient promise she now swears to keep. Soon, she wraps it around herself and becomes the newest stone to be placed on the highest course, supported by all those that came before her.

In Jerusalem, time and space refuse to move in straight lines. Every memory gets turned around into a prophecy of the future, every effort to progress in one direction appears a moment later gaining on us from behind. Living here, we forget to expect cause and effect. We live only in spirals.

The girl reads from the scroll that can only end at its beginning and speaks of bleary-eyed Jacob crossing his arms over his grandsons. In a few days she will fly home clockwise in a counter-clockwise world, and dream of coming back to her birthplace which she had never been to before.

We spent most of today traveling through the centuries in the City of David, climbing up and down ancient stairways, aqueducts and even a sewage system to discover how the foundations of ancient Jerusalem were built upon the Gihon Spring in the Kidron Valley. A wonderful experience and a good workout, too.

This evening, my wife and I took our children to one of our favorite restaurants, T'mol Shilshom, named for the novel by S.Y. Agnon, the Israeli Nobel laureate for literature. It is more than a cafe/bookstore that has hosted readings by some of Israel's leading literary figures, including Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua. It is a monument to the love affair this country  has with its language and its literature.

That's just fine with my children, who have had Christmas up to their ears since Thanksgiving in the United States. They are delighted to be in a country where there are more Chanukah menorahs in sight (more than a week since Chanukah ended) than there are Christmas trees visible on Christmas day. 

We entered Jerusalem today and took a moment to view her from Mount Scopus before driving down into the heart of the city. Yes, we saw some Christmas lights over the wall of the Old City as we passed the Christian Quarter, but down on Ben Yehuda Street where we had dinner it was just another bustling and busy night in the city. 

This is the first time my wife and I have been in Jerusalem in sixteen years, since before our children were born. It was a treat to show them the apartment building where we lived, the streets where I walked to school every day, and the restaurants where we went on special occasions. Jerusalem is "Ir HaKodesh," the Holy City, but it is also a place where my wife and I have many good memories, both sacred and profane. It's good to be back home.

Jerusalem is the last stop on our trip, but we will be here for another eight days. The main focus of our stay will be the the celebration of my niece as a bat mitzvah on Thursday morning. She will read from Torah at Robinson's Arch, part of the Davidson Center on the southern wall of the Temple Mount. 

This has become a popular choice in recent years for non-orthodox families who wish to celebrate a bar or bat mitzvah at a holy site in Israel where men and women can worship together and where women can read from Torah. That is not an option at the Kotel, the Western Wall, because it is controlled by the Orthodox Rabbinate and they enforce their standards of Jewish practice on everyone, regardless of the individual's practices or affiliations. 

It is a small reminder, but a sometimes painful one, that even in this country where Judaism is the dominant culture—where it is in the air we breathe—there is a narrow view of what kind of Judaism is "the right kind." At times, it can make me feel that my Judaism is less welcomed by some in this country than a Christmas tree in Zion Square. Ah, well.

It will not stop us from rejoicing. We are in Jerusalem, Ir HaKodesh! Our joy increases with the celebration of a young woman coming into her own as a daughter of our tradition in the heart of our people. What could be wrong on such an occasion!

That is why, when Jacob died, the brothers went to Joseph and told him:

"Before his death your father left this instruction: So shall you say to Joseph, 'Please forgive, I urge you, the offense and guilt of your brothers who treated you so harshly.' And now, please forgive the offense of the servants of the God of your father." 

The Torah tells us that Joseph cried when he heard these words (Genesis 50:15-17). 

Why should Joseph have cried? He already forgave his brothers when he told them that it was not they, but God, who had determined that he be sold into slavery (Genesis 45:8). Perhaps his tears were in recognition of the fear that his brothers experienced because of his power over them.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa (1765-1827) had a different interpretation, one that is fitting to the brand of loving and forgiving Chasidism that he taught. He observed that Joseph's brothers knew about their family's legacy. In previous generations, there always was one son who was the appointed successor and the other brothers were cast away and rejected. Isaac, their grandfather, had been chosen as Abraham's successor and his brother Ishmael had been cast out into the wilderness. Their father, Jacob, succeeded Isaac as God's treasure, and his brother, Esau, was rejected and regarded as a villain. Jacob's first ten sons thought they would share Ishmael and Esau's fate when they recognized that Joseph would be the successor of Jacob.

This is why they came to Joseph with a plea that can be divided into two parts, each introduced by the words, "Please forgive." First they acknowledge how wrong it had been for them to throw Joseph into the pit and to sell him into slavery. They offer no excuses or rationalization for their behavior, and so Rabbi Simcha Bunim regards their apology as sincere. It is only after this that they again say, "Please forgive," and ask Joseph to recognize them, too, as "servants of the God of your father." They were pleading not to be rejected or left out of the story of the Jewish people.

According to the teaching, this is why Joseph cried when he heard the words of his brothers. He recognized what they were asking for. He recognized that, at this point in their lives, all they wanted was not to be discarded and to be given a place as inheritors of the covenant with God. Since this was exactly what Joseph, too wanted, he cried to hear their righteous words.

It is interesting that Simcha Bunim sees no hint of deception or self-serving motives in the words of Joseph's brothers. That would be the obvious interpretation of brothers who made up a deathbed plea from their father to save their skins. Simcha Bunim would rather give the brothers the greatest possible benefit of the doubt and see them as motivated by the highest, not by the lowest.

This loving and forgiving approach was the hallmark of Simcha Bunim's approach and it continues to have resonance in the branches of Chasidic Judaism. I was reminded of that today as I walked through Tzfat (also called Safed in English), which is regarded as one of the four holy cities of Judaism (along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias) and it is the city most identified with Jewish mysticism. 

In the 16th century, Tzfat was the city where Rabbi Isaac Luria reignited Kabbalism and transformed Judaism in ways that are still with us. (The Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service, including the song L'cha Dodi, was an invention of Luria's followers). Today, some of his spiritual successors continue to make Tzfat a city that takes pride in being a center of Kabbalah and Chasidism.

But we sometimes lose sight of the fact that the heart of Chasidism in its original form was not just mystical introspection, it was about loving people. The primary energy of Jewish mysticism is outward, not inward. Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught a foundational teaching of Jewish mysticism, that we are to search for the holiness that exists in each person, not to judge them or to assume the worst about them. Joseph cried, he says, cried for joy when he recognized that spark even in the men who had sold him into slavery.

The Jewish people need to embrace this truth. We often appear to be a people divided into conflicting segments, more and more removed from each other by our harsh judgment, distrust and 
resentments. Imagine the tears of joy that would flow if we could see the holy spark within each other.


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This is what visiting Israel tends to do to people—and not just college students and twenty-somethings, either. I listen to one young woman talking on her cellphone to her mother back in the U.S. saying, “I didn’t think that being here would affect me this way. It makes me want to learn Hebrew and live here some day.” I’m sure that this young woman’s mother does not need to worry that her daughter won’t be getting back on the plane back home in a few days, but this trip to Israel will probably make a difference in her sense of Jewish identity and relationship to Israel for the rest of her life. 

That is what the statistics say, and that is why the American Jewish community puts so much of its resources into sending young people on trips to Israel. Demographic studies show that once young Jews come to Israel, they are permanently more likely to participate in other activities that promote Jewish identity—celebrating Jewish holidays, joining Jewish communities, raising Jewish children, and supporting the state of Israel. There is a romance in the land of Israel and the story of the Jewish people’s return here that holds people in its grip. There is a passion and an energy among Israelis that people experience here and it is infectious.

I experienced it today myself. At Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, I heard a presentation from an Israeli woman who talked about why Israel is so important to her personally. She told us, “Don’t think that living here is easy. Don’t think that we get used to it, either. I’ve sent three of my children into the army, and the third was just as hard to send as the first. But we do it. We don’t do it because we think Israel is perfect—believe me, it’s not. We can apologize for our mistakes, but we can never apologize for living. We refuse to apologize for being here in a place that we love, the only place that is a home for us.”

Even though I am no stranger to life in Israel—I spent a year of my life here as a rabbinic student—that speech got to me. It made me tear up inside to hear such passionate love and passionate insistence. I am moved by the choice made by many Jews that the only authentic way for them to be Jews is to live in Israel. 

I am warning you, if you come here, it will move you, too.

That joyful message seems just a little bit out of place today, a day of ancient Jewish mourning. Today is Asara B'Tevet, a fast day in commemoration of the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem in 587 b.c.e. It may not seem like the right time to rejoice over the love of Israel on a day when the Jewish people remember their exile from this land.

While I'm aware of the day's significance, this is one Jewish tradition I have never followed myself. As a Reform Jew, it is difficult for me to connect spiritually with this day. Frankly, most Conservative and Orthodox Jews also ignore or circumvent the fast. In addition to the siege of Jerusalem, the day is also supposed to be one of mourning the beginning of the composition of the Septuagint, the ancient Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

Why should that be a cause for sorrow? Because, in translating the Bible, one tradition says,some of the meanings found in the exact language of the Bible were muted or lost for those Jews who  could only  read the translation.

That strikes me as exactly the wrong message for the Jewish people today, and the joyful reestablishment of the Jewish sovereignty in our land is the exact example of that fallacy. The Jewish students I saw today have been drawn back to Judaism because organizations like Taglit-Birthright have made it accessible to them. Without making any assumptions about their attachments to Judaism or their Jewish knowledge, we have allowed these young people to discover Israel and let its magic and power draw them in. It is only once they take that step, that these young people surprise themselves by saying, "I want to learn Hebrew."

Mourn the translation of our sacred texts into a language that Jews actually understand? We should celebrate it. We should rejoice that the door is being held open for young Jewish people to step inside of Israel and be entranced by its magic.


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My family's first Shabbat in Israel began at Kehilat HaLev, a Reform community that is an offshoot of Beit Daniel, the  main Reform congregation in Tel Aviv. The community is led by Rabbi Or Zohar, recently ordained from the Israeli rabbinic program of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. 

About forty people came to pray, sing and dance at Kehilat HaLev, a small and eclectic group made up of a few regulars—some American transplants and some Sabras, too—and a large number of visitors from near and far. Quite a few were local spiritual seekers, interested in finding out what Judaism might look like once freed from the hand of the orthodox Rabbinate. I don't think they were disappointed. 

Or worked as a professional musician and Jewish song leader before entering rabbinic studies and we found his services to be filled with music. Some of the melodies were familiar from Reform services in North American. Some were products of the Israeli Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism. Many are his own compositions in noticeably middle eastern rhythms and harmonics. We sang to his guitar and voice while a percussionist kept the beat on a variety of drums. Lots of fun.

On Saturday morning, we strolled outside in the city's tree-lined boulevards and public parks and plazas. We stopped for a while in Habima Square (pictured above) where we saw young families pushing strollers and letting toddlers wander around in discovery. Couples of every age held hands and enjoyed the winter sun bouncing off their beaming faces. Old men sat on low stoops reading Hebrew newspapers. Artists with sketch pads tried to capture the scene in pencil and charcoals. 

This is Shabbat in the style of Tel Aviv. Most of the residents here have little interest in synagogue, but they make Shabbat into their own day of rest. The atmosphere of the whole city slows down into a state of intentional relaxation and enjoyment of simple pleasures. It is not just the change of pace one finds on the weekend in an American city. Shabbat here is long and leisurely, a moment outside of ordinary time in which nothing needs to be done. It is the unforced spiritual Shabbat that has no need for prohibitions and rules. We found it to be a blessing.

Finally, we ended Shabbat with lunch at the home of friends Rabbi Miri Gold and David Leichman of Kibbutz Gezer. I've written about both of them before. Miri recently became the first non-Orthodox rabbi in Israel to receive state funding (although the first check has not yet arrived). David works to build connections between Israel and the North American Reform Movement. He also is a leader in Israel's fledgling efforts for organized baseball. 

Very fortunately for me and my family, they are also both excellent cooks and connoisseurs of good food…especially chocolate. Over the homemade humus and stews, we talked about Israel's homegrown movement for liberal Judaism, life on the kibbutz, recipes, rabbinics, trips to Israel, and Kevin Youkilis (I'll never think of him as a Yankee). It was a delightful way to end Shabbat, filling in more ways than one.

Tomorrow, we will connect with my extended family—my parents, my sister and her family, uncles, aunts and cousins—to begin our tour of Israel. I'm looking forward to that, but I am very glad that we have had a few days to settle into the Israeli pace of life before becoming tourists. This was a Shabbat to remember. 


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Yet, there is another possible interpretation of this verse that I would like to share. It is possible that, even though he was surrounded by his brothers, Joseph at this moment was as alone as a human being can be. The word in the verse that is translated as, "when he revealed himself" (b'hitvada), actually should not have that meaning, which is causative (as in, "he caused them to know"). Grammatically, the verb is in a reflexive form, so it should read, "when he knew himself." Somehow, that reading makes a lot of sense to me.

"No one stood with him when Joseph knew himself…" There are moments in all of our lives when we really, deeply know ourselves in relationship to the world and we stand alone. It is not that we are placed on a higher rung than other people in such moments. Rather, when we most truly find the thing about ourselves that is distinctive and true to the root of our being, we discover that we are unique, as all human beings are unique. We find that, in the place where we most directly connect ourselves to God, we do so in a way that nobody else can. Each person in the world is necessary, because each person is a unique fulfillment of a place to connect with God.

That is what Joseph discovered in the moment when he understood his role in bringing his family down to Egypt to escape the famine and to set the stage for the exodus. Finally, he knew himself and he knew the place where only he could stand to bring about the future required by God for the children of Israel.

Today was my family's first full day in Israel. On our first day in Tel Aviv, we did not go to Independence Hall, the place where Israel's Declaration of Independence was signed on May 14, 1948. We did not go to the Diaspora Museum, which displays the history and culture of the Jewish people in exile. We did not go to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, with its paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso and Degas. 

Instead, since it was Friday, we went to Shuk HaCarmel, the Carmel Market, to join thousands of Israelis shop for vegetables, fish, fruits, cheeses, pastries, flowers and spices. Rather than go to a typical tourist destination to begin our journey, my wife and I wanted our two children to see something real and distinctive about the Israeli people and what it is like to live in Israel. We wanted them to discover themselves as members of this big, busy, bustling people as they get ready for Shabbat. We wanted them to see how they fit in, uniquely, as part of a unique people.

Shuk HaCarmel did not disappoint. The kids loved taking in the colors, the excitement, the energy, the flavors and the fragrances. I saw them processing a new understanding that, in this place, they are not a member of a small, misunderstood minority. Here they are part of a national culture that is truly their own. In each of their eyes, I saw a small awakening. Being surrounded by such a dazzling place—yet one as ordinary as an outdoor marketplace—helped them, I think, understand what it might mean for them to stand in a place where they connect uniquely with the Land of Israel, with the Jewish people, and with God.

And, in looking in their faces at such a moment, I felt that I, too, was learning how to be alone knowing myself in relationship to the world.


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