Learning the Narrative of the other

Just read this article in Ha'aretz and thought it was worth sharing. Apparently, the Israeli Education Ministry pulled a textbook from a Sderot High School. Why? Because it portrayed the Palestinian Narrative as well as the Israeli one.

Let's be clear; this isn't historical revisionism nor the primary history textbook for the High School, this was for an elective unit for 11th graders, and has gone through years of research and production and peer review, AND was endorsed by the Foreign Ministry:

Work on the textbook, which is entitled "Learning the Historical Narrative of the Other," began 10 years ago as part of a joint project initiated by (the late ) Professor Dan Bar-On of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Professor Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University, with input from numerous Israeli and Palestinian history teachers.

The completed edition of the textbook was published last year. It includes material on the genesis of the Zionist movement in the 19th century through events of the past decade. Each page in the book is divided into three sections of equal size. The Israeli narrative is presented on the right, the Palestinian narrative on the left, and down the middle are empty lines in which the students are asked to fill with their thoughts.

Last year, Michal Wasser, a history teacher at Sha'ar Hanegev, began using the textbook in specialized and expanded lessons for students who opted for the five-unit track. The class consisted of 15 11th-graders who will submit a final paper on the topic of their choice. The course work is in addition to the regular curriculum that is geared toward the matriculation exam. Last month, Haaretz ran an article about the experimental history course at Sha'ar Hanegev. During that period the head of the Sha'ar Hanegev regional council, Alon Shuster, hosted a delegation of Swedish mayors who sought to advance a joint educational initiative based on the textbook, a venture to encompass students from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Sweden.

Critics portray the Education Ministry's reaction as 'kneejerk', 'pavlovian', 'narrow-minded', etc. What makes me especially sad is the irony of the situation. Sderot, as some of us know, is right on the edge of the Gaza Strip, and was (and continues to be) a primary target of Hamas Qassam rockets from Gaza. Their playgrounds, schools and other public spaces have been redesigned with reinforced roofs and extra bomb shelters because of the constant barrage. Their rate of enlistment in the IDF remains among the highest. And THEIR CHILDREN wanted to learn the Palestinian side of the story. Of all Israelis who have a right to want to close a door on understanding, they are the most willing, most interested in bringing these two people together. That it was undermined by political appointees looking to score points saddens me profoundly and illustrates (for me, anyway) one of the many barriers to peace that, despite the violence, regular Israelis and Palestinians are still seeking.

Coming up for Air.

Now that the High Holidays are slipping into the past (and what a wonderful experience they were!) I'm able to come back up. Sermons can be found at the Beth Emeth website. I'm incredibly proud of my staff and the lay-people, was thrilled with the attendance (especially at the family services) and thought the whole experience was wonderful. Except one, which is gnawing at me even days later.

It happened in Neilah, the last service of Yom Kippur. At one point, I heard the sound of a happy child coming from the back. I looked over and saw a family that comes pretty regularly, and tries to bring their preschool-aged daughter when they can. I saw an usher go to them and then lost track, but when I looked up they appeared to be in the same spot, so I figured all was well.

All was not well. The usher had asked them to leave, and worse, several congregants had shot the family dirty looks. As it happens, the daughter who was making the noise has special needs (and nearly died when she was born), so for the family, this is an extra-sensitive issue. They constantly weigh whether they should bring their beautiful girl out in public where they know she'll be stared at and she'll have trouble keeping quiet, or keep her at home and deny themselves--and her--the opportunity to be with their community.

To be fair to the usher, she was VERY apologetic (no names to protect everyone here, and don't even try to guess), and felt terrible that she'd upset this family while trying to protect the worship experience for the rest of the congregation, and I know the family in question bears her no ill will. However, that they feel embarrassed about coming to THEIR synagogue, and bringing their daughter to worship, fills me with sadness and disappointment. No one should be turned aside, especially for the sounds of children.

I have NEVER kicked kids out of a service (one exception: b'nai mitzvah, and that's only because our 13-year old service leaders' nerves are usually so rattled as it is!); for me, as a shaliach tzibbur, I'm horrified at the thought that our kids--and by extension, their parents--should be kicked out for making a little noise. And the answer is not to ghettoize them in family and tot services (though those are good for other reasons). We need to always make sure that everyone knows they're welcome.

At Yom Kippur morning, I talked about the need to be accessible. As a Reform congregation, we work hard to be accessible to people with all kinds of challenges and abilities, and from all walks of life: we have English readings for non-Hebrew speakers, ramps for those who cannot use stairs, large print and braile books, audio boosters for those hard of hearing, etc. We do whatever we can to be as inclusive as possible--that should extend to our young families as well. And if that means the kids are going to make joyful noise, and if it means the parents come in chinos and a sweater because they didn't have time to change, FINE BY ME. Let them come! The seventh of the Sheva Berachot, the blessings for a wedding, thanks God for the sound of children at play. I am grateful for that sound and always have been (even before I embarked on Fatherhood), because well we should be aware, the alternative is unsustainable. Our gates should always be open.

Okay, rant over. Shana tova to all and more updates soon.

Thoughts on the Park51 Mosque

This is also going to function as my recording of "The Rabbi Speaks" on Sunday and my bulletin article for October, so apologies for those of you who tune in to either:

Last Shabbat started out so well. Services had gone well, as had Torah study. We had done a baby naming for a lovely 3-month old girl, and everyone was flying high. Friends from my former congregation had come down to visit. As I said, everything was going really well. Then I was speaking with a couple from my congregation at a luncheon for a baby naming. I had not met them before; they were charming, erudite, and seemed perfectly pleasant. Until they asked me the question that’s been on everyone’s mind.

‘So, what do you think about the ground zero mosque’.


I don’t like to talk politics. Or rather, I don’t like to talk politics in the synagogue. It’s not that I don’t engage politically: I’ve always been active, since my teens, both locally and nationally. I very much agree with Thomas Mann’s assessment back in the 30s that everything today is measured in political terms. But in the synagogue, I’d much rather talk about such things not in political terms but from a perspective of community engagement and social justice. The question for me is: what are our sacred and civic obligations to each other, rather than what is my obligation to the state and vice-versa.


At first, I tried to use humor to disengage through humor. “well you know it’s not actually at ground zero.” I said “And anyway, they’re building a strip club and a mcdonalds at ground zero. Isn’t that tackier than a house of worship? And besides that, they don’t even have the money to build!”


“That’s commerce” they replied. And it quickly became apparent that they weren’t interested in rapier wit. They were against the idea of a mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center, a place where thousands—including many arabs and muslims—died. And it became quickly apparent that they weren’t interested in any contrary thoughts on the matter. They challenged the idea that muslims died on 9/11, or any in great enough number. They were unimpressed with the idea that the Park51 Islamic Community Center might have a memorial to all those who died on that terrible day in 2001, as if somehow the attempt was cheapened by putting it in a muslim house of worship. A mosque near the site of ‘Ground Zero’ was an affront to Western Civilization, a way to mock the victims of that attack. “We side with the firefighters and policemen” they said, apparently in solidarity with those who were protesting against the construction.

Well, this got my blood boiling. I should have known better, I shouldn’t have engaged, but I did, and I let my temper get the better of me. No, no one got hurt and no yelling happened, but that perfectly charming Shabbat Morning was going quickly to the dogs.


I came back with arguments of the rights of all enshrined in the constitution of our country, that to allow a mosque to be built near that sacred ground was in fact a validation of our values, not a mockery of them. It was a way to honor the memory of those who died the best way we could, by not letting those extremists force us to surrender our values, but not sinking to their level of depravity and disregard of human life. As Jews, I argued, we knew better, and remember a time not so long ago when we were not allowed in many places in this country and even right here in Wilmington to build houses of worship, to live in certain neighborhoods, to build our synagogues the way we want. Did we want to return to that, to set that precedent?


They insisted that it was still true today that Jews couldn’t build anywhere they like; I’m hard pressed to come up with a single instance—except in areas where one wouldn’t be allowed to build ANYTHING, like a Superfund cleanup site—where a community prevented the building of a synagogue, Temple, Jewish Community Center, or the like.


Another congregant, who was overhearing our now heated engagement, joined in with a question: “Didn’t the Imam behind the project, after Daniel Pearl died, say that he too was a Jew, as an act of solidarity?”

The couple looked at this individual incredulously. They were sure no such thing had occurred. I professed that I didn’t know.


So I did some digging. In fact, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the fellow behind the Cordoba Initiative, did say those words. In 2003, at a memorial service for Pearl at B’nai Jeshurun, a congregation in New York City, this Imam—a moderate, even liberal forward leading leader of the Muslim community—stood before a group of Jews and said the following:

We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths. If to be a Jew means to say with all one's heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.

We are here especially to seek your forgiveness and of your family for what has

been done in the name of Islam.

Our conversations must continue where many end. Some of us may be suspicious

of the religious voices and believe that these voices ought to be kept out of public

discussion and policy. Others may fear that entering into constructive dialogue and

common ground with the “other side” must be wrong, sinful or at best useless and

naïve. We disagree.

Where once many of us may not have cared to speak, much less listened, to others,

now we must. We shall find ourselves with good people, of deep faith, and we shall

locate many important, shared values: justice, compassion, service, faithfulness,

and love. Though many of us may have come skeptically, we have all come seeking

to leave with hope and expectation of Your guidance, O Lord, and with a

determination to encourage others to embark on this kind of fruitful exploration. For

ourselves, and in different ways, we want to continue to convey the message not

only among us, but also in the communities and arenas of service to which we shall

be returning, that we are all create…in the image of God.

We intercede with You that You place us on the path of righteousness and direct us

towards actions done in fulfillment of the commandment taught by Your Great

Prophets and Messengers Moses, the Messiah Jesus son of Mary, and

Muhammad, which is to love our fellow humans as we love ourselves. Help us O

Lord, in courage and commitment, in reducing ethnic and religious hatred, strife and

violence, to build the kingdom of heaven on earth.

The skeptical among us might see duplicity here, saying one thing to a Jewish audience and another to a Muslim one. But I agree with Atlantic writer Jeffery Goldberg: that for this Muslim cleric to speak to Jews, never mind say these words, in our post-9/11 world, is to invite criticism and hostility and even violence from those most extreme members of the Islamic world. And to not only speak them in that moment but to repeat those values of dialogue, of acceptance, of cooperation and collaboration and REPENTANCE again and again, to Muslim as well as non-Muslim audiences, to American and foreign audiences, and to hope that building a center for dialogue and peace near a place of great violence might be a source of healing rather than hostility takes immeasurable courage and conviction. As a people, as Americans, we would be wise to learn from it.


I know these words won’t convince many; perhaps they will offend some, or seem like dreamy hippy nonsense to others. But these words are essential; for peace and justice must come in equal measure, and they don’t happen without hard work and the willingness to give something of one’s self. And the less we’re willing to listen, the more we’re willing to end conversations where they should begin, the longer that place in lower Manhattan will weep and fester as an open wound, and regardless of what building is erected, we will fail the memories of those who died that terrible morning nine years ago.

If you want more of the Reform Movement's perspective, go here.

What do you mean it's already August?!

Sorry for the delay; knee-deep in sermon writing (and that's going real swell, thanks for asking!). I'm hoping to post some Q&A I've been doing for CBE's online newsletter, the Beth Emeth News (BEN), but in the meantime, I wanted to put another question out there for you to generate some feedback and discussion:

I'm on the poetry committee for the new Reform Movement Mahzor (High Holiday prayerbook). How did I get on this? Well, at a meeting at the CCAR conference in San Francisco, I heard about some of the editorial ideas, and, frankly, didn't like what I heard. And then I started complaining with some colleagues. And then I realized that I was sounding like 'those people' (as in, "I don't want to be like 'those people', rabbi, but..."). I wasn't offering to help, I wasn't trying to be a part of the solution, I was just being a kvetch.

So I volunteered. I wrote my thesis on piyyutim and have tried my hand at liturgical poetry (among other genres) so why not? And to my surprise, they let me in (I keep waiting for the editors to realize their mistake, that they meant to grab Oren Hayon or something).

So now I'm going through the Birnbaum prayerbook and my old notes, as well as books like Weinberg's Jewish Hymnography. It's great fun and wonderful to be studying again. But it does lead me to ask a question, before I go too far down the piyyut rabbit hole:

What is it that you want in a High Holiday worship experience? What does your ideal Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur look like? Where does it take place? What is sung? What is read? How else do you want to experience it? What does God 'look' like on those days; how do you talk to God, and how does God speak back? I know what my answers are, but they're 'tainted', in that I'm so influenced by the tradition and my experiences as a service leader it's sometimes hard for me to remember what it's like to sit in the pews. So hearing your answers will be helpful (and for you as well I hope!).

Now back to sermon writing etc. Will be posting those as well, but not until we get a lot closer. It's not even Elul yet, after all!

Why does it cost so much to be Jewish?

A few years ago, at a program at Barack Academy (nee Akiva) in Philadelphia, the outgoing head of school described how it was now cheaper to make aliyah than try to maintain a Jewish life in America. Between synagogue affiliation, day schools, camp, etc., it was becoming increasingly untenable for most families to maintain a connection to those institutions that connect us to Jewish life.

These were not news to me, really. I had often lamented that we talk about membership in the fall and revenues in the spring. At the time I shared what I heard with other Jewish leaders and they brushed it off as hyperbole or shrugged their shoulders as if to say, well, yeah it's expensive, but what can we do?

Well, this article raises the question again, but with very different economic circumstances surrounding us. So, have we fallen into a trap of self preservation, and if so, how do we climb out of it? How can we think more creatively about synagogue (and other Jewish institutional) finance, without losing quality?

Some thoughts as we approach an important anniversary

With Gilad Shalit now reaching 4 years in captivity, I thought I'd share my "The Rabbi Speaks" for next weekend here:

In my wallet, surrounded by pictures of my son, credit cards, receipts and other assorted flotsam and jetsam, is what looks to be a baseball card. It’s blue, laminated, and has a young man in a uniform on the front, smiling, frozen forever in his youth. He’s not in a baseball uniform, however, nor any other sports paraphenalia. He wears the uniform of an Israeli paratrooper. His name is--was--Michael Levin, and he died on August 1st, 2006, leading his men against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Michael was an American, just 22 years old, from the Philadelphia region. While he was not a member of my congregation, I knew his family, their rabbi. Most of my congregants knew them, their kids had Michael as a summer camp counselor. Michael chose to make Aliyah, to immigrate to Israel, joined the army, earned the rank of sergeant, and was visiting his family while on leave when the war in Lebanon broke out. His friends told him to stay in the states, but he refused. His was an old-fashioned kind of Zionism, a love of land and people that could not be deterred nor minimized, and he was going to fulfill his duty to his people and homeland, though it would take his life. It was Israel where he belonged, alongside his men, and it is for Israel that he died, and in Israel where he is buried.

I think of Michael at this time of year, for this past Friday, June 25th, was the 4th anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s captivity. Shalit, of course, is the young soldier (he turns 24 this August) who was captured by Hamas in Gaza, after Israel’s disengagement and pullout from the Gaza strip. that event set off a chain reaction of kidnappings on the Lebanon border, causing Israel to move against Hezbollah and Hamas, therefore ending Michael’s life, along with the lives of many young people.

Full disclosure: I’m a peacenik, unabashedly so. I believe that there should be a Palestinian State, that Israel has a moral imperative to make peace with the Palestinian people. I believed in the Oslo process, what Yasser Arafat called “the peace of the brave”. I had hoped beyond hope for the Gaza disengagement to work. I want to see a smaller, more peaceful Israel, one that doesn’t have to send its children into harm’s way generation after generation. I cringe at the tone-deaf responses from an Israeli government paralyzed by its right-wing political parties and a military that is unmatched tactically and understands the immediate existential threat, but cannot see beyond the horizon to an Israel five, ten, twenty years from now and what is needed to fight and win then.

And yet, I am painfully aware of the double standard that Israel is held to, by both Jews and non-Jews. We expect and demand a Jewish state be somehow more ethical, more righteous, more perfect than any other in the world. I am aware of the latent anti-semitism that masks itself as a love of human rights or the downtrodden, that flinches at the idea of Jewish power. I am aware of a world that drinks in a sermon on ethical behavior from Turkey, a country that has perpetrated ethnic cleansing on the Armenians, and engaged in the surpression of the Kurdish people. I am aware of the pain all Israelis feel at Shalit’s captivity, for in Israel, which still maintains a national draft, he could be anyone’s son, anyone’s brother, anyone’s friend or partner.

A few weeks ago, after the Gulf of Mexico became a code-word for ecological disaster, before the World Cup and Kyrgestan exploded in violence, before McCrystal lost his job fighting the forever war in Afghanistan, Gaza came into our headlines again, with the deaths of so-called peace activists sailing a fleet of aid ships to a blockaded Gaza. We were all horrified by the scenes of violence, at the idea of young soldiers and sailors, poorly briefed and ill-equipped, rappelling into a lion’s den of violence, forced to respond with brutal violence themselves, resulting in indelible images of bloodshed and Israeli oppression. The incident with the blockade runners calls Israel’s leadership into question and heightens the need for a speedy peace. It reminds us that a military solution, by itself, will not solve Israel’s future security needs. But it also reminds me of Shalit and his parents, wondering if they will ever see their son again. It reminds me of Levin and his parents, how they will never see their son again. And it reminds me of this prayer offered by one of Israel’s greatest poets, Yehuda Amichai:

Not that of a cease-fire,
let alone the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather as in the heart after a surge of great emotion:
to speak only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill: that’s why I’m an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say mama.

A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into plowshares,
without words, without the heavy thud of the rubber stamp;
I want it gentle over us, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds--who speaks of healing?
(and the orphan’s cry is passed from one generation to the next
as in a relay race; that baton never falls).

I want it to come like wildflowers
suddenly, because the field needs it: wildpeace.

Required Reading

My Bible professor, Dr. (Rabbi) David Aaron, gave the commencement sermon at this year's Hebrew Union College Ordination in Cincinnati. If it were up to me, it would be handed out with every ordination certificate from HUC forever, and I'm sorry I wasn't there to hear it in person. It is as powerful a statement of what it means to be a progressive rabbi for a progressive movement as I've ever seen, and I'm not the least surprised.