Israel in a nutshell

In August 2013, I went to Israel to see if I wanted to move there. I didn't and, ironically, events on that trip lead to me moving to New Zealand a year later. Now life had come full-circle, with my eldest going on a gap-year program in Israel and me coming to visit her.

We planned it to coincide with the two-week school holiday, which happened to include Easter Friday, Easter Monday and ANZAC day (all public holidays in NZ) plus Passover*.  At the end of the seder dinner each year, the last thing you say is, "Next year in Jerusalem!" so even though we'd miss our friends, it was pretty cool to be celebrating in Israel.

The itinerary was pretty complicated. We started out as three -- me, my partner and son -- meeting a friend of mine from the UK and staying at her sister's place in Sde Boker, in the Negev, which happened to be near where my daughter was. After a few days, we'd say goodbye to my friend and take my daughter to Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, where my partner's cousin lived.  My mother-in-law from Scotland was meeting us there, and then the five of us were going to Zicchron Yaakov, halfway to Haifa, to see my mother-in-law's cousin.  Finally, we shifted to Jerusalem for three days, but one of those days was taking my mother-in-law to the airport and visiting a friend in Modi'in.  Finally, on the last day, even though the airport was half an hour away we had to drive two hours to drop my daughter then ninety minutes back to the airport, return the car and check in by 11am.  (I knew that would never happen.)

Things got even more complicated when we had a car accident. Fortunately no one was hurt, but the car had to be towed away. The rental agency gave us a new one which was much smaller, but because it was Passover we didn't have any other option. (Passover is a pilgrim holiday, which means lots of people visiting Jerusalem.)  Cramming five people in the car was bad enough, but there was no room for all of our suitcases!  Fortunately, my partner and I were able to cram our stuff into one large suitcase and leave the other at the kibbutz.  (That suitcase was mostly filled with things for my daughter, so it was fairly empty.  Since we planned to return our daughter to the kibbutz, anyway, it wasn't a big deal, although we later realised she was perfectly comfortable getting around by public transportation so we could have cut out three hours of driving, but now we had to go just to grab the other suitcase!)

In two weeks we saw Avdat (a Nabatean City), Ein Avdat (a canyon with a spectacular waterfall), Masada (a Roman palace that became the last stand of the Zealots), the Dead Sea (lowest place on earth), Shuq haCaramel (a large market in Tel Aviv), Stella Maris monastery in Haifa (unfortunately we arrived on a Bahá’í holiday, so the Bahá’í Gardens were closed), Cesearea (a Roman town that became a Crusader fortress), Zicchron Yaakov (which we were only using as a base, but the city was one of our favourite experiences), and Modi'in (a city between the original Balfour line and the 1949 armistice line, in no man's land).  In Jerusalem we explored the Western Wall, the Old City, Mahane Yahuda market, Mamilla mall  and (accidentally) the Muslim quarter and the West Bank.

The most amazing experience, by far, was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Centre.  I've been to Holocaust memorials around the world, but there is nothing that prepares you for this.  The detail, the faces, the stories are all recounted, until you feel you know these people, and then suddenly you're faced with a pile of silver menorah looted from synagogues, or a pile of shoes, and it is unbearable. We all cried, and we could have spent days there.  The Children's Memorial, in particular, was incredibly touching: In a dark cave, one-way mirrors turned five candles into a million points of light, while disembodied voices read off the list of the 1.5 million children who died.  That's unfathomable.

By the numbers, we  met 16 family members, three friends and two people we knew from New Zealand (it's a small world); we moved five times; and we drove entirely too much.  To be fair, Israel is a very small country (New Zealand is seven times as big) so the issue wasn't the distance, but just how aggressive Israeli drivers were.  I was overtaken in a roundabout! Driving was stressful and exhausting, and left me very irritable.  I'm sure I took it out on everyone at one point or another.

We'd promised our daughter we'd take her grocery shopping, as options on the kibbutz were quite limited, especially gluten-free.  What we didn't consider was that we left on the last day of Passover, which is a day of rest, and because it fell on a Friday that meant all shops would be shut for two days in a row.  As a result, when we got to the supermarket it had been ravaged, and they closed early as well!  We were driving back from Modi'in and I decided to take us through the West Bank because, of course, the Muslim shops would not be celebrating Passover!  It was an interesting experience, with lots of barbed wire and a checkpoint or two, but the supermarket was actually nicer than the one we'd been at.

I have to note that Google Maps is a nightmare in Israel.  It seems to insist on taking the most inappropriate routes.  When trying to get to the Western Wall, it took me on a half-hour excursion through some of the poorest sections, with the narrowest streets. In getting the supermarket, it took me down a back alley and through a flooded ditch.  I later discovered there was a main road we could have taken.  Everyone recommended I switch to Waze, which was created by Israelis, but it would only display the street names in Hebrew, which was not much use to me.

Another interesting discovery: "Kosher for Passover rolls."  One of the fundamental points of Passover is that you are supposed to get rid of all "leavened bread" products: Bread, cake, pizza, etc.  Some groups take it to extreme and avoid a raft of other things (oats, legumes) but in Israel the restaurants just switch over to gluten-free bread and carry on as usual!  For my partner, who is coeliac, it was like manna from heaven, but for me it just felt like cheating.

Another oddity is that it's very hard to find falafel in Israel that don't contain wheat.  I don't know why this is -- they shouldn't contain wheat -- but we asked everywhere and only found one place, in Zicchron, that said their falafel didn't contain any wheat.  We eagerly ordered two, chose our fillings and took them down to a little park to eat.  It was then we discovered there were no falafel in our falafel sandwiches.  (But the bread was gluten-free, go figure.)

Enough talk, here's some photos:

* The Last Supper appears to be a Passover celebration, so you'd think the two would be linked, but Passover is celebrated on the 5th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, and Easter is the first Sunday at least 13 days after the first new moon after the vernal equinox, so while the two are usually in spring, they rarely coincide.

Drasha - Tsav

On March 1, just three weeks ago, Rabbi Arthur Starr was here and gave a drasha discussing, among other things, the first shabbat after the 9/11 attack.  He said, we must feel for those wounded and killed in that horrendous event, but we must also make Shabbat a respite from all of that. Those words seem very prescient today.  We come together as a community to mourn, to comfort, to support one another, but we don’t limit that to one day of the week. Yesterday we commemorated the victims. Today, we heal ourselves.

I’ve chosen not to read my original drasha, but to read extracts from a drasha written two years ago by Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins, Senior Rabbi of Emanuel Synagogue in Sydney, Australia.

https://wupj.org/library/the-weekly-portion/1048/vayikra-torah-from-around-the-world/

The Torah of Priests for a Kingdom of Priests: Living with Conscious Being

Vayikra, the third book of the Torah, is known in the tradition as “Torat Cohanim”, dealing as it does with many laws concerning the priests and their role in leading the people in service to God. ... Of all the books in the Torah, Vayikra challenges us to think about what it means to live by the Torah’s precepts and what it means to be in service to God.

Just as the Cohanim of Torah and Temple times were called to lead the people in service to God, so too the Jews, known as a “mamlechet cohanim” – a kingdom of priests – are called to lead humanity in service to God as a “holy nation”. With the destruction of the Second Temple, the role of the Cohanim in their service is more circumscribed; [but] our service as a holy nation has never been more demanding.

...

To be a “kingdom of priests”, a people willing to take a leadership role among humanity in the service of God, requires diligent study and discerning application of Torah. … [The] opening word “vayikra”, whose last letter “aleph” is written small, provides an important insight into how we can connect with God and how we can read Torah.

Much rabbinic commentary has been written about the meaning of this “small aleph”. ... The Hassidic master, Menachem Mendel of Rymanov, taught that the only revelation actually heard by the people was just the aleph, the sound of which is silence. The small aleph at the beginning of Vayikra is a reminder that when we are called to the service of God, we should always recall just how small we are in the face of the infinite, ineffable mystery of life. Life in all its majesty and mystery is what we are called to serve. Understanding God as “existence and presence”, the creator of life, should inform our conscious being.

This principle guides us in our study and application of Torah. ... Our words and our will should be striving toward that which we understand as the source of Conscious Being.

Reading Torah as a pathway to conscious being and then accordingly applying its lessons is the ultimate “avodah”, or service of God. ...  There is so much in this book that guides us to living with deep awareness, such as teachings concerning the sacredness of time through Shabbat and festivals, the protection of the poor and underprivileged, the relationship we have with the animal world and our planet, and the striving for God as a holy people.

... A “kingdom of priests” must study and apply Torah with humility to understand our sacred responsibility of living with conscious being.

That is the end of Rabbi Kamins drasha, but I will add one more thought to this. We are all familiar with the Mishna tractate on the Sanhedrin, or rabbinical courts, warning:

Adam was created singly, to teach us that whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world.

This is quoted in the Quran, in the retelling of the story of Cain and Abel.

Our world was destroyed on March 15th; a week ago we awoke to a new world. Our leaders, and the thousands of kiwis who have donated time or money are already helping to make sure it is a better world. What else can we do to help?

Shabbat shalom.

Post Script

Whenever I write, I'm reminded of the adage, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."*  It's just so easy to regurgitate facts and figures and so time-consuming to try and distill knowledge and wisdom.

I remarked on the unfathomable scale of the Christchurch earthquake, and yet I know it's actually quite small compared to other natural disasters. In terms of deaths, the 2010 Haiti earthquake killed 160,000 and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed almost a quarter million people.  In terms of magnitude, neither quake was in the top 40.  In terms of property damage, it ranks 7th on the list.

Closer to home, I was in Los Angeles for the 1994 Northridge quake, which was 6.7 magnitude (and 3rd on the list of costliest natural disasters).  The Richter scale is logarithmic, so a 7.0 earthquake is ten times bigger than a 6.0 earthquake (and releases about 31 times as much energy).  Thus, the Northridge quake was 5 times bigger than the Christchurch earthquake, but it was deeper, there was limited liquefaction and I suspect LA had higher building codes, so you had a lot of damage but not the same level of distraction.  (To be fair, LA has earthquakes about every 20 years, and is still poorly prepared.  Christchurch hadn't had a quake in 110 years before this one-two blow.)

Also, my dad was in the hospital, dying.  I can't remember which hospital now, but it was close to Northridge.  The day before the quake, the doctor had told us his kidneys were shutting down and he had about four days to live.  I got to tell him, just before he slipped into unconsciousness, that his house was destroyed.  So my experience and memory of the actual earthquake was a bit hazy.

It's been eight years since the quakes, and Christchurch is an amazing city.  That they decided to bulldoze all the properties, rather than leave them to rot, is a testament to their will.  That they have no idea what to do with the area is a damning statement on their vision.  That they have rebuilt much of the city, from the ground up, is incredible; that they have not addressed the mental toll is incredulous.  That they changed the building codes to ensure this never happens again is laudable; that they were so unprepared for it, living on the Ring of Fire, is laughable.

As always, it's easy to judge in hindsight, and difficult to see the future.  Christchurch drained the New Zealand economy: While the Northridge quake cost USD $49 billion, that's less than 1/4 of 1 percent of the US GDP.  The Christchurch quake cost USD $40 billion, but that's 20% of New Zealand's GDP!  Almost all improvement programs throughout New Zealand were put on hold while the Christchurch rebuild was underway.

There is a parallel in all of this: The 1931 Napier earthquake, a monster 7.8 magnitude that killed 256 people and virtually levelled the town.  As Wikipedia notes: "The earthquake prompted a thorough review of New Zealand building codes, which were found to be totally inadequate.... Building regulations established as a result of this event mean that to this day, there are only four buildings in Hawke's Bay taller than five storeys, and as most of the region's rebuilding took place in the 1930s when Art Deco was fashionable, Hawke's Bay architecture is regarded today as being one of the finest collections of Art Deco in the world."

That was a happy accident, and there is no such coherence in the Christchurch rebuild.  My feeling is that, like the LA rebuild, it was designed to take advantage of government money and get things done as quickly as possible, with no real thought to the future or vision of what Christchurch wanted to be.  (The LA freeways were rebuilt to the same specifications that caused them to collapse in the first place.)  That was a wasted opportunity, but probably a necessary compromise at the time. Even today, with vast stretches of abandoned land, it would be good for Christchurch to take a collective breath and figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. But I guess the same could be said of any city.

* It's not by Mark Twain: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

D'rash - parashat Terumah

Exodus 26:31-27:19 (triennial)

Terumah begins the exciting portion where G*d describes the mishkan, or tent of meeting, and all the rules and rituals that we no longer follow, in excruciating detail. This triennial describes the curtains, the altar and the outer courtyard. There’s lot of yarn, linen, copper, silver, acacia wood and implements for animal sacrifices. It is said the tent was used for 440 years before Solomon’s temple replaced it as the dwelling-place of G*d.

Today, we reference some of these things, such as the menorah, but we use candles instead of oil.  The ark holds scrolls rather than tablets, the Ner Tamid is electric, the curtain is blue velvet not purple yarn, we have lions instead of cherubs.  There is no alter or courtyard or Holy of Holies, and thankfully nothing is gilded. Because our methods of worship have changed, it is easy to write this portion off as irrelevant, or at least archaic. 

Rabbi JoEllen, at the 2014 shabbaton, was the first to teach me about PaRDeS, an acronym for the four levels of interpretation:

• Peshat – "surface" or literal meaning
• Remez – "hints" or symbolic meaning
• Derash – the comparative meaning
• And Sod – "secret"  or mystical meaning

So if we move past Peshat and look at the text from a symbolic viewpoint, we can start with the word “Terumah.” which is interpreted as “gifts.”  The first line is “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him.”

Terumah is a negotiation, a contract. In last week’s portion, Mishpatim, G*d has made promises to drive out Israel’s enemies and give them their land, to remove sickness and make them fruitful. In Terumah, G*d sets out what He wants in return. It was not just money but also labour and skill, worship and fealty. This was a covenant for all generations.

So these symbols we surround ourselves with aren’t to remind us of the specifics of the Tent of Meeting, but our Covenant with G*d, and that it is a two-way street.  We ask for blessings, protection, guidance and peace, and in exchange G*d wants our faith, our time, our talents (and a little bit of our money). He asks us to be moral, to not follow our base instincts, to help others.  Of course, we could do all of this without G*d, but it’s much easier as part of a community, and reminded by everything around us.

[From wikipedia]

Two thousand years ago, Josephus interpreted the Tabernacle and its furnishings to represent the universe. He saw the Tabernacle's two parts accessible to the priests (the Holy and the Courtyard) to denote the land and the sea, the third part (the Holy of Holies) to represent heaven, inaccessible to people. He saw the veils as the four elements: the linen represented earth, purple the sea, blue for the air; and scarlet for fire.

Moving into Derash -- which is related to the word “midrash” -- we compare this portion to other portions.  In the most famous example, the rabbis compared this section of Exodus to Genesis 2: After G*d created the universe, he ceased from working.  In two weeks time, in Ki Tisa, the last instructions for the Tabernacle are immediately followed by a reminder about the importance of the Shabbat. Moreover, the same word -- melakha -- is used in both portions.  It is usually translated as “work” but can also refer to "workmanship", which is defined as “the skill with which something was made or done.” In other words, this work of man was equivalent to God’s work of creation, and thus was what was forbidden on Shabbat.  The rabbis then compiled the 39 melachot which is the basis for Orthodox shabbat.

As for the secret or hidden meaning, if we believe the Torah is of divine origin, that it comes from the infinite and we have to grasp it with our finite brains, then of course there will be hidden details.  If we believe it was written by man, and has been translated and changed throughout the generations, then of course things have been lost or reinterpreted. As the Pirkei Avot says of Torah, “Turn it and turn it again, for all is in it; see through it; grow old and worn in it.”  Each of you can turn this portion and find a different meaning, and I encourage you to do so.

One last interpretation, this one from the website Simchat Torah Beit Midrash: “Terumah teaches us the importance of giving. You may not be building a tabernacle, but you are building a family, a community, a business, relationships.  You always have something to contribute, and you should never underestimate the importance and power of the gift that you have to offer. At the same time, it is just as important to recognize that every person around you has something to offer, too.  Never underestimate the importance of every single person in your life.”

Today’s portion belongs to both Sam and my daughter, Lilly.  She would have read it but, as many of you know, last week she left for Israel. Over the next ten months, she will be making personal connections to all these things we talk about. When she returns, Torah will no longer be just words and stories, but sights, sounds, smells, experiences and memories. It is an amazing opportunity, and I want to thank the community who, directly and indirectly, made it possible through their own gifts.  You have all played a part in who she has become, and you have collectively done a fantastic job. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, and shabbat shalom.