Rabbi Barry Leff Digest
Number 70  Date  2/12/04

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Praised is God’s glory from His place—report from the Rabbinical Assembly Conference in Jerusalem

Tuesday morning as I was walking to the Kotel (the Western Wall) for morning prayers I was at the top of Yemin Moshe just as the sun was coming up over the hills in Jordan in the distance.  The sky was red, the Old City of Jerusalem was right in front of me, it was a truly beautiful site—I was moved to recite the blessing for seeing a beautiful sight, which is basically, “Thanks God, you do good work!”  From the top of Yemin Moshe I walked down the steps, down to the upper end of GeiHinnom, the Valley of Hinnom.  GeiHinnom, the Hebrew word for Hell, the place where Canaanites offered child-sacrifices, is now a park.  I couldn’t help contrasting this spot with Iraq.  There was an article in the New Yorker a while back, about how in Iraq there is tree in a courtyard which the locals claim is where the Garden of Eden was, and it’s supposed to be the tree that Adam and Eve at from.  Now it’s all paved over around it, and run down and decrepit looking, and the tree is fading and dying.  When I read the article I thought of the old 60s song with the line “they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”

By contrast, Israel turned Hell into a Garden.  As I left Hell, I walked the short distance to God’s address on the planet Earth—the site where the Temple once stood.  For a Jew to move to Israel is called making “aliyah,” going up.  To get to the site of the Temple, you have to go up, you ascend in a physical as well as a spiritual sense.  Just like I tell my friends when I take them flying in a small plane—I’ll get you closer to God one way or the other!

When I arrived at the Wall, I have to admit to having felt a little discomfort with the big deal we make about this spot.  The Wall itself, of course, is not even a wall of the Temple, but rather the retaining wall the Herod built.  But my concern was this—isn’t this big deal we make about going and praying facing a wall, near the site where the Temple stood, something that borders on avodah zarah, on idol worship?

But as soon as I started praying with my 300 colleagues, the magic of the place took over.  We were praying at the “Conservative section” of the wall, by Robinson’s Arch, south of the section that the tourists all visit, which is run as an Orthodox synagogue.  We have a section of the wall where we can pray with men and women together.  When I got to the spot in the prayers when we say “Baruch k’vod Adonay mimkomo,” praised is God’s glory from His place, I stopped short.  I was standing there, at the spot that for 3000 years the Jewish tradition has said is God’s place on Earth.  That feeling of connection with God, with the Jews around me, and with the Jews who came there before was incredibly powerful.  I realized the power of coming to that place is not because of anything that relates to idol worship.  It’s not that God is more present at the Wall—after all, the prophet also said “m’lo kol ha’aretz k’vodo,” the whole world is full of His Glory—but rather we are more open to feeling God’s presence in that place because of our associations with it.  It’s the same reason it’s easier to feel God’s presence in a synagogue—or on a mountaintop—than in a shopping center.

Despite being a rabbi, I’m not the kind of person who goes around spouting Scripture all the time, but Jerusalem is a place that brings Scripture to mind all the time.  As I was on my morning run yesterday, as I approached the walls of the Old City, the line from Psalm 51 came to mind “tivneh chomot Yerushalayim,” build the walls of Jerusalem..and as we continue when we bring the Torah out from the ark, for in You alone do we trust.  And as I rounded the corner and began my climb to the church which sits at the Zion Gate (which isn’t REALLY Mt. Zion, but no matter) the words from Isaiah chapter 2 came to mind “ki miTzion tatzei Torah,” for from Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.  And I prayed that the word of the Lord would again be going forth from a Jerusalem at peace.

One of the things I love about being in Jerusalem is you feel like you are in the center of lots of things going on.  Our convention has drawn a fair amount of press.  After our prayers Tuesday morning, we went up to the Western Wall Plaza to check out what’s going on there, with the Orthodox rabbis who run that section of the Wall engaged in a “land grab” to expand the amount of the plaza taken up by the separate men’s and women’s section—reducing the amount of space available behind the separate sections which is often used by groups of visiting Conservative and Reform Jews for minyans.  The paper reported that we conducted a vigil and one of our members was detained by the police.  It wasn’t quite as exciting as it sounds.  We went up there and took a look around, and one rabbi who disagreed about moving on when the police told him to move on was briefly taken inside the police station for a talking too.

We were also in the paper thanks to a speech Tomy Lapid gave to us on Tuesday night.  Tuesday night both Shimon Peres and Tomy Lapid came and spoke to us.  Peres was very thoughtful and statesmen-like, but nothing he said was picked up by the papers.  Lapid (head of the very secular Shinui party, and Justice Minister) on the other hoand, got covered by the papers because he had some very outspoken things to say. 

Lapid gave what would have been a great campaign speech, if we were eligible to vote for him.  He told us, a group of Conservative rabbis, “Israel is the only country in the world where Conservative and Reform rabbis are Class B citizens, and I don’t understand why you are willing to live with it.”  He said he doesn’t understand why we tolerate this insult.  He also said he felt that this discrimination poses an existential threat to State of Israel: if Reform and Conservative Jews from America feel discriminated against, they will not be such strong supporters of Israel, and Israel absolutely needs American support.  He told us we should be more aggressive in standing up for our rights.  He said Judaism has a bad name amongst the secular Jews in Israel because they associate Judaism with people like Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef and Arieh Deri of Shas, and want nothing to do with such a Judaism.  R. Yosef is very radical in some of his pronouncements, and Deri, the former had of Shas, did jail time on charges of bribery.

As if there wasn’t enough going here, there was an earthquake Wednesday, when I was on a trip to the Negev.  The Israelis immediately started joking—Hamas has claimed responsibility for the earthquake, while Yasser Arafat denies having anything to do with it.

Yet another connection to the news--Wednesday night the mayor of the town of Omer was supposed to meet with us, but his son who is pilot in the IAF had to bail out of his plane (!) earlier in the day;  the plane, an A4 Skyhawk was destroyed by the crash of course.  His son was OK, but was taken to the hospital in Tel Aviv for observation.  The mayor didn’t get back in time to meet with us.  We understood; Israel really feels like small place sometimes.

One of the messages that came through from several of the people we met with—from Lapid, from Avishay Braverman, the president of Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, and from a formerly secular Israeli who is now a congregant in the Conservative congregation in Omer, is that Conservative Judaism very well may have a critical role to play in the future of Israel.

Braverman told us he was very concerned about the moral and ethical fibre of the Israeli people.  Israel is NOT living up to the standards of the Jewish tradition with our behavior toward the Palestinians, with our behavior toward each other in politics, with the culture of greed that is flourishing here.  Israel desperately needs to have Jewish values be part of what drives Israeli society forward.  Yet many of the 80% of Jews in Israel who are secular have been totally turned off to religion because of the shenanigans, close-mindedness, and seemingly immoral statements and acts that frequently emanate from the ultra-Orthodox community.  They think that’s what Judaism is and want no part of it.  Yet when they learn about Conservative/Masorti Judaism, they see that Judaism CAN have a “kinder and gentler” face.  When they meet rabbis who also have solid secular educations, they learn that not all rabbis are racist fanatics.  And they are willing to learn from us, and are willing to let us teach their children.  The values of Judaism we can share can deepen Israeli’s connection and dedication to Israel—and perhaps help to reduce the “brain drain” of many of Israel’s best and brightest deciding to leave for America. 

One way Conservative/Masorti Judaism is helping with this is through the Tali School program.  Thanks to the Tali program, thousands of kids in mamlachti schools (secular curriculum) are getting at least a few hours a week of Jewish education, which may play a crucial role in bring Jewish values to the next generation of Jews in the Holy Land. 

Nowhere were the values of Conservative Judaism shown in greater force than in a bar mitzvah ceremony for “special needs” kids I attended today.  The Orthdox position has traditionally been that someone who is severely retarded is NOT eligible for an aliyah to the Torah.  Reuven Hammer, an Israeli rabbi who is head of the world-wide Rabbinical Assembly, wrote a teshuva, a Jewish legal opinion, which says that as long as the person can “direct their attention to God” they can have an aliyah.  Some of the kids study for six months to be able to just recite the blessings.  Some kids can’t even do that…they are trained how to use a machine which can recite the blessing for them.  They all study, and work at it for six months—and they do whatever it is they can do at that point.  One child had someone signing the blessings for him to recite.

It was incredibly moving.  I found myself thinking that this was a real testimony to the Jewish concept that the value of life is infinite.  And if the value of life is infinite, someone with handicaps is certainly the “equal” of someone without handicaps, and deserves to be treated with the same respect and honor, because they too are created “b’tzelem Elohim,” in God’s image.

More Jewish values were shown in the relationship between the Beduoin community in Tel Beersheva and the Masorti synagogue in Omer.  It was wonderful to hear of Jews and Muslims celebrating holidays together, and not just tolerating each other, but enjoying each other’s company.  It was delightful to see religion being a bridge between Jews and Muslims, instead of a barrier, or worse.

As if I haven’t been on the run enough in the three days I’ve been here so far, this morning I participated in the annual “Rabbi’s Run” sponsored by Behrman House.  I didn’t know this when I started out, but they make it a real race—at breakfast I was handed a trophy, for coming in third!  When I noticed that the trophy said “second place,” I told a colleague I was concerned about violating the Biblical precept to stay far from a false matter.  So I pointed the error out to the organizer, and he said that the trophy store gave him two first places and two second places.  My colleague told me not to worry about the “false matter” issue, I’ll always be third place in his mind…  J

Amongst all this fun was a reminder that times in Israel are still difficult.  Due to Israel killing 15 Palestinian militants and terrorists in an operation in Gaza Strip, the country is on a high alert because Hamas has vowed revenge, and the Israelis are bracing for an ugly terror attack.

May the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael reconcile their differences and live together as brothers in the land God promised to their father Abraham.  Amen.

Rabbi Barry Leff

Jerusalem, Israel

fax: (604) 271-6270

email: rebbarry@yeladim.org

phone: (604) 271-6262
fax: (604) 271-6270
web: www.btikvah.ca
email: rebbarry@yeladim.org

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