I wrote this Thursday night to go up on Shabbat. You know how in movies the credits say "No animals were harmed during this filming?" Well no work was done on Shabbat during this post. I’m just sending you some Jerusalem visions. More tomorrow.
Tag: Jerusalem
JERUSALEM DIARY 2.0 – DAY FOUR – THE SOTAH AND MEA SHEARIM
Thursday morning I sent myself an email that said this: We are just leaving Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood and I am so freaked out. Maybe the SOTAH story had more impact than I realized. I told my husband that I was close to tears, that my chest was tight and I was someplace between scared and angry and he said – "You mean you felt like the Sotah, huh?" Well.
She does haunt me. Even now, when I have learned so much that mitigates the horrors of her treatment, I can see her, standing there, as they pull off her hair covering and stand her before God (and the priests), forced to drink the waters full of dirt and ashes. And what does that have to do with Mea Shearim? I’m the intruder there; the very Orthodox residents who choose to remain largely on the outskirts of the rest of the world and live a highly structured and mostly literal interpretation of every law and passage in the Torah – didn’t invite me to go wandering around looking at them while my husband bought a new Tallit (prayer shawl.) Even so, for some reason every time I go there I get so sad.
My husband once accused me of "overidentification with the oppressed." Maybe that’s it. The men are so clearly the ones with the power here, walking by in 2’s and 3’s while harried mothers and kids run errands and see to 3 or 4 children under 5. I have no right to consider them opressed. Or unhappy. Or anything else. What happens is that I imagine myself – stubborn, curious, eager to see and know everything – growing up here and wonder what would have become of me. Maybe I would have had a peaceful and loving life, but my projections won’t let me think about that. I just struggle with the stories I write in my mind about these families (these women) and their lives.
I have always loved The Chosen, and I have great respect for Chassidic Jews, for the most part. But there is something about this infinitely old, infinitely tired part of Jerusalem that just breaks my heart. As I write this, I suddenly wonder if perhaps it has more to do with me and my issues — that their lives are their own and I’m not sure that’s true of mine.
I’m writing this Thursday night in case I can’t finish it before Shabbat tomorrow — so Shabbat Shalom.
JERUSALEM DIARY 2.0 – DAY TWO (CORRECTED): THE SOTAH, THE HEBREW AND THE MEANDERINGS OF THE DAY
Isn’t this funny? We passed it walking home from dinner tonight and I just thought I’d share it. We’ve had quite a day, one that I’ve already written about once and then, somehow, allowed the post to be devoured by the ethers of the Internet. I’m going to try again but far more briefly as it’s getting late.
First, here’s my daily security photo – from outside the coffee shop where we had breakfast. And yes, this young man is patrolling THE MALL with a machine gun.
After that well-guarded breakfast we went to our first class of this trip at Pardes, a wonderful educational entity that’s tough to describe and even tougher not to love. Our teacher today, as she was last year, was Tovah Leah Nachmani (she’s on the left.) She’s an inspired and inspiring teacher and we had a blast discussing the laws of the Sotah (a woman accused of adultery) and, according to the Book of Numbers (Bamidbar), what should happen to her. You can read it here – beginning with verse 11. It’s fairly horrifying on first (or second or third) reading but this time we ended up with an unusual perspective.
Tovah sent us out with our Chevruta (study partner – mine was my husband) to try to figure out what the commentators were asking themselves as they wrote about this passage -and how they answered. As we did so, a strange perspective emerged. SEE DAY THREE POST FOR IMPORTANT CORRECTION TO THIS: Basically,it seems that asking a woman accused of adultery to stand before God to be judged (the only time God concerned Himself in this way with the laws of men), to drink water mixed with dirt from the Temple floor and the ashes of the burned paper accusing her, and then to wait to see if her belly swelled up or not (yes was a sign of guilt) seems to subjecte her to something both terrifying and humiliating. But once past that, even if she was guilty, there was no physical punishment, only a mandated divorce – and her lover was also punished. SEE DAY THREE POST FOR IMPORTANT CORRECTION TO THIS
There’s more to it though: if his possibly adulterous wife stands before God to be judged, no husband however outraged is going to play God and punish her himself -by killing her ashe could in so many other cultures or even by beating her. The ordeal in fact protects her from worse. In addition, it’s clear to all that the preservation of the family was so important that only God could adjudicate when it was so jeopardized.
There’s lots more to it but it’s really late. Suffice it to say that it was exciting to learn how much more lay behind this disturbing ritual. Even so, it’s all of a piece. )Our hair is dangerous, our voices are dangerous, even the potential for adulterous behavior is dangerous. WE are dangerous. And it’s not, mostly, for what we might do but for what we might cause to be done that is the big issue. Granted, the Sotah has to have been formally warned in advance by her husband that she shouldn’t hang around alone with a specific man he suspects of having designs on her – and she can only be tried if she has done just that, but even so, these rules don’t apply equally to husbands.
One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in the couple of years since I began studying this stuff, however, is that you can’t read it only from the perspective of the present. The culture of the times is a critical variable in the mission and outcome of divine commandments and their enforcement. And of what we can allow ourselves to learn as we read.
Enough already. We also had an amazing walk around the city, bought me an orange hat and had a three hour Hebrew lesson. But that’s for another day. Goodnight for now… and, as I learned today – erev tov.
JERUSALEM DIARY 2.0 – DAY ONE: LIVING WITH SECURITY -EVERY MINUTE, EVERY DAY
This is the Jerusalem we all love to imagine, and there’s plenty of it that’s just like that. Usually, that’s where we spend most of our time — biblical Jerusalem. It’s thrilling.
This time, though, we’re here to study, and for the first time, instead of staying in a hotel, we’re in an apartment in a real neighborhood (Bak’ah for those of you who know it). We arrived this afternoon after flying from 5 PM Monday DC time through to 2:30 PM Tuesday Jerusalem time. That’s a total of 14.5 hours with the layover in Frankfurt. So, exhausted and eager to get to bed, we spent the evening wandering around the neighborhood instead of going immediately to the Old City as we have in the past.
We needed coffee, milk and some other things so we stopped first at the supermarket just blocks from our "house." But guess what? Before we could get inside, we were stopped at the door, my bag was searched and we were sort of assessed before entering. Nicely, matter-of-factly, but for real. I took this photo of the security guys on the sly, that’s why it’s so blurry. But there you are. Need apple juice? Prepare to have the diaper bag searched.
Bags in tow, we went on to dinner at a wonderful grill/salad place. There are photos of both the salads and the place on the left, but guess what? Before we could go in we had to check in with the guard at the entrance. He asked me not to take his picture, but he was there. Hungry? Meeting friends for coffee? Prepare to be checked out not by the cuties at the next table, but by the guard at the door.
Wandering around after dinner, we found a sweet coffee place. Everyone was sitting outside; the traffic was buzzing by beyond the sidewalk, the coffee was great and we were in a great place – living a neighborhood life in another country — one of particular importance to us. But guess what? The coffee place is part of a local mall, along with a drugstore and some not-very-expensive (almost cheap) apparel stores. And guess who were sitting outside the doors, on stools, on the sidewalk? Yup – security guards. A quick check of our bags of coffee and bottled water, and of my back pack, and we were good to go. But there you are. Going for diapers or hand lotion? Prepare to be searched at the door.
I’m not writing this to complain. Today I just felt, in a different way, what it’s like to live here. Whatever your politics, the idea of a people so under siege that no grocery store or bowling alley or retail mall can exist without security guards checking everyone who enters, is creepy and sad. I know, I know, a grave portion of our globe is at some kind of risk. And I’d probably react the same way witnessing their struggles. But this is where I am, this is where I’ve come to study, this is where I look into the eyes of mothers in the baby food aisle and old ladies squeezing tomatoes and crews of students buying up unthinkable quantities of fast food. And as they move through their lives, relief from their sense of danger, of vulnerability, is possible, sustainable, only until the next time they walk out the front door. And that’s a hell of a way to live.
Something there is that doesn’t….
We had a lovely day. It began at the Kotel (Wailing Wall) at 7:30. The guys prayed on their side of the Wall and Lea, the rabbi’s daughter, and I prayed on the women’s side. She’s 7 and knows all the prayers cold – helped me as I’m the newbie and still learning. I don’t want to post her picture for kid privacy reasons but here’s what the scene looked like.
The Men’s Side
The Women’s Side
Then we went wandering. Where?
Sign inside Uri’s Pizza – a tiny hole-in-the-wall that our friend took us to to get caramel jelly donuts (don’t ask!)
We also had a lovely dinner – the whole group — and crashed early. Yeah- lots to talk about about the separation of women and men. Later though. G’nite.
PIX
This has been a great day but I may be too tired to tell you about it.
So here are some photos of
A soup kitchen warehouse where volunteers organize food to feed 5000 families and prepare 300 meals a day
Their kitchen
A funny picture of Jack Abramoff
that he isn’t in.
And some pretty flowers on the edge of the wall overlooking Old City excavations.
More tomorrow.
THE WEST WING AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Since the end of the Clinton administration, the West Wing hour was the only hour I felt like I had a president I could count on. Seeing it here so long after the show ended and Bravo stopped running it was a real ambush moment. Just reminded me how much I grieve for all I’ve thought should be… and how very much I feel we’ve failed. Talking with our Israeli friends about not so hard; their own sense of despair over the state of this country brought it all back. I’ll get over it…
Before my weeping incident it was a lovely day today. Early morning at the Kotel – me and the rabbi’s 7-year-old daughter on the women’s side and all the guys on the men’s. It was sunny and cool and the city glows in the morning. Of course it’s unsettling to pass through metal detectors to pray but once you’re there, it’s quite an experience.
We had a great breakfast back at the hotel, then went walking with our friend Asher. We spent a couple of hours exploring the Mehane Yehuda market – crammed with vegetables and spices; meat, cheese, sneakers and clogs, sweaters, hats, nuts, loose tea, bottled water and almost anything else you’d want to buy. Asher took us from there to his old neighborhood Nachlaot, historic old houses off narrow streets.. strands of flowers hanging off some of the roofs and historic plaques decorating the walls.
So there it is – another day in Israel — the ridiculous, the sublime and the inevitable intrusion of the political longings that even a great adventure can’t stave off forever.
THE HARD PARTS
This picture, pulled from an image file because my camera battery died, is of a sign that appears all over the Jerusalem neighborhood called Mea Shearim. The article I linked to here calls it a “living museum” but somehow to me it’s always been oppressive. I go to an Orthodox synagogue and am accustomed to some painful facts about the role of women in Orthodox Judaism but this is different. To me it feels so joyless and heavy – I feel it sitting on my chest. No one smiles. No one will exchange a nod or even a glance as you pass them on the street – not the men who technically aren’t allowed to look at women not their wives, not the women – I’m not sure why — or even the kids. They are as closed off from us as if we were on two sides of a glass.
Sure you can buy things but that’s it. And it seems so strange to me that their stores are tangles of goods — no displays, no efforts to make things attractive – just piles and jumbles. I keep telling myself that it’s because the material world is so irrelevant to them. Their lives – every moment – belong to God. And to many I know that’s laudable. In some ways it is… but — and I’m thinking out loud here — in my view God gave us the rest of the world — why shouldn’t we enjoy it, too?
I guess I’ll just have to continue to struggle. I never could stand not being able to connect with people. Maybe I just want the connection that I have no right to expect. My husband says that I’m looking at THEIR lives through MY eyes and I have to open my mind to the acceptable differences between us. But they transmit such disapproval and so clearly feel none of the commonality that I want to feel with others who choose to practice Judaism that it’s tough. I’m thinking as I’m typing that it’s my bad – that I have to simply accept without comment the lives of others and stop wanting them to love me. Wow. Maybe that’s the whole thing — that and what I feel about the women and their very constrained lives. More to come on this I suspect.
Spent the rest of the day wandering around Jerusalem. In the morning we took a two hour class on the story of the Rape of Dina in Genesis. Because it was particularly important to me to read, particularly as a woman, it was quite exciting to spend two hours on it and the views of the sages about it. I love the intellectual activity that is part of Jewish study. Questions — then answers… but always more than one — shared observations, shared theories and opinions. To me the idea that Judaism is not a destination but a journey informed by shared study is wonderful and among the best aspects of it. Just the opposite of what seems to be going on in Mea Shearim. Gotta keep thinking… but right now I’m just going to sleep. Signing off from the City of Gold.
SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN
Here we are in what is supposed to be the best hotel in Jerusalem and the Internet can not get from the wall to my laptop. I’m down here in the business center just touching base but will post more when I have true access to the web, my camera etc. Sleep well everyone – Jerusalem is a huge intellectual, emotional and spiritual provocation. Will tell more later. Gnite for now. I cant’ find the apostrophe on this Israeli keyboard.
ART AND POLITICS
Just to the left is a famous mosaic of Tel Aviv scenes that’s stood in the middle of town since the early 70s. We went with our friends Joel and Nurith to the Nahum Gutman Museum and saw photos of the work, which I loved. Naturally, Joel immediately decided that we had to go see it. And we did. It’s a dear. lovely, loving and evocative work of the three columns you see here, surrounded by a ring of more scenes that serves as a kind of frame — really lovely.
The museum currently features a retrospective of the work of Duda Geva, an Israeli cartoonist who died recently, quite young. His work was kind of disconcerting; much of it joking about the absence of God. He appeared prominently in Israeli newspapers — and the tiny museum was jammed. It’s so fascinating, in a Jewish country, that this very secular man had such a wide following. Typical of the enigmatic nature of Israel in the 21st century – battling between the disproportionately powerful 15% who are super-orthodox and the rest of the country and of the frightful battle for the soul of the country between militant, militaristic right and the progressives. There is such pain and despair — on both sides. I’m going to try to write about it some here in future posts — after two years in progressive and highly secular Tel Aviv we go to Jerusalem tomorrow where religion and more conservative politics rule.