Loving Israel Flaws and All

Loving Israel, Flaws And All

Rabbi Keren Gorban Temple Sinai

Shabbat Tzav 5776 – March 25, 2016

Who here loves someone? Now, who here loves someone who’s perfect, someone without flaws, who makes no mistakes, who has no problems? Of course not…such a person doesn’t exist. And though we might wish that certain flaws or problems would disappear and that the people we love would be perfect, we don’t expect it of them. At most we encourage improvement and hope apologies come after mistakes. We don’t necessarily love the flaws, but we aren’t blind to them, and, in fact, in relationships just as in life, ignoring problems and mistakes can lead to significantly worse outcomes than acknowledging them and dealing with them head on.

That’s partly why our tradition gives us specific instructions for how to deal with our problems and mistakes. In Tzav, our parashah this week, we are given the details of how the priests should enact the sin and guilt offerings or, more accurately, the purgation and reparation offerings. The sin or purgation offerings rid us of the spiritual yuckiness (that’s the technical term) that comes from making mistakes. The guilt or reparation offerings help us make amends. In both cases, a person should bring the appropriate offering as soon as they realize their sin and, when necessary, made amends. These offerings, described in excruciating detail in Leviticus, model for us how to be in relationship with each other as much as they tell us how to be in relationship with God. Well aware of our tendency to make mistakes, God gave us a way to address them and move on. Just as God’s love for us doesn’t require us to be perfect, we should not require perfection from those we love. And the same holds true when we love country.

Rabbi Donniel Hartman, the head of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where Rabbi Gibson studies each summer and where I had the opportunity to study during the convention, notes that there are two types of narratives about Israel. The first he calls the “Crisis-Death Narrative,” and the other he calls the “Messianic-Redemptive Narrative.” In the Crisis-Death Narrative, either Diaspora Jewry is threatened by antisemitism and Israel will save us from destruction OR Israel’s existence is threatened by the neighboring Arab nations and Diaspora Jewry must save it from destruction. There are significant problems with these beliefs, but I’m not going to go into them. Instead, I want to focus on the “Messianic-Redemptive Narrative.”

In the Messianic-Redemptive Narrative, Israel is the embodiment of the age-old Jewish hope to return to the Promised Land and, as such, is the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jews. Rabbi Hartman sees two ways in which people express this narrative: 1) as the fulfillment of God’s promise, Israel can do no wrong OR 2) the problems they see in Israel contradict the redemptive vision so greatly that Israel cannot be the fulfillment of God’s promise. In that understanding, we must completely disengage from such a terrible bastardization of the vision for Israel and perhaps even work against it.

But Israel is neither perfect nor evil. Though we wish it to embody our highest ideals, it, like all of us, struggles to achieve that vision.

The convention program allowed us to see some of those struggles and the work that people are doing to try to address and mitigate them. I went on a tour that highlighted the terrible economic gap between rich and poor. My group visited Shechunat HaArgazim, a neighborhood in south Tel Aviv that doesn’t appear on official Israeli maps. It was settled by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries before 1948 and functioned as a maabarah, a transit camp for new immigrants waiting to get permanent housing. The permanent housing never came, and the people who live there have been making improvements on their temporary homes. Now, houses—often made of corrugated metal shipping containers (containers are called argazim)—have electricity and indoor plumbing, but that has happened piecemeal and through less than official means. There’s still no sewage system and no official road system or even house numbers, which means that there’s no way to get mail delivered to houses. On the plus side, residents don’t pay taxes, but they also can’t sign up for state services, especially those for the impoverished, that require an official address. Because residents don’t officially live there— despite having lived there for seventy years—they also have no rights to the land or their homes.

This issue has come to the fore over the past few years because the city of Tel Aviv sold the land in and around Sechunat haArgazim to a developer who is building luxury high-rise apartment buildings. These apartments will be significantly more affordable than those in the center of the city, but the families from HaArgazim will not be able to afford them, even though the developer is required to offer them housing. After seventy years of being almost forgotten, no one really cares what will happen to them now.

Meanwhile, just a 10 minutes’ drive north is the Sarona neighborhood.

This former German Templars’ colony went through a significant preservation and renovation process to turn buildings from the 1870s into a high end shopping and tourist district. The city spent billions of dollars to upgrade the neighborhood, including moving five buildings to widen a road. The apartment buildings that are being built around the neighborhood will be so expensive that only the wealthiest Israelis and foreigners will be able to afford to live there. All around Israel new apartment buildings are going up, but few Israelis who need housing will be able to afford it.

Israel, which used to have one of the most egalitarian societies and one of the smallest gaps between rich and poor, now has one of the largest economic gaps. It falls just behind Mexico, Turkey, and the US on the list of countries with the worst income inequality. More than 20% of Israelis live below the poverty line, while—and these are very unofficial numbers—about 20 families control about 80% of the wealth.

Almost five years ago, following the Occupy Wall Street movement and galvanized by skyrocketing cottage cheese prices—which, for those of you who Israelis, is a staple of their diet—not to mention unaffordable housing, Israelis took to the streets to protest the rising cost of living. And within months, the uprising crumbled because of increased rocket fire from Gaza into the south of Israel. Since then, domestic issues have repeatedly been put on the back burner as the government deals with security issues. The Crisis- Death Narrative rears its head to allow Israel to avoid taking care of its vulnerable citizens.

Now I am far from the first person to say that security is not an important issue in Israel; on the contrary, security is of great importance. Probably the scariest thing that happened to me on this trip was my aunt and cousin warning me to be careful of stabbings and car ramming attacks in Jerusalem—it’s normal for my parents in America to worry about my safety in Israel, but my Israeli family never worries. Yet here they were, telling me to be on alert. Despite the very real concern about safety and security, I believe that domestic issues are as much a threat to Israel’s future as security. This sentiment was echoed repeatedly by the leaders of the many NGOs that spoke to us. One of them even went so far as to say that the Netanyahu government has done an incredible job stoking people’s security fears to get them to forget their daily struggle to make ends meet.

Other groups of rabbis went to Chevron, the Palestinian city of Rawabi, settlements in the West Bank, Charedi communities, and neighborhoods where migrant workers and asylum seekers try to survive. Unfortunately, as an Israeli citizen who lacked a valid Israeli passport (that’s a story for another time), I wasn’t able to participate in any of the programs that went out of Israel proper, nor could I do everything (it’s hard to be in two places at once!).

But I can point you to blog posts and articles written by my friends and colleagues who saw other challenges that Israel faces if you’d like to read more about them. But even the tours I took opened my eyes to the extent of some of Israel’s problems and flaws.