Going home

[I originally wrote this as a blog entry for a special section on my journey with Nefesh B'Nefesh on a very special trip to Israel. The piece also appeared in the special Rosh Hashanah issue of the Heritage in 2008. Thank you, Nefesh B'Nefesh and all "my" olim, for giving my words wings.]

The full moon, cradled in the darkness on the other side of the cockpit glass, lit our way over the grey and billowing Atlantic. At 35,000 feet, the Boeing 777 seemed to float toward Tel Aviv. Its cargo was precious--two hundred twenty-five American Jews from 25 states, ranging in age from a one-month-old to a 71-year-old--all chasing a dream through the night sky to make aliyah to the Jewish homeland in Israel.

"Eifo anachnu achshav?" I tried out my Hebrew on pilot Gideon Livni.

"Somewhere over Atlantis," he said, gesturing over the vastness of the mid-Atlantic with a smile.

Our flight was something like a fairy tale: a magic carpet ride, a 2,000-year-old dream that in other times, other places, would never have stood a chance of coming true. For the Jews on the Monday flight out of JFK, it was real.

Since 2002, the organization Nefesh B'Nefesh has flown some 16,000 new olim to Israel, two thousand of them this summer. NBN works in close partnership with the state of Israel and El Al to ease the logistical and financial burdens of aliyah for Jews in North America and the United Kingdom. NBN co-founder Rabbi Yehoshua Fass calls it "a modern-day miracle."

These Anglo-American olim are making an "aliyah of choice," in which the persecutions and catastrophes visited on Jews in ages past play no part. The olim I met aboard the Aug. 18 flight embody NBN co-founder Tony Gelbart's description as "people who are not running from something, they're running to something."

Rena Glazer and her husband and three-year-old daughter Ariana are making aliyah to Rehavia in Jerusalem from Oakland, Calif. Rena is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and her grandparents were at the airport Monday afternoon for a farewell shaped by 60 years of history. For them in their youth, there had been no Israel.

Judy and Mort Zemel left Boca Raton, Fla. for Jerusalem after, as Judy told me, "moving in that direction for about four years." They've been renting in Jerusalem on a yearly basis, spent major holidays there, and traveled back and forth between Florida and Israel. "We love the country, so we'd like to make it official." Now that Jews have their own state after so many centuries of diaspora, for the Zemels aliyah is also "a way of showing thankfulness."

The couple are shomer mitzvot, which means they lead a lifestyle observant of the commandments. They studied with Rabbi Fass at the Boca Raton Synagogue, so they've followed Nefesh B'Nefesh from its inception, and two of their three adult children now in Israel made aliyah through NBN. Rabbi Fass "had really done his homework to make the organization economically viable, and we were very impressed by what he was doing," Judy told me.

In the U.S., Mort Zemel heads his own law firm, and Judy works in real estate. Since both their offices operate out of their Boca home and they're moving toward retirement, the logistics of aliyah have been fairly smooth. They have an apartment waiting, and they're looking forward to spending more time with their Israeli children and grandchildren. Their 16-year-old granddaughter is planning to go into the Israeli National Service.

Naama and Shai Zemach are another young couple from the San Francisco Bay area, on their way to Israel from the coveted suburb of Walnut Creek. Naama and Shai were both born in Israel, and wanted to go back "to give our kids that experience," Naama told me. Her husband runs a family business and she's the stay-at-home parent to their four children: Elad, who will be nine in October; almost-seven-year-old Yaniv; four-year-old Natan; and two-year-old Maya. When I met them at the NBN pre-flight ceremony at JFK, the boys were entertaining a small crowd by playing with their Yorkie, Pikachu. I don't know if Yorkies are Jewish under the Law of Return, but Pikachu is also making aliyah.

Although many of the olim are Orthodox whose return holds special religious meaning for them, our flight included Reform and Conservative Jews, and some for whom religion wasn't the point at all. I met several young people who will be joining the Zahal, the Israel Defense Forces--and they're only a few of the 150 olim this summer who will be signing up.

Many people would wonder why a beautiful and scholastically gifted 19-year-old from Los Angeles would choose to go to Israel to serve in the army. That question probably wouldn't even make sense to Danielle Sheldon. "Israel is the place where I feel most at home," she told me mid-way into our night flight over the ocean.

Danielle was raised as a Reform Jew, and attended day school and high school at Stephen S. Wise Temple in LA. She describes herself as not religious, but "very much a Zionist." Her father was born in Israel and is a strong Zionist, and thanks to him and her day school education and her studies at the ulpan in Israel, she's fluent in Hebrew. 

Danielle said that her father and her mother and stepfather are proud and "wonderfully supportive" of her decision, but the hardest part for her will be leaving them and her younger sister behind to become what Israelis call "a lonely soldier"--one without a family to go home to on Shabbat and holidays. She translated the lyrics of the popular Israeli song "Pictures in the Album" for me: The song tells the story of a father who remembers how he held his baby son, and now waits for his son the soldier to walk through the door, where all the family is waiting and the mother has prepared all his favorite foods... "I won't have that," Danielle said.

But she will have her dream, the "amazing things awaiting me in my future." She's been to Israel five times, including a birthright trip, and another time as a participant on the March of the Living. She's also been an international student at Tel Aviv University, where she plans to work on her master's degree in security studies while waiting for IDF induction processing, which can take a year or more. She already has her undergrad degree from UC San Diego, with a double major in Middle East and international studies.

"It's imperative that there be a state of Israel," Danielle said. When she speaks about Israel and her life there, you can feel her determination and passion in every word.

She remembers once hearing an Orthodox rabbi say that Judaism isn't about belief in God--"Judaism is about my community." She thinks that for every Jew, there is "a connection to the state of Israel--without being religious--by virtue of being born a Jew." She even loves the new two-shekel coin (which has been mocked in the Israeli press), because it completes the series of currency based on that of the ancient Hasmoneans. "Some Israelis asked what would they want with it?" But for her, it's all part of the "beauty of living in the state of Israel," where "Jews are equal in the world."

Protecting a place for Jews in the world is also an imperative for Ben Friedman, a 22-year-old Brooklynite I talked with somewhere over the Mediterranean, when most of the people around us were asleep. Ben was also brought up Reform, and is leaving Park Slope's gold leaves for the IDF.

He majored in political science and Middle East studies at Pace University. On his trips to Israel, he's met a lot of people who've been in the Zahal, and their experiences caused him to feel the need to be part of it, too. "I want to help build up the nation," he said. He thinks he's one of a small but growing minority of young American Jews who understand "the complexities and the seriousness" of Israel's situation in the world and want to commit to bettering it. But unlike Danielle's, Ben's family consists of relatively uncommitted Jews, not strong Zionists. Until his parents visited him there recently, no one in his immediate family had even been to Israel before.

So how did Ben become an ardent lover of Israel? His family tree includes former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens, who is a distant cousin, and the late screenwriter Ben Hecht, who was almost alone among Hollywood Jews during World War II in his vociferous support for the Zionist cause. Arens visited the Friedman family on trips to New York. And as a child, Ben saw posters of Hecht at home, although no one ever talked much about the famous writer who became his hero.

Ben strongly identifies as a political conservative, and he's "very pessimistic" about Israel's situation in the world and about the anti-Israel bias in the world press. But "things can always change. There's a very fluid political system in Israel."

He makes a forceful case for Israel's right to put self-defense ahead of ensuring public services for Palestinian enemies: "There's something very profound about the humanity of Jewish values, but I don't believe there's a Jewish value that says we have to take care of people trying to kill us."

And he's not afraid to put himself at risk to defend his country. "People like me, who are young and idealistic and strong, we need to come to Israel--there is something worth fighting for."

As we continued over the sea and the plane gently rocked me asleep, I started to feel as if I were also one of the olim, these brave and gentle and life-loving people who were now my friends, and that we were going home together. And I couldn't shake the mystical feeling of beshert, of a seeking for a destiny and finding it. And I couldn't stop thinking of the power of that something that binds Jews together, no matter what our birthplace or background, our sex or age or color, or our particular feelings about God. It's that power--of something--that caused a Jew to write, thousands of years ago, these words: "Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters." That spirit was protecting us on our journey home.

Jewish hearts around the world open for Haiti

[This column is my love letter to the people of Haiti, and to the many Israelis and Diaspora Jews whose hearts connected with them across miles and cultures. This piece originally appeared in the Heritage on Jan. 22, 2010.]

Jewish hearts around the world open for Haiti

By Lyn Payne

Associate Editor

 

Thus said the Lord:

A cry is heard in Ramah--

Wailing, bitter weeping--

Rachel weeping for her children.

She refuses to be comforted

For her children, who are gone.

—Jeremiah 31:15

 

It was the footage of the woman kneeling in the dust, her voice one long contralto keen of agony, that personalized it for me. And the man praying that the voice the rescue team heard under the stones came from his wife. The fawn-eyed gaze of the two-year-old girl who emerged physically unhurt from the debris that covered her dead parents. And the baby boy, born with the help of an Israeli doctor in the IDF field hospital on Port-au-Prince’s soccer field, whose mother named him “Israel.”

We’re into the second week after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti’s people and crushed its feeble infrastructure. Bodies lie scattered over streets, and people smear toothpaste under their nostrils to dull the stench of rotting flesh. International aid, from governments and organizations, has mobilized on a massive scale, but until this week, much of it languished in the capital’s airport, because the means of delivering it had collapsed. Only a few days ago, doctors begged for antibiotics to treat limbs infected with gangrene, as they pleaded with parents to allow their children to have their legs amputated to give them a chance to survive.

If such a thing as a shining light can even be said to exist in this hell on earth, Israel is a major part of the reason. On Jan. 18, CNN reported that the Israelis were running the only fully functioning field hospital; other countries’ teams were sending patients there, and the Israelis had treated hundreds. ZAKA search and rescue teams, whose members are observant Jews, worked through Shabbat to free victims from the wreckage, keeping the holiest commandment of saving lives. A surreal news clip shows a group of Haitians thanking their rescuers with a chorus of “Haveinu Shalom Aleichem.” Even the BBC, often criticized for anti-Zionist bias, reported the Israelis’ efforts.

The 220-person Israeli team set up their MASH unit as soon as they arrived, and plan to keep it in place for at least a few weeks. When a tiny, impoverished and brutalized country—one with no obvious historical or ethnic connection to their own—needed them, the Israelis, helped by the Jewish Diaspora’s alphabet soup of aid agencies, synagogues and individuals—flew thousands of miles to say, “Hineni.” We are here.

Why?

Jews are certainly not alone in caring or in the ability to raise funds and deliver aid: The U.S. government, along with nations like Turkey, Mexico and China, and religious and secular groups of all persuasions, have raced to help. Yet the instant and unstinting—and highly effective—response of the worldwide Jewish community has me pondering the particular map of the Jewish heart, as it has historically opened to aid the afflicted of every race, nation and creed.

Judaism continually insists that helping those less fortunate is not simply a generous option, but rather a religious obligation. Contrast that with right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh’s belittling diatribe against the Obama administration for aiding Haiti, saying the President wanted only to gain favor with “the black community, with the light-skinned and the dark-skinned community” of African-Americans. Fortunately, Limbaugh’s is the position of only a tiny minority of unsophisticated and emotionally stunted Americans. His disgusting bigotry was disavowed by former President George W. Bush, and aid efforts have been embraced by people across the political landscape. But extreme as it is, Limbaugh’s rhetoric offers a clear opposite against which to better see the power of Jewish ethics. To this puerile, spiteful, hateful voice gleefully chortling, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” into the face of the universe, Judaism replies, Yes, you are.

As Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks describes in his book “To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility,” Judaism is alone among religions in proclaiming that human beings are given the power by God to become partners in perfecting the world. Sacks points out just how radical that concept is, and how it confers responsibility to act with justice and righteousness. It’s as if he were saying that Judaism is a continual dialogue between the reality of what exists now, and the possible futures, good and bad, which will only be brought about by our own actions—or lack of action.

“Each religious act we do has an effect on the ecology of creation,” Sacks writes in explaining the kabbalistic concept of tikkun olam.

This holistic view is not only humane, although, dayenu, that would have been enough; it also fits the emerging reality of life in the 21st century—in a world Thomas Friedman calls “hot, flat and crowded,” where a political upheaval, climate change or natural disaster in one place increasingly and directly affects economics, infrastructure and lifestyles everywhere else. A butterfly’s wing moving in China can now truly be said to set off a revolution on the other side of the globe. To deny this reality is to join the likes of Rush Limbaugh, not only in bigotry, but in self-destructive ignorance.

In this ultra-connected world, it is not just our moral duty as Jews, but in our enlightened self-interest as human beings, to say, with the same passion as we view ourselves at Passover as having been personally redeemed from slavery in Egypt: I personally was pulled from the rubble in Haiti.

Not by might, not by power, not by hate

Not by might, not by power, not by hate

By Lyn Payne

Associate Editor

[I wrote this op-ed for the Jan. 22, 2009 issue of the Heritage, during a time of massive media bias against Israel because of its war with Hamas in Gaza. No apologies for wearing my love for that beautiful and tough little country on my metaphorical sleeve:]

A beautiful thing happened the evening of Jan. 5, and a viciously ugly one at the beginning of the following week.

On Jan. 5, some 750 people, mostly Jews but also many non-Jewish friends of Israel, assembled in the sanctuary and social hall of Congregation Ohev Shalom in Orlando to rally in support of Israel in its war with Gaza: its fight to make its citizens safe after eight years and some ten thousand rockets launched literally into their backyards.

In their addresses to the crowd, the representatives of the Greater Orlando Board of Rabbis were as eloquent as I have ever seen them, sometimes verging on the prophetic. We can all be proud that we live in a community that has such rabbinic leaders. One by one, they each spoke truth to power, decrying the biased coverage in the general media that often paints the Hamas terror organization—openly bent on Israel’s destruction—simply as “militants,” or even as freedom fighters against Israeli “aggression.”

Our rabbis gave every one of us an assignment that night: To go forth and proclaim the justice of Israel’s cause—its right to live in peace and to defend itself—to friends, co-workers, the media and the world. They recalled the fact that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza three and a half years ago, wishing only for peace with its Palestinian neighbors. They pointed out the massive documentation that shows the extent to which Israel routinely tries to avoid civilian casualties. Rabbi Aaron Rubinger, who hosted and organized the evening, noted a little-reported fact: “Before Israel aims a rocket at any building where known terrorists hide, Israel not only drops leaflets, Israel actually calls the inhabitants of that building and text messages them, warning them to get out.” Few if any other countries can make such a claim, and yet Israel in these last few weeks of the Gaza war has been condemned with a litany of slurs and vilification from world governments, “peace” organizations and media that has approached the anti-Semitic.

Sometimes this Israel-hatred is so vicious as to appear absurd to an objective observer, as in the case of the group of 300 British academics who proclaimed in the Guardian newspaper that it was essential for Hamas to win the war against Israel. Really? They would prefer an Iran-supplied and supported group—one that hides behind its own civilians in schools, mosques and hospitals, that kills and maims its political rivals, that has destroyed the economic infrastructure that could have brought its people a better life—to the Western-style democracy whose hospitals treat Palestinians, Israelis and all others equally on the basis of need; whose newspapers and courts are living witness to all its citizens’ right of dissent; and whose universities and businesses have supplied Britain’s own citizens with lifesaving medicines and technological advances? Really?

As Rabbi Rubinger said that night about Hamas’ use of human shields who have been tragically and inadvertently killed and wounded as Israel seeks to target only the combatants: “The leadership of Hamas is practicing the very worst form of child abuse and the very worst form of violence against women. For shame.”

And shame also on those who stood in Lake Eola Park on Saturday, Jan. 10, who demonstrated against Israel with words and images that attacked the Jewish state’s very right to exist. Despite their statements to the contrary, their very presence there gave aid and comfort to Hamas. I interviewed some of the rank-and-file members of that demonstration, and observed and listened to many more. There were many of Palestinian background, and no one with a heart and conscience could remain unmoved by their fear for friends and family caught up in the hell that is Gaza; no one who has a child could keep his or her heart from reaching out to the pictures of children bloodied and crying in pain.

Yet the sad truth, as has been the case from the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is that these children’s own leaders, who should be protecting them and giving them a chance at life, have condemned them to death. Through sheer intransigence and hatred for Israel and the Jewish people, Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups have thrown all their people’s chances into the sea. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, at enormous financial and emotional cost, the Palestinians could have chosen to live in peace, to use the infrastructure Israel left behind, to cooperate economically and technologically so that everyone could have benefited. Instead, they elected a terror group to lead them, and rained rockets and mortars on the citizens of southern Israel, who simply wanted to be left alone.

The historical record is clear: Israel has never fought a war of conquest, only wars of defense. It seeks no additional land, only the chance to be at peace. Each time I’ve visited, I’ve been astonished at the number and extent of the cooperative projects—humanitarian, scientific, cultural—that Israeli universities and individuals have initiated with their Arab neighbors. Last August, when I visited Hadassah Hospital outside Jerusalem, I saw firsthand the comradeship and mutual devotion to saving lives that flourishes among the medical staff, who are Jews, Christians and Muslims, some of them residents of the Palestinian territories. In the pediatric ICU, I saw three young children being lovingly tended by the staff and watched over by their parents: an Orthodox Jewish child, an Ethiopian Jewish child, and a Palestinian child.

So when I found myself surrounded by signs equating the Star of David with the swastika, saying the Israelis were practicing “genocide” in Gaza, were bent on “occupation” of Palestinian lands, were “terrorists,” had the situation not been so serious it would have been laughable.

For these demonstrators, most of whom had, we can only assume, good intentions but scant sophistication about the reality of the world, were aiding and abetting terror as surely as if they were sending checks to Hamas. Several told me they had no quarrel with Jews, only with “Zionists.” One told me that “the good Jews” were not counter-protesting that day (which happened to be Shabbat, our holy day of rest), because “good Jews” were not Zionists. I beg to differ: To be a “good Jew” is to be a Zionist, because were there no Israel, there would soon be no Jews. History has taught us that our only hope of collective survival lies in being “a free people in our own land.” To condemn Zionism is to directly and unequivocally condemn every Jew on earth to death. To say, as these protestors did, that Israel is an “illegal” state with no right to exist, is to tell us that we have no right to live.

Contrast this with the spirit in the Ohev Shalom sanctuary the week before. Yes, there were words of passion and power denouncing the violence of Hamas; but those words were necessary, measured and more than appropriate. And they in no way condemned the Palestinian people or wished them ill. Cantor Jacqueline Rawiszer led us in a stirring “Hatikvah,” a song of hope; Rabbi David Kay and Cantor Allan Robuck sang bittersweet songs in English and Hebrew that ached with the longing for peace; Rabbi Rubinger proclaimed with authority, “We are here to say to the Palestinian people, let us live in peace.” And Rabbi Steven Engel closed with, “May peace be upon Israel … and upon the Palestinian people.”

In that well-known and well-loved sanctuary at Ohev, I felt uplifted and encouraged, and filled with immense pride in my Jewish community and in all who had created that spirit-filled evening. Doing my grim journalistic duty the following Shabbat in the park, I felt the chill of fear: not of the thousand protesters around me, but of the power of their words to incite hatred. But hate eventually consumes itself, while the spirit of love I felt in that sanctuary continues to burn brightly in the hearts of all who were there, and to further the cause of righteousness.