Rabbi Landsberg's Blog

Rosh Hashana

Rosh Hashana, originally uploaded by Ayala Moriel.

Shana Tova to you and your families..

My congregation teaches me...

One of the many rewards of congregational life at Temple Emanu-El is the collective learning of my ever-probing congregation.  An example:  here is a link to an article on the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict that was recently forwarded to me.  Probably on my own I would not have come across it.

The piece  is by Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Foreign Minister in the Ehud Barak government.  It is a review (in the magazine Foreign Affairs) of the new Benny Morris  book about the 1948 War of Independence.  Ben-Ami outlines in his review, what was achieved, but also the grisly and ongoing cost of Israeli independence for both Jews and Palestinians. 

Looking clearly at events shrouded in national myth is hard but vitally necessary.  To engage young Jews who are skeptical of any national narrative in today's less credulous age, I must be prepared to talk tachlis, as it were.  The facts of Israel's founding do not undermine my love of Israel nor my Zionism, but they do impact how I speak; my Zionism is grounded in a harder, more nuanced world of power and painful compromise than the softer and simpler world of myth.  Instead of myth, I offer young Emanu-Elniks (together with us older ones) a relationship with Israel unafraid of fact and grounded in a Zionist commitment, that can love the Jewish nation in Israel and beyond "warts and all" .  

So, for your copy of Foreign Affairs left in outside my study door:  thanks, Phil!

Catching up on the Times and tales of Savta

I have been so engrossed in the US election and the preparation for the chagim, that I confess I have not been as diligent as I should be in following events in the wider Jewish world.  Now as I play catch up on the events of the last few weeks, I am stumbling on pieces that I want to share.

Here is an article from the New York Times magazine from a couple weeks ago entitled Evening in Jerusalem. It is a bittersweet recollection of a grandson (now living in Los Angeles) of an Iraqi Jewish  woman in Jerusalem.  Savta (the Hebrew for "grandmother") is from a world away, both metaphorically and literally.

According to my husband, his savta was not dissimilar in circumstance and manner from the  savta described here. She came from Basra Iraq and moved to Abadan Iran as a small child (from where later on she would make aliya on the creation of Israel). She died some months before I met Adam, but I like to imagine we would have enjoyed sharing some Nana tea as we spoke  in broken Hebrew.

the income of Episcopalians and the voting habits of Puerto Ricans ....

For any Jew raised in the U.S., this phrase needs no explanation.  For all others: it refers to the voting habits of US Jews, who refute class based explanations of voting patterns (i.e.,  with above average incomes but wedded to the Democratic party).  Now as the U.S. November elections approach, my attention has returned to developments south of the border.  There have been a spate of articles about how Jews will vote this cycle.  For one example, read this piece about the Democratic primary in Florida: "As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of Its Jews Have doubts"

I have always fought the easy syllogism that says: Jews tend to be politically progressive, therefore Judaism is progressivism.  There is much wrong with that position, not least that it is increasingly untrue for a vocal section of the U.S. [and Canadian] Jewish community.  More importantly, however, the civilization of the Jews is something so expansive it can respectably support almost any political stance.  To reduce the Covenant to politics is a transgression.

That said, I still read about the likely voting intentions of US Jews this November.   M J Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum writes:

"American Jews are, for the most part, well-off. But they vote as if they still were poor ghetto dwellers, somehow understanding that their fate is connected to the fate of those who have little or nothing."

For more read here.