Beit Tefilah Israeli – Finding a Path to Authentic Israeli Judaism
By Samara Minkin
Samara Minkin and Harriet Abraham
On Wednesday, we met with members of Beit Tefilah Israeli in Tel Aviv. We read texts together, including one containing the A.D. Gordon quote above, and discussed some of the complexities around religious Judaism and Jewishness for Israeli Jews. The members of BTI resembled our own membership: they were as diverse as we, and in spite of that diversity, they had come together because each wanted to make space for Judaism and spirituality in their lives. Just like so many of us.
The texts we read focused on the dilemma of Jewishess for Israeli Jews. Their national culture, their calendar, their history, is Jewish by definition – one of the blessings of a Jewish state is that secular life is Jewish. And yet that blessing is also a challenge as it frees the individual from defining him/herself as Jewish – and when we don’t define for ourselves, our own definitions are often lost. It can be liberating to not have to constantly define oneself against a majority culture but rather to be that majority culture, a feeling that Shaul Tchernikhovsky celebrated in another text we read. Gordon found beauty in the Jewishness of the mundane, the everyday, but he also lamented an absence, where Jews in the Diaspora kept alive the beauty of the sacred practices and holy days in ways that Jews in Israel did not.
Gordon, Tchernikhovsky and the others offered us some openings into discussing the paradoxes of vital, dynamic Jewishness in Israel and in the Diaspora. One of the highlight of our discussion was when we talked about the different challenges both of our communities have with Hebrew liturgy. BTI struggles with the God-language of liturgy; BTI members wondered if we at BJ understand the prayers we daven with such passion (for, if we do, how could we still be so passionate?!). Of course, we at BJ struggle with the opposite issue – if we believe in the power of Hebrew prayer, how can it be that so many of us don’t understand the Hebrew? How can we connect with the power we believe the Hebrew language gives our prayers?
Sofia Hubscher, Susan Fishman, and Samara Minkin
We also heard from BTI some of the issues we would come to hear all week long: how Jewish religion had come to seem synonymous with ultra-orthodox Judaism, and how out of step (and racist and prejudiced and even immoral) ultra-orthodox Judaism had become in the eyes of most Israelis; how members of BTI (and so many others) were actively creating a Judaism that felt authentic to them; and how gratifying it was to see attendance at their Kabballat Shabbat services (held outdoors at the Tel Aviv port!) grow in numbers. We were familiar with some of these issues. We understood the desire to create a Judaism that feels authentic and moral and just; we also know the joys (and the oys) of services that attract hundreds of people.
The meeting was warm and wonderful. A room full of people sharing the same ideals and supporting each others’ communities. It was very nourishing to spend that evening, and the entire week, thinking and talking about Jewish renewal in Israel and thinking about what lessons we could bring home with us to our own community.
“I remember my first impression of life in Israel… I felt it close to my heart. But in spite of that, I immediately felt some sort of aridness, a lack of poetry in everything, even in things that in the Diaspora were still filled with poetry, like Shabbat and the synagogue…Our mundane is much more beautiful and significant than of our brothers in the diaspora, but Shabbat and Holidays are much more beautiful and significant in the Diaspora.”
– AD Gordon 1918