Wendy Smith

Israel January 2015

There is so much to say about the trip. It was so much more than just the 9, nine (9? seemed like more) amazing days on the ground. The Israeli “trip package” started with that November 2013 meeting where Rabbi Mo, Sharon and Kari first shared their vision of a Temple Micah trip to Israel. Rabbi Mo opened his remarks with a poem that spoke to the longing of Jews to return to the homeland. At the meeting we all looked around and saw that we weren’t the only ones interested, we floated questions about safety, why couldn’t we fly ElAl?, we wondered about costs. The “trip package” started with Rabbi’s poem and his vision and continued with bi-weekly meetings to meet and greet and learn. We greeted familiar people and met new ones; we discovered who could be counted on for humor and who for history and who to us keep moving along; we were introduced to Jerry and came to appreciate Sharon and Kari so much; and then the extended plane ride and the lost items (speaking personally!); and dealing with things out of our control - the weather that changed the location of our early morning service and most importantly the way the vulnerability of the human body left us worried about and missing two of our treasured colleagues for much of the trip; and then, by today’s date, the return home of all of us!, and now a period of processing the experience in continuing community.

The “so much to say” is beyond the confines of a blog contribution..so how to narrow this down..it was a trip with so much happening so rich so well guided and led and experienced with such a great group of people...I think back about the people I came to know better, the beauty of the country...the way we laughed together in the bus...Yossi driving down the narrow streets, the art, the ocean..oh, and the food...how to narrow the “so much” at this early stage of digesting and sorting through the trip...Rabbi said to write from the heart and that anything goes...to maybe choose one thing to focus on...I’ve focused here on the unexpected, the things that happened to me in IsraeI that I didn’t expect, responses to the trip that surprised me. Narrowing the focus makes sense but I want it known for sure that I am addressing here just aspects of an amazing “so much to say” experience.

From the start I could tell that my not being Jewish was going to play a role in how I experienced Israel. As Rabbi Mo read the poem at that November meeting I could sense how he resonated with the words, sense how personally the poem of centuries of Jewish longing for Israel spoke to him, and started to imagine my fellow Micah travelers arriving in Israel. I pictured a rush of emotion, perhaps at the first aerial view of Israel or perhaps when touching the sacred stones of the Kotel; for each person a moment at which ancestral soil and ancestral ghosts would come flooding in. I felt somewhat sad, that next to those emotions, mine, whatever they turned out to be, would be pale.

For years now I have described myself as “Christian by birth and Jewish by marriage.”
I was born into and raised in a Christian family. My father saw to it that we went to Sunday school weekly and church often. I was cast as Mary in one advent production, a role I totally enjoyed as I got to wear a long gown and to put on lipstick and because I decided I had been chosen because I was so pretty (?). But when at age 12 it was my time to join the church, specifically to join the Mill Valley Community Church, I said “no.”

I became “Jewish by marriage” 37 years ago when, by just happening to be an interfaith couple wanting to be married by a rabbi at a time when there was in fact a rabbi in Denver who would perform such a ceremony, Marty and I were married in a Jewish ceremony without a requirement that I convert.

I do have solid Jewish “creds.” I do, for a start, have those proverbial “Jewish friends,” such as my husband, my two best girlfriends, everyone I ever dated, my rabbi, and my dear Micah colleages. And there is the following: I was not only married by a rabbi in a Jewish ceremony but had the complete deal - chuppah, broken glass, and a hora; over the past 30 years have attended give or take 500 Friday night/Saturday morning services, most every high holiday service – and this in contrast to the 2 Christian services (Quaker to be specific) that I attended over this same period ; raised two Jewish identifying daughters, spoke at their bat mitzvahs; witnessed the signing their ketubahs, and every Friday night, light candles, say blessings, break challah, do have some wine, and, even don a scarf! I have had “true Jews” tell me that I am more observant than they. And, besides, I don’t, maybe never did, believe in the divinity of Jesus, which in itself shifts me out or at least to the far left edge of the Christian camp. I may not be a Jew but I am very Jewish.

It appears to me that people range along an inclusion continuum from those for whom belonging to the group is pretty unimportant to those for whom belonging to the group is very important. I fall pretty high up on the continuum, I really like to feel I belong. I really value inclusion. If I am one of 10 people at a table meant for 8 and another friend comes along I will go get another chair. I attribute the stength of this tug to growing up in a step-family.

Why then, given how much I love inclusion haven’t I after 30 some years of membership at Micah and feeling “more Jewish” than anything else, why haven’t I converted?

As a child growing up in the fifties in Mill Valley, California, which was then (no longer) a small sleepy town I had no awareness that there was such a thing as a Jew. However, after moving across the Bay to eye-poppingly diverse and progressive Berkeley, I was surprised to learn that my new friend Sylvia was Jewish, and my new friend Arden was Jewish, and my new friend Edie was Jewish, and indeed that all the peers in my new group of high school friends were Jewish. And so, of course, I wanted to be Jewish too. In my understanding at that time I couldn’t be Jewish if I weren’t born Jewish and so it was a longing to belong to a club that I couldn’t get into, the worst kind of longing.

As an adult I know in my head that one can be Jewish without being born Jewish, and that converted Jews are considered the cream of the crop as they have made a “choice to be Jewish” but for me, maybe it’s an all or none issue, or wanting black or white no grey, but for some reason to me full Jewishness requires not just Jewish life style (which I have) and acceptance of Jewish doctrine but also ethnic history - those thousands of years of roots. And in some ways my religious beliefs - that there is a force, an answer, an order, an unknowable power behind this amazingly beautiful world - that all men are equal in the eyes of this amorphous being - that love feels good and is good - that all men belong to the same universe - that peace and the unity of the world are the goals - don’t require a specific religious affiliation. And although I understand the phrase is not a face value phrase, I, nevertheless have always strugged with the “chosen people,”... perhaps, because I don’t qualify.

Probably, however, it’s my grandmother “Gaga,” that stands between me and conversion.
To become Jewish feels like walking away from her. Somewhere way back, sitting next to Gaga in our Easter best at her Methodist Church, or as an adult visiting the austere windswept Connecticut cemetery with the weathered barely ledgible names of my ancestors my soul was at home in a setting very different from the Russian shtetl where Marty’s forebears lie, and where, no matter what, I don’t belong.

But to get back to the trip...fast forward to winter 2014. It is time to sign on the dotted line for the Micah Israel trip which has now moved from vision to reality. I am 99% sure we are going to sign up but I tell Marty I have a couple of things I want to run by Rabbi Mo before we do. Marty feels no need for a meeting but agrees to come along with me.


My first concern is about safety. The world isn’t looking very good, (not that it’s looking any better now). I anticipate that Rabbi Mo will be both realistic and thoughtful as to the safety of being on the ground in Israel and that I will, as I do, leave our meeting feeling reassured.

My second concern is about my not being Jewish. It isn’t that this will be news to Rabbi Mo.

Marty isn’t sure what my goal is. He wonders if for some reason I think I need permission to go on the trip. This had never crossed my mind, but maybe I am asking for a different kind of permission. Permission to be open during the trip about my responses which would be coming in a sense from someone “outside the Jewish family.” Will there be room on the trip for all types of responses from all types of starting places.

Rabbi Mo picks up on my unaffiliated status. He suggests that observations from an unaffiliated perspective - neither Christian nor Jewish - could add to the conversation. I leave not only feeling heard but like I could have something unique to contribute. In retrospect I think I also leave feeling accepted and that this is more important to me than I realized.

Having expressed my concerns to Rabbi Mo, I, in a contradictory way, find that as the trip gets closer I begin feeling that I just may come back from Israel having shifted farther towards the “yes, I will convert” pole. Perhaps the trip will so immerse me in Jewish culture and bring me so close into the fold with this remarkable group of Micah congregants that whatever is standing in the way of converting will melt as desire to jump more fully into the Jewish family gets even stronger. Marty has never pressured me to convert but I know that he would love it if we were go walk together in this aspect of our life. I tell several trip colleagues that I’m feeling I may return more interested than before in conversion and when Jerry cautions that no one can predict how Israel will affect them I think to myself that I do know.

Jerry, of course, is right, you can expect that Israel will have an effect on you but you can’t be sure ahead of time just what that will be.

Here’s what I didn’t expect, or at least, some of the things I didn’t expect:

I didn’t expect that my Christian beginnings would send up sprouts, but they did. The first inkling that this might happen came on Monday, Day Two, towards the end of the day when energy was flagging. I wasn’t very interested in eyeballing the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, but went along as Marty said he would like to see it. I was surprised by a sense of “he (Harley) doesn’t know what he is talking about” in response to Harley’s declaration that not even Catholics would feel a sense of familiarity with the Church as the Coptic Christians and other denominations represented in the Church are so far from western practice. “What does he know about that,” I thought. I knew Diana, our daughter’s mother-in-law and a fiercely religious Catholic would find lots to relate to and even I with early Christian but very liberal Christian exposure found to my surprise a sense of familiarity. The comfort of those early, early words, experiences, music. After all I still recite the Lord’s Prayer when the plane is about, for sure, to be tossed to the ground, or someone dear to me is seriously ill.

I did not expect that at the Sea of Galilee my mind’s eye would bring up as it did the image of Jesus standing on the surface of the lake, beneficently smiling his arms stretched out to the innocent and not so innocent. Pictures from Sunday School. Nor did I expect that there would be others on the trip for whom images of Jesus on the water would also come to mind. I was surprised at how much I valued kinship with tour members who weren’t Jewish by birth, those who had some relationship with Christianity or to alternative spiritual identities and how I instinctivly scanned for others who might who belong to that category.

In 2001, our daughter, Caitlin, traveled to Israel as a member of Hebrew High. She was well aware that in Israel she would not be considered Jewish because I am not and she was open to undergoing a ritual mikvah while in Israel as one of the required steps to gain official Israeli sanction as Jewish. At a distance this felt to her like a reasonable option but when in Israel it didn’t. When confronted first-hand with the requirement, Caitlin had a reaction. She decided, in her words, that she didn’t want to go through a series of steps to “appease” those who considered her not Jewish as she was satisfied in herself that she was Jewish.

I similarly didn’t expect to respond to words that excluded me, after all this was Israel and I’m not Jewish, but then I did respond, not a lot, but it was there. I didn’t expect to respond when our gracious Efrat hostess without missing a beat said that if congregants knew I weren’t Jewish I would not be allowed to join their synagogue. Of course, I wouldn’t be allowed, I knew that, but still l responded, not much, but a little. And when in the Old City a native and a visitor passed each other, the native said to the visitor, “are you Jewish?” and the visitor, “yes,” and the native brust forth in loud welcome, and handshakes and the hearty greeting of brothers, I responded a little; and when the check point officer was assured that everyone on the bus was Jewish, I responded a litte.

Back in Denver I realized that I had had a tiny taste, in a completely benign way, of what it’s like to be a minority...not a bad experience to have..and how in the United States, even were I to convert, I would probably never truly know what being a minority is like. It was interesting to experience how even tiny inconsequential incidents could trigger twinges of being left out or unseen.

This next thing on my list of “things I hadn’t expected” is more difficult to write about. It was uncomfortable at the time and still is. Many of the feelings I experienced during the trip were ones I had expected: awe at the beauty of the country; pride in what Israel has accomplished; outrage and sadness at the Holocaust Memorial; compassion for the uncertainty Israelis must live with. What I hadn’t expected, however, was the anger.

I had expected I might disagree with Israeli foreign policy and be angry about aspects of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians but this was a more global anger. Anger at all the peoples of the Middle East - the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians, all of them. Anger that bubbled up as we toured, a finger-pointing anger as in why can’t the peoples of the Middle East, all of them, move on. Why can’t they extract themselves from this endlesss cycle of revenge.

I thought back about my conversation with Rabbi Mo before the trip. It’s one thing to have permission to speak to one’s truth, but it’s another to be angry at people in a family you love, but don’t quite belong to. Anger coming from someone a little outside the family risks alienating the very people you care about.

But the anger was there.

I was angered at my sense of helplessness, my premonition that it was going to be the intractible Middle East violence, the seemingly endless cycles of retaliation that was going to lead to the nuclear meltdown that I as a child of the fifties had trembled in fear of. Anger that the lives of my children and their children were in the hands of this region, where comments I heard such as “if so and so does this...as in if a Jew were to pray on the Temple

Mount...it’s the third world war,” came too easily and to me suggested resignation and too great an acceptance of the possibiity of nuclear conflagration.

I hadn’t expected to come back more hopeless about reconciliation among the peoples of the Middle East, more hopeless, more worried and more angry. Our Efrat hostess, a lovely person, told us that she and her Palestinian housekeeper are civil but that at bottom the housekeeper hates the hostess and would not hesitate to kill her; and the thing about this that angered me most was the hostess’s sigh and resignation, there is nothing that can be done, no way to even begin to think about how to work together.

I didn’t expect to experience a “get over it” edge, as if I know what it’s like to live with the loss and trauma and seething anger of the people of the Middle East. It’s easy for me to say,” stop holding onto the past,” when my home is full of things I can’t bear to give away, but loosening the hold on the past would help us all. I was angered by the sign posted by settlers in Hebron’s nonfunctional bus station, the sign that reminded all of the murder of Jews in 1929, clearly a horrific act but does it justify fueling the cycle of revenge. Not good, but let’s move on.

I was surprised by how big and pivotal a role history as determined via biblical sources and interpretations plays in the ongoing Middle East conflict. To me, fair or unfair, the focus seemed to be on recapturing land based on claims set out in ancient stories, stories passed down and shaped by generations and generations. Stories that some would consider in the realm of “creative nonfiction.” From the arrogance and presumption of an outsider’s soap box, why value a piece of land above a peace among peoples.

I didn’t expect to start thinking of Israel and the peoples of the Middle East as stuck in the Old Testament’s “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” or to feel that the region could use a breath of New Testament, a good dose of “God is love.”

I have long known that Marty knows his Bible stories backwards and forwards and I know only a few fragments. In contrast I emerged from Sunday school with the message that “God is Love.”

Not a bad message.

But even as the anger was bubbling up I knew that I wasn’t taking into consideration the complexities of this part of the world and as much as I value the message that “God is Love,” and felt good about stumbling onto something from my Christian heritage that I’m proud of, the message in itself doesn’t solve anything.

Back in Denver my anger, although still present, has ebbed and the underlying frustration, struckness and sadness come forward. The anger has been tempered by a processing of all the many, and diverse experiences of our trip. I remember coming up and out of the Holocaust Museum into the sun and experiencing the unfolding hope of safety represented by today’s Jerusalem. I remember the terror of our Efrat host and hostess who feel only slightly removed from being pushed into the sea. I can understand Israeli’s recent support for Netanyahu. Who knows I might even have joined the groundswell myself were I an Israeli citizen.

Nevertheless I still stand by let’s “move on,” we don’t have that much time, lets get on with finding a way forward peacefully. Dang, guess that means I’ll have to figure out some baby steps for myself.

Finally, three “unexpected gifts”

The first unexpected gift was the discovery of Naomi Shihab Nye a poet who is the daughter of a Palestian Arab father and an American mother, a poet who captures the Palestinian voice, celebrates “half and half” identities; and wants to believe that peace is possible. I read and savored her poems during our trip. She dedicated one of her books to her father and included a quote from him that spoke to me: “If you look at the Muslim, Christian and Jewish religions, their first commandments are the same: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It’s not taken seriously.”

Second, my “discovery” of the Baha’i faith. It wasn’t the gold domed temple that did it but my brief Google perusal. Looking for inclusion, I found it here! Actually, some of what I read fit well with my beliefs and I liked that the Baha’i headquarters are in Israel, this would be a way of belonging more to Israel than I might otherwise. The main tenets include the unity of God and the unity of religion (religious history is seen to have unfolded through a series of divine messagers, each of whom established a religion that was suited to the needs of the time and the capacity of the people...included here, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed...). Per my internet sources Baha’i holds that “humanity is understood to be in a process of collective evolution, and the need of the present time is for the gradual establishment of peace, justice and unity on a global scale,” and believes “the unification of humanity is the paramount issue in the religious and political conditions of the present world.” Needless to say I haven’t delved deeply enough into the Baha’i faith to have discovered its quirks and problematic parts but the focus on inclusion sits well with me.

And third. Although I have not returned with an intention to convert to Judaism, a sadness for Marty and for me, I did come back with a greater sense of religious grounding - a greater awareness and appreciation of my several religious “parts” and a greater commitment to and appreciation of Micah. Micah is an inclusive religious community and I am more aware of how rare and how precious that is. I realize that I find spiritual sustenance at Micah regardless of what label I give myself and that I feel accepted by and valued by the community regardless of what label I give myself. I belong at Micah. I feel respected by Rabbi Mo. I am welcome to participate in the Temple’s secular life and even in its religious life as is appropriate. I don’t feel pressured to convert or to practice in ways I’m not comfortable. I have the gift of being free to be my own brand of “Jewish.”

As a foodie I had to sneak in a comment about just that, the food. In terms of the “expected” and “unexpected,” I expected Israeli food to be spectacular and it was. The breakfasts surpassed the advertisement. OMG! and I am giving a shout out for the salads - a cacophony of vegetables, spices, fruits, grain, elevating the vegetable way beyond American cuisine and, can you believe, salad for breakfast! Yum. I knew ahead of time (yes Jerry, this one I was correct about) that I would love street vendor shawarma, which I did, but my expectation that I would love Israeli bagels did not pan out. Okay, basically the food in Israel is spectacular but the bagels, not so much, I looked but found no firm, chewy bagels anywhere. I had to rush to Zabar’s during our post-Israel New York stop-over. Could be my Jewishness is of the New York variety.