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Lori Schneide is a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical college. Based in Los Angeles and Philadephia, Lori has taught Torah and served congregations in California, New York, New Jersey, Florida and Vermont. She is currently consulting with synagogues and organizations nationally on alternative programming for the Jewish 20- and 30- something.
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By Lori Schneide
August 20, 2006
I was sitting in a miklat (bomb shelter) in Haifa one breezy summer morning in July, when a young American woman next to me stopped crying long enough to say with the cadent punctuation of youth "why is everyone so calm?"
In that moment, the light in the windowless room seemed to change. People sat in clusters, handing out tea and biscuits, lining up for Internet access (during this particular bombing, I found myself in the Silicon Valley of miklatot, located beneath a new building in the University of Haifa, fully loaded with internet, microwave and snacks). Some of the students spent those three hours making plans to leave the country, some kept their noses in their books, resolute to affirm their personal goals of study despite the threat of disruption.
I consider the emotional response of this young woman similar to the role of the prophet. There is nothing sane about rockets falling from the sky, and sometimes it takes a healthy young woman with eyes reddened from tears of fear and love for her worrying parents to remember just how outside of reality are acts of war. As we sat in this anti-Sabbath, a break from our life to consider our life, her simple question made me wonder why everyone was so outwardly calm, and even more deeply, question what this entire experience of war was all about.
War is the opposite of Shabbat. Shabbat, as is described by Abraham Joshua Heschel in The Sabbath is a "unification of space and time." War is a disjunction of space and time. The goal of the Sabbath is to transcend our relationship with the temporal in order to enter the world of the infinite and seek an understanding of the world beyond ourselves. In war, there is no space for the infinite, no time for what lies beyond. Shabbat asks us to witness with awe the acts of creation. War destroys. Shabbat asks of us to find community. War reduces us to consider our personal well-being over others. When cramped in a windowless room lit with buzzing fluorescents, the literal notion of a transcendent light is extinguished. There is no sense of the rising of the sun or the emergence of the stars, there is no delight in a night's sleep when a siren calls, and even the ability to breath is disrupted by fear.
On the first Shabbat following the ceasefire, with travel restrictions lifted, I was drawn to visit my friends in Tsfat. My rabbi spoke to his lunch guests -- two young religious men wearing streimels in the summer heat with their young pregnant wives; his son -- a guitarist working with Autistic children while attending yeshiva; his young daughters who kissed the mezuzah every time they walked through the doorway, and asked me if I liked Lindsay Lohan; his wife who struggled with her guilt at having left the town they loved so much during a time of war; and myself, a student at a progressive Rabbinic college in America. "Hezbollah is not afraid of the Israeli soldier driving a tank, or flying a fighter jet," the rabbi raised his voice, "You want to know who Hezbollah is afraid of? Hezbollah is afraid of the old man with a grey-beard sitting in Meah She'arim studying Torah!" While the rabbi and I might have different interpretations of what this means, I find this fact, and his Shabbat table, the entire point.
As American Jews, we take our inalienable rights seriously. Look at any line in any airport, and you can literally cut the resentment of anyone being pulled aside to open their suitcase with a knife that you can no longer carry. Our inalienable rights are the very essence of our existence, causing our greatest joys as well as our darkest challenges. Choice defines the American experience, and is, for better or for worse, our most popular export. As Jewish Americans, we can observe Yom Kippur with our Protestant wife, or daven mincha in the middle of our workday -- being Jewish in America means being able to celebrate our identity in whatever way we choose. And although this concept of choice is a central theme of our Jewish identity as well -- from "chosen-ness" to "choosing life," we even have the freedom to reject or to never take any interest in that fact as well.
The war in Israel this summer is a war of choice -- of the choice of freedom of expression which allows an elderly man to rise before the sun in order to read an ancient text, and his granddaughter's freedom to kiss a mezuzah and google Lindsey Lohan. The war being fought on Israeli and Lebanese soil is less about land and more about how we live on this land. It is a war which asks us to consider the meaning of kedusha (holiness) and freedom for all races, colors and creeds. It is a war which seeks to challenge our perception, and heed the cry of the young American woman who soberly asks: "Why is everybody so calm?" as bombs are falling from the sky.
A few weeks after leaving Haifa, I found myself sitting in a Jerusalem coffee shop, despite the heightened threats of suicide bombers. The young woman who had been in the shelter with me walked in. She told me that she had returned to the States, but decided to come back to Israel. She returned even before the ceasefire was announced. "And I'm coming back again for second semester," she said. Sitting across from me studying modern Hebrew, she is the grey-bearded man in Meah Shearim, choosing life, a soldier in the war of freedom, turning their katyushas into our kedusha.
Views expressed by the author do not
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