Tag: 100 notable books

Balancing our wants and needs

It’s warm out! My kids and I are longing to be outside all the time – but we can’t. Not only is there still remote school, work and other obligations, but our neighbourhood is loud with construction noise. It’s hard to play in the yard when a table saw is screaming through stonework next door. It’s also a constant social-distancing game. Our corner lot is busy. People walk on the sidewalks on two sides, and construction workers on a third.

Some might respond with, “Well, move to the country, why don’t you?!” When we bought our house, it wasn’t so crowded, nor near to so much construction. We’ve made a life here. Moving requires a lot of upheaval. We want to keep our kids in the same school, too.

Like most things, we all must balance our desires and wants (for quiet, for more space, etc.) with our needs (relative safety, proximity to the basics like healthcare, school, work, groceries and a Jewish community). This balancing act is deeply personal. It’s not obvious from the outside what will work best to resolve this, and it’s not always clear “from the inside” either.

In my Talmud study recently in Tractate Yoma, I’ve been learning about how the high priest was to do the rituals of atonement on Yom Kippur on behalf of the Jewish people. It’s a series of very precise, concrete rituals. While deep meaning is assigned to some of these steps, the rabbis mostly want to parse what should be done to make the ritual work effective, as compared to making it invalid. They indicate that, if the high priest does it wrong, a year’s worth of sin remains for the entire Jewish people.

This kind of detailed ritual and accounting sounds like an enormous burden. The Temple high priest must have been under a lot of pressure! After all, when you consider the fate of Nadav and Avihu in Leviticus 10:1, who present “strange fire” as an offering to G-d and die. Or, if you consider Korach, who rises up against Moses – he and his buddies Dathan and Abiram and their families are destroyed when they rebel. In Numbers 16, the ground bursts open and swallows them up. Doing things wrong or inappropriately has consequences.

Some see that our tradition offers us a lot of fearmongering. There are those who worry that if they do things wrong – Jewishly, professionally, or other life choices – they will be literally “struck down.” Others don’t take any of it seriously and, as a result, their inability to abide by norms – public health orders, religious rules, societal ones, professional ones, etc. – results in a lot of problems for the rest of society.

What does this mean? If we turn it around and look for the gifts around us, instead of the potential hazards, perhaps things clear up and seem better. At least, searching for the gifts helps me cope.

We caught that upside recently – the gift, at 11:30 a.m. on a weekday, when, for whatever reason, the saws next door were quiet. The weather was sunny and cool. My twins stopped fighting. I looked up from the porch to find them in the yard, playing an ad hoc game of badminton, while keeping the dog occupied with her ball instead of fetching (and dismantling) the shuttlecock.

As warmer weather and, hopefully, healthier times are ahead, we have so many positive opportunities. It’s a rare moment where we can actually make personal, religious, social or political changes that might have seemed impossible before. Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely many pandemic moments when I’ve been caught in the detailed burdens or negativity – anxiety and fearmongering – struggling to see the good.

However, watching my kids laugh and chatter as they swung around their rackets, I was reminded of how lucky most of us actually are. Having a home, food and educational access, never mind green space, are great luxuries right now. Further, having a path forward, due to the COVID vaccines, also is a gift. Nobody has done everything right and, in the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, the high priest’s rituals served to help everyone process those mistakes, while we have different paths towards course correction and self-improvement today.

It’s important to recognize the flipside, which is that we haven’t done everything wrong, either. The warm and sunny days ahead can give us a bit of a break. It’s a window into whatever post-pandemic future lies ahead. Just as the warm weather provides us a bit of respite, so, too, do Jewish texts, which help us process our mistakes and concerns, balancing them with the joys, too.

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” based on Psalm 150, reminds us that the Temple was not just a place for sin offerings. Psalm 150 is filled with music, instruments and happy expression, often in relief after making those Temple offerings. According to the Talmud, huge groups sang Hallel as part of their Passover lamb sacrifice. Their observance made the Temple Mount ring with communal song.

Sometimes, finishing the difficult rituals and processing our experiences and the anxiety can put the noise and the stress behind us. The exercise can offer us a chance to bask in the sunshine and the music. Let’s all hope for that gift of laughter, music and thanks, as we celebrate Canada’s short summer season and lean towards the light.

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land is a vivid look at Zionism

In collaboration with the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library, the Jewish Independent will be reprinting a series of book reviews by Robert Matas, formerly with the Globe and Mail. He has chosen My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Speigel & Grau, New York) by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit as the first in the series. My Promised Land has been listed as number one on the Economist’s best books of 2013, is a winner of a National Jewish Book Award and is included on the New York Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2013.

Israel is an incredibly strong country. Its high-tech start-ups spur economic growth while most of the world is trying to sidestep a financial meltdown. Its democratic institutions remain vibrant, while its neighbors disintegrate. Its military, backed up by nuclear power, effectively has stopped any attack on the state over several decades despite virulent opposition to its existence.

image - My Promised Land cover
My Promised Land offers a fascinating window into the country at a crucial time in Israel’s history.

Yet the fault lines in Israeli society steadily widen. Internal divisions that threaten the country spread out in all directions. The rumblings of unrest are becoming louder and more frequent, from the occupied territories, the Arab Israeli communities, the ultra-Orthodox enclaves and the non-Ashkenazi underclass.

Ari Shavit, in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, offers a fascinating window into the country at a crucial time in Israel’s history. Based on family diaries, private letters and interviews and discussions with hundreds of Jews and Arabs over a period of five years, Shavit, a leading Israeli journalist and television commentator, has written a book with the potential to change understanding of the seemingly intractable problems confronting Israel.

This book is not for those who believe Israel requires the unquestioning support of Diaspora Jews. With brutal honesty, Shavit describes episodes in Israel’s history that many would like to remain untold, or at least to be discussed only in hushed whispers within the family. But his account of the life stories of numerous people including Aryeh Deri, Yossi Sarid and others who played pivotal roles in the development of the country is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about Israel.

In a nutshell, Shavit concludes that Israel is vulnerable and will remain vulnerable as long as Israeli cities and farms exist where Palestinians once lived. He argues that ending the West Bank occupation will make Israel stronger and is the right thing to do, but evacuating the settlements will not bring peace. The crux of the matter is that all Palestinians who were expelled – not just those in the West Bank – want to return home and will settle for nothing less.

He is pessimistic about the future. Israel can defend itself now, but he anticipates eventually the hand holding the sword must loosen its grip. Eventually, the sword will rust.

“I have learned that there are no simple answers in the Middle East and no quick fix solutions to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I have realized that the Israeli condition is extremely complex, perhaps even tragic.”

Despite his critical eye on events of the past century, it is difficult to label Shavit’s politics. He was an active member of Peace Now and a vocal critic of the settler movement. But he praises Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for confronting Iran. “I have learned that there are no simple answers in the Middle East and no quick fix solutions to the Israeli Palestinian conflict,” he writes. “I have realized that the Israeli condition is extremely complex, perhaps even tragic.”

***

Shavit explores 120 years of Zionism through vividly written profiles of numerous people beginning with his great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, who came to Jaffa on April 15, 1897, on a 12-day trek to explore the land as a home for the Jews. At that time, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, populated mostly by Bedouin nomads and Palestinians serfs with no property rights, no self-rule or national identity.

“It’s quite understandable that one would see the land as a no-man’s land,” Shavit writes. Bentwich would have to turn back if he saw the land as occupied, Shavit adds. “But my great-grandfather cannot turn back. So that he can carry on, my great-grandfather chooses not to see.”

Israel was settled and continues to be populated by people who do not see others who are right in front of them. The early Zionists bought land, often from absentee landlords, and ignored those who had worked the land for generations. Herzl’s Zionism rejected the use of force. But as the number of Jews escaping European antisemitism, a new breed of Jew arrived.

Shavit describes how kibbutz socialism, with its sense of justice and legitimacy, displaced indigenous Palestinians. Jews who were godless, homeless and, in many cases parentless, colonized the land with a sense of moral superiority. “By working the land with their bare hands and by living in poverty, and undertaking a daring unprecedented social experiment, they refute any charge that they are about to seize a land that is not theirs.”

Tracing the development of the state, he identifies in painful detail the Palestinian villages that were wiped out and replaced with Jewish settlements. Transferring the Arab population became part of mainstream Zionism thinking during the riots of 1937, as Zionists confronted a rival national movement. David Ben-Gurion at that time endorsed the compulsory transfer of population to clear vast territories.

“I do not see anything immoral in it,” Ben-Gurion said. By the time of the War of Independence in 1947/48, Palestinians who did not leave voluntarily were, as a matter of routine, forcibly expelled from their homes and the buildings demolished.

Shavit delves deeply into the sad history of the Lydda Valley, where Jewish settlements began in idealism but evolved into what Shavit describes as a human catastrophe. “Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sends out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless.”

In the new state’s first decade, Israel was on steroids, absorbing nearly one million new immigrants, creating 250,000 new jobs and building 400 new Israeli villages, 20 new cities and 200,000 new apartments. The new Israelis had little time for Palestinians, the Jewish Diaspora or even survivors of the Holocaust. As it marched toward the future, Israel tried to erase the past. The miracle was based on denial, Shavit writes.

“The denial is astonishing. The fact that 700,000 human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed.”

“Ten-year-old Israel has expunged Palestine from its memory and soul, as if the other people have never existed, as if they were never driven out,” he writes. “The denial is astonishing. The fact that 700,000 human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed.”

Yet the denial was essential. Without it, the success of Zionism would have been impossible. Similar to his great-grandfather, if Israel had acknowledged what had happened, it would not have survived, he writes.

He recounts how the settlements in the West Bank have changed the course of Zionism. They began as a response to a fear of annihilation but evolved into an aggressive movement to dislocate Palestinians and prevent peace agreements. Shavit is convinced the settlements will eventually lead to another war. The settlements are an untenable demographic, political, moral and judicial reality that harms the entire country, he writes. He believes occupation must cease for Israel’s sake, even if peace with Palestinians cannot be reached.

With similar intensity, Shavit offers insight into the Masada myth of martyrdom and reports on how Israel developed nuclear power. He maintains that nuclear deterrence has given Israel decades of peace. He exposes the cracks in Israeli society with thought-provoking portraits of prominent figures from the ultra-Orthodox and Sephardi communities.