by janet silver ghent
Before my first trip to Israel nine years ago, friends said it was wonderful to visit a country where nearly everyone was your religion. But when I arrived in Jerusalem, I was hard-pressed to find people who shared “my” religion. I saw Franciscans in cassocks, Armenian Orthodox in black robes and Chassidim in distinctive hats.
While davening at the Kotel with the Women of the Wall, we were told to keep our voices down — lest we disturb the men on the other side of the partition. As a Jew in the Jewish state, I didn’t have religious freedom.
But I didn’t feel connected to the secular world either. A religious gulf separated us. While seated at a luncheon next to a hospital official, I asked why only Orthodox rabbis were serving as hospital chaplains. He responded: “Why would someone who wasn’t Orthodox want a chaplain?”
Later while visiting the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, I overheard an Israeli guide uttering anti-Orthodox remarks to a European entourage. Then she added, “Some think the answer is Reform or Conservative Judaism. But they haven’t been around long enough and they may wind up becoming branches of Christianity.”
I came back from my trip saying, “Thank God I wasn’t born an Israeli. Thank God I was born in a land where Judaism, in all its wondrous diversity, could flourish.”
Among American Jews, the conventional wisdom is that the way to ensure a Jewish future is to send our youth to Israel. In addition, some Israelis believe the only way to live a fully Jewish life is to make aliyah.
Yet for some secular Israelis, it takes a visit to America to connect them to the beauty of ritual and prayer. Witness the number of Israeli youth who experience Shabbat services for the first time at an American Jewish camp.
“It’s easier here to be Jewish,” said a 15-year-old Tawonga camper from Kiryat Shmona in a 2003 j. article. “Here Judaism is a religion for the soul.”
In Israel, by contrast, Jewish identity is sometimes defined by the soil rather than the soul. At the Labor Day Peacemakers weekend at Tawonga, I met a teacher from Israel who said her students don’t even consider themselves Jewish, but simply Israeli. Send these kids to camp in the U.S.?
Of course, it’s not just youth from Israel who may experience a spiritual awakening in America. Some participants in my Beth Am Torah study group are Israelis who shunned shul before moving here.
“My experience of going to services was going with my father on Yom Kippur and chatting outside with the other women,” said Anat Pilovsky of Palo Alto, who grew up in Tel Aviv. “I spent just a few minutes inside the temple. It wasn’t for me.”
But at a bar mitzvah service in California, something struck a chord.
“I learned that going to services really helps you connect with your inner self — a place where you can cry and feel part of the community, a place where you can come and not feel alone. Somehow you connect to a higher place and afterward you feel so good.”
Rafael Ben-Natan of Belmont considers himself a secular Israeli. But several years ago, he joined a congregation “not for religious purposes” but to be part of a Jewish environment.
In Israel, surrounded by other Jews, he did not “feel a need” to attend services. “I just went about my life in a secular way and I was very content.”
But after attending Torah study out of intellectual curiosity, he became hooked. “If I were to go back to Israel today, I would have a better understanding of the way people think vis-à-vis religion. It enriched my philosophy about life in general,” he said. Today he calls himself “a Jewish Israeli,” rather than simply an Israeli.
Said Pilovsky: “If I went back to Israel, I would look for a Reform community because I don’t want to lose what I’ve been taught.” Many Israelis “don’t know what they’re missing.”
For my part, I’m hopeful that Jews, both Israeli and American, will discover that the distance between “religious” and “secular” can be a continuum, rather than a great divide.
Janet Silver Ghent, former senior editor of j., is a freelance writer/editor living in Palo Alto. She can be reached at ghentwriter@gmail.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California