Category: Israel

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Israel Rabbis Reform Judaism

Reflections and Concerns Upon Returning from Israel

I returned this morning from a week in Israel. I had planned to, under the auspices of AIPAC and with 17 other “progressive” rabbis (AIPAC’s term) see first-hand the multitudes of ways that Israel society is coping and excelling despite its continued security and societal challenges. Of course, what I got was a very different trip. I missed the first day due to a funeral back in Chicago. What I saw after that was a series of meetings with people of various backgrounds; the common word for all of them was that the situation is complicated. We met with a Palestinian demographer, GLBT activists, various professors, statesmen and community activists. Because of the war with Gaza there was much that we could not do, or at the very least there were many places we could not visit. Instead, we got to hear sirens, warning that Hamas missiles were incoming. We rushed to bomb shelters or stairwells. It all reminded me of a visit to Israel in late 2000, with the Second Intifada underway. The only difference was this time, thanks to the Iron Dome, the terror wasn’t really terror (at least for those not in the south). The terror was inconvenient. Which is to say it didn’t feel like terror at all.

Gaza security fence.
Gaza security fence.

My concern is for those with children, who cannot be so cavalier about the “they incompetently shoot missiles and if they are actually coming close by we zap them with Iron Dome”. My concern is for the soldiers, like my nephew, who may have to go into Gaza. And my concern is that the violence will not end soon. I came on the trip already believing that American Jews should support Israel much more than they should speak out against Israel. Actually I don’t think they should speak out at all. Unless they make aliyah of course, then be my guest. But I am grateful that Israelis themselves see the bigger picture. Most of those with whom we spoke will not give up hope that some agreement can be worked out.

On our last day (yesterday, actually) we visited a small hospital in Safed. This is a place with doctors and nurses of all religions and ethnic groups, including of course Jewish. For a year and a half they have been treating hundreds of Syrians who make their way to the board. We met with a three year old who was shot in the leg and who is getting excellent treatment. His father was the first Syrian I had ever met. I know he will always be grateful for the menshlikheit of the Jews and Arabs who saved his boy’s leg, if not his life.

One final thought, translated by me from the Hebrew of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s press conference last Friday: Hamas uses civilians to cover their missiles. Israel uses missiles to protect their civilians. That’s the difference.

I cannot wait to return to Israel, hopefully in a time of quiet and opportunity for peace. In the mean time I come away with even greater respect for Israel, a country that, in the words of Dr. Donniel Hartman, wants to be Scandinavia but is stuck in the Middle East.

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Israel News Rabbis Reform Judaism

Note from Israel: A Rabbi Reflects on a Difficult Week

It has been a difficult time in Israel. I have been here in Eretz Yisrael for more than a week now. Arriving just before they found the bodies of Eyal,Gilad and Naftali. When the news of the discovery of their bodies came over the news I was with several colleagues and it was a palpable moment that took our breath away. Israel went into mourning. Jews from the right or left cried with their families. I was surprised how few cars were out in the streets. I was glued to watching the funeral and crying too. And then in the midst of mourning, a young Arab teen burned alive. Retribution by a gang of Jewish thugs; it was cold-blooded murder.

A country and a Jewish people that prides itself on the value “choose life” has within it such depravity – it shocks the nation. The burnt body of Muhammed Abu Khadeir gave Israel another blow and made many realize that the rhetoric that they have espoused has consequences. Words matter and the words of revenge, the cycle of violence represented by this has given Israel pause. This was a reason for more tears for Muhammed, his family and for my Israel who is so conflicted and so battered from every side, even as the Army went door to door on the West Bank searching for the 2 murderers of Eyal, Naftali and Gilad.

IMG_4124But these deeply saddening events have taken place against a background of a barrage of rocket and missile fire from Hamas. Since the agreement of Fatah and Hamas to create their “unity” government, the rockets have fallen through the south with increasing volume. And then yesterday, as Israel called up reservists and gathered at the border of Gaza the rockets reigned down on an ever increasing circle of Israel. Sderot, Beersheva, Ashkelon, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Last night it took me a minute. I heard the sirens. But it didn’t compute. The TV was on. I was watching it and hearing it as if numb and realized this wasn’t just far away but overhead.   Hurriedly I found the safety of the shelter with others in the hotel. Shaken and realizing that Israel has entered a new and frightening phase it was a night of little sleep. All of Israel is vulnerable to the missiles.

Even though I have had many tears this week, I am strengthened in my commitment to Israel by being here. By sharing in the Israel experience, not just in times of quiet and celebration, but in these extraordinarily difficult times. And I know our rabbinic presence in Israel bring strength to Medinat Yisrael.

May Israel be kept in our prayers. For peace outside and within.

Rabbi Denise L. Eger is the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, CA and is President Elect of the CCAR. You can follow her travels this week in Israel @deniseeger #rabbinicmission2Israel. Or @AIPAC

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Israel News Rabbis Reform Judaism

Reform Jews Must Look at Themselves

Reform and Conservative Jews feel discriminated against in Israel. The rabbinic establishment shuns them. Though the state pays salaries to some non-Orthodox rabbis, it ignores and discriminates against them in many other ways.

Polls indicate many secular Israelis favour equal rights for all religious streams, yet most non-observant Jews choose Orthodox synagogues and rabbis for life-cycle events. Of those who turn to Conservative and Reform congregations, only a few actually join them, and even fewer are actively involved.

Nevertheless, non-Orthodox Jewish movements remain committed to Israel. They show it, for example, by insisting that their rabbinical students spend at least a year there. If some return less than enthusiastic about the state, it may be due to a sense of not really being wanted.

I perceived some of that when I heard a Shabbat sermon last month at the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew Union College, which trains Reform Jewish professionals. The weekly portion was M’tzora, which deals with an affliction called tzara’at, often erroneously rendered as leprosy but is better identified as “a mysterious and causeless malady that renders you utterly incapable of partaking in society.”

That’s how it was described by the speaker. Sam Kaye is completing a year in Israel before returning to the United States for the rest of his five-year rabbinical training. Referring to the ritual unfitness that may cause the affliction and deem sufferers to be outside the camp yet still inside the Israelite community, he suggested that’s how many Israelis perceive Reform Jews.

I believe he reflects the feelings of most of his fellow students: “All too often, especially in this city, it feels as if Reform Jews are the modern lepers of the traditional Jewish world, described as unfit and unqualified to participate in matters related to spirituality. While we remain in the secular realm, we’re tacitly accepted… but when we desire to enter into the realm of that which is holy, suddenly our infection bubbles to the surface.”

He believes the reason is that “Reform Judaism lifts up a mirror to Jewish society and reminds it of an uncomfortable truth” about the Orthodox establishment. He argued that “those that society has traditionally deemed ‘spiritually unfit’ are actually quite capable of embodying spirituality.”

Kaye seems to have had in mind the “big tent” that Conservative and Reform Judaism advocate. They and other liberal groups seek to make room for as many Jews as possible, irrespective of halachic status and chosen lifestyle.

He urged perseverance in the face of establishment intransigence: “Even if authorities don’t believe in our message or when they invalidate the messenger, it doesn’t change the need to continue holding up the mirror and show our people the flaws, the cracks, and the impurities they would rather pretend did not exist.”

Escape into victimhood is common among those who feel discriminated against. Self-righteousness to the point of claiming higher moral sensitivity than others is part of the defence mechanism.

But Kaye went further. He urged the future Reform rabbis, cantors and educators whom he was addressing to apply the same scrutiny to themselves as they do to others. Our critics, he said, are also holding up a mirror “that is shedding light on our failure to maintain Jewish identity” and they’re sending us a message “eerily similar to our own: ‘turn inward; acknowledge where you have left others behind.’” Instead of self-pity and self-righteousness, he advocated self-scrutiny.

Hence his sober conclusion: “When we demand that others face their reflection, it is fundamental that we do not find ourselves unable to bear that same self-scrutiny when our own turn arrives.” Being victims doesn’t entitle us to be smug. Responding to our critics includes being steadfast in our commitment, yet learning from them, despite their belligerence.

I can think of no more apt way to articulate my own Judaism: stand my ground as a critic, but apply the same rigid standards to myself. I’m grateful for the reminder.

 This post originally appeared on cjnews.org.

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Books Israel Rabbis Reform Judaism

Purim – Time for New Interpretation

I was teaching an Introduction to Judaism class this Tuesday night about (fittingly) Purim. I was in the midst of explaining to my class the mitzvah to drink until you don’t know the difference between blessing Mordecai and cursing Haman, and how it has been traditionally interpreted (get extremely drunk), when one of my students stopped me.

“What if,” she began, “What if we’re interpreting the commandment too literally. I mean, we’ve learned how many of the commandments have been analogized, or understood metaphorically,” she said, “but it sounds like this one is always taken literally, across Jewish communities.”

“Generally, yes.” I answered. “Purim is treated as an opportunity to drink heavily.”

“But what if,” she asked, “the commandment is not meant to be taken literally, not to mean that you should get really drunk, but perhaps, that you should use Purim as an opportunity to blur the distinction between good and bad people, to imagine that everyone, even our enemies, are good and evil, that people are complex, and that cursing people is a dirty business.”

There was a long silence. This was a brilliant and beautiful interpretation, but I wasn’t sure (in fact, I highly doubted) that it was what the Rabbis intended when they suggested the minhag. In fact, knowing what I do about Jewish history, and how Purim is, in many senses, a wish fulfilling fantasy of revenge on all those who have hurt Jews throughout the ages, I knew how unlikely it was.

But we live in a different world now. We live in a world where Jews wield power (political and otherwise), where we have our own state, and where humanist values have come to inform our understanding of what it means to be Liberal Jews. We live in a world where it is possible to find the wholesale slaughter of Jewish enemies (75,810 people!) at the end of the book of Esther morally troubling, and the cursing of Haman’s name discomfiting (however much he may deserve it). So what if we can use the commandment to blur the lines to teach complexity, nuance and that the notion that only in fairytales and Disney movies are people all good, or all evil. Too often we gloss over the slaughter of non-Jews that occurs at the end of Megillat Esther because it complicates the fairytale, because it’s too hard to explain to kids (let alone adults) the moral complexity of revenge fantasies.

For the past week, I have been reading Israeli journalist (and Haaretz columnist) Ari Shavit’s book, My Promised Land which has been hailed by everyone from Leon Wieseltier to Jeffrey Goldberg as exceptional. This is largely because of Shavit’s ability to hold and wrestle with multiple narratives about the founding of the State of Israel; the horrors of the Holocaust and the nightmare of the naqba, the miracle of Israel and the ongoing disaster of Palestinian displacement. What sets the book apart is its painful – and brilliant – ability to compassionately hold all of these narratives: the horrific losses of Iraqi Jewish olim, the unthinkable trauma of Holocaust survivors in the same period, and the nightmare for Palestinians who once inhabited the city of Lydda and were displaced by traumatized Jewish immigrants. These stories are told with grace, nuance and a heart big enough to hold –  and mourn – all of them. Purim gives us a similar opportunity; to know that in every victory there may also be great loss, and in every loss there may be a victory for our enemy, and that praying for tremendous suffering – for anyone – compromises us all. Purim is an opportunity to think deeply about these contradictions, and to acknowledge the pain, and nuance, contained in this realitiy.

So what did I tell my student? “That’s a beautiful interpretation.” I answered. “Really beautiful. But, I mean, given the historical context that the commandment comes out of, I’m not sure it’s accurate.”

“Maybe” she said, “It’s time for a new interpretation.”

Maybe it is.

Chag Purim Sameach.

Rabbi Jordie Gerson serves Temple Emanu-el Beth Sholom in Montreal. 

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CCAR on the Road Israel News

CCAR Delegation in Ramallah: Learning, Listening and Questioning

Our CCAR delegation had the unusual but rewarding opportunity to travel to Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority, to talk with Palestinian business and political leaders.  Each rabbi in our group took away something different from the day. I’ll begin with my own general impressions and then fill in the details. What I took away was: 1) we do indeed have partners for both economic and political engagement; 2) Palestinians are thinking creatively about building a sustainable economy in their emerging state and have been working successfully in mutual engagement with Israelis in universities and other settings; 3) Restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation such as freedom of movement of both goods and people are severely hampering economic development; and 4) Women are an emerging and strong force in the Palestinian work place.

Our leaders who arranged the meetings were Felice and Michael Friedson, founders of Media Line.  They first took us to meet with Kamel Husseini, the Managing Director of The Portland Trust.  Founded in London in 2003, the Trust is a “British non-profit ‘action tank’ whose mission is to promote peace and stability between Israelis and Palestinians through economic development.” Husseini is an ideal director for such a trust. For much of his life he has reached out to Jews and Israelis, moved by our shared humanity.  Husseini wrote a moving article about Hadassah Hospital as a model of humanity that we would all do well to emulate.  He spoke from personal knowledge, having taken his mother there for oncology treatments for 12 years.

The goal of Kamel Husseini and the Portland Trust in Ramallah is to work on 5 areas of economic development (tourism, energy, construction, information technology, and agriculture) that are realistic given the restrictions of the Palestinian reality under occupation.  It would not be realistic, for example, to work on manufacturing, since that requires access to resources and control of imports and exports through borders that are not available at this time.  His hope is that by focusing on things they can do, they can help prepare the Palestinian economy for a time when there is an independent state.  He is very eager to work with Israelis both now and in the future on economic projecCaryn Broitman 2ts.

Our next meeting took place at the beautiful new coffee house in Ramallah called Zamn.  The second of an Starbucks type chain, Zamn was started by the impressive and articulate entrepreneur and business woman, Huda el Jack. El Jack, who moved to the West Bank from the United States in 2003, went to business school at Tel Aviv University.  She wanted to go to a university where Palestinians and Israelis were together.  Watching the students work together, she learned learned that it is “amazing what Israelis and Palestinians can do together when they are free”. El Jack wanted to make a difference in the economy and she certainly has.  The food and coffee at Zamn were delicious.  She wanted to make sure we understood, however, that she was able to do what she did in spite of the situation (occupation).  “Don’t think there are a lot of opportunities here.”  Taking advantage of her education abroad, however, she is creating opportunities for others.

While enjoying our lunches we were given the unexpected opportunity of hearing senior Palestinian official, Nabil Shaath.  Shaat is a close advisor to Mahmoud Abbas and has been one of the key negotiators over the years.  Shaath expressed great respect for John Kerry and his efforts, however was dissatisfied with the direction of the negotiations.  While Palestinians, in his view, would overwhelmingly favor a plan of two states with 2 capitals and open trade between the two countries, what is being offered, in his view, is a state that is neither contiguous nor independent, and would not alleviate the restrictions of movement that he and other Palestinians suffer now.  He expressed the frustration that Secretary Kerry seemed to be negotiating with Bibi Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, rather than with Netanyahu and Abbas.

Finally, we visited the planned city of Rawabi, not far from Ramallah.  We were greeted by a woman, one of their engineers, who told us that there are 23 neighborhoods planned, 2 of them already completed with their 650 apartments already sold.  The city will include a hospital, many schools, an amphitheater, mosques and churches, a convention center and much more.  The building is on an almost unimaginable scale.  Its visionary, Bashar Al-Masri spoke to us of his desire to make a difference in the Palestinian economy.  He passionately explained that he does not want Palestine to be a state dependent on donations of other nations.  He wants to help build a self-sustaining economy of his emerging country.  Rawabi has become the number 1 private sector employer of Palestinians.  And while it is an expression of Palestinians’ independent spirit, it also is a model of engagement with Israelis and Jews around the world, who have come to both learn from and offer their help and experience.  While restrictions of movement and road building due to the occupation has been a major obstacle, Masri is still optimistic, and has received support from many in the Israeli public who can hopefully influence government officials to allow him the access to water and roads that the project requires.

We were all grateful to Felice, Michael and the CCAR for a day packed with opportunities for learning, listening and questioning.

 Rabbi Caryn Broitman is the rabbi of Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.

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CCAR on the Road Israel

CCAR Start Up Israel Trip: Learn What Makes the Impossible Possible

Walking through the late afternoon in Maktesh Ramon, breathing in air that is simultaneously warm and cool the way air in the desert in the late afternoon tends to be (but not at all the way the air in New Jersey tends to be), I overheard a colleague say: “if I’m not enjoying it, I’m doing the wrong thing”. I wasn’t really part of his conversation, more wandering alongside lost in my own moment, so I’m not entirely sure what “it” was. But whatever he meant, he got me thinking.

It is easy to throw around sentences like that one when you are on vacation and the only decision to be made is which of two equally gorgeous hikes to take through the desert. We can love either. But what about loving to do what we’re about the rest of the time: when the sun is not setting over the crater and the sky turning to colors we’ll never see in Princeton, or Joliet or wherever.

I don’t know well the rabbi who was speaking but from what I can tell he certainly seems passionate about the work of his rabbinate. And another rabbi on our trip told me today that she actually was prepared to hate the form her rabbinate had taken until she discovered that she loved her work with the people with whom she engaged day by day. The CEO of Friends by Nature, Nir, got involved in the Ethiopian community when in his post army wanderings he fell in love with an area, met the people there and loved those people even more than the surroundings themselves. He has dedicated his life to that love. Miri Eisen started our day talking to us about the geopolitical reality of Israel given the world in which it exists. She is a woman whose passion for the people of Israel, her love for them and the need to protect them is evident in all she says. In other words, what struck me today was the power of love.

When you love what you do and who you do it with, the impossible sometimes becomes less so. I know we don’t live our lives on vacation where loving what you’re about is easy. I understand that there are plenty of things that all the love in the world is not going to make possible. But I came here to Israel with the CCAR Start Up Israel trip to learn what makes the impossible possible. A MARAM colleague who met with us for lunch and is building in Caesaria one of the newest congregations in Israel — a place where she herself declared there could never be a reform community — told us that she didn’t let herself focus on what couldn’t be. She focused on what she knew in her heart there needed to be. And she shared that love with others. Guess what? They had 100 plus people at the high holidays last year.

My questions then: how do we make the impossible happen? And what’s love got to do with it?

Rabbi Carolyn Bricklin-Small serves Congregation Beth Chaim in Princeton Junction, NJ.
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CCAR on the Road Israel

Discovering Israeli Patience during the Start-Up Israel Tour

People keep saying that Israelis don’t have any patience. Maybe not for the inconveniences of daily life, but everyday of this Start-Up Israel tour convinces me more and more that In the long run Israelis are tenaciously patient. Consider Daniel and Anat Kornmehl who began raising goats in 1994. It took them three years to find the right home to make cheese and sell it at their restaurant. They find their home in the Negev but are still waiting for a long-term lease from the government so they can build permanent housing.

High-tech entrepreneur David Guedalia, along with a variety of colleagues, including brother Jacob, has developed at least a half-dozen software products. Now the group is part of Qualcomm. The group, based in Beit Shemesh, credits its success as a startup to working with people from a variety of cultures; their background in the army — which taught a strong reliance on each other, improvisation and the ability to take risks; and letting the best innovators take the lead with others carrying out their vision.

In Be’er Sheva’s old city, we met university students who are taking a cue from their grandparents to create a new Zionism for the 21st century. These 20 students make up just one of the 14 villages of Ayalim dedicated to improving the lives of residents of socio- or economically challenged areas. In Be’er Sheva, the students are focused on providing residents mostly in their 20s with cultural activities, including music and art. But the students want to do more. Once they are done with school, many plan to settle in the area because they love it and they want to be part of helping the community continue to improve. Ayalim’s Deborah Waller said the area has already been rejuvenated as business activity has increased.

As the day drew to a close we neared our final destination of Jerusalem but stopped first to enjoy the patient work of Tzora Vineyards where we tasted a variety of delicious wines. We then concluded our day with a “Shehechiyanu” at the Haas Promenade overlooking Jerusalem — the golden city Israelis have been patiently guarding with their lives to keep and protect every day of the past 65 years.

Sara Goodman is a hospice chaplain in Los Angeles, CA.

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CCAR on the Road Israel News

Marketing 101: The Product is…Israel

As our CCAR Rabbinic mission, “Start-Up Israel” started today, we asked two key essential questions:

1. How do we understand the changing face of Israel and bring that back to our communities?

2. How do we capture the spirit of entrepreneurship and use that in our communities?

We began by meeting a dynamic woman, Joanna Landau, the Executive Director of Kinetis, an organization whose mission is to market Israel to non-Jews who fall in the undecided category about Israel (in America this number is 69%, meaning they have not positive or negative feelings towards Israel).  What they have discovered is that in this generation as people decide what has meaning and value to them as individuals, Israel is in fact a product that can be “sold”. They have taken influential bloggers on various subjects, food, art, dance, music, sports, environment etc. brought them to Israel and have shown them that what Israel offers is among the best in the world.  These bloggers then share their experience, giving tangible stories about Israel.  These stories change the images that people have about Israel from concrete, barbed wire, a bunker to one that is more authentic.

As rabbis, we could not help but think how this applies to our own youth who fall in that undecided category about Israel?  We all know so many youth who see Israel as a far off place, that is inaccessible. What can we do to give them images about Israel?  We can find out what interests them and bring that face of Israel alive for them.

To that end, we took a VIP gallery tour, with art critic Vardit Gross, who showed us the beauty of the modern art scene.  Including how Israel can engage in Design Art and take concepts, design them and even manufacture them on a small scale.  What an incredible face of Israel to show art lovers!

Our meeting with Reuven Marko and Lior Ben Tzur (both IMPJ members in Netanya) further helped us connect with the notion of Start-Up as an engineer and a businessman, have teamed together to accelerate start up ideas.   They were involved early on with the PillCam and as well as the first “iPhone” an idea that came about that would use touch screen technology to surf the web.  The idea was born in 1994 and the iPhone produced then was roughly the size of a desktop computer with a phone attached to to it.

As we learned, the spirit of “Start-Up” is built on bringing people with different expertise together to create ideas.  This notion of teamwork is forged from the greatest teamwork experiment in Israel, called the Army.  It leaves us to wonder how we can capture that creativity. We should not be afraid to disagree, fail 2 or 3 times before getting it right, and focus on a key idea rather than a far reaching idea. (Reuven also mentioned how excited he was about the new 6 points Sci-tech academy, the URJ’s newest summer camp opening this summer that will put kids in a communal society and help them discover the tools towards ingenuity.)

Our challenge is how can we capture that innovation in our own communities? Perhaps some of the ideas mentioned above can be helpful and perhaps others will come to fruition.  As Joanna Landau taught us, Israel is built on a creative energy.

Rabbi Rick Kellner serves Congregation Beth Tikvah in Worthington, OH

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General CCAR Israel News Rabbis Reform Judaism

BDS: Biased, Dishonest, Self-Defeating

Deciding to boycott Israeli academic institutions, the American Studies Association has aligned itself with the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions against Israel. The ASA resolution, approved by voters who received only pro-BDS materials and no opposing viewpoints, illustrates the moral and political bankruptcy of this approach to one of the world’s most complex conflicts.

Biased.

Most fair-minded people recognize that in any complicated dispute, responsibility for the situation and the capacity to solve it are shared among the parties. Not the BDS posse! The ASA’s action is but the latest example of a pernicious bias that focuses obsessively on Israel’s flaws – real, exaggerated, and imagined – while ignoring or attempting to justify the misdeeds, failures, mistakes and shortcomings of Israel’s adversaries. This willful blindness, which singles out the Jewish State, and it alone, for condemnation and delegitimization, and holds that nation, and it alone, to standards that it fails or refuses to impose on others, is the newest form of the world’s most enduring prejudice: anti-Semitism.

For a taste of the hypocrisy inherent in condemning Israel for alleged human rights violations and repressing academic freedom, consider some of the countries on which the ASA and the BDS movement exercise the right to remain silent: Zimbabwe, Iran, North Korea, China and Russia, where dissident teachers and students are targets of violence, the ruling regimes’ ideological opponents are imprisoned or worse, elections are rigged, the media are state-controlled, homosexuality is banned, and the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion are denied. The ASA continues the proud tradition of those who ignored the atrocities of Pol Pot and Idi Amin, totalitarianism in Burma, mass murder in the Congo, and genocide in Rwanda to focus their moral lasers exclusively on Israel.

Dishonest.

BDS is a weapon in the arsenal of those who deny, explicitly or implicitly, the Jewish People’s aspiration to statehood and the right of a Jewish state to exist, while asserting vehemently, and often violently, the Palestinian People’s national rights. Non-state actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda, as well as Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, are determined to use all means available, ranging from disinformation to nuclear weapons, to destroy the Jewish State and annihilate its citizens.

Even Peter Beinart, with whom I disagree fundamentally on so much that pertains to the Middle East, denounced the ASA’s action. “BDS proponents note that the movement takes no position on whether there should be one state or two between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But it clearly opposes the existence of a Jewish state within any borders…This is the fundamental problem: Not that the ASA is practicing double standards and not even that it’s boycotting academics, but that it’s denying the legitimacy of a democratic Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian one.”

 Self-Defeating.

Bias and dishonesty aside, BDS does nothing to advance Palestinians’ national goals or improve their quality of life, either in the territories or within Israel. There is much to be learned from Mais Ali-Saleh, 27, the observant Moslem woman from a small Arab village near Nazareth, in Northern Israel, this year’s medical school valedictorian at the Technion, often called “Israel’s M.I.T.,” who observed, “An academic boycott of Israel is a passive move, and it doesn’t achieve any of its purported objectives.” Sooner or later, Dr. Ali-Saleh pointed out, the boycott will impinge upon academic researchers she knows, both Jews and Arabs. Her clear message: Efforts like BDS are unproductive and misdirected. Those who truly seek to assist Palestinians and promote Middle East peace should invest their energies in supporting successes like hers and those of her husband, Nidal Mawasi, also a Technion-educated M.D., and on pressing Arab countries and the Palestinian authorities themselves to emulate Israel’s academic freedoms and democracy.

Fortunately, many in the Arab world are far wiser and more sensible than their erstwhile supporters in the BDS crowd. The Allgemeiner reports that thousands of students from Arab countries have signed up for the Technion’s first course taught in both Arabic and English. Even before officially opening, the nanoscience course has drawn more than 32,000 views from all over the world, including 5,595 from Egypt, 1,865 from Kuwait, 1,243 from Saudi Arabia, and 1,243 from Syria. The course will be taught by Professor Hossam Haick, a Nazareth native and a pioneer in innovative cancer detection, one of the many the ASA now boycotts.

Academics are often accused of inhabiting an “ivory tower,” blissfully and cluelessly detached from the messy reality of the world. In aligning itself with BDS, biased, dishonest, and self-defeating, the ASA’s shameful resolution substantiates that notion.

Rabbi Rick Block is Senior Rabbi of The Temple – Tifereth Israel in Cleveland and Beachwood, Ohio, and President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.  This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post. 

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CCAR on the Road General CCAR Israel News Rabbis Reform Judaism

Why I’m Going On the CCAR “Start Up Israel” Trip

In January, the CCAR is leading a rabbinic trip to Israel focusing on the culture of entrepreneurship in the country.  This trip is part of CCAR’s Leadership Travel Series and provides a learning opportunity for rabbis so that they can return and teach their communities.   

When I hear about the brilliant technical advances being made every day in Israel, I am fascinated how such a little country can be such a powerhouse when it comes to problem-solving and innovation. For example, ever since my year-in-Israel, I couldn’t understand why every house and apartment building in America didn’t have a dud shemesh (solar-powered water heater) on its roof to heat its water … which means I am excited to meet our colleague Rabbi Susan Silverman’s husband Yossi Abramowitz, President of Arava Power Company, Israel’s leading solar developer which is working to bring solar power to developing nations.  (I’m also looking forward to meeting him because I used his and Susan’s book, Jewish Family & Life:  Traditions, Holidays, and Values as my Intro text for years.)

I’m also taking this trip because it includes a trip to Ramallah, which I was never able to visit during my year-in-Israel because of the second Intifada.  I’m excited because we will speaking with an entrepreneur who founded a chain of coffee shops to discuss her challenges and successes, as well as a side trip to the first master-planned Palestinian city, Rawabi, which will ultimately consist of 10,000 housing units for 40,000 people.  Having lived in several master-planned communities (and several that weren’t), I look forward to seeing how the planners prioritized different aspects of communal living and learning about their challenges and successes as well.

74019_455668595821_4837872_nLastly, I’m going on this trip because I want to come back to my synagogue with a plan for leading an “out of the box” trip that won’t be focused on “first-timers.”  As someone who works with a congregation where many of my congregants have been to Israel multiple times (who have seen and done all the “usual things”), I believe that this trip, with its focus on technology and innovation, will connect me with Israel in a way few get to and I will be able to bring this back to my community … “or chadash al Tzion ta-ir” – I will get to share the many ways a new light shines on Zion.  Won’t you join me?

Rabbi Cookie Lea Olshein is rabbi of Temple Israel of West Palm Beach, FL