It’s been a full few days since I last posted. filled with friends, old and new, and deep learning. It will take a long time to process it all, so I can offer only highlights and some scattered thoughts here now.

I visited on Friday day with two rabbi friends and their spouses (and tasted THE best croissants I ever had because, voila! French Jewish bakers moved to the neighborhood). I refer you to this article about one of the rabbis, Levi Weiman-Kelman, that had broken my heart when it first appeared in The Forward last month: https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/looking-forward/574527/takeaways-from-reporting-jerusalem-tel-aviv-haifa/. That feeling of a closed heart was shared by others over the last few days, and in a meeting tonight in my Reform rabbis’ group, Rabbi Gil Kariv, (a Reform rabbi who is also a member of Knesset with the Labor Party) reminded us that most Israelis are not seeing the images from Gaza on mainstream Israeli news.

with Levi and Paula Weiman-Kelman

with Susan Silverman

After a lovely Shabbat with my childhood penpal Bili (with whom I started corresponding at age 10–and who is also struggling mightily with her closed heart and her rage–her job with Israeli t.v., btw, requires her to be viewing the graphic footage from October 7) and her husband Mats and a couple of other guests, I left Jerusalem early this morning (Sunday) to get to Tel Aviv for 9 AM programming with the solidarity mission from Congregation B’nai Jeshurun (BJ) in Manhattan (one of three congregations I belong to).

with Bili and Mats

Rabbis Felicia Sol and Roly Matalon from B’nai Jeshurun (in the middle) with Dr. Rani Jaeger to Felicia’s right and Rabbi Chen benOr Tsfoni and Dr. Sarale to Roly’s left

First we met with a panel that included Rabbi Chen Ben-Or Tsfoni (who was an intern at BJ many years ago and now serves a congregation in Raanana–she spoke of her many relatives who physically survived the attack on Kibbutz Beeri on October 7 but who are traumatized, and how hard she is finding it to maintain or offer hope); Dr. Rani Jaeger, a founder of the Hartman Institute’s pluralistic Jewish-Israeli Identity program, who spoke primarily about his experience these last few months doing his miluim service as a medic; and Dr. Sarale Shadmi-Wortman, an international expert in the field of community building as a process for creating resilient communities and founder of VARDA Institute, which is working in communities all over Israel post-October 7 (including Bedouin and Arab communities). Most memorable tidbits she shared are:

1. the younger generation is very resilient and very motivated to make change in this country and that fills her with hope.

2. there is a political divide about what to do about the hostages. While most of the kibbutzniks and Nova party-goers who were captured come from left-of-center families and communities, the soldiers who are hostages come from a broader spectrum of Israeli society. There are, apparently, 5 families (right-of-center) who do not believe that hostages should be released, who are willing to sacrifice their own children to what they consider the greater good of Israel.

3. Arab Israelis are between a rock and a hard place, as they generally identify more with Jewish Israelis than with Palestinians in the territories. Sadly, current fear of Arabs on the part of Jewish Israelis is not helping Israeli Arabs to feel it or express their sense of solidarity fully.

4. The anti-Semitism that has been unleashed around the world after October 7 convinces her that Israel is the only place that is safe for Jews. She knows this is a paradox.

After this panel, we heard from the group Bonot Alternativa (Alternative Builders), a grassroots women’s organization, whose work on behalf of women totally blew my mind. It was founded after a gang rape of a teenage girl in an Eilat hotel in 2020 and has grown to be a movement that includes women from secular to Orthodox to Arab. The judicial reform that had been protested for weeks and weeks before October 7 would have affected women disproportionately. They often went to protest wearing handmaids costumes (think Margaret Atwood and “The Handmaid’s Tale”) and remaining silent to symbolize the silencing of women. Their  movement was ready and organized after October 7 to respond, as they did, with 50 operation centers around the country to address needs from housing to childcare to cooking. Note that it is not only those southern communities that have been displaced due to the Hamas attacks, but also 150,000 people in the north have been evacuated in anticipation of a war with Lebanon. The hotel I’m now staying at in Tel Aviv, the Dan Panorama, (as are hotels everywhere) is housing large number of these evacuees/internal refugees. (I’ve since heard that there is a rise in domestic violence–imagine being stuck in a hotel room with kids.)

Also note that what these grassroots organizations are doing are, of course, things that the government should be doing but isn’t. While the government was in hiding in those early weeks after October 7, the country was only held together because of its civil society. This is a view shared by everyone I’ve spoken to thus far. (Note that there is also a tremendous amount of anger at the utter failure of  the government, the IDF, and the intelligence community in not anticipating/preventing October 7.)

Lots of great and angry graffiti

A makeshift commemoration for the hostages in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv. Photos, messages, teddy bears, yahrzeit candles run all the way around the large fountain.

I brought Sharon a picture of her father z”l that was made by artist Pattie Lipman

When the BJ folks took off after this conversation for the rest of their tour, I went to visit my friends Sharon and Simon at their home in Tel Aviv. Sharon is the daughter of former congregants of mine who has lived in Israel for many years.

And then I went to meet my own Reform rabbis’ group (a group of 36) for its week-long program that officially started this evening, meeting with a number of Israeli Reform colleagues and then a deep dive into Israeli politics with MK Rabbi Gil Kariv.

While I’d love to share my pages and pages of notes with you–Gil is brilliant and compelling — I will not. I do want to say that he scared the daylights out of me with his assessment of what’s happening in the Middle East right now, the specter of Israeli’s having to fight wars on multiple fronts (in which Hamas is actually the least of its concerns as it doesn’t ultimately represent the existential threat that Iran does), the dangers of the Netanyahu presidency in his isolationism from allies in the US and Europe who could help contain these larger threats, and what the left and center-left have to do not only for their own political survival but also to prepare for the Day After this war and moving towards a vision of a two-state solution.

“IT’S COMPLICATED” will likely need be my title every day from here on. This country is filled with contradictions, and the black-and-white thinking about it from the left in the US  doesn’t take into consideration the larger geo-political realities and concerns. MK Kariv believes that what is happening here now is bigger and broader than the Palestinian-Israeli issue alone.

I’m happy to discuss any or all of this with any of you who’d like to know more.