The story I tell people is this: I went to Israel in 2005 to become a rabbi and study Hasidism. I left in 2006, a rabbinical dropout studying Jacob Frank, the greatest heretic who ever lived. The implied joke is that living in Israel - Jerusalem, at least - can wash the love of Judaism right out of a person, just as it can dye it in. And, to some extent, the joke is true. Every American who spends a year or more in Israel can date their time according to which historical convulsions the country was undergoing - in 1993, I was there for Oslo; in 1998, it was the calm before the Camp David storm; and in 2005 the hitnatkut, the Israeli "Disengagement" from Gaza. The last year was the most powerful for me personally. I saw that Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism aligned almost perfectly; that for me to have any pretensions to an Orthodox, or even Ortho-practic, lifestyle was increasingly absurd on a sociological but also intellectual level; and that the Jewishness I wanted to create for myself - and I did still want to create that - would have to be a Jewishness outside the conventional boundaries of Jewish religious belief and community (read on): zeek.net/706jay/
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 21:42:57 +0000
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