checking in on shalom simhon

At my Hebrew level, reading a serious news article is a huge chore. But Nadav and Google Translate tell me that this article says Shalom Simhon lost a court case and will not be chairman of KKL in the near future.

orientation

I'm in Ann Arbor. The first few days of classes were a hyperspeed review of the Real Analysis course I took at GW. So far the people who have run class or orientation sessions have spent far more time than I expected massaging egos--saying things like "you deserve to be here" and "don't worry if it seems hard, you'll be fine". Apparently impostor syndrome is common among graduate students.

The econ program at UM styles itself as a collaborative program. The administration wants everyone to work together and succeed. This is apparently different from some other programs, where individuals in each cohort are ranked and the lower half are rejected after several years.

The administration put us in suggested study groups, which are intentionally diverse. Mine has a Filipino man, a Chinese woman, an Indian woman, and a man from Missouri. Second and third year students told me their study groups became more homogeneous eventually, but so far our study group has worked out very well.

The general paradigm at UM is that PhD econ students take two years to complete course work and three years to write a dissertation. It seems like most students here are now taking at least four years to write a dissertation. I think students are taking extra time to avoid entering a crummy job market. Hopefully that won't be a factor for me.

beit ben gurion, palmach, ha'apalah

Yesterday I went to two museums. David Ben Gurion's house in Tel Aviv and the Palmach Museum. There's not much to see at Beit Ben Gurion, but its free and in central Tel Aviv. Ben Gurion amassed a huge library in Tel Aviv and also in his other house in Sde Boker, which makes me want to read more books.

The Palmach Museum is a very unusual museum. Its sort of like watching a movie from the set where it was filmed, and moving to a new scene every 5 or 10 minutes. Well worth the visit. Makes me want to be a soldier. (But not really.)

I'm also reading a book about illegal immigration from Europe between 1945 and 1948 (Aliyah Bet or Ha'apalah). Its a first-hand, journalistic account by I.F. Stone called Underground to Palestine. Very good so far.

more wzc - the settlement enterprise

The three days of the World Zionist Congress can be roughly broken down as follows:

Day 1 - Siyurim (field trips), corresponding to some committee
Day 2 - Committee meetings, where proposals on a particular topic are discussed
Day 3 - The general plenary session, where resolutions are voted on by the entire assembly of delegates

I attached myself to the sixth committee, "The Settlement Enterprise." Settlement has come to be associated with settlements in the West Bank, but the scope of the committee included the peripheral areas of the Galilee and Negev as well.

The siyur for members of my committee focused on Gush Etzion, the region of the West Bank bounded by Jerusalem to the north, the Green Line to the west, Hebron to the South and the Dead Sea to the east.

It was interesting to go on a siyur planned by someone else after spending the last several months planning siyurim for other people. I couldn't stop myself from deconstructing the siyur into the implied messages that the organizers sent through each component.

Herodiom - An ancient hill fortress, somewhat resembling Masada. The messages: Judea is beautiful, Jews have an ancient connection to the land (and therefore a right to it), anyone who tries to force Jews out of the land is like the Roman Empire.

Kfar Etzion - A kibbutz, abandoned several times under threat of violence and resettled in 1967. The messages: settlers in the West Bank are just like the chalutzim of the second aliya, settlers are heroic because they persevere in the face of technical and political obstacles, Arabs are destructive and violent.

Shaul Goldstein - The mayor of the Gush Etzion Regional Council. The messages: settlers are innovative and provide technologically advanced products to the world market, settlers have very good relations with regular Arabs, Arab leaders undermine their friendship and cooperation.

I asked the mayor, "Do you think there should be a Palestinian state?" He said no.

I honestly enjoyed the siyur, even though I felt it was inappropriate for the organizers to have so obviously taken one side (the wrong one) on a controversial issue.

Alternates (like me) were, as a rule, not permitted to attend committee meetings or vote in the general plenary session, but I subbed in for actual delegates in both the committee meeting and the general plenary.

After some initial turbulence, the committee meeting settled down into a very respectful atmosphere, which I attribute partially to the even-handed chairmanship of Hadar Susskind. The final resolution, which I presented on behalf of Habonim Dror, Ameinu, J Street, Hashomer Hatzair and Meretz, recognized a two-state solution as an urgent priority. It passed with a vast majority and the support of Likud after the Labor-Meretz-Reform faction accepted some of Likud's amendments.

After the resolution passed, an orthodox man praised the process even though his political beliefs forced him to vote against the resolution.

Susskind discusses the desertion of the committee by some of its right-wing members and the subsequent fiasco in the general plenary in this blog post. I would add that Liam Getreu from Habonim Dror was one of the "two young Australians from opposing political perspectives" referenced by Susskind.

world zionist congress

I was a delegate to the 36th World Zionist Congress this week. In its history, the congress has served some important functions. Today, its main function seems to be to haggle over who gets to serve in various appointed positions, such as head of KKL. Its also an opportunity to network with like-minded people and exchange nasty words with people who disagree with you.

One question on my mind is whether the congress is a democratic forum. There are clearly a number of procedures that resemble democracy. Voting (on some things), Robert's rules of order (sort of), elections (in theory).

There were no elections for the 36th WZC. Representation was based partially on the elections for the 35th WZC and partially on elections for the Knesset. The number of coalitions, factions, and sub-factions is astonishing. I was a diaspora Labor delegate, which was part of the World Labor party, which was temporarily aligned with World Meretz and the Reform Movement. Together, the Labor-Meretz-Reform faction was the largest, which enabled it to choose the next head of KKL.

This morning, an election was supposed to be held within the faction to choose the head of KKL. Before the election began, the candidates -- Menachem Leibovitch (who was not a serious candidate) and Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon (who was anointed by I-don't-know-who) -- introduced themselves. I thought that prior to the vote would be a good time to ask questions of the candidates. Acting partially as a representative of Habonim Dror (and youth movements more generally, which have been impressively united against land privatization), I asked Minister Simhon about his opinion of land privatization and the law suit between Kadima and KKL regarding a controversial vote about land swaps with the state.

Rather than allow Simhon to answer the question publicly, several faction leaders (mostly Reform) deflected it and hurried people into the voting booths. I protested loudly that Simhon had introduced himself partially by trying to establish credibility with youth movements as a former secretary of Bnei HaMoshavim, and yet was ignoring the question that was most important to youth movements. The Reformniks arranged a private meeting between me and Simhon, mostly in order to shut me up.

Nadav agreed to come with me to meet Simhon, who brought along his assistant Aliza and a former director of KKL, Yitzchak Elishiv. Simhon was polite but evasive. We spoke with him for about 15 minutes and he promised to meet with me again. My favorite part was when I told him that land privatization was against Jewish values (Yovel). He responded that even Ovadia Yosef had no objection. I pointed out that Ovadia Yosef doesn't define my Jewish values or Simhon's either.

british airways cabin crew appreciation

So much for getting back in the habit of blogging.

Something wonderful just happened which I feel compelled to share with the world:

I booked my flight home a bit less than a year ago through British Airways. BA caps the amount of time in advance it is possible to book flights, so the arbitrary date I chose was June 9. The program I run (Boneh) ends June 10, and I'm staying in Israel for several weeks after that to be a delegate at the World Zionist Congress. Knowing this, I obviously should have chosen a new flight with BA several months ago. But I didn't do anything about this until last week.

In addition to the $250 change of flight fee (which I knew about), BA requires passengers to pay the difference in the price of the flight (which I thought would be negligible). When I called BA last week, I found out that flights from Israel to the US can be far more expensive in mid July than mid June, to the tune of $300 or more (for a total of $550 or more). I refused to book a new flight last week, hoping that the $300 would be reduced a bit closer to June 9.

Today I checked in on my flight. The BA website announced apologetically that there is a cabin crew strike scheduled for some days in late May and early June, including June 9, and that all passengers who had flights on those days can reschedule for free.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my support for Unite, a union that represents many faithful members of the cabin crews of British Airways. BA wants to make drastic cuts to its workforce, impose a two-year wage freeze, and introduce a second tier workforce. This is an outrage, and I for one stand in solidarity with the workers of Unite.

ironic poetry contest

I was just made aware of a poetry contest sponsored by Tablet Magazine, in which entrants are asked to reinterpret a poem by Judah Halevi, a Spanish Jewish philosopher who lived in the early 12th century. Halevi's poetry often deals with the theme of yearning for Zion, as in this translation rendered by Hillel Halkin of "My Heart in the East":

My heart in the East
But the rest of me far in the West --
How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat?
How, in the bonds of the Moor,
Zion chained to the Cross,
Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must?
Yet gladly I’d leave
All the best of grand Spain
For one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust.

The grand prize is an iPad. Whoever wins this contest will undoubtedly be as torn as Halevi was, because the he or she will not be permitted to enter Israel with the iPad.

har tavor

It's been a long time since I posted anything. I think its a matter of habit, so I'm going to ease myself back into the habit with a brief post.

On Thursday I led the Australians and South Africans on a hike. We hiked from Kibbutz Ein Dor to the top of Har Tavor, ate lunch at the peak, then hiked down the opposite side into the town of Shibli, where a bus picked us up and took us back to Ein Dor.

Yesterday I went to Haifa to prepare to lead a siyur (field trip) there, which will be a few weeks from now.

poland

I am leaving for Poland tonight. I'll be back in Israel on Feb 14. In preparation for the week, I ran from my apartment in Ramat Gan to the beach and back this afternoon. I hope the endorphins will last the whole week. If you DC folks look out your windows at the thirty inches of snow and imagine me standing there for about six hours a day, I think that's approximately what Poland will be like.

amos elon and poland

I'm reading The Israelis by Amos Elon (published in 1971). I just found a section that explains why my "game" works. From page 305:

The average Israeli recognizes few regulations of universal applicability. In his dealings with the authorities he invariably demands, firmly and loudly, exceptional treatment. His demands are frequently accompanied by an emotionalism so intense that a public official, if his heart is not wholly stone, will be hard put to resist.

How exceptional can the treatment really be if everyone demands it? More:

In dealings with the Israeli bureaucracy, few measures are as effective...as a high tone of outrage, a demanding wail.

Maybe this explains some of the difficulty of enforcing a settlement freeze.

I'm going to Poland next week with the North Americans and Europeans who were on Boneh and some guides from hanoar haoved vehalomed. The journey will focus on the Shoah. I spent all day yesterday with the staff of the program, preparing for the emotional and moral issues we'll encounter.

torat hamelech part two

Yitzhak Shapira, one of the two authors of Torat Hamelech, was arrested today.

vaad bayit

The apartment residents in my building just finished a meeting. It was hilarious.

There were twelve people including me. Most of the time, two to five of the participants were speaking and gesturing vigorously. The three main topics were the gardener, a potential addition to the building, and the building manager.

Gavriel, the older man who lives closest to Ari and me, would raise an occasional objection and be shushed by almost everyone else present. There were two people named Yaniv, one of whom was the building manager and one of whom translated for me once in a while.

The garden hasn't been tended for months but Gavriel objected to bringing the gardener back. Yaniv the translator explained that Gavriel hated the old gardener.

Yaniv the translator introduced a proposal is to add a room and a porch to each existing apartment and two floors to the whole building.

Yaniv the building manager said there were a lot of rude people (chutzpanim), so he wanted to turn his duties over to a professional, which would cost more. But he'd be willing to continue in his role if he got as much money as would have to be paid to the professional.

torat hamelech

I regularly participate in a discussion group run by Habonim Dror for movement people around my age. One issue we discussed today was the book Torat Hamelech. I did not know about the book until I saw this article in the Forward, but its publication apparently got some news coverage a few months ago. Israeli officials arrested 10 settlers on January 18 from the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, which published Torat Hamelech, for burning a mosque in an Arab village in December.

My understanding is that Torat Hamelech presents itself as a halachic analysis of when it is acceptable to kill non-Jews. From the Forward:

Despite the precedent set by previous Israeli attorneys general in the last decade and a half to file criminal charges against settler rabbis who publish commentaries supporting violence against non-Jews, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has so far remained mum about "The King's Torah."

Why is Mazuz remaining mum?

Previous governments took a tougher stance against such publications, [Yair Sheleg] said, but "paradoxically, because the tension between the general settler population and the Israeli judicial system…is high now, the attorney general is careful not to heighten the tension."

Zohar, an Israeli who helps lead the discussion group, translated a few excerpts from Torat Hamelech. From what Zohar showed us, it looks like the first chapters establish a principle that killing non-Jews is justified in a variety of specific situations. The later chapters broaden the principle and essentially condone violence in many situations.

Here is one excerpt translated by Zohar that supports individual, rather than collective, decisions about when to attack non-Jewish communities:

There is no need for the nation to decide to allow the killing of a different nation, and individuals of the attacked nation can also hurt them; for Simeon and Levy are not the authority but individuals in the house of Jacob (that resist their acts), and yet it was allowed to kill the people of Shechem since a nation has hurt another nation, and it is not the official decision of the attacked nation that allows the attack on the offensive.

I have a gut feeling that this book is a distortion of halacha, but I am going to leave the argument about its halachic validity to others who know better.

Even if it is halachically valid, the laws of the state must be enforced, and Torat Hamelech violates them by inciting violence.

the game

My roommate Ari and I enjoy pointing out to each other "Israeli things" we find frustrating. One frustrating thing is that service employees have a mentality which is not very service-oriented. I doubt anyone from Bezeq, Orange, or Discount Bank has ever said "the customer is always right". I wouldn't even want employees to treat customers like they are always right, but a slight shift in that general direction might be nice.

Since such a shift seems unlikely, I've started treating my interactions with service employees like a game: the Frustration Game.

The inspiration for the game came when Ari and I went to pick up a modem from a Bezeq outlet as directed by a Bezeq employee Ari spoke with on the phone. I was just along for the ride, since all the interactions were in rapid Hebrew. The employee at the outlet told us initially that she could not give us a modem and that we should come back another day. After a long discussion, she gave us a modem. It seemed pretty clear that she reacted when Ari started showing the proper amount of frustration--the amount necessary for her to decide to help us.

Thus, playing the game means figuring out what the proper amount of frustration is and pretending to be that frustrated right away.

The game worked to great effect at Shufersal, a grocery store. I was expecting to get cash for returning glass bottles. I found out later that you're supposed to ask one of the clerks to count how many bottles you are returning, then put them in a grocery cart in the corner. I asked the wrong clerk, who directed me towards the cart rather than counting the bottles or directing me to the correct clerk. When I asked her for the deposit money, she refused to give me any money. If I was being polite, I might have explained that there was a miscommunication, most likely due to my poor Hebrew skills. Instead, I pretended to be offended and indignant. I wasn't rude, I just showed a bit more emotion than I was actually feeling at the time. The manager came by and approved my deposit money right away.

yad tabenkin

Yad Tabenkin is the "research and documentation center of the United Kibbutz Movement". The library of Yad Tabenkin at the seminar center in Ramat Efal is shutting down a substantial portion of its English language section. I have been empowered (through Hechalutz) to claim books before they are discarded and recycled.

Before the North American machzor of boneh, my tzevet and I raided a used book store on Allenby on a budget for books related to Jewish history and Israeli society. Now the only consideration is how many books will fit in my backpack.

Is this heaven? No, it's Yad Tabenkin.

shabbat with yisroel and the 402

I spent shabbat with my cousin Yisroel in Ramat Eshkol in Jerusalem. His apartment, for the record, it is just west of the 1949 armistice line, according to Google Maps. I met his lovely wife Eliana, whom he married at the end of October.

Yisroel went through a phase of working out compulsively. He seems to have retained his appetite--and some of his physique--from that phase. I felt obliged to keep up with his eating while I was there, so I'm planning to eat my next meal on Tuesday or Wednesday. Did you know that it is a mitzvah to taste all the shabbat food before shabbat begins, and that "taste" means eat almost half as much as I would at a normal meal even though I had already eaten lunch? I learned that this shabbat from Yisroel.

Yisroel and Eliana are in Israel for another six weeks. I think this is a sort of honeymoon for them. He is studying at the Zichron Aryeh yeshiva.

The language on the street in Yisroel's neighborhood was English, not Hebrew. The dvar torah (sermon) at the service on Friday night was nominally English, but I probably would have understood more if it had been in Hebrew because it was so littered with Yiddish or Ashkenaz phrases that I did not recognize.

My understanding of the labels used for sects within orthodox Judaism improved over shabbat, specifically "haredi," "frum," "mitnagdim," and "litvak." I'll skip the explanation now to get to a more interesting conversation on the ride back to Ramat Gan.

I took the haredi (ultra-orthodox) bus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, route 402. It has two major distinguishing features. Unlike most intercity buses, it does not stop at the central bus station in either of the cities. Instead, it travels through the orthodox neighborhoods in both. Technically Bnei Brak, on the Tel Aviv end, is its own city, but whatever. The second distinguishing feature is that it is segregated by gender. Women in the back, men in the front.

Yisroel and I argued for a little while about the significance of this. I think the symbolism of having women always sit in the back is clearly that they are second class. I told him I would accept the segregation more readily if the women sat in front half the time. Yisroel does not like the segregation either--he got in an argument with another passenger when he rode the bus one time and tried to sit in front with Eliana. He said that probably the justification for women always being in back is that men are more easily aroused and that putting men in front reduces the amount of times men might be tempted by women. He doesn't abide by this justification and would prefer mixed seating, but he also disagreed about what I claimed was the symbolism.

I stuck out like a sore thumb on the 402. These days I am wearing my hair pulled back in a ponytail. I wasn't wearing a kipah, and certainly not the white shirt black pants uniform of the haredim. A four year old boy in the seat in front of me stared at me for most of the ride. A man in his mid-20s named Yehuda sat next to me and to my surprise started a conversation with me.

We started with basics. Where are you from, what are you doing in Israel, etc. We exchanged family histories and current occupations. I think he was mostly motivated by trying to figure out why on earth I was riding the 402. (Answer: I was visiting my dati (religious) cousin in Ramat Eshkol and I live in Ramat Gan, which is next to Bnei Brak.) Now that the context is set, I'll give an abridged translation of the most interesting part of the conversation, which was entirely in Hebrew because Yehuda spoke no English. Keep in mind that I'm simplifying things significantly.

Yehuda: What kind of religious Jew is your cousin?
Ben: Litvak. [Yisroel self-identified as Litvak when I asked him.] What about you?
Y: Also Litvak. What about you?
B: Conservative.
Y: Is your father conservative?
B: Yes.
Y: Really? [He seemed shocked by this.]
B: Yes.
Y: Why not orthodox?
B: What do you mean?
Y: Orthodox is real Judaism. ["amiti" - a word I learned from reading the label on mayonnaise]
B: Orthodox is real Judaism, and conservative is real Judaism.
Y: Jews in the time of King David were orthodox.
B: In the time of King David, they weren't even called Jews yet. They were Hebrews or Israelites. The term "Jew" comes from the kingdom of Judea, after the split between the northern and southern kingdoms.
Y: The Judaism they practiced was orthodox Judaism. They had the temple and the holidays.
B: There are many differences between their Judaism and orthodox Judaism today, and there are also many differences between their Judaism and conservative Judaism today. Judaism changes over time.
Y: Orthodox Judaism today can be traced in a direct line through the rabbis back to King David.
B: It is inaccurate to talk about King David as a part of the chain of tradition that goes back to Moses at Sinai because the kings and the priests were excluded from that chain.

At some points in the conversation I made nitpick-y points (particularly the last one) because my Hebrew wasn't good enough to say what I really wanted to say. I'm quite pleased with the conversation in general because we were disagreeing politely and engaging honestly.

Yehuda and I exchanged phone numbers. I think he wants to recommend a seminar to me. I want to find a Litvak who is willing and able to talk to my chanichim about politics.