Finding Holiness in Israel

A convert to Judaism visits the Holy Land

By Sian Gibby

The beauty of Eretz Israel is manifold and deep. The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the country's existence should reflect that varied loveliness: the beauty not only of Israel's realities but of its promise. My recent trip there helped plant the seeds in me for this celebration. No doubt some of the nation's fete-ing will be militaristic and loud, but I hope that some of it will be quietly joyous, purposeful, laced with gratitude and with humility. Israel has a tradition of backbreaking work behind it: The Jewish people need to continue the work, even those of us in the Diaspora. Thanks to the early pioneers, the desert has bloomed. With further toil, perhaps a kind of blossoming and perfecting of the human soul can follow. B'ezrat Ha Shem (with G-d's help).

Finding Holiness in Israel: Slide 1...

Sian Gibby is a senior editor at Bloggingheads.tv

The Port City of Tel Aviv

This trip I went on was organized by my synagogue, Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, a synagogue that aligns most closely with the Conservative Movement on Manhattan's Upper West Side. My rabbi, J. Rolando Matalon, led the trip, and its aim was finding holiness in Israel through exposure to the works of a variety of people: religious and secular, left-leaning and right, Jewish and non-Jewish. We began and ended the journey in the lovely port city of Tel Aviv. Throughout the entire week we spent in Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), we encountered abundant holiness--overflowing, breathtaking--even when the places it was growing were stifling and small, even when the going was painfully hard. Being a religious Jew in Israel, we discovered, means being open to holiness and working to increase and sustain it.

Visiting Holy Sites in Jerusalem

In Jerusalem, we visited sites sacred to Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The city is a dizzying panoply of different types of holiness, and my rabbi warned us not to get distracted by its religious glamour (my word, not his). The city is getting more and more religious on all sides, and it's not making things any better for anyone. Nevertheless, I burst into tears when I heard the muezzin calling Muslims to midday prayer; the voice was hauntingly beautiful, floating around the walls of the Old City. We went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where my friend Larry, a Christian, stood visibly stunned next to the place where Jesus' body is said to have been washed. The emotions in his expression made me cry as the muezzin's call did.

Meeting Sheikh Ghassan

In the Arab Quarter of the Old City, we met with Sheikh Ghassan, who may be the most genial man of G-d I ever saw in my life. He led us rapidly through winding market streets on smooth, aged cobblestones, past noisy merchants and little kids on cycles, women shrouded in veils, and careening green garbage tractors that looked impossibly big for the narrow alleys. We sat on the roof of a mosque as the sheikh told us about Sufism and its missions of peace and love. He related a chilling tale of how his own son had been attacked and beaten because of his father's activism on behalf of tolerance. Some of us got distinctly uneasy, wondering if our visit would get Sheikh Ghassan into further trouble with fundamentalist groups.

A Monastery at Emmaus

We drove up into the hills to a monastery at Emmaus, where we sat in a low stone room flooded with sunlight and talked with the priest, Father Franz, and sang Psalm 117 in Latin and Hebrew with him and some French nuns and Rabbi David Lazar,: "Praise the Lord, all you nations; extol the Lord, all you peoples; for great is the Lord's steadfast love toward us; the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever, Hallelujah." I closed my eyes and let the sounds cascade around me. Father Franz and Rabbi Lazar talked about initiatives their respective communities had made to reach out to one another, to work together on text study, and to visit one another's services. The monastery is interested in Jesus' life as a Jew, and they take Torah very seriously and open-mindedly.

A Day in Sfat

We spent a day in Sfat, the seat of medieval mysticism and briefly the home of the ARI, Rabbi Isaac Luria, who revolutionized mystical practice and whose legacy of wisdom lives on. It's a beautiful place, but the previous summer it had been deserted, as missiles rained down on it from nearby Lebanon, about 12 miles to the north. One night during our time in northern Israel, we celebrated a Hachnasat Sefer Torah ("Welcoming a Torah Scroll"), in which our congregation gave a new Torah scroll to our sister community, Niggun Ha Lev, in the small town of Nahalal. This was a huge event for Niggun Ha Lev, and not everyone in the congregation was happy about having a Torah. Many of them came from third-generation kibbutznik families raised communist, and they mistrusted the trappings of traditional Judaism. We were impressed with their willingness to grapple with these and other thorny questions about what it means to be a Jew in Israel who takes Judaism seriously.

Off the Beaten Track

Our days in Yerushalayim centered not on the typical sightseeing activities of the Old City, etc, for the most part. It was nice for a change to be off the beaten track, out in the countryside more, and experiencing the area in eye-opening ways. One beautiful, hot morning, we went just outside the city to daven Shaharit (morning prayers) in a breathtaking valley. The sun quickly rose over the hills beside us, and the insects and birds seemed to sing in harmony to our morning melodies of gratitude: to the G-d Who created it all and Who brought us together...and Who brought us to the Holy Land. When I sang "Sh'ma, Yisrael..." "Hear, Israel!" I understood on what felt like a molecular level that all of Israel could hear us at last. The people and the land itself. "Sh'ma, Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. Hear, Israel, Adonai is our G-d, One G-d."

Brilliant and Jam-Packed Exploration

More wonderful faces: our local guide and teacher, Rabbi Yehoshua Engelman with my rabbi. Rabbi Engelman was with us the entire trip, teaching Torah along the way and helping the secular guides round out the tour with tales from the Talmud and snippets of poetry and music. He works with Rabbis for Human Rights and at the Jewish education center, Kolot. If there was one constant in this brilliant and jam-packed exploration for me of what it means to be in Israel as a Jew, it is the holiness of faces. There is a midrash about a rabbi who hired a man to accompany him on his rounds as he did his business, solely so he could look into his eyes and be reminded of the face of G-d. So many of the people we met had this look of openness, of the pain of experience, of compassion and of a sad kindness. The purpose of our journey was to seek out holiness, and we saw it everywhere in the eyes of these people working hard and long to make the world, and particularly their own land, better and more godly. "Establish Thou the work of their hands; yea, the work of their hands establish Thou it."