February 2008

One of the major institutions of National Religious Zionism is Hesder. Many religious Zionists who want to serve in the army, but also to learn in a post-high school yeshiva, participate in this program. In Hesder, they commit for a total of 5 years (instead of three for the average enlistee) but only serve in the army for 18 months (again, instead of three years for the average enlistee). The arrangement works well enough, but for some it was not enough - there exist some programs that are similar to Hesder, but that insist on participants serve the full three year army stint. This is done for purely ideological reasons - so that no one can claim they are doing less or are shirking their responsibilities.

One longstanding program of this sort is Yeshivat Kibbutz HaDati, the yeshiva program of the religious kibbutz movement. Two such yeshivot exist, in Kibbutz Ein Zurim and in Kibbutz Maale Gilboa. I’ve heard one of the heads of Maale Gilboa, Rabbi David Bigman, speak on the subject and he is a fierce believer in doing things this way. These yeshivot also used to be the schools where Bnei Akiva of North America would send its graduates for Hachshara after high school.

Haaretz recently ran an article about how the Ein Zurim campus is nearly empty, and how the Maale Gilboa campus is making changes out of fear that it will suffer the same fate. It’s an interesting article about an institution that has a rich and important history.

Surprise! Today instead of writing about the continuation of ex-President Katzav’s plea bargain, I’m bringing you some positive news out of Beit Hanassi.

Maariv is reporting that President Peres has decided to renovate the President’s House in Rechavia so that it is a greener building. This, according to Peres, is part of the plan to raise ecological awareness in Israel. Peres is trying to set a good example for the rest of us.

Step one was the installation of a recycling center. I.E. there is now a place to recycle plastic bottles, paper, batteries and plastic bags in the President’s House. It’s a little shocking that until now paper and plastic were not recycled there, but leaving that aside, this is indeed a good first step.  In lieu of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, an old bottle was thrown into the recycling box. As Maariv puts it, the honor belongs entirely to the bottle.

Next up is installing advanced water-recycling units, hook into renewable energy sources, and change existing systems for more energy efficient ones. Furthermore, the goal is to use Israeli products whenever possible.

39 years ago today, Levi Eshkol died of a heart attack while serving as the 3rd prime minister of Israel. He was the first Israeli prime minister to die in office.

Eshkol was prime minister during the Six Day War. He arranged to bring the body of Ze’ev Jabotinsky to be buried in Israel. He was also the first Israeli prime minister to be invited for an official visit to the United States. Azure published an excellent article a few years by Michael Oren that talked about the man’s accomplishments.

Today is also the 80th birthday of former prime minister Ariel Sharon who, it should be mentioned, is still alive.

While not my usual blog beat, I thought it was worthwhile to point out this article in the Cleveland Jewish News about a new Jewish artist/activist community springing up there.  While not an entirely new idea, this community seems to be part of a broader trend among major American Jewish communities, in which young leaders are experimenting with new visions of Jewish social structures, of which Ariel Beery’s and Aharon Horwitz’s Present Tense Institute for Creative Zionism is a prime example. Check it out.

Read this great piece in the Columbia Spectator by junior Dov Friedman.

The point of the piece is to discuss flaws in the discourse surrounding Arab perceptions of Americans.  But he also notes, in surprise, that despite a work schedule that is physically grueling and intense, he feels motivated in a way that he never did at Columbia’s Morningside campus.

Yet, over the last three weeks, I have discovered a different kind of intensity. The middle month has centered on archaeological fieldwork in a fourth century Roman city. Alarm clocks ring at 5:45 a.m., and we excavate from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. Another two afternoon hours are spent working at home. The intensity here is one of a collective mission. The excavation season is short and there is a tremendous amount to accomplish. Everyone here is passionate about archaeology, and the sense of collective responsibility means that no one wants to let others down. An otherwise brutal schedule becomes manageable, even desirable. Unlike the taxing intensity of New York, the intensity of this team of people has been invigorating.

This camaraderie is the type of feeling that I experienced daily growing up in my youth movement, and also when I served in the army. It comes from being part of a society or team serving something larger, beyond oneself. One of my greatest challenges when I got to Columbia was the extreme aloneness that can exist even amidst multitudes of people on campus. That aloneness structures the learning experience there. There’s friendship, and “hanging out,” but there’s not shared mission or camaraderie. In the end of  the day, when the final needs to get done, or the paper needs to be turned in, the individual student stands alone for four years. And when four years are over it’s about what job you and you alone are going to get, and this reflects backwards on the whole experience.

I don’t have a solution, but I suspect winds of change are blowing. Columbia seems inevitable in the culture of America during the 80’s and 90’s, but not today. People are looking for meaning and motivation that extends beyond financial and material achievement. Like Dov, I tasted what it means to be on a team and have shared cause and true collaboration. And maybe if enough of us experience that increasingly rare feeling it will remind us that humans are not meant to be alone.

[Hat Tip: BW]

Bible Rapper, and founding PICZ Fellow, Matt Bar gets big ink in Haaretz:

While he was developing his Bible raps idea in New York, Bar applied to the PresenTense Institute for Creative Zionism (PICZ), a grassroots think tank in Jerusalem this past summer that brought young Jewish activists from Israel and the Diaspora for six weeks of intensive work. He had been to Israel once before on a birthright trip in 2004 and after PICZ, he decided to enroll in the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem - a move, he said, that has allowed him to deepen his understanding of Jewish texts as he develops his lyrics. Bar’s raps, some of which are available on his site www.bibleraps.com, touch on Biblical stories from Cain and Abel and the binding of Isaac to Moses and the battle of David and Goliath. The five books of Moses, he says, are chock-full of drama and lend itself well to a “marriage” with rap. So far, he’s written about a dozen Bible raps. “I can take you through all of Tanakh,” he said several times throughout the interview.

Through rap, Bar sees a pedagogic tool that can be used for education in Jewish day schools and Sunday schools. At Pardes, he studies Biblical texts, as well as commentators like Rashi, while writing his lyrics. He’s now also working on creating a source sheet that will accompany each rap.

Bar says his lyrics - both in style and content - also aim to make tradition and biblical stories more relevant, like one rap about Noah’s flood.

Read the complete story by Daphna Berman in Haaretz. To listen to Matt and inquire about bookings, check out the Bible Raps Project website.   

Just in case anyone feels like getting back to their pioneering roots, this morning I heard on the radio an interview with a farmer about his prized cow “Shuki.” It seems that Shuki is in the running to be named the cow of the year, or something like that, because of the amount of milk she gave. The farmer mentioned that Israel has a well-developed system of cow breeding that has increased the quality of its herds. Let the land flow with milk… Anyone got some bees?

Two weeks ago, my office went to see a new building under construction in Tel Aviv, the new headquarters of Bank Benleumi designed by I.M. Pei. While I was walking along Rothschild Boulevard I realized that in all my tours of Israel, I never really did any touring in Tel Aviv. The only museum I had been to was the Diaspora Museum, near Tel Aviv University.

This week, with my parents visiting, I took a day off of work and went to go see some museums in Tel Aviv. We spent a couple hours in the Hagana Museum, which was fairly well done and informative. We walked around the Museum of Art and looked at the very good collection therein. It was fun to see a group of schoolchildren there, spread out on the floor drawing. But what really moved my mother was our visit to the building where Ben Gurion announced Israeli Independence. The speaker told of how his parents were waiting in Cyprus, behind barbed wire, for the announcement, and my mother got a little teary. It’s nice to be in a place that is unabashedly Zionist once in a while.

If you have a dream you want to make real, you should consider coming to the Jerusalem based PresenTense Institute. We’re still taking applications over at www.creativezionism.com for summer ‘08–so hurry up and apply! We’re especially seeking folks in tech and biz, and individuals outside of North America. Our early deadline is closed, and we’ll start accepting people over the next two weeks, so apply soon.

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