My
15-year-old son was in our bedroom, waiting for my wife to finish
ironing his white shirt. He began leafing through the recent copy of
the Swarthmore College Bulletin that lay on the bed.
"Put it down," shouted my wife, hurriedly lowering her iron. "That's not for you!" She grabbed the magazine from my son's hands. In an instant, the loving, solicitous mother became a hurricane of zealous conviction. "They've all got to go," she cried out to me. "We can't keep them in the house!"
I understood my wife's wrath at seeing our son peruse the Bulletin. The issue included an article by a woman who recounted her experiences as a lesbian at Swarthmore. I had found the article interesting, and certainly not offensive, but my wife held firmer views about the advisability of keeping such material in our home, even though none of our children read English fluently.
To me, it's another reminder of the other world--the one from which I came. Even after 20 years of living and working in Israel, studying Torah, raising my children, and serving in the army, in some important facets of my life, I remain an outsider.
Several years after graduating from Swarthmore, I became a ba'al teshuva (a penitent Jew) and took on the lifestyle of Orthodoxy, circumscribed by the religious law derived from the Torah. My turn to observance began during a visit to Israel in 1978. During what was to have been just an interlude in a European backpacking tour, I found myself studying in a Jerusalem yeshiva (Talmudic academy) for the newly observant. I returned to America, studied briefly at another yeshiva in Miami Beach, and then returned to Israel in 1979. Except for three brief visits, totaling about 10 weeks, I have been here for 20 years.
Between 1976 and 1981, I graduated from Swarthmore, worked as a copy editor and writer at TV Guide, backpacked through Europe, became an observant Jew, studied in a yeshiva, moved to a country where I had no family and barely spoke the language, married, and fathered my first child. No other five-year period of my adult life has been so densely packed with such a helter-skelter of significant experiences. Clearly, sleeping held less charm for me then than it does now.
In our first year of marriage, shortly before our eldest son was born, my wife and I moved to the development town of Migdal HaEmek, in Galilee. There, surrounded by ample fields and gentle green hills, we became part of a small, close-knit community of Orthodox English-speaking immigrants--primarily Americans--living side by side with Sephardic Israelis. Together with our peers and our rabbis, we maintained a synagogue and educational system, raised our children, celebrated communal joys, and shared communal anguish.
For various reasons, the community never became viable. Over the years, the flow of residents came to be decisively away from Migdal HaEmek. We reluctantly moved out in 1996, among the last to leave, with a feeling of going into exile. However, our diaspora was not very far away. We settled in Recha-sim, a small town on the outskirts of Haifa. With an outstanding yeshiva, Rechasim had developed into a major Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) center.
By choosing to live in these small communities in Israel's north, we have experienced a different environment from most American immigrants, who overwhelmingly settle in the crowded, urbanized center of the country between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Unlike their urban peers, my children have grown up accustomed to seeing countryside all around them.
This is, indeed, my home, and I don't think I would fare well in America after having spent nearly all my adult life as an expatriate. Yet I have been disconcerted to discover that I remain between two worlds, that I don't really feel a part of things.
Perhaps the most glaring example of my "otherness" is in the workplace, where I sense most keenly the gulf between my past and present. Since 1981, I have worked in the library of the University of Haifa, located atop Mount Carmel, helping to develop and maintain the computer systems that provide information services to about 20,000 students and staff.
I spent much of my childhood in the public library and at Swarthmore was in the McCabe and Cornell libraries more than in my dorm room. I am what I have read, more than what I have done.
So, as I walk to my office, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of books, I feel like a hungry but muzzled cow standing before an overflowing feeding trough, frustrated by the good things that are so near at hand yet unattainable. My muzzle is woven of both practical concerns--I have a lot of work to do and not enough time for sampling the library's wares--and of the awareness that, in the stern view of my religion, most of the items in the university's collection are at worst forbidden reading and at best a waste of time that would be better spent immersed in holy texts.
Jewish tradition maintains that one should spend as much time as possible studying the Torah, Talmud, legal codes, and their voluminous commentaries--with minor concessions to the need to make a living and tend to worldly matters. If one works, then the time outside working hours should be devoted to learning. Yet if one is able, it is considered exemplary to spend virtually all one's waking hours in the yeshiva, engaged in intense religious study.
That is the course taken by most young men in the Haredi community, from youth through the first years of married life. In all likelihood, my own sons--three of whom are already studying in yeshivas--will follow that path, which is the natural outcome of their education.
In my case, however, the process of internalization stalled somewhere. In my head, the words of daily prayers coexist with 30-year-old radio jingles, the weekly Torah portion with William Butler Yeats and Isaac Asimov, cantorial melodies with Sibelius and Alan Sherman. Intellectually, my religious commitment is solid; however, unless someone discovers a way to reformat a human brain, a significant part of me will remain secular.
Although I enjoy excellent relations with my work colleagues, my religious appearance and behavior mark me as someone whose worldview, daily routine, and priorities are so different from their own as to preclude any but proper, professional conversations. Most of my colleagues are women, and the strictures of traditional Judaism regarding social contact between the sexes as well as the prohibition of any idle gossip form another barrier to personal relations. I don't take part in the university's varied cultural life; I am strictly a commuter. I have given the best years of my career to an institution with whose
ideals I cannot wholeheartedly identify, which, in some ways, are antithetical to my beliefs. I cloister in the office I share with the library computer, work long and intensely, and try to project a positive image of a religious Jew to my co-workers.
I am between two worlds, like a spacecraft whose movements are governed by competing gravitational forces. I have to cope with ambiguity and perhaps alienation. I am neither an Israeli nor an American, neither ultra-Orthodox nor secular. Even in the confines of Rechasim, I am neither newly observant nor one of the good old boys. My closest friends, and my wife's, are still those from the community in Migdal HaEmek whose lives have followed a similar path.
My children do not share this ambiguity. They know who they are and don't grapple with identity crises. In a curious reversal, my wife and I--like our immigrant forebears in America--contend with a different language and culture, no longer a part of the old world and unable to completely assimilate into the new.
Jewish tradition survives by virtue of its unbroken transmission from parents to children. But it's difficult to pass on something that I didn't receive from my parents. We're trying to reforge links in a chain of tradition battered by assimilation, secularism, the Holocaust, and materialism. We're raising our children in a world vastly different from the one in which we grew up, and we don't always have the tools for the job.
From almost anywhere in Rechasim, the pleasant slopes of Carmel, and the university, are before my eyes. Not visible, on the other side of Haifa near the Mediterranean coast, is another prominent site, where, according to tradition, the prophet Elijah contended with and defeated the pagan prophets of Ba'al, annihilating them with a fire summoned from the heavens. These two landmarks symbolize for me the polarities within both myself and contemporary Israeli society: the allure of liberal, pluralistic, materialistic Western civilization on the one hand and the demands of uncompromising, all-encompassing Judaism on the other.
The struggle between those worldviews has been raging for 50 years on many fronts--national, communal, familial, and personal. There is no sign that it will be resolved anytime soon. My own modest, silent contribution to this fray has been, together with my wife, to raise children who will continue the tradition and sanctify G-d in their public and private lives. If they are successful, they will probably owe more to their teachers than to their parents.
Though my children will never attend their father's alma mater, I hope also to have passed on to them some legacy from Swarthmore: a basic respect for other people, even those with whom they differ passionately and fundamentally. So, for the time being, the Bulletins remain in the house, piling up in a bedroom corner. The bookshelves in the living room display texts more appropriate for our milieu.
The prophet Elijah has an additional role in Jewish tradition. He is not only the fiery, zealous destroyer of idols and false prophets but the messenger of peace, who will herald the Messiah's arrival. When he comes, we are told, he will resolve all our insoluble problems. I'll let him decide what to do with the Bulletins.
All rights reserved. Swarthmore College 1999