Spirituality begins at home
For the Tel Aviv native Jerusalem is 'extreme,' isolated, unreasonable
JERUSALEM - For many Israelis, Jerusalem Day, like the city itself, is set in one giant dust cloud. The snobbism of Israelis reigns as free as their city. The entire world seeks spirituality in Jerusalem and fights to retain its grasp of it. But we flock to the east to backpack for our spirituality.
When the second Palestinian uprising broke out in September 2000, people could use the excuse of fearing bombings to avoid visiting the city. But today? The explanation seems more complex. Jerusalem is more than a piece of real estate to the Christian and Muslim world. But for Jews, it is a live symbol, strewn in tremendous spiritual energies.
Even for the Tel Aviv native, Jerusalem is more than the pedestrian mall in Ben Yehuda Street and the market at the Old City. For him, it is a living, bubbling organ of the deep Jewish world. However, in the Jewish world, this poses a threat to the “Israeli” isolated from the “normal” world.
The spirituality of Jerusalem could be seen as being self-absorbed and demanding of full dedication and sacrifice of the hypocritical secular world.
It’s easy to identify the Tel Aviv native at the city’s gates. He looks like a Western tourist in Tokyo. For him, Jerusalem is “extreme,” isolated and unreasonable. If we were not in the midst of the “New Age” era, which places “spirituality” in the heart of human existence, we could pinpoint this phenomenon on the materialistic secular culture, whose capital is Tel Aviv.
But today, we do in fact seek “spirituality” in our every day life. This spirituality is seen in the way we raise our children, spend our free time and decorate our apartments. It incorporates the inner content of the literature we use. So why is Goa, India, closer than ever, yet Jerusalem, located 50 minutes from Tel Aviv by car, seems part of a different continent?
Abandoning religion
The abandonment of religion by secular Israelis has not only caused an abandonment of good deeds, but a continuous rejection of the active Jewish identity. The false assumption is that if you do not practice decrees, Judaism has nothing to say about any area of your life.
On the other hand, the religious Jews have happily accepted the role the secular Jews have bestowed upon them by their taking over of the “religion ministry,” the synagogues, the mikveh ritual baths, weddings, the Sabbath and kosher ordinances.
Everything has turned political and a subject for coalition debate, while “spirituality” has drifted farther, wrapped itself in blankets of rudeness, superiority and feelings of strangeness and growing apathy. The feeling of “home” that every Jew and every Israeli should feel in Jerusalem, regardless of their way of life, the earrings in their ears and even their dreadlocks, has been replaced by impermeability and alienation.
Why doesn’t an Israeli freshly released from the army say to himself, “I owe myself a month in Jerualem, to wander among the Breslav Hassids on their way to a yeshiva, or to walk from the Bukharan Quarter to writer Shai Agnon’s house?”
An internal journey, not meant to become religious but rather to freshen up, to meet vibrant Jewish spirituality whose elements could be brought back to one’s home and soul. A journey made within the pace and budget that’s right for the individual, with the proverbial backpack he so desires, even combined with other points of view.
Instead, they unfortunately go overseas to “seek spirituality,” to find thousands of miles away among the monasteries in Tibet and the Buddhist ashram what they have right under their nose.
The apparent insult of “Jerusalem Day,” barely observed among the Israeli public, should be a day of reckoning for us all.
Rabbi Rafi Feuerstein is chairman of the International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential in Jerusalem
