Bruce H. Bernstein: A “Listening Tour,” # 5

I am sitting in the cafeteria at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. It’s Monday morning and the rest of the group is touring the museum. Somehow I don’t feel like I can handle it today, so I’m taking the opportunity to catch up on my notes. This experience has been very powerful for me in ways that I don’t think I can articulate at the moment, and going through the museum would put me on overload. A little over a week ago I chaired a panel at NYU on Psychoanalytic Identity. I quoted Erik Erikson who said that after reading his book on “Identity” he realized that he did not really know how to say what “identity” is. If he doesn’t know, I certainly don’t, but I do know that in many ways this trip puts me in touch with questioning the meaning of my own Jewish identity. What does it mean to me to be a Jew? I’ve never been very comfortable with ritual, and being in synagogue has always been a kind of alien experience for me. At the same time there is a big chunk of who I am, my sense of Jewish identity, that belongs here, feels comfortable here in a country full of people who identify with being Jewish. I also feel much more at home with our Palestinian driver/guide Tamer, a smart, thoughtful, learned young man, than I do with many of the Jews that I meet. It’s a work-in-progress. Most of our group wanted to experience going to church in Jerusalem. They took our van to a small church run by the Church of England just inside the Jaffa Gate to the Old City. I hope Judy, our Disciples of Christ minister, can describe her experience. Wally and Chick and Lita and I walked from our hotel to the mall area coffee shop just outside the Jaffa Gate to eventually join the others. There we met up with Jean Mark, a fundraiser/attorney who specializes in immigration law. This is a particularly loaded issue in Israel and Palestine: who can claim a right to be here, and who and under what conditions can one claim property that had once been in one’s family, whether an Israeli, or Palestinian, or other. If I understood him correctly, as a lawyer Jean Marc has a lot of difficulty with the concept of “Right of Return” because a “right” is something that is actionable. He wants to talk about rights in legal terms, although he understands the moral components. I had mentioned previously that there were Jewish settlers living in apartments above the souk in Hebron, a largely Palestinian city. They had claimed the apartments because they had belonged to Jews who either fled or were killed in the massacre of 1929. The Israeli government supports them with constant military presence. If the government supports this kind of claim, how can it legally deny the rights of Palestinians to claim property that was once theirs? This is the dilemma that the government faces. And if it grants such a right to one Palestinian, how many does it recognize before it changes the character of a Jewish state? There are many voices that need to be heard as Israel defines itself. It is certainly a homeland for Jews. If it is a Jewish state, how does it include the millions of others who reside here, some of them from the time before it became a state? There is a law stating that the government must compensate Palestinians for property that they lost either through abandonment or confiscation. Few apply, because to accept compensation is to give up a claim to the property. It also is not clear how much the government has to pay: the value of the property in 1948, or its value now? The difference could be millions of dollars. As Jean Marc said, the State of Israel was built by putting facts on the ground. It’s an aggressive, but accurate statement. Possession is a major component of ownership. How much of this reality would Israel need to modify in order to create a more humane, peaceful state? After a simple lunch at the Aroma coffee shop we drove to Beitar Ilit, an ultra-Orthodox gated settlement on the West Bank, to meet with Ofer, a Reform pulpit rabbi. This settlement is modern-looking and huge, containing over 100,000 people dressed in late 18th Century garb. Beitar is located on a hill, but is gradually expanding down the hill and toward the edge of a Palestinian village in the valley below. Many of the people in Beitar live on government subsidies. The men study Torah and the women take on odd jobs within the community to bring in a little extra money. They have little to do with outsiders, and the men do not serve in the army. The Reform movement that Ofer belongs to believes that modernization cannot be ignored and the law of the country is supreme. These ultra-Orthodox want to ignore modernity as much as possible, and freeze time as it was two hundred years ago. They are a sort of Jewish Amish. One must be careful when generalizing about any group, including the ultra-Orthodox. Within Beitar there are several different sects, each with their own set of beliefs. One reason we were in Beitar was to experience in microcosm the situation that exists in different parts of this tiny country. Just over the fence, only yards from Beitar, is Wadi Fukeen, a Palestinian village of 150 families where the residents also try to live very much as their parents and grandparents did. Agriculture is central to this community, and farming methods have not changed very much. This is a matter of concern, since they are in the midst of a seven-year drought and the water use of the ultra-Orthodox community is threatening their water supply. Ofer enlisted Friends of the Earth to teach the Palestinians, and his own community, about drip agriculture as a means of conserving water. Beitar is located atop one hill, Wadi Fukeen is in the valley below, and atop the hill on the other side is Tsur Hadassa, where Ofer lives and works as a rabbi. Tsur Hadassa is a beautiful modern Jewish community of mostly people who work in the professions. From his living room we look out at Beitar and Wadi Fukeen. We sat with Ofer and learned about his life. He is part of a Reform movement that is concerned with social justice and taking care of one’s neighbors. He uses their mutual concerns about the shortage of water as a way of making contact with all of his neighbors. Ofer is both a Reform rabbi and an artist. He explores how to use ancient texts to express one’s religious identity artistically, to break the line between the physical and the spiritual. Bruce H. Bernstein is a 75-year-old psychologist/psychoanalyst in private practice and on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program. He has had a long-time interest in the peaceful resolution of conflict, and in recent years made connections among his Dartmouth Class of 1957, Seeds of Peace, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding. The class now sponsors two interns who spend a summer at the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine, followed by a term in Israel/Palestine.