Not in Israel

[liv]

It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of emotions and thoughts about this, and I also have an unexpected summer month with almost no commitments.

We finished with the actual main part of term mid-May, but then as usual there were a couple of months of the academic year sort of weirdly trailing off. A week of extra classes because the college interpret regulations as meaning that we must have 12 taught sessions in each module come what may. Some bits of extra post term stuff that needed to happen, continuing community and placement work. End of semester assignments and exams, which were manageable because a whole bunch of academically challenging stuff got moved into the autumn term but still took up time. And just a lot of fairly intensive activities, some of them directly student-related, some of them starting to take on something more resembling rabbinic work.

I completed my three months of sabbatical cover for Mosaic Reform in North London; this meant I was actually there fairly regularly rather than just showing up, leading a service and vanishing again. Some people advised me that second year is too soon to take on that kind of ongoing work, but it was good for me, at this point I can do random Shabbat services at the drop of a hat and I'm not really learning anything from that. Mosaic exposed me to some amount of difficult community politics that I'm not going to go into on an unlocked post, and also wanted me to hold space for everybody struggling with how to react to news from Israel. So it was frustrating at times but valuable; these are very much the kinds of things I'll have to build skills in to be an effective rabbi. They also have a professional choir and I had fun working with the MD there.

In the middle there was a lovely long weekend in Norfolk with jack, we didn't bother with the seaside this time but took a delightful little cottage in a village mainly notable for its Steam museum. The steam exhibits were fun, particularly on a meta level, as there was a whole lot of information about how the owner, a businessman who made decent money (not a wild fortune or anything, just enough to fund his hobby) running a garden centre, and loved steam engines a lot but really didn't have a lot of practical knowledge about creating mini-railways or engine preservation generally. The curation is therefore rather eccentric; on the one hand they had a lot of Dad's Army memorabilia as the recent film used some of their engines and created film sets there, but on the other they had a certain number of Nazi engines which were not exactly labelled as such, the plaques just gushed about the brilliance of the mechanism of engines "made in Germany for the war effort in 1941". I think it's on the whole good that nothing has overt Nazi insignia, but it was also disturbingly coy, especially alongside the wartime nostalgic "keep calm and carry on" aesthetic. Other than the steam museum we went on a few gentle countryside walks and ate lots of very good meals in country pubs.

I took part in a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot service hosted jointly by Oaks Lane Reform and the Liberal synagogue where I was on placement last year, ELELS and a smaller Reform synagogue in the same part of East London. They put me on lots of interfaith panels; they'd invited members of the three synagogues, plus some Christian clergy as guests, it wasn't a general interfaith event. It was very interesting to experience that kind of interfaith encounter in what was definitely a Jewish space. I've been to interfaith events physically within synagogue buildings before but we're almost always outnumbered by Christians. This time it was really clear that the small handful of clergy were guests at our event. Guests, not tourists. So we had a bring and share meal, with way too much food and lots of Jews being loud, then a typical Reform-style evening service which I think was quite a novel experience for most of the priests. Lots of singing, lots of participation from everybody, and a fairly mellow feel with lots of explicit emotional shaping. I gave the sermon and talked about my experiences growing up in the grouping of Essex and East London synagogues which overlapped with the three who were running this event, namedropping multiple historic rabbis and people present, while also choosing to be somewhat personal and vulnerable. Worked well.

The two panels they put me on were: the Ten Commandments; I did a lowkey rabbinic interpretation of 'honour your father and mother', while my Christian co-panellists either were a bit confused about what exactly counts as part of the Ten ('Love your neighbour' is important, but it's really not on topic for the panel), or tried to claim that 'you shall have no other gods but me' encompasses the rest, which led to questions from the floor about how a Christian can claim to keep that if they believe that Jesus is God, and poor Christians trying to explain the Trinity to a highly sceptical audience. Somebody commented to me that they shouldn't put priests on panels with rabbis because 'it just makes them look uneducated', which wasn't entirely fair, I did try to explain that it's more about a different approach to reading the Bible than lack of knowledge, but still.

And experiences of vocation and calling as religious leaders, I was really glad to be on that one. In part because I heard some quite heart-rending stories of Christian priests who had a strong sense of vocation from early childhood but were excluded for being gay and didn't return until much later in life, or who had been female and lifelong Catholics and deeply convinced that God had chosen them to be priests. Secondly because I wanted to convey the perspective that being a rabbi is a choice of career like any other, I don't believe that God loves clergy more than people with less glamorous jobs or disabled and unemployed people. Also I talked a bit about being poly and with non-Jewish as well as Jewish partners, which wove in well with the Christians' stories of being both outsiders and leaders. Another reason it was good I was included was because I was the only woman on the Jewish side, which is mainly coincidence, the female rabbi among the organizers just happened to be on leave that day, but four men and one woman looks a lot better than all male rabbis while the Christians had a good gender balance.

College sent some of us to a residential weekend for people from the Liberal movement who are being trained as lay service leaders. It's totally possible to just turn up and lead services, but the Liberals have a really nice training programme, really supportive and well thought out. It's a few days over 18 months, not a massive time-commitment, but very good for building core skills and most importantly confidence. And it turned out this course is full of people exactly like me. Not just that they've stepped up to lead services and often run tiny communities in the middle of nowhere where there are hardly any other Jews, but so many of them turned out to be similarly geeky and with interesting non-heteronormative family structures (even some poly folk) and homeschoolers and really quite a high proportion of people who are very open about being neurodivergent. It was most excellent networking because these are often communities too small to even hire student rabbis.

And then in mid-June the whole student body plus the principal all went to Germany for the very long-established Three faiths conference. That was an extremely weird experience in lots of ways, not least because our visit out there exactly coincided with the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran. The conference has had links with the college for literal decades, but we stopped regularly sending people because they had a historic problem with sexual aggression and weren't really handling it properly. And without us they have always struggled to attract Jews and indeed European Muslims, so despite significant effort it often defaults to being a crowd of generally liberal Christians and a couple of token minorities. To solve this problem they had in recent years started inviting an Israeli group, Jewish Israelis who are involved in peacebuilding, and ethnically Palestinian citizens of Israel (sometimes referred to as Israeli Arabs) who are are mostly Muslim with a significant Christian minority. However, most of this group didn't make it over this year because of the war. Some of them joined us over Zoom, including a Haifa professor with a very interesting background. When I say they joined us over Zoom I mean quite often participating from bomb shelters, or having to interrupt sessions due to a missile alert. And one young woman brought a cohort of 9 young people, Muslim Israelis of Palestinian heritage aged 11 to 15, on a terrifying odyssey across multiple countries during a war, in order to find any hope of a flight to Europe when airspace was closed. She wanted them to meet Jews who don't carry guns, these kids.

I had some great conversations and some very fraught conversations. It really did feel at times that the Christians were not exactly on the same planet as the Israelis, they were talking about how shocking it was for there to be violence affecting Europe after all those decades of peace since 1945 (sic) or explaining that if people would just trust each other and sit down and have an honest conversation there wouldn't be any conflict or war or killing. Many of them seemed like genuinely sincere, committed people, and it felt really good to be supporting and mentoring the younger Christian leaders who don't have the kind of collegial support trainee rabbis do over here. And the UK Jewish contingent were sort of between the two camps. Most of us have connections in Israel, often quite close connections, and are much more aware of what's happening there than our German Christian counterparts, but equally we were having a nice holiday in a nice safe part of Europe rather than a temporary respite from missile attacks and a lot of uncertainty about when we'd be able to get home. Because the college contingent all know each other and the small handful of other Jewish attendees, whereas the Christians were from disparate backgrounds and denominations, even though our numbers were about equal it did feel as if the Jewish group were much louder and more visible.

On top of everything else we were sleeping in dorms with very thin curtains, during a heatwave and with only about 4 hours of darkness a night. Between sleep deprivation and being adjacent to the war I was a total emotional wreck. I kind of fell apart when I got the news that my summer programme was cancelled. On the one hand I didn't want to go in the first place, and I had been carrying huge amounts of anxiety about what it would be like to have barely a couple of days at home before heading off to a foreign country for a month (even before I considered how likely it was that I'd encounter military or interpersonal violence there). At the same time, the situation being bad enough for both the Jerusalem Yeshiva who completely financially depend on their summer programme, and the college, to agree to cancel, was pretty scary. Frankly, the amount it was upsetting me just being on Zoom calls with Israelis, or simply having normal adult to teen conversations with the Palestinian kids, was a clear indicator that I was in no way emotionally ready to actually spend a month in Israel.

In fact, in hindsight it now looks like I could in fact have gone. The clash with Iran lasted 11 days, and when the US got involved I assumed it was the start of WW3 and there would be huge casualties, not just among the belligerents but worldwide, but actually it ended in a ceasefire which seems to be holding. And Israel is no more dangerous now than it was before June when everybody was telling me it was perfectly fine to travel there and I should stop being a baby about it. The rest of my cohort are either out there already or still planning to go (their trips were later in the summer than mine.)

After we got back from Germany I had a few days to recuperate, a couple of minor wrapping up the year meetings at college, a couple of community Shabbats, last time at Mosaic and a visit to one of the communities I've worked with on and off, Hull. And then a week of the college's end of year community learning, known as Kol-Bo. Again, incredibly emotionally intense with preparing our colleagues for ordination and realizing there's only one more rabbi who will be ordained between them and us. And we had another heatwave, and at some point in the week a classmate confirmed they are transferring to a pluralist US school from next term. This had been on the cards for a while and it makes sense for their career, but also they got sick during the interfaith conference and weren't able to join us for the final week so we didn't manage a proper goodbye. Between being recently bereaved and still not really recovered from thinking I was going to Israel and then not going and thinking everybody was going to die I wasn't doing well with keeping emotional stability through transitions. The ordination itself was really beautiful and I'm super proud of our new rabbis and delighted that they get to be rabbis for real now, even though it means we won't have them with us in school any more.

I will fully admit that I'm glad I didn't end up getting on a flight two days later. Intellectually it goes without saying that I would far rather Israel was in fact safe enough for me to be there, and that it had been consistently obvious it would be over the past couple of months. But personally, I am absolutely delighted to be at home. And have a chance to see my family and do fun summer things like go to concerts and have picnic dates and sort out practical things that I've let slip with the intensity of everything since Mum got sick. I even managed to overlap in London with redbird and her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

That's a lot of emotions. Big hugs and I hope I get to see you soon

[ambyr]

Oh gosh, that sounds like so much. I'm glad you were able to build connections within and beyond the faith community--we need that badly right now.

[kass]

I am glad of all of the good things herein.

And yeah. I hear you on the canceled Israel trip, and the vicarious emotional wounds many of us are carrying by virtue of having beloveds there and also by virtue of being Jews publicly in a world where a lot of people's hatred of Bibi and his policies is blurring into a messier kind of hatred. This is a tough time to try to be holding other people's feelings about all of this, but it is the work, especially now. Anyway: I hope you get to do that travel / learning another time, and I hope you get everything you can out of your unexpected time at home.

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for the update. You are amazing and I am so glad to read your posts.

[genarti]

This is SO much, and so much of it full of fraught complicated feelings, pretty inherently. It sounds exhausting, but it also sounds like at least there was a lot of connection-building in there, in ways that are deeply needed; thank you for sharing your perspective on it. I'm glad that out of the everything, you did get downtime to hang out with family and go on picnic dates and so on.

[altamira16]

My cousin was supposed to go see her father in Tehran during that period. He has cancer so it is not clear how much time he has left. She postponed her trip because of the bombing.

[mathcathy]

My aunt has a private station to that steam museum. If she contacts them they stop there for her and her guests and take us into the museum for free....

[silveradept]

There's a lot of feelings involved there. I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for choosing not to go while there was a war on, and the likelihood that it would escalate, on top of being in the middle of a place with lots of history and opinions. It sounds like not going was the best thing for you and your mental health.

[sfred]

Oof, that's a lot. Thinking of you.

[cesy]

That is so much.