Running, religion, history and chicken?

            When I first walked into the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora on the campus of Tel Aviv University, I’ll be honest: I was pretty underwhelmed.  You can either do the museum with a tour guide (which you prearrange) or an audio guide (that you show up and get).  As one person, the tour guide was out of my budget, so I can’t actually speak for how that was.  All I know is that at first, I went through this gallery where they talked about traditional Jewish customs.  You know, Bar mitzvah’s, weddings, the high holidays and so on, and while I appreciated the displays and the effort to depict these concepts, none of it was all that new to me, and they didn’t do it in a way that was attention capturing or anything, and my attention span faded quickly. 

            I was starting to think that the only benefit of having showed up was this chicken which I actually didn't think was a chicken when I first saw it (since when did chickens have that ring around their eyes?), that I found on the lawn of the university on my way in.

            That said there’s a reason the museum still exists (and it’s not the chicken keeping the doors open!).  If it were all bad, it probably would have lost funding by now.  Maybe I’m picky, I don’t know.  But, I do know that there were parts of it that made me want to hand the audio guide back at the desk, walk out of there and track down some good hummus (which really isn’t all that hard to come by in Israel).  Yet, there were other parts that were inspiring, that got the wheels turning in my head.  Quotes lined the walls that spoke to the writer in me, and video exhibits captured my attention. 

            The words of Abba Kovner, a famous Israeli poet who also served in the Haganah and was part of an undercover group which aimed to exact revenge for the Holocaust, are prominent throughout the museum. 

            As you enter into the first exhibits, you find his quote on the wall: “This is the story of a people which was scattered all over the world and yet remained a single family, a nation to which time and time was doomed to destruction and yet out of ruins rose to new life.”  - Abba Kovner

            That’s something you see more than ever in Israel.  At work, there are people born in Russia and the United Kingdom, I’ve met Israelis whose parents are from Syria and Yemen, and others whose families have been in Israel for generations, and yet they’re all Israelis.  The majority of people are Jewish (Although you have Arab Christians and Muslims as well), and even the ones who aren’t Shomer Shabbos, spend the Sabbath having dinner with their families and resting.  That’s something the rest of the world could take note of. 

           

            Determined to prod my way through each exhibit, I powered through.  There were video exhibits capturing the lives of different Jewish communities in Europe.  One I really liked was about Thessaloniki, a city in Greece which maintained a Jewish majority for several centuries.  One quote from the video that I felt encompassed the variety and success of the people there was, “The Jews of Thessaloniki are trained to take any and every job except for that of a Greek priest.”  Another noteworthy portion of the video was when someone asked a seafarer who had stopped in the port of Thessaloniki, what his nationality was.  He said, “I am a Jew”.  He was asked, “And nothing more?”  And responded in the affirmative.  Tinted with a bit of humor, and an accurate depiction of supreme loyalty to the Jewish culture, no matter where in the world they resided, I thought the video did a good job of defining faith, nationality and culture as a whole.    

            The video ended, however, in a note of tragedy.  The speaker said, “I could have been…” several times, and alluded to the Holocaust and the fact that most of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki was wiped out. 

           

            I liked how the museum was able to combine two sides of the story like that, capturing the importance of Judaism to the town and the success of the community, and the devastation that followed, with an understanding of how much this community has endured and yet, how it has simultaneously prevailed.  It all tied back into Abba Kovner’s words, “This is the story of a people…” 

            Moving on from the videos, there was an exhibit including Kovner’s Scrolls of Fire.  It captured the essence of the many pogroms and dangers that had wracked Jewish history from thousands of years ago up through the Holocaust. 

            I’ve been joking with myself that if I learn one thing on every visit to a museum or a historical site, I’m good to go.  

            And I did learn, walking through the exhibits that captured how Judaism had prevailed and fallen in Israel throughout the reins of different cultures and people.  But I also found myself intrigued by the way Kovner wrote and the things he said, reading the majority of Scrolls of Fire while standing there in the museum. 

            On a slightly different note, this quote was posted in the museum (it’s not Kovner):

            “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi and a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.” -Rabbi Israel Salame

            In Israel, there are a lot of different views on how to practice Judaism.  People interpret things in their own way.  I’ve noticed this in the U.S. too, but here it’s more pronounced.  I mean, take Yom Kippur for instance.  Tons of Jews around the world fast for the whole day, and others observe it in their own way, giving up one thing or fasting for part of the day or not at all.  

            On Saturdays, I’ll go running and I’ll strike up chats with other runners.  Sometimes I’ll ask, “Are there many runners around here?”  And they’ll say, “Yes, but not on Shabbat.” 

            And yet, I have a running buddy here who won’t drive, use his watch or touch a light switch on Shabbat, but he runs, because as he puts it, “It’s relaxing.  When they said not to rush, people weren’t rushing for leisure.  They were rushing for work.”  Granted, he also takes it easy, letting it be a fun activity, not a stressful one, and runs alongside his children and wife.  Last week, while on a 12 mile training run, he gave me a religious history lesson, and explained the vast disparity in different beliefs.  I also found it interesting that a lot of people don’t consider reform Judaism to be “real” Judaism.   It’s kind of like how Catholics can’t take Communion in a Protestant church.  Different beliefs, and yet the similarities abound.  But, yet at the same time, people still seem to accept each other despite it, except for certain political questions that arise as a result.  Can a public pool be open on Shabbat?  Can the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv force a restaurant owner to work on his day of rest?  Should the Ultra-Orthodox be permitted not to work? 

            And that, my friends, is the question.  Or a series of them. 

            Ultimately, everything I’ve experienced here has strengthened my understanding of the world and this (genuinely incredibly safe) country that people literally told me I shouldn’t go to before I came here.  Whether it’s a museum with seemingly dry exhibits in the beginning or a nation’s history and religion that I thought I understood, this country has opened me up to learning how to look beneath the surface, until the simplicity has been erased, complexities revealed. 

            Thanks for reading.  Catch you later.  Back to Jerusalem this coming weekend J