I’ve mentioned this a few times in recent months, but beyond hostages (always my primary concern), war and politics, one of the questions that has lodged itself in my mind is that of what I would call “Jewish religiosity with moderation at its heart.” By that I don’t mean this movement or that movement, or this way of Jewish life or that way of Jewish life, this mode of practice or that mode of practice. Rather, the question that I've been thinking about quite a bit is “What would it take for the fundamental pulse of traditional Judaism in Israel to be one of acceptance, of embrace, of tolerance, of love?”
That that description does not characterize Israel’s religious establishment is, I think, a proposition that scarcely needs defending. That it also does not characterize wide swathes of “religious” Israelis (it’s true of “non-religious” Israelis as well, of course) is also sadly not really up for debate.
What would it take to transform the pulse of Jewish religious life from what it is to something very different? Is it possible? Buried inside those questions are issues that are relevant not only to Judaism and not only to Israel, and there is a vast, vast literature on religion, moderation, tolerance, the tendency for religious passion to produce extremism, and much more. That’s far beyond the pale of our focus here.
So what we’re doing periodically on Israel from the Inside is to speak with people who do represent a Judaism of tolerance, of embrace, of love. We’re trying to hear from them how they got to where they are, who influenced them religiously, how it feels for them to be part of the wider religious picture in Israel, what they think we might do to create more people like them.
We’re going to do two episodes on the subject this week, today and tomorrow.
Our conversation today is with Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, who is one of the lay leaders of a community called Hakhel. We’ve mentioned Hakhel here before, because the community is home to Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin and their children, including Hersh, z’l, as well as to Ephi and Oshrat Shoham and their children, including their son Yuval, z’l. Ephi has appeared on our podcast on several occasions, and we’ve shared a deeply moving Yom Kippur presentation written by Oshrat, as well.
Hakhel also happened to be the “synagogue” I go to on Shabbatot and holidays (in no small measure because my grandchildren are among the little who run around the gym where we meet, but for many more substantive reasons as well), and precisely because it does represent the very ideals to which I pointed above, I asked Naama if she would tell us about Hakhel, its origins, its commitments and about the unique path that took her from a very different form of Orthodoxy to this one.
Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum is the Director of the Experiential Education Initiatives at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She has over two decades of experience fostering inclusive and intentional communities, designing meaningful educational experiences for teens, students, and young professionals, and building bridges between Israel and North America.
Prior to joining Hartman, she served as Director of Ramah Israel Seminar and Director of Education for Camp Ramah in California. Na’ama has been on the faculty of the Hadar Institute, Hillel International, the Schechter Institute, and the Dorot Foundation. She is a lay leader of Minyan Hakhel, a ba’alat tefilla (prayer leader), co-host of a radio show on Israel’s Galei Tzahal, and creator of a new podcast, sisters@war.
Na’ama received her rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Daniel Landes in Jerusalem, has studied at The Schechter Institute and Hebrew University, and is a fellow in M2’s Mabat, Senior Educator Cohort.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
We're doing a series of conversations with a variety of Israelis who are thinking outside the box when it comes to what Judaism in the Jewish state should look like. Some of that has to do with peace initiatives. Some of it has to do with forms of Judaism that are outside the orthodox mainstream. And today we're going to hear from someone who is within what might call the broader orthodox world, but who is a leader of a community that is very, very different from the mainstream of orthodoxy in Israel. And it felt to me very It's very important to hear from her and to hear about her community to get a sense of some of the kinds of things that are sprouting up in Israel that, to me, at least represent a source of hope and optimism for what this country can become. Our guest today is Rabba Na’ama Levitz Applbaum. She is the Director of Experiential Education Initiative at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She's also a faculty person there. She's got a tremendous amount of experience in fostering inclusive and intentional communities, which I think is going to come up very strongly when we talk about Haqqel, which is the community we're going to speak about today. We're putting her whole bio up, of course, on the notes today. But prior to joining Hartman, she served as Director of Ramah Israel, which is the camp, and Director of Education for Camp Ramah in California before that. She's been on the faculty of Haddar Hillel International, the Schechter Institute, Dorot Foundation. She received her rabbinic ordination from rabbi Daniel Landis, who, coincidentally, was the rabbi of my shul when I lived in Los Angeles. She studied at the Schechter Institute, Hebrew University. She's done a tremendous amount. You'll see all of the details when we post these notes. So rabbi Rabba Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, joins us today. Na’ama, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
Let's talk about you before we talk about Israel and Judaism. All right. Give everybody a sense. People are going to hear right away that you have a very mellifluous American accent, but you're not American. So just give us a quick summary of how you got to where you are in life now.
All right. Thank you for noticing that because I always say I may sound American, but I'm not. And so sometimes I do make those Israeli mistakes without the accent, which is usually more forgiving for those who do have it. I'm actually born in Jerusalem, seventh generation Yerushalmit, I take a lot of pride in that. I grew up in, I would say, just like run-of-the-mill, normal, Orthodox family. I'm the eldest of seven. My father is a rabbi and educator. My mother is a psychologist educator. We did move around a lot. As a child, we moved around a lot. I lived in Safed for a bunch of years, and then we went off to shlijut, my parents were emissaries in Los Angeles for six years. But really, hence my English. I came back with no Hebrew. That was a problem. I finished high school here, I would say, in a pretty right wing, Orthodox, all girls high school in Jerusalem. I was at Tsvia, it's hard core. Some would say that I'm at the bottom of the Midron Ha'Khalaklak, The slippery slope. Because I got my rabbinic ordination. I'm not sure that they would really welcome me into the school today.
You're not on the homepage of the website.
Correct. That is correct. I've learned a lot of Jewish text and halakhah, but definitely not on the homepage. I would say that really my career or my trajectory towards becoming also a rabbi, I really started as I was myself, a Shlicha, from the Jewish agency in the summer Shlichim program. I was sent to the Northwoods of Wisconsin, in Ramah, Wisconsin. Ramah is part of the conservative camping movement. Me being very young and naïve. It was the first time that I was really exposed to anything that was liberal in a Jewish setting.
Did you know what you were going to?
I was a little bit overly self-confident as an Orthodox woman coming to a conservative camp. This was right after the army. The fact that I did the army was also not in my favor with my school at that point.
They wanted girls just so everybody understands to do national service. Correct.
What did you do in the army? I was a tour guide. I was a for school kids, so definitely not a combat soldier in any shape or form. But I felt like it was very important to me as the stamp of what it means to be Israeli and to be a part of society here. I felt very passionate about being in the army and wearing that uniform warm. Right after the army, I decided to go and explore Wisconsin. And I felt like as long as they kept Shabbat and they could provide me with kosher food, I was like, great, I'm fine with that. And I was going to go off. And little did I know that that really set me on a totally different track as I came back.
Was the first time you saw women participating in tfila?
It was the first time that I not only saw women, but at the time, the head of my group, my Roche Eda, came up to me and was like, you're religious. You be in charge of all the services and tfilot because you have fluency and you have the Hebrew, et cetera. I was like, Great. I'm happy to give where I can. I have never spent any time on the other side of the mekhitza, let alone how to run any sort of minyan. And that was a summer that I learned a lot. And came back here and was angry. I was really angry. I was angry at my father for not having me learn any Talmud, never opened up a book of Gamara, and I went to learn. And that was my revenge a little bit. It's a good revenge.
Your parents can't complain about that revenge.
That is true. Today, they're very proud, but it was quite... Yeah. And just fast forward, this is where I'm at.
Okay, so you're working at Hartman, you're an educator, you're a formal educator, you're on the faculty, you're an informal educator, you're in Camp Ramah, Israel for a long time. You're doing a lot of stuff with Hartman now. But we want to talk about this slice of your life, which is more your not professional life, but your volunteer life, although it's a volunteer life that I think takes as many hours a week, probably as your professional life. So you've just stepped out of the role of being the coordinator of this Minyan called Hakhel. But you're still deeply involved, and you're just over the line. Somebody else just took over recently. You did it for the last period of time, three years, and it was during the entire time of the judicial reform, which had its impact on the Kehila and then the entire time so far of the war, which had a massive impact on the Kehila. And we'll talk about that to whatever extent you feel comfortable doing in a minute. But before we get to what's happened in the last few years with this Minyan called Hakhel, tell us just a little bit, even though you weren't one of the actual founders, a little bit too young. But nonetheless, you've been involved for a very, very long time. My first, by the way, my first encounter with Hakhel was a Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur davening when you davened. And I actually wrote, I actually asked somebody, who is that? And I ended up writing you a little text afterwards, it was really unbelievable hearing you daven. It was just unbelievable. Elisheva and I both remember that day very, very clearly. But You've been around for a very long time. So even though you weren't one of the founders, you know it inside and out. Talk to us a little bit about what was the vision of this, of forming this community? Let's just give people a sense. It's in South Jerusalem. It's in Baca, which when I was growing up here in Jerusalem as a kid, while you were doing Shlechut in LA, my parents from Baltimore were doing a Shlichut here in Israel for a couple of years, it was supposed to be Aliyah, but it ended up being Shlichut. We stayed only a couple of years. But Baca back then was the only neighborhood my parents didn't allow us to ride our bikes in.
It was the hood.
It was really the hood. They said, If you ride your bike in Baca, you're going to come back without your bike. So you can't ride your bike in Baca. Now, Baca is too expensive for anybody to afford to move into, which is a serious problem. But it's in Baca. It's near Kol Haneshama, which some people technically call the force reform community in this area. It's near Shirah Hadashah, which some people refer to as the first-Partnership, but in the tourism industry, it's called the egalitarian Orthodox Synagogue. It's near Tzion, and we've had rabbi Tamar Elad Applbaum on the podcast before. So it's in a somewhat Anglo area, but it's not really an Anglo Minyan, but it's in that environment. So we're in Baca, we're in South Jerusalem. What was the goal of the people who founded this? A lot of academics, a lot of professionals, doctors, lawyers. I mean, it's not a run-of-the-mill crowd. What were they trying to do?
I think every good founding story of a Minyan, this was a breakaway Minyan. There were a group of people that had Davened historically at Pelech, which is the girls' school. There still is a community there. And around the time that Shira Hadasha was already starting up, feeling like there needed to be some movement in the direction of including younger girls, whether it was singing Anim Zemirot, which is the last part of tefilah, where children usually will get up and lead that part. And, or women giving divre torah, meaning there was really just a push within Pellech to be able to include more women within Davening, and just I think there was a frustration for a core group of people that ended up breaking away and starting this Minyan, 19 years ago. Hakhel started, again, every good Minyan in someone's living room and ended up moving into the Matnas, into the community center of Baca. Where it still is. Where it still is and still will be. Meaning I think that part of the philosophy or the ideology of the Minyan is that it strives to be a place that is embedded within the community, within the neighborhood that is open to anybody who wants to come. And also knowing that we are not a community that is going to have three tfilot a day or three Minyanim and have a building that is going to be full throughout the week, recognizing that, as you mentioned, property is expensive here and knowing that we want to make sure that there's multi-purpose for that space. I will say I think that Professor Yair Furstenberg, who's one of the founders together with Oshrat Shoham, speaks about the fluid or the fluidity of the ideology of the Minyan, we go with the flow. And really meaning that, I think that what he means is, and I'm going to try to translate more into English, but we meet the community where they're at. And not to say that there aren't halakhic obligations and that we are definitely dedicated to a certain vision of halakhah, Jewish law. And we do try to stretch, I think, those boundaries in order to be inclusive, in order to make sure that we are also creating an authentic experience for our community, whether they are young or whether they are older. I think one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we are multi-generational. A lot of babies in Shul. And also we just celebrated one of our core community members who just turned 99. And I find that really just inspiring.
But it's more than a Shul. It always was more than a Shul. We'll talk about after the 7th, but it was always more than a Shul. It had a certain political activism that was very much a part of it. When you would go to the Jerusalem protest during the judicial reform days.
It was like the Kiddish after Kiddish.
Exactly, because they were Saturday nights, and you would see a huge percentage of people from Hakhel were there, and a huge percentage of people who were there were from Hakhel. They were not enormous protests, unfortunately. So there's a political dimension to it.
And I would say a lot of the leaders of the protests definitely came from the community. I will say that as the lay leader at the time, now I'm just in reserve duty. But as a lay leader at the time, I think that we were very careful not to bring too much of the politics into show because we do have people that are from the right and from the left and everywhere in between, and to make sure that there was room for different voices in the room and recognizing that people are coming to the daven. And that was the space for people to come and do that.
The space doesn't feel political at all, but there is a of a political electricity among the people there, I think, and they care. And it's also about even before the war, and we'll come back to the war in a second. But it's a community that does unbelievable things for the people in the community. Is that a function of the personalities of the people, or was that part of the vision when you guys set out to create, or when those people set out to create it? Somebody who needs us, we're going to be there. Every community says that, but very few communities do it like this. Was that part of the vision or did that just gradually emerge?
I think it's a bit of both. I think that it was part of the vision because of the founders that created the community. I'll go back to Oshrat Shoham, who is just an incredible driver of so many, just projects and initiatives that happen within the community and a lot behind the scenes. We are involved in so many different Hesed and Tzdaka projects within the neighborhood that don't have to do with any community members that I'm not actually sure that a lot of the members know about. And making sure that they're supported whether it's the shelter for women that we are very supportive of and youth that are at risk, and just one organization after the next that she has really just pushed pushed us as a community and pushes the agenda forward. I will say that going back to your comment earlier, there is an unusual amount of academics, of people who really care about the Jewish people. You know, I always joke that half of Hartman's office is at Hakhel as well. And just there's a lot of people that really care also about the future of what it means to live in Israel and the future of Judaism and what that looks like. So I think that just naturally and inevitably, that makes way for a deep commitment to what it means to live within an intentional community that really care about each other. I think we saw that, again, I know we're going to talk about the war in a second. But if it was not dormant, but definitely the roots were there, I think that in the the last two, three years, that has really just been highlighted.
Okay, so let's talk about that at October 7th.
It's hard not to.
But Obviously, on the 7th, one member of the community became a hostage, was badly wounded, and became a hostage. I'm sure that had a huge impact on how the community responded. And then, tragically, the community has lost another person since then. And people that have not been to Shul. There are weeks when you come in there, it looks like an armory. I mean, all the kids come back from the army, and there's all these M16s, and a lot of the, mostly men, probably not only, but mostly men are carrying a lot of pistols. I mean, it's visible. You feel the war. But the community transformed somehow after the 7th, largely because of Hirsh, but not only because of Hirsh. Can you say something about the leadership of the community and what the goal was? And some of it was just instinctual, probably some of it was intentional and conscious.
I mean, I'll just start off by saying that we have a rotation, usually every two years, of two gabbaim or lay leaders that lead the community. I think that, looking back now on the fact that one I signed on for another year, but really believing that term limits are important and to enable other types of leaders to really come in to lead the community. At that moment, on October 7th, my co-gabai was John Goldberg-Polin, Hirsh's father. Hirsh was at Shul that night, the night before. As good gabai's children, I have four boys of my own, and Hirsh and my boys were, we were pushing them to put all the chairs away because as a great lay led minyan, we sit on plastic chairs. My last memory of Hirsh was just bringing the chairs into where the storage, into the shed and closing it up. Then the next morning, John and I were at Shul trying to kind of navigate. First of all, there were just sirens again and again. As I mentioned, our now 99-year-old young man was there on October 7th. I think that I was most nervous about him running back and forth to the shelter and getting hurt, but also recognizing that something was going on. I looked at John as we left Shul and said to him, Okay, we'll recap after Chag. I had no idea what was going on at that moment. Nobody did. We'll try to figure out what we need to pivot. It was clear to us that people were already being called up. I would say at the beginning or at the height of the war, we're around 200 families now, which is already, I think, larger as we grew through COVID. I don't know that one of our COVID keepers was that we gained a bunch of families. We had 130 people from the community drafted right at the beginning. Many of those who were drafted also sat on our committees So we had to really reconfigure our whole leadership and mechanism of how we support. And there were new needs. I felt like those first two weeks, there was this manic energy of sending all of the things that the soldiers needed to the front lines. And then starting WhatsApp groups for those who, we had thousands, tens of thousands of families that ended up in Jerusalem that came from the south. My sister lived in Sderot. She moved into my parents house in Beit Shemesh. I mean, there was just all these other, as you mentioned, we're a very socially aware community. So People were just pivoted right into just the municipality and social structures that spring up right on October 7th to help the larger community. We had to support our families that were drafted, whether it was young mothers with children that were left at home, myself included for months. There was this added level, of course, of Hirsh, the anxiety around Hirsh. Already on October 7th, the Goldberg-Polin's were just unbelievable and created kind of the working group that really started working on trying to figure out what had happened. When I spoke to John, that at the end of Simchat Torah, he just texted me back, We haven't heard from Hirsh, you're on your own. Luckily, we do have a group of gabbaim bemiluim, we call them, but the leaders that are reservists.
Reservists leaders for the community.
To try and figure out how to deal with the situation and how to move forward. But I would say, I think even that Sunday night, which was October 8th, I felt like it was just extremely important to bring the community together. We had our systems from COVID, and so we just announced on the WhatsApp group that we were going to get on Zoom at 9:00 PM for a quick tefilah together. We read for the soldiers, I don't even know if we did for the hostages that first one because who knew? And saying something together highlighted something, some initiative that someone was involved with. And that went on for a few weeks where we gathered, whether it was nightly or every other night, feeling that people really needed something, a community and to come together, and to something to ground them within all the chaos, because there was a lot of chaos at that beginning. And fear. There was a lot of fear.
Yeah. I'll just say, personally, I remember our son was called up. He was called up a bunch of times. First time to Gaza, the second, third time to the north. But just in terms of what the community did, my son doesn't even live in Jerusalem. He's married, he's got his own kids. He lives in Givataim outside of Tel Aviv. But I think it was you. Somebody knocked on the door and brought us a cake. I think it was me. I just thought it was you. After you left, I thought, Okay, I really don't need a cake. I need my son to come home. Actually, that's what I need. But the cake, I don't know, it touched me. I still remember it. People have given us a lot of cakes over the years. But I still remember the day that you brought over the cake. You were bringing cakes to everybody who had a kid serving. It didn't matter if your kid was or if your kid was twice that age, which is what my kid is. It just was something about the community that, in general having nothing to do with the war. You mentioned COVID before. Those were the good old days. Bring COVID back. Exactly. We would be very happy to have COVID back. But we started actually going to the Minyan, the early Minyan, because it was much more sparsely populated. We were older and we had our little medical stuff.
It was outside.
It was outside. You guys had your little aisles between certain things. But I thought that was a little iffy, sketchy. So we went to the early Minyan, and there was this guy that we took two plastic chairs, and we marched them back in 20 yards, and we sat by ourselves outside, and it was very nice. And then this guy who was running the Minyan, who I had no idea who it was, comes up to me and says, I get what you're doing. My parents are doing exactly the same thing. I'm not going to bother you. I'm not going to ask you if you want an Alyiah. I'm not going to ask you if you want Aliyah services. We're going to leave you alone. And when you're ready to start moving up towards the front, you let me know when we're good. And every week he would come and he would check on us, just make sure we're okay. It was the sweetest thing. Like, after the third or fourth week, I didn't know he was because I was really new to the community. I said to somebody, I said to Elisheva, we got to write that guy like a note and just say thank you. You're being very sweet. We're Fine, but thank you. I knew it was. So I asked somebody who it was, and they told me who it was. It was Mikhael, right? Mikhael Menekin. Who is known, I think, among most people back in the day when he was one of the leaders of Breaking the Silence, which was kind of a controversial organization, it's more controversial now than it was when he was running it. It was very different when he was running it. It's an important to say. And then I reached out to him, and we've become obviously very friendly since then. I thought to myself before that, if somebody had said to me, there's this guy named Mikhael, and I knew who he was. That's right. This guy that used to run Breaking the Silence, and he hangs around in this community, which I think I have coffee with him, I would have thought, no. I mean, all the power to him, but that's not my thing. But the community enabled us to transcend things that otherwise might have been barriers and to develop friendships despite or sometimes even because of political differences, meaning that it's interesting to talk to people who you don't see the world the same way. You can be in an echo chamber anywhere you want. But the community really is very diverse, as you pointed out before, it really reached out to people. We're still in a war, and the IDF says we're going to be in a war for all of 2025, and now we're going to take over Gaza. I mean, this is nowhere near ending, tragically. And there's 59 hostages who have to be returned somehow or some way. But if you try to prognosticate a little bit, let's say the war ends and we go back to some normal, what do you think the long term DNA change in the kehila is? Do you have a sense about that?
I'm not sure I know what normal means. I want to pause on that for a second because I think that we're all changed. I've spent a lot of time in the last 18 months stressing and thinking about how do we create a future for our children that is not only, because we're all in trauma, but there's not only trauma-informed things We're thinking a lot about what is the story that we are telling ourselves and that we're telling others and our children from this time. I think that that's a crucial question that is going to determine, I think, what the future looks like for us and how the community has changed. It's interesting because after Hirsch was murdered, September or end of August, we called this the Hirsh effect in Shul. We had a lot of people who were curious, and I respect that. John had davened with us all year throughout Hirsh being a hostage, and Rachel returned to Shul to say Kaddish for him. We were so anxious and, I think, protective of her, and still anxious and protective. To make sure that she feels like she is a normal community member and seen.
And then she said that's what she wants.
That's what she wants. Even just trying to manage people, just onlookers and people who are coming to also grieve with the community. I think that that's an important piece of it. We, very early on, started to take. There's the Ark out to the streets and really enabling the neighborhood to come and not only pray with us, but to cry out for the return of the hostages. We had an incredible event for the 100 days, when I say that as we are approaching 600. It's just unbelievable. For the 100 days, it was at the promenade in in Armon Ha'Narziv at the Tayelet. Before every one of these events, it was like Oshrat and I and the other organizers looked at each other and were like, Nobody's going to come. Who's going to come to this? No one's going to come. Maybe it'll be a few community members, and we ended up with around 2,000 people there just praying with us. I think that that changes community a bit. I don't think that we are able to go back to what we were. Just like COVID has changed communities in the way that we operate and see things. I will say that part of what we really made a concerted effort over the past 18 months is to hold on to what Tfilah looks like, what community feels like, what's normal. We wanted people to walk into this space and not feel surprised that they were coming home to something that felt familiar to them. Because Tfilah, I always say, it can also be a change agent. It can also be something that feels very familiar and grounding. It's cheaper than therapy, it lasts a lot longer, it's more consistent. And I think that part of the reactions and the feedback that we were getting from community members was just, thank you for just being there every week. And that was a source of strength for a lot of people, knowing that show was going to happen and that it was going to happen in the way that we always did it. I said, I think it was the third week of the war where I was getting complaints about something very random and normal, whether it was the length of the Dvar Torah or the way that we did something. I looked over to my husband, Ari, and I said to him, I was like, great, people are complaining about the normal things. For me, that was a win because I wanted people to really feel like that stayed normal for them. There was, again, so much chaos that it felt so important to me to be able to hold that space for people. You speak about the cakes, and I was getting a lot of pushback because everybody kept saying, Why do we need to bake so many cakes? Don't make any more cakes. I said, It's not about cake. It's about seeing people, and it's about making sure that everybody feels seen. It doesn't matter if their child is 40 in the army or if their child is 18 and in the army, everyone's going through something and to make sure that everyone felt seen. I think that that was my biggest challenge over the past 18 months.
So let's talk about religion in Israel for a second. Let's just leave Hakhel specifically and certainly leave the war. You and I are having this conversation, I guess, about a week or so after there was this really, I think, horrific event in Raanana, where there's a shared memorial service people have been doing for many, many, many years, where Israelis have lost people and Palestinians have lost people get together to talk about their losses on Yom Ha'zikaron, which is the Memorial Day for Fallen soldiers. It's not actually a ceremony that I would go to on that day. I would be very open to going to something like that any other day of the year. But on Yom Ha'zikaron, for me personally, that's my Israeli Losses Day. So it's not my cup of tea, personally, but I certainly think anybody should be able to do what they want to do. And as most of our listeners probably know, but it was livestream, and you could watch it at home. But it was also livestreamed in a few places around the country. People gather just to watch it together, just to be online together and whatever. And one of the reformed synagogues in Raana did this, and the people literally had to be evacuated by the police who were warned that there was going to be violence and didn't show up in enough numbers. Who knows what that's all about? One can imagine, but whatever. And there was a mini attack on Jews by Jews in Raana for the crime, quote unquote, saying very cynically, of sitting in a reformed synagogue and watching a livestream. The event didn't even happen there. They were just livestreaming it. And then you look at other dimensions of Jewish life across this country, and it's hard to say that the official pronouncements about religion in Israel are the Judaism that you want your children, and eventually, you got your grandchildren, and I want my grandchildren to grow up with and say, that's the Judaism that I want. You don't hear from the chief rabbis ever something where you say, that's what I want my kid to be, or that sentence or that claim is going to bring thousands of secular Israelis running back to some traditional Judaism because it's so interesting, it's so warm, it's so engaging or whatever. There are these synagogues across the country. If you place them, I think, Hakhel is one of the defining ones, where you said there's a variety of political views, and we try to keep the space. You try to keep the space, space for everybody. It has a certain take on gender roles, and There's people who would be more comfortable if it was even more egalitarian, and there's people who would be more comfortable if it was less egalitarian. But somehow it makes space for a lot of people. And even if there's places that don't do anything like what, you just never hear a negative word said about another way of being Jewish. In shul, you just don't hear it. There's obviously extreme things that people might say are gross if Jews attack a Palestinian village. There's extremes. But by and large, within the mainstream, it's not a community that's critical of people. It's just about being, as I experience it, at least, it's tolerant, and it sees Judaism as tolerant, and it sees Judaism as fundamentally humanist. So let's just stay with the word humanist for a second. I guess my question to you is, as a woman who grew up here but has some experience of being outside of Israel, as an Orthodox woman rabbi, which is in itself a term that a generation ago, nobody would have thought that they would live to here. As somebody who's got her finger on the pulse, you have a podcast on Galei Tzahal, which is the IDF, Army radio, you have your fingers very much on the pulse of Israeli society. Can anything being done? The typical Yeshiva in Israel is not producing people who have that same set of tolerances about virtually anything, politics, religion, interpersonal stuff. The institutional, religious, educational places in this country that should be the repositories and the wellsprings of that are not doing that. I guess I wanted to ask you, can we steer that ship in a different direction, or is this the ship too big to steer? Can we imagine a world in which your boys are full-fledged adults with families of their own, where religion in the Jewish state, where Judaism in the Jewish state, has come to look very, very different? Or are places like Hakhel you think always going to be on the margins and swimming against the stream? And if that's the case, what does that say about the Jewishness of the Jewish state?
Easy question.
There you go.
I always feel like God laughed at me when he gifted me four boys as an uber-feminist. And my biggest anxiety as my twins, because my eldest boys are twins, turned bar mitzvah was that they weren't going to count me for Zimun, for when you finish a meal and you say the blessing after the meal, typically there's three men or three people, depending how you count, where you can add certain blessings to. And that was my biggest anxiety, which is I'm going to dissipate it a little bit. But I think that first and foremost, I have to focus on what I have control of. I would say in general. It pains me that I can't actually move out of South Jerusalem. Because there's nowhere that I can really go and have not only a community, but to provide education my children that I am fully aligned with. Both my boys just study at the Hartman High School. It's just an incredible bubble of what it looks like to have a liberal take on modern Jewish life that is, one, committed to Jewish life and to Jewish practice and committed to liberal values, and that they don't come in conflict with each other. I will say that every time I do go outside of our little community, I have a lot of thoughts about what it means to be in an extreme minority, and we are an extreme minority. I think for many years, that felt very devastating to me and a feeling that I don't know, how can I continue doing what I'm doing when nobody is out there listening? And I have to say, I listened to a TED talk by a rabbi Benay Lappe, who spoke, I think this was already 10 years ago.
She was a student of mine a thousand years ago.
She's an amazing person who talks about the different ways that we can deal with tragedy or with what happens when a story crashes, for us. She reminded me that even back in, you mentioned Yohanan Ben Zakkai and what happens when the Second Temple was then destroyed. But the rabbis were a real minority, meaning they were not the majority of the Jewish people at the time. I hold on to that a little bit. That gives It gives me a little bit of hope. It gives me also the strength, I think, to dig into my values and not let go of them, to be able to say it's okay. It's okay that I'm a minority. I really believe in these values. I know that there is another way for us to be able to do Jewish and to stay in Israel. I think that there are a lot of liberal Jews that are asking themselves the question, how Why can't I stay here when we see what's going on in the government? This is not my Judaism. Ben Gvir is not my Judaism. Smotrich is not my, they're just so far from the values and the beliefs that I hold. And I know that as we continue to do the work, there's part of what I've had the privilege to do at Hartman is that I work with a lot of summer camps in North America, and I went to teach the Shlichim, so full circle back around to my time at Camp Ramah. But I went to teach the Shlichim that were going this summer out to camps, and I happened to teach the Shlichim for the reform camps, for the URJ camps. And most of the Israelis come with zero, I want to say, zero text study backgrounds, not a lot of Jewish knowledge. I had two Druze young women sitting in my class, which I thought was amazing. They were going to reform camps as Israelis, which I thought it was mind-blowing. I was so happy to then talk to them and just find out, you're going to be Shlichot of the state of Israel to this URJ camp. It was amazing. And I decided to dig in and teach text. I brought in the mishnah of about how the world was created in 10 utterings of God. And the rabbis asked, they were like, why did God need 10? Why couldn't he just, or why couldn't God just say one, create the world, and the world was created? And we had a whole conversation about the power of words, and they came up afterwards and said, wow, that's like a Judaism that I can prescribe to and that I can connect with. And I think that part of what I believe is my life's work is to be able to create entry points for people who don't necessarily have all of the access to whether it's Jewish text and/or ritual. I'm a big believer in Jewish ritual and what that can do in order to provide also our lives with meaning and community? And what does it look like as we continue to do this work? So it might be my tiny little small part in it, but I believe that we just have to believe that there is another option and to be able to continue. I will say, again, I think that it starts at home. I think that when you look at the schools around our area, my children are privileged that my father is now the school rabbi of the local school here, the local religious school. I went to the Yom Hazikaron ceremony in the morning that was honoring Yuval Shoham and Ner Shapira, both of them who are alumni of the school. I watched the sixth-graders, Boys and Girls, dance on the stage together and said to myself, I know that this is one of the only schools that belongs to the religious, the mamad, the mamlachti-dati stream that allows this. I am so happy that this is still here and happening. And again, the more that we can strengthen this school here and for it to be a model for other schools, and our unbelievable principal is now thinking about moving to the periphery in order to strengthen other communities. And I say she has now had an opportunity to witness what liberal Judaism looks like, even though that might not necessarily be her practice at home, she knows that there's also another way. I think the ripple effect, as long as we continue at it, is powerful.
Powerful enough that we're going to be proud of the Judaism that represents the Jewish state one day?
I have to hope. I have to hope that that's going to be the case. I don't think that we're going to be able to hide our faults. There's a great passage in the Jerusalem, in the Talmud HaYerushalmi, that talks about how the question is, what happened to the tablets that Moses broke? What did they do with them? We knew that they were holy, and what happens? And the midrash goes that there were two different Arks that were then that sat in the tabernacle in the Mishkan in the desert. And the one that had the broken tablets, the Ark that had the broken tablets, was the one that went out to the public every time to lead the camp in their travels. And I think that there's a strong message in that, we don't hide from our faults, and we don't hide from the brokenness. We bring it out front and center. We know that something's broken. Something's broken in Israeli society. Something is broken in the way that we are witnessing religious fanaticism and fascism, and we can use all the 'isms'. I really believe that. That redemption comes in a blink of an eye. We witnessed that after the Yom Kippur war when we signed the peace agreement with Egypt, who imagined that we would have peace with Egypt. To quote one of my colleagues, Dr. Tal Becker, keeps saying we are at the most opportune moment here in Israel. We have the Middle East in our hands. The question is, what are we going to do with it? And are we going to just take those opportunities and do something with it? I want to believe that there is an opportunity for us to be able to re-imagine what Jewish life looks like, to continue and believe that we have the right to fight for these values and to really give our children. I have to believe that, to be able to give our children the future that we really want.
That brings me to my last question, but I think you already answered it, but that was I was going to say that when the synagogue, the congregation, the community, whatever you want to call it, had its recent celebration of its, every year, there's this celebration of its founding, this was the 19th year. Yud Tet. It's how you represent a number with Jewish Hebrew letters. That's what I was trying to say. So there's Yud, which is 10, and Tet, which is nine. And so that's how you do it. And then somebody, maybe it was you, said that Yud, tet, actually could stand for Yihe Tov. That's right. Things are going to be good. And then you did this amazing thing. You put things on the wall. I guess people what's up to you. You wrote out to the community, what does this community represent for you? And then people wrote back, and then you guys took them and wrote them up and put them up on the wall. It was really very sweet and very moving, I thought. In the little corner of the synagogue where I sit, so I could only see. I did look through them, but the ones that I sat week after week, they stayed up for a few weeks, and I was able to look at them. So one person said, This is the place in my life where there's sanity. Another person said, This Minyan is the second thing, if not the first, that I say when somebody asks me to tell about myself. I thought that was just unbelievable. But I want to come back to the Yihe Tov. It's going to be okay. It's going to be good. That's what you said. So this is like, you had 19, but it could stand for it's going to be good. It's been a horrible few years. We had COVID, which was in itself horrible, even though it did good things for the synagogue and some things for the world. A lot of people died, and a lot of things were lost. A lot of innocence was lost. Then we had the judicial reform, Which we thought was about as bad as it could get because that was, I remember it was Shisha Be'Av, it was on the sixth of Av. And I remember in this community that we're talking about, people sat out on the courtyard for reading the Book of Lamentations. And there's a few people who you and I both know who I literally saw sit down and start to cry, just started to weep. Had we had any idea then what was going to happen a month and a half later, we would have thought that what happened in the Knesset about the judicial reform was child's play. But then October 7th happened. We were sitting on the same courtyard on the morning of the seventh that we'd been sitting on when we were doing lamentations for the ninth of Av. It's just been a horrible few years. And I'm Almost a generation older than you, which I think makes a difference in terms of how we look at this. So I want to ask you about you and your kids. Do you have an optimism that your boys are, I'm not talking about them as individuals, but their generation, the kids who are raised in this an open, liberal, Jewish, Orthodox community, which is accepting and embracing of people who are like us and people who are not like us, who care deeply about Israel and its security, but also care about human beings, no no matter where they may happen to reside. You have a confidence that in a generation, your boys are going to be sitting where you are and committing themselves. Again, not them, specifically, but that generation. This is going to be a country that's going to be worthy of their devotion. Yihe Tov? It's going to be good?
Look, my twins are 16, and conversations around the army have started, which I said to my husband, he better be done with reserve duty by the time that they go in because I think I also have a certain capacity.
Meaning you can't have a husband and kids.
A husband and kids. I think that'll just put me over. Which we do have families in the community. We speak a lot, I think, about also the ethics of war and what it means to be able to have room to see other people suffering, just the whole debate around what's going on in Gaza right now. I want to hope that my boys will be able to speak up and speak up for their values I think that turning away or we can't run away from these problems. These problems are here. If we don't have our voice heard, then we've left the arena, to the extremists. And I think that's my real fear. My real fear is that the liberal community is going to just give up at some point. We're all very tired. When people ask me, How am I doing? I'm like, I'm really tired. It's been a really It's been really hard 18 months. And as you mentioned at the beginning, there's really no end in sight. So what does this mean for us? And I feel just a very strong sense of responsibility and commitment to be able to imagine, Zionism at its core was an exercise in dreaming. We didn't have Israel when Zionism started. I want to urge us to be able to have the capacity, and I know we're all tired, so it's hard to do, but to be able to dream again, knowing that our dreams can be fulfilled and recognized. I want to hope that my children will have that ability. Again, trying very hard to on one hand, not normalize what we're going through, on the other hand, not having them come out on the other side severely traumatized, feeling that to be able to give them the tools of coping mechanisms and resilience is something that I've, again, thought about a lot like many other parents. And knowing that I have to continue this work in order to enable my children to continue living here. And that keeps me up at night, and that's what keeps me going. But I can't imagine living in an Israel that doesn't put my children's future first, and that has to include liberal values. It has to include a joint future with Palestinians because we're both not going anywhere. However, that may play out, and hopefully a vision towards peace, as naïve as that might sound. But we have to be able to imagine it. Otherwise, we're not left with much.
That's beautifully said. I have to say, I think your boys are very lucky to have you as an Ema. And this community is very lucky to have you as one of its leaders. I think the State of Israel is very fortunate. It's people like you as its educators and dreamers. Our hope is not yet lost. One way of reading it is, I hope it's not yet lost, but it could run out. And the other is just, no, we just hope is our business. Exactly. And I choose to read it, as do you, the second way. And so for sharing this vision of Jewishness and Israeli-ness and how it's manifested in this particular kehila and in your own work, I'm very grateful. It's not an easy conversation. I can see in your eyes, you can see in my eyes. It's just not easy. But I appreciate you taking the time to share with everyone who's listening to this, your vision for what this place can still become. Rabbi Na’ama Levitz, Applbaum, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
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