Why is there a Jewish state?
Sounds like a ridiculous question, of course, but it’s really not. Imagine for a moment that anti-Semitism disappeared, and the Jews never again had to think about refuge. Imagine, as well, that our region changed entirely, and Israel was free (think Canada) to go about its business, without worrying about neighbors. Imagine, in other words, a world in which there was a Jewish state that we didn’t “need” because of others, but just because we wanted a place for Jews and Judaism to flourish.
What, then, would we do in this Jewish state?
That’s a question we don’t ask ourselves very often, but it matters. At the end of the day, I would argue, the Jewish state is simply a means to an end. It’s a means to a place where Jews can continually rethink and reimagine Judaism, deepen and reshape it as human history evolves.
If that’s going to happen, of course, Jewish study and Jewish texts cannot be only the province of the “religious” community. In today’s world, if we are walking in a suburb in the Diaspora and see through the living room window a set of Talmud on the bookshelf, or if we’re walking in an Israeli neighborhood and see the same through the apartment window, it’s more than likely that we’re looking into the home of an Orthodox family. Not certain, but likely.
But that, of course, simply can’t remain the case. How is the rest of the Jewish world, which is most of the Jewish world, supposed to have something to say about why Jews matter and what the Jewish world should be and say, if they haven’t had a chance to access that world of traditional Jewish texts?
Which is where a secular yeshiva comes in. Yeshivot are almost always for “religious” Jews. What about those Jews who do not wish to be observant, yet do want to be Jewishly literate? Where can they study? Where can they break open the tomes that have for too long been closed to them?
Today, we hear from someone who has fashioned a place where than can happen.
Dr. Ariel Levinson is the founder and co-director of the Secular Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He lectures and teaches Jewish and Israeli culture and Hebrew literature.
Ariel was born and raised in Jerusalem and he is a graduate of Himmelfarb High School, the largest religious boys’ high school in Jerusalem. He completed his Ph.D at Hebrew University. His Ph.D in Hebrew literature looked at early signs of secularization in early Zionist biographies and literature.
For those interested, you can check out the Secular Yeshiva’s Facebook page here and their Instagram page here.
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.
One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot during these past few months of this horrible year and the agonizing time of this war, which, at least at the moment, shows no sign of being anywhere near over, is that we have to stop the doom scrolling, even though we have to follow what's going on, and we have to begin to ask ourselves the questions about why we're here. And so, yes, the war is terrible, and it's going to go on, and we don't know how it's going to end or when it's going to end. But I've tried to, at least myself, try to remind myself that there's a Jewish state for a reason. And to focus our conversation here on Israel from the inside also, on what are the reasons for having this Jewish state? A lot of times people will say, how Jewish should the Jewish state be? I'm not sure that that's a very meaningful question. I mean, I'm not sure how you measure the Jewishness of a state.
But I think you could flip that question and ask, how should the Jewish state be Jewish? And one of the things that we've tried to do in the years that we've been doing this blog/podcast is to shine a light on some of the ways that people may not know about in which Judaism thrives in the most unexpected ways or not well-known ways, at least in the Jewish state. And today is an example of that.
My guest today is Dr. Ariel Levinson, who is the founder and co-director of what's called the Secular Yeshiva in Jerusalem. That there's a lot of yeshivot in Yerushalayim, everybody knows. That there's a secular Yeshiva in Jerusalem might be much less well known to people. Ariel actually grew up with another person who's been on our podcast a couple of times, Mikhael Manekin, who's been on once about his book and once about his work in creating Breaking the Silence. That's a conversation that we did years ago, but our listeners can go find it in the archive if you'd like to listen to it. He was in the army with Mikhael. Ariel himself is a graduate and a product of the standard religious- the religious educational system in Jerusalem. He went to the Himmelfarb school, which has actually been in the news a little bit because Aner Shapira and Ben Zussman and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, three young boys back then who all were in the same class, are all three, tragically, no longer with us. Aner was killed on the seventh, Ben Zussman fell in battle, and of course, Hersh Goldberg-Polin was brutally killed by Hamas not all that long ago.
So Himmelfarb has been in the Jerusalem news, at least, and a little bit in the news beyond, just because of that very sad story. But Himmelfarb is a fabulous school in Yerushalayim, and Ariel is a product of that, and of yeshivot, and has a BA, MA, and PhD. His PhD is in Hebrew literature from Hebrew University, where he looked at early signs of secularization in early Zionist biographies and literature, fascinating in and of itself. But we're going to hear about him and the institution that he's created, a secular yeshiva, which I think, again, on this time of high holidays and renewal, to renew our own thinking about what makes up Jewish life and what are the kinds of institutions that make up the Jewish state. So, Ariel, thank you very much for being with us today.
Thanks for the invitation. It's good to be here.
Before we get going, a little bit about you, more than I did.
So I grew up in Jerusalem in a Modern Orthodox home. Studied. My father actually teaches at Hebrew as well Agada and Midrash and the Talmud, so a very Talmudic home. My mother is a psychologist. I went to the religious scouts in Jerusalem, which is also a very strong movement here, a youth movement in Jerusalem, and went to Himmelfarb High School, and then to the Maalei Gilboa Yeshiva for two years, and the army for full service. But during the army, and also even the years of the yeshiva, the questions of the presence of God in my life and also of halakhic observance challenged me. I think I felt less and less the presence of God in my life. So the kippah, it got smaller and smaller, until it dropped into my pocket and then into my bag and then into a drawer. I had very difficult questions about halakha and halakhic observance. And with a lot of limud (study) and a lot of study of basic halakhic sugiyot (issues), I also approach my rabbis at the yeshiva with the questions that bothered me, the negation between, I say, the humanistic values I grew up on, I would say also mainly the question of equality between men and women, and the lack of, I would say, movement in halakhah to progress this issue. And slowly, I felt separated from the Olam Halakhah.
The world of halakhah.
The world of halakhah. It was a very slow process. I guess the first question was even as a teenager, but I was convinced I can make it work. But I think it came to a step also after the army, when the world opens up and more options, more identity options open up, you get to know more people who didn't grow up religious and come from very secular worlds, got me very, very intrigued and interested. I started my own personal spiritual journey with the question only, I think, a yeshiva bachur (yeshiva student) can ask. If I just studied for, let's say, 10, 20 years, the classical or biblical texts that I need that are essential to my religious identity, who are the essential writings of the secular modern Jewish thinkers that I need to read if I'm going to adopt or move into, transition into this new secular Israeli identity? Back then, I was working as a teacher in high schools and elementary schools here in Jerusalem, and also in pre-army mechinot (preparatory) academies around Jerusalem.
And I approached teachers, schoolmasters with this question: "Tell me who I need to read in order to create my own Jewish but secular identity." The funny thing that is what I met was silence and embarrassment that they couldn't mention the classical writings every secular Jew needs to know in order to form his identity. And these are (people involved in) education.
You were asking for non-religious Jewish sources or just general Western sources?
Religious. No, Jewish.
Jewish and Hebrew.
They couldn't mention them because they didn't know who they were?
They knew-- they would throw out a couple of classical names. They would say Bialik, they would say Ahad Ha'am. But after studying Hebrew literature in the university, you know that Bialik and Ahad Ha'am are second, third, even sometimes even fourth generation to the Enlightenment movement, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the Haskala. So they already grew up into a movement that's been secularizing Jewish culture through Hebrew literature. But I was interested in the origins. Where does the whole secular Jewish story start? This revolution that we are all part of. I mean, even if you're an ultra-Orthodox or religious Zionist, you are also a part of, or your identity is a result of, the secularization of Jewish identity in the last 300 years.
Because even if you're ultra-Orthodox, part of your identity is about being opposed to that.
Exactly. That's an interesting question because today people feel sometimes very embarrassed with the definition of hiloni (secular). It's only in the past few years, which is a very interesting phenomena, people feel they don't want to be described as hiloni because they feel either it's a box, a very strict and dichotomous definition that negates religion or negates God or negates tradition. Or they want to feel they have a spectrum of identities and that the definition of secular today means opposing to Jewish life. This is because of the social conversation and politics and everything. But this, just 20, 30, 40 years ago, was the other way around. The word hiloni was full of pride, I would say it was the fullest identity for an Israeli to walk around with. If you're religious Zionist or Haredi, you know that you're not, you're not the hegemony, or you're not the primary Israeli Zionist identity. But something shifted today. But as you mentioned, if you look through and you study these new identities, you see that every stream in Jewish culture today, Reform, Conservative, modern Zionist, Orthodox, and ultra-Orthodox, all define themselves on the background of the Haskala values.
Haskala is the Jewish renaissance of 17, 1800s.
Exactly. How do I... How immersed do I want to be in the modern liberal values and how much do I negate to? So, all identities work in a clash. But my own journey, first of all, was personal, was spiritual. I would say looking for inspiration. And I met a lot of figures, literary figures, thinkers, writers, and literary pieces that for me were enlightening. It was like reading a religious text just depicting the meeting with God or getting a revelation, but just a secular revelation about what does it mean to be a secular Jew.
Who are some of the people that had the biggest impact on you? The ones that these rabbis didn't mention? Because you know, Bialik and Ahad Ha'am, they're standard. But who were the ones that you didn't know about then, that after you read them, you're looking back now, many years later, you say to yourself, I don't know, the three books or people that you said yourself, "These people really exploded my world in the best possible way."
So the first one, I think, is Micha Josef Berdyczewski. Berdyczewski is well known-
He's easier to read than to spell his name.
Right.But he changed his name to Ben Gurion after the rebel leader in the Second Temple Revolution. And Ben Gurion, our first Prime Minister, chose this name inspired by Berdyczewski
Oh, that I did not know
Taking this name because there was a big debate between Ahad Ha'am and Berdyczewski about the ways secular, Jewish identity should build themselves. Is it a revolution? For example, is it a revolution or an evolution? When Ahad Ha'am represents the evolutionist perspective, and Berdyczewski is a radical. And many of the young people were inspired by Berdyczewski, creating this, what we call today the "new Jew", opposed to the old, diasporic bachur yeshiva from Eastern Europe, and creating this new, chalutz (pioneer)- vibrant, with power, that could lift up a gun or a shovel and work in agriculture or go to the army and be connected to nature and to his body and to this country. So Berdyczewski was, for me personally, and also for many of the builders of this country, the phenomenal Jewish secular thinker.
He didn't come here, right, Berdyczewski?
No, he didn't.
He stayed in Europe.
Yeah. He passed away at an early age, but he also moved from Eastern Europe. He was born in Mezibush, which you know is the Baal Shem Tov's… and he was supposed to be like the 12th generation rabbi in his family. But he moved to Berlin, Germany, and then started his new esthetic career in literature and philosophy. But he also was writing in Yiddish and in German and in Hebrew. So he wanted to be this multilingual writer and philosopher. And he also had a PhD, which was pretty unique for a Jewish secular thinker in the end of the 19th century. And also, I think he has a beautiful combination of a writer in prose and a thinker, philosopher, and also a researcher. When he was interested in researching Jewish history in order to see how he should create his own identity, but it has to build on real, historical research.
Okay, so Berdyczewski is one. I don't think, by the way, I might be wrong. I am wondering, are there any streets in Israel named after Berdyczewski?
There's one in Tel Aviv.
There's one? Okay.
Yeah, there's Berdyczewski Street in Tel Aviv. But you're right. Most of the thinkers I teach-
Don't have streets.
They are known as streets, and people know them only as street names. Right. The most important people that defined and created their identity are known today in Israel only as names of streets. That was one of the reasons I wanted to introduce this knowledge to young, secular Israelis coming of age and trying to create their own Jewish identity.
That'll bring us to the secular yeshiva in one second. But just really quickly, just for the curious listeners. So Berdyczewski is one person that you would say. Who are the other two?
Mendelssohn will be one, too, since one of the most important texts I teach and feel very connected to is, I would say, the first modern Hebrew text. It's called Kohelet Mussar. It's actually a periodical. Mendelssohn put it out, I think it was 1755, on the eve of Passover. I imagine it like he with his partner coming into the shul and putting these pamphlets on the shtenders (lecterns) where people are praying and davening. And after two additions, the rabbis and the heads of the community shut them down. There were some kinds of very interesting and new ideas they wanted to present to the Jewish community. After this failure, I would say, there were two outcomes. The first one was Mendelssohn retired from Hebrew writing and dealing with the internal Jewish issues and moved out for his philosophical, international career. The second one was that the students of Mendelssohn, the founders of the movement of Haskala, the Jewish enlightenment, that wanted to create this modern Jewish identity, when they published their first periodical, which lasted much more than two weeks and was the main platform for these new ideas. They republished Kohelet Mussar in their first edition just to show us this is the text they owed a debt to.
I would say the third figure who inspired me, which is closer to us today, is a man I think he's also (been) forgotten, although he passed away a little bit more than ten years ago. His name is Adam Baruch. He was a journalist. He was an art critique and a writer. And he had a column on the back cover of the newspaper of Maariv every Friday with like his small tidbits of what happened this week in the art, culture, politics-- writing beautiful, short aphorisms. Every week, it would open with one, halakhic shoot -shaila v'tshuva-
A responsa, a question and answer.
A responsa. That he would get from readers. The readers could be the readers of Maaariv. So they're religious, secular, traditional. Everything. And he's not religious. He wore like a hat, but he was like the heart of the Bohemian art scene of Tel Aviv. And he would write a responsa, a halakhic responsa, of how, since he grew up as a grandson to the Rosh Yeshivat Me'a She'arim- he left the religious world, became a journalist and an art critic- but he knew how to combine halakhic thinking and knowledge and the way to approach the needs of people who want to listen to the voice of tradition today, but in the 20th century.
So he's like an halalakhic posek, and halakhic thinker, a Jewish thinker, that writes in the newspaper, not publishing these in books… later on, he edited them into very important books. But for me, he's the one who managed to, I would say, create a beautiful combination between loyalty to Jewish identity and ideas, and the way to adapt them into 21st century day-to-day life.
Which is obviously, I think, very closely touches on the work of the Secular Yeshiva. So just take us from this period when you're talking to all these rabbis and reading all this stuff. And how does that get you to the Secular Yeshiva? How does that…?
After the army, I needed a break.
You're not the only one.
We all do, and we all did, and we'll come back to that because this is exactly the age we approach. These are the audiences we work with. But when my friends, most of them went to India or South America, I went to work as a shepherd in the Negev on the Egyptian border, very close to Sinai. I was there for a couple of months, waking up very early in the morning, taking out the sheep to eat, then in the afternoon, I'd gather them, make some milk and cheeses.
This time of isolation in the desert, I used to think, who (am I) and where am I going? I knew I'm going to do a very serious transition in my life, but I asked the fundamental questions. Let's start with an interesting one. If I'm not religious anymore, what partner, or woman, in my case, am I looking for? Will my loved one, and the one I'll be starting a family with, will she be secular? But I don't know secular women or what they think. Is she going to be religious since that's the world I came from? Or is she going to be datlashit, an ex-religious, who used to be religious, like me? For example, that was one of the questions that I was asking myself.
One revelation was, after a couple of years of studying in the yeshiva and many years of studying Torah, is that I love this stuff. I want to continue learning. In the army, I got the sense that I could be a good teacher. I was a sergeant, an educator in the army. I could be a good teacher. So first of all, I want to keep on studying myself, so I decided to go to Hebrew University to keep on studying Hebrew studies and Hebrew literature and to take out a teacher's degree because I had, and then it was an intuition, today it's common knowledge, that maybe in the secular educational system in Israel, we are missing young educators who can connect between the young Israeli generation and Jewish culture in an inspiring way. Making it, I would say, even sexy, and interesting. and inspiring for them to see them as building blocks for their identity or for their lives, because the feeling was it's not happening. You're talking about the Jewish state. One of the biggest absurds is that Jewish education in the Jewish state is very poor in the national, formal educational system.
Usually, you have to go to a non-formal program if you want to deepen your connection to Jewish culture and tradition. So I wanted to go back- I went back to Jerusalem and started my studies, and met a couple of friends. We were flirting between educational work and arts and culture - the culture scene in Jerusalem. Because if you want to engage young people, you've got to go to the places they are. They won't come to you. You've got to work with them. You've got to go to clubs, you got to go to bars, you've got to go to restaurants, you've got to open to art clubs and houses, and you've got to create some... decipher the code, how to make these ancient texts interesting and relevant to a young generation that's interested in social networks and everything.
And back then, we also had another-- we identified as a danger of the identity of Jerusalem. We had an ultra-Orthodox mayor. We had negative migration of secular people from Jerusalem moving out to Tel Aviv because they couldn't imagine a liberal, pluralistic future in the city. And we wanted to create a counterculture movement in Jerusalem, reclaiming the city and creating a lot of art and culture for people that can feel at home here and even to get here things that they can't get anywhere else.
So with a couple of friends, we started a couple of cultural events. We'll call them cultural events, trying to create, to decipher this code. For example, our first event was in Hanukkah 2010. We went into the biggest nightclub in Israel back then, which was the Oman 17 here in Jerusalem. We wanted to do a mesibat limud, a limud party.
Learning party.
A learning party.
Everybody should know, Oman 17-- it was really a wild place. There was all kinds of stuff going on there, whatever. We don't have to go into details, but we're talking about the opposite vibe from a yeshiva.
Exactly. It was Hanukkah, so it was like a tzelem b'heichal, but the other way around.
The foreign image in the temple.
Yeah. Exactly. Let's go to the most secular temple and do some Jewish learning that could be relevant for young people. We had a couple of short sessions of study on the bar,
When is this approximately?
Hanukkah December 2010.
Okay.
A very good friend of ours, who today is maybe the most prominent guitarist in Israel, called Berry Sakharof, who supported our work here in Jerusalem, came to play a DJ set. We got on our first event between 250 to 300 young Jerusalemites.
Coming just for that.
Coming just for that. I would say coming also from a variety of the 50 shades of Jerusalemite identity: religious and traditional and very secular and just a little bit of secular.
And formerly religious, struggling with whether to be religious, all of that. Jerusalem is really just a rainbow of all of that.
Nachon. Through a couple of these events, we did one in the Ma'abada Theater and one in the Shai Agnon House. We created this buzz about a new thing happening in Jerusalem, a secular yeshiva opening up in Jerusalem. And then we published a program inviting young Israelis, men and women, which is also part of the revolution, men and women studying together Jewish texts, coming from all over Israel, not only for the Jerusalemites, to a four-month study program with full board, like a full yeshiva program, starting from very early in the morning to very late at night. A very different curriculum that goes on in the traditional yeshiva. Maybe we'll talk about that in a second. But we identified the age of the post-army Israelis as, first of all, a very beautiful time in their life. For the first time, they're free from all formal programs, the army, the family. Usually, they take off to India, South America. They travel a lot, looking for themselves, looking to build themselves as young adults in Israel. We identified that as a beautiful time to create for them a program that they can come and ask all of these questions together with us as teachers and mentors, to offer them a variety of courses and a variety of texts to study and a variety of teachers who can all introduce different perspectives on Jewish culture and Israeli culture.
Our goals were to reconnect them to Jewish culture, which we know maybe today, one of the fundamental questions every community ask themselves is the question of the next generation. How do young adults find our tradition, culture, and heritage appealing and want to be part of it? The second one was the identity of Jerusalem. We connect them -- reconnect them to Jerusalem. I would say that in Israeli society, Jerusalem and Jewish culture are two brands that suffer from very bad PR. We took upon ourselves a very impossible mission to take these two brands and make them sexy again, interesting, that will connect them back to Jerusalem, which is also one of the beautiful texts. If you can look at Jerusalem as a text, a multi-layer text, and also Hebrew and Jewish and Israeli culture in order to help them connect to this place, also to Israel. Why are they here? What are we doing here now, 2024? What is my relationship to this place? And what is my relationship to my heritage and culture?
Tell us, before the war, on a typical day, how many people are enrolled? I mean, is it five people? Is it 5,000 people? It's obviously neither. But how many people are enrolled? They're there for four months. Give us a little bit of sense of what they're learning during the day, what we know about this crowd of people, how it's influencing them. Give us all of that. And then I would imagine that something dramatic has happened in light of October 7th, because obviously, the country has been thrown into an enormous question of what are we doing here? Are we going to make it here? Is this survivable? But at the same time, there's been a reigniting of a Jewishness in this country. You see all these totally secular soldiers who are not at the Secular Yeshiva coming in their tanks with their V-sign out of the tanks, but they're saying Am Yisrael Chai. They're not saying, Medinat Yisrael, the state of Israel is going to be okay. They're saying, Am Yisrael, the Jewish people is living. I want to hear before the horrors of the war, tell us, just give a snapshot in time of the Secular Yeshiva: who's there, how many people, et cetera. What are they studying? Then tell us a little bit about how things have changed since October 7th.
Great. The evolution of the yeshiva from 2010 would be developing more programs to get more of these young adults to come to our programs. We have, twice a year, we have this four-month program from after the holidays until the summer. In each program, we have about 15 participants. It's an intimate program because we know that very serious things can happen in an intimate group. And they see that as a life-changing experience, even if it's only four months in the yeshiva.
Where does it meet?
In Ein Kerem. The Ein Kerem neighborhood, since we have to be in tough competition with Rishikesh and ashrams in India, and South American nature, we had to find a very beautiful spot in Jerusalem that will make a good entry gate to the city. So in the beautiful Ein Kerem neighborhood is where we operate the programs.
Just outside the main Hadassah hospital for those who don't know.
Right.
So we have 30 participants in this four month program per year. We have an Elul summer program, which opened last week, which is a four-week program before the holidays.
Similar number of people?
Yeah, similar number of people. And also, an intense new program we have for people who are alumni and want to come for another session of studies. So they're already working and they're students, so they can't commit full-time. But we have an evening a week of four hours of study for two semesters. These, I would say, are the most intensive long-term programs. What we also learned is a lot of people want to come to the yeshiva and study at the yeshiva, but they're either working or students and have young families and can't commit full-time. So we opened last year about seven or eight young batei midrash, young study programs of Jewish text that are only an hour or two an evening. So you can drop by for an hour or two an evening to get your study session a week, and that's it. So we have about 50 students per year on our long- term intensive programs and a little bit more than 100 who come a week for a weekly study session. That I would say is the main branch of the yeshiva. But we also continued, since our first cultural event, is being producers of lots of cultural events in the city.
We know that Jewish culture needs a practice, not only study. So we take holiday events, we take Israeli national events, we take new ideas and new dates, and try to create a new cultural events that combine, I would say, entertainment and education. A spiritual point of view and a cultural point of view in one event, you could combine cinema, poetry, literature, TV, music, lots of music shows, a lot of new wave of artists and musicians.
Where do you do all this?
A lot of them are in Ein Kerem, but we have a lot of collaborations with institutes, museums, and artistic venues and cultural venues-- in the Tower of David Museum, the Hansen House, lots of very cool venues. Like I said in the beginning, we needed to go to where the young people are hanging out and create events for them where they are. So, let's say the second branch of the yeshiva-- we have dozens of cultural events per year.
And the third thing that happened without intention is a community. A young, secular Jewish growing community, which is very unique in the Jewish world since the secular sector in Israel is not organized by communities. They are liberal, autonomous individuals.
And after finishing our first program in 2010, we just wanted to rest. It was very intense. But all 15 participants decided they're staying in Jerusalem.
Wow. What percentage of the participants overall have stayed in Jerusalem?
So we had this survey done with the municipality, and we know today that although the under 10% of them come from Jerusalem, today more than 60% of them are Jerusalemites.
That's a huge contribution to the vibrancy of the city.
That's why this city, the mayor, even the new mayor, who we can't suspect was very –whose motives are to strengthen the secular identity of the city, they saw us as a strategic community in the city that strengthens the young, secular adults here and building their young families here. So we knew that after the program, they're starting to learn to go to the universities, they're looking for apartments, they're looking for jobs… They want to continue learning. So they stay close by. They want to stay connected to a human network and to a community. And we have maybe the largest growing secular Jewish community in Israel and maybe in the world with more than 100 new participants per year joining the community. We celebrate holidays together. We have specific events per year we do together, and we develop new programs for them to keep on studying with us. So, I would say creating a new community for young secular adults, creating a cultural scene, but infused with Jewish values and texts, and innovative educational programs that would attract them in the first place to come to the Secular Yeshiva.
So let's go back to the Secular Yeshiva for a second, but it's beginning to move towards the conclusion of our conversation, because I think this whole idea of Secular Yeshiva sounds a bit like an oxymoron. And you mentioned your own experience, having spent all these years in the standard orthodox world and in Maalei Gilboa, which is very open-minded, but still very much an Orthodox institution with an extraordinary leader. And then you did all this exploration. So how does all of that, what does it look like? How does that combination, what does it look like in the Secular Yeshiva? Somebody comes, they spend four months. If I find them the last week and I say, "What did you study?" What am I going to hear?
So you're going to hear, "I met the rabbis for the first time through a secular and pluralistic perspective. I read the Talmud and the Bible like I never read them before. They read the Bible in high school, maybe, but never with our great teachers who bring them to life. They might have never read the Talmud before, seriously. I remember one course when I was teaching classical rabbinical text, and in the middle of the class, one of the students started crying and left the class. After the session, I came asking her if she was okay and if I did anything to hurt her. She said, "No, I just didn't know that this book you were talking about, the Talmud, ever existed. I never heard about it before, and I didn't know how fundamental it was for Jewish literature and Jewish culture." That would be the-
She was crying because what?
She said, I'm crying about myself. I'm mourning the things I didn't get as a child growing up in Israel.
A lot of the secular Kibbutzim, and the secular society in Israel, also previous generation, used to talk about the "Tanakh to the Palmah," from the Bible to the Palmah, which was the strike force of the Haganah in the 1940s. If it happened after the Bible or before that, it was not anywhere there. I remember meeting, it's very similar to what you're saying, remember meeting, now they're probably '40s, but maybe even '50s… But decades ago, I met young people who would come out of secular kibbutzim, really great kids, and terrific young people, and had gone to the army. And then met some experience like this-- and their reaction was rage. In the particular case of the people that I knew, they were just like, to the kibbutz, "Who were you to decide that I didn't need to be exposed to anything Jewish between the Bible and the 1940s? That should be my decision, not your decision." And a lot of them left the kibbutzim and did things like this program and other programs. They joined Beit Midrash Elul back in the day, because they also thought that they'd been robbed. I mean, ironically, the Jewish state had robbed them of Jewish heritage.
And in a certain way, I think, the Secular Yeshiva that you've found and you are running, is trying to make up for that mistake.
Exactly. And they also make up for another mistake, which is surprising, which is that in high schools, they don't teach even the secular, modern thinkers that came before Zionism. Since the formal educational system, is interested in creating Zionist participant civilians in society, our history books start from 1881, the big pogroms in Europe, anti-Semitism, the rise of Zionism and the establishing the Jewish state.
But what happened before 1881? We have at least 150 years of vibrant Jewish identity trying to figure out what a modern Jew is. And this serious question- what is a modern Jew?- is not asked in the high school classroom. They only get the answer. The answer is being a Zionist in Israel. That's why they're not exposed to the variety of thinkers who created Jewish modernity. And I would say that will be the third (thing), I think, an alumni would say, we studied the first secular thinkers, and now I have a couple of answers, or deep research, of the question, "How do I combine my secular identity and my Jewish identity?" Because I think that would be the paradox of Jewish, Israeli, secular lives here. This is a question unanswered. What is the relationship between my Jewish identity and my secular one?
Because we grew up to see them as negating, but we know that they're not negating, but we don't know how to make it work.
They can actually enrich each other. It's more than not negating. They're much more powerful together.
Exactly.
So let's just look forward for a second and 10, 15 years, and the program continues and maybe grows, depending on what you do, what's your hope that the Secular Yeshiva is going to have on Israeli society writ large?
So my hope is that when you walk into a house of our alumni, or their friends, or their families and communities, or a normal, secular home, two or ten years from now, you would find that something changed in their library, in their homes. You would see a variety of books. You would see holy texts and what we call secular texts. You'll see modern Hebrew literature and classic Hebrew literature. They will have tools and knowledge how to read them and approach them. They would even share them with their kids. We will have the power and creativity to create new ceremonies and traditions, not only the old classical ones, or how do we rejuvenate our culture and create new traditions and new ways to create community life in Israel by secular people. That community life would be a default. It doesn't matter if you live in Beersheva, Sderot, in the Otef (Gaza Envelope), or in Tel Aviv-- you will have an option of an alive and vibrant, dynamic Jewish community. It doesn't matter if you define yourselves as religious, secular, masorti (traditional) or Haredi-- you'll have an option. You have a way to walk into the Jewish world and feel at home.
Maybe we'll conclude with when we started, and we were thinking about the name, and our intuition told us it has to be a secular yeshiva. There has to be a secular yeshiva. If every stream has their own yeshivot, where the people come and study and create their identities. Why isn't there a secular yeshiva? There's thousands of ultra-Orthodox. Every stream inside modern Zionism has their own specific yeshiva, and we don't have one for secular young adults who to study Jewish culture? But people warned us (away) from this oxymoron: "If you call it a secular yeshiva, no one would come." The secular won't come because it's a yeshiva, and the religious won't come because it's secular, and nobody will come. But what happened is the opposite. The curiosity intrigued by this oxymoron attracted many people to come and taste from the yeshiva. And that's, I think, what we wanted to do, is break the imprint of who does Jewish culture belong to in Israel? And to offer a gateway for people who want to explore it seriously, rigorously, and being open-minded, but also willing to change and willing to adapt to create their own route into Jewish culture.
It's really so exciting. People outside of Israel tend to think of Israel as religious and secular. People who live in Israel know that it's much more complicated than that. The Mizrahi (Jews who immigrated from Arab countries) world is not exactly, much of it, religious, but it's far from secular. It's not binary in any way. But this proactive way of taking people who define themselves as being outside the religious community in some way, but making these texts part of their life.
It's always struck me. I grew up in the States, and I was in the States for the first 40 years of my life. It always struck me as being so sad that if you saw a set of Mishna in a living room, 95% certainty, you were in the Orthodox home. And if you saw a set of Talmud volumes in a somebody's house, 95%, you were in the Orthodox home. It always broke my heart. It doesn't belong to the Orthodox world. It belongs to the Conservative world, the Reform world, the Reconstructionist world, the secular world. But why did we give that up? Why did those of us who didn't define ourselves classically in the Orthodox world, why did we say, "Okay, this is yours"?
And what you're doing is saying, "We're taking it back." We're not taking it away from you, but it's for all of us. And we should all drink from the same wells, or at least some of the same wells. We'll have a conversation with each other that heretofore would not have been possible. And hopefully, we can generate something for the Jewish state, which people might not have imagined. And certainly, living in the time in which we're living, we need a new discourse with each other. We need a new way of talking about what makes a society Jewish, what are the multiplicity of ways in which people can make Jewishness paramount in their lives. We need new models. And the work that you're doing is, I think, one of the most exciting and interesting ways inside the State of Israel where it's happening. Super grateful to you for taking the time and for telling us about the institution, and wish you continued success.
And we have all the links for people to learn about it on the notes for today's podcast, so people can learn more about the Secular Yeshiva, go on to all kinds of sites. Thank you very much.
Just a pleasure. Great. Thanks a lot. Mine too.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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