Comments (0)Reform Jews On Film
December 11, 2009Jerusalem
Stuart Schoffman
Special to the Jewish Times
It has been 21 years since I landed in Israel, in December 1988. I say “landed” and not “ascended.” I use the word aliyah as freely as the next Jew, but one way I’ve come of age as an Israeli is that this is mostly a place where I fight traffic and pay exorbitant water bills. In other words: a place to live.
People can also be splendid Jews in the U.S. Trust me, no matter what the next visiting Israeli dignitary tells you from the podium, however half-seriously, you can relax: You don’t have to live here.
Some of you, however, might rightly want to. This country has fantastic advantages, not the least being universal health care. I am duly proud of Israel’s achievements in high-tech, and certainly the biomedical fields, but don’t quiz me on the details. I adore our modern dance companies, even though I seldom go see them.
What I do know a lot about is Israeli kids: my kids and their friends, and my friends’ kids, and the Israeli kids they marry.
My son is 20, a soldier in the IDF. When I was his age, I was a junior at a venerable New England college, having busted my tuchas at the Yeshivah of Flatbush to get in.
My kids both went to the arts high school in Jerusalem, where they were spoon-fed enough history and literature and Bible and math to do fine on their matriculation exams. Someday, I expect, they’ll go to college. Now, they barely think about it.
It’s common for us American olim to brag that our kids are not obsessed with grades and extracurricular resumes. I agree 100 percent, but to be frank, I wouldn’t complain if my two children were currently attending Yale or Johns Hopkins, and were not in range of Iranian missiles.
My daughter is 18, a recent high school graduate. Next year, she goes in the army. This year, she’s in a pre-army mechina. There are about three dozen such operations here, all approved by the Ministry of Defense. Hers is in Jaffa, the mixed Jewish-Arab city that’s part of the Tel Aviv municipality. It’s run by Telem, the acronym for Israel’s Reform movement.
Other mechinot are secular, or Orthodox, or a mixture. Some focus on yeshiva training and some impart military skills, including one where the kids study Arabic to hopefully be accepted into intelligence units. There’s even a mechina of Druze youngsters and another dedicated to environmentalism. All have in common a mission: to foster qualities of leadership, self-confidence and mutual responsibility, in a Zionist context. It’s working.
My son also spent a year at the Jaffa mechina. His group had 30 kids. They study in the morning, with an emphasis on Jewish social justice, ethical dilemmas in the army and the Talmud, Chasidic spirituality, that sort of Israeli Reform stuff.
In the afternoons, they do volunteer work — with underprivileged Arab and Jewish kids, the Hebrew-speaking children of foreign workers, elderly Holocaust survivors, Ethiopian Jewish teenagers. Afterward they do a lot of sitting in circles and intensely sharing their feelings about the day’s experiences.
They live communally, crammed into several apartments in a rundown building situated amid auto repair shops. They take cabs to a mega-supermarket, buy epic quantities of groceries and do all their own cooking. Some weekends, my daughter comes home, along with her laundry. Other weekends, these kids are out briskly hiking shvil Yisrael, the trail that traverses the country north to south, or spending a traditional Shabbat together.
The Yaffo program, headed by an ex-Orthodox elite commando officer who became a Reform rabbi, centers on eclectic education. One annual outing is a full Shabbes in Mea Shearim, hosted by ultra-Orthodox families. Two years ago, my son spent three days at a monastery.
Toga parties they don’t have, but I assure you they have fun (though I surely don’t know the half of it). The beach is a 10-minute walk, and they’re near Tel Aviv’s hippest neighborhood.
A few weeks ago, I spoke at the mechina about film, which I used to teach in Israel and the States.
Down in the multi-purpose room, I spun a few DVDs for the kids, showing scenes from recent Israeli films to illustrate how movies are put together. The kids asked great questions like, “Does analyzing films the way you do make you enjoy them less?” The same could be asked of my life in Israel. Now, as my kids and I come of age as Israelis, the answer is: I enjoy it more.
Stuart Schoffman, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and editor of Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation, writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES.