Last week, I was in New York. Its usual hustle and bustle felt happy, but nowhere near as joyful as I remember. I am more than willing to admit that looking at New York, through the lens of the last eight months has definitely tainted the experience. We arrived in the city during university graduation week. Kids in caps and gowns, holding diplomas, could be seen everywhere, though many of them had draped keffiyehs over their shoulders. Despite the visible political expressions on the streets, there was also something much sadder. The number of people sleeping rough seemed higher. Though admittedly, I have no verifiable figures; only a feeling that there were so many more people out on the streets seeking shelter in doorways. I’m not a gloom predictor; it just isn’t in my nature. Almost to a fault, I want to see what is good in every situation. That said, New York is still New York, and there are so many Jews that things like kosher food, synagogues, and Jewish schools can be found everywhere. Antisemitism aside, it’s not hard to be a Jew in New York, and yet…
This week, I am in Israel, and it occurred to me that the balance of power in the Jewish world has shifted. It has not shifted overnight; it has been happening over the last hundred years, and yet I think that balance is now securely on the Israeli side.
Let me explain. The Jews who came to Ottoman Palestine and later Mandate Palestine were coming to a place with little to no infrastructure. There was so very little. My mother’s family – part of whom had been living in Israel uninterrupted since the destruction of the Second Temple and the other part who came from Lithuania in 1809 – lived in the ancient cities in the north of Israel and within the confines of the Old City of Jerusalem, respectively. It was only with the First Aliyah (starting in 1881) that the new pioneering spirit arose. These pioneering Jews didn’t come to a new land where the sidewalks were paved in gold. Rather, they came to a place so desolate that it took many years, much sweat, and so many tears to build the infrastructure needed to lay the groundwork that would one day be pavement. And that pavement was not paved in gold either; rather, it was paved in the knowledge that hard work and perseverance would be the only way every single inch of this ancient land would be reclaimed.
The Jews of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel) went to the Jews of the diaspora to raise much-needed funds to support the fledgling communities in Israel. One of my ancestors was called Moshe Varshaver (“Warsaw-er”), not because he was from Warsaw, but rather because he traveled there to raise much-needed funds to build the first Jerusalem hospital ever outside the old city walls — called Bikur Cholim. Famously, Golda Meir often traveled back to America, where she was brought up as a young girl, in order to raise much-needed funds for the Yishuv. The JNF, UJIA, UJA, and many others were organizations created in the diaspora with the express purpose of raising money to fund the building of Israel.
Israel was missing so much. I remember coming to Israel as a little girl to visit my cousins, and we each had to bring a second suitcase filled with shampoo, white toilet paper, and sugary cereal. At the time, in Israel, you could buy one generic brand of shampoo, scratchy blue/green toilet paper, and the only cereal available was cornflakes. Ben Gurion Airport’s terminal was so small that the conveyor belt for the luggage was outside the terminal on the sidewalk. And I suppose reparations from Germany were one of the reasons all taxis were six-door Mercedes Benz sedans (and not what my younger self thought was a limousine).
During my “gap-year” in Israel (between high-school and college), which was 30 years ago, things were still ‘missing’ from the shelves; but it wasn’t as drastic. If you wanted extra fluffy towels or a down-filled winter coat, you needed to bring it with you. There was this feeling that Israel was still a place where, especially if you were coming from America, but from other English-speaking countries as well, you were sacrificing an easy life, a life of plenty, for the Zionist dream.
I clearly remember an article written in the early 2000’s by a former president of the Orthodox Union. In a nutshell, it said that those who could not make it in America were the ones who made Aliyah to be supported by their wealthier brethren back in the States. I’m not commenting on the article itself — whether the author was wrong or right is not the discussion here – rather: what is clear is that the Jewish brethren in Israel were less well off than the American diaspora Jews. Israel needed the diaspora’s help on every level.
Is the feeling still true today? Please understand, I have no intentions of questioning what Israel’s political relationship is with the diaspora. Rather, I am talking on the average Joe and Jane level. The people of the diaspora raised over a billion dollars to aid the soldiers and their families who were affected in one way or another by the events of October 7 and the continuing war. The many missions of solidarity from organizations, synagogues, and individuals – from people picking fruit, to the others who were bearing witness at the sites of the atrocities – these, I believe, were important and perhaps even vital steps. But what is interesting is that the door swings both ways. As many solidarity trips that came to Israel, Israelis came to visit us in our communities in the diaspora. As often as we asked them if they were okay, they asked us if we were okay. My children – the three who live in Israel – are more concerned for our well-being in London than their own. That includes the one who served in Gaza at the start of the war.
The relationship that, at the start, may have seemed one-sided – with the diaspora giving and Israel taking – is no more. But I would like to posit that it has never been a one-sided relationship. As much as the diaspora has given, Israel has given more and given it for longer. Israel, Jerusalem, has been in our prayers, in our hearts long before “Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. Our hearts have beaten to the rhythm of Israel, of our homeland, from time immemorial. While Torah is our spiritual center, Israel and Jerusalem are our physical center, our true north but located to our ‘east’. As long as we didn’t lose sight of the fact that as a People we have a spiritual home, we stayed bound together.
When that home was threatened, we bound together even tighter.
As I walked the streets of Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem this week, I saw cities that are thriving. Though Tel Aviv streets are currently a mess of construction (as they are in the process of installing the light rail system), the streets were clean. I could see no one sleeping rough, though we know that poverty does exist. There was a buzz and vibrancy as we walked from the center of Tel Aviv to the south. Hundreds of young people were dining al fresco, spilling out from bourgeois restaurants onto the sidewalk. Yes, there is a war, and at Dizengoff Circle, there is a poignant reminder in the form of an outdoor memorial & exhibit, almost every restaurant window displays the same ‘Bring Them Home’ yellow sticker. The war is never far from anyone’s consciousness, but they are also getting on with their lives.
As for the ‘things’ – those American mass consumer things we used to bring in our suitcases – from chocolate chips to stick deodorant, there doesn’t seem to be anything you cannot buy here.
Israel and the diaspora need each other for many reasons, from ‘things’ to funding, but I think, primarily, it is brotherhood. For a strong diaspora Jewry to exist, it needs a strong Israel and vice versa. One of the main precepts of the Torah, one that has explained that the bond we feel with our fellow Jew, is the maxim in this week’s Torah reading on the verse in Leviticus 26:37: כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה – that “all of Israel are guarantees for each other”. When one of us is hurt, the other feels his pain. Rabbi Sacks writes beautifully on this very topic in his essay on the Torah portion Behar.
What is the strength of the Jewish people? There truly are so many reasons we still exist, but I don’t think that any can top the idea that we are bound to each other: not as a people, but as a family.
Adapting to my mothers kitchen:
I have spent the last few days cooking with my mother in her kitchen, and it has been an eye-opening experience in terms of how I will start thinking about my recipe writing in the future. My mom is a great cook, but her true passion isn’t in the kitchen; it is her family and her art. So, although her kitchen is fully equipped with large and small appliances and is of a decent size for Jerusalem, it doesn’t have every single appliance and gadget that I have to hand while I cook. As a result, recipes that I think of as ‘easy’ or ‘quick’ became a little less easy and not nearly as quick to make in my mother’s kitchen. Yet, as I have always known and learned from both my mother and my grandmother, necessity is the mother of invention, and adaptability in the kitchen is an integral quality of a good cook.
We made my Savta’s date cookies without a rolling pin by covering a wine bottle in plastic wrap and using it to roll out the dough. The filling that I usually make in my high-powered food processor was made in my mom’s less powerful one, resulting in a chunkier texture, but it still tasted amazing.
We changed course halfway through preparing the chicken when I realized that prepping my Moroccan-style Apricot Chicken in a small kitchen that was already getting very crowded would be an inconvenience not just to me but to everyone around me. Instead, we opted for a much easier chicken recipe. It’s one I have yet to upload, though this Smoked Paprika Chicken would have been a great option as well.
The one recipe I didn’t need to adapt was the Sticky Toffee Loaf Cake. The weak food processor was perfect, and the aluminum foil cake tin we found in the supermarket worked brilliantly.
All in all, I learnt that I need to make my recipes, even more adaptable, everyone’s kitchens are different, and saying something is easy or quick is all relative. Food for thought!