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For a year and a half, from January 1980 to the fall of 1981 I was on leave from Reed College. After a few months of agricultural work in the fields of Kibbutz Degania Bet (during part of January, February, and April, it was time for a May day celebration (picture, right).
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You remember May First, don't you? The day to celebrate the world wide solidarity of working people? There were dances, a tractor parade, maidens carrying baskets of fruit and waving sheaths about, and all sorts of neo-Cananite kibbutz mythology. Apparently, at one moment on May 1, 1980, this is what I actually looked like. Most of the time on kibbutz I looked like a man in work clothes and boots picking grapefruits. Following our work in the fields, from about 4 to 8 or 9 in the morning, we learned Hebrew until noon. Then it was time for lunch and a snooze through the afternoon heat. It was a romantic time, in many ways. The nights were hot and humid, but the determined minds of a young man and woman could always find a place to hide. I remember well, to this day, my dear friend P., a lovely young professor of English literature from South Africa. And what of Amy Grant? As she and I learned Hebrew, we quickly turned to the exotic mysteries of the Jewish Bible. We shared the excitement of understanding it in the original language for the first time in our lives. Amy was my partner in first apprehension and first comprehension of the bible. But we both quickly learned that religious interests were not approved of on the adamantly secular kibbutz, so we kept our bible studies to ourselves. Then she learned of a woman I was seeing and disappeared suddenly, gone forever. Around me men and women far from home partied into the nights, had affairs with lovers not their spouses, and awoke at 4 every morning to pick grapefruits. Most of my memories from that time are very sweet. However I cannot forget that it was in 1980 that I encountered outside the kibbutz the stone rubble and collapsed and weed overgrown walls of what seemed to be a small Palestinian village, and heard an absurd story of how the former inhabitants had "fled." Sometimes one encounters a falsehood, and even though one cannot define it it can be tasted. We were living in a former battlefield, and almost on top of the homes of the former Palestinian occupants. I could almost feel those exiles watching me as I went for my regular jog past the stones of a small destroyed Palestinian village. The image of that rubble stuck with me and would open my mind, in time. ~ The picture of me with a longish beard above from the 1980-1981 academic year conveys another kind of truth. After six months on kibbutz, I traveled down the Jordan valley to Jerusalem, and after briefly considering the one year program at Hebrew University, I instead decided to study Jewish texts in a more traditional way in Jerusalem. In that year (1980-1981) my diaries are filled with ruminations on the relationship between science and religion, as paths to knowledge, and a deep analysis of whether I was, or could become, a Jew, and what on earth it would mean to do that. I took seriously the Conservative Jewish idea about the communal flexibility of traditional law ("halacha") as an evolving body of thought that was compatible with modern life. Perhaps more importantly, I knew that there was some core truth of "modernity" or "democracy" or "science" that I could never surrender. If I was, a convert, I think I can say fairly about myself that I was a very cautious and thoughtful one - not wide eyed, and eager to avoid at all costs "the enthusiasm of the convert." However, the bottom line is that during this period I did choose to live my life as a Jew. Reflecting back on that time now, I no longer believe in any decision that commits a person for an entire lifetime, whether in marriage, or in religion, in any other matter. Serious commitments should recognize their own necessary provisionality. Whether we recognize it at the time or not "real" commitments are always provisional. They must be continually renewed over time or else they lose meaning. In spiritual terms Jewish life (like any social or spiritual path) is something you have to choose every day. It doesn't matter much to me who your parents were, or whether you were born a Jew or choose a Jewish way of life. In the end, the only thing that really matters is what you choose and how you choose to live, not where you begin. Marriage is like that too - the fact that you got married once long ago doesn't amount to much, relative to the fact that you do, or do not, continue to renew the commitment year after year, and day after day.
Above: Jerusalem from Neve Schechter/Midreshet Yerushalayim
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