Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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An Outsider Steps In: My First Week at CLAL

By Walter Ruby

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to speak at a conference in Israel attended mainly by religiously observant American Jewish academics. There I delivered a paper in which I grandly identified myself as a “tribune for the unaffiliated.”

I argued that I, as a lobster-eating, non-shul-going Jew who nevertheless views Jewishness as central to my being, might be better able than more traditional colleagues to convey to assimilated Jews the passion, joy and sheer juiciness of embracing one’s Jewishness. I also maintained that people like me are often better able than representatives of the sometimes preachy Jewish establishment to understand and empathize with the mindset of apathetic and uninvolved Jews. After all, I have certainly “been there, done that.”

“Tribune for the unaffiliated” seemed like a gloriously chutzpadik and deliciously subversive stance to take at the time. Little did I imagine that I would one day be joining CLAL, an organization which, in its open-mindedness and willingness to connect with assimilated Jews on the basis of mutual respect and listening, seems to me to be in considerable harmony with the personal vision I imparted at that conference. Indeed, I have been surprised and gratified that people at CLAL have responded positively to some of my ideas, even to the point of encouraging me to share them with the world under the organizational imprimatur in this magazine.

Yet now that I am actually writing this piece, I find myself beset by the sinking sensation that my bluff is being called. Indeed, for all of my posturing about being a serious Jewish thinker, do I really have enough to say about Jewish identity to credibly fill the prime-time slot I have been given at this intellectual feast of an organization?

My sense of unease has everything to do with a decided inferiority complex concerning my take on “spirituality,” the theme I was asked to explore in this article. What do I really know of Jewish spirituality, given that I grew up without a Jewish education or a bar mitzvah, and as an adult have never made even the feeblest attempt to tackle the Gemara (the Talmud) or kaballah? I mean, even Madonna has been studying the latter.

And do I really have much to share with my fellow unaffiliated Jews about embracing the pintele Yid (spark of Jewishness) in each of us when my own sense of Jewish connection has been informed by a sustained encounter with Israel that most assimilated North American Jews will never have? True, I grew up as a lonely Jewish kid in all-gentile suburbs of Pittsburgh and Chicago, but I also spent a life-transforming year in Rehovoth as a 12 year old, followed by a three-year-long return engagement in Haifa and Tel Aviv as a young adult. Then I followed up that experience with a subsequent career as a reporter for Israeli and Anglo-Jewish newspapers in New York and Moscow.

Sure, it is easy for me to say that being Jewish is fulfilling. Having been a so-called “Jewish journalist” for two decades gave me a laissez passer to witness summits and revolutions, stumble upon unlikely branches of the extended Jewish family in exotic places like India and Central Asia, and interview heavyweight landsmen from Shimon Peres, Natan Sharansky and Ariel Sharon to A.B.Yehoshua, Elie Wiesel, and I.B.Singer. What is not to like about that sort of Jewish connection? Yet only a handful of my fellow unaffiliated Jews will ever experience it.

So even though I have ascended to a seat at CLAL, don’t expect me to impart Torah mi Sinai anytime soon. Still, I retain enough chutzpah to believe I have something to offer the readers of Derekh CLAL and the wise men and women of CLAL itself. For the past six years, I have been holding a public dialogue with an African-American Muslim in venues around the Greater New York area and, more recently, have played a leading role in the creation of Encounter, an on-line community dedicated to communication and reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians. These experiences have immensely enriched my life, showing me the intellectual and, yes, spiritual turn-on that can be achieved by reaching across barricades to engage the “other” in mutually respectful dialogue.

Through Encounter (www.salam-shalom.net), I have made close friendships with several Palestinian-Americans, including one with whom I made a pilgrimage to our common homeland. Then, after an extended dialogue, I developed together with Aref Dajani, a Washington based statistician, a concept we call “Two States, One Common Land,” which calls for the creation of a commonly celebrated ethos of love for the whole Land of Israel/Palestine by both peoples. That idea seems a distant icon in the midst of the present bloodletting, yet it offers a model for reconciliation and joint spiritual uplift among grass roots Israelis and Palestinians in the years ahead.

I greatly respect and strongly endorse CLAL’s ongoing commitment to building bridges of love and understanding across the ideological chasm separating observant and secular Jews. We as a people are dangerously close to fragmenting into warring camps and losing the joy that comes from connecting with Jews from varying mindsets and discovering together the joyful ties that bind us together. Yet, as the Jewish community as a whole turns ever more inward, I fear that we are in the process of forgetting that we have a moral obligation to reach out to our non-Jewish brothers and sisters as avidly as we do to our Jewish ones. It is true, as our rabbis teach, that kol yisrael arevim zeh le zeh (all Jews are responsible for one another), but we happen to be as fully human as we are Jewish and, therefore, every bit as accountable to the 99 percent plus portion of the world’s population that is not Jewish.

It has taken me every one of my 50 years to get to the point where I feel that my joy in being Jewish and the embrace of my larger humanity are more or less in sync -- at least on a good day. Having spent the better part of a lifetime holding Jewish spirituality at arm’s length, I finally feel ready to plunge with relish into the opportunity for serious Jewish study that my position at CLAL affords me. Yet as grateful as I am for this chance to grow as a Jew, I intend to remain an outspoken advocate of Jews reaching out to their fellow humans. Yes, we should do so because of our moral imperative to tikkun olam, but let’s not forget that it’s a hell of a lot of fun as well. Indeed, in my life’s experience, there have been few things as relentlessly challenging, as frequently exasperating, yet ultimately as fulfilling and profoundly nachas-inducing as reaching across racial, religious and experiential chasms to turn a member of a supposed “enemy” tribe into a warm and trusted personal friend.

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