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Havdalah poignantly reminds us that Jewish life demands creating community around sacred space and time.
Courtesy of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
largest Jewish humanitarian aid organization. During the course of my fellowship, I worked on leadership training programs for young Jewish professionals in Eastern Europe and community development initiatives in the newly emerging Jewish communities of Asia. For young Jewish adults in the Balkans, who we met on social and weekend retreats, havdalah declares the inevitable end of the precious few days they have each year to feel part of something greater than themselves. The Jewish communities of the former Yugoslavia have survived the Holocaust, outlasted Communist dictators, and weathered the storms of ethnic violence. But their strength is surely not in numbers. As Simone Tiano, a young Jewish woman from Thessalonica, Greece, points out, “Coming from a small community like mine means that I don’t have many opportunities to share Judaism with others.” And so Tiano, like so many of her friends, comes to regional events like those sponsored by the JDC to learn about Jewish identity and peoplehood and celebrate Jewish life together. Similarly in Shanghai—where Jews once fled to escape the Nazis—on each Saturday night, a motley crew of Israeli diamond dealers, Hasidic mashgichim (kosher food supervisors), Russian computer programmers, American hedge fund managers, and French clothing manufacturers join hands to conclude the Jewish day of rest. For these traveling businessmen and even permanent residents of China, havdalah means an end to the protective bubble to which they safely retreat each week. “We are all strangers in a strange land,” says Ran Fridman, a RussianAmerican entrepreneur, who after years of travel through Southeast Asia now calls Shanghai his permanent home. Fridman and his friends of various walks of Jewish life—Sephardim, Ashkenazim, devoutly religious, and even the secular—join together each week to create community. And it’s no different in the hilly countryside of Western
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Ukraine, where youth gather to talk about the future of Jewish life there. Almost 30 Ukrainian Jewish students are selected each year to come to Metsudah, JDC’s seminal young leadership program in the Ukraine, to learn about group dynamics and hone their leadership skills, while developing an independent project to enhance Jewish life in their local communities. For the almost too-eager social entrepreneurs, these treasured moments are when they are treated with the “dignity and honor that they can be agents for change in this world and make a difference,” explains Amit Segal, the Israeli facilitator who guides this year’s cohort. On Saturday night, the soft whisper of the Metsudah students’ voices, chanting a popular havdalah tune, gracefully protest tomorrow’s impending departure. No one wants to leave. Because here, among their Jewish friends, they can leave behind their troubles at home—a dying grandmother, the chronically unemployed parent, the sister with acute autism, and intimidation and anti-Semitism at school. Yes, perhaps struggles we might have seen closer to home, but all the more dire in a country like the Ukraine with a deficient social welfare system, corruption, and a brutal history of Jewish oppression and denial. And for us wandering Jews, havdalah always means saying goodbye, each and every time, to the new friends we made. At the beginning of each encounter, we were a bunch of utter strangers, but by the end we were a family, sharing a common identity and purpose. Hamavdil bein kodesh l’chol, bein or l’choshekh, bein Yisrael l’amim. “[Blessed be the one] who separates between sacred and profane, between light and darkness, between the Jewish people and the nations of the world,” reads the havdalah prayer. The weekly Shabbat experience helps to positively construct a Jewish identity that alleviates loneliness. It enables the creation of a distinct community that shares in the desire to overcome the alienation and adversities of social life. And so havdalah signals the disbanding of this community protected by hallowed time, created out of the perhaps sheer flimsiness of the notion that “we are all Jews” but strengthened in the end by the passionate commitment to a shared heritage and vigorous sense of a collective future. Surely, this does not negate the swelling issues that rightfully divide us. But it serves as a reminder that, in spite of those differences, no matter where we are, the internal and eternal calling of simply “being Jewish” can often be powerful enough to bring us together. PT Zev Nagel recently served as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Ralph I. Goldman Fellow in International Jewish Service. He and his wife, Na’amit, lived in overseas Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and the Former Soviet Union working on community development, Jewish identity, and leadership training programs.
issue fifteen 2011
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