I Go to Shul on Kaplan Street

One of the main reasons why I decided to make Aliyah last summer was because I felt that my Jewish identity was in crisis in the United States.  

After college, I lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. My fondest memories of the neighborhood are walking past the iconic Chabad Headquarters on Kingston Avenue each Friday morning, seeing the rush of Hasidic families preparing for Shabbos. I cherish the many warm nights on my Crown Heights fire escape mainly because it gave me an idea of what it meant to be thoroughly and wholeheartedly Jewish in America, something all but missing in my childhood.  

Growing up in a reform community and synagogue, Judaism for me was less about faith and more about liberalism. Granted, I was Bar Mitzvah’d, and attended a Jewish summer camp, but when I was younger, I would have defined being Jewish as solely supporting the less fortunate and standing up for social justice. Because there was no foundation in anything particularly Jewish, by the time I was older, Jewish identity became a unique angle in my left-wing activism but provided nothing entirely interesting. 

 After Crown Heights, I lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and was excited to call home the once famed epicenter of American Jewish culture. At the turn of the century, Jewishness needed not only be expressed through faith, but also through playwriting, journalism, music, language and left-wing activism that did not jettison a sense of peoplehood. And yet while I called the Lower East Side my home, I came to find that only ghosts of this past remained. Jewish culture among the young, liberal New Yorkers felt solely marked by self-deprecating humor, kitschy bagels and lox, curly hair and, increasingly, by anti-Zionism.  

I began to feel stuck, believing that in order to honor my Jewish identity in America authentically, the only options available to me were to keep kosher and attend synagogue, adopt a neo-Bundist personality defined by opposition to the State of Israel, or to assimilate completely, to become no different culturally than the Christian living next door.  

So I came to Israel, honoring the hypothesis of the original Zionists: that Jewish nationalism could provide a “third way” between Orthodoxy and the evaporation of that which makes us different. In Israel, even a liberal, gay atheist can still be a fundamental part of the Jewish story. Simply by speaking Hebrew, living by the Hebrew calendar, sending their children to the army, and complaining that the makolet is closed on Saturdays, Israelis are undeniably tethered to their people and that which we have created, regardless of how much they may roll their eyes at such a sappy sentiment. I cherish this sense of meaning Israel has already provided me in my short six months as a citizen.  

And then came the moment when I thought it would all come crashing down. On the night of November 1st of this past year, Israel’s most right-wing and religious government in history was elected, and over the next few weeks, top minister positions were given to men who not only differed from me on policy preference, but also on the very purpose of the Jewish people, Zionism and Israel. If I wanted a rude awakening as to how different from American Jews many Israeli Jews understand their place in history, Itamar Ben-Gvir had certainly delivered. Immediately, there was talk in my circle of tattooed Tel Avivians of second passports, of ticking demographic time bombs, and of the profound disappointment in the Zionist project. Instead of sleeping that night, I wrestled over whether my romanticized “third way” had merely been an illusion. I grappled with whether the Jewish people were indeed destined for Halacha on one hand and subservient to a universalist void on the other.  

Yet despite what many said that night, Israelis, no strangers to existential struggles, did not panic and leave en masse. Instead, a new era has dawned, an era of mass demonstration and civil disobedience. Instead of burying our heads in the sand and giving in to those who tell us that we should just give up, that our state was unstable or even criminal to begin with, Israelis took to the streets with the flag in our hands and “Hatikvah,” our national anthem, on our lips.  

My first of these protests was the night Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in. Thousands of Israelis with rainbow flags gathered in Sarona Market, cheering on speeches by angry community activists who were transparently terrified of what lay in store. Hinting at what was to be later unleashed in the State of Tel Aviv, the protests spilled onto Kaplan Street, and without thinking, I joined in. While filming drag queens proudly brandishing the blue and white banner and men kissing in front of blocked traffic, I realized I had been crying.  

A week later, Likud minister Yariv Levin unveiled his plan for judicial “reform,” and immediately my first year as an Israeli shifted from furniture shopping and online dating to all-day, everyday consumption of news and opinions. I have since not missed a single demonstration in Tel Aviv, from the beginning of January when they were thirty-thousand strong to the end of March when two-hundred and fifty thousand are reported to be taking the street.  

I have since not missed a single demonstration in Tel Aviv, from the beginning of January when they were thirty-thousand strong to the end of March when two-hundred and fifty thousand are reported to be taking the street.

Each night, The Israeli Declaration of Independence is projected above the ocean of people, accompanied by the booming sound of Ben-Gurion’s voice. Each night, Herzl imagery is ubiquitous. Each night I pick up more Hebrew by concentrating on the words flowing from the stage. I get a rush of adrenaline every time I realize that I understand what is being said without thinking about it, or when I can join in on the chants and jeers around me and feel at one with the Jews united through our own language. Each night, after the inevitable break onto Ayalon Highway, impromptu hora circles form, friends sing and hug, and despite the seriousness of our cause, the ground shakes with palpable euphoria.  

Last night, while running under Yehudit Bridge with the flag waving behind me, something clicked. I have, for as long as I can remember, felt uncomfortable in religious spaces, because the powerful community feeling they provide is born from teachings to which I do not ascribe. And in the years before I came to Israel, I felt increasingly nervous in liberal spaces, where Jewish particularism was a quirk at best and a threat at worst. But on Kaplan there is a gathering of Jews, proud Jews, proud Zionists, electrifying the air with the intoxicating power of our shared beliefs, so powerful that I often cannot hide my emotions. The belief is in a Jewish and democratic state, a liberal, cosmopolitan society protecting and nourishing Jewish culture. That is The Promised Land and Mashiach wrapped in one for me, a conviction so strong that I can walk for seven hours on a Saturday night without any pain in my feet like an observant Jew can fast on Yom Kippur without so much as a temptation for a snack.  

I do not know what the outcome of the judicial legislation will be. But since moving to Israel, I am certain that the “third way” of Jewish identity is indeed alive and kicking, that the marches on Kaplan Street have served as a form of synagogue for me, and that the reaction to the impending threat to Israel’s democracy has made me feel, finally, like a Jew.

Blake Flayton is the New Media Director and Columnist for the Jewish Journal.