This past November, I was fortunate enough to participate in a delegation of 12 Jewish-American leaders to Kenya to observe Israeli humanitarian projects throughout the East African country. I knew almost nothing about Kenya prior to the weeklong trip and it opened my eyes to a whole other world.
Israel is involved in helping Kenya improve in the areas of agriculture, education, medicine, entrepreneurship, women's issues and more. Israel does this work through MASHAV, Israel's agency for international development. MASHAV is in the midst of a number of partnerships with Kenyan farms, schools and other institutions. Kenyan leaders have traveled to Israel and spent time learning about Israeli farming techniques, Israeli education institutes and more via MASHAV. The Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles arranged for me and the others in my delegation to visit Kenya and see these projects first-hand in the hope that we will see there is more to Israel than what is shown in the news everyday.
Los Angeles was chosen as a pilot for this program and the Israeli government is currently determining if it wants to do this trip again with Jewish-American leaders from another city. L.A. was chosen as the pilot because conventional wisdom is that L.A. has a lot of liberal Jews who might have a less than praising view of Israel in regards to the continued conflict with the Palestinian territories.
This might not have been what the organizers had in mind but I came away from the trip with a renewed appreciation for Judaism, as one of the more profound experiences of our visit was spending Friday night at Nairobi Hebrew Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue in the heart of Nairobi. Thousands of miles away from home, in a country I'd never in my life anticipated visiting, I stood in a pew alongside Valley Beth Shalom Rabbi Noah Farkas reciting the amidah underneath a panoply of stained-glass windows representing the twelve tribes of Israel. What was I doing here? How I did I get here? In the morning, over breakfast at the Silver Springs Hotel in Nairobi, I remarked to Rabbi Farkas that it's comforting how the words of the amidah are the same in Kenya as they are back home, that no matter where one is in the world, Judaism is Judaism.
While liberal groups in America might have a negative opinion of Israel due to its continued entanglement in the Palestinian territories, and anti-Semitism in Europe is on the rise for the same reason, there are places in the world that do not care all that much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iranian nuclear deal, who President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated as his ambassador to Israel, et al. In Kenya I met Africans of Christian faith who gushed over the opportunities they had to travel to Israel as part of their respective institutions partnerships with MASHAV. I met an 18-year-old student at a secondary school in Kisumu, a city in Kenya, who spoke about how much he admired Israel's military expertise, which, perhaps unfortunately, he has learned about due to terrorist attacks that have occurred against Israeli-owned businesses in Kenya. This student, Joseph Kiage, who is shown in the presentation below, wants to study software development. Israel is a place he would love to visit one day. Just talking to me, he said, was amazing, as he'd never met a Jew before.
It was also pretty incredible for me to be talking with him.
There is more to Israel than the conflict. I knew this before I went on the trip and I know it even better now. Israel isn't perfect and it never will be, but it deserves some credit for the work it is doing through MASHAV, which is present in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Central Europe and the Middle East. It abides by the 'teach-a-man-to-fish' wisdom in that it enters into long-term, but, ultimately, temporary agreements with various places in the hope that it will equip the leaders of the respective institutions with the tools they need to succeed on their own.
Israel and Kenya have more in common than one might think: modern Israel is only 15 years older than modern Kenya, which was a British colony until 1963. Israel's embassy in Nairobi opened that same year and the two countries have had healthy diplomatic ties ever since, even during a period following the Yom Kippur War when then-official ties were severed due to pressure on Kenya from the Arab world. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who visited Kenya for the inauguration of the embassy in Nairobi while serving as foreign minister, said, “Like them [African nations], we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yield of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together and how to defend ourselves.”
People in my group traveling with me were teachers, writers, clergy, program developers and more. Everyone came into the experience with different hopes, ideas and expectations. I can only speak for myself when I say in addition to the abovementioned conclusions, I came away from my week in Kenya with a recharged excitement about working for a Jewish organization that is committed to influencing the world about the goings-on in Jewish Los Angeles and in Israel.
Aaron Keyak, a congregant at Kesher Israel, the downtown Orthodox synagogue reportedly topping the list for Kushner and Trump, is a Democratic operative who helped run an anti-Trump political action committee. He’s been telling whomever will listen that the new top Jewish power couple will of course be welcome at Kesher.
“You have to be able to enjoy herring and schnapps with your political opponents when they’re standing next to you at kiddush,” Keyak told JTA.
But after speaking with Keyak, I had some doubts. And on reflection, having been a Jewish congregant and parent in the D.C. area for 16 years — and also, admittedly, one with 16 years of experience gossiping with other Jewish congregants and parents in the area — I got to considering how Panglossian this gloss is.
No one wants politics inside the shul. But honestly, in D.C., considering how deeply embedded our political outlooks are in our belief system, who are we kidding?
I’ve heard of several instances where tensions over national politics have reached the complaining-to-the-Sunday-school-principal level. Seriously. (Consider: An adult whose weekday job involves advancing an ideology – or who is married to someone with that mission – spends hours each week exchanging thoughts with 5-year-olds about God and leading a meaningful existence. What could possibly go wrong?)
Here are some occasions where politics on Washington’s mean streets seeped into shuls and holiday celebrations, and vice versa.
* William Safire, the late columnist for The New York Times, in his memoir recalled his annoyance when his synagogue’s rabbi during the Nixon administration issued a call “not to let our country be divided and polarized by those who use the technique of alliteration.” Safire, then a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, helped write Vice President Spiro Agnew’s (in)famous speech excoriating the “effete” that included the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism.” (For this citation, thanks to Tevi Troy, the former deputy health secretary under George W. Bush, who writing in The Wall Street Journal reviewed the phenomenon of politics insinuating themselves into Shabbat and holiday homilies in 2011.)
* M.J. Rosenberg, a liberal Jewish activist, in 2006 recollected a disruption during Yom Kippur three years earlier, when the rabbi was delivering a pro-peace process sermon at his shul, Ohr Kodesh, in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Charles Krauthammer, a fellow congregant and the conservative Washington Post columnist, started yelling at the rabbi. “People tried to ‘shush’ him,” Rosenberg recalled. “It was, after all, the holiest day of the year. But Krauthammer kept howling until the rabbi apologized.”
* Joe Lieberman schepped nachas at his congregation, Kesher Israel, and among the wider Jewish community in 2000 when he became the first Jew to make a major national ticket — Al Gore picked Lieberman as his running mate on the Democratic ticket.
* Not so much nachas was schepped several years later, when much of the Jewish community soured on President George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion — and Lieberman remained one of its most assiduous defenders. “In my synagogues today, we might have Mark the doctor, Jim the journalist and Joe the senator,” Lieberman wrote in his 2011 contemplation of Shabbat, “The Gift of Rest,” before he retired as a senator from Connecticut. “In synagogue, Joe might complain to Mark of a pain in his knee, to which Mark complains to Joe about Joe’s vote on the Iraq war. And there can be feuds. Jim the journalist, who used to write very positively about Joe, has lately been writing some things about Joe that Joe thinks are unfair. Now instead of greeting each other with a hearty ‘Good Shabbos!’ when they pass on the stairs, Joe and Jim merely nod their hellos.”
* Ohev Shalom’s rabbi, Shmuel Herzfeld, was famously ejected earlier this year from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference for standing up during Trump’s address and decrying him as wicked. Thus Ohev Shalom is reportedly not on Kushner and Trump’s list. But Herzfeld is adored by his congregants for advancing reconciliation within the synagogue’s walls. That didn’t keep one of them, prominent lawyer Nat Lewin, from denouncing Herzfeld in the Orthodox press in 2008 for the rabbi’s public denunciation of labor practices at the AgriProcessors kosher slaughterer. Lewin, noting his membership at Ohev Shalom and crediting Herzfeld with “electrifying” the community, accused him of “joining the vigilantes” against the business. (Lewin led the defense team for AgriProcessor’s manager.)
* A year and a half ago, at the annual Sukkot reception at the vice president’s residence, a group of prominent Democrats were chatting when one lamented that he was not invited to Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer’s home for his Rosh Hashanah reception, until then a regular occurrence. Others in the group said they had the same regret. A round of cellphone calls later, it was clear that every Democrat in Congress who had said they would vote to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, which Dermer vigorously opposed, had not been invited. I’ve been told that some Democrats raised the issue with the embassy, and they were told that the emails were sent, but through a server that tended to deliver emails to spam folders.
Here’s the thing: That’s probably true. I recall at that time getting a frantic pre-party call from the embassy asking me to check my spam folder — and there was, indeed, an invitation there. The staffer explained that the embassy was not getting RSVPs and was calling invitees to assure them they were on the list. I did notice a dearth of Iran deal backers at the party that year — and I also noted they were back this year. But the impression, however unfair, lingers among Democrats that Dermer cut them out of what was supposed to be a friendly holiday affair.
That’s D.C. for you. And the political climate is only worse these days. So if Ivanka Trump wants some solace, forget shul. She’s probably better off shoe shopping.
