Rabbi Allen Bennett returned from his trip to Israel “more depressed than I have ever been.”
One of four local rabbis who participated in a recent weeklong mission, Bennett, the spiritual leader of Alameda’s Temple Israel, said, “It’s a terrible time, it’s a terrible situation. If we ever thought we were paranoid, we’re not, because they are out to get us.”
Of the four, Bennett offered the bleakest assessment of how Israel and its people are coping with the ongoing crisis.
The trip, sponsored by ARZA/World Union, was aimed to demonstrate support for Israel and included stops at Progressive congregations and some firsthand views of how ordinary citizens are dealing with the violence and economic troubles.
A total of 41 Reform rabbis from the United States and Canada participated in the mission, including Rabbi Charles Briskin of Los Altos Hills’ Congregation Beth Am and Rabbi Andrea Berlin and Rabbi Steven Chester of Oakland’s Temple Sinai.
In a recent sermon delivered to congregants, Bennett described one discouraging encounter after another during the visit, which ended Nov. 1.
Bennett said he experienced growing despair after meeting with Knesset members, visiting the scene of last Passover’s suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya and talking with the families of kidnapped Israelis. The trip also included stops at the West Bank settlement of Ariel and to the violence-wracked city of Hadera.
Chanting Kaddish in the lobby of the Park Hotel, “The sadness seemed overwhelming and insurmountable,” Bennett told his congregants. At the same time, he urged them to support Israel now more than ever.
“Together we must rise to the challenge facing our people,” he said in his sermon. “It is our only hope.”
In contrast was the impression of Chester, who compared the visit to his two previous trips in August 2001 and last June.
While the outward situation hasn’t changed much, Chester said ordinary Israelis seemed to be adjusting to living with the intifada. “I didn’t find the same malaise,” Chester noted. “The people just don’t seem to be as depressed. There seems to be, in spite of the situation, a sense of normalcy and pattern to their lives.”
As an example, Chester said when he visited with some of his wife’s relatives in Tel Aviv, they described their recent decision to let their three children take a weekend trip. “My children have to live normal lives,” Chester quoted one of the relatives as saying.
“People are coping with the situation in a different way than they were before, emotionally,” he said.
Perhaps an even more upbeat assessment came from fellow rabbi Berlin.
“This time it was as if I was in a different country,” said Berlin, who had last visited Israel in March. “It was lighter and easier. The situation has not changed dramatically, but people’s ability to adjust to the situation has changed.”
She observed people dining in restaurants and shopping at malls. People “were smiling, laughing,” she said. She compared that outlook to her trip in March when “you looked into people’s faces…and you just wanted to cry.”
In another example of resilience, Berlin pointed to the reaction in the Knesset building when politicians learned that the unity government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had collapsed.
She noted “how very Israeli everyone was about it.” The group’s speaker mentioned, “Oh yeah, the government fell” and went along with the lecture, she said.
For Briskin, the Israel trip was his first since 1997, when he was a rabbinic student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew Union College.
In sharp contrast to Berlin’s views of bustling shopping centers, Briskin said he was alarmed by the desertion he witnessed when he stopped by Old Jaffa. “At 6 o’clock, it was dead,” he observed of the district filled with boutiques and galleries. “I don’t think we saw more than a dozen people walking around.”
Nonetheless, there were some positive signs, chiefly the growth he observed at Progressive congregations that “were in their nascent stages” when he last saw them.
After meeting with social workers and doctors in Hadera who regularly respond to terror attacks, Briskin said, “there’s a lot of resolve and determination and strong-willed people.
“It certainly is a testament to their will and resolve to keep living,” Briskin said. “To go to work. To talk on cell phones. Argue politics. All kinds of things all in the face of this terror.”