No Lines

Sarah Weinman, a member of Harry Kay Leadership Institute’s Cohort 11, reflects on her experience in Israel.

“Whatever is done or not done in this country will cast its light or shadow upon our whole people.”

Chaim Weizmann spoke these words as part of his inaugural address on Tu B’shevat, 1949, when he took his seat as Israel’s first Prime Minister. Danielle Mor, VP of Israel and Global Philanthropy at the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI), echoed them today as our Cohort sat in JAFI’s historic conference room, where so many dreamers, fighters, and leaders of the nascent State once met.

What is done and what is not done. One theme of this trip has been the responsibility that comes with leadership. Israel’s early leaders recognized that we exercise this responsibility through our acts and our omissions; both have the power to create our future. In sharing the miraculous story of Israel’s birth as a nation, Danielle suggested that Golda Meir’s highly public hunger strike in solidarity with the Holocaust survivors detained at the port of La Spezia, Italy, in 1946 was as formative as the Mossad L’Aliyah Bet’s sub rosa efforts to help survivors seek refuge in this land without British authorization, bypassing legal channels. Her actions mattered to the character of the country, and so did their omissions.

Light and shadow. Weizmann suggests that how we conduct ourselves has moral implications, bringing light or shadow to the world. Weizmann was no doubt employing the term “shadow” in its most common metaphoric usage: that which is not good, a stain, a mar.

But shadow is also just a place that light hasn’t reached yet: a place of expectancy, a place of potential. After our tour of JAFI, we visited the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee headquarters in Jerusalem. In its courtyard, our guide (an Israeli native of Minnesota and sister of an HKLI alum!) showed us a giant sundial, pointing to the ever-moving story of light into shadow.

Inside the Joint’s beautiful building, we heard about the organization’s efforts to develop cutting-edge digital therapy tools to aid October 7th survivors and mourners, among others. These tools allow those who face sigma, isolation, and other barriers to service come out of the shadows, step into the light, and get the help they need.

We also visited the Joint’s archives, which houses documents from field offices around the world. The name of my father—who spent three of his boyhood years in DP camps before being sponsored by the Joint to come to the United States as a refugee in 1949—will be written on one of those thousands of records. That, too, is a story—just one of many—of the heroic acts that cast light into shadowy corners of the world, creating a path out of darkness.

This country and our whole people. We ended our day in Rehovot, putting the Minneapolis Jewish Federation’s partnership with that city into practice through volunteer work. [1] Half of our group created a mural with local teens. The other half gardened at the home of Yehezkel, an 84-year-old man who found safe harbor here after the 1941 Farhud massacre of Baghdad’s Jewish residents. These volunteer efforts were organized by 24-year-old Yuval, a survivor of the Nova massacre who went on to found the social-services organization Jesta. Clearing brambles out of Yehezkel’s garden alongside Yuval and my HKLI cohort, it was hard not to recognize how this country is and can be a place of shalem, of wholeness, for our diverse people. We were sweaty and all scratched up, but we worked together and we laughed a lot.

Our last major activity of the day was to sit in conversation with student recipients of the Federation-supported Emma Gilbert Scholarship. Remarking on cultural idiosyncrasies, one young man, Raz, remarked that in the United States, everything is very orderly, everything is done in lines. “In Israel, there are no lines.” He may have been talking about the difference between Starbucks and Aroma Coffee. But he could just as well have been talking about the mixed multitude of Am Israel. When righteous conduct works to bring our potential from shadow to light, there are no lines among our people.

[1] We were also fortunate to learn about the Saint Paul Jewish Federation’s partnership with Sovev Kinneret, though unfortunately were not able to visit that area on this trip.