Written by Peter Luck
During our recent Shabbaton to Tel Aviv, our Nachshon cohort had the opportunity to learn from variety of Jewish community leaders that span the spectrum of Judaism in Israel. The first stop we made was in the religious community of B'nai Brak. There, our cohort was led on a street tour of the community until we arrived at the home of a family who offered to host us for refreshments and discussion. As we gathered around their kitchen table, many of us began compulsively comparing our social structures and lifestyles with that of our hosts. As our discussion with a Bnai Brak community leader began, many of these silent observations and judgments found their voice. Seeing as the religious make-up of cohort members is exclusively Reform or Conservative, many of us had limited or no prior experience interacting with members of the Haredi community.
The discussion that ensued was relatively challenging for many of us. We learned about many aspects of life in Bnai Brak, ranging from education standards to love to politics to Jewish identity, and everything in between. For me, it was personally challenging to learn about the educational content in Bnai Brak schools. More specifically, it was challenging to hear that school administrations actively protect students from learning about the theories of evolution and the Big Bang. My initial reaction was to characterize this as active ignorance. My Liberal American Jewish upbringing taught me to neither outright reject nor accept any teaching, but rather to grapple with it and that from that mental struggle, a more thorough knowledge would arise. For this reason and more, the notion of a Jewish community outright evading a mentally, emotionally, and spiritually challenging teaching was perplexing. But within Bnai Brak, this choice in education is thought of rather as active preservation than active ignorance. A preservation of a culture, a social structure, and a paradigm of thought. My discomfort stemmed from trying to reconcile the dynamic Judaism I embraced at home with the seemingly static Judaism I observed abroad in Bnai Brak. Despite observing these rather profound differences in interpretations of Judaism, the cohort searched for the commonalities that we as Jews shared with the Jews of Bnai Brak. And this search for commonalities is not limited to the Jews of Bnai Brak, but to the entire span of Jews throughout Israel. The question of 'What links me and you?' is carried by each of us Nachshon Fellows during our adventures here in Israel, and I know I look forward to struggling with that question wherever I go.
