In the Galil

The Galil (Ga-LEEL) or Galilee is the northern portion of Israel. It is a vital source of Israel's food and water, and is the home of Israel's network of kibbutzim. It is also the place where much of Jewish history in the Land of Israel took place from the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. until the early 20th century, from the early rabbis of Yavneh in the 2nd-6th centuries, to the Masoretes of Tiberias from the 8th-11th centuries, to the kabbalists of Tzfat from the 15th-17th centuries, to the kibbutznikim of the early aliyah periods in the 19th century. In other words, the history of the Galil in this period is for all intents and purposes the history of Jews in the Land of Israel.

After a brief detour to the Golan to see the strategic importance of this territory captured from Syria in 1967, we headed to Tzfat in the Upper Galilee. Tzfat is one of the four traditional holy cities in Israel (along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias) and has been a center of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism since the 16th century. We visited one of the synagogues of the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria, who developed a new version of Kabbalah, and the synagogue of Rabbi Joseph Caro, codifier of the seminal book of Jewish law the Shulchan Aruch. On our way down into the valley we looked out over the fields where the mystics went out to greet Shabbat singing a brand new song of their own composition, Lechah Dodi.

In the afternoon we went to Moshav Shorashim, headquarters of an organization called the Galilee Foundation for Value Education that is dedicated to dialogue and finding common ground between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs living in the Galil. Approximately 50% of the population of the Galil are Arabs (the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslim and a smaller part of whom are Christian and Druze) and they generally live in their own villages, separate from Israeli Jews who live in larger towns and cities. Unlike the Palestinians who live beyond the Green Line (the pre-1967 border) Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel. On paper they enjoy the same rights as any other Israelis (although except for the Druze they don't have mandatory military service) but in reality often live as second-class citizens, with less infrastructure, social services, and economic opportunity.

Rabbi Marc Rosenstein arranged a mifgash for us with Arab teens at Majad al-Krum, a Muslim village of roughly 15,000 people. We met at the community center and it was a somwhat chaotic and exuberant undertaking, but there were some really meaningful and important interactions with the teens that focused on personal plans for the future, politics, and feelings toward Jews and Israel. It was possible to see the future taking form in front of us, with changing attitudes toward family structures and dating, and girls who would never have gone to university a generation before planning to go to school and become professionals. We heard from teens who supported Hezbollah and teens who had close Jewish friends, from teens who were planning on staying in their village and teens who wanted to travel and live abroad. The take-home message was that there were as many different views and opnions as there were kids. And so once again we learned that the only generalization about Israel is that it's impossible to generalize; that the situation is varied and complex and the only way forward is to get to know people as individuals, do the hard work of building relationships one-on-one, and moving ahead together.