The presents threw me. I wasn’t expecting to see those, not in a picture of the family table set for dinner on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. But there they were, beautifully wrapped in sparkling paper, an image that to me screamed December 24th.
The photograph had been sent by an Israeli friend: we’ll call her Y. We had been trading New Year’s greetings via WhatsApp, and she had attached that picture. Later, we talked about it. I came straight to the point: presents for Rosh Hashanah? What heresy is that?
None at all, Y said. Not in Israel at any rate. It’s become standard practice. And it’s not just at New Year that doting Israeli parents give their kids gifts. They do it for Pesach too. I explained that, as far as I was concerned, the only time Jews give each other presents is Chanukah. Ah, said Y, we don’t do that. Since Israelis are not surrounded by Christmas, they feel no need to emulate it with a December retail binge of their own.
We’ve had a few conversations like that, Y and me. We talked about how Israeli kids associate Yom Kippur with the chance to ride their bikes down wholly empty roads, even motorways. It’s not quite like that for Jews outside Israel, I said, citing the walk to shul past cafés that seem to be deliberately taunting those fasting with the scent of coffee and freshly baked bread. Stuff like that happens when Jews are a minority. Y liked the story of how my kids used to take public transport to their Jewish school in full Purim costume, and the funny looks my oldest son got when he climbed aboard the 106 bus dressed as Kim Jong-un. In Israel, no explanations would have been necessary.
Through these conversations, Y and I are coming to realise just how wide is the gap between Israel and the diaspora. More important than the different customs — presents on Rosh Hashanah, for heaven’s sake! — are the radically different perspectives.
During the 11-day Gaza conflict, we spoke often. Y was drained from the hours spent in bomb shelters and felt under attack; I described how, outside the country, Israel was seen, almost universally, as the attacker.
We’ve talked about the fact that while Israelis are hawkish and often hotly nationalistic, American Jews in particular are super-liberal. Sometimes there seem to be two Jewish peoples: one from Mars, the other from Venus.
Is it a problem if a chasm is opening up between Israel and the diaspora? And if it is, what might be done to bridge it? At this point, I feel compelled to tell you who Y is. She’s Yonit Levi, anchor of the nightly TV news on Israel’s Channel 12 and the most-watched journalist in the country.
Each week, she and I talk to each other on Unholy, a podcast we launched in January. In a nutshell, it’s two Jews on the news, as she and I talk through the latest craziness in Israel and the newest lunacy in the world beyond, before nominating a mensch of the week and noting the most egregious display of chutzpah in the previous seven days.
Sometimes we have guests — the likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, former Obama adviser David Axelrod and, earlier this month, Sacha Baron Cohen and Gal Gadot — but mainly it’s the two of us: one inside Israel, one in diaspora.
When we started, we thought there might be an appetite for such a programme among news junkies and the like. But something bigger has happened. A few weeks back, a listener approached me on the street to say, with some emotion, that the podcast had enabled him to speak to his brother again. It turns out that the two men — one in London, one in Israel — had grown so far apart on politics, especially on the subject of Israel, that they’d lost the ability to talk to each other.
Now they both listen to Unholy and talk through it afterwards. We had a note from an eminent New York editor telling us, with what sounded like relief, how glad he was “that this now exists”.
People seem to like that there is, at last, a channel open for regular dialogue between what is fast becoming two Jewish peoples. Of course, there have always been summer tours and gap years for Jewish teenagers, or fact-finding and solidarity “missions” for concerned Jewish adults.
But those have tended to be one-way traffic: they aim for diaspora Jews to learn from Israelis before going back home. On Unholy, the talk is in both directions. The Israelis who listen to it — and there are more of them than we ever expected — say it makes them feel more Jewish.
The diaspora Jews who listen to it say it makes them understand Israel as never before.
Look, it’s only a podcast. But you have to start somewhere. If we are going to prevent a divide in the Jewish people from becoming a split, the solution could not be more Jewish: we need to talk and talk and talk. And listen.
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian
