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October 6, 2000/7 Tishri 5761, Vol. 53, No.2
Path takes rabbi, professor to 'return home' to Jerusalem
BARRY COHEN
Community Editor
A view of Jerusalem's Hebrew Union College, located just outside the walls of the Old City.
Photo courtesy of Moshe Safdie and Associates Inc. |
Ben Hollander was not a likely candidate to become a rabbi, make aliyah and raise a family in Jerusalem.
Instead, he envisioned a career teaching literature in the United States, tangentially connected to Judaism at best.
In the 1950s, Hollander attended Bucknell University, alma mater of Philip Roth, hardly the model of a committed, forward-thinking, passionate Jew.
"Many of those scenarios of people running away from their Judaism, or pretty much mixed up with their Judaism - that was the environment at Bucknell," says Hollander.
After earning a master's degree in 1960 at New York University, he pursued a doctorate. He had to select either taking Spanish or Hebrew for his language requirement.
"I chose Spanish, assuming I would have a use for that one day. That's how far I was away from Judaism."
But his life changed when he visited Israel as a youth counselor in the early 1960s. He experienced pre-Six Day War Jerusalem and studied with Nahama Leibowitz, educator and bibical scholar par excellence who raised a generation of Israeli Torah teachers.
"For the first time, I felt like I was home. ... All those things that we try to teach our children about Israel. ... You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to feel it. ... For the first time in my life, I felt like I was part of a people."
During this trip he met his wife, Judy. Like Hollander, she was from the United States, specifically Bronx, N.Y.
"I had to go 10,000 miles away to meet the girl who lived around the corner," he says.
The Hollanders lived in a part of town where Moroccans, Algerians, Persians and Holocaust survivors were his neighbors, and "everybody had a story to tell."
From Leibowitz he learned the literary richness of the biblical text.
"With all due respect to ... Melville or Hawthorne, biblical literature is a whole way of life," he explains.
Hollander says the jump from teaching literature to biblical literature was not a large one.
At that time, in order to study Judaism on a serious level, he had limited choices. The best alternative was going to rabbinical school. As a student in the Conservative Jewish rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary, he returned to Jerusalem the same year as the Six Day War.
"You knew this experience was never going to leave you."
Hollander explains how one of his classmates received a telegram from her parents: "Situation looks serious - better come home."
She replied: "Situation is serious - I am home."
Hollander says her sentiment reflected the entire class.
In 1968, Ben Hollander, one-time Ph.D. candidate, became Rabbi Ben Hollander; he made aliyah in 1972.
In the following years, Hollander taught full-time at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in addition to various Conservative and Orthodox schools and yeshivas.
He and Judy have four children, a daughter and three sons. Like the four children of the Haggadah, who have gone separate directions, says Hollander, his four children represent different expressions of Israeli Judaism.
His oldest child, Elana, grew up in the B'nai Akiva movement to become a modern pioneer. She currently lives in a development town outside Beer Sheva.
His oldest son Elie, adopted an Ultra-Orthodox yeshiva lifestyle and is living a strictly religious life.
His two other sons Dvir and Netanel, feel more at home in a liberal environment, they say. They learned about the unique aspects of Jerusalem and Israel through Camp Ramah, a system of Conservative summer camps in North America, and through the National Federation of Temple Youth, the Reform Movement's youth program.
In July, vandals targeted Hebrew Union College, smashing windows and spray painting graffiti.
Hollander condemned the action and says such violence seldom occurs.
"There is no doubt about it that the vast majority of people want Zionism to work," he says.
The key, says Hollander, is to foster a society where "people ... are serious in their approach to Judaism and Zionism, and they are enlightened and tolerant, and they create a reality where they can be religious in a Zionist setting, in a modern democratic state."
He agrees in principle with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's efforts to bring Israel into the 21st century with modern, democratic and Jewish values.
The problem, however, is Barak's timing.
"I think though at this point where there's such instability, and he's doing it under the pressure of losing power, it doesn't bode well."
Without the right coalition partners, and in the midst of the peace process, Barak's timing could be better, Hollander says.
One of the best outcomes of the latest rounds of peace negotiations, he says, is that the two sides are now confronting issues that used to be taboo: territorial compromise, a Palestinian state and compromise on Jerusalem.
Hollander says another principle of Zionism is the hope to reach a compatible relationship with Israel's neighbors.
"The Palestinians are most important because they live among us. ... I can't think of them as my enemy, and I know that the majority of them, like the majority of us, want to get this horrible conflict behind us and want to get on with our lives."
Hollander explains that through former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin's efforts, the peace process began on the eve of Rosh Hashana with a handshake on the White House lawn seven years ago.
He is hopeful that this year's High Holiday season the Israelis and the Palestinians will be able to perform "teshuva," turning toward each other, turning toward a true and lasting peace.
Rabbi Ben Hollander was interviewed before the latest violence broke out in Israel and in the Palestinian-controlled territories.
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