Three weeks ago today, the day of the long awaited UEFA qualifier football match between England and Israel, my loyalty to my country was challenged quite severely. As soon as I say those words, it’s obvious why: England versus Israel – which one is ‘my country’? In the past, my answer would have been simple. The English writer, Virginia Woolf, who was, incidentally, married to a Jew, Leonard Woolf, put it so well: ‘As a woman I have no country, as a woman my country is the whole world.’

For years I used to keep a post-card with that quotation printed on it, pinned up on a notice board in my study. And I could just have easily displayed the words, ‘As a Jew, I have no country, as a Jew my country is the whole world.’ But then with the first Lebanon War in 1982, my sense of identity was challenged, and to cut a very long story short, by the autumn of 1983 I was making a choice between, going on Aliyah to Israel, or, studying for the Rabbinate. I chose the latter – and ‘the rest’, as they say, ‘is history’.

The truth is that as a Jew, with a father, who was a heavily-accented Viennese refugee, and a mother, whose parents came from the Russian Pale, and whose first language was Yiddish, I never felt very English. Of course, it’s never quite as simple as that. Unlike her parents, my mother also spoke the ‘Queen’s English’, and could recite huge chunks of Shakespeare off by heart. But nevertheless, my parents did not seem to me to act at all like English people – and when I was a child, they were both, forever embarrassing me in public with their decidedly un-English ways. If anything, I was definitely more English – more reserved, more self-conscious – than they were.

Why am I telling you this? To try and explain that although I was born in England, it is not simply ‘my country’. Needless to say, I’m not the only Jew who feels like this. Walking on the Tel Aviv sea-front on the afternoon of the match, to catch the atmosphere, it was easy to spy the Jewish English fans in their carefully designed ‘England – Israel’ T- shirts, vertically divided exactly down the middle! Whose anthem did they sing? England’s? Israel’s? Both? And, who did they cheer when the match got under way, I wonder? Not that the rather dull game, which produced a disappointing nil-nil draw gave anyone much to cheer about.

I have to admit that I certainly failed the infamous Norman Tebbit ‘cricket test’… But supporting Israel rather than England in that match was not so much for me about my ‘national’ allegiance as my sense that my being is ‘Jewish’ rather than ‘English’.

But what does that really mean? The fascinating thing about being in Israel is that there are so many very different types of Jewish people, with different roots, cultures, ethnicities, ways of expressing their Jewishness, living such very different lives. It is impossible to give a simple description of a Jew in the context of the complex State of Israel. And yet with all that incredible diversity, even in one single diverse place, like Tel Aviv, whether you are enjoying coffee and cake in a European-style café on Basel Square, or eating a hearty Yemenite kosher meat soup in a tiny restaurant behind the city’s Carmel market, or messily devouring a falafel in pitta from a stand on Dizengoff street, the Jewish beat is essentially the same: swift, alert, direct. The way Jewish Israelis speak, whoever they are, whatever they profess, wherever they come from, literally, says it all. It’s impossible to sit for more than five minutes anywhere and not hear people exclaiming, gesticulating, questioning: Mah? Rak rega! Mah pitom! Lamah lo? Kol b’seder. What? Wait a moment! No way! Why not? Everything’s OK.

In Israel you get a sense of a particular kind of perpetually engaged Jewish energy, which only emerges fully when large numbers of very different kinds of Jewish people inhabit the same place. But, of course, it’s not as simple as that. What is the driving force behind all that energy? Over three thousand years of history as a people – both in that particular place and in different places across the globe – converging on one small strip of land.

To understand what that means we only have to think about where we are now in terms of the Jewish calendar. Within a period of three weeks, the Jewish people commemorate Pesach, Yom Ha-Shoah and Yom Ha-Atzma’ut: The festival of the liberation of our ancestors from slavery in Egypt, the memorial of the Holocaust, and the anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel – all in just three weeks. And only a month after the commemoration of these cataclysmic events, we celebrate the festival of Shavuot, recalling our ancestors’ experience of meeting the Eternal One in the wilderness of Sinai: In other words, all the most significant milestones in thirty three hundred years of Jewish history – compressed into seven weeks.

As Jews living in the Diaspora, being Jewish is mostly a matter of marking sacred moments in time. Imagine what it’s like to be in Israel, to live as a Jew with the added dimension of space, so that the Exodus, the Shoah, the establishment of the modern State of Israel, and the Revelation at Sinai, are not just recalled at their set times each year, but are also part of the fabric of the place: All these historical moments, either already part of the geography, or represented by buildings and monuments built into the landscape – like the shells of military vehicles on the side of the road to Jerusalem, commemorating the 1948 war. But it’s not just the convergence of time-space that creates a particular kind of energy fuelling Jews in Israel. It’s the people themselves; their personal stories, their family stories – of persecution, loss, exodus, survival, redemption, revelation – all concentrated now in that one land.

The energy fuelling Jewish Israelis; I’m making it sound very combustible – and indeed it is: quite explosive, even – with the obvious consequences. In this week’s Torah portion, Sh’mini, after relating the details of what happened on the eighth and final day of the ceremony for the induction of Aaron and his sons as priests, the Torah turns to a tragic – and shocking – tale. In their enthusiasm to serve God, Aaron’s eldest sons, Nadav and Avihu, offer what the text describes, at Leviticus chapter 10, as ‘strange fire’ – eish zarah – an offering that has not been prescribed, and they are, quite literally burnt alive for their efforts – although, interestingly, their priestly garments remain intact (10:5). The whole episode is conveyed bluntly in just two verses (10:1-2):

Now Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron each took his fire-pan; and they put fire in them, and laid incense on it, and offered strange fire before the Eternal One, which God had not commanded them. / And a fire went out from before the Eternal One and consumed them; and they died before the Eternal One.

No sooner have the priests been inducted into their new role as the religious leadership of the people then the High Priest receives the cruellest lesson conceivable about the limits of his priestly powers. Perhaps, the English expression about the dire consequences of ‘playing with fire’, derives from this story. Of course it would be superficial – and, indeed, irresponsible – to draw a simple parallel between Nadav and Avihu’s deadly experiment, and the combustible energy fuelling Jewish Israelis. But there is something in the dreadful tale that is relevant for Israel today: By virtue of the long history of the defamation and persecution of the Jewish people – including, not least, the recent history of the Shoah – the Jewish State established just three years after the defeat of Nazism, became the container of a highly explosive inheritance. And that is without adding the Palestinian claim to the same piece of land, and the hostility of Israel’s Arab neighbours, and the genocidal threat posed by a nuclear Iran, to the already highly inflammable concoction; once these ingredients are included, the strangest of ‘strange fire’ continually threatens to engulf the nation. No wonder Jewish Israelis are so highly charged. No wonder it is so difficult for reason and good sense to prevail.

But it’s not just down to the Jewish inhabitants of Israel. They are not the only ones burdened with a combustible inheritance. It’s very different, of course, but the Palestinians, too, bear the weight, both of their present circumstances, and of their own history of dispossession and marginalisation. The two peoples not only speak different languages – Hebrew and Arabic respectively – but they also have utterly different narratives of the past, and about the land they both lay claim to. It’s as if they don’t just inhabit different parts of the same small, contested piece of land, but separate universes.

No wonder only a tiny minority of people on both sides are prepared to acknowledge the other’s experience. And yet, opinion polls have revealed that around 60% of both Israelis and Palestinians support a two-state solution. How is this? Perhaps after decades of conflict, the great majority among both peoples have begun to realise that the other people is not going to disappear – so the next best option is to accept a part of the land, with the other people safely installed, behind a strong border fence, somewhere else.

A political solution to the conflict, involving the establishment of the State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel, will, of course, be a positive outcome of the current impasse, but it is only a first step. In the long term, unless they are going to remain fortress nations, hermeneutically sealed and cut off from one another, they will need to become co-operative neighbours. But will the nations of the Middle East facilitate the integration of Israel and Palestine into their midst, or will the Islamicist fanatics win the day, and succeed in banishing both Jews – and Christians – from the region (including Palestinian Christians)? Those who tend to ‘think positively’ – and I’m one of them – would argue that the creation of Palestine is the key, and that militant Islam will lose its chief cause if an independent Palestinian State comes into being. But who knows? And there is no doubt that the heavy burden, not only of their own pasts, but also of the continuing excruciating conflict, makes it extremely hard for most Palestinians and Israelis to think positively.

In the face of the on-going reality of life for Israelis and Palestinians, it seems facile to talk about football – but another aspect of that UEFA qualifier seems relevant here. Why is Israel competing in a European football tournament? Merely citing the precedent of the Eurovision Song Contest only serves to reinforce the question. Certainly, at least 50% of Israelis are immigrants from Europe – or the children and grandchildren of immigrants. But, equally, at least 50% are not. We will know that life in the Middle East has changed significantly when, one day, the football teams of Palestine and Israel both compete in a contest of Middle Eastern nations. Bimheirah b’yameinu – Speedily in our own day. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue, Adat Shalom Verei’ut, 14^th April 2007 – 26^th Nisan 5767

© Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah