Zionism – From Under the Fig Tree

Ever since I began this blog a few years ago, I’ve developed the habit of squirreling away things -- a chance remark, a funny incident, an enlightening news article -- for future use. This week’s post, in honor of Tu B’shevat, the New Year of the trees or Jewish Arbor Day, draws on one of those finds: a piece in the New York Times about one orthodox Jewish community’s sensitivity to its fruit trees.

Inspired more by the dictates of halakha (Jewish law) than by the promptings of eco-consciousness, the residents of Borough Park, Brooklyn, it turns out, are reluctant to chop down the mulberry trees in their neighborhood lest they “tamper with God’s property.”

What makes this practice even more commendable is that space in Borough Park is in short supply. Once upon a time, way back in the 1920s, its verdant, leafy streets and capacious single-family homes drew thousands of upwardly mobile, middle class New York Jews. Far more heterogeneous than it is today, Borough Park afforded a congenial environment in which Conservative Judaism as well as Zionism took root.

That would change with the influx of frummer yidn, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, in the 1960s. Bearing large families -- demographers claim that Borough Park has the highest birthrate in the city -- they transformed the neighborhood’s composition as well as its infrastructure. A former byword for the good life, Borough Park is now renowned as a citadel -- and an unusually crowded one, at that -- of Orthodoxy.

Living cheek by jowl isn’t usually conducive to embracing Mother Nature, nor is traditional Judaism, which, historically, places more of an emphasis on internal rather than external matters. Under the circumstances, then, the concern displayed by contemporary Borough Park residents for their physical surroundings is to be applauded.

A few weekends ago, while a scholar-in-residence at Temple B’nai Shalom in Northern Virginia, I was privy to a fascinating discussion about the presence -- or absence -- of flags in the sanctuary.

Temple Chai Bimah — Bimah at Temple Chai, a Reform congregation in North Phoenix, Arizona. Flickr/Al_HikesAZ

For years, many American synagogues like this one had featured two flags on the podium or bimah: the Stars & Stripes and the blue & white or “Jewish flag,” which was first associated with the Zionist movement and then with the State of Israel.

Mute but powerful symbols of what historian Jonathan Sarna called the “cult of synthesis” that characterized American Jewish life well into the 1970s, (“The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 5, No. 1/2 Autumn 1998-Winter 1999, pp. 52-79) they once stood like sentinels, guarding the dual dimensions of American Jewry’s patrimony.

But somewhere along the line, the flags vanished altogether, as they had at Temple B’nai Shalom. What happened to them?, a couple of congregants, their memories jolted by our exchange about the visual identity of American Jewry, now wanted to know. Where did they go? And why?

“We still have them,” responded the congregation’s founder and longtime rabbi, Amy Perlin. “They’re in storage.” She gently explained that changing notions about the separation of church and state on the one hand, coupled with heightened concerns about the policies of the State of Israel, rendered them less and less attractive to those in the pews.

In other instances, near as I can tell, it wasn’t ideology so much as interior décor that prompted the removal of the two flags. As more and more congregations redesigned their sanctuaries and reconstituted the bimah to accommodate the needs of their handicapped members as well as a different, more intimate vision of community, the flags went the way of all things.

I’m not sure what any of this says about contemporary American Jewry, but it’s certainly worth contemplating as the Fourth of July swings into view.

Tag: Zionism

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Flag waving