Dear Gap Year Parents and Educators: About Chevron

Dear Gap Year Parents and Educators,

Your kids are probably making plans for shabbat next week already. Most weeks, I’m sure you tell them to get plans together sooner, and not land on someone at the last minute. But the week after this one is special, and they might be getting their plans together now. 

I’m asking you, please, ask them to reconsider spending Shabbat in Chevron.

Thousands of people will go to Chevron the shabbat after next for Shabbat Chayey Sarah, which describes the purchase of the field of Machpelah in Hebron by Avraham. Having been there myself during my gap year, I won’t tell you it’s not something to see. It’s honestly amazing to see the extent to which the Hebron Jewish Community opens their homes to the various visitors, giving tours, meals, hosting many an Oneg Shabbat, and just chatting with people as shabbat goes on.

And of course, people feel a connection to being in Chevron on that Shabbat because it’s watching the Parsha come alive, seeing sites and feeling connected to the stories.

In other words, there are so many reasons why your kids will want to be there that Shabbat.

And here’s the thing. From a security perspective, some of you might be worried, but it’s actually the most secure time to visit Chevron, because of the heightened presence of military personnel for the sake of this Shabbat.

So that’s not why your kids shouldn’t be in Chevron on Shabbat, November 15. But I think there is another reason.

Your kids are in their gap years (especially those at Yeshivot and Midrashot) to learn more about their Jewish heritage, explore our seminal texts, and experience realities on the ground in our homeland. None of this stands in contradiction to experiencing a shabbat in a place associated with our tradition. But there is of course the part of learning which is also learned outside of Midrasha and Yeshiva, which you I am sure have tried to give them through years of teaching and educating at home. And that is being a Mentsch. This shabbat makes that one value incredibly hard to uphold.

Allow me a minute, because I know people will get defensive. When I was younger, I used this platform to talk about other events as problematic, as Chilul Hashem. I believe this event also contains many moments, experiences, and examples of Chilul Hashem, even if the whole event, as I’ve tried to impress here, is an understandable want.

In order to facilitate this event, a lot of people are inconvenienced, at the least. And I am only asking for you to ask your kids to consider that inconvenience, and how that looks.

As a gap year educator, I have met many students who have gotten used to a single idea, and have not been introduced to enough friction. I make it my business to cause students to question, and it’s often a shock to me how sure some students are of their understandings of reality as they perceive it. I was a student like them, and I know how that surety feels.

One night when I was in Shechem, worshipping at the Tomb of Joseph, around 2 AM, as such journeys are undertaken, with an army escort, I saw a few apartment lights on in one of the buildings nearby. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was in Shechem, worshipping at this holy site, I was also standing in a residential area of Nablus, where people happen to live adjacent to an old tomb. The story they live is very different than my own, and my story was keeping these people up at 2 AM, because of all the noise we were making, singing and dancing and commemorating the memory of sainted Joseph. Upon that moment, I realized I was lucky to have visited this shrine, but I could no longer justify the lack of manners I was showing by allowing my personal interest and worship to disturb their night’s sleep, something which the Talmud tells us we can never repay.

I don’t expect you to introduce your kids to the full complexity of the general Palestinian-Israeli reality. While I think it’s useful for them to be brought to terms with these complexities before a campus decides to educate them on the subject, it’s not necessarily something people can learn in a year. It took me years of living here to even begin to start understanding how much of a challenge this reality poses to certain emotions, considerations, and moral undertakings. I’m no smarter than you are.

But with all that said, I do ask that you help your kids understand that next Shabbat might not be the time for a visit to Chevron, when things so quickly and easily become insensitive and honestly unnecessary. The year I went, I was, against any better judgment, literally swept into a crowd of guys jumping up and down, chanting, “Baruch Goldstein, we love you” in the Kasbah. Mind you, I hadn’t even learned about who Baruch Goldstein ימ״ש was, I thought he was just one of their Yeshiva buddies. And without thinking about it, I had joined into a group of guys yelling praise of a mass murderer. I’m not saying that happens to everyone. But it happened to me. And the guilt I feel for that makes me hungry to fix something.

I know that the incidents of aggression, violence, cursing, swearing, yelling, chanting, and whatever else gets directed at Palestinian civilians will get dismissed by many as a minority phenomenon (I will say that in halakha we also consider that any constant minority is as a majority; in this understanding, even small events disqualify a whole thing, if they are consistently part of it, but that is not the conversation here). That is not the argument I’m making here. This is a matter of basic obligation to other humans. 

If your kids are sure they want to go, fine, and it’s your choice as parents and educators to tell them or to not tell them what you think of this choice (and you might think it’s the right one!). But I ask that a degree of complexity be introduced, an extra encouragement for a bit of Mentschlichkeit, and a bit of consideration for folks for whom it’s just another Saturday, but which comes with inconveniences and limitations, and once in a while, at the very least unpleasant (and at the worst, violent) interactions.

I’m not a parent; I am an educator, but that’s not the hat I’m wearing now. I’m wearing the hat of a guy who unwittingly took place in behavior with which I now feel severely uncomfortable.

There will be other times to visit Chevron. My 18 year old self wishes I’d chosen another time. 

Sincerely,

A Gap Year Educator, Formerly a Gap Year Student.