Origin of Judaism, Modern Jews, and Israeli Culture

Sixth in an ongo­ing series

RAMAT GAN, Israel — So I was sit­ting in one of my Inter­na­tional MBA classes at Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­sity the other day, and I real­ized that I had for­got­ten to bring a pen. The stu­dent next to me had an extra one sit­ting next to his note­book, so I took it with­out ask­ing. When I had fin­ished tak­ing notes, I put it back on the table.

Then, a few min­utes later, I real­ized that it had been a very Israeli thing to do. I guess I had started to adapt to the cul­ture here.

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Israelis are fre­quently stereo­typed as being very rude, pushy, argu­men­ta­tive, and obnox­ious. Some­times it is war­ranted. Just board­ing a bus involves a lot of shov­ing and elbow­ing because every­one wants to be first. The next per­son to be served at a food counter or bank teller is the one who pushes his way to the front. Israelis have no tol­er­ance for wait­ing in line — every­one tries to “jump the queue,” as the Eng­lish put it.

But much of Israeli behav­ior is under­stand­able when one looks at the cul­ture in the con­text of three spe­cific traits. First of all, Israeli soci­ety, like the Jew­ish peo­ple as a whole, views itself as one gigan­tic tribe in which every­one is a mem­ber of a sin­gle, large, extended fam­ily. (Some would say it is quite the dys­func­tional fam­ily as well.) Sec­ondly, many of the Euro­pean Jews who set­tled the land that became mod­ern Israel in the nine­teenth and early twen­ti­eth cen­turies were social­ists. They built com­mu­nal farms — the term in Hebrew is “kib­butzim” — in which every­one shared every­thing while they tried to build a new coun­try out of noth­ing but sand. Even the chil­dren were raised by the com­mu­nity as a whole. Peo­ple needed to work together to sur­vive the harsh con­di­tions. Thirdly, Israelis feel that they are alone in the Mid­dle East and sur­rounded by hos­tile Arabs and Mus­lims who only want to kill all of them. So every­one sticks together to defend them­selves against a com­mon per­ceived enemy (one can argue whether it is real or imaginary).

As a result of these col­lec­tive men­tal­i­ties that have trick­led down into day-to-day Israeli cul­ture, what would be viewed as rude in the United States is con­sid­ered nor­mal here. Amer­ica is indi­vid­u­al­is­tic; Israel is com­mu­nal­is­tic. The com­mu­nity is more impor­tant than the indi­vid­ual. When peo­ple go out to restau­rants or bars, peo­ple take food off of each other’s plates with­out ask­ing. If a per­son wants to try another person’s beer, he will sim­ply grab the glass and take a drink. If a per­son needs to bor­row a pen, he takes it. And no one minds. It’s not that peo­ple are rude; it’s that every­one is expected to help every­one else with what­ever they need. Peo­ple rarely ask some­one to pass the salt; they just reach over the table and take it. In a com­mu­nal cul­ture, every­thing belongs to everyone.

But there is more to the cul­ture than shar­ing food. Despite the intense social, polit­i­cal, and reli­gious divi­sions that exist within Israel, peo­ple gen­uinely care about each other. If some­one drops some­thing or needs help, six peo­ple will run over. Every time I go to the super­mar­ket, I get frus­trated because it seems to take twenty min­utes for a per­son to check out even if he only has a few items. (I think I picked up impa­tience in Boston.) The cus­tomer and cashier spend the whole time talk­ing to each other. At first, I thought it was because the cus­tomer was argu­ing over the price of each item. (This would not be a sur­prise.) But then an Israeli friend of mine told me that cashiers often have con­ver­sa­tions with every­one. When a cashier asks how a per­son is doing, the cus­tomer will not merely respond with “fine.” The per­son will actu­ally talk to the cashier about his prob­lems that day, and the cashier will try to offer some help­ful advice to a com­plete stranger. I’ve never seen that anywhere.

When­ever I go to a store with an Israeli friend, he always tries to tell me what to buy. I’ll get one brand of orange juice, and then he will take it out of my hand, grab a dif­fer­ent one from the shelf, and then give a bot­tle of the other brand to me. “You don’t want that one; this one is bet­ter,” he will say. And then we will get into a friendly argu­ment over which one is bet­ter. It’s not that my friend is being pushy or bossy; it’s more that my friend gen­uinely cares and wants to help.

Here’s a com­mon occur­rence (recounted from this book): A boyfriend and girl­friend go to a restau­rant. The girl tries to order a salad, and the waiter starts crit­i­ciz­ing her choice. “You should get some­thing big­ger!” he exclaims right in front of the boyfriend. “You’re so skinny! If you had some more meat on you, I’d date you myself!” And no one usu­ally minds because it’s just part of the cul­ture. If I had said some­thing like this while work­ing as a waiter in high school in the United States, I would have been fired. Israelis are a very prac­ti­cal peo­ple, and they have a blunt­ness that is refresh­ing but occa­sion­ally tiresome.

The desire to help every­one even occurs in love lives. When­ever I meet some­one, I always get the same three ques­tions right at the begin­ning of the con­ver­sa­tion: “Are you hun­gry?” “How old are you?” and “Are you sin­gle?” (In response to the first ques­tion: when­ever an Israeli offers you food, you take it.) Every­one is always try­ing to set some­one up with a date. Being sin­gle is viewed as a trav­esty in Judaism and some­thing that needs to be cor­rected as soon as pos­si­ble. When I went to a recruiter to find my first job in Tel Aviv, she men­tioned that she thought I might like a girl whom she had placed ear­lier at a com­pany. If I got a job there, the recruiter said she would intro­duce me. (I ended up going some­where else.) Friends and fam­ily mem­bers of friends are always keep­ing an eye out for some­one who might like me. And every­one does this for every­one. (In addi­tion, women do not mind if you ask for their age because every­one does it.)

The atten­tion that Israelis give to each other also extends into daily life here. One of the first things a per­son notices in Israel (as well as in much of the Mid­dle East) is that peo­ple are always talk­ing, argu­ing, ges­tur­ing, and shout­ing. Peo­ple are much more emo­tive here than in the West. Part of the rea­son is that peo­ple are more irri­ta­ble because it is extremely hot. Another part of the rea­son is that peo­ple are gen­er­ally more stressed out as a result of the con­flicts. But I think the major rea­son is that Israelis care so much about every­thing that they feel a need to argue about it. (If one thinks that the coun­try might be invaded or that he might die in a sui­cide bomb­ing tomor­row, then every lit­tle aspect of life is mean­ing­ful today, and every­thing mat­ters. This atti­tude is the com­plete oppo­site of the phi­los­o­phy of nihilism, in which every­thing is mean­ing­less and noth­ing mat­ters because we will all die someday.)

When I lived in Jerusalem, I once asked a man at a bus stop what time the next one was arriv­ing. “Ten min­utes,” he said. Another guy stand­ing ten feet away walked over. “No, it’s twenty min­utes!” he replied. Then the two men started argu­ing over whether our bus was com­ing in ten or twenty min­utes! When the bus finally arrived in ten min­utes, the first man slapped my back, pumped his fist in the air, and grinned. “I was right!” he exclaimed. In West­ern cul­ture, peo­ple gen­er­ally try to avoid con­flicts and argu­ments in their inter­per­sonal lives out of a sense that it is uncivil and impo­lite; in Israel, peo­ple run towards con­flict. Peo­ple argue over pol­i­tics, reli­gion, busi­ness and sports all the time. (It’s almost like the idea of the mar­ket­place of ideas in cap­i­tal­ism: if every­one debates every­thing, then the best ideas will rise to the top. End­less argu­men­ta­tion can help a soci­ety.) To para­phrase New York Times colum­nist Thomas Fried­man in this book: Two Israelis hav­ing a calm dis­cus­sion sounds like four Amer­i­cans hav­ing an argument.

But fierce debate is not just a result of mod­ern Israeli cul­ture. For thou­sands of years, Jew­ish reli­gion has gen­er­ally encour­aged argu­ment and con­flict. Yeshivas (reli­gious schools) are filled with tables of stu­dents who read the Bible to each other and then talk back and forth over the mean­ing of a par­tic­u­lar pas­sage. Within min­utes, the entire room is full of peo­ple yelling and shout­ing over the per­son­al­ity of Moses, the nature of Cre­ation, or the com­mand­ment not to mix meat and dairy in the same meal. It’s quite the sur­real sight. In fact, the sec­ond most-important book in Judaism after the Bible is the Tal­mud, which is essen­tially a col­lec­tion of argu­ments and debates between famous rab­bis over count­less cen­turies on Jew­ish law and how one should inter­pret the Bible.

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In many of the let­ters I’ve writ­ten, I’ve focused on the neg­a­tive and polit­i­cal aspects of life in Israel because that is mainly what most of you see on the news. In this essay, I wanted to show some of the endear­ing traits of this occasionally-anarchic-but-always-exciting coun­try. I imag­ine that liv­ing in Israel is like liv­ing in a small town — after all, this is a very small coun­try, and there are prob­a­bly only two or three degrees of sep­a­ra­tion between any two peo­ple. But it would be a small town with a lot more sand.

Now, I don’t mean to say Israelis are per­fect. As I wrote ear­lier, they can also be extremely rude. In fact, I’d say that Israelis are para­dox­i­cally the nicest — and the rud­est — peo­ple I’ve ever met. But that’s the topic for my next letter.

Next Let­ter: No Way Out (or, Stuck in the 1970s). Prior Let­ter: All About the Pales­tini­ans