Samaritans

This is coming way too late, but there's always such a delicate balance involved in trying to keep the updates coming. The first stage is always to experience these things before I can write about them. I mean, that's obvious, right? Good. So first I have to to somewhere. Then I have to think about the experience and remember it so I can write about it in my journal at night. But sometimes there's too much to write about and so I lag a day, which then snowballs into too long of a time to remember all the details that I had wanted to write. All the while there's emails from friends and family that ask questions about everyday life that would be answered on here if I were to update often enough. But I feel bad about not giving personal replies, so I spend time coming up with answers that could be organized into blog entires but that are located in all sorts of different email conversations.

Please, please, don't take this to mean that I don't like getting emails. It's much nicer to get an email than to read a short comment on my posts (though those don't hurt, either) but it's not always so easy to personalize the responses to those emails.

I think that's the end of this section of the entry. Except to remind about the photo albums.

Last Monday, the 18th, I officially switched from the History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict class into the Lost Jewish Communities class. My introduction to this course was a 45 minute bus ride to Holon, in the general Tel Aviv area, in which our group of 18 met with a few members of the Samaritan/שומרונים/Shomronim community. Specifically, we talked with Penina, the daughter of the first Samaritan to leave their main population center in Shechem/שכם/Nablus. Penina's father moved to Yafo/יפו/Jaffa before 1948, at which time Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, future second president of Israel, became very interested in Lost Jewish Communities. When he entered the Presidency in 1952 he managed to get the Samaritan community a significant amount of land in Holon and ever since then, part of the original Shechem community has lived in Holon. Their total number is in the 600-ish region, up from only 140 in 1900.

So who are they? They say that they descend from Jews who were not exiled by the Babylonians and that since there was no religious gap, their practices are the practices of the Israelite tribe from the time it crossed the Jordan. They therefore don't recognize the Talmud or any of the oral law and halachah of the later rabbis. In their religion, Har Gerizim is the place which God designated as holy for Akedat Yitzchak and so Shechem is the holy place. They point to the fact that Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Torah, which, as I've said, is what they recognize as the divine canon. They recognize the Five Books, Moses as the one prophet, God as the one god, and some of the other later writings as being the stories of perfectly nice people. But rules set down in Nevi'im and Ketuvim/נביאים וכתובים/Prophets and Writings aren't seen as carrying weight and so Jerusalem was never the focal point of their religion.

One of the absolutely most interesting features of their religion--aside from the sacrifice which I'll address later--is the language they use. It's Hebrew. Sort of. The shapes of the letters are the shapes used for Hebrew before the Exile. At that time the letters adopted Aramaic shapes and started to look more like what Hebrew looks like today. But their Torah scrolls are written in script that looks like this. And outside of her house, Penina has a mezuzah written in the old script. The pronounciation is slightly different too but unfortunately I couldn't switch my camera setting quickly enough to record her when she read out first the Shema and then the list of central tenets of Samaritanism. One the bus a few days later I started decoding the script and found out that there are no sofit letters in the Samaritan alphabet. Or at least for chaf there aren't any.

Their synagogue is much more modest than the entry gate may give away. (By the way, written on the sides is ברוך אתה בבאך / ברוך אתה בצאתך--Blessed are you in your coming / Blessed are you in your going). Shoes are removed before entering the room. The only pieces of furniture are a few plastic chairs and some wooden rods. The chairs are for people who can't stay standing; the rods are for people who need help. (Afterwards I asked the priest about the age range of the community and he told me it was nothing out of the ordinary. Penina seemed to confirm this by

telling us that plenty of Samaritans marry Jews, thus increasing the Samaritan population. Though that's a segue to her husband's intense hatred of the Rabbanut tht I'm not quite ready to take yet.) The priest is the only one allowed up on the bimah-equivalent, and he brought out the Torah, encased in an enclosure like Sephardi Torahs are. There are engravings on the silver as well as on the sides and back of the parchment. The layout, as you can see, isn't columnular like we're used to but we didn't get a chance to look at it long enough to really figure out if there were paragraphs; the text certainly wasn't rectilinear, though.

After returning from the synagogue, Penina's husband Hillel came out and started talked to me and Harry after asking whether we undersatood Hebrew. (Penina had up to this point only spoken Hebrew and poor Tobi was stuck trying to translate pages at a time instead of the usual three sentences.) His gripe is with the Rabbanut, i.e.: the Haredis in control of everything religious in this country. Samaritans are given the Right of Return but it was decided that a Jew marrying a Samaritan is considered to be engaging in intermarriage by the Rabbanut. He simply wants to be recognized as Jewish and to be given everything that comes with this designation. He said (my translation), "There would be 50 million Jews today if the Rabbis hadn't always been restricting who is a Jew." Once, he says, he offered a Shabbat Shalom to a rabbi walking down the street and was returned with Shabbat Adom (Red Shabbat: blood).

I don't quite feel I did this subject justice, though that's probably because I wrote it in so many different snatches that it was hard to get my writing organized. I'll try to be more on it in the future.