Eleven Transformative Events of the Decade: The Third Event --A Trip to the Holy Land

The first two transformative events of this decade centered around 9/11.

The Third Event

Five weeks later (after 9/11) I am aboard an El-AL flight to Tel Aviv.

One of the passengers asks me why an American would want to fly to the Holy Land in the wake of 9/11. (Remember that the aviation and tourist industry were both hit hard with families afraid to fly anywhere and stock prices of major airlines plummeted to all time lows..)

I am flabbergasted by this query as I explain to him I am showing my spiritual and financial support to a country always 'under' verbal if not actual military attack.

On board, I meet a young transplanted East Coast Rabbi who gives me a mystical book on leadership and invites me to spend Sabbath with him in Hebron. The book is entitled Awakening the Spark Within--Five Dynamics of Leadership That Can Change the World.

The book is a manual that anyone can follow to become a leader in his or her own social milieu and simultaneously contribute to finding those outstanding spiritual and political leaders that can effectively lead us out of the moral, economic, social and political and ethnic crises that infect society collectively: nationally and globally.

I attend and participate in morning services (Shacharit) at the Sephardic synagogue on R'chov Hess where the highlight of the service occurs at the conclusion: the entire congregation chants all the Psalms of David in an intense heartfelt sing-song prayer. This ritual is repeated every morning

On the sad side, I visit the tourist shops in Jerusalem near the City of David; I discover myself to be literally the only tourist they have seen in weeks. Eerie feeling.

On the positive side, I pay a visit to the grave site of my maternal grandfather, Rabbi Moses Kalonymous Skinder who emigrated to Palestine in the summer of 1947. He was to fulfill his mission of building low cost housing in Cholon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, that consisted mostly of sand dunes.

Rabbi Moses Kalonymous Skinder

There were so many displaced Jewish construction workers who had been living in European DP camps in the wake of World War II  and were now emigrating to Palestine; they needed housing--immediate housing so they could begin working to build up the soon to be created State of Israel.

So first grandfather retired from his 25-year  leadership role as pulpit Rabbi at the Soho based Pike Street Synagogue in New York (also called the Sons of Israel Kalwarie). He then formed a corporation and began selling shares to family and friends in order to finance the construction.

Cholon, Israel. A community built on and surrounded by sand

Courtesy of panoramio.com

A visit to the Municipal Offices of the town yields me the original plans for his community. This was at a time that the village consisted of sand dunes and a few thousand residents. ( Indeed the name Cholon is derived from the Hebrew word for sand).

Today, this suburb of Tel Aviv has well over 184, 000 residents.

However, my Holy Land experience would soon take a more serious turn to be narrated in the next segment.

Event Number 4 to follow shortly.