By Rabbi Gary Creditor

Last Friday, Feb.13, I landed in Atlanta, then flew on to Richmond. I have continued to live in two time dimensions, Eastern Standard Time and Israel time, which are seven hours apart. It is such a strange thing to live in these different realities. I may walk these streets, but at the same time, I see the streets of Jerusalem, the newer and older cities, the stores, and hear multiple languages _ Hebrew, English, French, German, and Amharic, all being spoken at once. I don’t know how to settle my brain down from functioning in warp speed.

I was in Jerusalem for the elections and watched the results starting at 10 p.m. that Tuesday night. The Israeli political system is based on the British model in which you vote for the party of your choice. They receive a representational amount of seats in the government and then the president invites the leader of one of the largest parties to form the government. This always has been a coalition of several parties garnering more than 61 votes (60 being 50 percent), thus insuring that a vote of ‘no confidence’ will fail and not bring the government down. This is always a very delicate maneuver.

It was fascinating to watch this process from close up. I was amazed how little material was in public view. I was looking for handouts, large banners, advertising on buses and billboards. There was so little! Yet somehow the message got out. We are used to two parties and rarely a maverick third. In Israel there were many parties running slates, some of which did not receive the threshold necessary for even one seat, such as the Pensioners Party and the Green Party. When I was interviewed by Alberta Lindsey (for The Times-Dispatch, I thought that the Kadima party had the best overall posture on the issues. Tzipi Livni really surprised the pundits, yet the complexity of issues and the variations on themes within each party makes the choices ever more complex and difficult when you look at it while in Israel rather than looking at it from here.

The concerns spread over a vast panorama with consequences for the survival of the state. How many will be above or below the poverty line? Will education be enhanced? Will the ultra-religious community continue to receive state subsidies for education and the size of their families while not being obligated to military service or any other comparable service to the country?
Will the religious parties maintain their monopolistic control of marriage, divorce and conversion? Will the Arab citizens of Israel be singled out to make a pledge of loyalty, a move that threatens the very fabric of any democracy (remember what was done to the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II in the USA?).

No party had all the answers that I wanted. Some answers were better in Likud, others better in Kadima, and some in Labor.

To borrow a Yogi Berraism and change it: “It’s not over even when it’s over!” Even while I watched the celebrations at the Kadima headquarters on television, I learned that they still had to count the ballots of the soldiers in service and then, depending on other pieces, who will President Shimon Peres tap first to make the new government, Tzipi Livni or Benjamin Netanyahu? Even as I write this on Feb. 16, this is not clear. Meanwhile the events of the economy, military and foreign policy, the desire for the release of Gilad Shalit, continue under the caretaker government of Prime Minister Olmert.

It was a fascinating time to be there. No country in the entire Middle East can claim to be a democracy, but Israel. In the newspaper and on billboards were posted official notices of the voting places, hundreds in Jerusalem alone. There were notices of the guaranteed right to vote, about noninterference, about who was eligible (our daughter got there just a few days too late to vote), with detailed writeups of each candidate and party and what they stood for. And then the post election analysis that continued endlessly. Amazing! The deep grasp of citizens to the complexity of the forces that shape their world.

In Israel there are five large newspapers and at least as many smaller ones, especially those that are in other languages. Official signs are in Hebrew, English and Arabic. And the consequences are not theoretical.

The answers, the decisions, influence the very survival of the state, for the welfare of its citizens. Israel is not immune from the economic situation. People are losing jobs. There is serious concern about homelessness and poverty. There are many organizations and volunteer efforts to alleviate this. And the enemy is only as far as the nearest katyusha missile and Grad rocket, or the threats from Iran to wipe Israel from the map.

And yet the sunrise which I watched from our daughter’s window and the sunset that I absorbed into my soul as I walked to her place of work _ the Ramah Programs in Israel _ were stunning and elevated my soul to look heavenward, as if to say to God, “There has to be some way to hold evil at bay, to bring tranquility and serenity. If from this little spot on this spinning globe we all pray to you, can there not be some way that from way out there can come an answer to help us find the way down here?”

Even if I just watch the hues in the sky, I feel a measure of reassurance that the efforts, at least human, will strengthen this country and continue its efforts to build a Jewish, democratic, progressive country. My wife and I are thrilled that our daughter is part of this great enterprise in human and specifically Jewish history. I was blessed those past two weeks to walk the streets of Jerusalem with her, absorb the sounds, music and aromas. In my sleep I am still there.

And then I visited Sderot and looked into Gaza. I was told where to run and how to hide if a missile came. That will be the next piece, from Jerusalem, at least in my heart and soul, even as I type from my synagogue office here in Richmond.