At 80, R is a charming lady with fascinating thoughts about the Land of Israel, Judaism and the people of Israel. It is especially her eloquence that keeps me glued to her. After her non-religious grandson’s rather crisp and merry Bar Mitzvah, we got talking about religion. Though R’s mother was an observant Jew, her father turned non-religious and became a pioneer of a kind. He was the first in the family with radical views of ‘quitting’ religion at a time when religion kept the Jewsish diaspora bound together. He brought up his children with little or no religious influence. Religion was saved for the high-holidays like Yom Kippur.

 
Despite her father’s views, R was not far removed from religion because the Bible was a mandatory text to be studied throughout her 12 years of schooling. “The Bible has a lot to offer in terms of culture, language and even history; not just religion,” she tells me. R tried her best to impart any and every knowledge she had about religion to her sons, not forcefully of course. Her youngest, she says, is not just non-religious, he is anti-religion. Her second son is the moderate kind, he is not vehemently ‘anti’ at the very least. And her third son, in a manner of speaking, is a sheep that found its way back to the shepherd. He lives with his family in Jerusalem, practicing Judaism as a Modern Orthodox Jew (more about the various shades of Orthodoxy in a separate post). She was quite impressed that her youngest behaved in a civil manner at the synagogue. He does not even own a kippah, if that suffices as a testimony for his anti-religion stance. Replying to her as she gave him a pat, he joked, “Who knows, I could be the next sheep.”

 
She confesses that having an orthodox member in the family strains relationships within the family (it is same with an orthodox family if a member decides to become secular or even tone down the level of orthodoxy). “My mother would like it that at least one member in the family has gone the religious way,” she said, making peace with the situation. But it is because her eldest son is religious that the Bar Mitzvah ceremony was conducted by her eldest and religious grandson. The farther we go from our forefathers, the more dilute religion becomes, she observes. That does not pain her though, she recognises that scientific reasoning trumps blind faith.

Having studied the Bible at length, R had the responsibility to coach her non-religious grandson on the Holy Text for a school exam. She commenced the tutoring with genesis and the story of creation. E did not allow her to finish the first sentence even; he was aghast that his grandmother was feeding him some ill-founded story. “God created man? You believe all this?” he asked. Not allowing her to explain herself, he said, “I thought you believed in nature and evolution.” As she recounted this incident, I could see that she was proud of her grandson. “I must now pull his leg and ask him why he read verses out of the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah,” she whispered to me, with a naughty glint in her eyes.

Israel is a country of extreme contrasts. It is because of people like R and her family that I feel that there is still hope.