My father, like many European Jews of his time, growing up in the 1930’s, was a Zionist. He wanted to see a Jewish state reestablished in the Land of Israel, so he joined one of the many Zionist parties of that time and he participated in Macabee, the Jewish sports league. I remember him showing me his little paper Zionist party membership card, which was dutifully stamped with a record of his dues payments of machazit ha shekel, a half-shekel. Of course, in Slovakia the Shekel was not a real currency; the national currency was the Czechoslovakian Crown. So why did they use this term?
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, begins with a census, “This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight” (Exodus 30:12-13). Jewish history echoes back and forth across time. Twentieth Century Zionists used the religious/historical memory of our sacred texts to build a modern Jewish/Zionist, political identity. If the enrollment tax for the Israelites who had just left Egypt on their journey to the Land of Israel was a half-shekel, so then for European Jews who saw themselves engaged in a political struggle to reestablish Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, their enrollment dues would also be a half-shekel, thus linking the two struggles.
Even though most Zionists were not religious. and in fact many rejected Jewish religious life as too passive, they were still grounded in Jewish history and Jewish sacred texts. I knew that little membership book was important to my father because through all his wanderings, he somehow preserved it. It was a part of who he was and a memory of the world he had come from that was gone after World War Two. Our history and our sacred texts make us who we are as individuals and as Jews, without them we are adrift. With them, like with the half-shekel, we are grounded and strong.
Ki Tisa, Exodus 30:11-34:35, Parshat Ha Shavua for Shabbat, Saturday, February 19, 2022
February 18, 2022 by Dean Kertesz • Drashot
My father, like many European Jews of his time, growing up in the 1930’s, was a Zionist. He wanted to see a Jewish state reestablished in the Land of Israel, so he joined one of the many Zionist parties of that time and he participated in Macabee, the Jewish sports league. I remember him showing me his little paper Zionist party membership card, which was dutifully stamped with a record of his dues payments of machazit ha shekel, a half-shekel. Of course, in Slovakia the Shekel was not a real currency; the national currency was the Czechoslovakian Crown. So why did they use this term?
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, begins with a census, “This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight” (Exodus 30:12-13). Jewish history echoes back and forth across time. Twentieth Century Zionists used the religious/historical memory of our sacred texts to build a modern Jewish/Zionist, political identity. If the enrollment tax for the Israelites who had just left Egypt on their journey to the Land of Israel was a half-shekel, so then for European Jews who saw themselves engaged in a political struggle to reestablish Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, their enrollment dues would also be a half-shekel, thus linking the two struggles.
Even though most Zionists were not religious. and in fact many rejected Jewish religious life as too passive, they were still grounded in Jewish history and Jewish sacred texts. I knew that little membership book was important to my father because through all his wanderings, he somehow preserved it. It was a part of who he was and a memory of the world he had come from that was gone after World War Two. Our history and our sacred texts make us who we are as individuals and as Jews, without them we are adrift. With them, like with the half-shekel, we are grounded and strong.
~Rabbi Dean Kertesz