Welcome ברוכים הבאים

    Join Justin White on a physical and spiritual journey from the American suburbs to the exotic and misunderstood land that is the cradle of three of the world’s great religions.

    Justin was raised in strictly secular circumstances in an outlying suburb of Washington, DC, the son of a Korean War orphan who became a US Army officer and diplomat, and an architect/ engineer of German-American descent employed by a government agency.  Prior to attending the University of Virginia, he had little exposure to religion of any kind.
 

    So it was on the campus of Mr. Jefferson’s monument to religious freedom that Justin became friendly with a group of Jewish students and active in Hillel, the campus Jewish organization.  As a physicist-in-training, he was as interested in what the sages of this, the most venerable of the three Western religions had to say about origins, about the source of all that is, as he was in the religious life and culture of his new friends.  But it was a chance encounter just off the Beltway in Maryland that was to prove a crucial turning point.

   Having missed his exit to Northern Virginia, Justin found himself on the doorstep of a Sephardic synagogue and thus became acquainted with a different brand of Judaism, one that was little understood by his Ashkenazic (European-descended) college friends.  And it was his fascination with this piquant religious and cultural brew that was to precipitate, not long thereafter, his first trip to Israel.

   Over the next twenty years, Justin would make many journeys back and forth to Israel, converting to Judaism and becoming a dual citizen, and, along the way, experiencing a cross-section of Israeli life:  from working in the high-tech sector and attending some of the country’s most prestigious universities to living and learning in the ghetto-like neighborhoods of the Sephardic ultra-orthodox.  He would in his travels encounter intriguing characters:  a group of yeshiva kids with whom he learned Talmud and debated science; a secular security guard, the son of German Holocaust survivors, whose religion was environmentalism, yet who could not escape his Jewish identity; an ultra-orthodox rabbi who gave freely of his support, hospitality and wisdom, yet connived to derail Justin from his academic path and pull him into the ranks of his fundamentalist, science-denying flock.

   Many of these characters had in common the quality of being “neither here nor there,” caught between different worlds, living in that liminal space “between the suns” where, according to mystical lore, nothing is quite real and anything is possible.

   And Israel itself seems to be caught in such a state:  between secular and religious, science and Torah, European and Arab cultures, democracy and theocracy… And so the memoir of one man’s time in Israel provides us with a glimpse into the conflicts that roil Israeli society and whose resolution will determine the fate of the state of Israel and its people.