Actually, more than you might think.
When I was growing up, I don’t think I ever thought about
Israel and the Philippines in the same context.
Yet, during the past few weeks, there have been three times that I’ve thought about both the Philippines and Israel
-- and so I thought it worthwhile to describe them.
I.
A few weeks ago, my wife, Elana, brought home an unusual magazine from
the Post Office. It was Focalmag, a free English-language magazine
devoted to serving the Filipino community here.
(Click here for the
online version.)
Now, you may be wondering:
The Filipino community? Isn’t Israel a Jewish state? What are Filipinos
doing here?
That’s a very interesting question. In fact, there are many people from the Philippines here. The Philippine embassy estimates that there
are 39,000 Filipinos working in
Israel, 10,000 of them in
Jerusalem. Click here for details.
The reason is quite simple.
There is a great deal of unemployment in the Philippines. Israel, on the other hand, is a country with a great need for low-income workers. Through a program created by the Israeli government
a few years ago, many Filipinos come to this country to serve as caretakers for
the elderly. It seems to work out well, for both the Filipinos and the Israelis. The Filipinos speak English,
which is a second language here, and they don’t raise any particular political or
security anxieties. They are able to earn money that they can send back home to
support their families.
Wherever you go in Israel you see Filipinos walking down the
street hand in hand with the elderly, or wheeling them around in
wheelchairs. In my neighborhood, you
often see Filipinos shopping in the grocery store or riding the busses. In the elevator in my building, I am as
likely to encounter a Filipino as an Israeli. It’s gotten to the point where
they don’t stand out.
(Patar is the name of a beach in the Philippines.)
Focalmag is a
reminder of just how much a presence Filipinos are in this country. Filipinos not only have their own magazine;
they have their own restaurants and stores and churches and pastors. It’s fortunate that they have the latter,
because, as low-income foreign workers, they can be quite isolated and can
sometimes be the victims of condescension, disrespect, and even discrimination.
The other day, I asked an Israeli whether he was concerned
about the growing presence of Filipinos in the country. “Not particularly,” he said. “After all, they
have to go back to the Philippines after a few years.” But, of course, not all do. What we are
seeing is in effect the creation of a new minority of non-citizen temporary workers here in
Israel. Is Israel prepared for this? Who would have predicted this when the state
was created in 1948?
II.
One of my projects this year has been to translate articles
from Otzar Dinim u-Minhagim, "A Treasury of Jewish Law and Lore," a guide
to Jewish religious practice written in 1917 in Hebrew in New York City by the
Jewish scholar, J.D. Eisenstein. (I'll have more to say about this project in a future blogpost.) The other
day, I was working on an entry entitled, “Day and Night.” It concerns various questions that have to do
with when a day begins and when it ends.
A good portion of the article has to do with how Jews are supposed to
behave when they are travelling in the area of the International Date Line in
the Pacific Ocean. (To read my translation of the article,
click here.)
In “Day and Night,” Eisenstein points out that when the
location of the date line was altered in the mid-1800s, certain communities
found that not only the date but also the day of the week changed. One of these communities was—you guessed
it—the Philippines. Prior to 1845, the Date Line ran to the west of the
Philippines, but in 1845 it was moved to the east, so that the day and date in
the Philippines would be identical to those in China and Japan. Monday, December 30, 1844 in the Philippines was followed by
Wednesday, January 1, 1845! (An even more complicated day and date change
occurred in Alaska in 1867 when the United States purchased the territory from
Russia and the line was moved to the west of the territory.)
Now, why did Eisenstein think to discuss what had happened in the Philippines or in Alaska in his
book? What would be the relevance of
this to Jews?
As you might have guessed, the Jewish question this raises is, when should a
Jew in these areas observe Shabbat? Should he or she observe it according to the old calendar or according to the new one?
The answer that Eisenstein gave is this:
With respect to the decisions made by the governments in Alaska and the Philippines to switch the day and the date: if in these places there were ancient Jewish communities that regularly observed Shabbat from time immemorial, then even newcomers who moved there after the respective changes would be obligated to observe the traditional local Shabbat, and no change by the government to add or subtract a day would make any difference. But if the community is a new one and there is no established Shabbat there, then they should observe Shabbat consistent with prevailing law and local practice.
In my opinion, this is a sensible solution. In fact, there never were “ancient Jewish
communities” in either the Philippines or Alaska, so Jews living there, whether in 1845 or today,
follow the current “prevailing” calendar.
III.
Speaking of Jews and the Philippines, ...
One recent Friday evening, we went to a friend’s home for
Shabbat dinner. That evening, she happened
to have volunteered to host folks in her shul who didn’t have a place to go for Shabbat dinner. Visiting the shul that evening was a couple from
California, and so they joined us for dinner. The guy looked like a typical American Jew of
Eastern European ancestry; the woman he was with did not. She looked, well, Filipino. Indeed she was. Looking around the table, it was clear that
people were intrigued. Given that in Israel, practically the only Filipinos one encounters are aides to the elderly (see above),
seeing such a couple defied the conventions.
When the woman began talking about her synagogue in California, and how
excited she was finally to be travelling to Israel, we realized that we were in the presence of a Filipino Jewish
woman. We later learned that she had converted to Judaism a few years ago, and that although her husband had already been to Israel several times before, they had long anticipated travelling to Israel together. I shared with her what I had learned about the Philippines and the movement of the International Date Line in 1845. (She was very polite.) What an unexpected and delightful reminder of just how heterogenous a people we are!
So who says that Israel and the Philippines have nothing in common?
