Sitting in the El Al terminal at JFK waiting for our flight, I encountered one of the pieces of Israel that I have been most concerned about as I prepared to spend this semester of rabbinical school taking courses at various yeshivot (places of intense Jewish learning) throughout Jerusalem.

I sat waiting for the plane with my husband, who has been granted a five-month sabbatical from his job so that we can spend this semester abroad together. We discussed our excitement, which had grown considerably since we had left our home in Boston and begun this journey that we had spent so much time preparing for. Our flight was an hour delayed. We talked and people-watched as the sun began to sink in the sky.

All of a sudden a young man sitting near us jumped up and began approaching various people in the waiting area. At first I thought he was selling something, and quickly realized he was organizing a minyan (quorum of 10) for mincha (the afternoon prayer service). With more interest now, I watched him organize people for prayer. He gathered men in black hats wearing white shirts and black suites, each carrying a cardboard hatbox from some store in Brooklyn to protect their new purchase, presumably updating their wardrobe for the approaching High Holy Days. Other men came. Some were wearing graphic T-shirts, some had clearly come straight from the office. The men were old and young, bearded and shaven, clearly religious and only recognizably religious by their kippot. Some wore gartles (belts) around their waist to separate the lower half of their body from the upper half during prayer; some had big knitted kippot and peyot (side curls) the size of a ponytail. Some men clearly knew each another, some were from what I assume to be vastly different communities, but each greeted the others with warmth and recognition as they assembled to pray together.

With each person he found to daven (pray), my heart sank a little bit. Each time he passed by my husband and me without asking us to join, I felt a little sad, a little frustrated, and totally invisible. There I was, a rabbinical student, dedicating my life to gathering people for prayer, on my way to Israel for a semester of full-time learning in the yeshiva as part of the six years I will be spending in rabbinical school, and it felt as though I wasn’t even Jewish.

I had no external markers of my faith, and, even if I had, I would never be asked by these men to make up a minyan. And fine, if he wouldn’t ask me because I am a woman, what about my husband? Just because his hat was more hipster than Hasidic, he was discounted as a Jew who might participate?

As my face started to flush and my eyes grew hot, my husband pointed out: no one can “make” you feel anything, that’s up to you. If he, or I for that matter, wanted to join or were in need of a mincha service, we could simply stand up and pray. And, of course he is correct. But as the twenty or so men gathered to pray right in front of us, they prepared their space by dropping down a computer cord between themselves and our row of chairs in order to make a mechitzah (partition). I couldn’t have felt a more drastic separation between us. Suddenly these men began to represent the Israel that I feared: a place where the Orthodox own religious life, where one can be surrounded by Jews yet feel completely alienated religiously; where the path of a progressive, female, rabbinical student would be, at best, misunderstood and, at worst, unrecognized and despised.

So often in the Jewish world I hear the question being asked “where do you draw your lines of who’s in and who’s out?” Whether about intermarriage, the question of “who’s a Jew,” political views on Israel, what texts are tolerable in a beit midrash (Jewish house of study), what spiritual practices are acceptable within our community, whose home we will or will not eat in (due to it’s kashrut standards), which rabbis’ opinions we heed, whose marriages we will attend or officiate, the list goes on.

What if instead of erecting ever-higher barriers between one another, we were tearing down the walls and, beyond the labels that have been imposed upon us and the labels we adopt, connecting to one another as human beings? On this level, we are all related – all connected by the very cells that make up our bodies, the emotions we feel, and the days we share on this planet.

As the men mumbled and the sun sank, our aircraft finally pulled up to the gate. I began to daydream what such a world might look like. How could mincha, something so Jewish, become a venue to dismantle the walls between our fellow human beings and ourselves? The Jewish ritual of praying three times a day—thereby marking the transitions from night to day and taking time every few hours to connect to ourselves, to something beyond ourselves and to community—is a significant opportunity for reflection and reevaluation. I think these times for check-in throughout the day could be utilized by anyone, regardless of religion, whether secular or devout. I thought about how liminal airports are and how strange it is, when one stops to think about it, that, routinely, five hundred humans file into an aircraft where they sit inches away from one another breathing the same recycled air—even becoming vulnerable enough to fall asleep in one another’s presence—for ten hours at a time and speak perhaps not a word to one another.

How might this experience be transformed if passengers gathered before the flight to share a few intentional moments together in which we created a sense of shared community and together and set a communal intention for a safe passage? What would it have looked like if this young minyan organizer had gone up to everyone in the waiting area and invited each person to join in marking, in his or her own way, this momentous time of day before this journey? How different could it have been if I had taken responsibility for my emotions and ownership over my actions and had joined in with the minyan that had formed, respectfully, even though I wasn’t asked to participate?

Erecting barriers is easy; it is dismantling them that necessitates work. Taking down the dividers requires each of us to imagine the world as it could be, believe this world is possible, and, in the smallest, most mundane actions of our lives, take responsibility for nudging reality ever closer to our vision. As our time in Israel unfolds I am looking forward to expanding the power of my imagination in seeing things both how they are and how else they could be.

My image (via Wikimedia Commons)