We Jews
Friday, April 21, 2023
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
I once heard my sister, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, say that the most significant moment of a young person’s Jewish education is the first time they say the words “we Jews.” In that moment they take their place in the four-thousand-year old story of our people. It is a fateful moment.
April is the month in which we grapple as a people with our history, both ancient and recent. In April, we face the consequences of what it has meant and what it means for each of us today to say “we Jews.”
April is first of all, of course, the month of Passover, on which we celebrate the birth of our people and our liberation from slavery. We tell the old story and attempt to pass it on to our children and our grandchildren. We sing the songs, and eats the foods, and return to memories of family gatherings when we were young, and attempt to remember Passovers of the distant past, long before we were born.
April is also the month of Yom HaShoah, just this past week, in which we force ourselves to stare into the abyss, the Holocaust. That time in living memory when Germany, the most technologically advanced nation on earth, created a vast industry of death, condemning millions of Jewish men, women, and children to die by poison gas, by torture, by starvation, and by disease. When we teach our children to say “we Jews,” we bring them into that devastating collective memory.
And April is the month of Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day, coming up this week, in which we consider the modern miracle of the return of our people to our ancient homeland. The fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel, from two thousand five hundred years ago. “Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and when I raise you up from your graves, My people, and when I put My spirit into you, and you come to life, and I set you on your soil.”
We have witnessed that miracle, and this year we have come face to face with the most profound question for anyone who has spoken the words “we Jews.” We Jews are forced, this year more than ever before, to ask the question: “What kind of country will Israel be?”
I would like to share with you very personally some of my own thoughts over the past five months, as I have tried to learn and to slowly understand what has been happening since the Israeli election last November. As I have shared with many of you, I try not to spend too much time watching the news, because I find it overwhelming. And rarely enlightening.
But I feel a responsibility as a citizen of this country, and of the world, and also as a rabbi, to be aware of the important events of our day. So I talk with thoughtful friends, and read some of the articles that get sent to me, and do my best to form my own educated opinions.
When the new Israeli government formed in November, I heard that it included figures on the far right wing, but I had never heard before of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. I glanced at some photographs in the news and noted that Ben Gvir looked kind of goofy and Smotrich looked intelligent. I’m not proud of the fact that I focused on their appearance; I’m just being honest. That was the extent of my initial first-hand analysis. I think I remember hearing that one them had been a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach party, but Kahane was killed over thirty years ago, so that seemed like the distant past. I did hear that Itamar Ben Gvir until 2020 had a framed picture in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish doctor from Brooklyn who in 1994 massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hevron. Knowing that Ben Gvir had a picture of Goldstein in his living room seemed so bizarre that I refused to take him seriously.
When the demonstrations began against the legislation weakening the Israeli Supreme Court, I started to read more. I read the open letter to “Israel’s Friends in North America” written back in February by Matti Friedman, Daniel Gordis, and Yossi Klein-Halevy, in which these three centrist or center-right thinkers and influencers warned that the current government is “undermining the cohesion of Israeli society and its democratic ethos.” I don’t always agree with these three, but I consider them all to be thoughtful and they have often been in the forefront of defending Israel from its critics. The three of them were writing, as a team, “out of a sense of anguish and anxiety for the future of our country.” Friends of mine in Israel were writing to say that they felt terrified, but also proud and energized by the size and quality of the demonstrations. The demonstrators were peaceful, and waving Israeli flags and in general expressing deep love for their country. For me, and for many of my friends here and in Israel, it has been a time of concern but also of renewed hope for the future.
One article in February, by the Jewish writer Peter Beinart, left me frustrated. He objected that the demonstrators are now, suddenly, alarmed by the threat to Israeli democracy. They have only woken up, says Beinart, when it is Jewish rights and freedoms that are at risk. But for millions of Palestinians, Beinart wrote, “Israel is not a democracy. It’s not a democracy because Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can’t vote for the government that dominates their lives.”
I was annoyed. “Give me a break!” I thought. “Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are standing up for democracy and you’re criticizing them because they are not standing up for everything, for everybody? We live in an imperfect world and need to celebrate the moments of human courage, even when it is not perfect… even when it is not everything, for everyone.
That’s where I was for a couple of months. Concerned about how things would play out, but reassured by the strength and the loving patriotism of the demonstrators. But I’m reading more and I’m thinking again.
A week ago, I came across a piece of writing by Leah Solomon, the Education Director of Encounter, which is an organization that brings American Jews to meet Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. My daughter Rachel went on two trips with Encounter when she was a young woman living in Jerusalem.
In her piece, Leah Solomon also notices the complete lack of interest among the democracy demonstrators in the lives of her Palestinian friends and colleagues. But unlike Peter Beinart she speaks with deep, firsthand knowledge and compassion of the daily life experience of everyday Israelis… like herself. She speaks of her own fear. Her fear during the Gaza War of 2014 when she had to take her 3 little children down to the bomb shelter, afraid of the Gaza rockets landing in Jerusalem. Her fear every time she hears about an explosion on a bus, just as her own kids are riding a bus to school. Her own fear when she hears young men speaking Arabic on the street. She’s being honest.
That daily lived experience of fear of their Arab neighbors, she writes, is what has produced an Israeli public that does not care deeply about democracy for the Palestinians. Liberal Israelis long for a two-state solution, she says, because they are afraid, and desperately desire to be freed of the Palestinian population. Leah Solomon calls for a new kind of Israeli courage, the courage to acknowledge that their lives and their society are deeply intertwined with their Palestinian neighbors. She asserts what we all know, that it is much too soon now to even begin talking about the shape of a final settlement between Israel and the Palestininans. One state. Two states. A confederation. These are all possibilities, but they are far in the future. For now, she asks that we simply acknowledge that neither people is going to disappear, and that the only path forward is the long and arduous path of building a shared society.
Solomon ends her piece with a short and powerful paragraph. She writes: “My colleague Mahmoud recently shared his belief that to achieve liberation, Palestinians will first need to help liberate Jews from our own fear and trauma. I would be grateful to any Palestinian,” she writes, “who supports that process, but the ultimate responsibility for this work is our own.” That sentence feels true and important to me, this April and any time we begin to speak of “we Jews.” “The ultimate responsibility for this work is our own.”
She goes on to conclude with a succinct statement of what our work is to be: “Now is the time for us as a people to move beyond the paralysis of fear, so that we can not only liberate Palestinians, but also work together to develop a positive vision for our existence in this land—a vision in which all inhabitants live with security, equality, dignity, justice and freedom.”
I will continue to read, and I expect that my thinking about where we Jews stand right now, at this moment in history will continue to evolve. But tonight, poised between Yom HaShoah and Yom HaAtzmaut, Leah Solomon’s words of courage and vision feel right to me. Shabbat shalom.