Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

A Prayer For All of Us Who Are Mourning A Year After October 7

A year of mourning has a rhythm, supposedly
A bass line laid down by Sages
To help the heart re-pace itself
So the heart can help the body
Metabolize absence
Let go the face, the name,
The vocal signature
Let them travel the neuron network pathways
For 7 days, for 30; 11 months, a year
Find their way to the assembly point
At the node of peaceful memory

That’s the rhythm, more or less
So the body can metabolize its absences
So the soul
Which loves to climb the Babel Tower every day
Stalking truth and peace to the heavens
Can crumple
Can fold up neatly like a fan
For a time
And still remain a soul

7 days and 30, 11 months, a year
From: There are no words, ein milim
To words that are approximate and fumbly, but mostly they will do
To when it’s finally fine to sort of say: How are you
To someone who could answer on some days
Or not yet quite.

That’s the rhythm we require.

So how do we uncrumple
When the soul so capacious is not so much folded
Crumpled
As: scrunched
Like the draft of a Shana Tova card, too sappy or superficial, tossed in the can

How when yahrzeit and shiva are scrambled
When after Shmay Rabbah, the critics overpower
The comforters’ Amen
When you’re mourning and still searching for survivors

When you can’t tell about the New Year challah if it’s raisins in there, or if it’s stones

The heart was not meant to beat this fast
To meet our distant cousins at all once
To learn the names of all those new places and all the new vocabulary, the nuance
   of ne’edarim shvuyim and chatufim
Or in the age of the first flowering of redemption, to repurpose a prayer
   for captives in the hands of medieval bandits

It is difficult for the heart, kasheh m’od la-lev
For the heart – for the body --
To mourn so many people and so many dreams
All at the same time

One heart can’t do this by itself
It takes our many hearts.

Our souls are rolled up like the priestly blessing
Inscribed 2500 years ago and hidden
In a crypt on the hill ignoring the Valley of Gehenna below
Staring rather toward Zion
Waiting for the bored youth who will discover it on a field trip
And bring it to the place where the delicate foil
Can be unfurled
Will be restored
Will call out once again:

And grant, you, peace.
V’yasem l’cha shalom.

*****

Some of the references:
yahrzeit -- Yiddish word for the anniversary of someone's death
shiva -- Hebrew for seven, the traditional mourning period after a funeral
shmay rabba -- "God's great name", a phrase in Kaddish, the prayer said by mourners
Shana Tova -- "A Good New Year", a greeting for Rosh Hashanah
The new vocabulary mentions words used for people who are captive or missing
The last part refers to the actual discovery of a scroll/amulet containing words similar to the Torah's priestly blessing of peace 

D'var Torah for Balak: Saying We Are Blessed

It's Friday and here is my current draft of a D'var Torah for Shabbat morning on Parashat Balak, Numbers 22:2-25:9:

In the parasha this week, an enemy of the Jews asks a man of powerful words to curse Israel. To say bad things about us in a way to bring us harm.

And it doesn’t work.

Balak, the king of Moav, fears that Yisrael is going to conquer his land, which is just across the Jordan River east of Eretz Yisrael -- but he has no actual justification for that fear. He doesn’t seem to know that the Divine regards his people as a kind of cousin-people to Yisrael, and even though they are presumably pagans and aren’t necessarily all that friendly, there is no reason why Yisrael and Moav can’t coexist. Which doesn’t prevent Balak from spreading this libel to others and from trying to enlist Bil’am, a sorcerer from the region who has the power of blessing and cursing, and in the Torah those are the kind of words that make things happen, sometime immediately.

It doesn’t work, and the Torah has a lot of fun with both Bil’am the sorcerer and Balak the king, making them look foolish and giving us some laughs at their expense. Bil’am has of course the talking donkey, who sees Divine messengers better than Bil’am does, and Balak looks ridiculous running Bil’am around to different places hoping if they find the right scenic overlook Bil’am will be motivated to issue the curse.

In the end not only does Bil’am not curse Yisrael, but in fact blesses us. I’m not sure we really needed Bil’am’s blessing, but Balak thinks it’s powerful and tells him basically to stop talking -- if you can’t say something bad about someone don’t say anything at all.

One of the remarkable things about this parasha is where it is in the Torah, in particular at this point in Sefer B’midbar (the book of Numbers). We have been reading about problem after problem. The past four weeks have been complaints about hunger, and thirst, and inadequate battle readiness, and unfair leadership, and plagues, and leaders at their wits’ end. A lot of people have died. This is the Torah speaking about us. This is Divine word and it’s not been terribly complimentary about us. Some years it’s fun to read those stories at arms’ length and really revel in how wise and the Torah is about group dynamics and political processes. This year not so much, it’s been very on the nose.

My point is that the Torah and Moshe himself say some pretty horrible things about our people, and they are frustrated words and include some pretty accurate criticisms, and in fact we are bogged down in the midbar (wilderness), not getting anywhere. And then the Torah switches it up. Just when you could think it would be the perfect time for outsiders to pile on and their curses would work at a time of our weakness and weariness -- the Torah says no: We are blessed. You can’t curse us. You can try. But no matter where you position yourself, you can’t curse us. You can want to, you can pay someone to, it just doesn’t work. This people is blessed.

And for a couple chapters it’s not even a struggle. Even a donkey can figure it out, can cut through the political dynamics and the money being spent and say -- don’t go that way. This people is blessed, and there is nothing you can do or say that will change that.

This year, people began trying to curse us since before the sun even set on October 7. I remember talking about this in the fall, it was Parashat Lech L’cha when the Torah first says to Avraham that he will be blessed and through his descendents all people will be blessed, and in my D’var Torah just three weeks after October 7 I was already talking about how we needed to hear those words, because so many people were saying the opposite, about Israelis and about Jews here. It felt so unrelenting already back then, and it has continued these past nine months.

So it’s important now to listen as the Torah says we are blessed, and this is not only the Divine point of view or our point of view but also an outside point of view -- if not an enemy leader, at least a powerful religious figure outside of our own.

It is Bil’am the foreign sorcerer who says: Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov mikenotecha Yisrael. How good: all the places you live, Yisrael, and the places you gather to pray, all the places where you draw in the Shechinah and where you find shalom with yourself or with family, and where you connect among yourselves.

Every time we walk in here the first thing we do is to sing the words of an outsider who blessed us. Who affirmed for us our sense of being blessed or our dream of being blessed.

Now I have to say it is not enough to be blessed from the outside, to have some relief from those trying to curse us, and it’s not enough even to hear words of Divine blessing. We need to bless ourselves and each other.

We have spent these nine-plus months reacting to the curses of others --  pushing back on them; our mood and sense of wellbeing defined by them. When we have heard a blessing we have felt better -- whether from the president of the United States, or seeing our symbol projected in light in Berlin!

We have been in a pattern dictated in this country by the attempted curses of other people, and in Israel profoundly shaped by that dynamic as well.

But being Jewish today means being able to say our own blessings about ourselves in our own words, from our own observations and convictions.

On Monday I participated in a siyyum, a completion of a one-day worldwide reading of the Tanakh, the whole Bible, which was organized by the Goldberg-Polins, the family of Hersh who is a Yerushalmi still captive in Gaza. His parents, Rachel and Jon, said that while they and other hostage families have been tirelessly speaking to the outside world, and lobbying their own Israeli leaders and powerful people around the world for the hostages’ release, they also decided it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah u’mitzvot.

So they organized this Torah study. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They had an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages with Leket Yisrael, and to post on one webpage acts of chesed people would be doing this week all over the world. There are at least 200 things pinned to that page, mitzvot of all kinds from taking the challah offering from bread to opening up one’s swimming pool to lots and lots of feeding to reaching out to call friends to cultivating patience to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel.

At the online siyyum, with about two hundred people, Jon and Rachel spoke about their faith, their conviction that Hersh and the others will come home and lead good lives, and they spoke those words toward him. They talked about how the Bible is showing them right now how to be resilient and hopeful. They talked about the importance of peace and safety for Jews and for all people.

This is how we are a blessing. It’s not a one-dimensional thing. It’s so much richer than the one word curses or the short phrase curses that the Balaks have been trying to get repeated over and over, from hill to mountain. And no one can say it quite like us. Bil’am says Ma tovu -- we say Hinei mah tov umah naim, shevet achim gam yachad: look how good and how more than just good, what we are all together.

And we don’t have to be perfect to bless ourselves nonetheless. The whole book of Numbers is still there, all the problems, and in fact immediately after the Bil’am-Balak story the Torah brings us back to ground level and more trouble with Israelite behavior. Rabbi David Kasher proposes that this was going on while Balak and Bil’am were watching from above. But still, says Rabbi Kasher, Bil’am proclaimed that we are blessed.

We are quite good at criticizing ourselves in real-time as Am Yisrael, and we don’t hide away the self-critical parts of the Torah either. But criticisms are not curses. As Rabbi Kasher says, they do not destroy our covenant or block Divine love for us, and they do not prevent Bil’am from noticing that we are blessed.

It would be great to have others stop trying to curse us. But mah tov, how good, if we would also bless ourselves and each other. Mah na’im, how delightful and how sweet we are, just here today on Shabbat. What are the good things you have to say about yourself as a Jew right now? What are the things you are proud of when you look out on your people, your community, your fellow Jews? Say it, and your heart becomes a mountain, and all of us will blessed.

Shabbat Shalom.

The Grape Cluster and the Two Who Carry It: A D'var Torah for Pride

This is the D'var Torah I gave for Pride Shabbat 5781/2021, for Parashat Sh'lach L'cha (Numbers 13:1-15:41).

I love this parasha about the scouts, the m’raglim, and the fact that the Torah is so brutally honest about how hard it is to go forward even to a land of milk and honey, even when the alternatives are to stay in a desert or to return to Mitzrayim (Egypt). I love the duality of feeling like giants vs. feeling like grasshoppers -- and as I’ll tell you in a bit, thanks to Pride Shabbat I love the big cluster of grapes, so large it takes two people to carry it.

When I look forward on Pride Shabbat, toward a promised land, I personally have to start by looking back, to a day I think of as “The Lunch of the Three Jonathans.”

It was right after a final exam during college, and I remember this lunch partly because we ate at one of the dining halls I almost never went to. I can’t remember if I ran into two other Jonathans by accident or if I had plans with one and the other showed up too.  These two other Jonathans were distinct and important in my life at that time.

Any one of us could have become rabbis, and we briefly talked about it that day because I thought I might and I really thought they should too, both of them. Of the three, Jonathan #1 -- I’ll call him just Jonathan -- he really was the one most suited at the time to become a rabbi. He had the widest vision; he had the widest ranging intellect of the three of us; he had integrity and fearlessness about being an activist; he had been an active youth group person in high school. I brought up the rabbi thing and Jonathan laughed, a certain look on his face that was trademark for him -- a combination of a silly grin and a knowing, “no-way” laugh. If it’s possible to be simultaneously loving and telling someone how stupid they sound for the thirtieth time, it was that kind of laugh.

Jonathan #2 at the table was me, the only one called Jon to the exclusion of Jonathan. Jonathan #3 was a star yeshiva student, sometimes called Jonathan and sometimes Jon, and he’s a whole other story.

I knew Jonathan wasn’t going to rabbinical school but it was fun to poke him about it periodically and I didn’t mind the look and the laugh. I thought I knew at the time why Jonathan wasn’t going to be a rabbi, because we were good friends and had talked about it. But it turns out, I didn’t know at all.

I didn’t know until another lunch three or four years later, in a different cafeteria, this one at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was in rabbinical school, and Jonathan was on a panel of three people brought in to talk about what it had been like to grow up Jewish and gay.

I knew Jonathan was gay, but that was the first time I heard him speak about what it was like to have been a gay Jewish teen, in a liberal Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. People in his youth group thought of Jonathan as the ultimate insider, a leader, he said -- and Jonathan told his story of being unseen, of the closet as the price he had to pay to belong. Other people, straight kids, could be draped on someone of the opposite sex in a friendly way as they hung out, but for him this kind of regular youth group behavior was a constant reminder of what he couldn’t share, and the very cameraderie that was so essential for other teens was alienating to him, and told him that there was no room for him within Judaism. We didn’t use words like “heteronormative” so much back then in the early ‘90s, not even the gay and lesbian speakers on the panel that day. But that’s what Jonathan was talking about.

Listening to Jonathan I was crushed on so many levels. Ashamed of ourselves as a Jewish community. Ashamed of the myself for the things I thought were tough for me when I was in USY. After hearing him talk that day at JTS, I couldn’t believe that Jonathan had ever set foot in Hillel.  He had so much Jewish and Israeli in him that just walking away was never an option -- that too would have denied him so much of himself. Jonathan came to the Seminary and said he appreciated that we students were listening to their stories, even though we couldn’t ever fix Judaism for him enough that it wouldn’t be painful. At least maybe we could do better for kids in the future.

I was crushed and ashamed that I had known Jonathan by then for at least five years, intense years, and considered him a good friend -- and I never knew any of this. What kind of a friend had I really been. What must have I communicated, out loud or in unspoken assumptions, that he wouldn’t think of me as someone he could share any of this with when we were in college.

I hold up these two lunches next to each other in my mind, the lunch of the three Jonathans in college and the lunch listening to Jonathan at JTS, because the second lunch was the first turning point for me when it came to think about Judaism and LGBTQ+. It was Jonathan’s gift to me and hopefully his gift through me. That was the first time I got that it wasn’t enough to be unfazed when someone came out, to treat it as no big deal, an interesting and important thing about someone just like other interesting and important things. That was the moment I realized that the Torah about LGBTQ+ lives ought not be confined to two verses in Leviticus. It’s because of Jonathan that I eventually became convinced about marriage equality -- later when his partner Peter was dying and I saw what was already one of the most beautiful love stories I had known become even more beautiful and heartbreaking. It took me quite a while even so to arrive where I got to about gay marriage right around the time I arrived here in New Hampshire.

I cannot stand here as an ally, or tell you that I use he/him/his pronouns, without acknowledging Jonathan, and the impact of his friendship and pain and integrity on me. It would not be truthful to say I always knew what the promised land looked like, that from the start I was like Kalev (Caleb) in our parasha and knew how to be a giant and not a grasshopper.

Jonathan might be horrified that I am talking about him to you only through a series of stories about Mitzrayim and the midbar, Egypt and the wilderness, and not getting on to talking about visions of the promised land. (I should say that Jonathan is someone I’ve also learned from about other things, such as affordable housing and Israel-Palestine.)  I really want to embrace the terrific formulation that the Tzedek crew created about this Shabbat, which I stole for my note yesterday. We are celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish lives and we are celebrating what queer Jews have brought to Judaism, to Torah itself.  So let’s talk about that enormous cluster of grapes, so unexpected, so big and juicy it takes two people to carry.

A cluster like maybe you’re not sure what it is, and I can say about myself that I’m only just beginning to get a view of what might be called queer Torah, just in the past two or three years. And I have to say, I’m excited and challenged. Here are a few things I’ve begun to see, on my own scouting of the land we’re heading to.

Liz brought to my attention the Queer Niggun Project -- melodies composed and traditional prayers interpreted by LGBTQ+ Jewish creators. Last night I was so taken by the “Carousel Niggun” for L’cha Dodi, one of the big Shabbat love songs -- this version mashes up very traditional, yeshivish Hebrew pronunciation with both old and new idioms for the metaphor of God and Israel as lovers, married partners.

Or take Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara, which she calls a “traditionally radical yeshiva.” Her insight is that queer theory is actually the key to understanding the Talmud, because the Talmud was originally a project of marginal Jews who saw the world shaking before other Jews did, and these different-living, different-thinking sages were far more ready when the Temple was destroyed than any other Jews to pick up the pieces and make something strong and beautiful, which is the foundation of all of our Judaism today.

Rabbi Lappe says that a queer perspective is actually helpful and necessary for everyone, because the Talmudic rabbis were brilliant at tooling for a world exactly like that of the scouts in our parasha, who knew they would have to move into a new world about which so much was uncertain.  So at Svara you study in Aramaic, the rabbis’ own language, whether you’ve ever studied before or not, and sometimes their study events attract an aundience that is majority straight, because they find it’s the queer perspective that is illuminating. Once upon a time, this kind of thinking was the very definition of Conservative Judaism. I heard this same kind of perspective encoded musically in Itai Gal’s niggun from last night.

So this is my very new-for-me take on queer Torah. People like me, communities like ours, have tended to talk about LGBTQ+ Jews as people “we” quote-unquote need to “welcome”, to “include”, and to do that we have to let go of something we have had, some earlier definition or some certainty. But really, these queer teachers and creators are saying: What we have is this cluster of fruit, and we can carry it together. Yes, you could say it’s heavy, it’s unusual, I don’t know what to make of it. Or you could say it is nourishing and it’s sweet and it’s been missing. It’s been there rooted in the land the whole time, but until we went looking for it, hopefully together, you didn’t recognize it. You thought milk and honey was in the future, but the truth is the promised land is even richer.

When I think about us, this community in particular, I think about the two scouts holding that large dowel between them, carrying this new and large fruit. I can easily imagine that one of them, but only one, was Kalev, confident about the future and ready to live in it right away. The other was concerned or had questions, felt the weight of it more than the sweetness. But they carried it together. That’s a moment I treasure too in the parasha. That’s why we invited Mimi Lemay here. That moment is a hope for us, so that we don’t get stuck in the desert for 40 years. We don’t know exactly what the promised land is like when it comes to equality or what it means truly to celebrate LGBTQ+ Jewish lives all the time. What we can know, and what I do know, is like this in the Torah’s words: tova ha-aretz m’od m’od. The land of our Pride is a good land; it is very, very good.

An Invitation From a Zionist to Non- or Anti-Zionists: Talk to Me

For the non-Zionists or anti-Zionist in my circle, a sincere set of questions from a Zionist.

I’m actually looking to understand where you are coming from, so these aren’t gotcha questions. I’ve been working on this for a week or more, but held off posting so as not to intrude on people’s marking Yom Hazikkaron, Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Nakba Day. This all came to me after I posted a comment to someone else's Facebook post, and that back-and-forth got me thinking.

I’m not looking for comments here from Zionists (other than myself). I will delete comments that are Zionists’ critiques of anti-Zionism (other than my own), and please don’t take that as a judgment of whether I agree or disagree. I am experimenting in a particular kind of exploration here – a Zionist convening a conversation with non- and anti-Zionists. I am trying to use those labels neutrally and you can tell me which one you prefer, or something else. I think this will be helpful (at least for me and maybe for some who “listen in”), among other things to get a clearer view of the the anti-Zionism-and-anti-Semitism issue.

I worried briefly that by writing these things down I might be giving air to “dangerous” ideas or commitments. But I realized first that I don’t have that kind of power. Everything I am writing is already out there, there is not an original idea here, and it’s better to be in a discussion about them even if I’m not going to change my mind today and neither are you. One of the problems with some of the campus protests is the notion that by even letting someone speak an opposing idea you are normalizing it. It’s all normalized already.

I am also not trying to use a conceptual discussion to divert myself from war, suffering, and moral accountability for myself or anyone else. I hope this might serve in a small way to advance peace.

So first, to check if I understand the bottom line:

An anti-Zionist holds that the entire area in dispute should be governed by either one state based on Palestinian nationality, or by one neutral state based on equal rights for everyone who lives there. (Obviously both those formulations beg a bunch of questions too.) Israel should ideally be replaced by one of those two things immediately or soon or eventually.

I am using the term “state” to refer to a sovereign governmental entity, and “nation” to refer to a specific group that has a common background and is tied to a territory.

Have I got it right so far?

If so, it seems to me there are various arguments one could make for why one or both of these non-Zionist scenarios is superior to the existence of Israel even as one of two states. Which one or ones of these below are your position? Am I missing anything or any nuance or variation? Here’s what I’ve got so far, in no particular order:

#1 Jews are not allowed by God to establish a sovereign state until the Mashiach (Messiah) comes. Unlike Israel, that state will be led by a descendent of King David.

#2 Zionism is bad for Judaism. Whether Judaism is a religion or a culture or whatever it is, as soon as it is wrapped up with nationalism it becomes corrupted and unable to sustain the Jewish people in our ethical, spiritual, or cultural quests and obligations.

#3 Nationalism is inherently problematic for anyone anywhere. It either is or tends toward racism or some form of supremacy. No state should be defined on the basis of any primary nationality.

#3a Zionism/Jewish nationalism is the paradigm case of racist nationalism.

#3a.1 Zionism is both the paradigm of and the prime feeder for racism and racist nationalism in other places.

#4 Unlike #3, a nation is a correct basis of a state (maybe: a nation is the best basis of a state). However, Jews are not the kind of group we mean when we use the term nation.

#4a Some Jews in Israel-Palestine could be defined as a national group, but the Jews who came after some point, maybe 1917 (Britain’s Balfour Declaration during World War I), never had the right to be there and are not part of a legitimate nation. They are or are descended from settler-colonialists.

#4b Jews are and continue to be a national group, but their claim to nationality is not as strong as the claim of Palestinians.

#5 The nation-state paradigm is particularly bad for territories with multiple national groups where one is not the clear majority and/or where there is a history of conflict between two or more groups. The paradigm of a majority with rights for the minority doesn’t work well enough in most such places, nor do arrangements that divide up and assign powers at the wholesale level between specific groups. Therefore no nationality should be the basis for sovereignty in any part of this particular land.

#6 A nation-state can be legitimate at one point but forfeit its legitimacy. Zionism was at some point no better or worse than any other nationalism, but Jews have forfeited the right to a nation-state based on their actions since then. (This might be the same as #3a above.)

#6a Zionism is the paradigm of a nation-state that has forfeited its right to statehood.

So again to pause and check, have I got all the varieties of anti-Zionism? If not, in the comments add a #7 or a variation of one of the others. I’m trying hard to be calm as I write these things down.

What’s next are my follow-up thoughts and questions on each of the above. Again, looking for someone who holds any of these positions to respond and make the case for any of those statements and against my critiques where I have them below. I’m a Zionist and you writing back are not, and we are not going to persuade each other today. If you don’t want to see my critiques or questions, but just respond to my formulations so far, that’s fine and thanks for reading up to here! If it’s more comfortable to message me privately that’s good also.

Probably you’ll have to scroll back and forth to follow my thoughts. I’ll give a capsule of each argument as I go but they are better explained above.

#1 (no Jewish state except by divine intervention) is the forceful position of religious Jewish groups such as Neturei Karta. I think there is a version of this among charedi (“ultraorthodox”) Jews who treat Israel as the regime that they live under and whose laws they follow, but who do not regard the state itself as having Jewish significance.

#2 (Zionism is bad for Judaism) is an argument that in my view only Jews can make. It’s for Jews to decide what the role of Zionism is or should be for us.

Now immediately I ask myself: Am I consistent here with relation to the Christian nationalism that affects me in the United States? As a Jew I guess I can’t argue that a Christian isn’t being true to their Christianity when they say that the U.S. is a Christian nation. That’s an argument Christians can have among themselves. I can argue against that as a statement about the U.S. but not as a statement about Christianity.

Back to the Zionism part of this, I will note that the past few years have been the first time I have spent significant time talking with Jews who hold this #2 position about Judaism and Zionism.

#3 (nation-states are inherently bad) is a principle I understand based on a lot of examples. Already in the 18^th century, this question was very hot in political theory, both within the classical liberal and utilitarian tradition and in the Schmidtian critique of that tradition.

This #3 is something I find hard to apply consistently in the world of today. Even though I live in the U.S., which is not a nationality-based state, very many of the countries in the world are. (Side issue – some on both the anti-racist left and the blood-and-soil or Christian nationalist right argue that the U.S. is or functions as a nation- or faith-based state, and that’s a terrible thing or a great thing. I disagree with both versions of the premise.)

I tend toward what I think I’ve heard Michael Walzer argue, which is that the nation-state is in most but not all places today the best imperfect way to secure human life and prosperity, and in many places human rights as well. The nation-state is certainly not universally just, so this is a sociological question worth asking here and anywhere. To me it’s a pragmatic question, not one of universal principle.

#3a (Zionism is the paradigm of racist nationalism) is the position that has been widely identified with anti-Zionism in the world since the 1960s. It is the version of anti-Zionism that I think people have foremost in mind when labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic. If this is your position, say more, because I can’t understand it as an objective comparison of nations and nationalisms. There are so many nation-states (and other states) which are violent or biased against some group within them or some outside group, with consequences at least as bad as in Israel-Palestine.

I would also note that the mirror version of #3a is what some Jews have said about Palestinian nationalism – that it has been uniquely violent in its actions and rhetoric, in both its nationalist and Islamist forms. I have worked hard to overcome this in myself as a characterization of Palestinian nationalism and nationality. The equation of Arab and/or Muslim with “terrorist” in American culture and politics is horrendous. Using “Zionist” as a slur is the same thing and it’s an anti-Semitic slur.

#4 (Jews aren’t really a nation) is a cousin of #2. To me it is also one of those things non-Jews can’t say. National groups are the ones who attest to their own experience of the things that define nations – common land, language, culture, history, etc. This is the very mistake that many Jews have made toward Palestinians when we have claimed that there is no such thing as Palestinian nationhood or that Palestinian nationhood was invented only recently. I can’t make that argument vis-à-vis Palestine, and others can’t tell Jews that they/we/some of us don’t have the right to define ourselves as a nation.

#4a (Israelis are settler-colonialists) -- a few types of thoughts, and maybe too much to put on this theme in this post, but I will anyway.

One is that groups are more than their individuals, and Jews have had a presence in the land continuously for more than three thousand years, and a consciousness of that presence and a longing for the land even when the numbers of Jews there has been small. If a people have roots in a land, they have roots in a land. To deny a universal Jewish connection to the Land of Israel would be anti-Semitic.

Second, Jews are not in Israel primarily as a Western project. Yes, there are Western Christians who have come to believe there is a role for the Jewish return in their Christian story. Yes, some Western powers have at different times supported Zionism, though not all of them and not all the time. Every single Middle Eastern group has had an imperial or imperial-style power allied with it or against it in the past two centuries.

But Zionism is a Jewish project. Jews drove the migrations to Israel on our own, because of our own ideas and situations. Jews were rejected in Europe as un-European, un-white, un-Christian, etc. They were not organized by the European authorities, but often in spite of them. British policy during the Mandate supported the Jews’ immigration for maybe half the years of their administration, and then turned against the Jews.

The other empirical thing, which I think goes here but I’m not sure, is that the flow of people and groups in and out of the land in question is something that has happened throughout its history since biblical times. Groups have gotten bigger and smaller and bigger again. Significant numbers of Arabs from elsewhere immigrated into Mandate Palestine between the wars, and became Palestinian at that point. Not as many as Jews from elsewhere, but somewhere from 100,000-200,000 Arabs. That doesn’t make them non-Palestinian. I think this kind of argument about who came when works better as a rationale for reuniting Palestinians in Palestine than for removing Jews from Israel or cutting some of them off from Israel.

And in the particular case of Israel-Palestine, coming up with objective indices of indigeneity is even harder. One study found that DNA found by archaeologists from biblical Canaanites correlates more of less the same to Arabs in and around Palestine and to Jews including Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who lived for centuries in part of Europe). Take that for whatever it’s worth ethically or scientifically.

I will say that the rhetoric of expelling Jews from Palestine is not generally what I have heard from the pro-Palestinian activists in my local community. More so in the campus protests. I’d like to know how this point plays in your own non-/anti-Zionist thinking or circle.

#4b I am not sure if I’ve heard this argument articulated much. If it’s your position I’d love to hear more.

I will say that there is a mirror of this argument made by some Jews about Palestinians, and it’s wrong in that direction just as much. When people say that the Arabs have all these countries and why do they need one more, or that Jordan is already the Palestinian state because of its large Palestinian population -- that’s a way of saying the Palestinians aren’t enough a nation to warrant their national rights. The argument doesn’t work for either Jews or Palestinians.

#5 This is a position like #3 (not #3a) that I take more seriously.

It’s one of the reasons I actually am for the two-state principle, with rights for the minorities who remain in the territory for either state. Two states are an attempt to make sure each nation is in a state where they are the vast majority, in order to reduce though not eliminate the tensions between groups. That was a rationale of the 1947 UN partition plan.

You could say #5 is also a critique of two states, linked to argument #3. That neither state will work with any minority within it, given the history and that a completely neutral state is best.

I would also say that if #5 is an argument against Zionism, it could equally be applied to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Jordan. Each has a different constitutional arrangement and some are not functioning well at all. I wonder if those who hold #5 as the main anti-Zionist rationale have thoughts about those other countries or are as upset by the carnage and death in those places in recent years.

Lebanon is a state that for a long time has tried to assign specific powers to each of its major subgroups, and it has not worked to generate a unified or functioning state. I don’t think any of us, Zionist or not, recommend it as a model for other places.

#5 can be a serious sociological and political science argument and I don’t see anything anti-Semitic about raising its questions. To push that only Israel among the nation-states of the world should give itself up unilaterally as a real-world test of this kind of argument, that’s one of the things one could argue is anti-Semitic or at least unfair.

#6 (Israel has forfeited its prior legitimacy as a nation-state) seems to me like one of the main arguments fueling the intensity of anti-Zionism right now. But tell me if I’m wrong.

If #6 is a good argument, then other states like Germany or Turkey would have long ago forfeited their right to exist and would have been replaced. That is not how the world ever saw it, though it’s true that Germany had a probationary period before essentially getting its independence back. But in fact Israel itself beginning in the 1950s established a relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany, so close to the end of the Shoah (Holocaust). One of the things that gives me hope about Israel-Palestine is the ongoing and uniquely positive relationship that Israel and Germany have.

So one critique of this argument, from the anti-Semitism angle: Since this has never been applied, even in the worst cases, why is it applicable only to the Jews?

#6a The labeling of Israel as a genocidal state across the generations is a way of saying this is the most evil, worst form of nationalism imaginable. This justifies on its terms singling out Israel as the one state on the planet that should not be a state.

I do not regard Israel’s actions as genocide. If you do, I don’t expect me to persuade you otherwise in a paragraph. I do understand why Palestinians are worried about their continued existence as a people and I don’t question the urgency with which this is raised and pressed. When I say it’s not genocide, I mean that I do not see Israel trying to annihilate all Palestinians, eliminate the Palestinians from the land, or remove all traces of their culture. To be clear, I do think Israel is guilty of very serious wrongs against individual Palestinians and the collective. It is also clear that there are powerful Jewish figures who dehumanize Arabs and do in fact want to remove Palestinians from part or all of the land. From within my own Zionism and Judaism, I have to work against those things.

Terms like “genocide” and “anti-Semitic” are meant to be descriptive, or at least to sound descriptive. They aren’t always. They can be ways to justify shutting down conversation, or delegitimizing or radically othering. So I’m in the position of both acknowledging why people raise the issue of genocide, and why it’s a conversation I have to be willing to have with people -- and also wanting others to see why calling Israel a genocidal state lands as an anti-Semitic move to single out Zionists/Jews in a threatening and dangerous way.

And again, I am noticing the ways many Jews single out Palestinian nationalism as having a uniquely cruel and violent history of terrorism that justifies turning away from all Palestinian national claims. If I turned around what I wrote in the previous paragraph, I would say both that Palestinians have what to answer for morally and politically, and also that other groups in the world who have fought for self-determination have engaged in horrible violence and yet their opponents have acknowledged them and made agreements with them, and coexistence has been possible despite the violent history (e.g. Northern Ireland).

So, there you have it. That’s my attempt as a Zionist to understand the arguments against Zionism, and some of my commentary on anti-Zionism. Your turn now, anti-Zionists and non-Zionists, speak to me if you like. Whether you are Palestinians or linked most directly to Palestinians, whether you are Jewish, or however you’ve come to that position in a way that is urgent for you. Thank you for listening so far, and reply to me or engage with me if you wish.

Yom Hashoah Remarks 5784 (2024)

This is what I said at the ceremony of lighting candles at the end of our annual Holocaust Remembrance Program in Nashua which the Jewish community holds at Rivier University in conjunction with the school, our Catholic partner in remembering. After the thank you's I said this:

We came here this evening to learn and to mourn. We learn to pick up lessons, and charges -- but we mourn just because. Not because everyone whose memory we honor was righteous or heroic or resilient. But just because they were ours.

We comfort each other, and we comfort especially those who are mourning a loved one whom you knew, or whom you might have known if not for the Shoah.

How many candles we could light. If we wanted to recite the names of every Jew who was lost and began today and did not stop, we would be here until the start of next spring.  We honor the memory of six million Jews and millions more – Roma, LGBTQ+, disabled, political opponents of the Nazi regime. We weep for every person who lost a life, and we weep for those who survived but lost loved ones, or whose body or soul was wounded forever by those who acted and those who stood by. 

As Jews we are grateful for you who have come to sit with us and around us as we grieve. Because alas, even our mourning has become contentious. We Jews have been told this year by too many that we cannot simply mourn our dead. That we cannot share the names and faces of our dead and our captives. That our pain is not significant enough. Among the many shattering things about last October 7 is that survivors of the Shoah had to go through it or see it, in Israel and here. So it is precious to have not just our own Jewish place but a public place, where we can mourn.

This year the charge of genocide is being directed against us. Jews in Israel are not engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people. Jews here are not supporting a genocide against Palestinians.

I am an educator and a member of the state Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education, so for those who say something else than what I jsut said and want to talk about it I offer myself to listen, to hear the pain of others and not just hear it but acknowledge it and the mourning and anger with it, and also to explain why I just said that the death and terrible suffering in Gaza is not genocide. If you need to have that conversation, or know someone who maybe does, if you have a young person in your life for instance, please come get my number or share it.

We often ask ourselves as Jews how much to devote our energies to the safety of Jews everywhere and to anti-Semitism, which has increased in all directions, and how much to work as allies to other groups who experience bias and intolerance and more, and need us with them. There is yet another part: As Jews we have to deal with the racism and Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias within us.

I have them, in ways I know and in ways I continue to discover. We have people within our Jewish collective who are powerful who dehumanize Arabs and who do not hide their wish actually to  remove Palestinians from their communities in many parts of the Land of Israel. We have to take responsibility for that. We have to live with the knowledge that in our hands are the lives, dignity, and freedom of another people. Not in our hands only, to be quite sure -- but still, much of it in our hands.

We have been insistent that the people of this country learn to see anti-Semitism is not just its overt forms but its most subtle forms, not just its physical forms but also its ideological ones. We have achieved support for that at the highest levels of American society and government. We have succeeded in passing a law in New Hampshire that every young person explore these things, even if they know not a single Jew personally, just because they are American. How could we not ask the same kind of thing of ourselves.

We have set a high standard for observation and nuance. We cannot be the one group not in the kinds of conversations everyone is having, with that level of nuance, even though we are in such pain and it is so hard.

Nor should we want to be. Looking at ourselves, doing our teshuvah, is not a reward to terrorists. It has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is on the contrary about who we see when we look at ourselves with the glorious third eye that sees us as the Divine sees us. It is how we know after the Shoah that we are still here. It is how we know, after everything, who, we, still, are.

We came here tonight for hope, in the story of people who were here for us when that took tremendous courage. We have heard a story that makes us less lonely as Jews, and it’s a story that might inspire us to be more courageous ourselves. This is an evening to see glimmers and sparks and beacons, not only in the past. To feel love and understanding across difference in this very room.

And we came here tonight to remember, to light candles because flame is both destruction and light. Let us light these candles, and bring to light again the beloved souls we are remembering here.

 

Tentative Torah For the Week's Parasha and Week of Protests

Some meandering and very rough notes about the opening of this week’s Torah reading, Leviticus 16, somehow sort of in light of week’s events at Columbia University and other places.

 

The chapter appears to be just the description by the Divine to Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) of an elaborate ritual for Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish high holy day of “atonement” – cleansing, resetting. This year, I’m thinking that it’s hinting at a conversation between the Divine and Moshe about his brother Aharon, who is not there at the moment. The conversation is about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing.

 

Some scholars view this conversation as the center of the Torah itself. It references the Holy of Holies, which is in the very center of the traveling community of Israel in the wilderness.

 

“The Divine said to Moshe – after the death of two of Aharon’s sons, in their coming near in the presence of the Divine, and they died. The Divine said to Moshe: Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come just anytime the Holy Place inside the curtain, facing the Cleansing-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover that is on the ark, and die – for in a cloud I am seen over the Cleanings-Resetting-Ransoming-Cover. This is how Aharon should come to the Holy Place…. And atone/cleanse/reset for himself and for his household…”

 

And then more, about atonement/cleansing/resetting/ransoming for the entire people, through offerings and a scapegoat and an encounter in a cloud in the Holy of Holies.

 

1. Nadav and Avihu

 

In the first verse, the Torah is already wrestling with itself. The two sons had names, so why are they hidden here? Nadav and Avihu were their names. They died in a fire that came out from the Divine presence, when the two of them brought some kind of unauthorized fire offering. So that’s a reason to hide them. But then the verse shifts, softens -- unauthorized, “strange” fire is reported here as “coming close to the Divine.” And the Torah just mentions that they died, as a thing that happened without pronouncing judgment. It happened and it seems to be how Aharon is marking time right now, or how Moshe is, or how the Divine is.

 

If you want to say Nadav and Avihu were punished, you could say they wouldn’t tolerate holiness by any kind of methodical system. They had waited through seven days of an elaborate ritual of dressing up and waiting inside, to become priests. As soon as that was over, they just came the way they decided was right. You could say they wanted a short cut to absolutes, to truth. They didn’t trust authority, not their father’s or the Divine’s. They were protesters against the system. They were individualists masquerading as brave rebels. They broke from their tribe and family, from a long collective process of inquiry into truth and value and holiness, and fell into groundthink, an echo chamber of two.

 

Or you could Nadav and Avihu were right, but the Torah has no room for them, or the system can’t figure out how to assimiliate them. They were on a different plane, one which just couldn’t coexist with the world of method and system. The Torah doesn’t say in the chapter where they died that they sinned. The “strange fire” of many translations is probably too harsh and wrong for the Hebrew “zarah”; “unauthorized” is more precise. So maybe their story isn’t about punishment at all? Nadav and Avihu were just completely absorbed, in every sense, figuratively and literally. And still we can’t build a bridge from the Torah to them, on this way of seeing it. And to those they left behind, the matter was never resolved, and no one understood who they were or what they had done.

 

2. Aharon and his two sons

 

I never noticed this before this week: the Divine is worried that Aharon will go back to the place where his sons died, and if so he would also die. He might go at the wrong time, or he might go not prepared in the authorized way.

 

None of them had been priests for long. But Aharon was the quintessential system guy. He had to be, after he had improvised in the Golden Calf situation and look at the chaos and carnage and death that ensued. Aharon was at the top of the careful pursuit of holiness, the absolute, and truth – with his carefully designed garments, and the step-by-step processes of shepherding people through their offerings whenever they felt whole, or guilty, or joyful. Aharon would be the one to make judgments, first by oracle and eventually by the book of Torah.

 

But even so Aharon couldn’t suppress the improvisational, says the midrash. Doing his compulsory figure-eights, Aharon had the cultivated calm and metronomic pace to listen to people. And when they hurt he wanted to help them find peace within, or reconciliation between.

 

From time to time, could it be that Aharon was jealous of his two sons? Wished he could dispense with the time-consuming processes and inquiries, and go straight to the absolute? Is that the ground he wanted to go back to, at the Holy Place – to experience himself as they did for a once and only time? Did he need go there to reassure himself that this was him, and that was them, so he could reground himself? Or did he ever doubt his own way? If he did, who else could the Divine possibly find, to model the best of the priestly way and not just the prophetic?

 

Or maybe Aharon would go to the Holy Place simply to weep at the site of his loss, which was or wasn't connected to anything Nadav and Avihu did or represented in relation to him or anything. And the Divine was worried the people might never get him back from there, or never get him back intact.

 

3. The Divine and Aharon

 

How to talk to Aharon about this? How to protect him from searing pain, from being retraumatized by the Holy Place itself? How to shield him from a complexity he might never emerge from?

 

But also, how could even the Divine know when Aharon was healed enough, clear enough, to play his essential role? Which was to help the nation take responsibility, be accountable in a global way, for all it had done over a year’s time. It was Aharon the priest, not Moshe the teacher, whom the Divine designated to shepherd them through. It was Aharon the Divine wanted to train for this, even after Aharon had made the Golden Calf.

 

I have sometimes thought that Aharon’s priestly life was the Divine’s way of guarding him from ever making another public pronouncement in front of an idol that *This* is your god, O Israel. Literally from now on his every word and move would be scripted. But for some reason, that’s not the Aharon I’m seeing this year in this text. The Divine wants the father of Nadav and Avihu to be the one who comes to their meeting together in the Holy of Holies, to be the one person who will speak out loud the Divine name.

 

4. The Divine and Moshe

 

So the Divine went to Moshe with this dilemma.

 

Usually when the Divine has a charge that involves Aharon, the Divine speaks to them together. Not always, but mostly. Here, it stays for the time being between the Divine and Moshe.

 

Let me tell you what I have in mind, which the people need soon, and we need Aharon to guide them through. Maybe if I tell you, Moshe, you can tell him? Or you’ll know when he will be able to take this on?

 

Could we possibly say that the Divine “felt better” unburdening from this load, even if it would be a charge, a command whose execution we don’t hear much about?

 

Usually the Torah records that Moshe passed along what was spoken to him by the Divine, and then the Torah reports who followed through on the matter. In this chapter, it’s only sort of. We hear at the very end that someone did what the Divine had charged Moshe, but you almost miss it. We don’t know if “he did what the Divine had charged” means that Moshe talked to Aharon, or that Aharon performed the ritual.

 

Usually we don’t think of the Divine and Moshe as having conversations of consoling, of reflection. Moshe is the insistent one, the resistant one, the impatient one, the one who has an answer back or pushes the Divine to do something or do the opposite of what was just announced. Who just demands that the imperatives of absolute truths and methodical systems be reconciled – and you, Divine, make that so now! Usually the Divine relies on Aharon to slow things down and soften the edges, or make the dilemmas less painful.

 

On very rare occasions, it has to be Moshe. In this chapter, Moshe just listens to the Divine, listens absolutely, like no other time. And I have to think Moshe sobs in worry for his brother, for the Divine, for the people who need both the Divine and Aharon. Sobs for himself, for being Moshe and not Aharon. For not being able to meet these needs of the people himself.

 

And the Divine will not forget this, and will one day teach Moshe how to be like Aharon. But not yet.

 

5. Aharon and the people

 

It’s not like there haven’t been “sin offerings” until this point. Somehow it hasn’t been enough.

 

They need from time to time a broader accountability, for their year as a nation. Not just when they realize or find out they’ve done wrong – that’s what the “sin offerings” were for. They need to be made, forced, to ask themselves on an annual basis what have we done wrong, and give real answers and not just formulaic ones.

 

Even if they are in pain and in mourning, they need this periodic accountability. Nadav and Avihu were their loss too. Their trauma. It happened in their Holy Place.

 

Aharon will have to be the one to lead them through this new Yom Kippur, this day of cleansing/resetting/ransoming themselves back. Partly because Moshe is too harsh. The teacher is always grading. Partly because Aharon is the master of both systematic method and peaceful reconciliation.

And because when Aharon shows the people how to do this, from within his own pains and questions and anger and uncertainties, they will say: If he can, if he must, then we must, and we can.

 

Aharon will show them that you start with yourself, and your family. Before he can engage the people in confession, he must reflect on himself, on Nadav and Avihu, on everyone who is left. He will confess what he can, and what he doesn’t know is a sin or not he will at least offer up out loud as a report, to say that he knows.

 

Then he will speak on behalf of the people. Atonement is a word muddying the matter. There is a dimension of confession and acknowledgement, and then there is the Kippur, the cleaning/resetting and possibly ransoming back of one’s own soul and the national soul.

 

Interlude – Two Goats

 

The Mishnah says the two goats have to be identical in every way. The one that will carry off all the people’s wrongs to a far-away, sealed-off place no one can get to – and the one whose blood Aharon will take with him into the Most Holy Place.

 

Our worst acts and our ideals, sometimes they flow from place that are twinned within us. A quantum entanglement. (Or maybe just a cliché.)

 

6. Aharon and the Divine, or: Two Cherubs, or: Us Now

 

In the Most Holy Place it is crowded and it is lonely.

 

I have often thought of this part of Yom Kippur, where Aharon disappears into a cloud and meets the Shechinah, right by the ark with the deposit of the Divine words, as a calm retreat. A place he can see the most things, and hear spoken the special sounds of the Divine name, a word reserved and protected from the ways the world barnacles onto even our best most powerful words. How peaceful, how whole in this place.

 

This year I wonder about the lonely part. How will the Divine and Aharon be together? Will the two cherubs, which in the midrash embrace when the people as a whole are reconciled – will they be a comforting metaphor, especially to Aharon, or a cruel reminder of the separations he feels? Or of Nadav and Avihu who came toward this place and are no more – tragically, or because of their choices?

 

From Tali Adler this year, I think for the first time that Aharon and the Divine speak to each other. It’s not just Aharon, speaking the Name. About the Golden Calf, and what happened; about Nadav and Avihu, and who they were and what they did and what happened to them, and how everyone was affected. Aharon and the Divine have the best and most difficult conversation, about the year past and the losses and the wrongs and the world. Just like our midrash says that revelation at Mt. Sinai took as long as each person needed – a spiritual case of special relativity – so too Aharon and the Divine speak. From their perspective it takes as long as they need, maybe infinitely long, even if to the outside it seems to be over in a few minutes.

 

They have the conversations we all need – about mourning, being wounded, accountability, uncertainty, protest, timing. I wish the Torah would have told us more how to do that.

 

I believe Aharon emerges more cleansed, and restored, and healed. Through his acknowledgements, of his own faults and those of the people. And then all of the people through him are cleansed and restored and healed. They feel better and they are better, in every sense of the word. I believe this because I believe Moshe doesn’t tell Aharon to do all of this until Aharon is ready. (I wish the Torah had told us more about when Aharon was ready.) I believe this because I believe it’s possible to be ready.

 

Not just back then, but for us too.

Being Jewish Is More Than Anti-Anti-Semitism

This was my D’var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 23, 2024.

This is my closing address for our six-week conference of the Society for the Advancement of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy.

Today is Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat that comes before Purim. Shabbat Zachor is the dark set-up for a zany festival.

Zachor means “remember.” We are charged in the Torah to remember the particularly brutal attack on us by Amalek in the desert, and that single attack gets a treatment that even Pharoah doesn’t get for his years-long campaign of killing and enslavement. How on-the-nose is that for this year. Zachor in our era became a watchword for the Shoah, for Never Forget.

Of course in the Torah zachor means other things too. It’s in the Ten Commandments as zachor et yom hashabbat, l’kad’sho – remember the day of Shabbat to make it holy. It’s l’ma’an tiz’k’ru at the end of the Shma -- remember the mitzvot and do them. And often it is remember the Divine who rescued you from slavery and brought you to a land flowing with milk and honey. Zachor is also a prayer we fling at God in the Torah – remember us, your covenant, our ancestors and their kindness and loyalty. Remember, God, to be who You are supposed to be in this world.

“Remember” as a concept in Torah is about bringing something to the forefront that is fundamental, but that we might have lost track of. All those zachors are hyperlinked with each other. So Shabbat Zachor is about bringing to the fore what it fundamental about us as Jews, when we are re-experiencing the confrontation with Amalek. Amalek is a symbol of physical threat and also represents our opposite: the ones who do not have awe for the Most Awesome One, and who choose the weakest to attack and kill rather than to help. The thing is: How do we pour energy into remembering Amalek without forgetting who we ourselves are.

Or to put it more simply – during a year of anti-Semitism like this, how do Jews remember to define ourselves as more than anti-anti-Semites.

There are three verses in the Megillah that I want to use to suggest an answer. One is from the beginning of Haman’s plot, one is the moment Esther decides to act, and one is after it’s all over.

Here is how Haman sells his plot to King Achashverosh, in chapter 3 of the Megillah (3:8-9): There exists one nation, dispersed and spread out among the nations, and their laws are different from every nation, and the laws of the king they do not do, and for the king there is no value in letting them be. If it seems good to the king, let it be written to make them vanish and I will weigh out ten thousands kikar of silver….

There is something perennial in this description of Jews are not fitting – not even fitting into categories of group that describe anyone else. We’re not in one place, we’re not just a religion, we’re not just a nation, and therefore we are hard to understand. And there is something so modern about Haman’s ancient description too. Noah Feldman recently described anti-Semitism as “shape-shifting”: “In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.”

So for many of those who regard capitalism as the fundamental evil of the world, Jews are identified as the secret bankers or by now the not-so-secret ones. For those who see immigrants as the big threat, Jews are the organizers of the “great replacement”, squeezing people of European origin and arranging to bring in people of color from Africa or Latin America. But for many who regard racism as the essential problem in America, the Jews through the Israel Defense Forces are the master trainers behind the most brutal practices of the police. If it’s imperial, Western exploitation that is the root of all evil, then Jews are the paradigmatic white colonialists. If it’s the corruption and weakness of Arab governments that are the problem, it’s because the Jews are occupying al-Aqsa or buying out Arab leaders, or manipulating the Americans. Etc., etc.

In each case, it’s like Haman said about the Jews – they are everywhere, they do what they want, and what would make our world better is exactly what these people don’t want. So it would be better if they were gone.

And there is always someone of stature who will listen because they are threatened by whatever that core problem is and desperate for an answer, or because there is money in going along. And once this gets out, there are plenty of people who buy into the problem statement and never thought about the real solutions, so they want to be on board and they will kiss Haman’s ring. And you never know when a Haman will speak to an Achashverosh and set all this in motion again in a dramatic way, as we are experiencing now.

Anti-Semitism isn’t about real Jews, but the reality is that we are the ones who attract Hamans all the time, and they aren’t just talk.

It’s real, and all of the anti-Semitisms I described are active and more, and not only in connection with Israel. I don’t pretend to be certain about what it means for us this year entirely. I was really sure that once Thanksgiving was over the campus protests would be over, and boy was I wrong.

Each time there is another anti-Semitic happening we are retraumatized, some of us even more than others, and each time our dreams of redemption absorb a blow.

We have to act, but the question is who are we when we do. Does zachor just mean to point these things out to other people relentlessly and keep our anger going to power us through?

And that brings me to a second verse, the next turning point, in chapter 4. Everyone knows Haman’s plot but Esther is just finding out about it from Mordechai. He sends her this message (4:14): If you stay completely silent in this time, relief and rescue will come to the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will vanish, and who knows if for a time like this you have arrived at royal power.

Mordechai seems to say: This too shall pass, because it always does. The only variable is how, and whether you be in that story or not. You have arrived at royal power, higa’t lamalchut. The best thing for us is that you be the one to orchestrate our response, from that power.

As Jews we think we are not powerful. Or we are afraid that if we say to ourselves that we are, we will give up the moral authority that comes from being targets and having a history of oppression. And we are afraid that if we act out of our power, we will be identified with whatever is evil about the power structure in our world and vilified even more.

But Esther hears what Mordechai says and she decides that she has power, she has malchut. Yes, it is royal power in a political sense. But in the Kabbalah malchut is also the name for the closest that spiritual power gets to infusing our bodies and our world. Malchut in the Megillah is political power infused with spiritual power.

For four decades, we are more powerful than Jews have ever been. More powerful than the Jews who stood at Mt. Sinai and more than the Jews of the kingdom of David and Solomon. In Israel, to be sure, we are powerful because no conventional army or other group can threaten the existence of the state any longer. In this country, Jews since the 1980s have been prominent whether the administration is Democratic or Republican, not just the Henry Kissinger-type Jews by name only but people identified publicly by Jewish values and religion.

Which means that we are powerful even when we are in danger and when we are attacked. This week in Israel was the funeral of Daniel Peretz z”l, a soldier who was killed on or just after October 7. He had been missing ever since and only just now was there conclusive evidence that he was dead. There was a funeral and his family had only some of his blood to bury; they wait for his body to be returned along with all the hostages. The rabbi at his funeral said, “We are not weak. We are not helpless. Daniel did not fall in Auschwitz, and he did not fall in Bergen-Belsen. He fell as a hero of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

It makes a difference if we see our power, our malchut, even when we are struggling and even when God forbid Jews are killed. Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi said recently that the core thing is the difference between victimhood and vulnerability. It’s impossible after October 8, he said, for Israelis to see themselves as victims anymore. We try to hold onto victimhood as a way to get sympathy from the world, as a way around the arguments about the war. Yet the answer to Hamas and to anti-Semitism in the world can’t any more be our victimhood and it won’t be sympathy.

Because we have malchut, we have allies, some of whom respect us and some of whom love us and some of whom just find value in us instrumentally. Because we have malchut, we can take risks, we can go to places and be in conversations that are uncomfortable, and we don’t have to win over everyone today, or to win over everyone period. Because we have power, we don’t have to fear every single social media post that is ridiculous.

Because we have power, we know that we are not vanishing even when others aren’t seeing us, and we can value ourselves and other Jews no matter what other people are seeing or saying. Because we have malchut, we can even look critically at ourselves while we are fighting, whether that fighting is on the battlefield or in political debate.

It is better, the Megillah says, for us to do that, rather than wait for someone else to protect us or to be the moral voice in this moment that rescues us or forces us to act the right way.

Which brings us to the last verse I want to cite, from Mordechai’s instructions at the end of the Megillah about how Purim should be remembered forever (9:22): As the days when the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month that was turned around for them from sorry to joy and from mourning to festive joy, to make them days of feasting and joy, and sending portions each person to their neighborhood and gifts for the poor.

These verses establishing Purim don’t specifically mention Haman at all, and they don’t revel in the killing of tens of thousands of people to the degree that non-Jews were actually afraid to be seen as not-Jewish.

We are not in the “after” of the war that began on October 7, or the ripples out from that. We are reading the Megillah “during.” We are also eating our hamantaschen and exchanging our treats while people are starving in Gaza, and while a great deal of that responsibility lies with Hamas, we have part of the responsibility for that starvation. We can’t this Purim tell a story that’s over – not for the hostages, and not for any of us. And in the future we won’t be able to tell a simple us-or-them story when it is over -- yes about the day of October 7 but not about the days after.

Mordechai and Esther drop the mitzvot of mishloach manot and matanot la’evyonim into Purim. They are a tikkun, a repair, for the worry that we will read only a story of might against might, and that we will only remember and tell about our vulnerability and nightmares. These practices remind us that the Megillah is not only a story of successful anti-anti-Semitism, but also a story of malchut, of friendship, of solidarity, of prayer, of trusting Esther and each other.

In this vein, at a recent conference in Israel called Hasmol Ha-emuni, “The Faithful Left”, Rabbi Daniel Epstein gave an arresting speech. After saying that even though right now questions of security and strategy are pressing, and questions of life and death, Rabbi Epstein said the fundamental question right now must be: Who are we.

Who are we as Israelis, as Jews, as human beings?

I am who I am because I relate to the other, to the stranger, despite the enormous spiritual difficulty in doing so.

As I would a person like me, someone who deserves freedom, dignity and humanity.

Our Sages taught: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person” -- It is difficult to learn from every person, when your enemy denies you the very title of “person”, and when you do not see in him a person. But in order to learn from every person, you must first see them as a person. This is not surrender, nor is it a magic bullet, it is simply the hard work that is incumbent upon us.

And maybe you will say this is not the time -- but this is exactly the time.

If I am not for myself who will be for me;

And if I am responsible only for myself, am I still even me

So -- if not now, when.

So Mordechai and Esther make sure that in telling the story of Purim, we tell about who we were in the middle of it, when the outcome wasn’t known, about how we found each other again. And they ask us to make Purim a day to stretch ourselves as mensches.

And the Megillah says the Jews accepted this way of framing Purim and will forever remember it this way, that same word “remember” yet again: v’zichram lo yasuf mizar’am (9:28).

*****

We have to work against anti-Semitism, and we have to be more than just anti-anti-Semites. And it’s important for the world to see how do we both of those things. All the zachors of the Torah are hyperlinked. They are heavy responsibilities. But my many months of Esther-Informed Spiritual Therapy make me hope they might be not heavy so much as hearty. That inside each hamantasch we get tomorrow -- each pastry pocket into which we have transmogrified Haman – we might taste a different zachor, a different sweet and hearty filling. May we get to savor and digest them all.

Shabbat Shalom, and Chag Purim Sameach.

Adar Conversation -- Getting to Mi Yode'a (Who Knows): Moral Clarity in a Topsy-Turvy World

Here is a session I did picking up on another of the themes I laid out in my talk a couple weeks ago. Grateful to Valley Beit Midrash for hosting it. You can watch or listen.

 

 

Follow the texts I refer to here on this source sheet at Sefaria.

Purim: The Buddy Film

This was my D'var Torah for Shabbat morning, March 16, 2024, Parashat Pekudei. which fell this year about a week before Purim.

It’s already after the Oscars, but I have a pitch for a new movie -- it could even be a franchise!

It’s about a pair of young friends who travel the world together. Every two years they pick a different spot. There has to be something grand about it -- imperial castles, or gaudy restaurants, or flamboyant festivals. They’re great friends who met in eighth grade and have always been just friends, nothing else going on there -- but each place they go, if anyone asks, they pass themselves off as cousins.

Before each of their travels, they do Wikipedia-level cultural research, giving themselves no more than two days to learn enough to choose new names to go by for the trip. Names that will help them blend in but are also a bit too on the nose. It’s kind of an inside joke between them. In Rome, for instance, they would be Sophia and Cesar, philosophy and empire.

You’re thinking: Entitled, alienated, bored millenials? Far from it. In fact the places they pick all have certain things in common.

They are prosperous places, but complacent. The ruling class is checked out, mildly corrupt, but mainly buffoons. There are latent tensions in society, whispers of racism and nativism, worries that it’s more. But the people who used to want to do something about it are stuck and have drifted away from each other. Nothing awful has happened there for a long time, but you never know. In each place there’s always someone who runs a boutique or a yoga studio or a food truck but used to be a young activist.

And here is the actual caper: The two friends choose these places in order to shake things up, to force the issue and help the people save themselves.

On the way, on the train, they talk through the whole night about all the big things. It’s like Before Sunrise or My Dinner With Andre. An hour before they arrive, they split up on the train so one will see they came together.

Once they arrive they head in different directions. She befriends the regional governor, who is (of course) recently single again. She takes language classes and always ends up starting an English-language book group for the other college students; they teach her colorful idioms and she brings them Shakespeare. He hangs out in the local taverns, figures out who the movers and shakers are, always buys the editor of the newspaper a drink.

For a few months, our gal and our guy don’t see much of each other. They pass in the streets and drop a note in each other’s pocket: Miss you, can’t wait to hang out. Did you catch that play, I think I’m learning enough of the language to get it. I heard the funniest joke, can’t wait to tell you. Dinner when we get back. Occasionally, someone notices these little connections between them and asks: Do you know each other or something? And they say: No -- well kinda. It’s my cousin; I can’t believe he’s here too.

After a few months, they know enough about the texture of the place to provoke the necessary crisis. You can probably fill this part in yourself: Local jerk who’s actually worse; owns a bunch of businesses; was the governor’s best friend back in the day. The jerk keeps selling the governor on changes to laws that one by one aren’t much, but together amount to a massive anti-immigrant crackdown. She gets her book group to raise their consciousness and take to the streets, and the owner of the boutique or yoga studio or food truck calls up her old friends and they group up too and show up together for the kids.

Right before the local jerk can make his final move, she invites him and the governor out to dinner at the gaudy restaurant down the path from the old imperial castle. She calls him out. The guy is run out of town.

Our guy and our gal, Sophia and Cesar or whatever they’re called this time around -- the people of the area finally put two and two together. They did know the other was here! The citizens honor them at a huge festival celebrating what they all achieved together. Speech, speech, the people demand, and you can write it: You people have welcomed us, you stood up for each other more than you ever realized you would because you’ve always loved each other, you just forgot for a time. Don’t forget anymore, tell this story, keep being good to each other. The two of us had to lose each other for most of a year -- don’t you all lose each other.

The people beg them to stay, but they have to move on. You know us as Sophia and Cesar, but that’s not who we really are. (In the film we learn her real name but never his.) Their year is done, and they’ve missed each other. They also need the friendship they saw all these people around them share, in the book group and the tavern and the streets. It’s time to find each other again. To tend to their own friendship for a year... and plan their next caper.

Do you recognize this movie?

If you think you don’t, think again, because the story I’ve told is the Megillah. Megillat Esther as: a buddy film.

I’ve taken a few liberties, of course; it’s my own fan fiction, my own midrash. But did I really? Couldn’t this be the story?  To give credit where credit is due, first of all I have to give a shout out to Paul Franks, who some of you know or remember from our community. One year around Purim at our Thursday Torah class, he said something like: The story of Esther and Mordechai is actual a heist; it’s Ocean’s Eleven. Something like that.

I’ve reimagined it instead as a buddy film, and I got the idea via Rabbi Josh Feigelson, who I quote here a lot, currently the leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. More on Rabbi Feigelson’s idea in a minute.

If the Megillah were a buddy film, wouldn’t it be great? In my pitch, Esther and Mordechai are old friends in every way. Their friendship is their company, the plays and the jokes they share, and how they want to change the world.

I’ve said before that within the Torah is absolutely one of the oldest buddy films of our culture. Moshe, Miryam, and Aharon -- they are for sure Luke, Leia, and Han Solo; they are Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. Each one in the group has a special power; it takes all of them to defeat the Empire or Voldemort; and they goof around and poke fun at each other, and grow and gather other friends too around them for all of it. Yes, I know in each case there is some kind of family dimension that’s hidden or created -- but really all of these are about friendship first.

Rabbi Feigelson says our parasha, Pekudei, has a buddy thing going too. The construction leaders for the Mishkan (the desert sanctuary) are Betzalel and Oholiav. This is me and not Rabbi Josh but it seems like this could be a classic Odd Couple dramatic situation. Betzalel means “in the shade of the Divine” -- he’s the spiritual free spirit. Oholiav has “my tent” in it -- he’s the quieter homebody. Rabbi Josh wrote this week: “It makes sense to me that the Torah would choose to highlight two friends at the center of the creation of the Mishkan, as the word for friend, chaver, is related to a word the Torah itself uses to describe putting together the Mishkan, l'chaber.”

Am I just messing around here, or does this have something to do with Purim and Shabbat?

I would love for the Megillah to be a buddy story between two people who come to Shushan calling themselves Esther and Mordechai. But regardless, Purim is a friendship chag. There is a specific mitzvah that I don’t think has a parallel anywhere else in Torah, the mitzvah of mishloach manot ish l’rei-eihu, of friends sending portions to each other. I can’t think of any other  affirmative mitzvah that is about friendship.

In the story of the defeat of Haman and the rescue of a whole people, part of the story is friends. A pair of friends, small groups of friends, even devious friends. In the aftermath of this violent self-defense, there is a charge to do something sweet for your friends. Something about friendship itself is a tikkun at this time of year, a repairing thing.  A tikkun for the large-scale brokenness of the Purim story.

As I was reimagining the Megillah as a buddy film, I was thinking about the interplay between our purposes and our friends, and all the forms that takes. I was thinking how the small joys of friendship and the big things we contemplate in life interweave, and how some friendships come out of meeting people around a collective purpose. Or sometimes it’s with our existing friends that we just find ourselves talking about the big world things on our minds and our place in their tikkun, as we drift into and out of those conversations even in the midst of a casual dinner or a gathering for fun.

In buddy movies there are all kinds of these friendships with all kinds of rhythms. From the intensity of Thelma and Louise or Butch and Sundance, to the quieter friendships, the once in a year or once in a reunion cycle reconnections. The friendships of extroverts and introverts. Maybe that’s why I imagine Esther and Mordechai as two people who pal around a lot, and also as two people who don’t see each other for a long time.

As we don’t live on bread alone, we also don’t live our dreams on ideas alone, or accomplish big things on meetings alone, or enjoy our lives on family alone.

The Purim practice of mishloach manot ish l’rei’eihu is a way to acknowlege that, to lift up the sweetness of the people we are friends with on any and all of those levels. Our tradition says a hearty treat is what we exchange, and it can be hearty food or even a hearty book!

And on Shabbat, we call the same kind of thing Shabbat dinner, or Shabbat lunch, or Kiddush at the synagogue. A day of friendship, with food made by friends and served by friends. We don’t go out on adventures, like in the buddy pics, but bring the stories of those adventures here, and as they project in the background we reconnect and talk.

There isn’t any aspect of our lives, any meaningful caper, that isn’t better as a buddy film. So on this Shabbat half an hour before Kiddush, and a week before Purim: May we send each other the blessings of Betzalel and Oholiav, of Moshe and Miryam and Aharon, of Esther and Mordechai.

Adar Conversations Continued: Esther and Responding to Anti-Semitism After October 7

Rabbi Karen G. Reiss Medwed and I recorded this conversation last night, and you can watch it on YouTube or listen as a podcast. The Megillah (the biblical Book of Esther) is a story of anti-Semitism set in the Diaspora in a multiethnic empire where Jews were living in peace. How did the Jews of the story see themselves in biblical Persia, according to the biblical text? What were the various ways they responded to being a minority and to anti-Semitism, and how did that unfold? How in particular did Esther view herself, act, adjust in real time? How should we take the end of the Megillah, the forceful and violent Jewish response described there?

All of this hits us differently after October 7. Karen and I walk through each part of the biblical story and reflect on how different parts resonate today and might answer some of the dilemmas we are facing. We recorded a week before Purim 5784/2024, and much of it reflects the year and also the particular moment during this war.

 

 

To read the biblical book of Esther (the Megillah): https://www.sefaria.org/Esther.1?ven=Tanakh:_The_Holy_Scriptures,_published_by_JPS&lang=bi

To continue this conversation with us, e-mail [email protected] and/or [email protected], and feel free to post a comment here as well.