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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.

 

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 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.

Israel's Declaration of Independence

 

 

I am posting this on the eve of Israel's 75th anniversary of independence. The translation is based on what I found on the Israeli Knesset website with my own revisions to bring the words closer to the Hebrew at the sacrifice occasionally of an equivalent English idiom. I have chosen to translate the term "Eretz Yisrael" throughout as "The Land of Israel", though there might be room to understand the term at the same time as "Palestine" in the sense it was understood in 1948, as that territory in question over which the British Mandate applied.

 

 

In Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) the Jewish nation arose. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first lived as a polity, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Out of this historic and traditional connection, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent generations they returned in their masses. Pioneers, immigrants in defiance of restrictive legislation and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave specific international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to establish anew its national home.

The Holocaust which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – proved anew the imperative of solving the problem of its homelessness and statelessness by re-establishing in the Land of Israel the Jewish State, which would open wide the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a full and equal member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi slaughter in Europe, as well as Jews from other lands, did not stop migrating to the Land of Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of the Land of Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.

Accordingly we have assembled, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish community of the Land of Israel and of the Zionist movement, on the day of the conclusion of the British Mandate over Palestine, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the basis of the decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel: the State of Israel.

We declare that beginning at the moment of the conclusion of the Mandate tonight, the eve of Shabbat, 6 Iyar 5708 (May 15, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the constitution which shall be adopted by the elected constituent assembly not later than the October 1, 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish state, to be called "Israel".

The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

The State of Israel is ready to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of the Land of Israel.

We call on the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to receive the State of Israel into the family of nations.

We call – even in the midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend a hand in peace and neighborliness to all neighboring states and their peoples, and appeal to them for cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to contribute its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We call to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of the Land of Israel through immigration and upbuilding and to stand by its side in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream of the redemption of Israel.

With trust in the Rock of Israel, we hereby affix our signatures in witness to this declaration, at this session of the Provisional Council of State on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, the Eve of Shabbat, 5 Iyyar 5708, May 14, 1948.

David Ben-Gurion
Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner

Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
David Zvi Pinkas

 

 

 

Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

 

My Testimony on "Divisive Concepts"

I testified at two committees of the New Hampshire legislature on bills to change or repeal our new "divisive concepts" law -- Senate Judiciary and House Education. I said essentially the same things at both hearings. Here it is, video and my written statement (they are the same).

 

Mr. Chairman and Honored Representatives: Thank you for your service and for this opportunity to address you. I am Rabbi Jonathan Spira-Savett. I live and work in Nashua, and I am the father of three children who are students and grads of our Nashua public schools. I myself have been a high school teacher of American history and literature, and I currently serve on our state’s Commission for Holocaust and Genocide Education. I come to speak to you in strong support of HB 1576.

This country saved the life of my family and my wife’s family, from the tyranny of the czar and the genocide of Hitler. I am a proud American and a religious person who says a blessing over freedom whenever I vote – and on voting days and occasions like today, I wear those commitments together on my body, above my head. I feel that my own group’s history obligates me in gratitude to be a civic leader in this country, and I carry responsibilities as a member of both a religious minority and the white majority.

Earlier in my career I had the opportunity to create from scratch a course for juniors about America in place of the usual AP history and literature out of that sense of obligation. I was working at a private Jewish high school, and together with a colleague, we set out to give our students interdisciplinary tools to look at American history and culture, and to look at themselves as critical citizens -- connected critics, to use the terminology of the political philosopher Michael Walzer. Perhaps this was natural for us as Jews, a group of whom so many have lived the “American Dream” and a group so often the targets of violence and discrimination even in this country. But what we did in that school was to prototype a concept with application far beyond our specific group and private school setting.

I am proud that the alums of that course have become those connected and critical citizens – doing work in everything from our national defense and intelligence, to representing the underrepresented before our Supreme Court. Facing all of our story as a nation, in an honest and questioning spirit, only fueled their engagement and their intense dedication to our country, their resilience to keep working on problems especially in times of crisis from 9/11 through now.

How will we motivate our public school students to locate themselves as creators of a more perfect union? How is it possible to draw lessons about the dynamics between one’s ideals and group pressure, if you don’t learn about three-fifths compromise and sit in shame and embarrassment, as well as understanding of political strategy? How is it possible for our students to learn about the inner challenges of actual leadership, what it’s like to sit where you sit where we hope they will one day -- unless they can probe Thomas Jefferson in both his idealism and his cowardice? Why bother reading Thoreau if we don’t allow students to take seriously his indictments of the nation and even of his own friends? How can we study Twain without asking whether he was lampooning the racism of his time or swept up in it?

Sometimes as teachers we have to make sure that a perspective that was or is in our history, that is so opposite of what a patriot teachr like me would ever want to entertain or say out loud, is made vivid and alive in class so students know what’s at stake – slaveholder, or Stalinist -- so it can be addressed in the safe and trusting container of our classrooms.

If the creators of divisive concepts laws such at the existing one are concerned about America lapsing into an unpatriotic socialism – well it is the hallmark of socialist dictatorships to write laws that hide their implications behind innocent sounding words, in order to sow doubt about whether you or someone else is breaking the law, and to create a situation where an official or another citizen can take legal action against you or just threaten to do so. Which is exactly what is happening in New Hampshire and elsewhere with such laws.

Members of my Jewish community have lived under such laws in our lifetimes in other lands, and that’s why they came here. I have had conversations with people running for school board or attending meetings – they are at my kid’s school, in my American neighborhood -- and there is never any actual incident of a teacher declaring that someone is “inherently racist” or that America is. There is only “I have heard of a few times”; “no, I can’t tell you the name of a school” and “I’m just trying to make sure it doesn’t happen here.” That is what the current law is, and it sure doesn’t sound like the American Constitution to me.

If that is not how you intended the current law, then consider my remarks to be teacher comments on an essay whose thesis was confusing and needs a rewrite. If you are serious about education for a proud and patriotic American citizenship, not just for diversity but for a difficult unity -- and I hope that you are, then show you are serious, by getting engaged with the fine work of our social studies leaders and our civic education thinkers. Pump more substantive standards into our system and invest in the resources and training for our educators around critical citizenship and a true patriotism. And in the meantime, get these words out of our current laws and pass HB 1576. Thank you for your time and I am happy to respond to any questions.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day was chosen by the UN because it is the day in 1945 when the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was finally liberated after the world woke up too late to the extent of Nazi atrocities. In 1942, a week earlier in the calendar, the Nazi leadership had convened the Wannsee Conference, a retreat at a fancy villa where plans to coordinate the "Final Solution" against the Jews was discussed and worked on.

 

We mourn all those who were murdered in the Holocaust -- Jews as well as Roma, disabled people, LGBT, political opponents of the Nazi regime. I mourn, for members of my own extended family and Laurie's family, and I think about how profoundly and concretely the Shoah affected our families.

 

I share this video made in New Hampshire for the purpose of supporting the education of students in public schools about the Shoah. There are interviews with survivors, family members, educators and others. Please share with anyone, especially with those who are teachers.

 

Violence and murder of one group by another is ancient, and the targeting of Jews is ancient as well. What makes the Nazi "Final Solution" different is the mobilization of culture, media, science, and industrial organization in a coordinated way to the goal of exterminating one group.

 

I am a member of our state's Holocaust and Genocide Education Commission, created to help our state's public schools fulfill a new mandate to teach about these things in middle and high schools. There are so parts of the specifics of the Shoah as a case study and the general themes that people ought to learn, among them:

• anti-Semitism in its modern forms and its many sources
• the systematizing and systemic mobilization of hate, discrimination, and violence against a group by a majority
• the sociology of followers and bystanders
• the "pyramid of hate" that helps us locate individual acts of bullying and violence in relation to larger trends of bias and violence
• the redemptive power of social leadership and individual moral courage

May the memories of all the individuals who were murdered in the Holocaust be remembered for a blessing.

 

Chatting Up the Local Proud Boys

That's me right after a conversation of about half an hour last night with a few members of the Proud Boys, who have become an unfortunate fixture around meetings of Nashua's Board of Education. Knowing they would be there I could not stay home. This is my family's school, and my community, and people I know who are being harassed by them.

A few thoughts:

1. It is more than distressing that this group is now a public fixture in Nashua particular at Board of Ed meetings. It is incredibly reassuring how easy it was to gather another group in much greater numbers outside the school against white nationalism. That latter group has developed an energy of ease and confidence, of genuine joy to see each other. It's not defensive or reactive, beyond the reactive element of choosing when to meet. There were no attempts to shout at the Proud Boys or chant at them, and in fact if had I read some things ahead of time from local organizers I'd have stuck with the plan of not engaging them at all and just focusing on being a pro-democracy coalition glad to be with each other.
2. I hope it's clear that when I'm talking about the Proud Boys, I mean just them, and not people generally who are politically conservative or Republicans.
3. I went to talk to a few of the Proud Boys. I introduced myself as a Jew and a rabbi. I wanted to stand that ground on their side of the sidewalk. A couple of them told me they have Jews in their local group. I'll be honest, I thought my presence might bait them, though I figured probably not, and it didn't.
4. So I had to decide whether to talk further or not. I take conversation seriously, and I don't enter into it as a stunt. My credibility on this point is perhaps all I uniquely have as a local leader, and I would not squander it for gamesmanship or a cheap self-congratulation. So I was willing, as long as I was talking, to talk with them based on what was right there on the sidewalk in their signs, in whatever came up in their words of our conversation, to talk about things in our actual community and not an image they had or I have about someone else, not something I had heard third-hand about them.
5. They were wearing body cameras, a couple of them. I don't know if they were real but they said it was for transparency. So perhaps the part of the conversation with the camera'd-up men is recorded somewhere and used for some purpose.
6. I asked them about their signs -- about Marxism, critical race theory -- and they told me about what Black Lives Matter leaders are trying to do and where they are trained, and what is being taught in Nashua schools. Except they couldn't tell me anything that was actually happening in any of our schools, or any specific curriculum, or any specific website. Nothing they referenced was anything other than vague. I gave them specifics about people in town, in the schools and the activist community, and in the course of that a couple of my interlocutors just walked away. I told them some things about website and incidents I thought they might be referring to, and what the facts are around those things that they might actually celebrate. No response. I said I was giving them the benefit in this conversation of not talking about general things I had read about them, and invited them to talk to me that way too.
7. I talked to them about accountability for bad things one's own group does on a number of levels. I told them about anti-Semitic intimidation in town from members of the Proud Boys, and they told me they don't stand for it and encouraged me to follow up with specifics. They gave me contact information that turned out to be bogus when I tried to follow up today. I told them what I do when there is anti-Semitism in groups I'm a part of or even groups I'm more loosely allied with, and how much time I spend speaking to groups or engaging people over coffee around that. I suggested that they could demonstrate something by doing the same, if they want to be taken seriously as a group for racial equality which is what their signs said last night.
8. Since they wanted to engage me in friendship as a Jew, I tried to work an analogy from exploring the history of white and Christian anti-Semitism even today, when a Jew like me has it good in white and American Christian society. I said it's essential to face this history, because that's part of making things better, and doing so doesn't make me anti-Christian or make the wounds of the past worse. In fact just the opposite, and I am quite the proof about it. They said that rehashing slavery and such is just "opening up wounds for no reason."
9. I talked about my patriotism, and my choice to live here and not in Israel, and how nothing in the exploration of the history around race in the U.S. makes me less committed to being American. I said it's possible to be ashamed of certain actions in the past of one's group or family, without being ashamed to be part of that group or family. This is how we heal. They didn't like that at all.
10. One person I spoke with said he was religious, and we talked about the sense of responsibility that comes with being a religious person and the awareness of how groups go astray that is also part of humanity. He said he thinks of human nature as susceptible to sin, but not any particular groups as groups. So groups within humanity don't need to confront their own past wrongs or explore themselves as groups; just humans as humans.
11. I told them about what members of my own family who are Black have experienced, and friends of mine in the local community, and asked if they have any sympathy for that, and got no response at all.
12. They asked me if I was aware of the law Gov. Sununu recently signed about teaching around race in schools. I explained to them what the Attorney General just announced about how our history can be taught. I think they thought the law supports their position and their case about the schools, and they were going to tell me how. But it turns out that it doesn't; just the opposite.
13. In this picture above I see one of the Proud Boys giving the OK sign. I understand this is either a trolling poke at me and who they take me to be -- maybe they wondered what I would be doing with that picture -- or it's an actual not-so-secret white nationalist signal meant to outsmart me for posting this picture. Neither of these is awesome, but I suppose I could have said I was taking a picture and would be writing about this and sharing the photo, so I'll call it a draw.

I was prepared, if the controversy about "critical race theory" was brought up in the Board of Ed meeting, to make a speech based on what I think democratic education is about. I have a pretty good speech, if I say so myself -- it's not the usual stuff, I think it's original, and I'll publish that at some point or maybe use it at the next Board of Ed meeting. I left the meeting inside pretty quickly because I'm not ready to be inside with a group that way. So I don't know what happened after I left, and I have to catch up.

Why did I bother with this? I wasn't going to change anyone's mind. But more and more, I think that when a group like the Proud Boys projects themselves, the important thing is to meet them not just as protestors, but as "I am the reality here." I can feel a change here in town; I could feel it in my body. My heart was not in any way pounding, as it usually is in these situations. That's because of this coalition that is coming together here in Nashua with confidence and dare I say love. It's the early days and it's not a uniform coalition who agree on everything when it comes to justice. Usually, the handful of times I've talked to activists like the Proud Boys I leave feeling frustrated and like I didn't come close to doing my part well. This time I knew I had the better of the argument, and they were far more tired of talking to me than vice versa.

Why did I bother? This makes me stronger and sharper. It tells me that the time I have spent slowly getting to know more people from religious and cultural groups outside my own is in fact making a difference. There are answers to some of the divisive questions today that are not just compromises or safety valves. I am proud to be in the mix, which is all that I am, and I would be proud to bring any of you who are local along with me.

The Sacrifice of Yitzchak: Remembering Rabin on the Anniversary of His Assassination

October 29, 2020 is by the Jewish calendar the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin z"l, by a Jewish religious extremist opposed to Rabin's peacemaking with the Palestinians. This is the D'var Torah I gave five years ago for Rabin's yahrzeit.

This is the week of the 20th yahrzeit for Yitzchak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel who was assassinated by a Jewish religious religious fanatic.  By the Jewish calendar it was last Sunday, and by the secular calendar next Wednesday.  His murder took place in the first hours of the week of פרשת וירא, this morning’s reading, and I will never forget one of the headlines in an Israeli paper the week of his funeral:  עקדת יצחק, the sacrifice of Yitzchak.

There is a particular story told about Yitzchak Rabin in all the biographies and memoirs from Israel’s War of Independence.  It was June of 1948, only about a month after the State of Israel officially came into being.  The Jews of Jerusalem were under siege, living truly near starvation, because the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was cut off around its midpoint by the Arab Legion, which was holding a police fortress in a place called Latrun.  The Israelis had already tried several times to storm Latrun without success.  The fortress was on ground just high enough to see the plain around it, and the Israelis did not have enough troops to take it by overwhelming force.  The battles for Latrun had been some of the costliest in the war in terms of lives lost; many of the soldiers had been refugees from the Holocaust, just liberated from displaced persons camps, with almost no training and no language in common to hear instructions in battle.

As dire as the siege was in Jerusalem, there were Arab armies threatening Jewish areas all over the country.  The Israeli commanders felt they had to make choices about where to deploy their limited number of trained forces, and they knew that attacking Latrun again would be futile  But David Ben Gurion was obsessed with Latrun and had summoned his army leaders repeatedly to demand an attack on Latrun to open the road to Jerusalem.

The commanders responsible in early June for the area of the road to Jerusalem included Mickey Marcus, an American Jew and experienced solider who had come to volunteer.  Some of you may know him and this part of the war through the film “Cast a Giant Shadow”, where he was played by Kirk Douglas.  Also Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach, the most elite and well-trained Jewish fighting group.  Yitzchak Rabin was the young commander of the Harel Brigade of the Palmach.  Ben Gurion summonded his commanders, and Alon and Marcus knew they would be asked to divert their scarce resources to Latrun, and when they would object they would be subject to Ben Gurion’s fury.

So they decided instead to sacrifice Yitzchak.  The 26-year-old Rabin went by himself to talk to Ben-Gurion, to present an alternative proposal.  By accident, one of Rabin’s underlings had discovered a way to go around Latrun, out of sight of the Arabs, and create a path for supplies to get to Jerusalem.   Rabin would propose that they pave a new supply route and avoid Latrun altogether.

When Rabin came to Ben Gurion, the prime minister lived up to his name, son of a lion cub, and flew into a two-hour rage.  Yitzchak was astounded as Ben Gurion at one point threatened to shoot his own commander, Yigal Allon, in the head, but Rabin stood his ground.  Where other times Ben Gurion had overruled a more senior commander and ordered an attack on Latrun, not this time.  The attack did not take place, the road was built, and the siege of Jerusalem came to an end just in the nick of time.

For people who knew Rabin or wrote later about his life, that confrontation with Ben Gurion exemplified a couple key things about the man.  His wife Leah wrote in her memoir that as a commander and a statesman, Yitzchak was fanatical about his goals and but always looking for the least costly way to achieve them.  He tried to minimize risk to soldiers in battle -- by doing his own detail work of intelligence and reconnaissance to outmaneuver his enemy, by considering creative alternatives, rather than relying on superior force alone which could lose more more lives.  After Ben Gurion, Rabin was probably the most detail-oriented and methodical prime minister Israel has ever had.

The confrontation with Ben-Gurion also showed how little Rabin was interested in ingratiating himself with anyone if those things put the mission at risk.  He didn’t care overly about the feelings of his peers or his superiors, but about the many people he knew less well, the men who served under him.  So Rabin didn’t bother to join Mapai, Ben Gurion’s political party, even though he would have advanced much faster if he had.  He had no hesitation when he was prime minister about cutting his own mentor, Yigal Allon, down to size when he disagreed with him.  

Later on, as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. and then as prime minister, Rabin could be plenty sharp and critical.  He could seem detached.  But at the same time, and this was key -- as long as he could win he had no need to demonize the people who disagreed with him.

These were not the things we call people skills.  Rabin was not a jolly man, and in no way a glad-handing politician.  Leah reprints a letter she received when they were dating in the mid-1940s and Yitzchak was imprisoned by the British, and it was more like a business letter than a love letter.  Rabin was not beloved or revered, the way his peers like Moshe Dayan would be.  He didn’t unite his country when he was prime minister or when he signed the agreement with PLO on the White House lawn.  It seemed ridiculous to me when Bill Clinton called Rabin his friend.

Yet without the typical people skills, Rabin was able, at key times, to surprise people and earn their trust.  How could Rabin have possibly negotiated with the Palestinians?  For fifty years, he had not only defeated them in battle -- he had out-organized and outwitted and outsmarted them.  He had every reason to have contempt for them, as soliders and leaders, and therefore to doubt their ability to do the things they were promising -- but he chose to see them simply as opponents.  Just as in 1948, Rabin was willing to fight only the battle that was necessary, in the 1990s Rabin was clear about exactly how much he needed to be the PLO’s opponent and in what ways he could be their partner.

Rabin knew that in order to bring Israelis along with the peace process, he would have to teach through his example how to balance peace ahead with justice and grief looking back.  At first, he wasn’t going to go to the White House to sign the Oslo agreement, but eventually he figured out that if he didn’t, Israelis would write it off as a ridiculous dream cooked up by Shimon Peres.  Rabin managed every step so carefully, relating just as in 1948 not to his fellow leaders but to the average Israeli.  So he opened his speech at the White House by talking about Israeli families who would never stop grievning, he shook Arafat’s hand in the only way he could, politely but not enthusiastically.  

At the White House and in later ceremonies to sign agreements with Arafat, Rabin put on his non-Israeli-style suit and looked like an adult, and made Arafat look like a child who could not take off his costume.  Rabin made sure to have a working relationship with Arafat and to show that when they appeared together, but he was also carefuly not to portray to Israelis that he and Arafat were becoming friends.  He was perfect for the role; he wasn’t big for smiling or scolding, his natural face and voice were holding back even when he tried to do revolutionary things.

Rabin understood that leadership is not like other relationships.  He didn’t try to use on the people skills he didn’t have, because that’s not what leading his people is only about.  And Rabin could lead because he was aware that he was modeling a new way of being a Jew in a new world.  Not just modeling, but maybe inventing it as he went along.

In 1994, at an award ceremony honoring Israeli writers just a year after the White House handshake, Rabin said:  “These days we are in the midst of a battle without cannons in a war without fire, which may turn out to be perhaps one of the most significant and decisive battles in the annals of the Jewish people in recent generations.”  In that speech, he said:

Let us admit the truth: the atmosphere of siege, the hostility, and the war have elicited tremendous energies from us for almost five decades. Much of what has been achieved in the State of Israel in all areas is a direct or indirect outcome of the necessity to defend our existence, of the atmosphere of siege from which we are so glad to free ourselves these days. Ours was a productive unity, a healthy unity, standing shoulder to shoulder against the manifestations of enmity and facing a hostile world. Just between us, we have become accustomed to this lifestyle, and, already, we think we cannot do without it. Perhaps we have even come to love the pleasant warmth of power and the encircling siege.

And now? What are we to do now? What message should we deliver to our people these days? How should we avoid becoming entangled in delivering a double, and contradictory, message: are we on the brink of peace, or do we expect another war? How do we change the atmosphere that has characterized our state for generations? What should we choose – should we declaim again and again: "a state under siege," "the whole world is against us," "all the Arabs are the same"? Or perhaps we should bear a new message: "the new Middle East," "the peace of the brave," "nation shall not lift up sword against nation," "He who makes peace in heaven above..."?

How do we become accustomed to a world of new concepts, to a different culture, a different style, and at the same time not completely abandon the old world, just in case, God forbid, we might need it again? How do we maintain the invigorating rhythm of our lives, the Jewish mind, all those tremendous energies of ours, our unity – without the sword hanging over our heads?

This is the Rabin who was taken from us by his assassin. How do we become accustomed to a world of new concepts,.... and at the same time not completely abandon the old world, just in case, God forbid, we might need it again?  This is who the Jewish people lost on the 12th of Marcheshvan 5755.  Not necessarily the man who signed the Oslo agreement, which may well have stalled even had he lived.  We lost the man who fought wars until the moment he thought they were not necessary, and was prepared to fight them again if necessary.  We lost the one who hoped we might figure out how to live as Jews in the world we are in and not in the mythic worlds of dreamy peace or eternal Jew-hatred.  

Rabin’s assassin took the worst message from the Akedah -- that to be Jewish is to live as though you were always just escaping a knife at your throat; and that extreme atrocities are beloved to God.  That is a Judaism of no joy and no hope, an impossible Judaism -- and in the square 20 years ago a desecration of God’s name.

Yitzchak Rabin was the truer heir of the biblical Yitzchak.  He lived through the wars of survival and knew they were over for his people, and he didn’t pretend to know for sure what was next or how long it would take.

We would honor Yitzchak Rabin’s memory most if we could find a way as Jews of being comfortable with our power, and with taking responsibility for how we use it.  We would honor his legacy if we could take the proper measure of the threats to Israel, and to Jews, and fight them rather than our ghosts, and take satisfaction when we are defeating them  That is the true spirituality of Zionism.  To know the perfect place between the smile and the scold, to scowl appropriately while trying revolutionary things.

Yehi zichro baruch -- May Yitzchak’s memory be a blessing.

My Passover Haggadah Commentary for This Year

I just finished these thoughts. They are a combination of commentaries, reflection pieces, discussion prompts related to the Seder text, the Pesach Haggadah. You could read them before or after a Seder, or even during. Wishing everyone a good festival and a Zissen (sweet) Pesach.

https://images.shulcloud.com/544/uploads/Pesach/sederthoughts5780.pdf