Tag Archives: Judaism

Day of Atonement 5785

I’m an American Jew, and this year the High Holy Days of my religion have a special, and terrible, meaning for me. Another year of violence in the Middle East has brought tragedy to millions, and contributed to a surge in anti-semitism around the world. Last Monday, I found some comfort in the company of others who feel, as I do, that our community should mark this Day of Atonement with more than personal acknowledgement of what we have done wrong.

A year after a vicious Hamas attack on Israeli civilians turned long-simmering violence into open warfare, a couple of thousand non-Zionist Jews and our allies gathered in the Boston Garden. We met to grieve — not only for the more than 1200 Israelis killed on that day, and the hundreds kidnapped, but for the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the bloody year since then, and for the Lebanese who are now also under Israeli attack. The event was organized by IfNotNow, a group devoted to ending American support for Israeli apartheid and aggression toward Palestinians.

Late on the damp Monday afternoon of that sad anniversary, before most of the crowd showed up, a young rabbinical student led us through an ancient Jewish ritual called Tashlikh. This ceremony is performed during the “Days of Awe” between Rosh HaShanah – the Jewish New Year – and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One symbolically casts off one’s sins by throwing something in flowing water to be washed away. Usually people throw bread crumbs, but out of concern for the fish in the pond, we threw pebbles or dead leaves instead. The pond water wasn’t washing anything away, which also seemed symbolic to me.

The theme of the main event was “Every life is a universe”. Speakers included Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rabbi Toba Spitzer, Imam Ahmad Barry, and Rakeea Chesick Gordis. That young woman gave eloquent testimony to losing close friends and family members during the Gaza war, including both Israelis and Palestinians. She spoke of drowning in grief, feeling overwhelmed by waves of it. Again and again, the speakers insisted: Jews cannot be safe if Palestinians are not free.

After an hour of speeches, prayers, and songs, rain began to drip through the trees. Mosquitos emerged from the mist over the pond to ensure our discomfort. Considering the suffering we were there to commemorate, nobody complained. At one point, volunteers handed out small strips of cloth we were to rip, as a sign of mourning, and attach to our clothes.

October 12 is the Day of Atonement in the current year 5785 of the Hebrew calendar. I believe that American Jews have a lot to atone for. I am not refering to personal sins; Jews are no more or less hateful, thoughtless, or selfish than anybody else. I mean the Jewish community as a whole. For the most part, we have supported Israel for the 76 years of its existence, no matter what it did. We have pressured the US to continue sending more than $3 billion a year in military assistance to Israel, and ignored what Israel did with all those weapons.

Ever since the Holocaust killed six million Jews in Europe and the Nakba displaced three-quarters of a million Palestinians in Israel, both sides have committed too many atrocities to list. The difference is that American weapons have turned the Jewish state from David into Goliath. Israel has become a paragon of military might. Nearly all of its people are or have been soldiers. They believe they are fighting for survival, which excuses all their violence as self-defense.

According to the United Nations, from 2008 through 2020, 5590 Palestinians were killed in the ongoing hostilities, compared to 251 Israelis. There are many conflicting estimates of the casualties since the founding of Israel in 1948, but on one thing they all agree. Far more Palestinians have died than Israelis. This conflict is deeply lopsided, and not only in lives lost. The longer it goes on, the more territory originally set aside for a Palestinian state disappears into Israeli hands. Even the rubble that was Gaza is likely to get rebuilt into beach towns for Jewish tourists.

Now it seems that many American Jews have decided to drop their indifference to religion and rejoin the Jewish community. During most wars, previously apolitical people tend to rally around the flag. This is “my country, right or wrong” time. Jews everywhere have been taught to believe that Israel, and not the Torah, is the central element of our religion. In many ways, Israel has become our religion.

After 9/11, the US squandered the world’s sympathy by starting two completely unnecessary and unprovoked wars. Instead of hunting down the gang of Saudi terrorists that bombed the World Trade Center, we invaded and occupied Afghanistan and then Iraq. We killed hundreds of thousands, and made millions homeless. Now Israel has squandered the sympathy it garnered after the Hamas attack by bombing the millions of Palestinians it holds captive behind walls and military checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Most of those who survive are now homeless, and many are starving.

Zionist Jews, and most Israelis, believe that this violence is justified because it’s the only way to destroy the criminal gang that is Hamas. Yet this policy is doomed to fail. Violence begets violence. Every time an Israeli bomb kills someone, Hamas can recruit more members from among the people who loved them. Zionists blame Hamas for all the destruction on both sides, just as the most extreme pro-Palestinians blame it entirely on Israel’s decades of oppression and occupation.

The truth is that there is plenty of blame to go around. So long as we find war acceptable, we all must share the blame for the loss of so many irreplaceable universes. I am grateful to IfNotNow for giving us a chance to start the new year by acknowledging our part in the ongoing crime of mass murder. May the year to come bring a ceasefire, and healing to all who suffer. We must make peace. If not now, then when?

Common Ground

My family was not religious, but we were always aware that we were Jews. Until I was 12, we were the only Jewish family in a Catholic neighborhood. Some families wouldn’t let their children play with us. My parents sent us to Hebrew School, to get in touch with our roots – as we say now. My brothers and I attended for two hours after public school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and for four hours on Sunday mornings. We learned, or at least they tried to teach us, Biblical and modern Hebrew, the five books of Moses and historical commentary, and customs and ceremonies. What they also taught us, though we didn’t realize it until much later, was Zionism.

I was born three years after the Holocaust killed all our relatives who didn’t leave Poland in time. We learned that even though the world knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, few nations would accept Jewish refugees. Even the USA forced ships full of them to return to Germany. When anti-semites came for the Jews, we could not depend on anyone else to help us.

So, we were taught, Israel was the only safe place for Jews. It was the promised land of milk and honey. God had made a covenant with us: if we obeyed His laws, we would thrive in this land. We were taught nothing about the people who had been living there during the 2,000 years in which most Jews were elsewhere.

Jews in Israel were turning the desert green, they taught us. Jews were no longer helpless victims of anti-semites; in Israel, we were armed warriors, defending our new-built oases from the jealous tribes around us. Like the Sabra cactus that symbolized the settlers, we would be tough on the outside while we stayed soft on the inside.

At the Passover seder every year, my family repeated the ancient words: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Not that we intended to go ourselves. But Israel was the refuge of last resort. When we heard news reports about Arab attacks on Israel, our rabbis urged us to send money so that Israel could defend itself – for all our sakes.

The propaganda was thorough and relentless. Over time, support for Israel became as much an article of faith as the existence of God – and for many Jews, more worthy of our belief. Any Jew who dared to question Israel’s behavior was damned as a traitor to our people.

While we were learning about the Holocaust and Arab attacks on Jewish settlements, Palestinians were learning about the forced expulsion of 750,000 Arab residents from Israel after WWII – the Nakba – and the theft of Arab land and often violent repression of Arab residents ever since. Nobody taught American Jews about the Nakba. Nobody taught Palestinians about the Holocaust. The two peoples were deliberately blinded to each other’s suffering.

Now it should be no surprise to anyone that these two damaged, exploited, disrespected peoples, abandoned by the rest of the world after it trapped them together, have learned to identify themselves as bitter enemies, each willing to fight to the death to eliminate the other from their contested land.

One side shouts Holocaust. The other shouts Nakba. Both have long lists of atrocities to shout thereafter. Amid the shouting, who is listening? Who is able to see that everyone on both sides is the walking wounded?

It is heartening that today, in many demonstrations calling for a permanent ceasefire, progressive Jewish organizations are taking a leading role. At least some American Jews are finally waking up to our share of responsibility for the current disaster in Gaza. We have allowed ourselves to be silenced, while news of Israeli brutality sifted down to us past the censors. We have allowed too many of our so-called spiritual leaders to shame us out of fellow-feeling for Palestinians. We have continued to support an apartheid state that has segregated and oppressed Arabs just as Jews were segregated and oppressed in Eastern Europe long before the Nazis came to power. And we have sent untold millions of dollars, and urged the American government to send almost four billion dollars a year, to arm a country that always seems to meet violence with much greater violence.

Jews and Palestinians have all been brainwashed. Lost in the fog of partisan information is the sense of common ground – the awareness that we humans must share a finite and vulnerable planet. We have been taught to believe that Israel, or Palestine, has a right to exist. What we must come to understand is that no country has a right to exist. Only people have that right. Countries are products of our imagination. People are real. Until we can learn to acknowledge the harm we have all done to others, and determine to live together in peace, none of us will be safe.

Next year, may we share Jerusalem.

But is it good for the Jews?

To quote Robert Burns: “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!”

Growing up in my argumentative Jewish family, I remember most political and cultural issues were subjected, at some point, to the question: but is it good for the Jews? This question was also the punchline of many jokes. I was born three years after the Holocaust, when my relatives remaining in Poland were massacred. I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 12. So I knew about a lot of events, places, and people that had not been good for the Jews. Not all members of my family believed in God. But every one of us believed that no matter where we lived, how thoroughly we acculturated, or how outwardly successful we became, our environment might at any moment become not good for the Jews. We assumed antisemitism was everywhere, perhaps well-hidden, but endemic. 

Israel was our hope. Every other country might reject or turn against us, but Israel would always let us in and protect us. Zionism was our strategy for long-term survival. The country was surrounded by enemies, its allies were self-serving and unreliable, but Israel was backed by God (and American military aid) and would prevail, like David against Goliath. 

What many American Jews are only now realizing is that over the past 75 years, Israel has become Goliath and the Palestinians have become David. All the military might is on Israel’s side. Arab countries have paid lip service to the cause of Palestinians without offering them much actual help. They are just pawns in the great game. World sympathy, which might have been a major factor in Israel’s favor after the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, has turned to anger because of Netanyahu’s brutal response. He has bombed most of Gaza to rubble and killed around 25,000 people, mostly women and children. Many more are sure to die of bombs, famine, thirst, and disease.

Now “my” people, only 80 years after being subject to genocide, are accused of committing genocide ourselves. Many Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora (the whole world outside Israel) respond indignantly that Hamas wants to wipe out all Jews in Israel, so Netanyahu is trying to wipe out Hamas instead. And besides, they say, Hamas is using Palestinian civilians as human shields, so it’s impossible to kill Hamas militants without killing innocent people. It’s not our fault. We have no choice. It’s either them or us. If Israel is no longer safe for the Jews, nowhere is safe. So this carnage is good for the Jews around the world.

But the massive rise in antisemitism worldwide proves that the opposite is true. Seventy-five years of Israel’s terrible treatment of Palestinians – forcing Palestinians off their land, herding them into open-air prisons like Gaza in a virtual apartheid regime, depriving them of full citizenship in Israel, making a separate homeland all but impossible, meeting thrown rocks with bullets, finally telling two million Gazan residents to crowd into southern Gaza and then bombing southern Gaza – have had their predictable result. Nonviolent resistance has failed, with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement dismissed as antisemitic. Israel has left Palestinians with few options besides violent resistance, ie., Hamas. The many Palestinians who hate Hamas are afraid to say so in public. The thugs would torture and kill them and their families. Meanwhile, every innocent killed by Israeli bombs or siege conditions creates more recruits for Hamas. Hamas is not, as Israeli leaders keep calling it, a snake. It is a Hydra. Cut off one head, and more will grow in its place.

The hideous ambitions of Netanyahu give credence to South Africa’s claim of genocide. Meanwhile, the People of the Book have forgotten the words of one of our greatest teachers, Rabbi Hillel. When challenged by some joker to teach him the Torah while he stood on one foot, Hillel responded: “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to you. The rest is commentary.”

American Jews have pushed our government to support Israel no matter what it does. We should remember that we are Jewish before we are Zionist. What Israel is doing to Gazans goes against everything Judaism has always stood for. It is beyond horrible for Palestinians. It’s time more of us realized that it is also very bad for the Jews.

Atheist’s Bible: The Meek

I was raised Jewish. The New Testament was off limits. When I got old enough to question why, I read the books, and became – not a Christian – but a fan of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a radical poet, a superb teacher, a lyrical rabbi. His words, his stories, his metaphors, moved and delighted me in a way that rarely happened when I studied Jewish lore in the Talmud.

What was so dangerous in the teachings of this great rabbi that his work was forbidden to Jews? He taught that the most important thing was to be kind to one another, not to follow the rules. This threatened the fabric of Judaism, knitted from thousands of strands of legal arguments, meant to cover the actions of Jews at all times. If one could put aside these historic threads, one would be, in effect, naked in the world. One would be the agent of one’s own actions rather than limited by the prescriptions and prohibitions of generations of wise men.

If the meek are going to inherit the earth, we should get ourselves organized.

In a system, or an anti-system, like the one Jesus proposed, every individual would be a free actor. Such a person might or might not choose to remain in the community built for protection and survival over the centuries. The rabbis, those living encyclopedias of rules and regulations, would be no more and no less than any other people except as they demonstrated compassion towards others, non-Jews as well as Jews. All would be equal in the sight of God.

What Jesus represented was a threat to the powers that be. In his day, those were the Sanhedrin, the council of rabbis, as well as the occupying army of the Romans. In the centuries to come, they were the Church, and the priests who claimed its power for themselves, as well as nation-states. He taught that souls were equal, even the souls of small children, and of women. What glory they could claim belonged to themselves alone, for their acts of kindness, and not for their service to organized religion. To counter such egalitarianism, the Church turned the words of Jesus into mysteries that could only be safely plumbed by priests, intermediaries trained by the Church. Ordinary people could not be trusted with the Word.

Jesus trusted ordinary people. He could have remained among the rabbis, a precocious scholar, rising to be powerful and important among the established leaders of his faith. Instead he hung out with prostitutes, drinkers, and gamblers, not to mention fishermen. He believed in the meek, the gentle, the powerless. He threatened the idea of corporal power itself. If you knew that all you needed to satisfy the only true Power in the universe was compassion, you would be less likely to submit to those who rule through fear. You would be free.

Nobody who has risen through a hierarchy of power likes people to be free. What would happen if the masses of people, the lowly ones, the meek, began to see themselves as equal to those who rule them? Every person who has fought for and gained power in an organization would feel a disturbance, shall we say, in the force. The few who use force would have to recognize the overwhelming numbers of the gentle. Such a change in public consciousness would shake not only religions but nations.

The rabbis knew Jesus was a threat. All hierarchical organizations know that he remains a threat. He didn’t believe in top-down power. He tried to awaken power in the grassroots, from the bottom up. He believed in people; he exalted the meek. What he preached was neither obedience nor resistance, but solidarity, the most revolutionary concept in a world designed to keep the meek under the knee of the powerful.

Another Jew for BDS

I was a nice Jewish girl. I went to synagogue on holy days and to Hebrew School three times a week through high school. I believed that another Holocaust could happen at any time, and that only Israel could save the Jewish people. I was a Zionist. Now I support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), which seeks to pressure Israel economically into lifting its oppression of the Palestinians. Some BDS founders were anti-Semites. The movement has evolved as more Jews have joined it. What happened to change my mind? I spent a year in Israel.

What shocked me in Israel was the attitude of most Jewish Israelis toward Arabs. It was pretty much the same attitude racist white Americans have toward black people. Arabs were different, and lesser. They could be treated as second-class citizens, or isolated in impoverished bantustans like black South Africans under apartheid. 

After World War II, the Allied powers offered refuge to European Jews who survived the Holocaust in a country that was already home to the Palestinians. Some land was bought, some stolen. Arabs were understandably angry. Jews were understandably paranoid. This was a recipe for disaster for both peoples.

Now everyone in the Middle East is the walking wounded. Jews can reel off lists of atrocities committed by Arabs. Arabs can list as many atrocities committed by Jews. Both groups have bombed civilian targets, murdered innocents, and marginalized peacemakers. Both groups deny that they share blame for the ongoing slaughter.

Israel claims that it is surrounded by people who want to wipe it off the map, so the only possible response is to turn every Israeli into a soldier and arm the country to the teeth. America has supported this militarization with more than $3 billion in military aid per year. I do not believe this has increased security for anyone, Jewish or not. Every time you kill someone, you create new enemies out of all their friends and relatives. How can that make anyone safer?

A nation formed in response to oppression has become an oppressor. People who should appreciate the need for safe havens have denied all safety to Arabs in the lands they still occupy. People whose ancestors were forced to flee their homes are evicting others from theirs. People who should be tearing down walls have built them instead. The people who made the desert bloom are bulldozing ancient olive groves. This all makes me think of something a Jewish poet is supposed to have said a couple of thousand years ago: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:36-37)

I believe the Jewish people are in danger of losing the soul of our religion in return for gaining control of the land of Israel. It’s not a good trade-off. I don’t support BDS because I hate my people; I do it because I love them, and I want them to heal from the spirit-wounds of fear and hatred.

The war-mongers want us to look at one another and see Zionists or Arab zealots, patriots or terrorists. We must look past these imaginary classifications and see the reality: heart-broken human beings who want only to live and let live.