semitism.net

Last week, yeshiva students attacked a small group of Palestinian workers outside the settlement of Nahliel in the West Bank. The incident was reported by Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth, the BBC and other media. By all accounts, the attack was unprovoked. The workers were employed by the settlement, and were showing their permits at a checkpoint when the mob descended on them.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Hurling stones and waving bats, some 40 students from a yeshiva in Nahliel, west of Ramallah, attacked a group of eight Palestinian workers congregating outside the West Bank settlement, wounding three of them. The wounded were taken to a Ramallah hospital…

One of the injured Palestinians - Muki Shakarni - said he had no idea why the attack started.

“We came to the entrance of the settlement in the morning, and while a soldier was checking our identification, about 40 settlers came from inside and started beating us,” he said. “One of my colleagues fell down and they beat him; I tried to protect him, but they beat me, too. I lost consciousness and only came round in the hospital.”

An IDF spokesman described it as an attempted lynching.

There have been numerous other incidents of violence against unarmed Palestinians. These have been escalating as the disengagement plan ramps up. In Hebron, settlers tried to poison a whole herd of sheep owned by a Palestinian farmer. In Nablus, a group of settlers beat a truck driver quite seriously. Haaretz published an editorial yesterday blaming the situation on lax policing of the settlers by the Israeli government:

The lenient attitudes shown by the army and police allow the settlers to conclude that the state either cannot or will not deal with them. If a handful of rioters from Nahliel and Hebron get off scot-free after what the army itself defined as an attempted lynching, the next pogrom is virtually inevitable. The extreme right will stop at nothing to put a spoke in the wheels of disengagement, and the current clashes are merely an omen of what is to come.

I have been watching for the past week. Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I have seen no expressions of outrage from the Rabbinic community over these acts, no formal condemnations or expressions of regret from Jewish organizations in Israel or the U.S.

A Jewish mob attacks innocent workers, and we hardly notice. Have we completely abandoned our values? Have we all signed on to the despicable project of driving the Palestinians from their land? If so, Judaism has reached a pitfully low ebb.

It is quite illustrative to look back to the last time we had a Jewish state.

The Jewish people reoccupied Jerusalem in 539 B.C.E., after a period of exile. We rebuilt the temple and restored the priesthood, which began again to conduct the ancient rituals of worship and animal sacrifice. Jews lived in Jerusalem under Persian and Greek rule, and then under the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty. Jerusalem and the surrounding areas came under Roman control in 63 B.C.E.

By the beginning of the Common Era, the Jewish community was deeply divided. The priesthood was loyal to Rome. The wealthiest and most powerful members of the community (the Sadducees) supported the priesthood and its temple rites. To them, the purpose of religion was to appease God and give divine sanction to rulers. The priests’ main task was to carry out animal sacrifices. The nobles provided choice livestock, and supported the priests with gifts and money. Religion had nothing to do with the common people.

An opposing party, the Pharisees, was in the process of developing a more populist religious and legal code. Religion was to be practiced in the home, not the temple. Schools were established. Legal and religious teachings were accessible to anyone who wanted to study them. Learning was more highly valued than wealth or social standing. Matters of religious belief were not transmitted as dogma, but rather were open to discussion and intepretation. Perhaps most importantly, ethical precepts developed through scholarship and dialogue superceded the laws of the State and applied equally to all people, regardless of power or position.

There is a famous story about the great Phariseic teacher Hillel. A sceptic asked Hillel to teach him the Torah while he stood on one foot. Hillel responded: “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

In 68 C.E., repressive measures instituted by the Roman procurator precipitated a Jewish insurgency. It was led by a party called the Zealots, who advocated violent resistance to Roman rule.

By the year 70 the city of Jerusalem was under siege. A group of Zealots escaped and holed up in a fortress on Mount Masada, where they kept an entire Roman army division at bay for more than two years. When the Romans finally broke into the fortress, they found that all 960 of the besieged had committed suicide rather than surrender.

The Masada story - which is from the Roman historian Josephus, and is not mentioned in the Talmud or any other Jewish text - has been resurected by modern Israeli nationalists. IDF recruits climb the mountain to take an oath that “Masada shall not fall again”. The story figures prominently in settler lore as well.

The Zealots, in fact, accomplished nothing. Jerusalem fell in 70 C.E. and Masada in 73. The temple was destroyed. If nationalistic zeal had been the basis of Judaism, that would have been the end of us.

In fact, it was the Pharisees who saved Judaism. In 68, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai was carried out of Jerusalem under the noses of the Roman soldiers by his students, disguised as a corpse. He founded the first Yeshiva, or Jewish Academy, at Yavneh.

This was a pivotal moment in Jewish history. Ben Zakkai recognized that Judaism no longer needed a temple and priests. It had evolved from a religion centered around sacred objects and places, to a body of knowledge that could be studied and transmitted from one generation to the next. At that moment, the Jews ceased to be a circumscribed nation with a patron deity, and became the bearers of a theophany through time, a people in constant dialogue with the eternal.

Five hundred years later, Jews (and yeshivas) had spread throughout Europe and the Mideast and even Asia; and the Rabbis had completed the Talmud, the masterpiece of Jewish religious thought.

Traditional (pre-Zionist) Rabbinic Judaism strongly emphasizes humility, mercy and peace. This example, from the Midrash, is typical:

R. Johanan b. Zakkai says, “It says YOU MUST BUILD THE ALTAR OF THE LORD YOUR GOD OF WHOLE STONES (Deut. 27:6) - stones which bring peace. It is a matter of logical inference. If the Holy One prohibited wielding the sword above stones - which cannot see or hear or speak - because they will bring peace between Israel and their Father in Heaven, certainly suffering will not come to anyone who brings peace between one man and another, between man and wife, between one city and another, between one nation and another, between one family and another, between one government and another!”

This is why - above and beyond from the basic inhumanity of the act - the whole concept of Yeshiva students engaging in a lynching is deeply disturbing. What on earth are their Rabbis teaching them? How horribly has Jewish nationalism warped millenia of Jewish tradition?

Jerusalem is made of stones. The wailing wall is a relic - an inanimate object. We don’t worship objects, much less persecute and kill people over them. The West Bank - insofar as it consists of sand, water and vegetation - is an object. Land and water are important only as resources that need to be protected and shared by the people who depend on them. The attribution of iconic status to the land - the assertion of a right to possess it, and to drive other people off of it - is a profound betrayal of Jewish values.

Somewhere, Rabbi ben Zakkai must be weeping.