Archive for September, 2005

An Eleventh Commandment

Published by
September 29, 2005 in Religion and Personal Reflections. 0 Comments

The NPR program "The Next Big Thing" repeated a short piece last weekend on its program about the "Eleventh Commandment."  Some of you may remember reading that, early last year, the English Methodist church sponsored a "competition" across England to update the Ten Commandments with a more modern Eleventh.  The winner in England, despite some ingenious competitors (“Thou shalt not use plastic to multiply your possessions”), was "thou shalt not be negative."  So "The Next Big Thing" went to the streets of Chicago and got some other interesting responses from Americans.  But it all got me wondering what Semitism.net could come up with.  I have come up with a few ideas; what would you say?

 

But let’s think about this for a second.  How do you come up with a new commandment — with a simple and clear statement of a principle so true, so honest, so plain that it is worthy of commandment status.  A commandment must not only be true, honest and plain but must also be rooted in clear, universal beliefs that leave little to no room for argument or debate about its premise.  And a commandment’s universality must come not only from the principles in which it is rooted, but in its application – that is, no one should be able to claim that they are exempt.  Finally, the Eleventh Commandment should fit with and complement the Ten we already have.  (Judaism generally recognizes that the Torah contains 613 commandments, but for present purposes, we’ll follow the Methodists and focus on the Ten). 

 

Put another way, these must be words that could merit a pause during the communal reading of the Torah, so that the congregation could stand to honor the words, the meaning, the moment of receiving the truth of the commandment. 

 

No simple task.  But especially for me.  As some of you may have gleaned from my previous posts, I am not only a long-winded and convoluted writer, I struggle with my faith, my beliefs, my ideas of what should, must, can be done by individuals in this world.  I am not a master of simple, clear statements.  I am a lawyer, after all, a profession generally rooted in equivocation.  But I will do my best here to be clear. 

 

Thou shalt not oppress another.  For me, this is a clear and critical principle.  And a no-brainer for this website, which, in many ways, is all about what such a commandment means.  It is rooted in God’s consistent reminder to the Jewish people to remember the time when we were slaves in Egypt, to remember when we were oppressed, so that we will not “oppress the stranger.”  The entreaty to not oppress the stranger appears 36 times in the Torah, more than any other.  And although I believe we do remember much of our oppression, for some in our community, the reminder leads elsewhere, primarily to self-preservation, to insuring that we ourselves are not oppressed any more.  While self-preservation is obviously an essential goal, it is not an end that promotes the other Ten Commandments. 

 

But, as the Eleventh Commandment, it does not quite work, I fear, because, while oppression necessarily requires the acts of individuals, and some oppression is entirely carried out by individuals (slavery, for example), oppression also applies to the acts of a community, of a nation, directed and led in its oppressive efforts by a government or group of leaders.  And where a government directs oppression, there is the potential for the individual to claim that the commandment could not apply, as the individual did not know, was forced to participate in, or could not bring and end to the oppression. 

 

Finally there is the problem of how you define oppression.  Or, who is “another;” who is “the stranger?”  No matter how universal you try to make the definition, you will always face the problem of being too specific for some, and too broad for others.  So this may be a good principle, a good way to live your life, but maybe not an Eleventh Commandment. 

 

Thou shalt listen to others.  Alternate: Thou shalt reach your own conclusions.  The first option is a commandment not to follow or obey what others say – in many cases, we must do the opposite – but to always listen.  To understand what another person says, believes, experiences.  So many disagreements are rooted in our inability, unwillingness to listen to one another, to respect the humanity of those with whom we share the planet, whether we like them, agree with them, believe them, understand them or not.  The second says that, while you must listen in order to understand, you must not simply accept or adopt what someone else says as your own belief without challenging, without struggling, without making it your own.   

Again, I don’t think either goes far enough.  Whereas oppression is perhaps too specific, listening and reaching conclusions are too general, and do not get at behavior.  It is not enough to command someone to listen or think, but the commandment must also reach action.

 

Maybe the answer is to not be so serious and turn to the practical and truly beneficial, such as Thou shalt watch The Big Lebowski once per year.  As principle goes, this would be a clear winner and should require no explanation.  But the downfall is the application, as it would require that all of humanity own a DVD player or VCR.  So we won’t rule this one out, as much as put it on hold.

 

So back to the serious side for one more effort.

 

Thou shalt work each day to bring about Peace.  This paraphrases how my favorite yoga teacher (that is, until my wife becomes certified to teach next year) ends most every class.  I like this because, while simple and clear, its meaning is expansive and hard to dispute.  Sure, perhaps not everyone believes in Peace, or believes they should spend some of each day working to bring it about.  Or at least not the way I define Peace.  But Peace can be defined in so many ways, for the individual and the community, that this commandment can apply to, and for, everyone.

 

The word Peace in Hebrew – shalom — comes from the same root as the word for complete, or whole.  As a result, this commandment can direct you to bring about Peace in yourself, in your home, in your community, in the world.  Anyone, anything, anyplace that needs to be made whole.  To repair the hurt we feel or see, to do what we can to make sure that hurt does not return, to make sure that we are not in the way of Peace.

 

I am currently reading The Peace Book by Todd Parr to my son each night before his bedtime bath.  Peace, in that book, means everything from speaking a different language to watching it snow to supplying the world with pizza to saying you’re sorry when you hurt someone to helping a neighbor to just being free.  For me, my son is Peace.  But if Peace can mean all of those things, I think that working at it each day makes for a worthy Eleventh Commandment. 

 

As we begin the Jewish New Year next week, maybe the best we can do is to find our own Eleventh Commandments, and then do our best to live by them each day. 

           

 

Schlepping for Peace: The Blogger and his Family Attend the Anti-War Rally in Washington, D.C.

Published by
September 27, 2005 in U.S. Politics and Activism. 2 Comments

This is how we ended up going to the protest. Thursday night, Rebecca got all riled up reading Daily Kos. Friday, she called me to say she was packing the kids in the car - along with our Romanian nanny and her boyfriend, who is visiting for the month - and driving down to Washington for the anti-war protest. Equipped with security blankets, tippie-cups, diapers, a laptop and a bunch of Elmo DVDs they set off on the ten-hour drive to a hotel in Alexandria, where she had booked a single room for everyone to share. I left after work, drove down on my own, and stumbled in at 4:30 Saturday morning. The baby, as usual, woke up at 6:30. Four hours later, having sheparded the kids through the continental breakfast and onto the Metro, we were at the Ellipse…

I have no idea how to estimate crowd size, but even before the actual march started, it looked huge. We could see people filling Fourteenth Street as far as the eye could see, definitely past Pennsylvania Avenue; and Constitution Avenue was also packed in both directions. Everyone but us had clever banners and tee-shirts. "Make levees, not war" was popular. My favorite was "I voted for Al Gore and all I got was this stupid Orwellian nightmare". On our shirts, we had maple syrup and strawberry stains from breakfast.

The Blogger and His Family
 

 

We threaded our way through the crowd to where a proto-march seemed to be forming. Our four-year-old enjoyed herself reasonably well until the giant Bread-and-Puppet-Theater-type Death Puppets came marching down the street. They were supposed to represent casualties of the Iraq war and they scared her half to death.

Death Puppets
 

I hate Bush as much as anybody. I really do. But must we on the left really be so apocalyptic? When things go badly, we just dive headlong  into negativism. You really notice these things when you have kids.

Anyhow we beat a retreat and went looking for a bathroom and some food (which we had cleverly forgotten to bring: "I’m sure there will be lots of vendors…"). Nothing was happening except speeches and milling, so we went into one of the Smithsonian museums and had an early lunch. By the time we were done, of course, the kids were flagging and we thought maybe we had done our part and could head back to the hotel and go swimming.

Then, as we rounded the corner onto Constitution, we saw that the march proper had finally started. And it was, well, wonderful. Everyone had coalesced, and many more had come to the mall as the day went on. There were waves of marchers - not just die-hard activists but regular people, families like ours, obviously from all over the country - walking quietly past us. They weren’t noisy or demonstrative. Only a few had signs. They were just there, to say "this is also America. We do not want to occupy Iraq. We care about the victims of Hurricane Katrina. We want change."

The New York Times reported a "vast" number of protesters. A Washington Post/Associated Press story said:

The rally stretched through the day and into the night, a marathon of music, speechmaking and dissent on the National Mall. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, noting that organizers had hoped to draw 100,000 people, said, "I think they probably hit that."

 

AP Photo/Noah Berger 

So, we marched. I think Jane understood what we were marching for, in a four-year-old sort of way. She understands that we believe in peace, and in not hurting people. She understands the President is a bad man. "Where is he?" she wanted to know. Good question.

The baby understood that she was getting a very long ride in the baby-backpack.

There were counter-demonstrators. I felt sorry for them. It must have been hard to watch a hundred thousand people walk by protesting the war. Judging from their banners, a fair number of them have children serving in Iraq. It’s easy for us to say "we’re against the war, not the soldiers". But the kids who joined up after 9/11 did it because they believed in something, they wanted to defend their country against a brutal terrorist threat. And their families really need to believe that they are fighting for a worthy cause. I imagine the anxiety would be impossible to bear otherwise.

I really admire Cindy Sheehan for the stand she has taken. I think it is a very difficult one for military families.

I wish that were the end of my story - but after the march we had the bonus experience of being trapped for ninety minutes in a crowded subway car in a dark tunnel with two now-exhausted, hungry kids trying to get back to our hotel. The Metro system was overwhelmed - another measure of the size of this demonstration.

Were we right to spend hundreds of dollars and drive for twenty hours just to add six to the number of people who attended? Rebecca and I have no regrets. It was something we needed to do. All over the country, people obviously weighed the same pros and cons and decided to come. That’s how these things happen.

The media never give much coverage to grassroots phenomena like demonstrations. The communal web - blogs, bulletin boards, etc. - is more sensitive to mass movements in their early phases. I hope that this is the beginning of a change - that there will be more demonstrations, even larger ones, and an upswing in other forms of activism.

America does not belong to George Bush - or to any political party. I think we - Americans - can retake it.

Losing Balance

Published by
September 27, 2005 in Personal Reflections. 3 Comments

Let’s face the questions in as plain a way as we can: How many Palestinian lives balance the loss of an Israeli life? How many destroyed synagogues balance the destroyed lives of those fanning the flames? How many demolished homes, how many hours at a checkpoint, how many years spent stateless balance the loss of Israelis ruthlessly killed by terrorists, or the years Israelis have lived in fear for their individual and national existence? How many more years of occupation, of control of another people, of having and using all means necessary to defend Israel will balance centuries of anti-Semitism, of millions of Jews killed just for being Jews, of leaving the fate of the Jewish people to the rest of the world, only to watch most of the world turn away? The bottom line questions — how much does a tear weigh?  And are all tears created equal?  Maybe when we know those answers, we will have some idea of how many tears on one side will balance the tears of the other.

All of these questions address the mythical notion of Balance that dogs advocates of any aspect of any issue within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Take a stand, present a set of facts, advocate for a specific policy and you can be sure, much like the Miracle of the Circle, that the Demand for Balance will soon follow. For, if your stand, your facts, your policy position do not align with those of someone in the audience, then it is very likely the disagreement will be couched, not on the possibility that you are wrong, or need to develop a new policy stand, but rather in the notion that you lack a sense of Balance.

But what does Balance mean, when what is being balanced is not weights or scientific conclusions, but lives, tragedies, tears? When the questions are so weighty, so difficult, so individually insoluble, is Balance even worth seeking, or possible to find?

Alan Dershowitz believes it does. Last week, in the Times Online, Dershowitz responded to the recent call by leaders of the British Muslim community to change Holocaust Memorial Day, commemorated since 2001, to a more general Genocide Day, by pointing out the absence of Balance between the Holocaust and the various tragedies suffered by Muslim communities throughout the world, including Palestine.

Of course, the Muslim leaders who advocated for the change began the Clash of Balances. According to one unnamed leader, having solely a Holocaust Memorial Day "sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit." So rather than advocate for another day for commemoration of the tragedies suffered by Muslims, the proposed solution was to do away with Holocaust Memorial Day and create a Genocide Day that would remember all of the victims of genocide (but especially the Muslim victims). But in so doing, they would implicitly seek to Balance the victims of the Holocaust against the Muslims killed in Bosnia, in Chechnya, in Palestine.

But in responding to this, Dershowitz did not challenge the premise straight on, did not explain that Balance is not always possible, that not every taking of a life can, or should, be balanced against another. That there may be a way to commemorate both the Holocaust and Muslim victims of genocide and other tragedies on different days, or in different formats, but without necessarily undermining or limiting the meaning of any of them. Instead, Dershowitz simply reverted to his own Demand for Balance. And in his doing so, we see the two main fallacies of the Demand for Balance.

The first is ascribing evil intent to the assertion, or at least to the identity of the person making the assertion, that you believe is unbalanced. For Dershowitz, it looks like this:

First, I can understand why commemoration of the Holocaust should be offensive to those Muslims and others who supported Nazi victory over Britain and Nazi genocide against the Jews and others.

And there were many such Muslims, led by the leader then of the Palestinian people Haj Amin al-Husseini, who urged Hitler to extend the final solution beyond Europe’s borders to Jewish refugees who had reached Palestine.

Now, I admit that I have not read everything there is to read about this situation, but I have seen nothing indicating that the specific Muslim leaders in the U.K. who advocated for the change from Holocaust Memorial Day to Genocide Day were doing so because they "supported" the Nazis and the Final Solution. If anything, their argument is the opposite: that the killing of Muslims should not be ignored, like the killing of Jews was during the Holocaust, and for years after. Yet, because some Muslims supported Hitler, now every Muslim may potentially be stained by this evil if they dare tread near the issue of the Holocaust.

Once you have undermined the assertion, the second aspect of the Demand for Balance is the justification of the unjustifiable because, though perhaps sad, those tragedies just do not "measure" up. Or worse, that the people who are claming to suffer have actually had it pretty good. Dershowitz again:

Secondly, there has been no genocide against the Palestinian people. When Palestinian bombers target Israeli civilians, Israel refrains from targeting Palestinian civilians in turn. Many Palestinian civilians have died during the many Arab-Israeli wars and intifadas of the past several decades. But that number is dwarfed by the number of Palestinians and Arabs killed by Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Iran during the same period.

During its occupation Israel provided social security, built and supported schools, and maintained vehicle, water and electrical infrastructures for residents of the West Bank and Gaza. The Egyptian and Jordanian occupations that preceded Israel were far less benign, but of course no one accused those Arab countries of genocide.

This is not to justify Israel’s occupation. Even though it was the Arab offensive in 1967 that created the Israeli occupation, when the Six-day War ended I argued in favour of Muslim self-determination and partition of Israel and Palestine. Opposition, though, should be grounded in facts and tempered by fair-mindedness.

It would take several more pages to respond to each of Dershowitz’s sentences and individual claims: to his distinction between the "targeting" and "killing" of civilians, to his implication that Israeli killing of Palestinians is somehow excusable because the governments of Syria, Iraq and Iran have killed other Arabs, to his claim that occupation isn’t that bad because of how many wonderful things Israel actually did for the Palestinians. His throw-away line of "not justifying" the occupation does precisely that — justify occupation — when viewed against the rest of his argument.

The bottom line is that the reasonable basis Dershowitz has in criticizing and/or opposing the elimination of Holocaust Memorial Day is undermined by his resort to the Demand for Balance, and the callousness the Demand requires in dismissing the tragedies suffered by the Palestinians, by Muslims. In order to justify the need for Holocaust Memorial Day, is it necessary to take away or demean all other tragedies? Doesn’t Dershowitz’s use of the Demand for Balance show that, in some ways, he himself has lost at least part of the message of Holocaust Memorial Day?

I purposely chose an example of the Demand for Balance that was tangential to, but not directly from within, the conflict, as a means of stepping away for a moment, to see how we all resort to the Demand for Balance at times. How we may whitewash the killing of innocent Palestinians and of innocent Israelis, how we may justify the unjustifiable conditions in which Palestinians and Israelis live – conditions that are not equal or equally Balanced, but are equally unjustifiable. How we have forsaken the victims of tragedies by trying to weigh and Balance their tears.

It is time for all of us to put aside our own fears, our own failures, our own biases and listen to and face the harsh questions and facts that this conflict present us and respond not with justifications, not with rationales, not with ways we can try to Balance one unbalance-able tragedy against another, but with emotional and intellectual honesty, and with ideas and solutions. As we approach the High Holidays, when we remember and recall so many of the tragedies we have faced as a people, now is perhaps the best time of all.

Our Own Golden Calf?

Published by
September 21, 2005 in Jewish Culture, Zionism and Judaism. 1 Comment

A close friend of mine once asked, as we stood in the West Bank having just returned from a day in Israel, whether we were living in the Golden Calf. I was taken aback by the question then, but have always come back to it. Andrew’s brilliant last post helped me bring into new focus my friend’s question of whether some in the current Zionist movement actually “support” and “defend” Israel to the extent that they actually promote idolatry of Israel. And, when combined with the news I recently read in Ha’aretz that the Jewish Agency plans to send a group of 200 young Israelis, just recently finished their compulsory army service, to America to recruit students for a year abroad — sending soldiers out to promote, not just defend, the country — I now wonder if my friend’s question needs a new look.

Before getting into the Golden Calf story and some other thoughts, let me introduce this post with one image. My family lived for the past 2 years near the campus of an Ivy League university. I would estimate that, on average, I saw 2 students per week wearing some type of Israel Defense Forces gear – t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, pins. No big deal? Just kids wearing what they think are cool things? Maybe. But I think there is also something else more worrisome going on with those things and the image they promote.

But first, the theme. In case you forget the verses from Exodus or the wild scenes from “The Ten Commandments,” the basic context of the story is that Moses has been summoned to Mt. Sinai by God and has left the Israelites waiting below. After some time of waiting, the restless people go to Aaron and ask (32:1):

Up, make us a god who shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that
brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him.

According to the text, Aaron does not argue or debate, but simply asks them to gather their gold, which he then takes and molds into a calf. Once finished, Aaron simply states (32:4):

This is thy god, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

Aaron then gets a bit scared and declares that there is to be a feast to God in front of the Golden Calf.

God, having just finished giving Moses the tablets containing the Ten Commandments, is furious at what has happened and orders Moses off of Mt. Sinai, promising to wipe out this “stiffnecked” people (32:7-10). Without seeing the Golden Calf for himself, Moses intercedes and convinces God to relent from his promise and save the people. But once he sees the Golden Calf for himself, Moses is furious, throws down the Ten Commandments tablets, burns the Golden Calf, grinds it into powder and makes the people drink water that has been “laced” with the Calf’s remains. Moses, after ordering the Levites to kill close to 3,000 Israelites, then returns to Mt. Sinai and asks for God’s forgiveness for the people, who have “sinned a great sin, and have made them a god of gold.” (32:31).

First, I note that one Bible commentary I have appears to say Moses was incorrect in his last statement to God. The Collegeville Bible Commentary explains that, as Aaron molded it, the Golden Calf did not technically violate the commandment (Ex. 20:4-5) against false images of God because the Calf was meant to symbolize not God, but an aspect of God — strength. However, as Moses viewed it, because the people did not always distinguish between God and God’s attributes, and did not appear to make the distinction in this case, it was a violation in practice by many of the Israelites. Hence the punishment of many of them by the Levites.

So, back to my friend’s question. Is the modern State of Israel somehow a Golden Calf? Better said, not the State of Israel itself or its citizens, but the image of Israel that the Israeli Government and Jewish Community have created and maintained, particularly over the past 20 years. Has the created image of what Israel is, or should be, or must be in order to survive become an idolatrous symbol, a mere representation of the reality of Israel? One that does not motivate the Jewish people to act to fulfill the ideals of Judaism, which underlie the ideals of Israel, but rather only to believe and fulfill the basic mantras and needs of the image.

And maybe it is not quite a Golden Calf, but yet something we have created – or asked our leaders to create — to replace or represent God, or at least an attribute of God. Something we needed to move through a time where finding God, or our other leaders, was difficult. Resulting in an object made of all of our best intentions, our most valued items and ideals, but that in and of itself, actually betrays those intentions and ideals. Something that, even if technically not something problematic, may become so because of how it is interpreted by those who follow it.

Perhaps this is all an overstatement, but maybe, just maybe, it isn’t, maybe there is something to this analogy. Rather than try to convince you (or even myself) one way or the other, I will just introduce some admittedly leading evidence to consider. In the end, I am not sure anyone can or even needs to reach a definitive conclusion. That the question needs to be pondered at all is troublesome enough.

First is a point made by both Andrew and myself before on this site. Check the websites linked on this site in the “Major Jewish Organizations” category. Look in their “Israel” sections and what do you see? Pages, documents, guides for “defending” and “making the case” for Israel. Add in what you see from AIPAC, the dominant source in the Jewish community for information about Israel, and you get a relatively monolithic view. Perhaps only the Reform and Reconstructionist movements present diverse views and ideas.

Now, you might say, as I try to say to myself, that is what these organizations do: advocate for and on behalf of Israel. And if they don’t, no one will. Fair enough. But is that all that is needed from them, particularly within the Jewish community? Just talking points for defense? Or should these be the sources for space and information with which to consider all of the aspects of Israel? Do we need to see and asked to repeat just one attribute of Israel (its strength, the aspect of God represented by the Golden Calf), or all of Israel itself?

Second, a statement made by Brigadier General Gershon Hacohen in Ha’aretz last week. Hacohen is the commander of the 36th Division and was the soldier responsible for the actual physical acts of evacuating settlements. He is a fascinating man and the interview is well worth the read. Towards the end, he is asked by Ari Shavit whether he has emerged from disengagement “without a scratch.” He says all life is scratches but that he doesn’t whine because “Zionism is not whining. Zionism is accepting your destiny as a Jew, and struggling.”

Now, perhaps he misspoke, or this is a bad translation. But if not, then this begs a second look. Because, to me, “accepting your destiny…and struggling” is the definition of Judaism, not Zionism. And in some ways, Zionism is precisely the opposite. So has Zionism become Judaism? If not, has Judaism fundamentally changed because of Zionism? Can you now truly have one without the other? There are many answers to these questions, too many to consider here, but I believe that, where Zionism has replaced Judaism, or where its tenets have become as fundamental to people as the Ten Commandments, then we may again have another example of the Golden Calf. I am not saying that Zionism is in itself idolatry. But when whether and how you “defend” the State of Israel is seen as defining your fundamental religious and moral beliefs and your “being a Jew,” such that belief in and defense of Israel and Zionism defines, more than your observance of religious beliefs and rituals, your Judaism, then, you could argue, we have elevated this image of Israel to the level of God.

Finally, the college students and their clothes. The article I mentioned way back in the first paragraph of this post reported that the Jewish Agency will be sending 200 young Israelis recently finished their army service to the United States to recruit students to spend their “year abroad” in Israel. Sounds innocent enough: Young Israelis coming to recruit young Americans to go to Israel; something for these soldiers to do other than get high in India.

But think about it again. These young Israelis will be coming to do recruiting specifically as soldiers. Using their service in the military as recruiting cache, at least implicitly. Not surprising, as based on my unscientific survey, the Israeli military has a lot of cache on campuses. But should it? The IDF is a very strong military, one that has protected Israel valiantly throughout its short history. But, both early in its history and again of late, the IDF has been responsible for acts that, well, should not inspire people to don their emblems in admiration. The military should be a necessity, not a commodity. And the more we give into the worshipping of the Israeli military, the more we use the military as a means to bring Israel into the Jewish community, the closer we get to again honoring only one aspect of Israel, and placing that aspect above all else.

Here is the bottom line for me. I have an 11-month old son. His mother and I want very much for him to have a connection to Israel. Connection to Israel is how we met, after all; it is at the root of his coming to be. But when we look around and see that a connection to Israel means, in many places, simply defending what its government does and honoring its military, then I am concerned about what that connection will really mean for him, and for us as his parents. Will he understand the country and its people, or will they simply be a symbol to him? Will this kind of connection supplant, or at least crowd, his connection to Judaism? Will there be room for him to understand and connect to Israel in his own way, without being considered an outsider in his own community, without being as conflicted or as judgmental as his father? Will connection to Israel be at the root of his children coming to be?

Had We But Wept

Published by
September 17, 2005 in Israeli Politics, Religion, Israel History and Judaism. 4 Comments

I write in this weblog, perhaps more than any other reason, because I love Judaism. As a human and as a Jew, I abhor the oppression of one people by another. I abhor ideologies that try to justify oppression. I started the site when I came to understand that we, ourselves, are oppressing another group. We may be motivated fundamentally by a desire for land and resources, or by fear and a need for security - but we have accepted an ideological interpretation of Judaism that distorts the basic tenets of the religion in order to justify our actions. I was very disturbed by Ariel Sharon’s speech at the United Nations on Thursday because it was so deeply mired in exactly this view of Judaism. I will try here to explain, and to present an alternative view of Jewish attachment the land of Israel and the obligation of the Jewish people to non-Jews…

Here is a bit of the speech. It’s not the full extent of what Sharon said - some of it was more conciliatory - but this is the part that set me off.

The Land of Israel is precious to me, precious to us, the Jewish people, more than anything. Relinquishing any part of our forefathers’ legacy is heartbreaking, as difficult as the parting of the Red Sea. Every inch of land, every hill and valley, every stream and rock, is saturated with Jewish history, replete with memories. The continuity of Jewish presence in the Land of Israel never ceased. Even those of us who were exiled from our land, against their will, to the ends of the earth - their souls, for all generations, remained connected to their homeland, by thousands of hidden threads of yearning and love, expressed three times a day in prayer and songs of longing.

The Land of Israel is the open Bible, the written testimony, the identity and right of the Jewish people. Under its skies, the prophets of Israel expressed their claims for social justice, and their eternal vision for alliances between peoples, in a world which would know no more war. Its cities, villages, vistas, ridges, deserts, and plains preserve as loyal witnesses its ancient Hebrew names. Page after page, our unique land is unfurled, and at its heart is united Jerusalem, the city of the Temple upon Mount Moriah, the axis of the life of the Jewish people throughout all generations, and the seat of its yearnings and prayers for 3,000 years. The city to which we pledged an eternal vow of faithfulness, which forever beats in every Jewish heart: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning!”

I say these things to you because they are the essence of my Jewish consciousness, and of my belief in the eternal and unimpeachable right of the people of Israel to the Land of Israel. However, I say this here also to emphasize the immensity of the pain I feel deep in my heart at the recognition that we have to make concessions for the sake of peace between us and our Palestinian neighbors.

Sharon’s limits are on clear display here. He refers to all of Biblical Israel as if it belonged innately to the Jews, and thus to the Israeli government. He talks about “conceding” territory that is not, according to international law (or, for that matter, Israeli law), part of the modern Jewish state in the first place. Nowhere does he acknowledge that others also have longstanding ties to the land; that the places also have, or had, Arabic names; that the shrines of Jerusalem are sacred to three faiths. Nowhere does he recognize the painful sacrifice of the Arabs who left the land so that the Jews could live there.

Since Sharon quoted Psalm 137, I’d like to use that as a starting point. Here’s the full poem, as rendered by the Jewish Publications Society in its 1917 translation of the Hebrew Bible:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst thereof we hanged up our harps.
For there they that led us captive asked of us words of song, and our tormentors asked of us mirth: ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
How shall we sing the Lord’S song in a foreign land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.
Remember, O the Lord, against the children of Edom the day of Jerusalem; who said: ‘Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.’
O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that repayeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.

Readers familiar with ancient Jewish literature will not be suprised that the psalm begins with a touching lamentation and ends with a plea to G-d to smite our enemies (and their children, for good measure). The beginning of the poem is set, and was probably written, after the destruction of the first temple and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon in 586 B.C. The last three lines were added later: Edom is a reference to to the Romans, who exiled us a second time in 70 C.E. We had no further national presence in Jerusalem until the twentieth century.

In any case, there is an interesting tradition related to the psalm. Biblical scholar James Kugel, in a book called In Potiphar’s House, explains that early Rabbinic commentators were struck by the phrase “there we sat down, yea, we wept.” He quotes the Mishna:

“And we wept” is not written here but “Yea we wept.” This teaches that they wept and grew silent and then began to weep again.

The phrase also seems to emphasize particularly that the weeping was done on the banks of the Euphrates - almost like “Oh yes, we wept there” - with the implication that there was another place where we did not weep.

An extra-biblical story arose to explain the mysterious wording of the psalm. Jeremiah, who prophesied the fall of Jerusalem, is said to have accompanied the exiles as far as the Euphrates. Then he left them and returned to the fallen city. From Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews:

He joined the march of the captives going to Babylon, along the highways streaming with blood and strewn with corpses. When they arrived at the borders of the Holy Land, they all, prophet and people, broke out into loud wails, and Jeremiah said: “Yes, brethren and countrymen, all this hath befallen you, because ye did not hearken unto the words of my prophecy…”

When the captives saw Jeremiah make preparations to return to Palestine, they began to weep and cry: “O Father Jeremiah, wilt thou, too, abandon us?” “I call heaven and earth to witness,” said the prophet, “had you wept but once in Zion, ye had not been driven out.”

Does this story bring to mind, at all, the Gaza settlers whose agonized departure from their homes and farms captured the world’s attention a few weeks ago? One wants to say, like the prophet - had we but wept once, this might not have happened. Had we wept for the children growing up in refugee camps. Had we wept for the 2,500 Palestinian homes destroyed by the IDF in Gaza over the past five years. Had we wept and repented for the sin of taking more than one third of the land in this crowded, impoverished community when we constituted less than one percent of the population. Had we wept for our own plenty in the midst of others’ suffering.

Had Israel wept, even once, at the fact that its own creation meant the displacement of Arabs who had owned and cultivated the land for centuries - perhaps, in asking for forgiveness, it might have found the way to peace.

I don’t mean that in a completely abstract sense, either. Our stubborn refusal to acknowledge that we created the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948 - even in the face of meticulous documentation by Israeli historians - has been a huge impediment in Israel’s relations with the Arab states for more than fifty years.

Now, one thing we Jews ought to be good at is repenting, since it’s quite central to our tradition. So why is this so hard?

Well, for one thing, Orthodox sects sympathetic to Zionism as a political movement have gradually built up a very particularistic approach to Jewish ethics, arguing that our obligations to non-Jews are far slighter than our obligations to other Jews. We heard echos of this in the “Jews don’t expel Jews” slogan of the anti-Disengagement campaign. This relieves us of any responsibility for the well-being of the Arabs, and allows us to both discriminate against them and demonize them.

This is most emphatically not what Judaism is about. Rabbi Harold Schulweis presents an opposing perspective in a wonderful essay on the Ethics of the Neighbor. An excerpt:

A case in point is the verse of three Hebrew words: “V’ahavtah l’rechah kamocha,” “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” How simple - how clear. How are we to love the “Neighbor?” And who is my “Neighbor?” … Rabbi Schnayer Zalman, the founder of Chabad, interpreted the passage most of us understand as universalistic in a highly restrictive manner. When the Prophet Micah says, “Have we not one Father, has not one God created us all?” he refers only to real brothers, that is, to Israelites alone, for the source of their souls is in their one God.

Such a restrictive notion of “Neighbor” has serious consequences, for love is not an abstract concept, a matter of general sentiment; its consequences are concrete ethical conduct and prescribe the relationship between Jews and non-Jews. Does, for example, the “love of Neighbor” mandate that we feed the poor of the non-Jew as we are obligated to feed the poor of the Jews? Or to bury the deceased of heathens as we are commanded to bury the deceased of the Jews? Or to console the bereaved of Gentiles as we are to console the bereaved of Jews? Are we to return the lost property of non-Jews because it is biblically mandated to return the lost property of “thy Neighbor”? In the verse preceding “Love thy Neighbor”, we read: “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor…”

The ambiguity as to the parameters of “Neighbor” led to the celebrated debate between Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Ben Azzai. Akiba proposes that the greatest principle in Judaism, the klal gadol, is “love thy neighbor as thyself.” But Ben Azzai senses that that is too restrictive a foundation, and sets forth a more inclusive foundation, quoting from Genesis 5: “This is the book of the generations of man. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him; male and female created He them and called their name Adam.”

Adam was neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim. “Adam” derives from the Hebrew “adamah”, “from the earth.” The rabbis ask, “Out of what kind of earth was Adam formed?” They answered, “from black, white, yellow and red soil…”

A Jewish moral sensibility will not tolerate the denigration of the “other.” The Talmudic observation notes that “love of the stranger” appears in the Hebrew Bible thirty six times, more than any other verse in the Torah. “God loves the stranger” refers to no other class but the stranger. As the philosopher Hermann Cohen put it, “The discovery of the stranger is the discovery of humanity.”

In addition to dis-obligating the Jew from his neighbor, the other pillar of pro-Zionist sects is a disproportionate attachment to the land. Ariel Sharon’s brand of religion - it seems to me - derives its ethos from early (preformative) Judaism.

In ancient times, G-d himself was believed to dwell in the temple in Jerusalem, and to protect the Israelites from our enemies. This belief was not unique: temple-based deities were pretty standard in the early Bronze Age. In fact, worship of the national deity was probably the earliest form of nationalism and, conversely, annointment provided a convenient justification for kingship - especially in small, unstable states where hereditary monarchies rarely lasted for long.

Judaism has evolved far beyond these ideas, of course. For many of us, Judaism is not the ideology of a nation-state, but a religion, whose core values include tolerance, forebearance, justice, compassion and equity. But the literature of ancient Israel, which emphasized the centrality of Jerusalem, has been elevated by religious Zionists to a place far beyond its real importance in modern Judaism. Hence the quotation from Psalm 137.

I skipped a bit of the Ginzberg story above and I’ll include it here because I think it illustrates very well the transition of Judaism from a worship-of-national-deity model to a more universal form of religious practice that could leave its birthplace.

Jeremiah journeyed with them until they came to the banks of the Euphrates. Then God spoke to the prophet: “Jeremiah, if thou remainest here, I shall go with them, and if thou goest with them, I shall remain here.” Jeremiah replied: “Lord of the world, if I go with them, what doth it avail them? Only if their King, their Creator accompanies them, will it bestead them.”

Jeremiah, a patriot to the end, returns to a devastated Jerusalem. But G-d himself accompanies the refugees. Suddenly, our god is no longer a local deity - a cultic object - but a universal being, available to those who worship, regardless of where they worship. And from that point on, the center of the religion was not the temple in Jerusalem, but comprehension of and obedience to G-d’s law: the oral and written Torah. To be a Jew is to pray; to study Torah; and to honor G-d in one’s actions.

As a religion, we no longer need Jerusalem. What we do need, in order to remain Jews, is to honor our laws, our values - most especially in our treatment of the “other” and of those who have less than we do. As Schulweis writes, “To ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is to love God. Indeed, it is to love the Divinity in ourselves.

When we trample on this Divinity by mistreatment of others, we are destroying our own temple.

Suing Israel and Trying to Make the Blame Game Illegal

Published by
September 12, 2005 in Israeli Politics, Conditions of the Occupation and Activism. 1 Comment

Responsibility. Accountability. Consequences. Compensation. In the past couple of weeks, the Bush Administration has glibly grouped these concepts together as “The Blame Game.” But no matter what President Bush calls them, these are real and they are what underlie the aftermath of any loss: who is responsible and accountable for what happened, what are the consequences of what happened on those responsible/accountable individuals and how will the victims be compensated? And in many respects, these underlie all of the critical issues - settlements, Jerusalem, refugees — that the Israelis and Palestinians must agree upon in future negotiations. But for now, it seems, while the occupation still endures in the West Bank, Israel is continuing to make itself “legally” immune from any responsibility or consequences from some of its worst acts, all the while holding Palestinians responsible and accountable, imposing the harshest of consequences. Or, making the contents of the “Blame Game” illegal. As someone whose faith in Judaism derives from its reliance on legality, on its struggle for justice, I see the recent examples of Israel’s manipulation of a system of justice as further reminders of why we must all work to ensure that the end to occupation does not stop in Gaza…

Many of you may have seen the recent articles in several major news outlets, including the New York Times covering the conviction of Husam Khader, a member of the Palestinian parliament, on charges of assisting the Al-Aqsa Brigade in its attacks against Israel and Israelis. Mr. Khader’s conviction follows on the heels of last year’s high profile conviction by an Israeli court of Marwan Barghouti on five counts of murder and one of attempted murder resulting from four attacks he was alleged to have supervised (he was acquitted of many other charges). Although Khader was convicted in a more typical setting (an Israeli military court) than that used to try Barghouti (an Israeli domestic court), Israel has subjected thousands of Palestinians, high-profile, low-profile and no-profile, to its domestic and military legal systems, holding them responsible and accountable for their actions (or the actions of those whom they associate with) against Israel and Israelis.

But what has been covered less is the perversion of both of these legal systems though “occupier’s law,” as Raja Shehadeh termed it in his classic 1988 book. (Although it is hard to find these days, and may seem out of date, to my mind, there remains no better book for understanding the details of occupation.) “Occupier’s law” can mean many things, but to me, it has always meant that the occupier creates laws that benefit only the occupier, with the occupied the consistent target and victim of those laws. And when the laws can somehow be used to benefit the occupied at the expense of the occupier, the occupier simply changes the laws, or declares itself immune.

So it is with two recent cases. The first is the latest installment of the legal effort to hold then-Air Force commander (now Chief of Staff) Dan Halutz responsible for the July 2002 “targeted killing” of Saleh Shehadeh. The Israeli refuser group Yesh Gvul and a number of others have been seeking to hold someone responsible for this horrific act in which a 1-ton bomb was dropped on an apartment building in Gaza City in the middle of the night. The result? Shehadeh, the Hamas commander in Gaza, was killed, but so were 14 other people, many of them children. In response to the outcry that resulted from these deaths, Halutz said only that his pilots should rest easy at night, because theirs had been a job well done.

The Israeli Supreme Court has been dodging the issue of targeted killings, in one way or another, since 2001. And in last week’s ruling in the Shehadeh case, the Court yet again said nothing about the killing itself, nor the innocent victims of a plan so coldly planned and executed to exact just such a toll, choosing not to take even the cursory step of asking the Israeli government to explain its actions. Rather, the Court said simply that because the targeted killing policy has been suspended, there was no basis upon which to review anything that had happened when the policy was in effect.

This is occupier’s law at its most base. Innocent men, women and children are killed in the middle of the night, sleeping in their apartments. Yet no one is held responsible because, by the time the court can find no more reason to delay and finally gets around to hearing the case, the policy under which they were killed has been shelved. And in so doing, lawless acts - killings — are effectively sanctioned by an occupier’s court unwilling to hold any of the occupiers to account. As a result, victims must look elsewhere for justice (more on that at the end).

The second example of manipulating law and justice is the “Intifada Law.” As B’tselem explains:

Since 2002, Palestinians have not been able to sue the state for damages caused by combatant activity, broadly defined as, “…any action of combating terror, hostile actions, or insurrection, and action intended to prevent terror and hostile acts and insurrection committed in circumstances of danger to life or limb.” The new amendment (passed in July 2005) goes one step further and almost completely blocks Palestinians filing compensation suits. The law will not even allow Palestinians to file for compensation for harm caused by illegal shooting, looting, negligence on training grounds, abuse and degrading treatment at checkpoints, or physical violence.

In sum, in the first case, the Israeli Supreme Court refuses to hold the Israeli executive leadership and military responsible and accountable for their actions. In the second, the Knesset passes a law that, while perhaps not eliminating responsibility and accountability, at least in theory, shields them from facing consequences or compensation. While Palestinians are - rightly, I believe - held to account for their illegal actions against Israel and Israelis by the Israeli legal system, Israelis have their possibly illegal actions protected by that same system.

In the end, the Israeli government is working a two-pronged approach to undoing the fundamental notions of law and justice, the concepts that symbolize, more than any others, the intersection of Judaism and democracy. And as a result, Israel stands accused by its own citizens of failing up to uphold either of the structures upon which it was built.

Many in Israel and the American Jewish community criticize the efforts of Palestinians and the Israeli left to turn to other courts and countries to hold the Israeli government responsible and accountable for its actions, demanding consequences and compensation. Such criticism was heard loud and clear last summer during the International Court of Justice’s consideration of the Separation Wall; just yesterday, the former head of the IDF’s Southern Command had to stay on a plane at Heathrow and fly back to Israel, canceling abruptly a planned trip, when the Israeli government learned of a plan to arrest him in the context of a war crimes investigation.

But when the Israeli Supreme Court dances around the killing of innocent civilians and children on a technicality, and the Knesset makes many such cases illegal, what other option is there? Are Israeli officials above responsibility and accountability, while Palestinians are not? Should individual Palestinians not have the right to even seek consequences or compensation? Is the Blame Game that dangerous? If you believe it shouldn’t be, then I encourage you to go the Yesh G’vul and B’tselem (at the B’tselem link above, you will also see the names of a number of other organizations, like Rabbis for Human Rights, that are involved in these efforts) websites and see how you can support their efforts to bring ultimate meaning to a system of law and justice that can ensure responsibility, accountability, consequences and compensation for everyone subject to Israeli law.

Houston Day III: “You Will Never Know What Happened in that City During the Flood”

Published by
September 9, 2005 in Activism and Hurricane Katrina. 5 Comments

I spent my last night in Houston in the Astrodome. It’s a much more chaotic scene than the Convention Center. The Astrodome is a gigantic complex that includes two stadiums, an arena, storage facilities and vast expanses of gated parking. It must cover several square miles. The sight that greets you is of evacuees milling about everywhere - talking in clusters, sleeping on benches, pushing strollers, tossing footballs wherever there are islands of grass; gangs of teenagers dressed like rap stars standing on the pavement looking tough; volunteers scurrying around with tasks to do; Houston police on foot and horse directing traffic; state cops clustered around their cars every few hundred yards; trucks unloading at cavernous docks; bags, boxes and pallets of donated supplies stacked everywhere. It was still near 100 degrees at 6:00 p.m. when I inched my car through the crowd to the medical clinic that has been set up in the Reliant Arena…

Houston’s two medical schools have split the job, with University of Texas staffing the medical clinic at the Convention Center and Baylor taking on the Astrodome. Both clinics have the feel of MASH units. Frame partitions divide the space into specialty areas: general medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, orthopedics, trauma. Each is marked with a handwritten paper sign taped to the cloth. Within each area are ten or twelve numbered examining rooms enclosed by white curtains. The acoustics are what you would expect in a cement sports arena - there’s a constant murmur of voices, you can hear every clang and siren, and a stethoscope is useless while the generator is running. All the doctors and nurses there are volunteering their time, sometimes coming to the Astrodome to help out after finishing long shifts in the hospital.

All the patients have stories to tell, most of them horrifying. One woman, who came in to get blood pressure medicine and to treat a skin rash, said:

You will never know what happened in that city during the flood. We saw people climbing to the attics of the houses, and then the water rose to where the whole house was under water. I’m sure those people never made it out. They died in their houses. I saw women with three-day-old babies in the Superdome, in the pitch black all night. With people shooting and dying. All you see in TV is the looters. But people were breaking into stores to get food. No one knew when help was coming. It was days, and we thought they had forgotten about us. There were old people, sick people. They should have sent in the army right away, but no one did anything. You will never hear the real story of what happened in those days.

She was glad to be out, alive, in Houston. She was very appreciative of the volunteers. I gave her prescriptions and told her she could go over to the pharmacy and get them without charge (CVS and Walgreens were doing this). She asked politely if she could hug me, and then did, crying.

After a couple of hours in the medical clinic I was pulled aside with a few others to screen evacuees to relocate to a cruise ship. A cruise company had offered a ship docked in Galveston. We were supposed to decide who was healthy enough to board. There was a very nice geriatrician named Aimee Garcia, and - of all people - Robert Rakel. He’s the author of Conn’s Current Therapeutics and a popular textbook in family medicine. An old Public Health Service hand, he’d come down with everyone else to voluteer. He’s not Sean Penn but, OK, for me, he’s a celebrity.

They kept us sitting around for about two hours, during which time we decided which conditions to screen for and made up a checklist. They weren’t going to tell the evacuees where they were going until they got to Galveston. Aimee and I objected - you can’t just bus people out to Galveston and then tell them they’re going on a boat. They have a right to make their own decisions.

Everyone agreed, once the argument was made - but in the end it was a moot point. We went over to the staging area across the arena at 10:45 p.m. There were two employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was coordinating relocation to the cruise ship, and about twenty-five people who were identified as FEMA “contractors”. Evidently their job was to process the paperwork. They stood out a bit as paid employees in a sea of volunteers.

Come 11:00, the FEMA employees decided to knock off. The processing would have to wait until tomorrow, they declared - as if it made little difference whether four hundred hot, miserable evacuees got to leave the Astrodome now or later. This lassez-fair attitude struck me as inappropriate in representatives of the agency whose slow response left thousands of New Orleaneans to die in the flood. I told the FEMA supervisor this. She smiled and assured me that my concerns would receive full attention in the morning. Then she left for her hotel.

Aimee and I spent the rest of the night running the gastroenteritis clinic. I want to emphasize that the City of Houston is doing its absolute best to manage the influx of evacuees - but this is what happens when you crowd six thousand malnourished people together in an open space on cots. We had a steady stream of patients with vomiting and dehydration. We laid them down on stretchers, gave them intravenous fluids, anti-emetics, cleaned them up, found them new clothes. Once they were able to keep down some water, we sent them out to the quarantine area. They were remarkably cooperative about it once they understood that they could infect others in the Astrodome.

One young man wandered in who was autistic and mute. He had been separated from his group. We had no idea how to find them. He was frightened as well as sick. Aimee contacted a local agency that cares for the retarded. They were willing to take him in. How he will ever be connected with his prior caregivers, I don’t know.

As the night wore on and patients came and went, I began to imagine that he symbolized all the hurricane victims. It’s as if they’ve lost, not just their homes, but their place in the world: their individual voices, their collective voice, their power to choose. Who is representing them politically? All kinds of decisions are being made about them without their input.

When I left Houston and had time to look again at the media coverage, this feeling was even stronger. The administration is working assiduously to shift the focus away from the disaster, away from the three days that people were trapped in the flood zone with no food or water, and toward rescue and reconstruction efforts now underway. We see soldiers patrolling the now empty streets, politicians posing in front of demolished houses. Everyone cares! The great crisis is be the damage to the President’s reputation. Can he save his legacy?

We should not allow ourselves to forget the real experience of the people of New Orleans, those who were abandoned in the flood. I hope their stories will be collected and told. I hope that they will not disperse silently to whatever homes can be found for them. I hope they will not be bought off by a $2,000 ATM card. Their lives have been changed forever. I would like to know what happens to them.

There is an opportunity there for community organizing. It’s not my specialty - but I think it would be possible to establish groups, elect leaders, create a structure for collective action. I put this out in case anyone reading this post has the skill and motivation to begin the process. The flood victims I met were strong, smart, decent people. Their story should not become what the press and the politicians want it to be. They should have their own voice. They should be allowed to decide their own future.

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