semitism.net

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.