I mentioned that I’ve been reading Nevi’im (Prophets) - the companion to the Five Books of Moses. I’m interested, among other things, in a political philosophy of Judaism.
Prevalent interpretations of Jewish scripture - reflected in the prayerbooks developed from the mid-twentieth century to the present - are heavily influenced by the founding of the the modern state of Israel and hence by Zionism.
As someone who loves Judaism and wants to participate fully in Jewish prayer, I find the triumphalism of this interpretation hard to stomach. In the Zionist view, the Torah is a deed to the land of Palestine; and Jewish history consists of a long and finally successful struggle to reclaim our birthright.
This view certainly arose in the twentieth century. References to Zion in pre-modern Judaism had an elegiac or Messianic tone, while much of the practical import of Rabbinic teaching was directed toward sustaining community life as a devout minority.
A caution: searching Jewish texts to find confirmation of one’s own pre-existing values - in fact, searching them with any expectation at all of moral clarity - is a disappointing exercise. The texts command, they don’t comply. I have immeasurable respect for the rabbis and scholars who have grappled with them over the centuries, and found answers to daily human dilemmas in their crags.
My voice is definitely a small one. Still, I will post this and, I hope, future comments, as a sort of diary, as I make my way through Jewish scripture for the first time. I hope that it will be of some use to readers like me, who are seeking a more pacifistic reading of the Tanakh.
The Mosaic narrative (the Torah) ends with the Israelites on the banks of the Jordan, about to enter the Promised Land. Prophets offers a history of the Israelites in the land from the conquest, through a period of tribal settlement (Judges), the advent of the monarchy with Saul, David and Solomon (I Samuel and II Samuel), the division into northern and southern kingdoms - Israel and Judah - the decline of both states and, finally, their destruction by Assyria and Babylonia.
Although the Books of Moses are considered the central sacred work of Judaism, it seems to me that they can’t be fully appreciated except in the context of Nevi’im. From a literary standpoint, the Torah is a sort of mythic prelude to the actual political and military history of the people as recorded in Nevi’im.
It’s very important to understand that the story of the Israelites in the biblical period does not end in the fulfillment of God’s promise to bring them to the Promised Land. Rather, it ends in their conquest by another nation, their exile to Babylonia, and the destruction of Solomon’s temple.
Most of stories that make up Torah and Nevi’im were collected, written down, and edited into the form in which we now have them during the Babylonian exile (some scholars date the beginning of this effort to the reign of King Hezekiah in in Judah, after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom; and it extended to the Second Temple period when the Persian king, Cyrus, restored the Israelites to the land; but the bulk of the literary effort took place in Babylonia).
The whole ethos of the work is that of a people who have suffered a great historical tragedy. The Israelites, in writing down their history, were trying both to preserve their traditions and beliefs, and to reconcile their faith in God with the annihilation of their state.
One theme we hear in the Exilic work is the affirmation that God is just, even when He punishes. A corollary belief was that the Chaldean army, which sacked Jerusalem, was acting as an agent of the Almighty. More broadly, God is not seen solely as the Protector of a chosen people. Rather, He regulates the actions of all people and nations in the service of a universal moral order.
In the Exilic Period, God came to be conceptualized as both the motive force and the moral center of human history.
The disruptive power of God - the understanding that everything we take for granted can be upended in an instant - pervades Nevi’im. A particularly evocative example is the song of Hannah at the beginning of I Samuel.
To put it in context - Hannah is the mother of the prophet Samuel, the man who will place Saul and later David on the throne of Israel. Hannah is barren - an object of derision by other women. She prays to God for a child, conceives, and offers this prayer:
The bows of the mighty are broken
And the faltering are girded with strength.
Men once sated must hire out for bread;
Men once hungry hunger no more.
While the barren woman bears seven,
The mother of many is forlorn.
The Lord deals death and gives life,
Casts down and raises up.
The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
He casts down, He also lifts high.
He raises the poor from the dust,
Lifts up the needy from the dunghill,
Setting them with nobles,
Granting them seats of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s;
He has set the world upon them.
He guards the steps of His faithful,
But the wicked perish in darkness -
For not by strength shall man prevail.
“Not by strength shall man prevail.”
To accept this ethos at a personal level is compelling and challenging - especially, I think, for those of us living in the developed world. We believe in the stability of our institutions, our infrastructure, our culture, our possessions. Taking these things for granted, even as we go about our daily lives, is, itself, a form of arrogance.
Judaism calls us to a constant awareness of the limits of our own power:
When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God…and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” (Deuteronomy 8:12)
From this, I think, comes the very tonic Jewish propensity to bless everything - to thank God with multiple daily prayers for each meal, for the clothes we wear, for our health, for giving us children, etc.
The book of Joshua (24:13) carries an apt reminder for the prosperous:
I have given you a land for which you did not labor and towns which you did not build, and you have settled in them; you are enjoying vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant.
Consider Americans living on territory once populated by native tribes; Israelis inhabiting villages, and farming fields, that belonged to Arabs a generation or two ago; both possessing an excess of the world’s wealth and consuming a disproportionate share of its resources. We have powerful armies and nuclear bombs. We trust these things to guarantee our security.
The dispossessed of the world may understand the spirit of Jewish scripture better than we do ourselves. They understand, at least, the transience of places and objects and the fragility of life in the terrible vicissitudes of history. For them faith in God is faith in their own survival, in the restoration - sometime, even if at the end of time - of what was lost.
For conquerers, faith is eroded, I think, by a constant, nagging anxiety: that we cannot go on living without our possessions; that our essential well-being is insured by the exploitation of others; and that we must maintain our superiority in order to survive. When challenged by the Other, that anxiety explodes into a cavernous fear, a hatred that deprives the Other of any legitimate motives or humanity.
It did not take long for the Israelites to stray, on numerous occasions, with the removal of fear and want. Similarly, the corruption of Israel’s present leadership and the influence of money in American politics are manifestations of personal greed - the reflection of our cultural preoccupation with not having enough.
In the modern world, it seems to me, when we suspend our moral standards in the interest of protecting our land, our buildings, even our lives - when we oppress, torture and dehumanize our enemies - when we divert an ever-increasing portion of our resources to maintaining instruments of force - we grasp for power and truly “forget the Lord our God.”
One lesson of our history is that we can lose our land and our holdings and survive as a people by maintaining our beliefs. This, I think, is exactly the lesson of Tanakh. Law and worship, teaching and learning have been the mainstays of the Jewish people through millennia. Wealth and power, land, borders and palaces have never supported our survival; rather, by eroding our faith, they have contributed to our demise.
Judaism reminds us that everything we have is transient - that the difference between satiety and hunger, between the mighty and the broken, is slight in God’s eyes. It calls us to act with humility and compassion in an insecure world.
I think it’s interesting that we often think of God as the force that “raises us up” — forgetting that it is God that also knocks us down. Of course the Third Noble Truth in Buddhism is impermanence — it is the root cause of all suffering. (I read today that it is said that only one of the five disciples listening to the Buddha describe impermanence as the essential nature of our existence and the cause of our suffering really understood what he meant — only one had “profound insight,” which I suppose means it may take a while for this to truly sink in.) What I like here, re: Hannah, that impermanence is seen to be holy, of God’s making — all that is subject to arising (said the Buddha) is subject to ceasing. In Buddhism this is neutral, a statement of being (neutral except insofar as it goes that if your knees hurt during meditation, it will also stop, once you stand up). But here we are perhaps called upon to acknowledge the holiness of all states — we thank God for the ceasing as well as the arising? For making us humble, when good things cease?
Oh, so well put. If I’m not mistaken, Buddhism arose in the same time period as the Babylonian exile of the Israelites, though obviously in a different geographic region and probably independent of the religious thought of the Mideast.
Still, it’s interesting to speculate that this was a time of tremendous upheaval in the world, in which History came to be seen as a force in individual life; and our spiritual attention focused on impermanence over the hierarchical stability that characterized Bronze Age religion.
Thank you for this thoughtful and cogent post, Andrew — I feel certain I will return to this for multiple readings.
There’s a lot here that’s powerful, but the last paragraph really blows me away.
Lots to contemplate in this post. I wonder why it is that land assumes so much importance — not as territory per se, but as a visible manifestation of memory, history, connection. Not only Jews, but many cultures attach sacredness to certain spots — as ancestor burial sites, as traditional sites of worship, as part of legends of how the world began, as ground on which a vision was had by a religious leader. It’s as if we need the concreteness of place, of ground, to hold our history. The Jews have certainly shown that it is possible to have lost our land and yet to have sustained our beliefs, but as you point out, the codification of those beliefs into liturgy made the longing to regain that land a powerful underlying theme. Is this a human characteristic? You’ve raised some very thought provoking questions here.
That we lost the temple and sustained our beliefs may really be the seminal event of Judaism as we now know it. The priests and scholars who crafted the Tanakh defined a religion that was not centered in physical space, but on an imageless, omnipresent God. It was to be sustained through time by law, teaching and communal ritual rather than by a hereditary priesthood. This was a religion abstracted from geography, dependent only on the direct relationship between a people and God.
This is a difficult belief to maintain, exactly because, as you say, we are drawn to the place. We want things to hold our memories and buildings to shelter our devotion.
For such settling, though, we have tended to suffer.
Well, we’ve suffered, but we’ve made others suffer more. But here’s another thought: the missing piece here, I think, is how to sustain the beliefs of a community without some place for the community to affirm its beliefs together? Why belong to a syngagogue? Do we need rabbis to lay out our faith for us? Or is it because we need one another, we need to affirm our faith, conduct our rituals, celebrate our shared history together. A Catholic friend of mine, attending a Seder at our house years ago, commented that there is nothing religious in Catholicism that could be celebrated in the home: the church and the priest are what sanctifies Catholic practice. Passover is a historical, not a “religious” commemoration — but however one defines it, it can be done in the home, as can much else in Jewish practice. But it’s like participating in political action by sitting at the computer and clicking “yes” to add your name to a petition — it just ain’t the same as getting out there and marching in huge crowds with others who feel as you do. (As Gerry and I did last weekend…) That’s not even the best analogy, since so much in Judaism is profoundly tied to our connection to one another. So how to have community without place? How to have Zion as a community, without it becoming “Zionism” as it is currently practiced? We lost the Temple but built multitudes of temples to replace the one we lost. But is that enough? If we long for Zion, does it have to be Israel, literally? The Zionists were offered Uganda at some point, I believe. (Of course, there also happened to be indiginous people in Uganda, whom no one appeared to have taken note of at the time.)
I don’t know how I feel about all this …. just raising questions.
I think they were looking at Hinsdale for a while, too, but gave it up because of the property tax rates…
No, it seems to me you answer the questions you so eloquently raise. Judaism is designed to be practiced by individuals, families, communities, in whatever place we can find to gather.
When Solomon built the Temple, there was an attempt to centralize worship and outlaw the altars scattered throughout Israel and Judea - but people never really stopped sacrificing there, even though it was considered heretical.
In retrospect, the centrifugal tendency was more adaptive as these served as foci for worship after the Exile.
Eventually, though, the concept of a Holy Place was replaced by that of a Holy People - i.e. holiness resides in God, and we approach it through rituals, prayers and deeds that bring us closer to God.
Andrew — I found this essay today when I was searching for an Adrienne Rich quote, but I know some of your work from JVP (I’m a member of the Philly chapter). I’m really excited by your thinking here, especially about how 20th century Zionism has so effected our understanding of Torah. I’m right in the middle of founding new havurah here in Philly that is explicitly feminist AND non-Zionist. Many of our members are also anti-Occupation activists, and creating this prayer space for us has been a gift and a struggle. We’ve certainly lost some potential members because we’re calling into question the role of Zionism in our liturgical lives, but we’re finding others, and challenging some who aren’t sure yet where they fit. I wrote a statement, still very rough, to capture our initial thoughts about what it would mean to be a non-Zionist prayer group, which you can find at: http://groups.google.com/group/fringes/browse_thread/thread/578f8e2c3e8c0da3
I’m also doing an online class through the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College about the prophets. It just started, and the questions being raised are not yet as interesting as what you’re asking, but the historical background is good to have. I hope there are more posts coming, as I find the whole topic fascinating.
Waiting for the next post…
Elliott, thank you so much - I’m glad the post held some meaning to you, and I’m tremendously encouraged by the work you’re doing in Philadelphia with the havurah.
I would love to have a place like that to pray - I was just writing to my friend Cecilie at Muzzlewatch that I feel somewhat isolated in trying to maintain a pre-Zionist or non-Zionist Jewish practice. My own shul, though quite liberal in many ways, maintains a strictly neutral policy on Israel; and the Reconstructionist prayerbook is actually rather heavily influenced by Zionist thought.
Cecilie goes to the Tikkun community services, with a spirit similar to the one at your havurah, I think.
Maybe someday we will have something similar in the Berkshires.
Anyhow, thank you again for the comment, and I hope you’ll keep me posted on how things go.
PS - I’m afraid non-users can’t log on to the googlegroup link. If you want, you could copy the content here…
What shul do you attend? I’m on my way to NoHo for a long weekend away, and will probably drop in on the Amherst group. Their rabbi, from what I know of him, is pretty Zionist, but I like visiting other Jewish communities when I travel just to see what’s out there.
Oops, sorry, I forgot we made part of the googlegroups private. Still learning to manage that site. Here’s the statement:
Fringes: A Feminist Havurah
What do we mean when we say we are a “non-Zionist” havurah? Working
notes toward a statement.
Although our answer will continue to evolve and deepen, these points
capture our initial thinking
1. “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is
the whole world.” Virginia Woolf
It is consonant with our identity as Feminists to refuse to pledge
allegiance to a nation state, and even moreso to refuse to connect our
spiritual expression to governments, militaries, and other apparatus
of control. As Feminists, our political goal is a fearless and
unblinking analysis of the truths of power relationships, whether
between women and men, white people and people of color, or Jews and
Arabs. To use Adrienne Rich’s words, this “powerful, womanly lens”
brings into focus what has been missing from our spiritual practices,
necessitating this havurah in which space for multiple expressions of
gender is not separable from space for multiple expressions of
understanding of Jewish peoplehood.
2.”Zion by itself/is not enough.” Adrienne Rich
We chose the name Fringes because we intend to open a space for those on the margins, including but not limited to the three of us. One
important way we have been cut off has been our refusal to swear our
love for the State of Israel. In this new sacred space we are opening,
we understand Zionism to be one political strategy that Jews have used
to address issues of oppression and cultural expression. It is a
recent strategy, formed in response to historical events. It is not
the only strategy, was not understood to be so by some of the best
Jewish minds of our times, and is not the only answer from this point
forward.
While we expect and invite a wide range of opinions on this in our
community, we chose to define as non-Zionist because we feel strongly
that the founding of Israel as a Jewish state has been used to re-
write the meaning of too much of our liturgical lives. “Zion,” for
example, has been used for thousands of years to invoke a time and
place of nearly messianic perfection, a time of peace and justice for
all peoples, when all the world lives in a state of unity. But too
often now in our synagogues and prayer spaces, the power and beauty
and yearning of our communal dream has been reduced to meaning only
the state of Israel, and even that only for its Jewish citizens.
By making a prayer space defined outside of the view that Zionism is
the only answer to the question of Jewish oppression, we hope to
unpack and recover some of the power of words like Zion or Jerusalem.
We want to proudly reclaim the history of Jewish universalism, and the
voices of the millions of Jews who have cried out for justice for all.
And we want this to be reflected and expressed in the words we use
when we pray. We don’t know exactly what our liturgy will be or mean
as we raise this lens and these questions, but we know the struggle
will be worth the effort as we build honest voices for our prayers.
Rachel Adler says this about the “words of power” in liturgy: “Some
words wear out and become empty. For others, new contexts render their
power malign and not redemptive. Our present situation suggests,
however, that the passing of old words of power and the birth of new
ones is like the chevlei mashiach, the birth pangs portending the
messianic time; people of good will hope for its coming, but would
rather not be there before or after and not during the messy part.”
3. “Separatism is the antithesis of cooperation and results in an
ingrown and clannish remoteness which leads to cultural stagnation.
Otherness thrives best when accompanied by active cooperation and
interaction with neighboring cultures and civilizations and achieves
an individuality which is of universal significance.” Mordechai
Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask: Reconstructionist Answers, 1958
As Reconstructionist Jews, we find tremendous value in Kaplan’s
understanding of living in two cultures. Because we know ourselves to
be grounded in our lives as Jews, as U.S. citizens, and as so many
other identities and relationships such as women, or, for three of us,
as dykes, we reject the false dichotomy of Jewish life into the
categories of Israel/Diaspora. While many communities of Jews within
Israel are creating Jewish meaning and culture of tremendous value to
us, we reject the notion that the only “authentic Jewish life” happens
there. Jewish life as we know it exists only because of the
religious, cultural, political, and intellectual innovations of Jewish
communities across the world, historically and today. Much of Zionism
as a political movement rejected this, insisting that Jews deny and
abandon their rich cultures, languages and histories in favor of a
single Israeli identity. Among many problems we have with this as
Feminists is the erasure of the diversity that sustains us, and the
equation of “Israeli” with a hyper-masculine aggression.
One clear example of the rejection of the Israel/Diaspora dichotomy in
favor of making Jewish meaning comes from Jeff Halper, activist in the
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, who to the question,
“What can American Jews do to support Israel?” answered, “Get a life.
Stop treating Israel like your synagogue.” He expanded this to explain
that Israel is a nation with its own political, national struggles and
issues. While urging those of us listening to support those Israelis
struggling for the kinds of social justice we believe in, he also
warned that Israelis can not and should not be seen as carrying our
Jewish identity for us. “If you want a Jewish life,” he said, “build
your own wherever you are.”
By saying we are non-Zionist, we mean that we are building a Jewish
life where we are here and now, embracing fully our lives as Jews, as
Feminists, as residents of Philadelphia in 2007, whatever the
complexities and contradictions these different worlds embody. And by
consciously forming a havurah around these values, we mean to use the
complexities of our lives to build and inform a rich and shared Jewish
practice.
Nu, do I have to agree with all this to come?
In short, no. You should know that this is part of the underlying
ethic of this group, and be willing to live in this space for a few
hours each month. Every other synagogue and Jewish prayer space in
Philadelphia has Zionism in the center, and those of us who have
critical opinions, or who are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, accommodate
ourselves to fit, or stay silent, or stop going. In this space, other
opinions are at our core. What this might mean on the surface may not
be very noticeable, since we’re coming together to pray, not to debate
politics. We know, for example, that we’ll be clear to use the phrase
“the people Israel” in the liturgy, to clearly distinguish between
that concept and the actual State of Israel, but this is not a rupture
from what our liturgy already says.
Our statement does mean that, like the Feminist analysis, the presence
of a non-Zionist analysis is a given in our intentional community.
What either of this might mean is open-ended and will be shaped in
many ways by the coming together of this thoughtful group of people,
but, as one example, we will never be saying a prayer for any nation
state.
If you are certain you cannot daven in a space not centered on
Zionism, then this havurah isn’t for you. If you aren’t sure how it
might feel, please come and visit. If you have more questions, feel
free to contact any of us to set up a discussion.
That is a wonderful statement. It expresses very clearly a lot that’s been floating around in my mind - and, I’m guessing, many others.
I attend Ahavath Sholom in Great Barrington. But you’ve kind of inspired me to investigate starting a havurah, or maybe at least a study group in this area, with a similar theme.
Hey I don’t know how much time you’ll have in Noho but if you get a chance give me a ring - maybe we can have lunch or something. I’ll email you my phone number.