Ready for a Slow Paced Davening Adventure?
July 12, 2011
Join us on Shabbat morning on July 23rd at 10:00 am. The service will be “contemplative” and will emphasize awareness, gratitude and reflection. Led by Susan Brenner, the morning will be full of songs, chants, kavannot (intentions), niggunim (lai, lai, lai. . .) and guided meditation that will open your heart and mind to the source of all.
J.D. Kleinke will lead his own composition of a Jewish kirtan (call and response) style rendition of the prayer, Ma Tovu.
In a shortened Torah service (three aliyot chanted by Arleen Slive, Michele Goldschmidt and Len Shapiro), Len will lead a drash on the Torah portion, Matot.
If the traditional service isn’t your cup of tea, try this one for something different!
For lunch, please bring any type of salad, appetizers, kosher fish, veggies, fruits, bagels, spreads and dips, or dessert.
Read Rabbi Joey’s Entire Hakol Article: Progressive Jews, Israel and the Dangers and Opportunities of Christian Liberation Theology
May 19, 2011
Progressive Jews, Israel and the Dangers and Opportunities of Christian Liberation Theology
(I was invited to meet a Jewish opinion writer to discuss his recent book, in which he proposes that Jews should rethink support for Israel – on the basis of insights he gleans from Christian liberation theology. To be fair, he represents himself as someone for whom Zionism and Jewish texts were “mother’s milk”. His criticism comes in light of what he has seen of the occupation, and how it has imprisoned Palestinians and Jews alike. This essay reviews some of my thoughts on how he engages Christian progressives. The conversation about Israel with Christians makes us as Jews feel squeamish, but consider for a moment that it’s only right and natural that they should respond to humanitarian issues, especially where their tax dollars are implicated. That they have a moral perspective should not surprise us, much less inspire our indignation. They might have something to teach us, after all; and we might have something to convey of value in return.)
Recently, the acclaimed Columbia University historian Eric Foner has written a book that focuses on Abraham Lincoln and how his views on slavery evolved. Lots of ink has flowed on the topic of perhaps our greatest president, but until now little of it has been devoted to the political conversation that expanded the space for a society to come to terms with its moral blindness on the issue. Although Lincoln’s role in emancipating the slaves has been celebrated, what emerges in this study is the complex timing and leverage that comes into play when events race ahead and compel leaders to make decisions in advance of coherent philosophical motives. We often confuse political wisdom with twenty-twenty vision, but more often than not we find out that the willingness to grapple with past errors and misguided assumptions plays a crucial role.
Interpreting the past, of course, is not only the business of historians or political theorists. Theologians and ideologues of every stripe get into the act, in order to reset their moral compasses and weigh in on transcendent matters. The immediacy of change on the ground requires people to adjust their ultimate convictions about who bears guilt and who is innocent. Then there are the spin-masters on both ends of the spectrum, who wrap these views in smooth rhetoric. They oversimplify things and present a dossier for or against. In the case of the political left and its critique of Israel, there are Christian liberation theologians who attempt to apply their paradigm to the plight of the Palestinians. This is to be expected, since Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands has gone on well past when we had expected it to be ended. What we should be wary of are classical Christian attempts to throw out Jewish claims – on land, on history, on powerfulness. Ever since ancient Christians offered the world a new testament, they have sought to disqualify the earlier one. Dichotomization of who came earlier (primitive) and later (developed) put Jews in a vise. Today, on the left, there are new peddlers of this script, even a few Jews who feel little compunction in reciting it, on their way to disdaining Israel’s statecraft at whatever cost.
Progressives who refuse to march lockstep with Israel’s every move should be inquiring about what’s wrong with Christian supersessionism? Well, for one thing, it’s the philosophical twin brother of what critics on the political left refer to as colonialism. In both cases, a dominant and overwhelmingly pervasive force seeks to comprise within itself the vestiges of tinier, local systems. In the attempt to claim ascendancy or moral superiority, lesser cultures are shorn of legitimacy. Made to appear unviable, the former are given a symbolic, abstract meaning – as if to say that what has taken its place is sturdier, less dependent on the time-constrained needs of specific human beings, events and places, than on surpassing, grander themes. These lesser entities are thereby erased and subsumed beneath a larger corporative narrative. Jews were once-upon-a-time, narrowly concerned, whereas Christianity was essential Jewish wisdom, transmuted and conceptualized for the world. Christian Palestinians and their supporters worldwide, unjustly diminished by the policies of a Jewish state, will pander to this kind of logic, and seek to reverse what they see as a pattern of anomalous confiscations of their property and that of others by way of the occupation.
When there’s an ax to grind, then generally there is an unexamined anger management issue that keeps flaring up. For all who care about a progressive political agenda – whether it concerns serving the needs of the world’s poor or empowering indigenous communities wherever they exist – we should disqualify this latter-day colonialism and declare it specious. Even as we come to terms with the rage and xenophobia the seethes within Israel, we should beware of attempts to one-up or take sides with Palestinians versus Israelis, or the occupied versus the occupier – solely on the basis of Christ-centered corrections of inferior (read: tribal) Jewish strategies to secure Israel. It’s the wolf, in other words, coming in brand-new lamb’s haberdashery. In the end, it mischaracterizes potential partnerships in peace. It won’t help any to cast social change as taking place within the context of Christians rectifying what the Jews have gotten wrong. Reactionaries will pounce.
So when a local representative of a group that aspires to speak for the needs of Christian Palestinians touts a Jewish author, I want to know who he is. It turns out we’ve never heard of Mark Braverman, but I can say that his grasp of matters including Jewish history, early Christian history, antisemitism, and current political discourse about the Middle East is engaging and problematic at the same time. His failure to consider more thorough critiques – historical and political – undermines the effort. More importantly, his identification with the Christian narrative, in this case a liberationist one, is difficult, in terms of his willingness to vilify one camp and turn to the other for what amounts to salvation.
I care about these things for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the fact that Jews do have a problem, when it comes to blind support of Israel, at this point. But we had better be clear about what it is that fosters a reasoned critical perspective.
Constantinism: Dominant Christian Power
For one thing, in an online essay, Braverman should begin with the point he leaves for the end of his remarks. He speaks in terms of early Christianity’s “Constantinism”, as a stage in which the religion forged a centuries-long and unfortunate (especially for the Jews) bond with imperial politics and designs. With the Holy Roman Empire, the Church asserted its dominance and justified its favored status. The flip-side was a rejection of the Jewish people, shunted off to the side. The author is correct, in declaring that this form of authoritarian Christianity was a wrong turn, but it was hardly an aberration in the metamorphosis of Christian thought along the pathway to liberation theology. In fact, at the outset, Christianity departed from its antecedent Jewish noetic projects, evolving decisively toward a monolithic worldview. Its so-called Constantinism was, in fact, in line with the goal of incorporating (and co-opting) many differing paths toward enlightenment. As Elaine Pagels adduced in her study of the Gospel of Thomas, we now understand that early Christians excluded and ostracized other inspired religious discourses, in the name of authorizing one primary form of Jesus-centered myth and practice. (It seems there were initially many Sons of Gods. There were in the beginning many smaller Christianities, but they might not have been called that.) It bears mentioning that all of these early century coteries played with a volatile and expansive mix of ideas that characterized not only the Jewish imaginative culture they emerged from, but the multivocal Jewish Talmudic world which would evolve over centuries. The Jews chose a path of inventiveness, whereas early on Christianity sought to comprise what it could and winnow away heteronymous elements. Braverman, I think, understands this, but he somehow imagines that Christianity is now capable of reverting back to its original, pluralistic impulses. The trouble is that a dominant faith culture is unlikely to capture how important it is for a minority group with a history of being on the short end of the stick to get well-deserved recognition for what it has accomplished that is noble. They may be the strongman in Israel/Palestine, but certainly within a region that stretches from the Atlantic coast of north Africa on across Asia Minor they don’t compare in numbers. There’s a part of Jewish identity that is always concerned with being eliminated, so progressives of every stripe will have to worry about that Jewish phobia.
What’s important and hopeful is that normative Judaism in the centuries leading up to this era made no attempt to supersede an alternative system that shed light on the One God, just as the notion of “deleting” the product of whole generations in the name of some later version carried no weight. Amongst Jews, resiliency and pluralistic readings resulted, all in the name of a Sinaitic covenant.
So contrary to Christian supersessionist tendencies, difference was and is seen by the Jews as a good thing. What’s more, it’s the inheritance of Jews who assert a secular view of the world and are preponderantly involved today in building a culture devoted to human rights law and accountability. It’s a multicultural, cosmopolitan view of the world that vies with the older order of nation-states, (one to whose fraternity a Jewish people never gained admittance). According to that view, nation-states, at best, depended on a regime of laws and statesmen (seldom stateswomen) that represented the majority ethnicities resident within them. At worst, they were modern iterations of the medieval clans that birthed them and demanded fierce loyalty. However, human rights law asserts a political philosophy that resonates beyond the ethnic groups who are ascendant (within a border) at any particular time. It speaks on behalf of the individuals independent of their majority or minority status who take up residence, and regardless of ethnicity (or race or gender or sexual orientation); and it advocates for their rights and aspirations. In this view, there are actually two social contexts that command the attention of progressive Jews. The first is the subsistence farm (which until now in history has been thought of in terms of the indigenous dwellers who live on it), and the second is the urban landscape. In the case of the latter, we recognize the excitement and danger inherent in a space that “explodes” with new smells, new tastes, new looks, new ideas – and new immigrants. We’ll come back around to the former later in this essay.
Urban Jews on the Fringes and the Hazards of Self-Reinvention
Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews have been identified (for better or for worse) with the possibilities of the city and its emergent bourgeoisie. With few upwardly mobile pathways, and with unstable means to make a living, they formed a bridge between landed gentry, peasants and a gradually awakening world dependent on credit and inter-jurisdictional commerce. They were run off, on the other hand, by Christians, from land-holding possibilities in regions where they might have evolved the characteristics we think of as being indigenous. Precariously, Jewish communities foundered on the edges of cities, navigating the whims of power elites who exploited them and quite often in history expelled them entirely. The “Constantinist” merger of guild economy and Christianity meant that Jews were pushed to the fringes. Wherever they managed to congregate in new urban configurations, they built up not just their own cultural institutions; they still conjured dynamic relationships never envisioned before with the people around them – learning their languages, adjusting to their political systems, and in some cases, adopting new ways of thinking. While some have over-generalized that the Jews kept themselves separate, recently scholars have portrayed a more nuanced view that depicts communities quite determined to foster discourse, on the one hand, and preserve distinctiveness, on the other. For sure, it was tough-going and time limited (by the nobles and local bishops who exploited them and dispensed with them capriciously), and it left the Jews as an ethnic group forever at the mercy of a controlling religious society.
In the 19th century, in an era when Christian Europe threw open its gates and tentatively offered a way for Jews to become citizens of nation-states, the paradigm of co-optation asserted itself anew. Citizenship came with conditions: it required the abandonment of Jewish national status. In a continent ubiquitously Christian, the Jews were advised to practice in private. Signs of their corporate affiliation were disdained, in the name of a higher kultur. Public accusations of dual loyalty belied pluralistic hopes. With Herzl and his notorious response to the Dreyfus Affair, some Jews took things into their own hands and birthed Zionism; and it might be said that the shock of Jews mirroring what others did for themselves has never worn off. It, moreover, toppled the Christian mythical paradigm of Jesus superseding all that was affirmatively Jewish which preceded him. It was a radical departure, and we, concerned today as we are about contemporary Israeli political and military intransigence, can revisit it for purely postmodern liberal and progressive reasons. However, history is irreversible, and at this late date it seems a bit hypocritical to summons an argument against the Jewish State that emanates from Christian kindness or superior concern for the disenfranchised. To put stock, however correctly, in the fact that Christianity also espoused a doctrine that paid heed to the poor, or that there were monastic orders that removed themselves from the barbarous course of powerful Christian rulers, and that this brand of Christianity is the world’s only hope, seems naïve. In terms of the dialectical tensions that have existed between Jews and Christians, it is insulting to imagine that Braverman, a Jew, would suggest that Israelis, now armed to the teeth, are the new Constantines. Instead, it should be hoped that progressives offer arguments in favor of putting an end to the oppression of Palestinians on the basis of egalitarianism and human rights alone. It’s also worth pointing out that even though it might be a bad idea for Israel to focus on its short-term security interests at the expense of a longer view, it can hardly be ignored that the Arab world is experiencing as much foment as it is – and that no one really knows how the dust will settle. We want to see more proactive political exploration from Israel during this Arab spring, but there’s no telling what the scorecard will look like in the end, in favor of fundamentalists or secularists with pluralist inclinations.
Utopian Zionists
It is noteworthy that one other basis for a wishful humanitarian reformation of politics in the land which progressives recall favorably is the brand of Zionism that came before all others. There were thinkers who, in fact, engendered what might be called an “indigenization” of Jews living directly off their land. In eastern Europe, they formed cultural clubs and organizations, as much to transform themselves in terms of being forward-looking people. Christian antisemites in Poland and Russia excluded them from their own projects to improve society, and they confined them within specified territories. And yet, like other Europeans, they determinedly began to write explorative fiction, publish journals, and take the steps to extirpate all signs of stigma and obsolescence. In particular, they taught themselves about agriculture and agronomy – and they did this, remarkably in an era when a “return to the land” could only have meant migrating to a place familiar from sacred texts. One Zionist writer, A.D. Gordon, waxed eloquent about Jews nourishing a forlorn, rocky soil, working the land and refurbishing Jewish character. He himself made the move at an advanced age, and was only one of many Jewish poets of the soil and the romance with nature.
These early immigrants had no knowledge of nor did they have sophisticated concerns about statecraft. All they cared about, in the most idealistic, utopian way – was a nascent remaking of a life shattered by Christian antisemitism. They eschewed the city, and they migrated in droves to collective farms. This is not to say that Jews didn’t move to urban environments in the first part of the twentieth century; but it speaks seriously about a collective commitment to a labor model and one that was egalitarian. In many cases, it was wildly and starkly naturalistic – that’s the worst thing that can be said about it.
It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to accuse those earlier generations of immigrants of not caring about Palestinian Arabs, who lived there under Ottoman control. How could these crazy Jews have been so myopic, we want to know? Well, they simply wanted for themselves what others already had – and not more. They wanted to feel proud of their hard work, and they wanted a connection to their place (as described in their ancestral literature, their prayers, their rituals); and they were persuaded that in Israel all of this was possible in a way that it had been denied elsewhere.
Zionism: The Evolution of a Political Agenda
Herzl and the many other European political Zionists redirected this idealistic resurgence, by harnessing it to diplomatic motives on a scale they couldn’t have imagined. More than a century later, progressive Zionists and post-Zionists like myself would say that numerous mistakes were made in the name of expediency. The kind of statecraft the twentieth century Jewish brokers of power espoused in Herzl’s name soon became based on bringing as many Jews as possible – “Jews without a land” – to a “land without people”. This was not just distortive, but patently fraudulent, in terms of Palestinians who were there first. But we should recognize that Zionist plans were a later clone of earlier Euro-centric colonial models that moved human beings, as if they were pawns on a chessboard. The historian Foner makes the case that Abraham Lincoln himself wasn’t as passionate about the abolition of slavery in the beginning, as he was about the scourge of unfree labor and how it limited American economic horizons. In fact, he had a propensity for seeking out a solution to the vexing “Negro problem” that involved shipping them to Central America or back to Africa, and he gave attention to this possibility long after it should have been dropped. The world’s most enlightened leaders well into the twentieth century solved social problems by dreaming in technicolor of mass exoduses. So Herzl merely appealed to current large-scale diplomatic emotions.
With the Shoah, needless to say, the high priority of rescuing an entire people – not just from the Nazis and their sympathizers across a continent – but from a complacent and often hostile Christian world took center stage. For post-Zionists, we may wrestle retrospectively with what happened to Palestinian victims on the other end, in terms of the Naqba. We can condemn the deeds of many 1948 Israeli heroes, but we know that had we lived in that moment, we would have been caught up in making immediate choices. There is a whole Israeli literature that grapples with the suppression of the needs (and the stories) of the survivors who flooded the new Jewish state during those years. Israeli leaders are scrutinized today for their lackluster record, in terms of caring for the needs of all kinds of victims. Within Israeli society, during the 1950s and 1960s, families who immigrated earlier in the century preferred to view themselves as rightfully “belonging” (already) to a restored land, with reinvigorated self-image and respect. The survivors provided nightmarish images, reflections of the past that were unwelcome. The Israeli film “The Matchmaker” that came to our own Jewish Film Festival seizes on this internal collision of self-images. In a world that shunned the Jews, it was and still is immeasurably difficult for them to claim a place and embrace it fully. This is especially the case, where mainstream Christian dogmas have conveyed over time the idea that the Jews were long supposed to be off the stage of history.
Antisemitism and Progessive Strategies For Resolving the Conflict
We also know as Jews how much internalizing this kind of contempt and disgust must have damaged our collective psyche, so that it reverberated for the next generation – and cast the dye for rightist ideologues in the second half of the twentieth century. Progressive Jews are well aware of this, because of a fissure that exists within our camp in America. Some of us are well aware of the pressures in western culture to subsume our unique spiritual practices beneath the more acceptable and more readily available religious forms and references; and we are involved in a quest to rediscover what is uniquely, spiritually our own. Others are too embarrassed, too traumatized, and prefer a brand of politics that identifies them with outsiders and an outside view. We have undergone our own internalized oppression both in the mainstream, in terms of a pop template of “light” Christianity (in the malls, on the airways, in public education, in the sheer proliferation of every variety of churches across the American landscape), and we have endured, more intensively, a heavy dose of blowback from the left. At the same time, we are frustrated with the Jewish establishment’s methods to reframe so much, in terms of the moral superiority of its own perspective – in the face of discrimination (imagined or real). Now, an entire generation of liberal and progressive Jews has grown up since the 1970s, in a period when the State of Israel’s crimes against a people it has oppressed for more than forty years have come to light. These Jews, more aware of global issues thanks to the Internet, chafe at Jewish exceptionalism. They often don’t share the view that criticism of the State of Israel is bad in itself. While post-Zionists still express outrage that a dominant Christian religious majority in American society at times seeks to supersede other coherent points of view, we should readily avow moral and political sympathies with Christian progressives who, like us, care most of all about human rights and open political discourse.
Jewish progressives are more enamored of the side of Israel that reflects a broad ingathering of many diverse communities. In this sense, we are ethnologists, who want to keep their stories alive – and we are not flag-waving defenders of one larger nation-state in a perpetual state of war against others. In referring to our curiosity about stories, I am speaking of sub-ethnic groups: Iraqi Jews and French Jews and Argentinian Jews and Indian Jews. In recent years, Ethiopian Jews have come to Israel too. There are many colors and recipes and accents that reflect so many points of origin. That they can get along with one another at all is a miracle – and we work on behalf of their common enfranchisement. In this sense, it’s the cosmopolitan Jewish instinct that sparks our political action: the belief in difference and burgeoning cultural richness. So it’s, in fact, Otherness and difference, once again, that gets us excited about Israel – much more than an often jingoistic approach to the politics of the Middle East. For those of us progressive Jews who are observant, we will have nothing of prayers and spiritual practices hijacked by homogenous ideological settlers. Their insistence upon equating “a whole Land of Israel” with God’s Will unnerves us, to say the least. We are outspoken in this generation against such propositions, and we temper our friendship with Israelis with chagrin about Israel’s political system and its lack of inspired leadership. Nowhere else is this as obvious as with regard to the festering crisis with the Palestinians, and Israeli (and American Jewish) refusal to treat it head on.
It is true that the Occupation (with regard to both the West Bank and Gaza) absolutely shifts and submerges the conversation about 1948, the birth of the State of Israel, and the Naqba. Jewish progressives who are well informed realize this, no matter how much they may have grown up loving what is good to celebrate about Israel’s march to independence. Yehouda Shenhav, an Israeli sociologist, has written about the way that over-focusing on the injustices of the Green Line (the boundary between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank) obscures some basic injustices at the core of the Zionist project. Coincidentally, he also notes that the current political discourse about the territories obscures the hegemonic Ashkenazic onslaught against later-arriving (Jewish) sub-ethnic groups, who have been left out of the pie. It’s the case that the politics of the Land of Israel has also devolved to a politics of inclusion and exclusion when it comes to private real estate. That real estate may have once belonged, according to Zionist narrative, to the Jewish people, but it has been bought and sold now over the past couple of decades by the lucky few. Global economics Israeli style has dealt its hand, so there are many considerations beyond security that prevent state actors from putting an end to the kind of violence that keeps the Palestinians out. This is violence that serves the status quo.
If we are to conceive of solutions to the problem, it’s important that we view it as co-created by more than one party. In other words, when we let Palestinians off the hook in terms of their own history of violence, we allow internalized forms of oppression to play a role in the formulation of strategies for change. There is yet another facet of our decades-long love/hate relationship with Israel that progressive Jews treasure, and in many ways it represents the grief we have experienced. For those of us who grew up admiring Israel, or at the very least, envisioning it in terms of prophetic possibilities, we held out the hope that in Israel both Jews and Arabs would learn to respect one another. During the 1970s, we saw that hope trickle away. We were chagrined by rightist leaders, beginning with Menachem Begin, who swept the labor ideal out of fashion and utilized a new rhetoric – one which broadly and didactically structured a debate about Israel’s enemies in the region. The debate was framed in terms of the Shoah and opened the door to reprobative public speech in a way that was not current before this point. It undoubtedly played a role in the maneuverings of political and military leaders in the first decades of the State of Israel, but it was not used to galvanize the way that Jews who live in Israel or abroad have subsequently used it to justify every resort to force. It’s true that if we scrutinize the archives, as revisionist historians by now have done, we can say that ethnic cleansing was a minute-by-minute aspect of mid-century Zionist designs for a new state. But it was in the 1970s that the future became subservient to leaders staunchly opposed to justice for the Palestinians. In politics, in economics, in religion – the shift in the political conversation obviated progress towards peace, and it foreclosed a forthright rectification of the earlier decades’ misdeeds. With the exception of Yitzchak Rabin, few high-ranking leaders attempted to revise their views about cooperation in the region. All this happened while Israel became a military power, and forged a strategic relationship with the United States. Symbiotic relationships between the American Jewish mainstream and American military designs became enshrined, and there was less room for dissent among Jews who felt that Israel had lost its way.
Pragmatism on the Left Versus Denial
More importantly, for progressives, the dream of two side-by-side states was swept to the sidelines. We all know that the peace process has been more fantasy than reality. The role of Palestinians in subverting this process has been substantial, as well. One trip with Americans for Peace Now to Gaza City in 1998, to meet Yasser Arafat, convinced me of what others knew well before then: he was a corrupt leader, a demagogue, and one who knew how to make political theater, but who failed to plan for a better day. For all he did to bring the Palestinians to the front-boiler internationally, he did so little to build democratic institutions and establish the people’s trust in one another and in a national, internal debate about their future.
And Hamas is an altogether different story, because it (like Hezbollah and Iran, the benefactor) plays a cynical game predicated on totalitarian violence. The suicide bombings of ten years ago concussed Israelis, who might have worked to change facts on the ground, and the missiles lobbed continually into the southern plain dented Israelis’ faith in a shared future. It is a canard that ugly events such as these should not matter in the long run: they make all the difference in the world in terms of people leading real lives. On the other hand, for progressives, there are other markers. Individuals like Rachel Corrie matter too, not so much because they are blameless or figures to be beatified. I have written that she was the anti-Anne Frank, to signify that whereas the youthful Anne Frank went to her death with no avenue of escape, Rachel Corrie, of her own volition, made a choice. She naively enmeshed her life in a conflict that swallowed her up and transformed her into a symbol of vulnerability and state terror. That it was her choice, with such lack of mature deliberation, infuriates the right, because this side of the spectrum resists the portrayal of sacrificial lambs altogether. But the symbolism uniquely plays into the hands of those on the left who are susceptible to a liberation theology message that puts a suffering servant first and the descendants of the Pharisees second. We shouldn’t need to receive the message in a theologically correct envelope, in order to realize how unbearably sad and unconscionable it is that innocent people are losing their lives.
Now we can mourn the Italian human rights worker Vittorio Arrigoni, who has suffered a death no less ignominious. That he worked on behalf of the Palestinians, and that he was abducted and murdered by a Palestinian extremist, shocks us and chastens Israelis who hold the cards. He too was dedicated to people who are oppressed and to the people of Gaza he loved. His death won’t fit the narrative, and his name will be forgotten. That both Arrigoni and Corrie dramatized the injustice that gets meted out every day in Gaza is something we should regard with reverence and humility; and we should redouble our efforts to stop the trampling of human lives altogether. But progressives cannot live on ideology alone, on abstract vapors – we shouldn’t kid ourselves. While Israelis live in a volatile region that seeks to overcome its penchant for authoritarian tyrants, we are going to need to acknowledge how anxious they will be about these awful murders perpetrated by both sides and how they undermine hope for the future.
Fear is a real-life emotion, and when it becomes codified – in terms of political theory – it can take a lifetime to overcome. The Christian notion of supersession – or even that there is one right way that takes precedence above and beyond all other ways – argues that a tribal narrative that validates difference and treasures intimacy and safety is a thing of the past. Such a perspective denigrates the importance of a Wailing Wall or any other monument to specific history and geography. Accordingly, all walls, for that matter, should come down immediately, in the name of broader, more liberating calls for truth and justice. The separation wall (not fence!) should come down, but it was put up to assert a power equation. It’s revolting, but now it poses a deeper question: Why have borders, or why declare a state at all? When we restructure the cultural geography – when we resection it, realign it, morph it, truncate it – don’t we in fact deny the inexorable temporal forces their right to obliterate us? And doesn’t all the effort to stave off obliteration require us to eviscerate someone else’s narrative?
Jewish progressives who have studied history and are well-versed in Jewish dialectical thinking on these matters call attention to an underlying fallacy: our artificial borders demarcate psychotic wishes. Our best selves, as Jews, were crystallized in places where we daily bumped into people not like us. On this point, we realize that Christians might see through our motives and jump to the wrong conclusion. And yet, however cosmopolitan we may be, we still want a place we can call home, so the reference points are important and we need to control them. The ancient Israelite prophets, who spoke in Hebrew and on behalf of a distinct group of people, would not have presumed to know what applies to political crises halfway around the globe, and their regard for homeland was paramount. They worked locally, and even though they allowed for the real possibility that Others might someday live alongside them in harmony, they understood that history interposes its stages, its steps to peace, its periods of negotiating the arduous intermediate path. The fact that many are so willing to generalize what these prophets had to say – for all ages and times, as transcendently and immediately applicable – reflects a flaw in their own narrative. It’s also a narrative which fixates on this one tiny place, in disproportion to so many other violent zones in the world.
Jewish progressives will nonetheless stay at working for peace between Israel and Palestine, by bringing down walls wherever it is humanly possible. While we point out the crimes perpetrated by Israel’s leaders with American Jewish tacit support, we won’t, like some others, evade the broader contemporary context. There is a much larger region in which the Muslim world’s Salafi extremism, despotism and misogyny are depressing facts. So while we work incrementally, diligently and mindfully – to know and love our neighbor – our eyes will be open. You see, those Old Testament prophets may have held their heads skyward, but their feet were very much on the ground.
The involvement of Christian liberation theology is welcome, on the one hand, and a cause for concern, on the other. Progressive Jews should admire Christian willingness to speak out resoundingly on behalf of Palestinian victims of oppression. Work on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed is the great equalizing force behind radical Christianity, and Jews should be thankful for all teachings that bring light into the world. That same Christian teaching on loving our neighbors and recognizing them fully should be a powerful motivator and a reminder to us not only how far we, as Jews, have come, but of the work ahead. And now it is up to us, to include the stranger in our midst, something we uniquely know all about and can offer the world as our own gift. In a little place, we can expand the conversation. Min ha-meytsar karatee Yah.
Rabbi Joey
Did you miss an “Evening of Memories” on December 17th?
January 4, 2011
Thank you to Rob Freedman and the entire Memoir Class group for a wonderful night full of laughter, tears, happiness and reflection. Their creativity and especially the courage to stand in front of a group of people and expose their feelings, fears, desires and triumphs is what makes Havurah a truly participatory community.
Members of the class have been asked to share their stories. Click on each person’s name for a link to their memoir piece.
Lebanese Food for Thought: Read Leerom Medovoi’s Presentation from December 9th
December 29, 2010
A Captive Audience
- Leerom
Lebanese Food for Thought
by Leerom Medovoi
Last October I left on a trip to Lebanon that only lasted five days, but that has really changed the way I think about the middle east. I teach in the English department at Portland State, where I am researching the literature and culture of America’s state of permanent war. Several years ago, I wrote a book about American culture during the long cold war, the era under which I grew up.
Now I’m working on contemporary literature, culture, and the war on terror. I left for Lebanon because I was invited to give a talk by the Center for American Studies Research at the American University of Beirut. This center was recently endowed by a Saudi prince with a big budget to fly out American scholars. My plan was to talk about a key part of my research project in which I am analyzing Islamophobia, and the construction of the Muslim as permanent enemy. The more I’ve looked at this, the more I’ve grown convinced that Islamophobia is a kind of racism, but not like the color-line racism we’re more familiar with in the U.S. It actually functions very much like anti-semitism, and I’m discovering that it is even linked to it historically.
So this is was what I had been invited to talk about.
Read Rabbi Joey’s Op-Ed on Indefinite Detentions and Human Rights
December 29, 2010
Needed: a Full Accounting of U.S. Detainees
On Dec. 17, The Washington Post reported that a nonpartisan think tank would look into the way that detainees in the war on terror are being treated. This news comes none too soon, considering our country’s post-9/11 experimentation with black sites, Guantanamo prisoners without rights, and cases under seal.
In Jewish teachings, a leading second century sage once said that it would be preferable to execute a criminal (for a capital offense) rather than keep him incarcerated for a long period of time. Since historians are pretty sure that no Jewish courts ever implemented the death penalty, the worry about indefinite detention is of paramount importance.
