What exactly does it mean that Israel is a Jewish state? Does it simply mean that the majority of the citizens are Jews and that any Jew has a right to come and live there? And that the state is entitled to act like other states, and get away with anything it can get away with?
Or must a Jewish state meet a higher standard than other nations? Does it have an obligation to use its power in the world for good?
I am Jewish. Unlike friends who call themselves "recovering Catholics," I am not a recovering Jew. My recovering friends see their childhood experience with Catholicism as toxic, an illness they had to recover from. I feel the opposite. I believe that my moral vision, my desire to save the world, began in my family's practice of Judaism.
THE PASSOVER SEDER AS MORAL TEACHER
Despite the fact that my father grew up Orthodox, my immediate family was not very religious. But every year we went to a Passover seder at my Auntie Sarah's house. Every year we sat around a table with the aunts, uncles and cousins on my father's side. We read the Passover Haggadah aloud.
Passover is a very political holiday. It celebrates the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt. I believe that Passover is the carrier of the moral vision of Judaism.
We ate charoses, a delicious paste of apples, walnuts and wine, on matzah, a dry tasteless cracker. The charoses represents the mortar the enslaved Jews used to build the pyramids. The matzah represents the bread dough that didn't have time to rise because the Jews had to take what they had and get the hell out of Egypt.
For me as a child, slavery was made real and escape from slavery was made real.
And when we recited the names of the ten plagues that God inflicted on the Egyptians, we dipped our fingers in our wine (or grape juice) ten times, and scattered a few drops on the plate. We are commanded to remove wine from our glass so that our celebration of our freedom cannot be total. Why? Because Egyptians had to suffer, even die in order for the Jews to make their escape.
Compassion for the enemy, even the slave master, was made real to me.
Another significant Passover ritual came at the end, when we all said, "Next year in Jerusalem."
(I'm realizing as I'm writing this: That one sentence, "Next year in Jerusalem," was the carrier of many Jews' longing to return to their ancestral land with all the political power of a sovereign state. That has turned out to be a very dicey proposition.)
Of course the Haggadah was developed long before the state of Israel came into being. The Haggadah goes on to say, "We still say 'Next year in Jerusalem,' because the whole world is not at peace. We will only truly be in Jerusalem when we have world peace. "
That the Jews' destiny was inseparable from all of humanity was made real to me.
JUDAISM WITHOUT ZIONISM My family never talked about Israel when I was growing up. To me, it was just a fact that it existed. My cousin Sam, who attended the same childhood seders, was a Zionist. For Sam, Judaism was absolutely central, and he passionately wanted to be part of the Jewish State. Israel was the only place he could truly live among Jews in a Jewish society. He ended up moving there with his wife and small children decades ago.
For me, Judaism has never been focused on Israel. It has been about social justice. Unlike Christianity, there is nothing in Judaism that says you have to be Jewish to be saved. Nothing says that only Jews go to heaven. It is very clear in the Torah that anyone can be a good person and live a good life without being Jewish.
CHOSEN FOR WHAT?
Admittedly, there are clear messages in Jewish texts that Jews are the Chosen People. But we were never chosen to rule over others. We were chosen to bring God's moral law to the world. And, let's face it, folks: For its time, the Ten Commandments were pretty damn advanced. Scholars say they might have been written as early as the 16th century BCE. Whenever the Ten Commandments came into being, "Thou shalt not kill" was a pretty radical idea at the time.
Sadly, it remains a pretty radical idea.
THE PROPHETS & THE RABBIS
Another Jewish contribution to the ancient world was the belief that society could get better -- more peaceful, more just. Other ancient people's view of history was cyclical: The more things changed the more they stayed the same; the poor will always be with us; the rich will always come out on top. The world is the way it is, and that's that.
But the Torah does not accept this passive view. The Torah says history is moving upward toward a better and more just world. And if it isn't, it SHOULD be, and we'd better start cracking to make it happen! The Jewish prophets, who lived from 750 BCE to 350 BCE, introduced the concept of social justice. They proclaimed that poverty and oppression were NOT an inherent part of life. The existence of unnecessary suffering and inequality was a sign that something was terribly WRONG with society. Widows and orphans and others in need must be taken care of! This vision of ethical progress was bequeathed to Western civilization by the Jewish prophets..
After the Jews were driven from Israel in the First Century CE, Rabbinic Judaism became the carrier of the ethical tradition. The moral leaders were teachers, not prophets. One rabbinic concept that I find very powerful is referred to by the phrase "Whose blood is redder?" This is taken to mean that, since everyone's blood is the same color, everyone's life is of equal value. No one can consider their life more important than anyone else. People are basically equal. All of them. Everywhere. Jew, non-Jew, black white. This concept was articulated by the Sage Rabbah, who lived in the Third Century CE. WHOSE BLOOD IS REDDER? Feel the reverberations of this absolute expression of universal equality.
AND NOW...
I have felt so much pride in Judaism's great contributions to the humanistic tradition. And now I feel great shame at what Israel is doing in Gaza. Not only is it evil, it's stupid! They're creating more terrorists than they're killing with their senseless bombing. They are actually using what our military calls 'dumb' bombs, to guarantee that destruction and death are spread as widely as possible.
The Israelis even murdered three ISRAELI hostages who had somehow escaped or were abandoned by their captors. These young men were shirtless to show they had no bombs under their clothes and were waving a scrap of white cloth, the universal symbol of surrender. And still they were cut down at close range by Israeli soldiers.
We are all forced to wonder how many Palestinian men met the same senseless fate. At least we know the names of the Israeli men who died. Their families know what happened. We will never know the names of all the Palestinians who must have been similarly and pointlessly murdered.
Are the deaths of Palestinians less tragic than the deaths of Israelis? WHOSE BLOOD IS REDDER?
THERE IS NOTHING JEWISH ABOUT THE BEHAVIOR OF ISRAEL IN GAZA.
The nation is wounded and enraged, mindlessly killing Palestinians and reducing Gaza to ruins.They do this because they CAN do this -- thanks to our own country's boundless support for their military.
Israel has lost its soul. Its leaders are violent and corrupt. They are also incompetent. (See headline below right.) | 
No comments:
Post a Comment