My
heart is broken as I witness the suffering of the Palestinian people and
the seeming indifference of Israelis. All my life I’ve been a champion
of Israel, proud of its many accomplishments in science and technology
that have benefited the world, insistent on the continuing need for the
Jewish people to have a state that offers protections from anti-Semitism
that has reared its head continuously throughout Christian and Islamic
societies, willing to send my only child to serve in the Israeli Army
(the paratroopers unit-tzanchanim), and enjoying the pleasures of long
swaths of time in which I could study in Jerusalem and celebrate Shabbat
in a city that weekly closed down the hustle and bustle of the
capitalist marketplace for a full 25 hours. And though as editor of
Tikkun I printed articles challenging the official story of how Israel
came to be, showing its role in forcibly ejecting tens of thousands of
Palestinians in 1948 and allowing Jewish terrorist groups under the
leadership of (future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak
Shamir) to create justified fears that led hundreds of thousands of
other Palestinians to flee for their lives, I always told myself that
the dominant humanity of the Jewish people and the compassionate strain
within Torah would reassert itself once Israel felt secure.
That
belief began to wane in the past eight years when Israel, faced with a
Palestinian Authority that promoted nonviolence and sought
reconciliation and peace, ignored the Saudi Arabian-led peace initiative
that would have granted Israel the recognition that it had long sought,
an end to hostilities, and a recognized place in the Middle East,
refused to stop its expansion of settlements in the West Bank and
imposed an economically crushing blockade on Gaza. Even Hamas, whose
hateful charter called for Israel’s destruction, had decided to accept
the reality of Israel’s existence, and while unable to embrace its
“right” to exist, nevertheless agreed to reconcile with the Palestinian
Authority and in that context live within the terms that the PA would
negotiate with Israel.
Yet
far from embracing this new possibility for peace, the Israeli
government used that as its reason to break off the peace negotiations,
and then, in an unbelievably cynical move, let the brutal and disgusting
kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens (by a rogue element in
Hamas that itself was trying to undermine the reconciliation-with-Israel
factions of Hamas by creating new fears in Israel) become the pretext
for a wild assault on West Bank civilians, arresting hundreds of Hamas
sympathizers, and escalating drone attacks on Hamas operatives inside
Gaza. When Hamas responded by starting to send its (guaranteed to be
ineffective and hence merely symbolic in light of Israel’s Iron Shield)
missiles toward civilian targets in Israel, the Netanyahu government
used that as its excuse to launch a brutal assault on Gaza.
But it
is the brutality of that assault that finally has broken me into tears
and heartbreak. While claiming that it is only interested in uprooting
tunnels that could be used to attack Israel, the IDF has engaged in the
same criminal behavior that the world condemns in other struggles: the
intentional targeting of civilians (the same crime that Hamas has been
engaged in over the years, which correctly has earned it the label as a
terrorist organization). Using the excuse that Hamas is using civilians
as “human shields” and placing its war material in civilian apartments,
Israel has managed to kill more than 1,000 civilians and wounded
thousands. The stories that have emerged from eyewitness accounts of
hundreds of children being killed by Israel’s indiscriminate
destructiveness, the shelling of United Nations schools and public
hospitals, and finally the destruction of Gaza’s water and electricity,
guaranteeing deaths from typhoid and other diseases as well as
widespread hunger among the million and a half Gazans most of whom have
had nothing to do with Hamas, highlights to the world an Israel that is
rivaling some of the most oppressive and brutal regimes in the
contemporary world.
In my book “Embracing Israel/Palestine” I have
argued that both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of
post-traumatic stress disorder. I have a great deal of compassion for
both peoples, particularly for my own Jewish people who have gone
through traumas that have inevitably distorted future generations. Those
traumas don’t exonerate Israel’s behavior or that of Hamas, but they
are relevant for those of us seeking a path to social healing and
transformation.
Yet that healing is impossible until those who are victims of PTSD are willing to work on overcoming it.
And
this is precisely where the American Jewish community and Jews around
the world have taken a turn that is disastrous, by turning the Israeli
nation state into “the Jewish state” and making Israel into an idol to
be worshiped rather than a political entity like any other political
entity, with strengths and deep flaws.
Despairing of spiritual salvation
after God failed to show up and save us from the Holocaust, increasing
numbers of Jews have abandoned the religion of compassion and
identification with the most oppressed that was championed by our
biblical prophets, and instead come to worship power and to rejoice in
Israel’s ability to become the most militarily powerful state in the
Middle East. If a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or
around the world and says, “I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t
follow the commandments,” most will still welcome you in and urge you to
become involved. But say, “I don’t support the State of Israel,” and
you are likely to be labeled a “self-hating Jew” or anti-Semite, scorned
and dismissed. As Aaron said of the Golden Calf in the Desert, “These
are your Gods, O Israel.”
The worship of the state makes it
necessary for Jews to turn Judaism into an auxiliary of
ultra-nationalist blindness. Every act of the State of Israel against
the Palestinian people is seen as sanctioned by God. Each Sabbath Jews
in synagogues around the world are offered prayers for the well-being of
the State of Israel but not for our Arab cousins. The very suggestion
that we should be praying for the Palestinian people’s welfare is seen
as heresy and proof of being “self-hating Jews.”
The worship of
power is precisely what Judaism came into being to challenge. We were
the slaves, the powerless, and though the Torah talks of God using a
strong arm to redeem the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, it
simultaneously insists, over and over again, that when Jews go into
their promised land in Canaan (not Palestine) they must “love the
stranger/the Other,” have one law for the stranger and for the native
born, and warns “do not oppress the stranger/the Other.” Remember, Torah
reminds us, “that you were strangers/the Other in the land of Egypt”
and “you know the heart of the stranger.” Later sources in Judaism even
insist that a person without compassion who claims to be Jewish cannot
be considered Jewish. A spirit of generosity is so integral to Torah
consciousness that when Jews are told to let the land lie fallow once
every seven years (the societal-wide Sabbatical Year), they must allow
that which grows spontaneously from past plantings be shared with the
Other/the stranger.
The Jews are not unique in this. The basic
reality is that most of humanity has always heard a voice inside
themselves telling them that the best path to security and safety is to
love others and show generosity, and a counter voice that tells us that
the only path to security is domination and control over others. This
struggle between the voice of fear and the voice of love, the voice of
domination/power-over and the voice of compassion, empathy and
generosity, have played out throughout history and shape contemporary
political debates around the world. Because almost every single one of
us hears both voices, we are often torn between them, oscillating in our
communal policies and our personal behavior between these two
worldviews and ways of engaging others. As the competitive and me-first
ethos of the capitalist marketplace has grown increasingly powerful and
increasingly reflected in the culture and worldviews of the
contemporary era, more and more people bring the worldview of fear,
domination and manipulation of others into personal lives, teaching
people that the rationality of the marketplace with its injunction to
see other human beings primarily in terms of how they can serve our own
needs and as instrumental for our own purposes, rather than as being
deserving of care and respect just for who they are and not for what
they can deliver for us, this ethos has weakened friendships and created
the instability in family life that the right has so effectively
manipulated (a theme I develop most fully in reporting in my book “The
Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right” on
my years as a psychotherapist and principal investigator of an NIMH
study of stress and the psychodynamics of daily life in Western
societies).
No wonder that Jews and Judaism have had these
conflicting streams within our religion as well. In the 2,000 years of
relative powerlessness when Jews were the oppressed minorities of the
Western and Islamic societies, the validation of images of a powerful
God who could fight for the oppressed Jews was a powerful psychological
boon to offset the potential internalizing of the demonization that we
faced from the majority cultures. But now when Jews enjoy military power
in Israel and economic and political power in the U.S. and to some
extent in many other Western societies, one would have expected that the
theme of love and generosity, always a major voice even in a Jewish
people that were being brutalized, would now emerge as the dominant
theme of the Judaism of the 21st century.
No wonder, then, that
I’m heartbroken to see the Judaism of love and compassion being
dismissed as “unrealistic” by so many of my fellow Jews and fellow
rabbis. Wasn’t the central message of Torah that the world was ruled by a
force that made possible the transformation from “that which is” to
“that which can and should be” and wasn’t our task to teach the world
that nothing was fixed, that even the mountains could skip like young
rams and the seas could flee from before the triumph of justice in the
world? Instead of this hopeful message, too many of the rabbis and
rabbinical institutions are preaching a Judaism that hopes more in the
Israeli army than in the capacity of human beings (including
Palestinians), all created in the image of God and hence capable of
transformation, to once again become embodiments of love and
generosity. They scoff at the possibility that we at Tikkun and our
Network of Spiritual Progressives have been preaching (not only for the
Middle East, but for the U.S. as well) that if we act from a loving and
generous place, that the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our
behavior helped to create) can melt away and people’s hearts can once
again turn toward love and justice for all. In an America that at this
very moment has its president calling for sending tens of thousands of
children refugees back to the countries they risked their lives to
escape, in an America that refused to provide Medicare for All, in an
America that serves the interests of its richest 1 percent while largely
ignoring the needs of its large working middle class, these ideas may
sound naively utopian. But for Judaism, belief in God was precisely a
belief that love and justice could and should prevail, and that our task
is to embody that message in our communities and promote that message
to the world.
It is this love, compassion, justice and
peace-oriented Judaism that the State of Israel is murdering. The
worshipers of Israel have fallen into a deep cynicism about the
possibility of the world that the prophets called for in which nations
shall not lift up the sword against each other and they will no longer
learn war, and everyone will live in peace. True, that world is not
already here, but the Jewish people’s task was to teach people that this
world could be brought into being, and that each step we take is either
a step toward that world or a step away from it. The Israel worshipers
are running away from the world, making it far less possible, and then
call their behavior Judaism and Israel “the Jewish state.”
No
wonder, then, that I mourn for the Judaism of love and kindness, peace
and generosity that Israel worshipers dismiss as utopian fantasy. To my
fellow Jews, I issue the following invitation: use Tisha B’av (the
traditional fast-day mourning the destruction of Jewish life in the
past, and starting Monday night Aug. 4 till dark Aug. 5) to mourn for
the Judaism of love and generosity that is being murdered by Israel and
its worshipers around the world, the same kind of idol-worshipers who,
pretending to be Jewish but actually assimilated into the world of
power, helped destroy our previous two Jewish commonwealths and our
temples of the past. We may have to renew our Judaism by creating a
Liberatory, Emancipatory, Transformative Love-Oriented Judaism outside
the synagogues and traditional institutions, because inside the existing
Jewish community the best we can do is repeat what the Jewish exiles in
Babylonia said in Psalm 137, “How can we sing the songs of the
Transformative Power YHVH in a strange land?” And let us this year turn
Yom Kippur into a time of repentance for the sins of our people who have
given Israel a blank check and full permission to be brutal in the name
of Judaism and the Jewish people (even as we celebrate those Jews with
the courage to publicly critique Israel in a loving but stern way).
For
our non-Jewish allies, the following plea: Do not let the organized
Jewish community intimidate you with charges that any criticism of
Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinian people proves that you are
anti-Semites. Stop allowing your very justified guilt at the history of
oppression your ancestors enacted on Jews to be the reason you fail to
speak out vigorously against the current immoral policies of the State
of Israel. The way to become real friends of the Jewish people is to
side with those Jews who are trying to get Israel back on track toward
its highest values, knowing full well that there is no future for a
Jewish state surrounded by a billion Muslims except through friendship
and cooperation. The temporary alliance of brutal dictatorships in
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and various Arab emirates that give Israel
support against Hamas will ultimately collapse, but the memory of
humiliation at the hands of the State of Israel will not, and Israel’s
current policies will endanger Jews both in the Middle East and around
the world for many decades after the people of Israel have regained
their senses. Real friends don’t let their friends pursue a
self-destructive path, so it’s time for you too to speak up and to
support those of us in the Jewish world who are champions of peace and
justice, and who will not be silent in the face of the destruction of
Judaism.
And that gets to my last point. Younger Jews, like many
of their non-Jewish peers, are becoming increasingly alienated from
Israel and from the Judaism that too many Jews claim to be the
foundation of this supposedly Jewish state. They see Israel as what
Judaism is in practice, not knowing how very opposite its policies are
to the traditional worldviews most Jews have embraced through the years.
It is these coming generations of young people whose parents claimed to
be Jewish but celebrated the power of the current State of Israel and
never bothered to critique it when it was acting immorally, as it is
today in Gaza, who will leave Judaism in droves, making it all the more
the province of the Israel-worshipers with their persistent denial of
the God of love and justice and their embrace of a God of vengeance and
hate. I won’t blame them for that choice, but I wish they knew that
there is a different strand of Judaism that has been the major strand
for much of Jewish history, and that it needs their active engagement in
order to reestablish it as the 21st century continuation of the Jewish
tradition. That I have to go to non-Jewish sources to seek to have this
message printed is a further testimony to how much there is to mourn
over the dying body of the Judaism of love, pleading for Jews who
privately feel the way I do to come out of their closets and help us
rebuild the Jewish world in which the tikkun (healing and
transformation) needed becomes the first agenda item.
Above all
else, I grieve for all the unnecessary suffering on this planet,
including the Israeli victims of terrorism, the Palestinian victims of
Israeli terror and repression, the victims of America’s misguided wars
from Vietnam through Afghanistan and Iraq and the apparently endless war
on terrorism, the victims of so many other struggles around the world,
and the less visible but real victims of a global capitalist order in
which according to the U.N. some 8,000-10,000 children under the age of 5
die every day from malnutrition or diseases related to malnutrition.
And yet I affirm that there is still the possibility of a different kind
of world, if only enough of us would believe in it and then work
together to create it.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair
of the interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual
Progressives, www.spiritualprogressives.org and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun
Synagogue-Without Walls in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. He
welcomes your responses and invites you to join with him by joining the
Network of Spiritual Progressives (membership in which also brings you a
subscription to Tikkun Magazine). RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com.
Source:
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/04/israel_has_broken_my_heart_i%E2%80%99m_a_rabbi_in_mourning_for_a_judaism_being_murdered_by_israel/
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