What Are We Doing Here? Five Thoughts from an Israeli Jew

Clal’s Stand and See Fellowship seeks to cultivate nuanced and sophisticated religious leadership for America — leadership that can stand up for six words, regardless of the policies for which they advocate or the conclusions they reach: It’s more complicated than we know. The Stand and See Fellowship brings hundreds of Christian seminarians and ordained clergy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, where they learn with a Jewish Israeli guide, a Christian educator, and a Clal rabbi.  Our trips are not designed to prove a particular politics, and certainly not to identify on which side God stands.  Sadly, that kind of trip for clergy — both Christian and Jewish — is more the norm than the exception.  We are that exception, inviting both those already in, and those preparing for, Christian leadership to take a personal journey through a theological lens to deepen their faith and widen their perspective. 

Our trips are not the typical interfaith experience, either. They are not designed to seek commonalities, but instead to search for firsthand experiences and intellectual-spiritual tools that nurture ways to live in the dignity of our differences. That requires great stewardship — the kind provided by the three great minds whose words you are about to read:  Rabbi Ross Singer, Rev. Dr. Brian Maguire, and Rev. Jill Harman. All are leader-educators on our trips, and their conversation gives a rich taste of the kinds of conversations into which all our participants are welcomed, as they travel the land.

When Ross originally published a version of his piece, I knew that we needed more, and we needed commentary from Christian colleagues.  Brian and Jill have graciously written responses to form a series – a conversation, really. Each author writes with passionate commitment to their particular faith and genuine curiosity about the other’s.  Each writes recognizing the interconnectedness we share, even in the midst of legitimate division.  Each is self-reflective about their own vulnerabilities, using them as sources of compassion.  That, in my experience, is how religious leaders can lead best, and why it is an honor to share the words of three people I know as colleagues, teachers, and friends.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, President, Clal


I have found that the post-October 7 anti-Israel diatribes have become increasingly problematic.

Two elements of the criticism have been particularly troubling to me. The first is how the detached, abstract, ideological top-heavy discourse of the academy fails to capture the lived experience of so many Jews. At times it can be as ill-informed as it is sophisticated. The second is the common pretense that somehow the warp and woof of Israel, Jewish people, and Judaism can be neatly isolated from each other. I share these five thoughts as one who worries that much of the suffering of both Jews and Palestinians is a product of profound mutual misunderstanding.

1. History

For more than two millennia, we Jews were a persecuted minority in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Some times were better than others, but rarely were we treated with full dignity. There is truth in the claim that overall Jews had it better in the Middle East and North Africa under Islam than they did under Christian Europe. But everywhere Jews were second class citizens and everywhere our fate was dependent upon the whims of rulers and societies that could be extremely fickle about their Jewish subjects. After the Bar Kochba Revolt of the second century C.E. ended in misery, the dominant Jewish response to our contingent status was to keep our heads down and eschew escapades to restore sovereignty or to use physical force to improve our status. 

But in the 19th century, a sense began to come over many Jews that those survival mechanisms of the past were spiritually problematic and insufficient to sustain physical survival. More and more, we came to feel that our experience indicated that abdicating our security to others was unwise, an evasion of responsibility, and immoral. We started to conclude that the time had come to reassert national independence and to defend ourselves with the sword when necessary. At first, advocates of this new direction were very small in number. Many felt that this new direction that was being proposed was ill-advised and too risky. Slowly but surely, though, circumstances convinced Jews in ever-growing numbers that, in fact, this new approach was the answer. An extremely abbreviated list of precipitating incidents that pushed this process along includes the Damascus Blood Libel, the Hamadian Massacres, the Kishinev pogrom, The Johnson-Reed Act, the 1929 Hebron riots, persecution in the Soviet Union, anti-Jewish elements in the rise and development of Arab nationalism (see the works of the seminal anti-colonialist Jewish-Arab nationalist Albert Memmi), the rise of Nazism, the Evian conference, the Farhud in Bagdad, the Holocaust, the Kielce pogrom, and the violent riots that swept through the Arab world from Aden, to Bahrain to Aleppo and beyond in the fall of 1947. Greater and greater numbers of Jews came to the hauntingly prescient conclusion that Jewish life in much of the diaspora was unsustainable. There was a desperate need for a plot of land, somewhere on the globe, to serve as a haven for the increasing flood of Jewish refugees, from which to organize self-defense, and in which to secure our fate. Large portions of the holdouts like Reform and Isolationist Orthodox Jews, who resisted the new direction for longer, ultimately came to embrace it to one extent or another. 

2. The Land of Israel

The land of Israel naturally became the dominant and then exclusive focus for reconstituting as a nation and creating the apparatus to take our destiny into our own hands. To be sure, other options were proffered, but given the deeply embedded connection of the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland, the land of Israel won the day. “Next year in Jerusalem” is the refrain that ends the Passover Seder and follows the shofar blast that concludes Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Those of us a bit more religiously affiliated sing about restoring our sovereignty on Friday nights in Kabbalat Shabbat, with the words of the poem “Lecha Dodi,” written in the 16th century in the Galilee by rabbis obsessed with redemption here in the land and who built institutions to bring about just such a restoration. Those meticulous about traditional ritual practice mention returning to the land of Israel every time they break bread and pray for that return three times a day. The holy books our children chant from at their Bar and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies were written in, or on the way to, or about, this land and call upon us to create a great society here. At every wedding, we swear an oath not to forget Jerusalem and break a glass to mourn our exile from it. On the anniversary of the destruction of our capital and the beginning of our exile, many Jews fast, sit on the floor, and chant dirges that bemoan our national loss. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how deeply this land and the aspiration for Jewish sovereignty in it is embedded in our practice and in our spirit.

3. Criticism, Accommodation, and Moderation

Over the centuries of our diaspora, despite the fact that we never gave up on our dream, other people(s) moved into the land. Before our mass return over the last hundred and fifty years or so, we were a minority in the land and we did not grapple with this fact sufficiently. Some of the notions and practices that the pioneers of our return brought with them were misguided and problematic. To say there is much to criticize is a gross understatement. But absorbing the legitimate criticism and engaging in a process of transformative reckoning is extremely complicated and difficult in an environment that denies the basic prevalent Jewish intuitions and realizations outlined above.

Opposition to Israel takes place in a context where it is not difficult to find The Protocols of the Elders of Zion masquerading as a legitimate historical source, the calumny of Jews as Christ killers, Holocaust trivialization and denial, claims that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and much more in this vein. The notion that every Israeli is a legitimate military target has a long history and is defended in many quarters. There is an ongoing sustained campaign to deny Israel any political legitimacy whatsoever. These phenomena are not on the margins of Anti-Israel activism and rhetoric. Post Oct. 7, a number of activists who worked on promoting social justice in Israel and the territories discovered this in very painful ways and have lost faith in the forums in which they work because of this issue.

This makes political and military moderation and accommodation much more complicated. We live with a justifiable suspicion that compromise will not be a stepping stone to a better future for us and our neighbors, but rather will make us vulnerable in a way that could have existential ramifications. On this backdrop, the rhetorical and military defense of Israel rises to the top of our priorities.

4. Pride

When our forefather Abraham was first called to this land, he was charged to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3). In that spirit, many of us who returned to the land sought to create an ideal society here. This aspiration to create something special, worthwhile, and admirable is also part of Israeli DNA. And so, despite the fact that we are aware that we have a checkered past, we take great pride in the successes that we have managed to create here. We are proud of our internationally recognized contributions to science and technology. We are proud of the humanitarian missions that our military undertakes around the world. We are proud of the strong economy that we have created. We are proud of the rich literature that we produce. We are proud of the steps that have been taken to integrate non-Jewish minorities like the Druze (as just one example) into our society while recognizing that much more work needs to be done. We are proud of our freedom of expression. We are proud of our social welfare system, while also expecting more from it. We are proud of our advanced nationalized medical care system where Arab and Jewish health care providers work hand in hand to give top medical care to patients of all races and religions. We are proud of our cutting edge desalinization, drip irrigation, and water recycling. We are proud that agricultural technology and know-how developed here is being used to feed the hungry all over the world. We love the tapestry of Jews from the four corners of the earth that the ingathering of our exiles has created. We love the land itself and we tour and trek and hike and drive and walk and bike its breadth and its length. We love the land’s produce and our farms and our dairies and we love our delicious culturally eclectic hybrid cuisine and our fusion pop-music music that integrates Biblical Hebrew lyrics with electronic instrumentation that oscillates between Eastern and Western modes. Though it doesn’t always seem that way, we deeply love each other.

5. Future

We are sure that if the apparatus of our state falls apart, we will not fare well. We can see this by looking around at the minorities who live in our region. Transplanting ourselves is out of the question. Who is going to take in 7 million Jews? But besides that, we don’t want to go anywhere for all the reasons mentioned above.

**********************

I peek, more often than is healthy for me, at the Anti-Israel cyberverse and the ideological Israel of colonialism, Jewish supremacy, and Imperialism that I find there strikes me as a phantom. It might be relevant for understanding some members of Knesset, but I am fairly certain that most Israel-sympathetic Jews of the diaspora and certainly most Israeli Jews are not committed to the State of Israel because of ideology that can be articulated through academic jargon. They are supportive or they are here because of deep intuitions born of experience, historical awareness, loyalty to their people and heritage, religious tenets and commitments and a desire to survive and thrive in a world that can be unfriendly to us.

To the anti-Israel crowd: If I am wrong, and everything I wrote is just a cover for economic superficial, colonial, Western interests, then maybe you will succeed in sending us packing like the French who left Algeria.

But if I am right, then your sustained global campaign of resistance won’t achieve its goals so easily. I am afraid that things will get awful on levels that will make what is happening now pale in comparison. This is not intended as some sort of threat. I mean that things will become awful for all of us, including me and my people. On the off chance that I am right and that the project of a Jewish state cannot be captured in the common ideological paradigms in which it is so often framed, I hope you will consider what I wrote here carefully. So much human suffering is at stake. If you conclude that there is something organic and appropriate and reasonable about Jewish sovereignty in at least part of the land of Israel (or Palestine, if you prefer), then I invite you to join me in a discourse of mutual understanding in place of heated demonization.

Read a response by Rev. Dr. Brian Maguire.

Read a response by Rev. Jill Harman.

WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com
Send this to a friend