Mollie Leibowitz]

guest post by Rachel Kaufman

“No poetry will return to the lonely / what was lost, what was / stolen,” wrote Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on October 20, 2023, at the age of 32.^[1]

In today’s Parsha, we are confronted with the insufficiencies of language. Abraham says “Hineni,” a powerful declaration of here-ness, of obligation and embodied agreement, to both Gd and to Isaac, and I hear this as a double promise, two promises impossible to fulfill at once.

Issac asks for his father as he anxiously looks for the ram as they ascend, the wood of sacrifice in his hands, and Abraham answers him: “Hineni.” Isaac replies:

הִנֵּ֤ה הָאֵשׁ֙      וְהָ֣עֵצִ֔ים וְאַיֵּ֥ה הַשֶּׂ֖ה לְעֹלָֽה / Here are the firestone and the wood; but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”

To his father’s here-ness, Isaac offers his own “here”/ הִנֵּ֤ה—but this “here” refers to the tools of his own sacrifice. The word slips from feigned fatherly comfort, “Hineni,” to “הִנֵּ֤ה,” the objects of a certain betrayal. To whom is Abraham accountable? This double-edged “here-ness” reveals an impossibility: what if we are accountable to two opposing forces, two forces asking us to do different things, two parts of ourselves dedicated to distinct, and incompatible, inheritances or convictions?

The language of the Akedah reveals this impossibility—of choice, of ethic, of accountability or of faith. The story’s language holds each figure’s (even Gd’s) faltering in the face of an impossible moment. I struggle through this parsha, because in the story, silence looms loud; no one speaks for themselves, no one speaks wholly: in answer to Isaac’s question, Abraham tells his son that Gd will provide the ram; Isaac remains silent as he is bound to the altar; an angel of Gd, rather than Gd Gdself, comes down to tell Abraham to stop the slaughter; and when Gd first tells Abraham to kill his son, Abraham does not say a word. The act of speaking in this story is impossible; everything is ventriloquy, words placed in another’s mouth, words postponed, accountability suspended. Gd’s original instruction to Abraham does not include a place of sacrifice—it is עַ֚ל אַחַ֣ד הֶֽהָרִ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֹמַ֥ר אֵלֶֽיךָ, / on one of the mountains that I will tell you. Rashi writes that Gd makes the righteous wonder, only revealing full details along the way (“Go to the land I will show you,” Gd says to Abram earlier in Genesis, or “Go to Nineveh and proclaim to it the proclamation I will say to you,” Gd says to Jonah. Two psukim later, Jonah arrives in the city and speaks. When was he told what to say?). So much text is unwritten.

When Isaac asks his father about the ram, Abraham answers:

אֱלֹהִ֞ים יִרְאֶה־לּ֥וֹ הַשֶּׂ֛ה לְעֹלָ֖ה בְּנִ֑י / God will see to a ram for an ascent-offering, my son. Rashi moves the comma: God will see to a ram (and if there is no ram), for an ascent-offering, my son.

The violence lives in the unspoken; whether or not Isaac understands this hidden message, Abraham can only speak it by not speaking it. Language falters, dissipates, turns to silence.

And yet the parsha is framed around language. It begins: “וַיְהִ֗י אַחַר֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה” / and it was after these words…; and the story ends: “וַיְהִ֗י אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה”. This phrase appears a few other times in Genesis and elsewhere, and could always be translated in terms of time: sometime later, after these events, etc. But are we meant to stay in the world of the story, within narrative time (later, after), or are we perhaps meant to live in the world of the telling of the story, within the narrator’s time (after these and those words)—at a remove from the action and from the site of sacrifice, with an awareness that we are being told a story? The story can only begin after language (whatever that previous language was; it’s unclear), and it can only end when new language arrives. We, as readers, are suspended in a story that reads to me like farce, like surrealism, like an empty field where everyone is staring off into the distance and muttering, their words lost before they reach any audience. And yet we are given some narrative comfort, some linguistic frame, that there were words before this story and there are words after. So what do we do with the noticeable quiet, the impossibility of speaking, that lies between?

I’ve written about and even spoken here, at Shtibl, about holding multiply, about remaining accountable to multiple stories, histories, griefs, communities at once. But as we sink further and further into ICE kidnappings in our city, to which we are all witness, and into a genocide, for which we are all accountable, I am faltering in the face of multiple accountabilities. If we promise ourselves multiply, as I see Abraham doing, and find it an impossible promise, our words get lost, we fail to speak. In the silences of the Akedah are every failing, every faltering; the sequence of silences leads to almost-disaster. The site of Isaac’s almost-sacrifice is named a site of vision, a site where Gd can be seen or, as Rashi writes, “on the mountain of Gd will be seen the ashes of Isaac as though piled up, serving as atonement.” The ashes sit on the mountain in memory, even if they were never really there. The ashes as though piled up, the bodies as though piled up; what about now, when there is no “as though”? “No poetry will return to the lonely / what was lost, what was / stolen.”

How can we surpass this story of sacrifice, of impossible accountabilities, in which our inherited figures fail to speak?

I was hoping this parsha would provide an answer to this question: How do we confront the impossible? And how can language help us? Disappointed by the story, I turned to today’s haftorah instead. In Yirmeyahu 31, it says:

כֹּ֣ה  אָמַ֣ר יְהֹוָ֗ה/  ק֣וֹל בְּרָמָ֤ה נִשְׁמָע֙/ נְהִי֙ בְּכִ֣י תַמְרוּרִ֔ים / רָחֵ֖ל מְבַכָּ֣ה עַל־בָּנֶ֑יהָ/  מֵאֲנָ֛ה לְהִנָּחֵ֥ם עַל־בָּנֶ֖יהָ כִּ֥י אֵינֶֽנּוּ

Thus said Gd: A cry is heard in Ramah—Wailing, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children. / She refuses to be comforted / For her children, who are gone.

She refuses to be comforted for her children, or on behalf of her children, or in the name / for the sake of her children.

In the face of silence, destruction, the failure of the living and the failure of the word, Rachel refuses. A midrash on this passage asks: “When did Israel weep a gratuitous weeping? And when did Israel weep a weeping of substance?” Some rabbis cite Rachel’s tears as a weeping of substance. Why?

In her refusal to be comforted, Rachel resists. She dwells in the impossible, in the unspeakable, in exactly the place where all sound but wailing falters. “Interruption and hesitation [can be] used as a force,” writes poet Susan Howe.^[2] In the face of silence, missing histories, unnamed and endlessly perpetuated cycles of violence, the poet hesitates before the impossible, stutters, tells her reader that she is confronting and then attempting to act amidst an impossible story, an impossible moment. This is what I hear in Rachel’s wail; it is an impossible, and yet sounded, telling.

And so I am ending with impossibility, bringing impossibility to my beloved community—not as a site of hopelessness and certainly not as a site of inaction, but as a site of refusal. In today’s parsha of ventriloquy, of succumbing to silence, of speaking around and through, I do not find courage. The imagined ashes of Isaac can not be our site of atonement; Abraham’s quiet in the face of a double promise can not be our model of accountability; and Gd’s absence at a site of violence which Gd created is not a Gd in whom I want to place my faith. As the father and his son stay silent, Rachel wails. Her resistance is exactly an acknowledgment of the impossible, and of an impossible persistence—in the face of lost children and at the edge of an ability to speak, we must refuse to be comforted.

Gud yontif, Shana tovah

^[1] Hiba Abu Nada, “Pull Yourself Together,” tr. Huda Fakhreddine, Words Without Borders / The Home for International Literature, https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/.

^[2] Susan Howe, “Encloser” in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York, NY: Roof Books, 1990).

The post “No poetry will return to the lonely / what was lost, what was / stolen”: a drash for Rosh Hashanah appeared first on Jewschool.

On November 26, 1944, the New York Times published The Auschwitz Protocols, a collection of 3 reports from Auschwitz escapees. The Times included a detailed description of crematoria and gas chambers, and the escapees’ estimates of the number of people killed. Notably, the estimates were, in fact, inaccurate. The escapees estimated that 1,765,000 Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau between April 1942 – April 1944; according to the Auschwitz museum only 1 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz over the course of the entire war.

 I couldn’t help thinking about this report as I read Yehuda Kurtzer’s recent essay on Genocide and the Burden of History. Kurtzer writes that before defining what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, the following information would need to be gathered:  “Death counts, precisely; the differentiation among the dead between civilians and combatants; the military calculations that are actually going into the choices to attack targets that also result in the killing of civilians, so that you could determine whether those choices were being done responsibly or not. You would need to understand the obstacles to the distribution of aid on both the Israeli side, on the Gaza side, and on the Egyptian side.”

According to Kurtzer those are the criteria needed to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place: accurate data, the ability to distinguish definitively between civilians and combatants, the opportunity for the military to justify their decisions, an opportunity for governments to explain why starvation took place. Estimates based on eyewitness accounts cannot be trusted.

These requirements lead me to believe that had Kurtzer been alive on November 26, 1944, and reading the Auschwitz Protocols, he would have been reticent to claim that there was a genocide taking place. In fact, given Kurtzer’s standards, it seems like scholars will never be able to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place until years after the genocide has been completed. The United Nations office of Genocide Prevention would have no purpose because *no one* would *ever* be able to claim that a genocide was taking place. According to Kurtzer, genocide can only be accounted for with the benefit of hindsight.

For the record, this is not the criteria for determining genocide according to the genocide convention. Article II of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Ironically, the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. This was while the genocide against the Jews was still ongoing. He did not have hard data on the number of people who had already been killed. He did not know the ratio of civilians to combatants, he did not ask Nazi Germany why so many people were dying of starvation and disease, and he did not ask the Nazis to justify the military rationale for any of their actions. And yet Lemkin had no hesitation in naming the Holocaust a genocide.

 While Kurtzer is reticent to use the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, he has no hesitation in describing Hamas’s action on October 7th as a “genocidal rampage”. He does not discuss the criteria that he uses to determine the genocidal nature of Hamas’s attack, and he doesn’t seem to consider whether or not there was a military rationale for Hamas’s actions on October 7th, or if initial targets were military in nature, before passing his judgement. There is no discussion of whether or not Hamas, a ragtag guerilla group attacking the world’s strongest military, even had the *capacity* to commit some of the acts associated with genocide.

Of course, within the Zionist community, it has become taboo to even entertain the idea of Hamas as a rational actor. Hamas must always be motivated by antisemitism and a lust for violence, not by political strategy, desperation, or a lack of alternative. If anyone attempts to analyze the attacks of October 7th from Hamas’s perspective, they are “justifying” Hamas’s attack. Careful scholarship is worthwhile when it comes to justifying the Israeli military’s actions; it is emboldening terrorists when it comes to doing the same to Hamas.

I want to consider the world that Kurtzer is building. It is a world where it is easier for governments to commit genocide because genocide is now unpreventable. If you cannot name a genocide until after it is over, that makes it much easier for the perpetrators of genocide to succeed in their crimes. At first I couldn’t understand how a Jew, let along someone who fashions themselves a Jewish “thought leader” could be so callous as to dismiss the post World War II rules-based order, which understands genocide prevention as a foreign policy goal. But then I realized that illuminated a key difference between Kurtzer and me. I believe that Jewish safety post-Holocaust, is a result of a liberal international order which takes international human rights seriously. Kurtzer does not. He believes that for the last several decades, Jews have been safe solely due to the existence of the state of Israel. So he has far fewer qualms about destroying the rules-based order. Now that Jews have power, he’s not concerned with abuses of political power; he is happy to align himself with the powerful.

Kurtzer spends the first half of his essay credentialing himself, giving a lengthy and flattering description of his academic training, and contrasting the diligence involved in academia with the “memefication [of] moral complexities” that he claims is popular within activist circles. “Activism,” Kurtzer claims “is not responsible scholarship”.

Now, Kurtzer isn’t *always* opposed to activism. In fact, he encouraged people to attend the “March for Israel” in November of 2023. He did not waste time worrying whether or not offering Benjamin Netanyahu the full support of the American pocketbook was a wise decision. He did not question the ramifications that manufacturing the American Jewish community’s consent for the Gaza war might have long-term. He just took action. He didn’t try to be careful, he didn’t worry that some dishonest actors (like John Hagee) were participating in this rally. He didn’t do a power analysis to determine the likely outcomes of his activism.

I write this essay in between coordinating my neighborhood’s response to the federal government’s military occupation of Washington, DC.  I am one of those people who Kurtzer truly seems not to trust: an activist, more preoccupied with saving my neighbors from deportation than in analyzing the morality of illegal immigration, who uses “rhetorical tools” to try and save people’s lives. I genuinely do not care that the Auschwitz Protocols overestimated the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz by 750,000 people. Maybe the escapees made poor estimates. Maybe they embellished the number in the hopes of sparking international outcry. I don’t care. I’m glad they shared their report. I embrace Kurtzer’s criticism – I would rather raise the alarm and be wrong than rest on my laurels while another genocide goes ignored.

Eliana Fishman lives, works, and prays in Washington DC.

The post Response to “Genocide and the Burden of History” appeared first on Jewschool.

Corrections

Three decades after my bat mitzvah
All of my Hebrew school teachers, youth group counselors, rabbis, and
that lady with the guitar from camp
They got us all back together
to issue some corrections

“We didn’t really mean that,” they said
Which part? I asked.
Everyone was quiet. Even Zach, who always goofed around.
And Erica, who passed notes and popped her gum.

When we planted the little parsley seeds and tended them as they grew?
When we put the coins in the tzedakah box, and discussed how we most
wanted to repair the world?
When we took three steps back and three more forward, coming into the
presence of God?
“All of it,” they said. “Just forget it all.”

And we made sandwiches for the people who were hungry at the soup
kitchen, remember?
And delivered mishloach manot for the bubbes at the Hebrew Home?
We practiced opening the door during the seder for all who are hungry
to enter and eat?
We went down to the stream before Rosh Hashanah and put those crumbs
in the water, and told our “sorries” to God and tried and tried to be
good

“No no no” they said. “You misunderstood. When people are hungry, it’s
a lie. Also, it’s someone else’s fault. Killing people every day for
hundreds of days in a row is okay, actually. 10 is okay. 10,000 is
okay. 100,000 is okay. With bombs from the sky. With gunshots to the
head. Or just taking away their food, and destroying the hospitals.
Being Jewish means never having to say you’re sorry. We yet live!
Other people do worse things.”

That doesn’t make any sense. Do not kill, I’m sure that was one of the
ten. And you were always so gentle with us children. Starving,
dismembering, and killing children, now? How could that be?

We braided the challah so carefully remember, we blessed the One who
brought forth bread from the earth,
We leave the corners of the field for those who need it, remember?
Remember? I was there, and so were you.

What about the songs and stories, we asked, carefully. “We will be
re-collecting them before you leave,” they said. Aren’t they two
thousand years old, we ask, aren’t they very special? Some of them
have been in our hearts so long now, I don’t think we can give them
back. “Well, hand them in. Sorry if there was any confusion.”

What about those prayers we wrote with pencil on looseleaf and folded
up into tiny little pieces to press into the cracks in the holy wall,
our heart’s deepest wishes at age 5 and 8 and 11, that someone took on
an airplane all the way to a holy place where God would read them all?

It was quiet for a long time. They looked nervous.

“We worship that wall now, and the flag that flies over the wall. We
kill because the wall and the place where it stands is ours. No one
cares about your prayers. No one read them. But we needed to make you
love that wall, and you had to want to stand there.”

What about God, someone whispered.

“Who?”

Joelle Novey lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. 

The post Corrections appeared first on Jewschool.

In response, here are 30 articles articulating why the ADL is no longer a legitimate civil rights organization representative of American Jews and how Greenblatt and his organization have turned their backs on both civil rights and the sizable portion of the American Jewish community that identifies as progressive. If anything, Mamdani (or Brad Lander on his behalf) should explain how the ADL has abandoned its mission and values and no longer seeks to protect the Jewish community writ large, rather than grovelling before an institution that has clearly lost the plot and thrown in with fascists.

• December 3, 2015: ADL defends Trump’s remarks at Jewish Republicans’ forum — “Here, context is everything,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement Thursday evening. “Mr. Trump’s presentation was completely supportive of Israel and the Jewish community, even if one might disagree with him on some of the other issues he raised.” Earlier in the day, Trump had said he didn’t expect support from Republican Jews because he wasn’t seeking their money. “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” Trump said. “You want to control your own politicians.”
• Spring 2021: How the ADL’s Israel Advocacy Undermines Its Civil Rights Work — “Interviews with eight former ADL employees found that CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has repeatedly chosen to support crackdowns on criticism of Israel over protecting civil liberties, putting him in conflict with his own civil rights office.”
• May 1, 2022: The ADL Doubles Down on Opposing the Anti-Zionist Left — Speaking directly into the camera in a pre-recorded speech, Greenblatt said that “SJP, JVP, and CAIR … epitomize the radical left, the photo inverse of the extreme right that ADL long has tracked.” The ADL plans to apply “more concentrated energy toward the threat of radical anti-Zionism,” he said. Though the organization has long maintained that anti-Zionism “isn’t always necessarily antisemitic,” as noted in its online glossary, Greenblatt rejected that view on-screen. He said that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” calling anti-Zionism an “ideology … rooted in rage … predicated on one concept: the negation of another people.”
• March 8, 2023: ADL Staffers Dissented After CEO Compared Palestinian Rights Groups to Right-Wing Extremists, Leaked Audio Reveals — But Greenblatt also stressed throughout the meeting that if employees had major disagreements with his positions on the question of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the ADL might not be the right place for them to work. “If you still feel like you can’t square the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, then maybe this isn’t the place for you,” he said.
• October 19, 2023: ADL researcher quits over Greenblatt blasting of Jewish left on Israel and Hamas — “A researcher at the Anti-Defamation League resigned Thursday, apparently in reaction to the group’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, publicly condemning American Jews who are protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.”
• October 31, 2023: The ADL Is Defaming Palestinian Students as Terrorist Supporters — An “urgent” open letter issued last Thursday by the ADL…urged college and university administrators to “immediately investigate” their campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.” They claim to have sent the letter to nearly 200 schools.
• November 11, 2023: Anti-Defamation League Maps Jewish Peace Rallies With Antisemitic Attacks — “The Anti-Defamation League has classified the event — and dozens of other protests led by Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — as ‘anti-Israel,’ according to an analysis by The Intercept, and added them to their database documenting rising antisemitism across the U.S.”
• November 19, 2023: The cowardice of Jonathan Greenblatt — “ADL has not called Elon Musk an antisemite,” he said on September 7th. “ADL has not called Twitter an antisemitic platform. ADL is not actively pressuring companies to not participate on Twitter. In fact, up until last week, ADL was advertising on Twitter. So the notion that we were trying to ‘kill the company,’ that’s a fiction.” Less than a month later, the organization announced it would resume advertising.
• November 22, 2023: The ADL Smears Anti-Zionist Jews Like Me While Overlooking True Antisemitism — “Somehow, Greenblatt saw little difference between a gathering of rabbis and human rights activists — garbed in tallitot, blowing shofars and evoking values of justice and human dignity — and a murderous movement of mass shooters, race-war fanatics and insurrectionists who champion the smashing of multiracial democracy with genocidal glee. Greenblatt was telling me that when I, a Jewish person who stands for justice, dig through a dark web of Hitler memes and screeds of ​“white genocide” each day, I’m essentially looking in the mirror.”
• January 5, 2024: Anti-Defamation League staff decry ‘dishonest’ campaign against Israel critics — “There is no comparison between white supremacists and insurrectionists and those who espouse anti-Israel rhetoric, and to suggest otherwise is both intellectually dishonest and damaging to our reputation as experts in extremism,” a senior manager at ADL’s Center on Extremism wrote in a Slack channel to over 550 colleagues. Others chimed in, agreeing. “The aforementioned false equivalencies and the both-sides-ism are incompatible with the data I have seen,” a longtime extremism researcher said.
• January 26, 2024: I Regret to Report There’s a New Antisemitism Controversy at Harvard — Finally, and as egregiously, there is the fact that Penslar’s critics evidently combed through his scholarship for phrases they could present as antisemitic. “Lessons in how NOT to combat antisemitism, Harvard edition,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “Start by naming a professor who libels the Jewish state and claims that ‘veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization’ to your antisemitism task force. Absolutely inexcusable. This is why Harvard is failing, full stop.” … What makes the series of events at Harvard so disheartening is not that the attack on Penslar is unique but that it transparently gives the game away: There is no set of credentials that can prevent a person who is earnestly trying to do work in this space from getting sucked into the politicization and, yes, weaponization of antisemitism.
• March 5, 2024: By honoring Jared Kushner, ADL suggests Trump is now kosher — and betrays its founding values — “At a moment when ADL should be solely focused on fighting rising antisemitism in the wake of the war, the group is again choosing to spark controversy with no clear end goal.”
• April 15, 2024: 60+ Muslim, Arab & Allied Groups Condemn ADL for Anti-Palestinian Hate, Call for Firing of CEO Greenblatt — “We join American Muslim organizations and dozens of other communities in condemning the ADL and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for enabling anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate. Mr. Greenblatt’s reckless, dangerous comments about the Nazi swastika and the Palestinian keffiyeh were simply the latest example of how far the ADL will go to smear and silence critics of the radical Israeli government.”
• April 29, 2024: The Anti-Defamation League Has Abandoned Some of the People It Exists to Protect — “But the ADL, under the leadership of Greenblatt, is insisting on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and it has made this conflation central to the ADL’s work. This has not only muddied the waters of its own antisemitism research, it has also undermined the safety, security, and pluralism of American Jews.”
• May 16, 2024: Anti-Defamation League ramps up lobbying to promote controversial definition of antisemitism — “Its lobbying spike marks a dramatic shift – it spent about $100,000 on lobbying in 2020 and is on pace to spend nearly $1.6m this year based on its first quarter expenditures, a Guardian analysis of federal records finds. The spending positions the ADL as the largest pro-Israel lobbying force on domestic issues. Records show the surge’s broader aim is to promoting a controversial definition of antisemitism across a range of federal agencies and mobilizing the government to enforce it.”
• October 30, 2024: Former ADL chief Abe Foxman blasts group for muted response to Trump’s MSG rally — “I’m reluctant to criticize my successor, but, hello, he went after this guy on CNN yesterday, and couldn’t mention Trump, it’s a little bizarre,” Foxman, who led the ADL for decades and has endorsed Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s no question about it: For the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, Conference of Presidents, the federations, all these institutions, if this happened six months ago, they would be out there condemning racism and antisemitism and hate speech,” he said. “So I’m troubled.”
• November 1, 2024: Let’s Call the ADL What It Is: an Ally of Fascists — “This response—or lack thereof—should have been surprising. But it’s merely the latest evidence that the ADL has completely abandoned the civil rights part of its mission, which has long been in tension with its Israel advocacy—a contradiction that movements have pointed out for years. These days, the organization, under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, appears to have one primary objective: demonizing those of us in the movement for Palestinian human rights.”
• November 1, 2024: Why Is the Anti-Defamation League Running Cover for Trump? — There were the racist statements targeting Puerto Ricans, Latinos, Black people, Palestinians, and Jews; the description of Vice President Kamala Harris as a “Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ” individual; the prominent display of a font regularly used in Nazi campaigning on the hat of Trump’s shadow running-mate, Elon Musk; and the speeches featuring rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler. One of the event’s speakers even described the night as a “Nazi rally” in his own remarks. … So how, with all that storied history behind it, did ADL respond to Trump’s 2024 Nazi rally? “Political rallies should be about politics and policy, not offensive jokes,” the organization wrote, in a bizarrely anodyne message that did not even name the presidential candidate for whom the rally was held.
• January 9, 2025: ADL Chief Invokes Pager Attack as Inspiration for Taking on Internet Trolls — “We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle,” Greenblatt said. “This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the State of Israel, that have always been a characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it.”
• January 21, 2025: ADL says ‘awkward’ Musk gesture ‘not a Nazi salute’: ‘This is a delicate moment’ — “This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety,” the ADL wrote in a Monday post on Musk’s social platform X. “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge.”
• January 22, 2025: The ADL needs to dump Jonathan Greenblatt — Unfortunately, in the last couple of months, the current ADL CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has pushed for policies that infringe on free speech, congratulated election denialists, and sanitized clear Nazi salutes as “awkward gestures” while labeling anyone who advocated for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war as antisemitic. Such actions have brought criticism to the ADL and have put its reputation in jeopardy, which is a tragedy because there are many counter-extremism researchers who are doing lifesaving work that push for policies that help non-governmental and governmental institutions reduce racially motivated attacks. However, as long as Jonathan Greenblatt stays in charge of the ADL, more people will realize that the Anti-Defamation League isn’t meant to combat disinformation and extremism anymore, but to preserve a Nationalist ideology at all costs.
• February 27, 2025: Why the ADL is encouraging Jews to invest in Tesla — “Among the top 10 holdings of TOV are Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, Amazon and Tesla. Roughly 2% of the fund is invested in Tesla, the primary source of wealth for Elon Musk, who is currently leading the Trump administration’s efforts to slash federal spending and workers — and who has for years been embroiled in antisemitism scandals as well as tussles with the ADL itself.”
• March 3, 2025: Controversy surrounds Anti-Defamation League’s ties to Trump administration — Melissa Shaw worked as a contractor facilitator at the ADL for over a decade. She is sending this message to the leadership of the organization she says she once loved dearly. “I’m going to call in Jonathan Greenblatt very publicly. I would like to implore Jonathan to listen to the diversity of Jewish voices that are asking for something more and something different,” said Shaw.
• March 4, 2025: The ADL goes quiet on some hatreds — “I watched from the inside as the ADL erased racial justice from its civil rights priorities, caved to pressure from conservative media for being ‘too woke,’ and quietly abandoned core education programs. The shift began with an internal pause on its use of the word ‘racism’ while it sought a ‘new’ definition (spoiler: they still don’t have one). Then, it removed ‘racial justice’ from its portfolio altogether.”
• March 24, 2025: ADL’s position on Khalil arrest puts freedom of speech at risk — As a longtime supporter of the Anti-Defamation League and as a board member of ADL Midwest, I am opposed to the national ADL position and messaging about the imprisonment of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. His arrest, detention and imprisonment by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is unconstitutional, as he is a legal, permanent resident of the U.S. I write today with my Jewish and American values to say, “Not in my name.”
• March 27, 2025: ADL Shutters Flagship Anti-Bias Program — “The civil rights division is not engaging on any civil rights issues,” said the former ADL education staffer. “The division has been reduced as it no longer aligns with the current strategy. The only issues ADL speaks out about are related to antisemitism.” In this context, sources say the shifts in education appear less like an incidental administrative update and more like a concerted effort to back away from the organization’s broader mission. “The ADL appears to be responding to the political winds shifting,” said a former senior education executive at ADL National who requested anonymity to protect their professional reputation. “Why have a dual mission when one of them is increasingly out of favor and one of them is increasingly rewarding in all senses of the word?”
• April 23, 2025: ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt Praises Trump’s War on Harvard: ‘It’s a Good Thing’ — Asked, “Do you support what the Trump administration has done and the way they’re doing it?” Greenblatt replied, “I am really glad that the Trump administration is leaning in and holding the perpetrators accountable. Now, the question becomes, how do you do it in a way that’s strategic and addresses the systemic issues that’s sort of detrimental to the whole enterprise of higher education?” He continued, “I think it’s complicated, and at ADL we focus on the nuance, to be frank, but make no mistake, it is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in. It is a good thing.”
• June 6, 2025: ADL chief compares student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaida in address to Republican officials — “There is a throughline from Occupy Wall Street to BLM to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea,’” he added, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement launched a decade ago to protest police violence. “They are the same people, these are the same kind of nihilists.”
• June 13, 2025: ADL regional board member resigns over organization’s approach to antisemitism and civil rights — “Historically, the ADL has been a premier civil rights organization and working in concert with other civil rights organizations,” Ludwig said in an interview. “That focus seems to have been abandoned and there seems to have been a decision made to ally the organization with a very misguided use of antisemitism as cover to implement authoritarianism.”
• June 26, 2025: Amid record fundraising, ADL lays off staff to consolidate focus on antisemitism — The Anti-Defamation League laid off 22 employees this week, roughly 4% of its workforce, as part of an effort to focus its work more narrowly on antisemitism as it shifts away from broader civil rights and public policy work.

So to recap, according to the ADL under Greenblatt, Nazi salutes and antisemitic slurs are okay if you’re “pro-Israel,” but any expression of opposition to Israel is virulent antisemitism requiring federal crackdowns, deportations, and the abandonment of our commitment to civil rights.

This is who Mamdani needs to seek approval from, on behalf of the Jewish community? I think not.

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There has been much writing these past days about Israel’s choice to strike Iran, and Iran’s response. What I have read thus far is pretty predictable, some opinions more enlightening than others. Israel’s defenders claim the attack was “preemptive” and legitimate, even necessary, Israel’s detractors view it as an act of aggression. And there are some middle positions that explore the war’s global implications.

Here I choose to take the advice of R. Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar. During the Six-Day War in 1967 Teitelbaum refused to make any public statements critical of Israel. Instead, he sent money to his communities there, and organized communities to gather in synagogues and recite psalms. His message was clear, “when Jewish lives are in danger, one prays and recites palms on their behalf.”

And so, I will not weigh in on whether the choice to attack Iran was right, wrong, or somewhere in-between. I simply do not know and can only hope the loss of life and injury is kept to a minimum.

I understand that war compels solidarity, unity, and collective angst. I share all of that. And yet, as a scholar of Judaism, and as a Jew, my thoughts also take me elsewhere.

*

There is a larger issue I would like to address, one that this occasion may, perhaps should, evoke for us, an issue that precedes this moment, and will extend far beyond it.

In the history of the Jews, there have been three basic competing visions of self-fashioning that are drawn from the tradition. The first comes from the mouth of Balaam, a prophet hired by Balak the King of Moab to curse the Israelites as they passed through his territory. Famously, in the Book of Numbers, instead of cursing the Israelites as Balak directed him, Balaam praises them, part of which states “A people who lives alone, not reckoning themselves one of the nations” (Numbers 23:9).

Was this a blessing, a curse, an aspiration or a description? The tradition is not quite sure. After the state of Israel was founded, Zionists took this verse very seriously. Yaakov Herzog, son of a Chief Rabbi of Israel and brother of Hayim who became Israel’s President, published a book with the title, A People that Dwells Alone (1975) and Naphtali Lau-Lavie prominent Israeli journalist and diplomat, published a book entitled Balaam’s Prophecy (1998). I am sure there are many others.

Balaam’s declaration applied both to Jews in the Diaspora, and the nascent state of Israel. Naftali Zvi Berlin, one-time rosh yeshiva of the famous Volozhin yeshiva in Lithuania wrote on this verse in his commentary to the Pentateuch Ha-Amek Davar to Numbers 23:9 “If it is a people content to be alone, faithful to its distinctive identity, then it will be able to dwell in peace. But if Jews seek to be like the nations, the nations will not consider them worthy of respect.” Berlin was not speaking about a Jewish state, but rather the state of the Jews in the Diaspora. In Berlin’s Shearei Yisrael, one of the first books in Hebrew about antisemitism published in the 1870s, Berlin argued that animus against the Jews was precipitated by Jews not acting as Jews, that is, by assimilating. When they live separate from the nations and adhere to the tradition, he claimed, they were able to maintain a basic status quo of co-existence. The conventional understanding of this is that assimilation is discarding one’s Jewish distinctiveness to “melt” into the nations. But I will suggest below there is another kind of assimilation worth considering, the assimilation of nationalism. Berlin was not suggesting that traditional Jews were not subject to antisemitism. Rather, he was making a quasi-metaphysical point to suggest that Jews who abandoned tradition set in motion a gentile animus against them that also affected traditional Jews.

The second aspirational vision to define the Jews comes from the prophecy of Isaiah, to be “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6), that is, as I explain it here, to be an exemplar, and not an exception. Whether Isaiah’s vision was a description of a messianic time or a posture that could cultivate the messianic time, is debated. But it is a vision of exemplarity nonetheless.

There is a third rendering of Jewishness that comes into play here comes from 1 Samuel 8:19, “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.” Martin Buber in his book The Kingdom of God, called this the beginning of Jewish secularism. The mandate of Jewish difference and the seemingly perennial inclination of Jews to be “like all the nations” begins in 1 Samuel and filters through the entirety of Jewish history. For more on this see Moshe Halbertal and Steven Holmes, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel (2019).

In any event, three visions: to be alone, to be an exemplar, or to be like everyone else. This is one way to historically frame the parameters of Jewish self-fashioning.

One can argue that throughout Jewish history these three visions return in various forms to describe how Jews see themselves, how they want to see themselves, and how they want others to see them. Jonathan Sacks argued in an essay, “A People that Dwells Alone” (A People that Dwells Alone | Balak | Covenant & Conversation | The Rabbi Sacks Legacy) that the state of Israel enables Jews to, in some sense, embody all three of these models. I disagree. I think, in fact, that the establishment of a state puts these three models of collective identity in even deeper tension, even irreconcilability, and perhaps in this precarious moment this can be articulated anew.

Between exemplarity and exceptionality

Isaiah’s prophecy is a prophecy of exemplarity. The distinctiveness of the Jews, he argued, is that they carry a wisdom tradition that can be a gift to the world by suggesting a template of human affairs that can maximize compassion, to “love the neighbor” as well as to “love the stranger.” This vision, which also was reflected in Jesus’ teachings as well as in the Quran, has arguably served as the template of modern ethical teaching. The exceptionality of the exemplarity is embedded in the universalism that emerges from Israel’s particular destiny. For some it took the form of “ethical monotheism,” for others an “exemplary state.” But there is another exceptionality – the exceptionality of Balaam’s vision, “to dwell alone,” either because no one wants to dwell with you, or because you do not want to dwell with others. Or both. This version of exceptionality is buttressed by Jewish victimhood, most prominently in the Shoah.

The choice of the Jews to engage in the politics of statecraft, as some say, to “re-enter history” was monumental and shifted the entire trajectory of Jewish destiny. Setting aside the practical component of physical safety and refuge, that decision would have significant consequences in terms of the three visions of Jewishness described above, exemplarity, and assimilation.

Aaron Shmuel Tamares, in his 1921 book Knesset Yisrael argues that Zionism as a form of nationalism is an instantiation of “assimilation” no less than, the non-affiliated post-emancipatory secular Jew. It is different only in that the Jews want to assimilate nationalism as a collective and not assimilate as individuals. But in both cases, Tamares argues, it is the adaptation of a foreign idea that becomes the central tenet of Jewishness, in some cases, at the expense of Judaism. I do not say this critically as much as descriptively.

But in that assimilatory collective state, the three visions remain: exemplarity, exclusivity/exceptionality, or sameness/assimilation.

The vision of Israel was hotly debated in those early years on these three visions. There were those such as Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, Rav Binyamin, Judah Magnes and others that focused on exemplarity, that is, Zionism as an opportunity to instantiate Isaiah’s vision. They fought to make Israel an exemplary nation, against the tide of the nationalist thrust, which is why they favored a binational state The Jewish-Arab state was not a compromise for them, it was an attempt to embody a different kind of nationalism. In their estimation, if the nationalism of Zionism could not be exemplary, it is abandoned Isaiah, it would not be “Jewish,” which is why so many in that circle had such little patience for Herzl.

But there were others, Zev Jabotinsky (and disciples, including Ben Zion Netanyahu), Ben Gurion et al who favored the Balaam vision of “a nation that dwells alone,” in Ben Gurion’s case because he did not believe, as Buber and others did, that the Arab world would accept Israel under any circumstances, so it was futile in even trying to create regional allies. Ben Gurion achieved short-term success. He founded the state, aligning himself with the US who helped solidify UN support.

Between the secular and early religious Zionist there was a debate about how far the nationalist assimilation should go. Some radical secular Zionists such as Brenner and Berdichevsky believed it should go all the way to the point of replacing Judaism altogether. Others like Ahad Ha-Am believed the assimilation to nationalism could produce a new form of modern Judaism. And then Rav Kook believed that religion would eventually transform the secular vision of assimilation into a new sacred form of ethical difference.

These were all lofty visions, and each tried to incorporate the three aspirations mentioned above, albeit in a different and in a very hierarchical, order. In all these alternatives these three visions always existed in tension, almost never in a state of complementarity.

I think many of the debates between the Jewish progressive left, liberal Zionist center, and religious right also revolve around which of these three visions is possible today, which should be pursued, and which should be abandoned.

As I see it, the path Israel has chosen at this moment, and here I include the Gaza war and now the Iran war, is the path of Balaam combined with the path expressed in the Book of Samuel, ironically to dwell alone and to be like all the others. We have chosen to express our “normality” in an exceptionalist, and not an exemplary, fashion. There may be many reasons this this, Realpolitik, proximate history, trauma, etc. I do not discount any of these. But one of the great things about Jewish modernity is agency. We get to choose. And as I see it, today we have chosen the Balaam vision because in large part we have come to believe, true or not I do not know, in a kind of “eternal antisemitism” which means that we will be hated whatever we do and if that is the case, we needn’t consider the vision of exemplarity at the cost of being “like all the nations.” And our history of victimhood offers us a case of exceptionality that, coupled with Balaam’s vision, offers us the license to make certain choices that lock us into being “like all the nations,” for good and for ill. But such a choice, like evert choice, comes at a price and I simply reject the common adage “we had no choice.” We always have a choice. That’s what being a “free people” means.

We have staked our roots, and even our destiny, in nationalism without considering Rogers Brubaker’s thesis in his 1998 essay “Myth and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” what he called “the myth of resolvability,” that “nationalist demands, quench nationalist passions, and thereby resolve nations conflicts.” As Brubaker sees it, “nationalist conflicts are in principle, by their very nature, irresolvable.” If so, what are our options? I do not know, but one can posit what is not possible without knowing what is. And what price will Judaism pay for this choice?

*

War has not been kind to the Jews, not as victims and not as perpetrators. In some way the grand victory of 1967 was a mixed blessing. It saved the state but created a veneer of invincibility that has eroded from each war since, perhaps most starkly in the military collapse on October 7.

The sages posit that the Davidic kingdom was destroyed because it overextended its militarism. And of course we have been victims of many wars, some directed at us, and some not.

I don’t know if this war with Iran will be just another war in the history of Israel, or some kind of turning point. I don’t know if it is justified, or not. Necessary, or not. I don’t even know what its realistic goals are.

What I think I do have some idea about is how this is another stage of a choice, a choice to accept Balaam’s prophecy and reject Isaiah’s, a choice to collectively “assimilate” into nationalism that makes war if not inevitable, then all too likely. I do not agree with Rabbi Sacks. I do not think a nation-state can embody all three visions, I think a nation-state creates increased tensions and even incompatibility. It makes choices. For many Jews, that may a choice worth making.

For me personally, I didn’t devote my life to a beautiful wisdom tradition called Judaism just to become like everybody else.

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“It could have been any one of us.”

My classmate read aloud the opening of the email from the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles as we drove downtown to join one of the many anti-ICE protests in front of the Federal Building on June 10th. In his email, the Federation’s President and Chief Executive Officer Rabbi Noah Farkas recounts recent antisemitic attacks and appeals to the Jewish public to help combat antisemitism in Los Angeles.

Rabbi Farkas continues, “our protection rests on two pillars: our city and ourselves.” He’s right, no one is going to protect us but ourselves. But who constitutes “ourselves?” I disagree with whom he seemingly excludes from this group.

My classmates and I were driving downtown from Hebrew Union College, where we are participating in the Summer Beit Midrash program focusing on Israel. We had just finished a session about the use of B’nei Yisrael in the Torah and what it might mean to be a “child of Israel” amongst the children of Israel.

B’nei Yisrael is often used to distinguish the Israelites from the other nations of the land. The first time B’nei Yisrael appears is after Jacob wrestles with [something or someone] at Peniel and the socket of his hip is dislodged in the struggle. “Therefore, the Children of Israel do not eat the sciatic nerve that is on the socket of the thigh until this day” (Genesis 32:33). Our medieval commentators remark that this naming serves as a reminder of the glory that bound the Israelites together in the Torah and that will continue to bind Jews together across the world today.

To be a member of B’nei Yisrael is to be a part of this Jewish “ourselves,” yet Jews have a long history of emphatic disagreement and mutual disownment. I’m not sure the B’nei Yisrael of the Torah ever felt a true obligation to protect one another: not when Moses took them out of Egypt, not when they married Midianite women, not when Korah rebelled, not when David tried to fight with the Philistines against King Saul, against the kingdom David would soon inherit.

Instead, the people in the Torah who do fight for the safety of the Israelites, who put the lives of B’nei Yisrael over their own, are the very people excluded by the distinction of B’nei Yisrael, the people of the other nations: Shifra and Puah, the Egyptian midwives who delivered Israelite babies despite Pharaoh’s decree, and Bilam, the non-Israelite prophet who refused to curse the Israelites at the Moabite King Balaak’s orders.

So why do we insist that only Jews can and will protect “ourselves”?

For Rabbi Farkas to send this email out last week, without mentioning the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles or the recent increase in ICE raids across the country, was to send a message that antisemitism and Jewish security are separate issues from the fascism descending upon our country. This is frankly false.

As civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer said, “no one is free until everyone is free”; our freedoms are dependent on one another. Jews won’t be free from antisemitism until nationalism dissolves and borders are demolished, until immigrants are free to live without the fear of deportation, until Palestinians are free from zionism, until until until. When Rabbi Farkas said, “it could have been any one of us,” he meant it could have been any one of us Jews falling victim to an antisemitic attack. But the opening line of his email could be spoken interchangeably by any group in the United States facing violence today.

Though there are Jews I do not feel obligated to (for moral and political reasons), and many Jews who certainly do not feel obligated to me (for the same reasons), as long as we are B’nei Yisrael in our sacred texts, our fates are undoubtedly connected. However, by using “ourselves” exclusively for Jews, we are withdrawing from our potential coalition partners, which makes all of us more vulnerable to fascism, unprotected. If we can hold Jews with whom we do not agree in our B’nei Yisrael, what is stopping us from bringing in non-Jews who share the aim: to make the world a safer, more joyful, more connected place.

If we expect to defeat antisemitism, we must expand who we understand to be a member of B’nei Yisrael, who we are bound to. Now, more than ever, we must turn towards our non-Jewish community members in need and use our voices and our bodies to protect them—and fight like hell while doing it.

Mollie Leibowitz is an educator, artist, and Master of Educational Leadership student at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

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It was late June, 2004, my first summer working at The Seeds of Peace Camp on the shores of Pleasant Lake in Otisfield, Maine.  “I’m an old man,” Mohammed told me, though he was younger than I am now. 

“You are not so old.”

“Getting old is different in Gaza than in America,” he said.  

In the following years, Mohammed and I became friends. In the fall of 2006, I accepted a full-time position with Seeds of Peace and moved to Jerusalem. Alongside his job as a professor of education at a university in Gaza, Mohammed represented Seeds of Peace on the ground in Gaza; over time, he expanded his role across our network. The two of us worked closely together.  We met in Ramallah, in Jerusalem, in Amman, by Petra, in Wadi Rum, in Cyprus, in Manhattan, at a retreat center in New Jersey, at the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine. We always roomed together. At night, he wore his tight knit Islamic skull cap on his head; he often gifted me such caps, so when we were together in the evenings, we each wore them. 

We stayed up late talking. I heard him each morning clearing his throat and coughing up flem.  When we were apart and he was home in Gaza, we talk on the phone several times a day. I would be walking around Jerusalem; he would be at the grocery store in Shijayea or at the nearby ice cream parlor. The grocery store owner was Mohammed’s childhood friend; the store was a gathering spot. The men there would ask Mohammed to ask me about life in Jerusalem. At the ice cream parlor, Mohammed always ordered strawberry ice cream with strawberry sauce. 

In June of 2014, members of Hamas kidnapped three Israeli teenagers in Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc in the West Bank, also a Jerusalem suburb where my cousins live. Israeli military forces invaded Gaza and The West Bank. That summer was supposed to be the culmination of years of our Seeds of Peace work. But when I asked the Palestinian and Israeli educators, my allies and friends, if we could go forward, they said  “no way, Daniel. The ground is burning.” 

That summer is burned into my memory. When missiles from Gaza hit close enough to trigger the sirens, I rushed to the bomb shelter I shared with my Israeli neighbors. My friends and colleagues visiting from America huddled together at my apartment on Shimoni Street, across from Gan Sacker, a sprawling park that included an ancient monastery built on the location where, according to tradition, the tree once stood that was cut down and then used for the cross that crucified Jesus. Deb, a facilitator, coach, and curriculum designer from Portland, Maine, got stuck overnight in Ramallah because of tear gas at the checkpoint. We drove by a missile from Gaza burning on the side of the road outside of Jerusalem. When I called Mohammed, he was often in bed under the covers.  “Daniel, the bombs are all around me. My bed is shaking. I think I’m going to die.”

Late that summer, Mohammed joined me at the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine. Most of the day he kept his skull cap on and stayed in his bed in our cottage by the lake.  I didn’t see him smile until by accident he met an Israeli woman named Orli who was visiting her teenage daughter. Orli had grown up on Kibbutz Nahal Oz.” I want you to meet her,” Mohammed told me. 

We met by the flags at the entrance of The Seeds of Peace Camp. Dark hair cut short, about Mohammed’s age, Orli was much shorter than him. The two of them hugged like old friends. A former Hebrew teacher in Gaza, Mohammed took every opportunity he could to speak the language. He loved to to speak Hebrew with Orli but they also went back and forth to English for my sake. They reminisced about when they were young in the 1970’s. Israelis would drive into Gaza; Palestinians from Gaza would drive into Israel. Mohammed’s large family lived in a one room house made from clay and hay with a dirt floor. His parents could not read or write, though his father memorized The Koran. His father—in his late fifties when Mohammed was born—worked as a nightwatchman. “We depended upon the chickens and the vegetables we could plant next to the house. . . .The only way for us to cook was with the primus stove or the wood, ” Mohammed explained. “I remember when I was a child, there was a grocery store close and another one a bit far. I used to go to the one close with an egg and the man there would give me candy.”  In 1975, when he was about eighteen, Mohammed started working at a gas station in Ramle [a mixed Israeli city of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel]. This launched him into new worlds. 

“I was a smart boy and I succeeded to learn Hebrew faster than anybody else. . .The boss looked to me,” Mohammed said that first time with Orli, or at least other times, for such conversations have blended.  “I was also smart with math. I succeeded to gain his trust, to occupy his heart. He depended on me. He was a German Jewish Israeli. His name was Asher Khofkin. He had numbers on his arms. He had daughters, one with a popular television show, Rifka Michaeli. This daughter had been in the army and was living on a kibbutz. Asher was married to another wife, a woman who was a head stewardess. They had two daughters, too. He had a brother. Together they owned about five gas stations. His brother David was the head of the union of gas stations. Asher used to take me to Gaza in his Pontiac. He treated me to hummus and falafel. Later he offered me a gas station in Gaza. He used to give me my salary and then more than the salary. He was always buying and giving me things. One time I said to him, Asher, you have a lot of money and you don’t have a son to carry your name when you die, and all of your money is going to the girls. He said: ‘You are a crazy Arab. Who cares if when I die anybody remembers me. Who cares about the money.’ That is something I’ll never forget. It had an impact on my thinking. I heard that once he was injured in a movie theater. There was a bomb there. He was a major in the army. I worked with him for a long time. I would leave, go home, and come back. When I got married, I came with my wife to visit. He said anything you want, just call me. . . “ 

By the flags at the entrance of the Seeds of Peace Camp, Mohammed said to Orli in English, “I used to go to the demonstrations in Tel Aviv.”

Orli nodded. “Of course, me, too. I was there.” 

“How far were your homes from one another?” I asked. 

Mohammed thought for a moment.  “With no checkpoints, you can walk from Shijaeya to Nahal Oz. Maybe it’s three miles.”  When Orli and Mohammed looked at one another, the silence between them contained infinite depths of memory and loss. 

“My whole neighborhood has trauma,” Mohammed said. “I still believe in peace.” During that same conversation, he told us that he wanted to create a community center for his neighborhood after the fighting stopped. 

That fall, Mohammed opened The Shijaeya Community Project (The SCP) on the ground floor of his family compound, on the land where he grew up. I helped him to raise money, so I immersed myself in the language he used to describe the center’s mission: “to teach life skills; to teach ethics through storytelling; to encourage free thinking through the arts; to teach the English language; to use the English language as a window for cross-cultural understanding.”

Not long after, I remember taking Mohammed to visit my father. The two of them stood on the balcony of my father’s 17th floor apartment on 123rd Street, in Morningside Heights, across the street from The Jewish Theological Seminary.  They spoke in Hebrew like long lost relatives, with such passion and care. My father grew up the second of four sons of working class Orthodox Jewish immigrants from the borderlands between Romania and Hungary. As a kid in the late 1940’s, he stood in uniform to greet Menachem Begin, the right-wing Zionist leader, when Begin visited America. After high school, my father spent a pivotal year on a secular left-wing kibbutz. There, he stopped wearing a yarmulke and eating kosher. He was moved by the radically egalitarian kibbutz vision, the integration of work, of purpose, of community. He loved working with the cows. He loved the intellectual intensity. He loved the folk dancing at night. After moving back to New York, against his parents wishes, he insisted on going to City College: he became the first in his family to get a secular liberal arts education. He made his way into America. But he never washed the kibbutz dirt from the way he approached life. I remember my father and Mohammed on the balcony, leaning into one another as if they had known one another forever, using their hands for emphasis, sharing their hopes and loves. 

When my father visited me in Jerusalem, which he did regularly over those years, I took him with me to workshops, public events, and work meetings on both sides of The Green Line. I tried to show him what I was learning on the ground: peace, like health, is a long-term practice rooted in trust and relationship and composed of small decisions, small acts, that add up over time.  To begin, I did what I could to earn the trust of Israeli and Palestinian educators and community leaders. I visited their schools and community centers; I sat across the table with them for meals; I did a lot of listening. My colleagues and I did what we could to support immediate needs on the ground while we weaved together circles of courage and commitment across the more distant lines of conflict. 

In April of 2015, Mohammed, the Palestinian educators, and I, organized a spring camp at the Murad Hotel in the hills outside of Bethlehem. Mohammed did the impossible: I helped him.  He selected twelve Palestinian children of ten and eleven, most of them girls, from his community center to participate in that camp. He obtained written permission from parents making him temporary guardian. He got permission from relevant Hamas officials. He worked with our Ramallah and Tel Aviv offices to get Israeli permits to enter Jerusalem and the West Bank. He worked with Uraib in Jerusalem on transportation, room and board. With the help of our friend, Islam, director of a community center in the south Hebron Hills who was visiting Gaza for work, Mohammed shepherded the kids from Gaza through the checkpoints, to Jerusalem, and then to the camp in the hills outside of Bethlehem–what for those kids was the stuff of dreams. 

On a beautiful spring afternoon around Easter, I sat in the restaurant of the Jerusalem Hotel, across from the Palestinian bus station and The Garden Tomb, around the corner from The Old City’s Damascus Gate, waiting for Mohammed and the children to arrive. The Jerusalem Hotel’s restaurant, one of my favorite spots in Jerusalem, is designed like a greenhouse —glass ceilings crisscrossed by purlins and bows, a stone fountain with water trickling, stone floors, and plants hanging everywhere.  One can sit there undisturbed for hours. I started with a cup of Arabic coffee, a plate of hummus and pita bread. In succession, I ordered multiple cups of coffee.  In the early afternoon, my phone rang.  “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Mohammed said, so I paid my bill and waited outside. Then I saw them. 

Mohammed is a tall, lumbering man with olive skin, short dark hair on the side, and a patch of dark hair on top. He jokes and laughs a lot. Deaf in one ear, he speaks loudly. He likes to buy things at Goodwill, Sam’s Club, and Costco, and give them away.  That day, he was in a dark sweater and a dark wool sports coat, a dark cap on his head, folded glasses on a chain around his neck, and a radiant smile on his face. There were the children, each one dressed in their best clothes or in outfits borrowed for the occasion: black patent leather shoes; dresses for the girls, clean, well ironed pants and shirts for the boys; hair combed and moussed; skin scrubbed; exuberance on their faces along with looks of childish shock. They were understandably shy at first. They shook my hands and looked up with eyes, shades of brown, of green, gray and blue, that gave me a chance to take in their already individual approaches to life, along with the vulnerability, curiosity, and courage they were mustering up.

“Let’s get something to eat!” Mohammed said in Arabic and English while waving us forward. We walked toward the Old City and then down the stone steps to Damascus Gate. We passed the vegetable stands and wrinkled old women selling fresh herbs; the tables with carafes of fresh lemonade with mint and Arabic coffee; the din of layered conversations in multiple languages; through the light dust hanging in the air, until we made it to a crowded falafel restaurant. 

“These kids are not like the kids you know from the American School or from camp or even from the places you go in The West Bank,” Mohammed told me, in between bites of falafel. “These kids are from Shijaeya. It’s another world.  They come from very poor families. Their parents don’t speak English; many of them hardly read or write Arabic. These are simple people. You are the first American they ever met; you are the first Jewish they ever met. You are the first foreigner they ever met. I think the first person they ever met who says he is not a Muslim.”

After lunch, we walked as a group to “The Haram al-Sharif,” also known as “The Al Aqsa Mosque Compound” and as “The Temple Mount.” According to Jewish tradition, God created the world from that location. According to Jewish and Christian traditions, Abraham, obeying God’s command, brought his son Isaac there as a sacrifice.  Many generations later, almost a thousand years before The Common Era, King Solomon built The First Temple there; it was later destroyed by the Assyrians and rebuilt after The Babylonian Exile. During the time of Jesus, King Herod turned this same site into one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the Roman Empire. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, including The Holy Temple, they built a Temple to Zeus and forbid Jews access to The Holy Site. Early Christians built churches on the ruins of The Temple Mount. According to The Koran, from there, The Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of a winged horse-like creature.The first Muslims prayed in the direction of the ancient Temple. The Crusaders gained control of the City but left the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound intact. Various Islamic regimes ruled Jerusalem, most recently The Ottomans. The British took over after World War I. According to the U.N. Partition Plan, Jerusalem was to be an international city. Instead, after what Israelis call “The War of Independence” and Palestinians call “The Catastrophe,” from 1948 until 1967, the Israelis and Jordanians divided Jerusalem among themselves: The Al Aqsa Compound, The Temple Mount, stood on the Jordanian side.  

For generations, The Temple Mount itself was closed to Jews who prayed instead beside “The Kotel,” “The Wailing Wall,” visible remnants of a wall that King Herod built as part of his Temple complex. When the Israelis conquered East Jerusalem in 1967, they demolished houses and cleared out a neighborhood below The Al Aqsa Compound to create a pilgrimage site around The Wailing Wall. Claiming descent from the Prophet Mohammed, the Hashemite Rulers of Jordan remain the guardians of the Islamic holy sites of Jerusalem. Extremist Jewish groups envision building The Third Temple on The Temple Mount—where the Al Aqsa Compound stands. In late September, 2000, a visit by former Israeli general and opposition politician Ariel Sharon, accompanied by Israeli riot police officers, ignited what became The Second Intifada.  

We are talking about an intricate emotional and spiritual geography, a focus of prayer and longing for billions of people across generations with concentrated power that is difficult to convey. In Temple Times, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year—and only on that day—The High Priest ventured into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of The Temple, originally the place for The Ark of The Covenant, dressed in white linen, to burn incense and sprinkle the blood of the sacrificed bull in a ritual of atonement. It was the single instance of the year when The High Priest spoke God’s true full name out loud. The High Priest entered The Holy of Holies with a rope tied around his ankle and that rope linked to something outside so that, if needed, he could be dragged out without putting anybody else in danger. Muslims built their Mosque Compound over The Temple Mount because they continued with such reverence and awe. 

This is a long way of explaining why the young, thin, unshaven Israeli soldier stood guard, keeping a tense calm between Jews and Muslims. When this soldier stopped us with a gesture of his hands, Mohammed spoke to him in fluent Hebrew. The soldier looked over Mohammed’s and Islam’s passports and permits. He looked over the children. Then he looked at me while speaking to Mohammed. “Is he a Muslim?” the soldier asked in Hebrew. 

“Of course,” Mohammed replied in Hebrew, smiling.  “Mohammed—come on,” I said in English, worried that he would get himself in trouble. “Show me, show me,” the soldier beckoned for my passport. When he saw my American passport and Jewish name, he shook his head and turned to Mohammed. In Hebrew, he said, “The rest of you, go; he stays here.” 

“But why must he stay? He’s a good Muslim.” Mohammed meant that I was, from his perspective, a person who lives a life of submission to a Godly ethic and is thus, broadly speaking, a Muslim. The meaning of “Islam” is submission to God: Muslims view themselves as those who submit to God.  For Muslims, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, all of them, are Muslims; Jesus, too, is a great prophet, not the Son of God. The Prophet Mohammed is the last of this line of prophets with final words of Revelation. My friend Mohammed would not call himself devout.  He compares himself to his imam, to his wife, to his older sister, and to others who pray five times a day and are far stricter in their ritualistic observance. And yet he has a difficult time understanding how people can be agnostic or atheistic: God, the creator and sustainer of all life, for him, is an obvious fact.  Are you a Muslim,” the soldier asked me, now switching to heavily accented English. “Or are you Jewish?”

“I’m Jewish.” Switching back to Hebrew, the soldier turned again to Mohammed. Pointing to me, he said, “He stays here.” Mohammed gave a slight nod. In English, he said: “okay.” 

During this exchange, the Shijaeya children were watching, their mouths agape. I sat down on a plastic chair as Mohammed and the group walked into the Al Aqsa Compound. When they returned, we retraced our steps through the streets of The Old City. By the Jerusalem Hotel we boarded our charted bus and headed out. The children were quiet. Like me, they looked out the window as the scenery changed.  Until the late 19th century, The Old City of Jerusalem—densely packed into its Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian Quarters—was surrounded by semi arid rocky hills that would have been recognizable to the ancient judges, prophets, pilgrims, farmers, shepherds, queens and kings. These hills have been covered by roads, by apartment blocks of Jerusalem stone. Away from the center of Jerusalem, it becomes easier to see the hills for what they are. One can still find shepherds walking with their flocks, though fewer make their living this way, and local lamb, more expensive than what is imported from New Zealand, has become a relative rarity in the local shops. The Holy Land is not large in a physical sense. The Jordan River is unimpressive as a simple river.  Jerusalem is a relatively small city. Putting aside The Holy Sites, Bethlehem is not that much of a town. But the emotional geography, the undulating levels of perception, the spiritual geography, of Israel/Palestine, is a kind of Mount Everest.

In The West Bank, prominent red signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, mark the boundaries set up by The Oslo Peace Process in the 1990’s and meant to be temporary. “Area A,” is composed of Palestinian urban areas that The Palestinian Authority directly governs. Area C, which includes Israeli settlements, is governed fully by Israel.  Area B is theoretically under joint Israeli/Palestinian administration, with Israel in charge of security. Palestinians cannot cross checkpoints to Jerusalem without permission from Israeli Authorities. Israeli citizens are legally barred from Area A.  Between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, in between checkpoints and those red signs, in liminal space, there is hilly land where both Palestinians and Israelis can meet legally. On this land are three hotels—Talitha Qumi, owned by The German Evangelical Lutheran Church, and The Everest and The Murad, both privately owned by Christian families—that live from the peculiarities of the political situation: this is where Israeli and Palestinian activists and peace builders and their international allies meet. On that drive from Jerusalem with the children from Shijaeya, we entered this liminal space: we turned from the main flow of traffic and followed the curves of a dirt road to the gates of The Murad Hotel. What a welcome we received.  

We joined the roughly 50 Palestinian children who had arrived earlier from Jerusalem and across The West Bank, along with about 30 Palestinian educators. The children were there for the camp; the educators were there to run the camp and to participate in a workshop on “peaceful learning environments.”  It was rare even then for Palestinians from Gaza, The West Bank, and Jerusalem, to gather in one place. I spent those days at the Murad between the children’s activities and the educators’ workshop. I sat with educators over long meals and into the night. On alternate evenings I joined the men at the swimming pool and in the sauna. I walked the hills and took in what we were accomplishing together—something so precious and so difficult to describe. 

The Shijaeya kids vied for my attention. They used my presence to practice their English. They asked me questions.  “How are you, Mr. Daniel?” “Will you visit me in Gaza?” Can I visit you in Jerusalem?” “Are you really Yahud [a Jew]?” “Can you take me to America?” “Can you help me to be a doctor? “What’s your favorite animal?”  “Can you take us to the zoo?  

I looked at Mohammed. He looked at me. We both smiled. “Yes.”  

The morning everybody at camp was going home, the Shijaeya kids dressed in their best clothes, what they had worn on the day they left Gaza. I have issues with zoos. But those kids cast their light on the experience. 

The Jerusalem Zoo was integrated into the hills and criss-crossed with walking paths. Many of the animals enjoyed relatively ample living areas. We checked out the amphibians. We walked through the dark room of nocturnal creatures. We walked through the humid bird room like a jungle, where the small birds with bright colors flew all over chirping. We spent time with the chimps, each one with a photograph and corresponding name tacked up by the fence so that we could get to know them individually. The kids stood, stared, and danced with excitement in front of the tigers, the lions, the zebras, the hippos, the African and Asian elephants, the monkeys, and the penguins. There was a special Biblical section where members of various species mentioned in The Bible shared an enclosure. There was a separate enclosure for a wild boar with a prominent sign in multiple languages: “THIS IS NOT A PIG. Do NOT throw garbage.” 

A zoo can help us remember: the diversity of life is stunning. And those penguins were something else. They had their own pool of water and a surrounding infrastructure of white shelves in a panorama meant to mimic the snow and ice of their Antarctic home. While we stood in the penguin section, the penguins dove into the water and swam about. They played together as penguins do–with joyful abandonment. That day, I saw those penguins in their black and white penguin birthday suits as the kids from Shijaeya saw them—as marvels of creation. An Israeli Jewish guide, a young brown haired woman, passed us with her group of Israeli Jewish children, and then stood, facing the penguins. She pointed to the penguins and started speaking Hebrew. The Shijaeya kids kept looking at the penguins, jumping around, making noises of amazement, laughing, and talking amongst themselves.

“Quiet, please,” the young guide said in Hebrew, no idea where we came from or who we were. “Be quiet, children, Mohammed said to them in Arabic. “This woman is telling us about the penguins.”  My senses went abuzz to worlds of experience colliding. 

We left the zoo in the late afternoon and drove a short distance to “Melik Shawarma,” a fast food restaurant. Mohammed handed out sandwiches. After we ate, the kids stood in line outside of the bus. One by one, they approached me, shook my hand and looked up with eyes, shades of brown and black, of green, gray and blue, that gave me a chance to take in their sheer joy and gratitude.

The next morning, I woke up alone in my apartment on Shimoni Street in West Jerusalem. I walked into Gan Sacker, the park I used to see from my balcony. I walked by the monastery built on the site where, according to Christian tradition, the tree once stood that was cut down and used for the cross that crucified Jesus. When my phone rang, it was Mohammed.

“Daniel,” he said. “There is a revolution.”

“A revolution?”

“A Revolution. Really. Everybody in the neighborhood is talking. They all want to go on a trip like we did. Now we can really do something. We just need more money.”  

As things turned out, though, that was the last trip of its kind that Mohammed and I did together. The leadership of Seeds of Peace got distracted by shiny events in banquet halls and incubators for social entrepreneurs in Stockholm, Athens, London, and New York.  Reflecting dynamics of the larger society, the organization broke down because its leadership could not talk with one another.  At 3:30 one afternoon in January of 2019, the brand new director of Seeds of Peace global programming, a young woman of about thirty who advocated a new vision for the organization, “to imagine a world without oppression,” called Mohammed on the phone. She told him that he was being “let go:” she said his e-mail inbox would be shut down by the end of that day.   I hung on longer to my position at Seeds of Peace. I tried to bring Mohammed back. The extreme carelessness of the organization’s leadership continued. The Global Pandemic made things worse. In May of 2021, I left Seeds of Peace. I made a new life with my partner Celia in upstate New York. We adopted a rescue dog from Texas. We named her Maizie. We built a yurt in the mountains. I tried to snap out of a rolling sense of shock. 

On October 7th, 2023, Orli’s Kibbutz, Nahal Oz, was one of the targets of the Hamas terrorist attacks. Hours after those attacks started, Mohammed called Orli from Columbus, Ohio. Orli was in the suburbs of Boston. Orli’s sister was in her safe room on the kibbutz, hiding from the terror outside. The sister could text Orli but for obvious reasons, they could not talk on the phone. Mohammed listened to Orli. He wished her sister and her whole family safety and security. He spoke with deep empathy about the loss of Israeli life. Then he said something like “this is going to be very bad for the people in Gaza.” 

That day, twelve residents of Nahal Oz were killed, along with approximately sixty Israeli soldiers. Others from the community were taken hostage. The kibbutz—a rare effort to create a humane, radically democratic community—was devastated. The people of the kibbutz remain overwhelmed by trauma and grief. Just as Mohammed predicted, the Israeli military rained hell on Gaza. Mohammed’s wife Haja was visiting Shijaeya when hell made its appearance.  Mohammed’s niece and her family were among the tens of thousands of people killed by Israeli bombs. Mohammed’s son Ahmed and daughter-in-law Oraib, along with Mohammed’s daughter and her family, and most of their extended kin, fled Shijaeya and went south.  Oraib gave birth. Her husband, Mohammed’s son, took her to the hospital on a wagon drawn by a donkey because they didn’t have gas for a car. In the following months, they escaped to Cairo with as much of the family as possible.

In July, 2024, nine months into the devastation, Israeli bombs destroyed Mohammed’s family compound in Shijaeya, including the community center. Relatives staying there escaped in time. But while running away, one of them, a man in his seventies, died of a heart attack. 

I called Mohammed. “I’m so sorry to hear about another death in your family. And I‘m so sorry about your home, Mohammed, and about the center.” 

“Thank you. But the building was only a building,” he said. “And I was expecting it.” Our conversations go in circles of futility and loss. 

“I’m worried for you and for the Jewish even in America. There is so much hate against the Jewish. I’m worried for you.”

“Thank you, Mohammed. But I’m more worried about the people in Gaza.”

“You don’t see what I see on Tik Tok. You don’t hear what I hear. And only the Jewish in America can stop Israel. Only the American Jewish can stop Netanyahu. Maybe. It’s enough. Halas. I remember I used to go to Tel Aviv for the peace demonstrations. What happened to the Israelis, Daniel? Their government doesn’t want peace. They are radical. What happened to the ethics? Where is the humanity?”

“I don’t know, Mohammed. I don’t know.” Then Mohammed said what he had said so many times before: “you have to do something.”  I said goodbye to Mohammed. I sat down on a rough wooden bench by the Poestenkill Creek in the woods by the local cemetery in Troy, New York. Maizie the dog sat by my feet.  I ran through the “somethings” I might do. I let myself be enveloped by the swaying trees, the singing birds, and the flowing creek. 

Almost every week day, late afternoon, early evening, depending upon the season, depending upon the time of nightfall, Maizie, and I walk in those same woods.

“We have completely lost,” Mohammed told me on the phone just before Thanksgiving, 2024. We were talking about the money we had raised to support activities for the children left in Shijayea. The teachers on the ground were using the shell of Mohammed’s center. They wanted to expand their offerings to include a range of academic subjects because there were no schools in operation. But they needed toilets. They needed running water. Running water. I looked out at the creek again. And again. The creek iced over in places but the water continued to flow. Maizie and I tramped through the snow. The snow melted. It snowed again. The snow melted but it snowed again. The final snows of the season melted, as did the ice in the creek. The birds returned to sing. The buds on the trees burst forth in spring-time splendor.  The feelings of despair and futility grow stronger.  I am surprised by how often I think of the penguins and those kids from Shijaeaya, Gaza. Images of Mohammed and me, of the young Israeli woman, of those kids from Gaza, of those Israeli kids, keep flashing through my mind: penguins just being penguins; children just being children. That memory stands out as a high point of my eleven years living in Jerusalem and twenty five working in conflict zones.  

***

I wrote not long ago to an Israeli cousin in Jerusalem to thank her for the invitation to her son’s bar mitzvah and to say that I could not make it. When she wrote back and mentioned that her oldest daughter, a recent high school graduate, will be joining the army, I thought of that daughter, a kind girl with thoughtful brown eyes and a quiet smile. Images of that daughter at family occasions over the years flashed before my eyes, along with images of Noah’s ark floating through the downpour, and of walking with the ancient Israelites through the parted sea and the desert toward a forever receding Promised Land. I thought of Mohammed and my father standing on the balcony together. I got swept into a tsunami of tears over the realities that we, human beings, collectively create, and impose upon one another, and upon ourselves, and then inhabit like prisoners in striped uniforms in a pantomime jail. 

*******

Daniel Noah Moses is a former Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University and former Director of Educator Programs at Seeds of Peace. From 2006 to 2017, he lived in Jerusalem. He’s been a Jerusalem Fellow at The Mandel Institute; he taught in the JTS Kesher Hadash Program for Master’s students in Jewish education. More recently, among other things, he is the
co-founder of The Fig Tree Alliance. He’s working on a writing project, Fragments from a World on Fire: Life in Conflict Zones. See this page for more about The Shijaeya Community Project, see.

The post Those Penguins and Those Kids from Gaza: “Man is Wolf to Man” appeared first on Jewschool.

Are we moving to the point where we can think about October 7 and its implications? If so, to borrow a midrashic phrase, “to what can it be compared?” One obvious place to begin would be the Six Day War in June 1967. In what ways are October 7 and the Six-Day War different, and in what ways are they similar? In what ways does 1967 inform October 7, and in what ways does it disprove 1967? There are some similarities; the brevity, six days and one day, and the unexpected consequences, albeit in opposite directions. Yet as is the case with comparison’s more generally, the differences are what makes comparisons interesting to think with. As we know, in May 1967 Jews were preparing for a possible second Holocaust. Mass graves were dug in Israel to prepare for many casualties. The fear was palpable, “maybe this is the end, a state that lasted a mere twenty years?”.

What happened in June 1967 could not have been imagined a week before. Israel not only defended herself against formidable enemies, but captured territory that increased its size by one third thereby creating a security buffer it claimed to desperately need while also becoming responsible for hundreds of thousands of refugees. In addition, it captured land (liberated or occupied depends on your politics) with religious significance, amplifying messianic expectations. It thus constituted a secular victory as well as a theological one. It also created a problem that Israel still lives with, a problem that arguably sowed the seeds of October 7. Each one of us will decide for themselves whether that war was a “miracle” (Israeli philosopher Ernst Akiba Simon once said, “I too would believe the Six Day War was a miracle, if I didn’t believe in God so much”) but it certainly was fortuitous. It also constituted a significant defeat for Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria who ostensibly waged the war to reverse their defeat on 1948 . Israel took advantage of the opportunity, and over the next decades tacitly enabled the construction of a subculture in those “occupied” territories, settling over 500,000 civilians there (if we include East Jerusalem). That project, and arguably the ideology called “Greater Israel” that it represented, has now come, in one way or another, to dominate the country, religious and secular.

In short, the settlers waged a decisive and tactical battle for control of the country and have largely won. This is not because of what Netanyahu or Ben Gvir say, it is because of what Ganz or Lapid or Bennet say. For example, the protests in Israel against government reform were not essentially about what 1967 wrought. The occupation was not really on the agenda. For many, not all, in the Israeli protest movement, the occupation ceased being a moral blemish and became a (tragic) necessity.

I understand the animus toward Netanyahu, and I also understand the settlers support of him. Like a person who doesn’t think the Holocaust was unique cannot easily speak about the Holocaust to a person who does, so too, supporters of Netanyahu and those who oppose him arguably do not share basic premises sufficient to be talking about the same thing.

The religious Zionist message is pretty straightforward. According to Rav Shagar, as he defines it in his sermon delivered on Israel Independence Day 1997, “Land and Exile and the Pursuit of Peace,” religious Zionism contains a few components. First, that the ingathering of the Jews to the land of Israel is part of a messianic process (broadly defined). Second, that the state has religious value even as a secular enterprise. And third, in one form or another the state is fulfilling a prophetic promise. I would add to this that religious Zionism., certainly in the Kookean variety, believes that all the land, from the river to the sea, belongs to the Jews, what Israeli historian Chaim Gans calls “proprietary Zionism.” Whatever decision Israel chooses to make viz. a now largely defunct “two-state solution,” it is a compromise. To them the land, – all of it – belongs to the Jews.

Many religious Zionists interpret these in different – sometime very different – ways and come to different conclusions or alternatives. But I still think most adhere to these principles. Those advocating for a truly secular democratic state, a state that grants all those in-residence full and equal rights and privileges begin with different premises and thus are talking about a different vision for the country. This debate has been a real struggle in Israel for decades. In fact, one can argue it had its genesis in 1967.

One of the reasons settlers succeeded in 1968 in Sebastia (an abandoned railway station near Ramallah where a small group of settlers set up camp and refused to leave) and then in Hebron (where a small group led by Moshe Levinger rented a hotel in Hebron for Passover and then never left) was because they knew exactly what they wanted, and the government didn’t know what it wanted. Members of this small settler movement slowly, strategically, and brilliantly kept going, founding Gush Emunim in the winter of 1974, often tactically regulated themselves, while their ideology continued to develop and evolve in response to changing circumstances and realities.

In 1984, the settler movement experienced a setback when the Jewish underground’s plan to blow up the Dome of Rock Mosque was discovered and many were arrested and imprisoned, mostly for short sentences that were later commuted. And of course, Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 murder of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron on Purim morning, and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 sent shockwaves through the settler community, with many thinking this was a sign of its demise. But it recalibrated and survived. And grew. That has been the root of its great success. It has been cultivating a quiet revolution for almost half a century, slowly making its way into the mainstream. People will counter that this was because of Palestinian resistance which of course is partly true. But I find that obfuscating. Israel is a sovereign state. And sovereign states are not, or perhaps should not be, totally reactive. That is part of the responsibility of sovereignty.

With the Gaza disengagement in 2005, the settler movement suffered its greatest challenge, which crippled it, but instead of surrendering it broke into various factions. The Hilltop Youth, many of them “children of the disengagement” chose lawlessness, in effect abandoning Zionism and becoming Erez Yisraelists, a fascinating iteration of nativism that Yonatan Ratosh spoke about in a very secular register in the 1940s. I think Ratosh was only partly right. Ratosh argued that a native Hebrew culture/civilization will eventually emerge distinct from Jews and Judaism in the Diaspora, in fact severed from it, but he thought it would abandon Judaism, whereas in fact the Hilltop Youth have adopted Judaism into a kind of neo-Biblicism. They have become shepherds and artisans on the land.

Another faction, that has now become the Religious Zionist party, began to work its way into government institutions, and in November 2022 achieved a victory few could have conceived a few years before. Meir Kahane was removed from the Knesset in 1986 with a “Racism Law” and now those who openly support many of his views, are at the very center of power in the Knesset. In some way, with all the ups and downs, November 2023 was the apex of June 1967.

Then came October 7. Whereas in June 1967 Israel overestimated its adversaries, thinking the Arab armies could inflict serious, perhaps even fatal, damage, on October 7 Israel underestimated its adversity (Hamas) not believing it had the resources, skill, or fortitude to wage such an attack. If 1967 was an exhibition of Israeli grit, courage, and devotion, October 7 was an exhibition of Israeli arrogance, failure, and disorganization. For example, the fact that there was a music rave with thousands of civilians a few kilometers from an enemy border with almost no security. What was behind such a decision to pull security (especially given that there was military intelligence that Hamas was planning something) if not a deep underestimation of Hamas’ capabilities? And as to why it took the IDF, a military that prided itself on capability and readiness, six or seven hours to respond, is something that needs an investigation that will likely come out in time.

In June 1967 Israel celebrated mass death averted, and on October 7 they mourned mass death realized. The strength of June 1967 gave Israel the confidence of a functioning regional power that could negotiate a deal with neighboring countries from a pace of strength, whereas October 7 humiliated Israel into reacting with vengeance, essentially destroying Gaza.

I see this not as an exhibition of strength but weakness, as I understand vengeance as an expression of weakness disguised as strength. One can see this more generally in Hannah Arendt’s On Violence where she argues that violence itself is an act of weakness. Violence as an expression of vengeance, that is, violence that has no goal other than inflicting pain, even more so.

June 1967 brought Jews worldwide together, creating a pride in Israel previously only matched by 1948, perhaps even more so. It essentially erased the remaining ambivalence many Jews held about Zionism. October 7 has torn world Jewry apart, created animus and even hatred among Jews who support the war and those who oppose it. Calling Jews who oppose the Gaza War “pro-Hamas,” and creating documents suggesting those who strongly criticize Israel, even Jews, are guilty of “antisemitism.” And alternatively, calling anyone who defends the war, “fascist.”

I am suggesting that what was created in June 1967 totally imploded on October 7. I frame this as a difference between triumphalism and desperation. June 1967 was a triumphalist moment for many Jews. It was, in some way, a collective exhale from the Holocaust. It is therefore not coincidental that October 7 was compared to the Holocaust (erroneously in my view). If the victory in 1967 “proved” to many Jews that they had the wherewithal to avert any future Holocaust by having a sovereign state, October 7 tragically exhibited how that was false. The entire project of Zionism was arguably created so that October 7 could never happen, not that an enemy could never attack (that is always possible) – and Israel could defend its civilians in any attack.

This is why I am suggesting that Israel’s reaction, on the ground and rhetorically, is best described as desperation. Its desperation, in one sense, is the opposite of the triumphalism of 1967. The triumphalism of 1967 was an expression of relief, the desperation of October 7 is an expression of humiliation. In 1967 Jews in Israel were frightened and worried, rightfully so, and reacted with courage and resolve. In 2023 Israel were overconfident, even arrogant, and acted with dismissal. In 1967 the resolve of Jewish Israelis resulted in perseverance; in 2023 its overconfidence, even arrogance, resulted in mass death. To repeat, as we move further away from that horrific moment of October 7, “to what can October 7 be compared?”

*

I submit that in myriad ways the era that began in June 1967 ended on October 7. The broad assumption in the 1970s through the 2020s was that the occupation could be “managed.” October 7 showed us that this is no longer the case, if it ever was. The notion of “mowing the lawn” (a grotesque racist image in my view) where occasionally, the IDF goes into Gaza, kills some terrorists, and retreats, has been debunked. I think this war against Gaza illustrates that. It is a war of almost complete destruction; it is no longer “mowing the lawn,” it is obliterating the entire region. This itself, in my view, exhibits how those in power believe that the rules of the game have changed. I don’t think this resolves anything, but it certainly changes the dynamic. Without the recognition that what began in 67 ended on October 7, I think we are simply buying time until another October 7.

But here I think there are similarities between the post 67 world and our moment. The settler movement remains resolute in their program. Now they have security jurisdiction in the West Bank to act in concert with the government. And the IDF is doing the settler movement’s bidding in Gaza. The center, however, like in 67, doesn’t know quite what to do. The ambivalence is as palpable as it is dangerous. And that is why the settlers will likely win. What that will mean remains to be seen, but just as Israel became a different country after 1967 it may do so once again after October 7, perhaps in the same direction only more draconian.

For those who often say to me, “well, what is the solution?” my response is that not everything has a solution. In this paradigm, the paradigm that began in 1967, there is no solution. For there to be a solution the paradigm would have to change. And that is no easy task after half a century of investment, false hopes and broken promises, and incompetence. People from Ben Gurion to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, warned of the dangers of occupation back in the late 1960s. At the time, triumphalism, optimism, and relief, made it impossible to hear. And now, perhaps, it is too late.

The ideological product of a small band of messianic nationalists who camped on the hilltops of Judea, mostly to the curiosity of Israeli society, now run the country under the guise of “security.” How they can say that with a straight face after October 7 is beyond me. “Total victory,” is a ruse, a mantra to lull us into a hypnotic state to enable us not to go mad at what we are doing.

At any rate, tragically the Palestinians have shown the world, like the American slave population before them, that eventually if pushed far enough, the oppressed will find a way to resist and incur serious damage on their oppressors. I am not justifying, I am describing. The slave revolt leader Nat Turner and Yahya Sinwar come from similar mindsets.

One question we can ask is whether we can transition from humiliation and desperation to think about a future for Israel outside the false narrative 1967 provided. One who looks at October 7 within the paradigm of 1967, and one who looks at October 7 as the undoing of 1967, are looking at two different things. The Six-Day War lasted only six days, but it reverberated for over half a century. October 7 is its inverted finale.

The post Triumphalism and Desperation, or, “To What May October 7 be Compared?”: Is October 7 the End of an Era that Began in June 1967 appeared first on Jewschool.

On Yom Ha-Azma’ut 1997 Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg 1949-2007) rose to address his yeshiva. As one might think, his sermon was devoted to Israeli Independence Day, but as we will see, not in any conventional way. This was 1997. Oslo II was signed two years before. The prospect of “peace” which meant the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank was in the air. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a settler in 1995 because he promoted the peace-process. The religious Zionist sector was being pulled apart. On the one hand, “land for peace” was a dagger in the heart of the religious Zionist project. On the other hand, one of its own had recently assassinated an Israeli Prime Minister. The community was shaken, not knowing whether to admit it had gone too far, or to acknowledge that this was a necessary act to save its messianic movement. That is, since 1967, religious Zionism had negotiated a fragile balance between the “natural messianism” of the state project and the “apocalyptic messianism” of hastening the end. Rabin and Oslo threatened to upend that balance.

The Six-Day War in 1967 enabled a kind of amalgam between the natural and apocalyptic models while it also led settler advocates to determine that they were living in an acceleration of the natural process toward the end-time. Rabin’s assassination was a breach in that balance. Rabin was viewed as the force that was subverting the process that began in 1967. Rabin and Oslo were viewed, in some way, as the religious Zionist anti-Christs.

In 1997, Religious Zionism was in crisis, having to choose between trying to reinstate the balance, or to lean into the apocalyptic. The natural process was arrested by Rabin and Oslo. For Shagar, the problem was even more acute. For him, religious Zionism was basing itself on an outdated “modern” model of nationalism that was becoming obsolete. It wasn’t about which way to turn in its own internal ideational orbit. Rather, his question was whether religious Zionism could reconstruct itself beyond modernity. Was religious Zionism relevant at all?  This was the context, and subject, of Shagar’s sermon that day in May1997.

This sermon was not a salve, and not a condemnation, it was a deep reflection on the reality on the ground and the ways in which the religious Zionist vision and movement was at a serious crossroads. Can it survive? Should it survive?

After an analysis of Shagar’s position below, I offer a post-October 7 reading of it. Has religious Zionism lost its raison d’etre in Shagar’s view and is its obvious success today indicative of its true failure.

*

Shagar begins his sermon with one of the most cited prooftexts of the religious Zionist claim of ownership of the land, Rashi’s first comment in Gensis responding to his own questions as to why the Torah begins with creation. Rashi famously wrote:

What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the creation? … He gave an account of the work of creation in order that He might give them the heritage of the nations.” For should the peoples of the world say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan”, Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed, He gave it to them, and when He willed, He took it from them and gave it to us” (Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 187).

Shagar then goes on to detail how his community misconstrued Rashi’s comment. He does this by showing how Rashi cut and pasted a series of three different and disparate midrashim that undermines the standard interpretation of his position. This comment, Shagar suggests, was not a mandate for ownership or even permanent inheritance of the land. Rather, for Shagar it was a testament that the land, in fact, belongs to no one save God. He concludes, “God gave us the land of the nations (goyim) according to God’s will, and God’s will can also take it away from us – God forbid – and return it to them.”

He begins this way to destabilize the entire religious Zionist project whereby residence in the land is not merit based but inheritance based. That sin can cause banishment, but never erase inheritance. In any case, Shagar cites this to set up his main argument, reflecting on Oslo and its implications for his community. He writes,

Israel stands today confronted with the biggest challenge of its history, the revolutionary events of the Oslo agreement. This is not merely a peace proposal with the Palestinians, but rather a challenge to refocus the entirety of the state and its citizenry. As Shlomo Fisher wrote, “A ghost-spirit is pursuing Israel. It is the ghost-spirit of the Israeli citizenry. From the establishment of the Labor government in 1992 there existed a revolutionary potential in Zionism. The Israeli project has revealed the possibility of instantiating Herzl’s dream that Zionism will nullify the antagonism between Jews and non-Jews.” This had become manifest in the shifting priorities of Prime Minister Rabin in allocating resources to the Arab sector [through the PA].

The problem for Shagar was that the religious Zionist movement did not have the ideological or theological tools to absorb this shift in priorities and adjust to the prospect of “land for peace” within its present Zionist vision. This was not a practical claim of security, this was a fundamental abrogation of religious Zionism’s very belief. In fact, the entire prospect pf peace contradicted the religious Zionism project. Before offering his critique, Shagar “sets the table” as it were, by articulating some of the basic principles of religious Zionism as he sees them.

The religious Zionist vision is that the state of Israel has religious significance. In one way or another, it is in some way the manifestation, at least in part, of the prophetic vision, the realization of the divine promise of the ingathering of the exiles and redemption. This identification of Malkhut Yisrael (the kingdom of Israel) with the state of Israel is deeply embedded in the religious Zionist consciousness.

The problem arises when this vision had to contend with the notion of “peace.” The underlying principles of the peace of Oslo or any two-state solution is not the peace expressed in tradition, but a peace expressed in “liberal, democratic, universal values.” These values are foreign to the religious Zionist mind-set. But the incongruity goes even deeper. This peace is also not founded on a modern notion of all humans being created in the “image of God” which functioned as the basis of Herderean nationalism to which religious Zionism adapted and added to it the religious foundations mentioned above. Here Avi Sagi and Dov Schwartz say it quite succinctly.

Religious Zionists sought a balance between divine and human action. They never doubted God’s involvement in history…Human action to them was a reflection of divine action and vice-versa; consequently, messianic approach of religious Zionism could not be judged only in light of European national awakening. (Sagi, Schwartz, Religious Zionism and the Six-Day War, 111).

Religious Zionism is definitively modern, European nationalism combined with some form of messianism. It is in modernity we find the belief in the intrinsic, and essential, existence of a coherent people, and legitimate rights to a homeland, components we can see in Ernest Renan’s 1882 essay “What is a Nation?”. The nation, many European thinkers believed, could be a context for “peace” that empires, in their expansionist ways, could not achieve. Religious Zionism (and here Abraham Isaac Kook was its architect) accepted this idea and merged it with a theological precept of redemption that could unfold through this national project. The creation of ethnopolitics that was happening in Europe at the time was a great fit for Zionism, ancient people cum modern nation.

However, this moment, argued Shagar, was different. This postmodern moment suggests that nations do not necessarily have lands to which they are intrinsically connected, but rather envisions a world where all essences are destabilized, where all claims are constructed, where all myths of origin are questioned. This reality is one that religious Zionism, as it is, could not contain. The question was then not “land for peace” or not, but rather can this movement survive at all. It is important to note that Shagar is not simply proposing the postmodern turn as an alternative, but claiming it is simply where we are. He does, I think, believe that adapting to it holds the potential to succeed where the modern paradigm failed. For him, postmodernism is a template that is both descriptive and prescriptive. Part of the Zionist impasse as he sees it, is that it is still functioning according to an outdated model.

He then turns to a related question. Not whether peace is possible, but rather what is “peace” at all? And here he deploys the haredim, who he often believed got certain things right. Citing the medieval philosopher Joseph Albo (1380-1444) and the sixteenth century kabbalist Maharal of Prague (1512-1609), he represents the haredi position that peace itself is only a consequence of divine intervention. Human beings cannot make peace. They can resolve conflicts, they can sign treaties, they can procure certain freedoms, but those are all temporary and can falter. Real peace, Albo and Maharal argue, is unattainable by human hands. Real peace is a disembodied spirit waiting to unfold. The haredim, Shagar argues, hold by such a position. Thus, for them the state cannot be a vehicle for real peace, and thus they empty it of religious significance. The state is, for them (to borrow a term from Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, who Shagar read) “exile within sovereignty.” Many don’t deny the privileges of sovereignty, but they don’t view it in religious/theological terms. Shagar thinks this model can better serve the postmodern turn.

For religious Zionists, the concept of “sanctifying the mundane” in an applied sense, lies at the core of the Kookean vision. That is, religious Zionism is founded on the notion of “harmonization.” But that may be of an earlier “modern” era. We are now living in a postmodern reality where harmony of the sacred and mundane is no longer even an aspiration, because the very categories have undergone revision.

Shagar then makes an interesting observation.

The response of religious Zionism to what is happening in the state today (i.e. Oslo, land for peace) is like the haredi response to Zionism itself: utter and absolute rejection…What then will happen to religious Zionism? Where will its younger generation turn in the coming years? It’s hard to tell.

If in fact the reaction to his contemporary reality (1997) is, and in fact must be, rejection, and if the present state actualizes itself into a true “land for peace” reality, religious Zionism either radically re-tools, or reaches obsolescence. If Greater Israel dies, post 1967 religious Zionism dies with it. One can see this even more profoundly in Shagar’s response to the 2005 disengagement with Gaza, which he considers religious Zionism’s true “Nakba.”

It’s important to note that Shagar is acknowledging that this new era is something that religious Zionism, as presently construed, simply cannot bear. It cannot bear it because it undermines the very founding principes of its Zionist vision. He writes,

There is no doubt that religious Zionism as it is today, cannot bring about peace. There are some in that camp that can see the other’s (the Palestinian) rootedness in the land, without nullifying one’s sense of rootedness, but we must find another kind of intimacy with the stranger, a harmony that is different than the harmony that was described earlier.

The new harmony is not between the “sacred and the mundane,” but a harmony embracing two true claims of homeland (Jews and Palestinians). Shagar claims that Palestinian claims to the land as a homeland does not impact his belief in the Jewish homeland at all. He claims religious Zionism must find harmony in that. Postmodernism demands leaving the internal project among Jews (the secular and the religious/ sacred and profane) and addressing the external and transnational project between Israel and its neighbor, or alternatively, harmony between the religious significance of the state and the continuation of exile. That is, between what is, and what will be, but is “not yet.”

This is because, in part, the “modern” nationalist claim of people and land is no longer operative. Elsewhere Shagar notes how the liberal left got many things right in terms of what they wanted to achieve, but secularism in his mind did not have the tools to achieve it, in part because it remained bound to a modernist conception of liberalism and cosmopolitanism that he believed was obsolete. The secularists, he claimed, prefer to remove the sacred from the picture altogether and replicate the liberal state as a purely secular project. For Shagar, they abandon the particular for the universal, even as Shagar notes, the universal remains an integral part of any Jewish redemptive vision.

And the haredim got it right in rejecting the state as a manifestation of a reality they believe can only exist outside the state, that is, in the divine. In short, secular Zionists want to abandon the redemptive spirit, and haredim want to protect it by rejecting the state and retaining redemption as fully aspirational. Here the secular Zionist Yosef Hayyim Brenner represents the secular left quite well. “There is no Messiah for Israel, let us brace ourselves for a life without Messiah.” (Brenner “On the Vision of Apostasy,” in Writings, vol. 3). In fact, Shagar notes, both the secular left and the haredim are right in part, and for religious Zionism to survive it must draw from elements of both. He writes,

The reality of the land of Israel is that is can no longer simply remain in the state of aspiration. The occurrence of Zionism brought about the land’s reality and created a kind of harmony which inspires the religious soul. And yet, the notion of exile protects us from the danger of idolatry (worshipping that state or the land, sm) and a false sense of permanence. We can build a house, but not a child’s house of the worshippers of Baal (a biblical god) that has a sense of ownership of the land. This house would have to be in harmony with the sanctity of the land, but the Jew who dwells there would know that this reality is not, and cannot be, the complete redemption and the longing will maintain an important part of the project.

For Shagar, the secular left gives up too much (they abandoned the national aspect of redemption) and the haredim give too little (they rejected the state as having any religious value). But the secular left aspires to what is just, the universal, and the haredim are right in believing that real peace is a divine act that requires waiting. The haredim provide the necessary stopgap against the idolization of envisioning the end before its time which leads to the abandonment of the pursuit of peace in favor of the exercise of power. The haredim are thus right that the story remains unresolved; exile is the very template of the state.

The settler project includes a serious occupational hazard by infusing the state with religious meaning. To overreach it is to abandon the universal which abandons messianism for the sake of the false messianism solely of the particular. On the haredi position, Shagar writes, “The only way for messianism not to become a rigid ideology is to retain its utopian and miraculous dimension. Therefore, we should integrate the haredi position that redemption is aspirational without abandoning our religious Zionist perspective which identifies the state with the realization of the prophetic aspiration.”

Shagar also asks his listeners to adapt the secular position of creating a state, and the haredi position that this state is not the reality long promised – it is an exilic phase in and of itself. In order not to allow the harmony of religious aspiration and landedness to lead to justifying domination and conquest which are forms of idolatry, religious Zionism must live inside a mindset whereby the state is a vehicle for a yearning and not the instantiation of its realization.

The challenge in 1997 when the postmodern situation undermined a stable notion of nation, state, and land, is to reconceptualize harmony not as sanctifying the mundane but bringing together the reality of the land and the desire for redemption that is not fulfilled. The danger of sanctifying the mundane in the older modern model (which is the product of the Kooks (father and son) is that the holiness of the state easily yields both the state and land objects of worship, and the act of power to sustain that sacrality introduces idolatry. Earlier in the sermon, Shagar quotes Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s famous essay after the massacre of Qibya in 1953 where, reflecting on the Israeli massacre of 69 Palestinian civilians two-thirds of whom were woman and children, Leibowitz makes that very point that sanctifying the land or the state is the great tragedy of applied redemption in our time

Moving back to Shagar’s initial point about Rashi and ownership of the land, religious Zionism in his mind needs to abandon the certainty and embrace the doubt, the unfinished notion of exile, relinquish the state as redemptive and embrace the exilic mindset of what Franz Rosenzweig called the “not-yet.” This because for him, “Messianism includes two ideals: The ideal of universal peace and the ideal of a return to the land of Israel, a national ideal. And it is forbidden to abandon either of these.” And he would reject, I think, any notion that the national precedes the universal. As I understand Shagar, he is asking for nothing less than a religious Zionist Reformation for it to avoid not only failure, but irrelevancy.

Shagar concludes his remarks ominously with a question: “Since religious Zionism believes in natural redemption in combination with a national vision, so too it should be in relation to peace. Will it be possible to cultivate peace between nations without abandoning our national identity and home?”

*

Reading Shagar’s 1997 “Land and Exile” in 2025

Shagar’s final question, arresting then, is even more so now. Perhaps ironically, after everything that happened since 1997, I submit the challenge remains, albeit the movement has chosen a different path, and the country has moved in a different direction. I know some will argue that it was a reaction to Palestinian resistance. Of course that is partially true. But a true Zionism would view itself sovereign enough, and responsible enough, to own the decisions it made in response to any provocation. That perhaps is the transition from mere freedom to liberty.

Below I offer some post October 7 reflections on this sermon and, perhaps, some implications for the future.

One way to read Shagar’s essay in 1997 is to mark a series of moments that bring us from there to here. From (1) Rabin’s assassination in 1995 (2) the Second Intifada in 2000 (3) the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 (4) the election of Hamas in 2007 (5) the Nation State Law in 2018 (6) the Israeli elections in 2023 and (7) October 7 and the Gaza War from 2023 on.

There are, of course many ways to mark time, but I think these may be helpful in assessing the current state of religious Zionism from Shagar’s perspective as I understand it.

For Shagar the great rupture of religious Zionism from which it has arguably not recovered was not Oslo but the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. This is not because he was opposed to leaving Gaza (in principle he wasn’t) as much as because he was opposed to how it was executed. Elsewhere in Briti Shalom he writes that he could not wish Ariel Sharon, who facilitated the evacuation from Gaza, a “complete healing” (refuah shelemah) after his stroke. For Shagar, Sharon’s error was that profound.

The government’s decision to forcibly evict Jews from their homes in the land of Israel (other cases like the Amona evacuation in the West Bank can be folded into this) led Shagar to conclude that this was the end of religious Zionism’s project of sanctifying the state. As one hilltop youth told me in Jerusalem in 2010, “We no longer study the writings of Rav Kook.” Why? I asked. They responded, “because Kook focuses too much on the state. And the state has abandoned us.” And indeed, on some real level, that is true, and the extent to which religious Zionism has not recognized that and restructured its program, is what Shagar believed was irredeemable.

That crisis led to the emergence of a new brand of religious Zionism that had always existed but was largely repressed, a Zionism that combined the romantic modernist harmony of Rav Kook, and the conquest militancy of Meir Kahane. That is, in some way, it sided with Yigal Amir’s decision to eradicate Rabin (even if they did not agree with the assassination itself) and not R. Yehuda Amital’s impassioned speech after the assassination that religious Zionism had to see itself as overextending, and thus is abandoning, its mission.

For Shagar, an unreconstructed harmonious Zionism of Kook was bound to fail because, as we saw above, it functioned in a past paradigm. The issue was no longer harmonizing the sacred and the mundane (the state), but the Jew and the neighbor, and the aspiration for redemption with its unfilled exilic reality. The militant Zionism of Kahane was, through Shagar’s lenses, not religious Zionism at all but the acquiescence of religious Zionism into a dark secular register of conquest. It held no authentic redemptive vison. It was not interested in peace. It was interested in state power and nationalist violence to achieve the desired end of control. Peace was no longer even aspirational. Peace was the illusion.

But even after 2005 the tension remained inside the religious Zionist camp. But as I read Shagar, it never really abandoned the Kookean model, and thus could never truly respond to the reality in which it lived. Until October 7. If 1995 (Rabin’s assassination) was a religious Zionist’s attempt to bring about the apocalyptic end by assassinating the figure who stood in its way, October 7 was Hamas’ attempt to accelerate the end by attempting to assassinate the state. Amir succeeded, Sinwar did not. But Sinwar did unwittingly succeed in something else.

Sinwar’s assassination attempt of the state largely ended the tension of religious Zionism’s messianism. In fact, one reading might be that it removed messianism altogether, replacing it with brute survivalism, leaving vengeance in its place, or, on the other hand, it enabled the apocalyptic messianism latent in religious Zionism to rise to the surface. A few weeks after October 7, there was a rally in the West Bank where a settler, in army fatigues, declared October 7 “a great and awesome day,” because now the apocalyptic floodgates are open. While not acquiescing to that ideology (I am sure most settlers would not agree with that assessment but could also see the messianic logic in it), the government has basically done its bidding. Religious Zionism has won at the price of abandoning its very purpose for existing, at least on Shagar’s terms.

Rav Shagar’s challenge remains as does the question with which he ended his sermon. That question still echoes in the psyche of a people. There are groups such as Ha-Smol ha-Emuni and Shorashim, religious groups on the left in Israel (some members identify as Zionists, some not) and The Halakhic Left in the US, who are actively trying to salvage a religiously informed vision from the grasp of trauma, vengeance, and hatred. Many use Shagar as a loadstar. But as much as I am with them, if they do not radically restructure the very nature of the project (Shagar offers one path) I fear they too will confront pre-mature, and tragic, obsolescence.

Independence can mean many things. Perhaps most fundamentally it presents an opportunity. It may be “freedom” but it is in no way “liberation.” It may offer sovereignty, but it does not end exile. If religious Zionism has any reason left for being, in my view it would require the radical restructuring Shagar suggests.

That morning in May 1997 Shagar questioned whether that was even possible. In 2025 it seems even less likely. Can Zionism survive the descent into brute nationalism and package it as a religious value (or necessity)? Sinwar failed in his attempt to assassinate the state. But has he wounded it beyond repair by robbing it of a path from freedom/independence to true liberation? The forecast is not great. But as Bob Dylan sang, “A change in the weather, is known to be extreme.” (“You’re a Big Girl Now”).

The post Is Religious Zionism Obsolete?: Thoughts on Israel Independence Day based on Rav Shagar’s Sermon “Land and Exile: The Religious Community and the Pursuit of Peace” (1997) appeared first on Jewschool.

I begin my reflections on part of Tamares’ essay with a caveat to better understand his social and intellectual context. In much of Tamares’ work he constructs his proximate critique of the Judaism of his time by means of a Jew-Gentile binary. I make no excuse for the superficiality of such a binary, nor its application. Tamares uses it, as I read it, for polemical purposes, although he might have believed it more than I do. That is, he opposed the notion coined by Zionism of Jews becoming “like all the other nations,” suggesting that the quest for normalcy, while understandable, was both an error as well as an abandonment of the very thing Judaism could offer the world. In short, he believed that being “like all the other nations” was a usurpation of being a “light to the nations,” a price many early Zionists were willing to pay for sovereignty. For him, the binary of Jew-Gentile (Judaism-Christianity) with all its fissures and inaccuracies, works to caricature the European world around him in need of repair and construct his claim that Judaism could make a contribution to that broken world, of which it was a part, if it did not succumb to its own internal distortions and the failures of European collective existence.

Yet his is not a sweeping critique of the Enlightenment and its byproducts (i.e. freedom – hofesh). Modernity certainly provided an evolved state of human existence for Tamares, one that also contained its own deep shortcomings (think, for example, of Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis in The Dialectics of the Enlightenment). He firmly believed that Judaism contains the resources, structurally and substantively, to contribute to that development and circumvent some of the pitfalls that he witnessed in the rise of nationalism and violent revolution. In the beginning of his essay “Herut” which is mostly devoted to a critique of ideological/political violence, he offers an interesting intervention founded on the distinction between the freedom indicative of European society of his time, and the liberation that stands at the center of the Jewish experience of the exodus.

*

The distinction running through this essay is between “freedom” (hofesh) and “liberty’ (herut), the former a product of the Enlightenment, signaling the fall of absolutist empires and the rise of populist movements and democracies in Europe, and the latter, “herut,” a Jewish notion of liberation and, in his view, the signature ethos of Judaism. Both hofesh and herut are positive phenomena for Tamares, but they are not identical, and the distinction for him is what marks the distinctive character of Judaism. He writes:

“This festival (Passover) is ‘the time of our liberation’, a very interesting notion especially in our time, the time of “freedom.” On this notion of freedom there are many opinions, some view it is very positive, others as negative. How is this idea viewed in the Jewish tradition? (“Herut” 30).”

Put otherwise, how do we distinguish between the human freedom of modernity (hofesh) and the liberatory experience of the Exodus (herut).

Here Tamares introduces a distinction that I find both interesting and painfully relevant, a distinction between how the Jews celebrated festivals in the land, and how they were celebrated in the Diaspora.

As a preface, it is well-known that the major festivals as described in Scripture always have two components, an agricultural one, and a historical/miraculous one. Passover is the spring wheat festival, Shavout the first fruit festival, and Sukkot the fall harvest festival. In this sense Scripture relates that the Israelite calendar mirrored other civilizations that shared those times for celebration. Scripture also places “historical” elements unique to the Israelites, Passover as the celebration of the liberation from Egypt, Shavout as the giving of the Torah at Sinai, and Sukkot as a celebration of God traveling with the Israelites in the desert. Tamares will draw out different elements from this agricultural/historical paradigm.

“When the Jews resided in the land, the agricultural, physical nature of the festival was primary and present. The spiritual nature of the festival, the miraculous intervention of God in history, was viewed as something from the past, the memory of salvation that was bequeathed to our ancestors.”

“But in our present state of exile when we don’t have our own fields and orchards [to celebrate the harvest], when we don’t have the light, and even the air we breathe is attenuated [by others], in our time, things have become just the opposite. The agricultural element of the festival is now a thing of the past, given to memories of an ancient world, a memory that has become weakened with the passage of time. Today that source of joy and physical pleasure has diminished. In its place, the miraculous elements that carry with it ethical implications have strengthened. The focus now is on remembering the earlier miracles that were done for our people and how they are needed today, to learn from them to know how to act in our daily lives. This is because our ethical sensibilities are the very foundations of our existence in this exile and without them “we would not be able to be sustained, even for one hour.” (“Herut” 30).”

Later in the essay he distinguishes between the “freedom” of the nations and the “freedom” of the Jews. The experience of freedom more broadly is often expressed as independence. But for him this is a mistake.

Freedom is often seen as earned and not the product of a gift. However, we can see a difference between the acquisition of freedom of the European nations and how we Jews understand/enact freedom. They “take freedom” such as in the French Revolution, by rebelling against one despot or another. Alternatively, we “take freedom” through the Seder, eating matza, reciting Hallel with our families. That is, on our lips is the remembrance of freedom through the exodus from Egypt. So, let us consider: which of the two types of struggling for freedom yields better results?

For Tamares the biblical phrase “be joyous in your festivals” (ve-samakhta be-hagekha) was specifically directed to the physical sustenance one enjoys from the spoils of landedness, the fruits of harvest, and the experience of a festival. The historical, miraculous dimension of the exodus, etc. that is, the memory of divine liberation, is something from the past and is thus secondary.

However, when Jews are not in the land, that is, when they are in exile, the physical enjoyment becomes secondary (it becomes an object of remembrance), and the miracles of the festivals become primary. The purpose of divine intervention morphs into the evolution of morality whereby liberation is not viewed as a product of human agency but as a divine gift. Hence instead of celebrating “like other nations” with fanfare and exhibitions of power (e.g. military parades), we sit with our families and tell the story of liberation via divine fiat.

This for Tamares is the basic distinction between Enlightenment and nationalist “freedom,” and Jewish “liberation.” True liberation for him does not begin with the exodus from Egypt but with Moshe’s encounter with the divine presence at the Burning Bush. Tamares writes, “This hints that this redemption (geulah) is not only about the liberation from Egypt but from all the ‘redemptions’ the Jews will experience throughout history.” The exodus from Egypt is its first instantiation.

Tamares’ distinction between “freedom” (hofesh) and “liberation” (herut) between European autonomy and Jewish morality, offers an interesting inversion of landedness verses exile, not from the perspective of Jewish bodies but from the perspective of the Jewish conscience. Or, perhaps, not from the perspective of power but from the perspective of morality.

Interestingly, the Enlightenment offered us a new understanding of morality as a humanly generated sense of collective life through Reason. Yet this very Reason – remember this is 1905, a year after the first Russian revolution, and a few short years before the Young Turk revolt in 1908 – also created a sense of collective power that in less than a decade would destroy Europe. The freedom of morality morphed into the freedom to assert power over others.

As Tamares presents it, the biblical description of Jewish festivals, originally framed as agricultural with a subsidiary component of history/miracle, provided the Israelites with a sense of a double meaning: first, like all civilizations around them, an occasion of thanks for substance and safety in their harvest. And second, a historical/miraculous (perhaps mythic) sense of the moment as a product of divine beneficence. In times when the Israelites lived in the land, the former was primary and the latter, secondary. Thus, he reads the biblical locution “be joyous in your festivals” as referring primarily to harvest.

When Jews lost their land, the priorities of the festivals were inverted. The historical/miraculous became primary and the agricultural secondary. For him, this provided the Jews with a distinctive opportunity that can only be achieved by a de-territorialized collective. The focus on the historical/miraculous elements served as kind of moral training whereby the collective would develop a recognition that power is always a dangerous tool in the ones who have it (in the case of the Jews, through the experience of victimhood), and that power can be better expressed through a sense of one’s own powerlessness.

[As an aside, this is also an interesting way to understand why the sages choose the story of the miracle of the oil story on Hanukkah instead of celebrating the military victory of the Hasmoneans.]

This, he suggests, serves as the contribution the Jews could make to a quickly nationalizing society in Europe where power through “freedom” was being deployed in destructive ways. That is, when the power of nationalism is void of a moral barometer that the historical/miraculous dimension of the Jewish festival provides. Later in the essay he argues this results in intellectual/ideological violence (rish‘ut sikhli) justified by means of power as a tool of control.

His critique of the Jewry of his time is that the opportunity of a return to the land through Jewish nationalism poses a serious challenge for Jews to return to the land with an evolved sense of moral sensibility that was the product of their exile and not use victimhood as a justification of power. Thus, the Zionist notion of “negating the exile” was anathema to him, not only an error but dangerous, and pointed to the ways in which Jews were abandoning the very aspect of their historical existence that could provide a “light to the nations.”

After attending the Zionist Congress in London in 1900 Tamares returned home despondent and disappointed at the expression of overt nationalism and the lust for, and intoxication of. power that he experienced there. This led him to the conclusion that Zionism was making the same mistake as the nationalisms around him. Instead of retaining the sense of the miraculous that produced humility through cycles of collective festival as a landless people, the Zionists he encountered in London were becoming seduced by the potential power of a landed people and, wanting to become “like all the other nations,” would indeed succeed in that. In doing so, however, they would abandon their destiny.

*

It is difficult to celebrate the Seder this Passover without thinking about how Tamares may have been right. The worst kind of violence for Tamares is not the violence of desire or passion, or even anger. The worst violence is the ideological violence that is justified through myriad arguments, including ideological precepts that are veiled under the guise of security. In those cases, Tamares argues, violence is justified only when the “false” becomes revamped as the “true,” convincing a collective that committing acts of violence is not only justified but necessary, even praiseworthy. When such an ethos becomes embedded in a society it is hard to excise it.

As we witness such acts of violence in Gaza that are committing politicide and sociocide, the utter devastation of an entire society, and we listen to all the justifications, rationalizations, and bromides about our people’s “innocence” in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, I submit we are witnessing Tamares’ inversion of the “false” and the “true.” How do we recite at the Seder, “all who are hungry, come in an eat,” when we are starving children in Gaza (and to make it worse, some of us are denying we are doing it). And anyone who dares disagree, becomes the enemy.

In a sense, we should ask at the Seder whether our return to the land has not only reversed the inversion of primary (a landed, material, agricultural, presentist celebration) with secondary (historical/miraculous) but in fact enslaved the miraculous to power – not God’s power, our power.

I think the inversion of “false and “true” may be even deeper than we think. The nation of Israel, the “Jewish state” is not becoming more religious. As I read Tamares, the nation of Israel is becoming less religious, in the most egregious way by using religion as a cudgel of power, as a weapon to justify killing innocent people. The people themselves can also become an idol. Tamares writes in Knesset Yisrael in 1921 “eretz moledet zu avodah zara” (the homeland can also be idolatry). Miracle in the service of brute force. God in the service of human depravity.

Tamares predicted what was coming in 1906. By 1914 Europe would go up in flames, and by 1945 European Jewry would go up in flames. The Prophets had something to say. Has Judaism in this moment silenced them while claiming to be speaking for them? Maybe this should be the Fifth Question at the Seder.

Chag Herut Samaekh

The post A Passover Interlude: The Difference between Freedom and Liberation: Reflections on Aaron Shmuel Tamares’ essay “Herut/Liberty” (1906) appeared first on Jewschool.