This Is Not Jewish: How to Support Israel Without Being Racist

this-is-not-jewish:

Please note up front that I am not Palestinian, or Arab, or Muslim. I am an American Jew. So any list I draw up with this title is doomed to be incomplete, because there are a lot of facets of the Palestinian experience that I just don’t see.

HOWEVER.

I’ve seen a shocking amount of orientalist…

6 months ago  Notes (248)

D’var Torah, October 2012

D’var Torah for Simchat Torah (Parashiyot V’zot ha’brachah/B’reishit)

Good morning everyone. I’d like to offer some thoughts today on what I think is one of the most beautiful and profound moments in the annual Torah cycle: the transition from the end of the year to the beginning.

The readings for today are really an amalgam of two parshiyot: what we read last Saturday, and what we will read next Saturday. The end and the beginning. Moses’s death and the creation of it all. In between these two shabbatot, on this day of rejoicing in the gift that has held our religion together through the ages, our holy text, the Torah, which really, if you think about it, is a whole creation story unto itself: the creation of the Jews – our national founding myth, if you will – we are thrown into a strange moment, where the end of the Israelite’s mourning period for Moses upon his death, and the anointment of Joshua as the new leader of the people is met not with the next chapter, but instead, with B’reisheit barah Elohim et ha’shamayim et ha’aretz: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

I think that it is no accident that just as we read of the death of Moses, and we are told, “Never again would there arise a prophet in Israel like Moses, who God singled out, face to face,” we are transported right back to the beginning, to the creation of everything. Before Moses. Before Egypt. Before the Israelites. Before the Akedah. Before Abraham. Before the Great Flood. Before Adam and Eve. Before existence, plain and simple. From the end of the story, we start again.

But the story of Moses doesn’t end without a poetic moment of promise. Not for Moses himself, of course. He knows his fate. But for the nation he has shepherded through the desert, the Israelites. Moses blesses them and he leaves them, and he heads up to Mount Nebo, opposite Jericho, we are told, and God shows him “the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan; all Naphtali; the land of Ephraim and Manasseh; the whole land of Judah as far as the Western Sea; the Negeb; and the Plain–the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees–as far as Zoar. And the Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will assign it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you will not cross there.’” Our moment of tragedy, the loss of the man described as the greatest leader Israel has and will ever have had, is coupled with hope: that the Israelites will cross over into the Promised Land. A lineage is traced back through the Torah, tying it all neatly together, and Moses exits, stage left. We can imagine it as if we are watching a movie (I don’t know about you, but I always see Charlton Heston when I think about Moses): the screen fades to black. But instead of the closing credits, we get a voiceover: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Instead of ending, our story is on a loop. It starts again.

And if this metaphor of circularity isn’t enough, we come to the haftorah, the beginning of the Book of Joshua, where the promise that underpins the entirety of the Torah begins to be realized. God speaks to Joshua and outlines the plans: invade the land across the Jordan, I will be with you to protect you, and grant you the inheritance I promised your forbears.

I’d like to briefly link this to the spiritual experience that we have just undergone over the past few weeks. We celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the new year of the calendar, which remembers capital-C creation. We spent ten days reflecting, repenting, and we came to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On that day, we reenacted our deaths while still very much alive: we wore white, we fasted, we refrained from all those things that make any day into a normal day, and we asked to be forgiven before the final judgment was made. And as Ne’ilah drew to a close, and we davened a quick (and hungry) ma’ariv, we were reborn into a new year. Hopefully a little wiser for the effort.

Now, as we find ourselves at the end of this holiday cycle, as we read the last chapter of Torah, and before we resume the year as it is usually lived, we are reminded: as the story comes to an end, and yes, sadly, it ends with the death of the protagonist, we are reborn into something freshly created. And guess what? It’s here, in this newness, that promises and dreams get fulfilled.

In the early 20th century, there lived a German theologian and philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig. His life was the stuff of legend: an assimilated Jewish young man decides he will convert to Christianity, but before doing so opts to go to shul one last time – for Yom Kippur. Things don’t go quite as he had planned: he was so moved by this service that he abandons his upcoming conversion and becomes, basically, ba’al teshuvah. He never forgets his draw towards Christianity, though, and he dedicates a huge amount of his career to explaining the correctness of both Judaism and Christianity, religions he saw as each possessing a particular mission in the unfolding of world history. His writings on the Jewish holidays in his magnum opus, the Star of Redemption, a book which he wrote in fragments and sent home to his wife on postcards from his station at the front during the First World War, are really remarkable.

I’d like to share briefly his thoughts on the conclusion of Sukkot:

As the Sabbath leads back into the workday, so this conclusion of the spiritual year, without first needing once to enjoy life fully as a conclusion, must go back again directly into the beginning. Following directly from the last word of the Torah is the first one in the holiday of the rejoicing of the Torah, of Simchat Torah; and the old man who rules in the name of the community over this transition is not called “husband,” that for ever and ever only “bridegroom of the Torah.”

The “bridegroom” inhabits that moment of transition – that liminal space – between bachelorhood and marriage. He awaits his Kallah. Once the ceremony is over, he’s no longer the Chatan – he’s something else entirely. But in our tradition of the Chatan of Simchat Torah,that moment of being Chatan is never finished. The Chatan Torah doesn’t sign a ketubah, and he certainly doesn’t break a glass. He is under the chuppah with his beloved forever. And his beloved is the Torah. And so, the Torah ends and it begins again. And we, the community, are never granted the satisfaction of a neat and tidy ending. We live our religious life in this looping of the story of the history of the Israelite nation.

Those who have heard me speak about what I love about Judaism before have probably heard me say that I love the performative nature of the rituals: the fact that our prayers, our readings, and our practice often as us to act out some sort of moment – a relationship, a transformation, or even a time in history. To me, this moment of Simchat Torah is no different: we have spent a week reenacting the life of the desert generation, living (or, well, at least eating) in temporary shelters, exposed to the elements, looking up at the sky. And now, on the precipice of a new beginning, we finish the story and begin again. And we celebrate it: the end that never ends. The death of a great leader that leads to the fulfillment of a great promise, but only in the extra reading, but that, leaving out the supplement, that turns right back around to the beginning, where there earth was “tohu v’vohu” – unformed and void.

The African-American novelist Toni Morrison once said that “Narrative is radical, creating us at every moment that it is being created.” This can be said of the Jewish tradition, a tradition of words and stories, dialogues and disputes. We tell the same stories year after year, giving shape to our lives. But at the same time, we look for new meaning in our old texts. We look for each end of a story to lead to a new beginning.

In her beautiful critique of contemporary culture, The Future of Nostalgia, a book which I am currently reading for the third time, Svetlana Boym describes a condition she calls, “Hypochondria of the Heart.” This condition? Nostalgia: that peculiar longing for home that can’t quite seem to be satisfied no matter what is out there, because that home has become idealized, or has been lost in the past. I could talk about her study for hours, and I highly recommend the book for anyone who is interested in ideas of exile and memory, history and loss, cities and memorials, especially in the former Soviet Union. But I will leave it at this: it is precisely that ill-at-ease feeling of nostalgia against which Simchat Torah attempts to inoculate us as a community. We don’t get to stop at the loss. The year ends, Moses dies, but we don’t stop there. We aren’t left to mourn any idealized community or leader. In our jump from the image of the death of Moses to the creation of everything, we are reminded that it all starts again. Which means that it always does, and that it always will. The Torah, the book that binds the Jewish community in the absence of a physical home (the modern state of Israel aside), never ends. Our home is never lost. It is just transformed – end into beginning. And in that transformation, we are delivered.

Chag sameach.

 

7 months ago  Notes (0)

D’var Torah, April 2010

My d’var torah, delivered for 7th day of Pesach services at Kehillat Darchei Noam in Toronto.

Chag sameach.
 
Seven days ago, we sat around our tables, telling the story, as we do each year, of our forebears’ deliverance from slavery in Mitzrayim. More than that, though. We were invited to live the story – to experience it, as though we ourselves were slaves in Egypt, and as though we ourselves witnessed the miracles of which the Haggadah tells. No matter what our opinion of the theophany of the Exodus narrative, we are asked to embody this formative moment of our people. Beyond the seder nights, this has at least one very palpable implication for our observance of Pesach, which I would like to take a moment to remind us of.
 
Ho lachmo anya: This is the bread of our affliction. For seven days, we have been reenacting our forbears’ trek across the desert. Simple as it may seem, the act of refraining from chametz, I think, is meant to connect us with the story of the Exodus, to remind us that: “B’chol dor va’dor, chaiv adam lirot et etzmo keilu hu yatzah mi’Mitzrayim” – “In each and every generation, a person ought to look upon him or herself as if he or she had gone out of Egypt”. We have been asked to take part, physically, in the retelling of one of our foundational moments as a nation through limiting what we eat. And we have. In this way, we are called to remember. And, more than remember, to participate.
 
So, here we are, seven days later. And the words of the seder, for me, are still strong:
 
Ho lachmo anya: This is the bread of our affliction that our forbears ate in Mitzrayim. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who need a place join us in our Passover celebration. Now we are here. Next year, in Eretz Israel! Now we are not all free. Next year may we all be free people!
 
We have been walking through the proverbial desert with this bread for a week now, and today we have crossed through the Red Sea, as our Torah tells us, by the hand of Hashem. And once we have crossed over and been delivered from our enemies, we sing a song of praise – the shirat ha’yam, song at the sea, that we heard this morning.
 
As is often the case when I get confused about a particular moment in Torah, I turned to the Midrash. And, as any of you who have had the opportunity to read midrash knows, this means that I was only barely able to scratch the surface of today’s parshah. I assure you, I intended to talk about much more, but I was so struck by this particular drash that I decided it was more important to focus on one line of Torah than give any sort of exhaustive overview. So, I give you:
 
Midrash Shemot, Beshallach, 23:4
Another explanation of THEN SANG MOSES. It is written, She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and the law of kindness is on her tongue (Prov. 31:26). From the day when God created the world until the Israelites stood near the sea, no one save Israel sung unto God. He created Adam, yet he did not utter song; He delivered Abraham from the fiery furnace and from the kings, and he did not utter song; Isaac, also, when saved from the knife, did not utter song, nor did Jacob when he escaped alive from the angel, from Esau, and from the men of Shechem. As soon, however, as Israel came to the sea, which was divided for them, they uttered song before God, as it says, Then sang Moses and the children of Israel. This is the meaning of ‘She openeth her mouth with wisdom.’ God said: ‘I have been waiting for these’.
 
I puzzled over this midrash for some time. It’s beauty was immediately apparent to me, but the choice of a prooftext from Proverbs stumped me. Until I turned to the pasuk in question. This pasuk occurs in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs, in the half of it better known to us as Eshet Chayil. This beautiful passage sings the praises of a “capable wife”, extolling her virtues. Why, then, do the rabbis draw on it as a prooftext for “Az yashir Mosheh u’vnai Yisrael”, “Then sang Moses and the Israelites”?
 
I would venture that there is something metaphorical going on here, as there always is in Midrash. That it is no accident that the rabbis chose the description of a wife for B’nai Yisrael in this moment. The midrash points out that this is the first utterance of a song of praise in the Torah, despite many notable miracles. None of the patriarchs sang, although they certainly all were delivered from adversity in our holy text. And, well, the matriarchs, I’ll leave that without saying. But here, just across the Red Sea, away from the Egyptian pursuers, B’nai Yisrael sings a song of praise. And the rabbis notice. And in this moment, they choose the image of Eshet Chayil to describe the Israelites. The Israelites are the capable wife, worthy of praise, in this moment. They have entered a partnership with G-d in sealing their collective identity as a free people. A partnership that G-d was waiting for.
 
I hope you will understand where I am going when I choose to draw on a passage from the famous French-Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, from his brief essay entitled, “Judaism”:
 
“The traumatic experience of my slavery in Egypt constitutes my very humanity, a fact that immediately allies me to the workers, the wretched, and the persecuted peoples of the world. My uniqueness lies in the responsibility I display for the Other. I cannot fail in my duty towards any man, any more than I can have someone else stand in for my death… Man is therefore indispensable to God’s plan or, to be more exact, man is nothing other than the divine plans within being. This leads to idea of being chosen which can degenerate into that of pride but originally expresses the awareness of an indisputable assignation from which an ethics springs through which the universality of the end being pursued involves the solitude and isolation of the individual responsible.”
 
Levinas gives us, I think, a very palatable definition of “chosenness” which fits nicely with the Reconstructionist reconfiguration: “sh’bachar lanu l’avodato” – “who called us to do His work”. It is in our relationship to the sacred that we experience ourselves as moral people.
 
The Haggadah I grew up with cites a beautiful midrash about the man, Nachshon, who, faced with the sea at his front and the Egyptian army at his back, walked into the water as deep as his head. The rabbis tell that it was only then, as he acted out of absolute autonomy and faith in G-d, that the waters parted for the Israelites. I would like to add to this by noting that had Nachshon, in this telling, not taken this absolute risk, not put himself out there to possibly drown, not acted as an absolute individual in a moment of fear and anguish, the water may never have parted, and we would never have crossed over the sea to our collective freedom. In this way, Nachshon acted, wittingly or unwittingly, out of absolute responsibility for his people. It is only when Nachshon became an active part in the miracle of the parting of the sea that the miracle itself occurred. Nachshon, in this way, became a true partner to Hashem in the Exodus narrative. To restate what I think is key in the Levinas passage I quoted above, “Man is therefore indispensable to God’s plan or, to be more exact, man is nothing other than the divine plans within being.” To complicate this a bit: G-d is no more than humankind allows Him to be. This statement, I think, is valid no matter how we perceive G-d — as supernatural, as the sum of nature, or, as altogether non-existent. In some way, we are partners in G-dliness. This is at the core of our existence: we were, after all, created B’tzelem elohim: In the image of G-d.
 
So, what does this mean for us? We all have the potential to be Nachshon in our lives, in whichever way this may happen for us. To put ourselves out there and see what comes. Or, as Levinas would put it, we should “follow the Most High God…by drawing near to one’s fellow man, and showing concern for ‘the widow, the orphan, the stranger and the beggar’,” and, in this way, we can live our lives as called upon to do this holy work.
 
This to me is the meaning of Passover. I was fortunate enough to spend the second seder at the home of my wonderful friends, Rabbi Aaron Levy and Miriam Kramer. They introduced me to a custom which they had learned and then adapted for their seder. One group of Jews has the tradition, before hiding the Afikoman, of taking the bag, one at a time, and throwing it over their shoulder as if it were a pack. Each participant in the seder is asked: from where are you coming? Each answers: from Mitzrayim. Each is then asked: and where are you going? And each answers: to Eretz Yisrael. Aaron and Miriam adapted the custom to make the experience deeply personal for each member of the seder. We were each asked to name our own personal Mitzrayim, etymologically, narrow place, which we hoped to leave this year, and to name our own personal Eretz Yisrael, or promised land, which we hope to reach.
 

As Pesach ends, and we cross over the Red Sea together to freedom, I would like to invite us all to leave the narrow places of complacency and lack of empathy and move toward a place of renewed commitment to ourselves, our community, and the world around us.

Chag sameach.

3 years ago  Notes (0)