Tikkun editor and author Rabbi Michael Lerner says the only way to achieve peace between Jews and Palestinians is through genuine reconciliation and implementing the Golden Rule.
Agreements like the Wye Memorandum, he said, actually harm Jews in the long run because they leave the scales of power out of balance. “Power doesn’t equal reconciliation.”
Elliot Brandt, American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s associate regional director, expressed support for the peace process as well as continued American aid to the Jewish state.
“It is true that perhaps the Jewish community no longer needs to be insular and focused on defense,” he said. “However, there is still a need for protection of Israel.”
The two offered differing strategies for furthering Mideast peace in a program titled “Israel and the Peace Process: How Should American Jews Be Involved?” The program was part of the all-county Jewish Community Relations Council conference held at San Francisco State University earlier this month.
Lerner emphasized that Jews shouldn’t expect Palestinians to accept anything that they would not accept for their own people if the tables were turned around.
“What we have to understand is that what is a disaster for the Palestinian people will be a disaster for the Jewish people,” he said. “There is only one correct strategy and it must be win-win.”
Brandt, who will become AIPAC’s regional director in January, also advocated civility and claimed that there is room for various opinions in the territorial debate. But he said, “There is a meaning that this people is called Israel — `wrestlers with God’ — it means that we wrestle and we don’t let go. And that’s our master story.”
The differences in their ideas about the appropriate way to achieve peace was as marked as the differences in their presentations.
Brandt, speaking with a polished ease and kibitzing with the audience, built his lecture in a point-by-point, question-answer format. Lerner, who is spiritual leader of San Francisco’s Beyt Tikkun: The House of Love and Healing, took a philosophical approach. Bringing in ethics, emotions and principles from the Torah, he called for a more just approach to the conflicts between Israel and the Palestinian people.
“A fundamental notion of Torah is that every human being is created in the image of God,” Lerner said. “The most frequently repeated injunction of Torah is `When you come into your land do not oppress the stranger. Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ We have created a Judaism that has so deeply forgotten that injunction that in a fundamental way we are betraying our Judaism.”
Turning to the responsibilities of American Jews toward Israel, Brandt advocated that Jews here should take an active role in supporting Israel through the American political process.
“What’s the first thing we should be saying to our elected officials? Thank you! Thank you for what you have done. It is an unbelievably pro-Israel Congress at an unbelievably important time.”
Lerner countered, “We need to stop defining what is pro-Israel by what is the current policies of the government of Israel… It is in the best interest of the Jewish people, and hence pro-Israel, to oppose the policies of the current government of Israel.”
He called the U.S. Congress “the most anti-Israel and the most anti-Jewish Congress we’ve had in a very long time precisely because of its willingness to knee-jerk to the demands of the right wing of Israel, which end up being not in the best long term interests of the Jewish people.”
Brandt said American Jews can help Israel by making their presence known, at home and abroad, communicating not only with American legislators but building relationships with Israelis as well. “What do we say to Israel? Hineini. Here I am. Hineinu. Here we are. And we’d like to take the time to learn what it means to build a relationship with you.”
Lerner took a different approach to bridging the gulfs that divide people.
“Our rights and our humanity are not higher than anyone else’s,” he said. “We are all created in the image of God. Our rights are the same as the rights of others. This is the kind of attitude that American Jews need to take when we approach these issues in the public sphere.”
He voiced concern that “many American Jews are walking away from the Jewish community in part because they feel that [it] requires lying to oneself about what’s going on in Israel…Young people have reacted to a Judaism that has become increasingly a lock-step salute to Israeli policies. That has alienated many young people in this country.”
Brandt, however, said that “our role should be to get out there in the community and bring our community back. “We need to reconnect political activism to Judaism.”