I was surprised and disheartened at Kol Nidre this year by a rabbinic sermon that seemed to ask us to give yet greater support to the State of Israel. This on Yom Kippur, when we are to examine our sins and those of our people. One might think Israel’s latest campaign against Gaza would provoke soul-searching. But the only “turning” discussed was toward supporting our Jewish family more vigorously around the world.
The rabbi didn’t discuss the treatment of the “others” of Palestine. No case was made for the morality of Israel’s actions. I recognized what I heard from the bimah as what sociologists call “amoral familism.”
Israel is our family, was the message. We must stand with our family, whether or not we agree. It doesn’t matter what Israel does, seemed the unspoken subtext.
There is of course nothing new about clergy serving as nationalist cheerleaders. But I think of our tradition differently.
We remember: “He who destroys a human life is as if he has destroyed the whole world.”
Now it’s: “We’re done apologizing!”
Though it seems ridiculous to have to say this, Judaism isn’t amoral familism, but was perhaps the great advance over the concept that the only moral test is what our family wants or does. One of the Torah’s three commands to love is, of course, to love the “other.”
A Judaism that treasures Jewish lives and devalues Arab lives is no longer Judaism.
But even this is now controversial. We’re in a struggle for the Jewish soul between those for whom Judaism is a religion of universal human values and those for whom it’s basically a tribal military cult, a belief system whose central tenet is support of the Israeli state whatever it does, dishonoring Jewish values of freedom, hope and resistance to tyranny that echo through history.
The synagogue is debased by prayers for the triumph of the occupying army, whose mission has become subjugating Palestinians in perpetuity, policies few if any Jews would support by any other state against any other people.
We can’t simply say “We are one” in unison and ignore the incompatibility of these visions.
The founding event of the Jewish people was history’s greatest slave revolt. As a young Jew growing up in New York long ago, I knew every fight for freedom was mine. Jews supported the rights of all in a way that inspired others.
Young Jews grow up now in a radically different world, pressed by the organized community to explain away permanent oppression of subject Arabs and “self-defense” killing when they fight back.
For Israel’s posture, defended by so many of our community leaders though opposed by most American Jews, inevitably means more theft of Arab land and more killing of those Arabs — and their children, shown so horrifically this summer in Gaza — who resist the subjugation to which today’s Israel consigns them.
What, I wonder, is the Palestinian choice beyond active resistance and meekly accepting oppression?
If our rabbi had rather asked how we could together influence Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, move toward two-state coexistence between equals (Oslo accords, anyone?), that would be a profound Kol Nidre sermon worthy of our community.
We know the history. And though great and terrible things happened in 1948 and 1967, before and since, let’s say clearly: None of them justifies permanent subjugation of the Arabs of Palestine.
Blockade and occupation are acts of war most of us would support resistance to anywhere else in the world. The West Bank has been occupied almost 50 years, its residents subject to arbitrary arrest, control over movement, indefinite imprisonment, land seizure and home destruction. Nearly 2 million Gazans have been blockaded nearly a decade in strangulating, desperately impoverishing collective punishment and subjected to periodic decimation in wars of choice.
What today’s Israel needs from us is not more “support,” which only solidifies intransigence, but an intervention — a profoundly Jewish intervention — a decisive shift in the posture of U.S. and world Jewry back toward Jewish (and American) values like the rights to life and self-determination of all peoples.
A clear voice, so long lacking from U.S. Jewry, simply on behalf of traditional Jewish morality in treatment of the “other,” could make an enormous difference. Continued knee-jerk defense of the indefensible will not. Jews should stop fighting movements that work to hold Israel accountable and start leading them.
Israel and its American cheerleaders have long reversed the moral posture of the Jewish people, a disaster for American Judaism as we try to pass on an ethos profoundly compromised by the need to rationalize oppression of another people.
Our Bible’s core narrative is of a people freed from slavery who win, then lose their land through losing touch with who they are, their ideals and their God, betting “pragmatically” on the wrong deities and the wrong empires — in the language of the modern, the wrong values. Confronting today’s Israel and demanding change, far from being a rejection of Judaism, is the most profound manifestation of it.
Steve Koppman is author of “A Treasury of American-Jewish Folklore.” He lives in Oakland.