Even as those others were killing, raping, and robbing them, some sought to reinterpret the word "stranger/other" (the Hebrew word ger) in a more tame way -- saying it only meant "convert to Judaism" (an interpretation that flew in the face of the Torah statement "remember you were the ger in the land of Egypt).
In the 2,000 years of relative powerlessness when Jews were the oppressed minorities of the western and Islamic societies, the validation of images of a powerful God who could fight for the oppressed Jews was a powerful psychological boon to offset the potential internalizing of the demonization that we faced from the majority cultures. And the practice of demeaning the "other" while embracing a notion of Jews as "chosen by God," rather than responding with love to our oppressors, was arguably a brilliant psychological strategy for refusing to internalize the demeaning rhetoric of our oppressors and fall victim to self-hatred.
But in this moment, when Jews enjoy military power in Israel, as well as economic and political power in the United States and to some extent in many other Western societies, one would have expected that the theme of love and generosity, always a major voice even in a Jewish people that were being brutalized, would now emerge as the dominant theme of the Judaism of the 21st century. Trusting not in love and kindness and the possibility of transforming (tikkun-ing) our world, but instead believing that we must always be on the defensive and rely not in trusting our fellow human being but relying on power and military might -- this is the tragic victory of Hitler over the consciousness of the Jewish people who are increasingly unwilling to continue to embrace the worldview of hope and possibility that Judaism originally emerged to affirm and popularize.
No wonder, then, that I'm heartbroken to see the Judaism of love and compassion being dismissed as "unrealistic" by so many of my fellow Jews and rabbis. Wasn't the central message of Torah that the world was ruled by a force that made possible the transformation from "that which is" to "that which can and should be"? And wasn't our task to teach the world that nothing is fixed, that even the mountains can skip like young rams and the seas can flee before the triumph of God's justice in the world?
Instead of preaching this hopeful message, too many rabbis and rabbinical institutions are preaching a Judaism that places more hope in the might of the Israeli army than in the capacity of human beings (including Palestinians) to transform their perception of "the other" and overcome their fears. Even in the darkest days of our oppression, most Jewish thinkers believed that all human beings were created in the image of God and hence were capable of transformation to once again become embodiments of love and generosity. As the prayer for Yom Kippur says, "Till the day of their death, YOU (God) wait for them, that perhaps they might return, and YOU will immediately receive them."
In contrast, today's rabbis are more like the set of past-era Protestant theologians who used to emphasize human sinfulness as almost impossible to overcome and hence rejected any hope of social transformation. They scoff at the possibility which we at Tikkun magazine and our Network of Spiritual Progressives have been preaching (not only for the Middle East, but for the United States as well) that if we act from a loving and generous place, seeking to overcome behaviors that were previously perceived as disrespectful and humiliating, that the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our behavior helped to create) can melt away and people's hearts can once again turn toward love and justice for all.
Our call for the United States to develop a Global Marshall Plan and a strategy of generosity toward the developing world (www.tikkun.org/gmp) and for Israel to develop a Marshall Plan to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank so that it can easily accommodate the millions of Palestinians still stuck in refugee camps around the Arab world get ignored because in both the United States and Israel the belief in "homeland security through domination" leads people to dismiss the religious call (in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, as well in some secular humanist communities) for security through generosity and open-hearted reconciliation. I've applied these principles to develop a detailed plan for what a peaceful resolution of the conflict would look like in Embracing Israel/Palestine.
In an America which at this very moment has its president calling to send tens of thousands of child refugees back to the situations they risked their lives to escape; in an America which refused to provide Medicare for all, and in an America which serves the interests of its richest 1 percent while largely ignoring the needs of its large working middle class, these ideas may sound naively Utopian. But for Judaism, belief in God was precisely a belief that love and justice could and should prevail, and that our task is to embody that message in our communities and promote that message to the world.
It is this love, compassion, justice, and peace-oriented Judaism that the State of Israel is murdering. The worshipers of Israel have fallen into a deep cynicism about the possibility of the world that the prophets called for in which nations shall not lift up the sword against each other and they will no longer learn war, and everyone will live in peace. True, that world is not already here, but the Jewish people's task was to teach people that this world could be brought into being, and that each step we take is either a step toward that world or a step away from it.
The Israel worshipers are running away from this world of love, making it far less possible. And yet they call their behavior "Judaism" and Israel "the Jewish state." If Judaism's call for a world based on social justice, peace, and love for "the other" is dismissed as impossible under current conditions, the least we could ask of Israel is that it describe itself as "a State with many Jews" rather than as "a Jewish state" since the latter implies some connection to Judaism and its prophetic tradition.
No wonder, then, that I mourn for the Judaism of love, kindness, peace, and generosity that Israel worshipers dismiss as Utopian fantasy. To my fellow Jews, I issue the following invitation: use Tisha B'av (the traditional fast-day mourning the destruction of Jewish life in the past, and starting Monday night August 4 till dark on August 5) to mourn for the Judaism of love and generosity that is being murdered by Israel and its worshipers around the world, the same kind of idol-worshipers who, pretending to be Jewish but actually assimilated into the world of power, helped destroy our previous two Jewish commonwealths and our Temples of the past.
I urge Jews who agree with the perspective in this article to go to High Holiday services this year and publicly insist that the synagogue services include repentance for the sins of the Jewish people in giving blind support to immoral policies of the State of Israel. Don't sit quietly while the rabbis or others give talks implying that Israel is wholly righteous and that the Palestinians are the equivalent of Hitler or some "evil other." Pass out to people the High Holiday "For Our Sins" workbook that Tikkun has developed and that will be on our website in early September. Write to your synagogue beforehand to ask them to include that list of sins among those that are traditionally read on Yom Kippur. That reading will be certain to generate a new aliveness in your synagogue and make Yom Kippur more spiritually real and deep than passively sitting through a service that is ignoring some of the central issues for which we should be atoning. Whether or not you go to synagogue on the High Holidays, please donate to Tikkun to keep our voice alive (the organized Jewish community and many Jews who are liberal on every other issue still refuse to support or read Tikkun precisely because we touch this issue--just ask the social justice-oriented Jewish groups you know about why they are not speaking up about Israel and you'll see why it is so important to support Tikkun). And please: join our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives and help us create local chapters to get out the message that the Judaism being preached in many synagogues is antithetical to the highest values of our people and our Jewish tradition (even while acknowledging that there have always been within that tradition contradictory and pro-domination voices as well).
Please don't be silent when rabbis refuse to acknowledge their idol-worship and their blind support for Israeli policies. Insist that they take into account when judging Palestinians the psychologically and ethically destructive impact of living under Occupation. Ask them to choose between demanding that Israel immediately help the Palestinian people to create their independent state without an occupying Israeli army or demanding that Israel give all the Palestinians the same rights that Americans fought for in our own revolution and that we demanded for Africans in South Africa and African Americans in the South -- one person, one vote (in the Israeli Knesset elections).
We may have to renew our Judaism by creating a liberatory, emancipatory, and transformative love-oriented Judaism outside the synagogues and traditional institutions, because inside the existing Jewish community the best we can do is repeat what the Jewish exiles in Babylonia said in Psalm 137, "How can we sing the songs of the Transformative Power YHVH in a strange land?" And let us this year turn Yom Kippur into a time of repentance for the sins of our people who have given Israel a blank check and full permission to be brutal in the name of Judaism and the Jewish people (even as we celebrate those Jews with the courage to publicly critique Israel in a loving but stern way). Doing so does not mean obscuring the immorality of Hamas' behavior. But the High Holidays is meant to be a time to focus on what our sins are, not the sins of others. Isn't it time that we stopped hiding behind the distortions in others to avoid our own distortions?
For our non-Jewish allies, the following plea: do not let the organized Jewish community intimidate you with charges that any criticism of Israel's brutality toward the Palestinian people proves that you are anti-Semites. Stop allowing your very justified guilt at the history of oppression your ancestors enacted on Jews to be the reason you fail to speak out vigorously against the current immoral policies of the State Israel. The way to become real friends of the Jewish people is to side with those Jews who are trying to get Israel back on track toward its highest values, knowing full well that there is no future for a Jewish state surrounded by a billion Muslims except through friendship and cooperation.
The temporary alliance of brutal dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and various Arab emirates that give Israel support against Hamas will ultimately collapse, but the memory of humiliation at the hands of the State of Israel will not, and Israel's current policies will endanger Jews both in the Middle East and around the world for many decades after the people of Israel have regained their senses. Real friends don't let their friends pursue a self-destructive path, so it's time for you too to speak up and to support those of us in the Jewish world who are champions of peace and justice, and who will not be silent in the face of the destruction of Judaism. One concrete step: join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and help us get the messages I'm articulating here into the public arena in the U.S. With 57 percent of the American public polling support for Israel's assault on Gaza, the most important task we have is to shift mass consciousness toward a more nuanced position that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine.
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