Spoken at Seaside Jewish Community, Rehoboth Beach, DE
Beth has asked me to
speak about Israel
over this holiday weekend. There’s a lot I can talk about. I’ve lived in Israel for 22 years, at Kibbutz Lotan in the Arava Desert
for 21 of them. This year has been an interesting one in Israel, this summer has been
amazing. Thousands of Israelis moved out of their homes and camped in the
streets, for five weeks, in a wave of protest that started against the high
cost of housing and ended as a broad cry for Social Justice across the board.
There was an exhilarating feeling in the air. Even a terror attack on the
Egyptian border near Eilat didn’t stop the protests, even the Palestinian
rockets that fell on Be’er Sheva and Ashkelon
only brought a brief lull in the weekly Saturday night protest marches.
What were those protests
about? It seems that people want more than just economic wellbeing. Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel, in his great book The Prophets, explores the relationship between
spiritual truth and political power, and the clarion call for justice in
Biblical Israel. Israel’s
government, it seems to the protestors, is more preoccupied with profits (with
an F) than prophets (with a PH). On Israel's streets this summer, in the many
'Tents of Meeting' this call has been ringing out again, demanding that social
justice be put at the center of its public agenda. (1)
The tent cities have come
down and it’s still too soon to see if anyone will be able to create any
electoral leverage out of the summer’s excitement. The polls are pessimistic,
and the next election is scheduled for 2013. Many pundits think the success of
the tent protests was rooted in the fact that these protestors didn’t speak
about the elephant in the room, the Elephant that sits in the middle of Israel and has
paralyzed its politics for forty three years – the occupation of the Palestinians.
And the American Jewish
community is also struggling with how to engage about Israel because
of this same elephant. Rabbi Melissa Weintraub has spoken about the three most
common avenues for Israel
engagement in the Jewish community:
Avoidance. In a speech last winter, Melissa
said that every one of the organizations that make up the Jewish social justice
movement in this country has an organizational policy to avoid discussion
of Israel.
We can’t possibly, they say, build a broad coalition on issues like Darfur,
the environment, or poverty, if we touch Israel– that troublesome powder
keg, perennial elephant in the room. Rabbis of every denomination have
voiced fear of saying anything in relation Israel. Rabbis are afraid to get
fired for anything they might say about Israel.
The second avenue is Mutual
antagonism. Attacks and counter-attacks on OpEd pages and in the
blogosphere, egged on by media groups from both right and left primed to
spring into action in response to perceived criticism on the one hand or
defense on the other of Israeli policy. Character assassinations, mutual
vilification, reckless caricatures of each other’s positions,
counter-accusations of misrepresentation. Unraveled relationships in families,
synagogues, local and national institutional Jewish communities.
The third option, she calls
collective solipsism (though it really could be called
“avoidance 2.0”). And that is Israel-related advocacy and activism that
involves congregating, conferencing, and talking exclusively to those with
whom we agree. That is, the Jewish people splinters into self-affirming nuclei
of our respective organizations, each of them morally superior and
self-certain, talking past one another, or now and then colliding in frustration
and hostility. We each rally, mobilize and take pride in the numbers of those
who are with us, while dismissing those who aren’t as dangerous, ignorant,
malicious or loony.
These are the three
predominant modes of Israel
engagement in American Jewish life. To counter this trend, to introduce the
radical concepts of LISTENING and CIVILITY, Melissa and a few other young
leaders created a new organization just a couple of years ago. Encounter is
dedicated to bringing together Jews to discuss Israel,
to encounter Palestinians face to face, and to overcome stereotypes, both
within the Jewish Community and between the American Jewish community, Israel, and Palestine. (2)
Many of us want to engage
the next generation in Jewish life. Recent studies document what many of us
know anecdotally: a sharp decline among Israel engagement and attachment
of those under the age of 35. They tested the marketing of Israel advocacy organizations seeking to
assist young Jews on college campuses to defend Israel against its critics. And
what they found is pervasive aversion, AVERSION. Israel Advocacy messaging
inadvertently turns off the vast majority of Jews under the age of 35.
Why?
They found that young
Jews want welcoming, inclusive settings in which to listen,
explore, ask hard questions, and decide for them selves what they think in an open
exchange of ideas. Relatedly: They found that young Jews want to be
exposed to nuance and diversity of perspective, not
black-and-white thinking.
My guess is that these
findings are true for many of us in the boomer generation and older. Only our
experience of anti-semitism is stronger, our memories of the Shoah and the wars of the 1960s and 70s are not just history
lessons. We may have a deep existential fear that our children lack. Thank God,
they have not had their lives threatened for being Jewish.
Thus their Jewish
identity may not be threatened from without. But it may be threatened from
within – if we do not heed what Melissa Weintraub and her associates say. I
made Aliyah 22 years ago because I felt that Israel was in danger of becoming a
country with which Jewish youth like me might not be able to identify. Less
than a month later, a wave of Russian immigration increased Israel’s
population by nearly 20%. The freedom of Soviet Jews, for which I had protested
in the 1980s, brought to Israel
a million new voters, unaccustomed to democratic life, easily convinced by
demagoguery. My one vote has been drowned out, and young Jews in the US today are increasingly alienated by Israel.
This isn’t to say they
don’t care about their Jewish Identity. They care passionately. They engage
core Jewish values of feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick.
They gather on the holidays, celebrating and studying.
Encounter is committed to
creating a safe container for right– and left-wing Jews to encounter each other
with real mutual listening and respect, to sit down in front of the separation
barrier together and grapple with what it means. Often participants claim
that our trips are the first time they’ve been able to hear other Jews who
think differently than them, let alone Palestinians.
An orthodox rabbi who
participated in an Encounter tour of Bethlehem wrote the following: “I realized
that while I’ve been sitting at home worrying about how my experiences in
Bethlehem and Hebron could create negative PR for
Israel, my students have been out in the world hearing those messages from a
hundred other sources. They hear about it in the news. They hear about it in
their public schools. And they hear about it from each other. These issues are
on the consciousnesses of young North American Jews. If they don’t hear about
what’s happening from me, they’ll hear about it from someone else. Someone who
is likely to have a strong anti-Israel bias, and who will present the information
without balance and nuance.
“So last week I shared my
Encounter experiences with my Grade 12 class…. Many students in the class had
decided, based on what they had heard from other sources, to turn against Israel
entirely. They were embarrassed about what goes on in the West Bank, and were
using that as reason to give up on the whole Israel experiment. They didn’t
see constructive criticism as an option. They had never heard someone criticize
Israel
out of love. I was able to model an approach for them that balances a love for Israel and a recognition of Israel’s mistakes. It was a perspective
that they needed to hear. And it was thanks to Encounter that I was able to
present it to them.” (3)
Our children need to hear
us challenging our own thinking, thinking out our most complex problems aloud,
and bringing our venerable tradition to bear on them.
We must be willing to
live with complexity. I don’t know if you heard the speeches at the UN last
week. I listened to President Abbas’ speech and found myself agreeing with
almost everything he said. And then I listened to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
speech, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with everything he said,
too. Israel
is a country. A country with a lot of challenges, indeed, but none of them are
as existential as the alienation of Jews around the world. Prime Minister
Netanyahu demands recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. This
summer’s protesters demanded that a Jewish state must act Jewishly, caring for
the weak and the poor. Israel’s existence will not be threatened by honest,
meaningful discussion within the American Jewish Community. It can only be
strengthened, and so can you.
Shuva Yisrael – return, Israel – the haftara of this
Shabbat Shuva calls upon us to return, return to our Prophetic values, return
to the path of justice and right action. Hillel reads the commandment “love
your neighbor as yourself” as “what is hateful to you, do not do to your
neighbor”. Listening to one another can be a great start. Shuva Yisrael
– return, Israel,
return to civil conversation, return to grappling with a difficult topic, to
agreeing to disagree, to accepting one another regardless of our political
positions.
Notes:
(1) Dr. Jeremy Benstein, Heschel Center
(2) Rabbi Melissa Weintraub, "The Need for Civil Discourse", in fact, most of the rest of this sermon paraphrases this and other essays on the Encounter website. I participated in an Encounter tour in early March, 2011.
(3) As related by Weintraub in another essay, "Do Young Jews Care About Israel".