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Rabbi Daniel Gordis has written again about rabbinical students who can’t see the difference between Israel and its enemies. He’s “rendered speechless” by an email to students at a rabbinical school that included this:

For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”

I don’t blame him for being speechless. Actually he’s not — he has plenty to say about it. He mentions the fact that these students don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a state of Israel, don’t grasp the possibility that Israel could cease to exist, and don’t understand Israel’s importance to Jewish life in the Diaspora.  But then he puts his finger on the central issue:

This new tone in discussions about Israel is so “fair,” so “balanced,” so “even-handed” that what is entirely gone is an instinct of belonging—the visceral sense on the part of these students that they are part of a people, that the blood and the losses that were required to create the state of Israel is their blood and their loss.

Judaism’s commitment to particularism may be based in instinct rather than ratiocination, but it need not be mindless. No thinking Zionist ought to deny that Israel is deeply flawed or that its leadership makes grievous mistakes. Israel, like all free societies, needs internal criticism in order to improve. The right of these rabbinical students to criticize Israel is not in question. What is lacking in their view and their approach is the sense that no matter how devoted Jews may be to humanity at large, we owe our devotion first and foremost to one particular people—our own people.

Gordis points out that, despite rules about the need to treat the stranger (ger) among us fairly, Judaism takes the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ very seriously (in fact the injunction to treat the stranger fairly proves this):

What these students did not learn on their Jewish journeys, because they were not raised that way, was the instinctive Jewish sense that Judaism is, at its core, still a matter of “us” and “them.” To this generation’s students, that claim strikes a horribly discordant tone. To be sure, Jewish tradition is extraordinarily nuanced and generous when it comes to the question of how Jews are to treat non-Jews. But it is a simple matter of fact that Jews have always been taught to care, first and foremost, for other Jews.

Why is this? The first reason is that the Torah is a book about the relationship between God, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel. Of course it matters if someone is a Jew.

And the second one is the Jewish experience through centuries of Diaspora, the need to remain a people despite persecution. I grew up in a household with immigrants from a place where Jewish life, to borrow Hobbes’ words, was often “nasty, brutish and short.” To them, everything was divided between Jewish and non-Jewish.

This isn’t an easy argument to win with someone educated in an American university in the last 40 years or so. They are taught that the highest ethical value lies in universalism — understanding, engagement (Gordis talks a lot about this), communication, openness, acceptance, multiculturalism, diversity are good. Particularism, orthodoxy (upper- or lower-case ‘o’), moral judgments about cultures, separatism, borders, patriotism, homogeneity, tribalism are bad.

There are lots of internal contradictions in this position. For example, take the most universalist American academic and suggest that his child, or even his cousin’s child, should be the subject of a dangerous experiment that might help find a cure for a plague that kills, say, hundreds of thousands of black Africans every year. Humans are primates and some degree of tribalism is built into them; it’s just a question of where they draw the line.

Consider also that among Israel’s enemies are found some of the most tribal and chauvinistic peoples imaginable, peoples who are generally remarkably intolerant of anyone who is different from them in any way, intolerant on the basis of gender, clan, color, religion, etc. But we are not permitted to think that these cultures are morally inferior — which raises the question of where we get the authority to condemn intolerance in our own culture.

But don’t bother. Gordis is frustrated in trying to get through to these rabbinical students and (worse) their teachers, and I’ve had the same experience. A few years ago I wrote from Israel to friends in the US and tried to express the feeling of belonging that I experienced there, despite the real differences between American and Israeli cultures, differences which often gave rise to dislike or distrust. I wrote about the feeling that I needed to defend these Jews and they would defend me because we were all members of a  people. A people needs to stick together.

Other things being equal, I said, I should come down on the side of the Jew in a conflict between Jews and non-Jews.

They were annoyed. There is no reason for me to feel differently toward someone because he is a Jew, rather than an Arab or a Norwegian, they insisted. That’s a kind of racism, they said.

This is a very deep-seated issue, one of the deepest. Everyone has general moral principles from which they reason out particular decisions (when they do try to reason morally as opposed to simply rationalizing their felt needs and wants). The choice to accept or reject the principle that who a person is can be relevant to our treatment of him is fundamental to one’s moral system.

Gordis thinks he knows why so many American Jews take a different path than that of traditional Jewish ethics:

All this is simply a reflection of the decreased role of “peoplehood” in Judaism. What we are witnessing is a Protestantization of American Jewish life. By and large, today’s rabbinical students did not grow up in homes that were richly Jewish. More often than not, these students came to their Jewish commitments as a result of individual journeys on which they embarked. They sought meaning, and found it. They sought prayer, and learned it. Their Jewish experience is roughly analogous to a Protestant religious awakening. The Protestant religious experience is a deeply personal one, not a communal one. Worship in the Protestant tradition is about reaching for the divine, while in the Jewish tradition, it is no less about creating a bond with other Jews. In Protestant liturgy, history is almost absent, while in the Jewish prayer book, it is omnipresent. The replacement of communal faith by personal journey among today’s young Jews is a profound reflection of the degree to which Christianity has colored their sense of what Judaism at its very core is all about.

So these Jews are closer to the principles found in the Gospels than they are to the Torah, despite the fact that they are studying the Torah. Why? Because years of exposure to popular culture (including Hollywood movies made by Jews!) has inculcated them with the principles of Christian morality first.

They are also far from the persecution that characterized the Diaspora until the golden age for Jews in post-1960 America (and today in the ‘Tel Aviv bubble’). Combine these factors with the previously-mentioned failure to grasp the precariousness and importance of the existence of the Jewish state, and you get what rendered Gordis speechless:

Young Jews that can’t tell the difference between Israel and her enemies.

Technorati Tags: Jews, Daniel Gordis, ethics

Today is Jerusalem Day, 28 Iyar. Jerusalem Day commemorates the reunification of Jerusalem in June, 1967. Today, also, almost no political leader in the world outside of Israel thinks Jerusalem should stay unified. Maybe the reason is that after 1967, Israel didn’t take complete control of the Temple Mount, the central feature of Jerusalem and the holiest place in Judaism.

Here is a post I wrote a few years ago about a man who was there in 1967, and his prayer book. It’s worth a look.

***

This statement was released by Hamas on the occasion of Jerusalem Day:

[We call] for abolition of “Jerusalem Day” and its removal from Israeli calendars, because it is a false holiday commemorating a false event. What is called “The Unification of Jerusalem” was in fact but the creation of a regime of occupation and oppression over the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. It is the rule of police which resorts to the shooting of live ammunition on the streets and resorts to electric shockers against peaceful demonstrators, the rule of settlers who expel Palestinian families from their homes in the middle of the night. Jews were given access to the Western Wall, but inhabitants of the Occupied Territories — Muslims as well as Christians — were denied access to their holy places in Jerusalem. Jerusalem Day is a major holiday for extreme nationalists and racists, settlers and provocateurs. The vast majority of Israeli citizens, including the Israelis living in Jerusalem itself, vote with their feet and stay away from the events of the Jerusalem Day, rightly considering them as a nuisance rather than a holiday.

Oops — it wasn’t Hamas. It was “Gush Shalom,” which means “peace bloc,” an Israeli organization founded by 87-year-old Uri Avnery, the extremist’s extremist, in 1993 to oppose “the repressive measures introduced by the new Labor party government headed by Yitzhak Rabin.”

Avnery has an interesting history. He came to Israel with his family from Germany in 1933, and was a member of the Etzel (“Irgun”) from 1938-42, fought and was seriously wounded in the War of Independence. It was pretty much all leftward after that.

Uri Avnery meets with Arafat in Beirut, 1982, in violation of Israeli law.

Avnery’s Gush Shalom calls for an end to ‘occupation’, removal of all settlements, recognition of a Palestinian ‘right of return’ (somehow in a way which will be harmless to Israel), transfer of all of eastern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, to the Arabs, etc. It often joins anti-Israel demonstrations, like the weekly riots at Bili’in.

Avnery has clearly devoted his life to his cause, which today seems to be very close to the Palestinian cause — although he seems to think it doesn’t contradict the continued existence of Israel, even the continuation of Jewish lives in Israel. It’s strange.

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Before independence, eastern Jerusalem had numerous Jewish neighborhoods, including the Jewish Quarter of the old city, as well as mixed areas. All Jews living in them were expelled at gunpoint by Jordanian troops in 1948. Mahmoud Abbas declared last week that there will be no “Israeli presence” civilian or military in the Palestinian state; in December 2010, he was even more specific, saying,

We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it.

Some have insisted that this isn’t a description of a racist state because he said ‘Israelis’ and not ‘Jews’. But given that he considers Arab citizens of Israel ‘Palestinians’, it’s easy to see what he means: he wants to re-institute the Jew-free Jerusalem of the Jordanian period. Do you think they will allow us to visit the kotel [Western Wall]? I doubt it.

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Here’s some more Arab wisdom about Jerusalem from Abbas Zaki, former PLO Ambassador to Lebanon:

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

Pay attention.

Technorati Tags: Jerusalem, Israel

Who do the territories belong to?

In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Definitely worth your 6 minutes.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Judea and Samaria