In keeping with the tradition of self-assessment at the opening of the Jewish year, I want to follow up on a piece I did
three years ago. This piece, like that one, will start off as a journal and then morph into a cri du coeur about Israel. Such is the nature of things.
In my spiritual life I've more or less continued on the path I laid out in the previous piece. My Jewish practice is mostly oriented
around year-cycle: We just had a family dinner on Rosh Hashanah, and
I will fast on Yom Kippur and then build a sukkah. My daily practice is
mostly Buddhist-ish: every morning I read an inspirational passage,
meditate for 20-25 minutes, and conclude with a brief prayer. I've
been pretty consistent with that; my Insight Timer says I've done it
over 1100 times since I started doing it three years ago. And of course I consider my political work part and parcel of my spiritual life. All in all I'm pretty
satisfied with where my spiritual path is right now.
Our Shabbat practice is casual,
to put it that way. I recently decided that bullying my way through
my kids' reluctance to cooperate in weekly Shabbat dinner was no
longer worth the effort. We probably do a full sit-down Shabbat
dinner once or twice a month now, when the stars align and everyone
is home and in the mood for it. Less has turned out to be more in
this case. I don't take work commitments on Friday night and Saturday
morning is usually spent at the park and library.
I only rarely go to synagogue during
the regular year. I'm tutoring bnai mitzvah students at the Temple,
so I go to their events; if there's a special service that we're
involved with (Boy Scout Shabbat, for instance) we'll go to
that. I read haftarah a couple of times a year. Once in a while I'll
think about going (or making the kids go) to synagogue once a month,
but I never do it, mostly because I don't really want to go.
A while ago I posted on Facebook a list of my favorite podcasts – mostly political/left casts with one
recovery cast and a couple of Buddhist ones. My friend Daniel said
simply, “Nothing Jewish?” Instead of saying “pshaw” or
unloading my resentment on him, I asked him which ones he would
recommend. He gave me a couple but of course I never listened to
them. (I do listen to 2 Jewish podcasts now: Treyf, which is mostly
Jewish leftist politics, and Judaism Unbound, which is more spiritually oriented and which is sympathetic to my viewpoints, both political and spiritual.)
For the most part I keep a healthy distance from
the Jewish community. I like to think it's by mutual decision but
that's probably flattering myself. I pay my modest,
partial-scholarship dues to the synagogue we still belong to. I don't
donate to the Federation and no one ever asks. I haven't had any kind
of pulpit or official Jewish leadership role (aside from the
tutoring) since I lost my job in Lawrence in 2015. At some point I
“put out into the universe” that I wanted a High Holiday pulpit,
but I haven't gotten one. This year there was a holiday posting that came up late because their previous rabbi had to pull out; I
applied for it and interviewed, but didn't get it. Because of this late near-miss I'm more melancholy about this (non-)aspect of my life than usual. It seems clear that my pulpit rabbinic
career, such as it was, is over, and while I don't think I'd be doing
what I'm doing now if I weren't a rabbi - and I'm happy doing what
I'm doing now - in my weaker moments I wonder why I went $65,000 into
debt for a career that I basically had for 3 years (my one and only
full-time pulpit.)
And, as ever, the other factor that's interfering
with my ability to find my place as a mainstream Jew -- the elephant in the room -- is Israel. Since I talked about this three years ago, Israel has continued down its dark path, becoming more autocratic,
making common cause with the most horrible right wing leaders in the
world, and continuing its violent repression of the Palestinians –
this past summer's sniper target practice being only the most extreme
recent example.
Of course, just typing the phrase
“continued its violent repression of the Palestinians” is
enough to make one unviable in mainstream Jewish community. Post it
on social media and you'll get 100 responses about how Netanyahu is
bad but that's not “Israel” or about how the dead protesters had
it coming because some of them flew burning kites into Israel or
about how (I'm not kidding) this is all the Palestinians' fault
because they didn't accept the UN partition plan in 1947. I look at
this aghast, as what seems to be to a clear-cut moral issue (Israel shouldn't shoot unarmed protesters, and Americans shouldn't defend it) is treated as, perhaps regrettable, but necessary
self-defense. You can say it's necessary defense, and you can sort-of
say it's regrettable (but still necessary self-defense), but if you say
it's a war crime (as it is) you're pretty much out of the communal tent.
Parenthetical explanation of a concept: I'm re-reading a book by Jonathan Smucker about organizing called Hegemony How-to. In it, in discussing the accomplishments and failings of the the Occupy Wall Street encampment, he explains at some length the differences between two models of
activist-group dynamics: prefigurative politics, and strategic
politics. To make a 50-page story short, the former is focused on a) developing and maintaining the
identity of the group, and b) living as if the revolution (as it
were) had already taken place -- that is, prefiguratively; the latter looks to expand the
effectiveness of the group in the real, existing political context,
so that it can attain political goals, i.e. win something. He claims OWS' main failing was too much a reliance on prefigurativeness. In reality the two
need to be balanced: too much reliance on group cohesion and idealism will make it impossible to act effectively when and if the
opportunity arises; too much reliance on strategizing and practicality can
lead to the jettisoning of even the most deeply held values when they
appear to get in the way of effective action.
Smucker points out that when a group is
out of power, or has no chance of influencing events, it will be
(understandably) more likely to focus on building the cohesiveness of
the group and articulating an idealized philosophy. (End parenthetical explanation.) It is this that I
think makes it pertinent to a discussion of Judaism and Israel. When the Jewish people existed in a state of powerlessness, it was necessary for us to
focus our efforts on group cohesion and stability, and it was possible, or even necessary, for
us to idealize our beliefs and practices: to promulgate an ideology
of righteousness. When we “returned to the world stage,” as the
Zionist locution had it, we moved over time to the other extreme, a
radical pragmaticism that has now led to the situation we find
ourselves in. In other words, we jettisoned the ideal – the values that formed the
core of Jewish identity for all those centuries – for the sake of
the realized practical. (Although Israel and its defenders often use
the idealistic explication of Jewish values in defense of its actions
– the defense of continuity and thereby, Jewish values – it's
rather a call-back to values rather than the values themselves.)
In other words, we've sacrificed
something core to the Jewish project and irreplaceable – our ideals, our Jewish
moral center – for the sake of the pragmatic statecraft of (what has turned out to be) an unjust state of Israel. That's why I say that the Zionist project is
not only calling itself into question but is threatening the continued viability of the Jewish project itself.
This summer, in an attempt to dip my
toe back into Jewish thought, I started reading Heschel, perhaps the
greatest Jewish theologian of the second half of 20th
century. A few pages in I read the line, “Judaism teaches us that
beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination and
should be rejected for its loathsomeness." And immediately I have
to put the book down, for I am hit by one thought: What about
Israel? All this wonderful Jewish theology, this godliness, this “you
shall be holy for I am holy” - how does it stand up next to the
major historical Jewish project of the era, the state of Israel? When our ideals are realized, what happens? The Palestinians are destroyed, individually and collectively, that's what happens. Heschel, and other theologians, are working from a theological premise that does not include the state of Israel – or at least
does not include it in its full, current, decrepit form. The idealism
of Jewish theology, the fullness of the prophetic tradition, the true
beauty of the Jewish ideology (admittedly, developed in
powerlessness) is devastatingly undermined by three simple words:
What about Israel?
The single most important question
facing Jewish individuals, communities, and theology today is how to
respond to the reality of an unjust Israel. Some (most, apparently) will support
it, some will oppose it (and be excommunicated for their troubles), and some will try to distance themselves from it and
pretend it is no concern of theirs. I don't think that last is really
possible, both because Israel – the reality of Jewishness in state
power – calls into question everything we were taught to believe
was important in Jewish ideology, and because it remains the main
political aim of official American Jewish-dom to support Israel,
whatever its behavior, whatever its crimes. We can't absolve
ourselves of that by distancing ourselves from either Israel or the
mainstream Jewish community, for we are part of them, and they are part of
us.
As Heschel also said: “Some are
guilty, but all are responsible.”
