Identity, Israel, and Shared Humanity

Dear Friends,

Each week I reflect, professionally, on a couple of fronts: for Friday nights, I try to write in a spirit that reflects the spirit of Shabbat—a poetic sensibility angled towards Shabbat as a palace in time, a foretaste of the world to come, where we indulge in transcendent possibilities, on giving respite to our weary souls. At least ideally. During the week it’s more prose: the on-the-ground situation in Israel, Gaza, and our all-too-broken world.

October 7 impacted my orientation of what it means to be Jewish. Whereas I am someone who, for much of my life has oriented around Judaism as a spiritual identity—how can Jewish rituals, values, and beliefs serve as a pathway to the Divine, to meaning, and to holiness—October 7 called for me to re-engage with my relationship to the peoplehood Jewish: what does it mean to have ties to this distinctive group of people who have traveled across time and space, with a very real story and history, and how am I called upon to engage with those ties?

Part of those ties mean, for me, engaging with the State of Israel, which, while perhaps not an embodiment of the aspirations of all Jews (there are non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews), is home to more Jews than any other country and sits atop what is indisputably land to which the Jewish people have cultivated a connection for millenia. Exiled from this land over the course of multiple centuries it remained subject to their (our!) prayers and yearnings throughout the generations—to this day the prayer book includes prayers for a rebuilt Jerusalem and a return there, prayers which were composed centuries ago.

Still, over the course of those millennia, another group of people, now known as the Palestinians, also developed strong ties to the land that go back generations. Traditionally understood, this group was not involved in the initial exiles of the Jewish people; but rather developed their own organic attachment to the land.

Then the Holocaust happened. Six million Jews were slaughtered in countries—Germany, Poland, Hungary, for example—to which they had been exiled generations before.

The notion that the Jewish people would be one of the only groups in the world that did not have a nation-state in which it could author its own self-determination, as a group, no longer felt tenable, safe, or just. Waves of immigration of refugees to what is now Israel, fleeing previous versions of persecution/antisemitism were given sanction by the United Nations with a vote by the representatives of the world’s population to partition the land into two states, one Palestinian, one Israeli.

It was a fate the Palestinians, who were not the authors of the European Holocaust, could not accept, and war was declared between surrounding Arab states and Israel. Israel, for all intents and purposes, won that war, and an armistice was declared between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, expanding Israel’s territory to the “Green Line,” the current internationally-accepted borders of Israel.

That was 76 years ago. Generations of Israelis, and Palestinians, have been born since then.

Somehow, however, after October 7 there has been a renewed push to not only critique Israel for its conduct of the war—conduct which should always be debated given the life and death stakes of war—but to shake the very foundations of the country: to argue that not only should Israel cease its attack on Hamas, the militant group who has had control of the Gaza strip since 2006 and who launched the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 and has said that it will continue to launch such attacks, but to argue that a 76-year old country—the only Jewish country in the world and the only country in the world under this kind of pressure—should be dissolved.

This is a story in which I am deeply invested. I am deeply invested in the Jewish people, a group of people made up of individuals, like every other individual in the world, created in the image of God.

One of the fullest expressions of our humanity is the connections we feel towards members of our family—our family of origin and/or our chosen families, the families we create. In a sense, we can feel an analogous sense of connection to our people—once again our people of origin and/or the people whom we’ve chosen to belong to.

This is not to suggest that any other peoples are less worthy; it’s simply to articulate our sense of intimacy to people who have shared a story with us.

Part of that Jewish story has become the State of Israel.

It doesn’t mean Israel can do no wrong.

I recently offered a talk on adolescence in connection with becoming B’nai Mitzvah, in which I cited famed child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who articulated the challenges in navigating each developmental stage of life. One of his observations about adolescence, as summarized by Arlene Harder, is that “a significant task for us [during adolescence] is to establish a philosophy of life and in this process we tend to think in terms of ideals, which are conflict free, rather than reality, which is not” (emphasis mine).

There have been many failings by individual Israelis and Israeli leadership over the years, as there have been by non-Israeli Jews, as there have been by Palestinians, and Dutch, and Mexicans, and Canadians, and all peoples.

There are members of the Israeli public who terrorize Palestinans in the West Bank, as there are Palestinians who have terrorized Israelis.

Still, we can’t set up a dynamic where if Israel does not meet our ideal expectations, it shouldn’t exist. All international actors—all human beings—are imperfect vessels. We chart out ideals, navigating these ideals through the harsh realities of the world, knowing that sometimes the results will be messy.

I do not mean to minimize the real, lived messiness: war isn’t just messy; it is deadly. Thousands of people, perhaps thousands of children, have died in this war. That is devastating.

It is also not clear to me that a unilateral ceasefire on the part of Israel would lead to a cessation of death. Hamas has not let up on any of its aspirations about the ultimate destruction of Israel. Why are we sure that we would not be right back here in a short while if Hamas is allowed to remain in power? How can there be any future for the Gaza strip if Hamas still operates with significant lethal force within the Gaza strip and therefore would act violently against any regime, Arab or otherwise, who would take control of the Gaza strip?The only solution to this conflict is one in which both peoples’ independent connections to the land are acknowledged, and one which creates a pathway to peace and self-determination for both peoples. While the current Israeli government shows deep reservations about the future of a two-state solution, over the decades, Israel has indicated significant willingness to move in that direction. Israel is a democratic country that has the capacity to replace its leadership, and move towards a two-state peace agreement, and which has done so in the past, something that Gazans did not have the capacity to do under Hamas, who violently suppressed its political opposition.

The United States, which exercises significant influence, but which goes back and forth between different approaches depending on its own electoral results, will have a role to play in navigating to a future, peaceful resolution as the Biden administration is trying to do.

I pray for a lasting and just peace in which both peoples are recognized in the journeys that they have been through and in their rights to collective self-determination. I know I am deeply invested in my people’s story, and I pray that each of our respective engagements in our people’s stories can bring about a sense of collective redemption.

What a follows are the remarks I delivered last Friday night:

Some Torah that is with me this week comes from a B’nai Mitzvah student, whose Torah I summarized at our Shabbat service last week celebrating our high school graduating seniors. As part of that service, I shared with a number of these students parts of their divrei Torah from their B’nai Mitzvah that they celebrated some 5 years ago. All of their teachings were gorgeous, sophisticated pieces of Torah, and there is one in particular lingering with me right now.

The student encountered a very difficult, jarring piece of Torah, of which there are many. In his case it was about a man in the wilderness put to death for violating Shabbat. But rather than discard the Torah altogether because of this part of it that did not align with his values, this student said that, instead, his internal reaction to this moment—the compassion he felt, the sense of injustice he felt—was the Torah.

That as we engage with Torah, it is not only about the literal words we are reading, but the responses that reading and that study elicits within us—the Torah is in that response.

The same can be applied to life—all of life, according to Jewish tradition, is in a sense, Torah. We are seeking to learn from, to find God in, all of life. And so one question we can ask is, what is our response to this moment, and where is God in it.

In this post October 7 world, one response that I know a lot of Jewish people are having is a sense of distress, a sense of isolation.

There is compassion for all involved in the wake of October 7—certainly for the hostages and their families, for Israelis who lost loved ones on October 7 and in the war since, and for Palestinans at ground zero in Gaza, the primary battleground of this war, facing the hazards of war, hunger, loss, and heartbreak.

And then there is our experience here in the United States—on campus, and in online discourse—where the deeply challenging experience Israel is in, having been brutally attacked, in ways that show an ongoing threat to its survival, is largely erased, or justified as part of a righteous resistance to the presence of Jews in this ever-conflicted land.

Here in the United States we feel a sense of isolation from many of those we consider to be cultural kin—fellow students and academics; organizers and social justice advocates. We feel as though people, while perhaps coming from a place of seeking righteousness, are overlooking large parts of our story—of our exile from this land, of our dispersal and oppression throughout the world, of our efforts to find some safe harbor in our former home. That these parts of the story—while not the entire story—are being overlooked. We feel a sense of abandonment and isolation in response to these currents in the world.

And so my question, based on our Bar Mitzvah student’s Torah, is:

Where is the Torah in this experience of distress and isolation? Where is God in this experience?

My response comes from the most famous verse in this week’s Torah portion, and perhaps the most famous verse in all of Torah. I

n Vayikra, Leviticus, 19:18, it says, v’ahavta l’re’achah kamokhah—love your neighbor as you love yourself, ani Adonai, I am Adonai, the Source of Being.

When I feel distress, and isolation, I ask where is God, and part of my response is right there with me, in that distress, in that loneliness. As Isaiah says, “בְּֽכׇל־צָרָתָ֣ם ׀ (לא) [ל֣וֹ] צָ֗ר” “In all their troubles [God] was troubled.” God, Jewish tradition, teaches is present with us in our afflictions, with us in exile.

I feel this presence when I invite this presence in, and I feel less alone—both on an individual level, and on a collective level. I feel God present with me in my tzuris, my sense of affliction, and our community’s experience of it.

This is one level of v’ahavta l’re’achah kamokhah, ani Adonai. Love your neighbor as you love yourself, I am Adonai. Invite God in, from within, to be present for that love for yourself. It is there.

And then I turn to the other aspect of the verse. When I invite God in to be present for my response to this moment—the isolation, the loneliness, the despair—first I feel God’s affirmation, and presence and love for my own experience, my own understanding, and then I feel God invite me to look afield, to look around and to ask, who else may be experiencing something similar—who is my neighbor (different than my kin) in this moment? My neighbor in loneliness, my neighbor in isolation to whom I can connect with love. It doesn’t have to be related to this conflict, but it can be.

It can be my wife, who is on her own when I am working too much. It can be a congregant, who is caring for a sick loved one, with no one to see the trials and travails they are going through. It could be a Palestinian-American who might feel supported by fellow students, but who might be experiencing roadblocks and isolation elsewhere in their lives.

My internal response to a particular moment, this student says, can be seen as a manifestation of Torah, and when I encounter Torah, I ask, where is God in this. v’ahavta l’re’achah kamokhah teaches me that God is both present to me; genuinely seeing what

I am going through and reaching out to connect, and, having shown me that love and support, inviting me to look around and to see who might be a kindred spirit; who might be going through something similar to what I am going through, in need of love and support in their own right, an opportunity for us to connect on a deeper level, to manifest God’s presence in the world, through that connection.

These are hard times. For us and for others. Let’s invite ourselves to find the Torah in what we are going through, to find God’s presence in that Torah, and to act accordingly.

Shabbat Shalom.