Category Archives: Jewish Identity

“We Don’t Want You Here!” – Bereaved Palestinian and Israeli Parents Speak to J Street

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Divrei Torah, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Stories

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“Anachnu lo rotzim etchem po — Ma bidnaash an takuunu hone! — We don’t want you here!”

30 Israeli and Palestinian men, women, and children spoke these words alternately in Hebrew and Arabic in a short film shown to 3000 delegates of the J Street National Convention in Washington, D.C. this past week. Each person had lost a close family member to Palestinian or Israeli violence, and they wanted no more to join them in grief.

At the film’s conclusion, Robi Damelin and Bassam Aramin walked arm-in-arm onto the stage.

Robi is an Israeli mother whose 28 year-old son David, a student who was working on his masters in the Philosophy of Education at Tel Aviv University, was murdered by a Palestinian sniper a few years ago. The murderer had witnessed the killing of his uncle when he was a child, and when he was grown stepped onto a path of revenge and took David’s and 9 other Israeli lives.

Bassam is a Palestinian father whose 10 year-old daughter, Abir, was shot dead by an Israeli border policemen in 2007 as she walked down the street with her sister and two friends after buying sweets in a shop across the road from her school in the West Bank village of Anata at the end of a math exam.

When David was murdered, the first words his devastated mother spoke were: “Do not take revenge in the name of my son…get out of the occupied territories.”

Robi and Bassam are the Israeli and Palestinian Spokespersons for The Parents Circle, a group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children to violence (see http://www.theparentscircle.com/). They say, “There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… More war creates more victims on both sides … The power of Israel and the resistance of the Palestinians doesn’t work. We need to sit down and negotiate.”

J Street is a pro-Israel pro-peace American organization based in Washington, D.C. that advocates before Congress and the President the necessity of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. J Street has 180,000 members, a college division of thousands of students on 125 American campuses, 60 chapters in cities around the country, and a rabbinic cabinet, that I co-chair, of 850 rabbis from across the religious streams of American Jewish life.

J Street represents, however, the opinions of far more American Jews (and many thousands of Israelis) than its membership numbers reflect. J Street’s positions are held by roughly 70% of the American Jewish community who believe that a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is in Israel’s best long-term interests. J Street has endorsed more than 90 members of Congress (its endorsees are growing by roughly 15-20% in each Congressional cycle) who agree with J Street’s principles and who have welcomed J Street as a pro-Israel organization that does not necessarily agree with every policy position taken by any particular Israeli government or Prime Minister.

Like Robi and Bassam, J Street recognizes that there is no military solution to this conflict, that the only way Israel will remain secure, Jewish and democratic is in a negotiated two-state end-of-conflict agreement.

Specifically, J Street agrees with the broad consensus of the international community of what a two-state solution will look like. The border will be drawn roughly along the 1967 Green Line with land swaps that would include within Israel 75% of all Israelis living in the large settlements blocks in the West Bank and around Jerusalem. Jerusalem will be the shared capital of Israel and Palestine. Palestine will be demilitarized except for necessary police forces. There will be firm security arrangements in place for the benefit of both Israel and Palestine. Palestinian refugees will have the right of return to the new state of Palestine and not to Israel. Appropriate compensation for refugees will be given.

My purpose here is not to get into the weeds of this conflict which are long, deep and complicated, but rather to communicate the human costs of this conflict as embodied by the pain and suffering of only two families, that of Robi Damelin and Bassam Aramin, and to articulate what I believe is ultimately at stake for the Jewish people and state of Israel if a two-state resolution to this conflict is not reached soon.

Without a negotiated settlement, in a short amount of time Israel will cease either to be a democracy or a Jewish state. Settlement building by Israelis and population growth among Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza and within the Green Line of Israel, all taken together, ultimately will doom the Zionist enterprise, arguably the most important historical event in the life of the Jewish people in the last two thousand years.

Yes – there is still time for a two-state solution, but time is running out.

For the sake of the future of Israel and the Palestinians, the status quo is unsustainable. “Managing the conflict,” as many in Israel believe is their only option, is unsustainable. Only a two-state solution can, as J Street’s communication Vice President and journalist Alan Elsner recently wrote, “complete the Zionist dream” of Israel being Jewish, democratic and an “or lagoyim – a light to the nations.”

There are risks no matter what Israel chooses to do, but the risks are far greater in doing nothing.

Perhaps the insights of one of Israel’s greatest poets, Yehuda Amichai, will inspire clarity and hope:

“From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plough.

And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.”

 

 

The Back Story of the UCLA Judicial Anti-Semitic Incident

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice

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Despite every effort by the four original nay-voters to reverse themselves and clean up the mess they made in the recent vote against the nomination of the Jewish student, Rachel Beyda, to serve on UCLA’s student Judicial Board, and despite the UCLA Administration’s sincere efforts to deal appropriately with this matter, and despite the 12-0 vote of the UCLA Student Government to condemn anti-Semitism in all forms this week (see below), there is a back story that ought to be known.

That back story, published by the “Faculty Lounge: Conversations about Law, Culture and Academia,” shines a light on three of the four initial voters against Ms. Beyda. These three students have been activists in the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement against Israel at UCLA.

“For the past year, there has been a concerted effort at UCLA to rid the student government of anyone who might be insufficiently antagonistic toward Israel, which was seen as necessary to the passage of a BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) resolution. And as it turns out, at least three of the four anti-Beyda voters have been closely connected to that campaign. It is often said that the BDS movement is aimed only at Israel and not at Jews, but this incident shows just how easily anti-Zionism can give rise to what might be called Judeophobia – the assumption that Jews are politically suspect until proven otherwise.” http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2015/03/ucla-the-untold-backstory.html

Though it is possible to accept the right of the Jewish people to a nation state of our own and at the same time support limited-BDS in the occupied territories (a position I do not support because I believe it unfairly targets Israel and does nothing to further a negotiated two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians), the fact is that the main proponents of BDS deny the right of the Jewish people to a nation state on any part of our historic homeland. This position is not only anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, it is also anti-Semitic.

Yes, those three students changed their vote and apologized for offending Jews, but I question the sincerity of those apologies given these three students pro-BDS activism.

See story on UCLA Student Government resolution condemning anti-Semitism in all forms: http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/ucla_student_government_passes_resolution_condemning_anti_semitism1

New Israeli Feminist Ultra-Orthodox Party Runs in Election – Biz’chutan

10 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Ethics, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Women's Rights

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If ever there was a time that ultra-Orthodox women need political, economic, and social power of their own in the state of Israel, now is the time.

For those who have seen the Israeli entry to the Academy Awards this year “Gett” (the third in a trilogy of films) by the brother-sister team of Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, you have witnessed how horribly insensitive and misogynist is the Hareidi rabbinic community in Israel.

Gila Yashar is a Hareidi wife and mother of 7 children who tells her heart-breaking story on the TLV1 broadcast aired on March 8. (see link below). Both the film “Gett” and this story about the women running for the Knesset on the Biz’chutan (“In Their Merit”) list, will shock you. If you are not a part of the Hareidi community or knowledgeable about the place of women in it, it is likely that you have no idea of the depth and breadth of the discrimination against women who stand up for their rights, nor of the dismissive attitude towards injustices they have sustained and which have been ignored by the all-male batei din (rabbinical courts).

I hope that this new political party Biz’chutan wins a necessary minimum (3.25%) of the Israeli electorate so that all four of the Hareidi women running for office – Ruth Culian, Noa Erez, Tami Bilui, and Gila Yashar – will be able to take seats in the next Knesset.

Their courage to defy the ultra-Orthodox Israeli Hareidi community has already given heart to many Hareidi women in similar circumstances who feel utterly alone and abandoned and as though no one cares about them.

Click here to hear this heart-wrenching and inspirational story: http://tlv1.fm/so-much-to-say/2015/03/08/going-against-the-grain-the-bizchutan-party/

B’hatz’lachen!

Zionism and Crisis – A Conversation

08 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Women's Rights

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In late February I was invited to participate in a dialogue on the meaning of Progressive Zionism, Israel’s character as a Jewish homeland and democratic state, why Israel is important for American Jews, our role in US-Israeli politics, and our relationship with each other vis a vis the state of Israel.

I was questioned by Dr. Joshua Holo, Associate Professor of Jewish History and Dean of the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, in a 45-minute conversation. Dr. Holo and I covered many of the most critical issues facing American Jewry in relationship to the state of Israel today. Our conversation can be watched at http://huc.edu/academics/learn/zionism-and-crisis.

This program, called “Zionism and Crisis – A Conversation,” is part of an on-going series of discussions led by Dean Holo on a wide variety of themes in a series called “THE COLLEGE COMMONS.” Currently, 20 Reform synagogues throughout the western United States from Seattle to San Diego and throughout the southwest are participating in a live-stream and real-time conversation followed by discussion in each synagogue led by their respective rabbis. Dr. Holo prepares study materials for those synagogue conversations.

There is no charge for synagogue participation. This is not what Josh calls “Pajama Torah,” meaning that you cannot access this conversation in real-time on-line from home. It must be done in community with others, and so synagogues are signing up and gathering congregants to watch, question the speakers and then discuss together these themes.

If you are interested in participating, ask your rabbis and adult learning chairs to contact HUC and schedule these events. They occur on Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings four times annually. If you live in other communities around the country, you are welcome as well but note the time changes.

For more information see collegecommons@huc.edu. Also see http://huc.edu/campus-life/los-angeles/college-commons and http://huc.edu/academics/learn/theme/458

Upcoming Conversations include (all moderated by Dean Holo):

• DEATH BY SUCCESS? WALKING THE TIGHTROPE OF IDENTITY: with Dr. Kristine Garroway and Rabbi Tali Zelkowicz
• OUR JEWISH FUTURE: THE B’NAI MITZVAH REVOLUTION: with Dr. Isa Aron
• REBIRTH IN GERMANY?: with Dr. Leah Hochman and Dr. Sharon Gillerman
• THE MYSTERY OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS: with Rabbi Joshua Garroway, Ph.D
• ARMED WITH SCRIPTURE: QUR’AN AND TORAH AS WEAPONS IN THE WAR OF IDEAS: with Rabbi Tamara Eskenazi, Ph.D

Past Conversations are now available on-line (above) for viewing from home:

• BULLY PULPIT: TORAH WITH A POINT OF VIEW: with Rabbi Richard Levy
• ANTI-SEMITISM: ROOTS AND REALITY: with David Lehrer
• POLITICS AND THE PULPIT: with Rabbi Stephanie Kolin
• HOW JUDAISM IS CHRISTIANITY?: with Rabbi Joshua Garroway
• FROM ARAB SPRING TO ARAB SUMMER – OR WINTER? FAULT LINES IN THE ARAB AND MUSLIM WORLDS: with Rabbi Reuven Firestone, Ph.D
• A FORUM ON THE 2013 PEW STUDY OF JEWISH AMERICANS: with Sr. Sarah Bunin Benor, Dr. Bruce A. Phillips and Dr. Steven Windmueller

This is an exciting new forum for synagogue learning with leading scholars and teachers. My own synagogue will be part of next year’s series.

I wish to express my gratitude to my friend Dr. Josh Holo for conceiving and initiating this forum and thereby bringing scholars and HUC faculty to our communities on a regular basis.

Remembering Leonard Nimoy – Eulogy

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Art, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Tributes

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(What follows is a portion of my eulogy at Leonard’s funeral on Sunday morning, March 1. He was married to my first cousin, Susan)

Leonard shared with me after he and Susan married 26 years ago that he had never met a woman like her, never had he loved anyone so dearly and passionately, that she’d saved his life and lifted him from darkness and unhappiness in ways he never thought possible. His love, appreciation, respect, and gratitude for her transformed him and enabled him to begin his life anew.

Susan – you were a stellar, loving and brilliant life-partner for your Leib. He knew it and in loving you he learned how to love his own children and grandchildren more deeply, and he came to recognize that his family was his greatest treasure and gift.

At the moment Leonard’s soul left him on Friday morning, his family had gathered around him in a ring of love. Leonard smiled, and then he was gone. It was gentle passing, as easy as a “hair being lifted from a cup of milk,” as the Talmud describes the moment of death.

What did Leonard see? We can’t know, but Susan imagines that he beheld his beloved cocker spaniel Molly, an angelic presence in life and now in death.

My wife Barbara and I shared much with Susan and Leonard over the years, in LA and in so many spectacular places around the world – so many joys and not a few challenges, and through it all we grew to love Leonard as a dear member of our family and were honored that he felt towards us as members of his own family.

At his 80th birthday celebration three years ago, I publicly thanked him for all he’d meant to my family and me, for being the love of Susan’s life, and for bringing her so much happiness.

Kind-hearted, gentle, patient, refined, and keenly intelligent was he.

As I listened to NPR’s story of his passing on Friday, I was struck by how uniquely recognizable to the world was his voice, not only because of its innate resonance and gentle tone, but because it emanated who he was as a man and as a mensch.

He was unflappably honest and warm-hearted. He embodied integrity and decency. He was humble and a gentleman. His sensitivity and intuition connected him with the world and offered him keen insight into the human condition. Whatever he said and did was compelling, inspiring and provocative. He strove always for excellence.

Leonard’s Hebrew name was Yehudah Lev, meaning “a Jew with a heart.” His interests and concerns were founded upon his faith and belief in the inherent dignity of every human being, and he treated everyone regardless of station, friend or stranger, with kindness and respect. His world view was enriched by his Jewish spirit and experience.

Leonard was nurtured in the Yiddish-speaking culture of his childhood on the West End of Boston, yet he transcended the particular categories with which he was raised. He cared about the Jews of the former Soviet Union, about Jews everywhere, and he was concerned for all people as well.

Because he grew up as a minority in his neighborhood, even sensing at times that he was an outcast living on the margins (which is what his Spock character was all about), Leonard ventured out from the conservative home and culture of his youth, courageously at a very young age, into the world where he sought greater truth and understanding. He was curious about everything and was a life-long learner.

Leonard appreciated his success, never taking his fame and good fortune for granted. He was generous with family, friends and so many good causes often contributing without being asked, quietly and under the radar, to individuals and causes selflessly, without need of acknowledgment or credit. In his later years, he learned that by fixing his name to some gifts, he could inspire others to give as well.

Over the years, from the time he performed in the Yiddish theater as a young actor, Leonard was particularly drawn to Jewish roles in film, television, stage, and radio. Most enduringly he brought the gesture of the Biblical High Priest to the world’s attention as an iconic symbol of blessing. He was amused that his fans unsuspectingly blessed each other as they held up their hands and said, “Live long and prosper!”

Most recently, Leonard created magnificent mystical images of feminine Godliness in his Shechinah photographs, one of which he gave to me as a gift graces my synagogue study and adds a spiritual dimension for me of everything I do in my life as a rabbi.

One year Leonard asked me what I thought of his accepting an invitation from Germany to speak before thousands of Star Trek fans. He told me that he’d been asked before but always turned the invitation down due to his own discomfort about setting foot in a country that had murdered six million Jews.

I told him that I thought it was time that he went, and that he take the opportunity to inform a new generation of Germans about who he was as a Jew and about the Jewish dimension of Spock’s personality and outlook. He liked the idea, and so on that basis accepted the invitation.

When he returned he told me that he had shared with the audience his own Jewish story and that Spock’s hand gesture was that of the Jewish High Priest blessing the Jewish community, an image he remembered from his early childhood attending shul with his grandfather in West Boston on Shabbes morning and peeking out from under his grandfather’s tallis at the Kohanim-Priests as they raised their hands in blessing over the congregation.

He told me that when he finished his talk he received a sustained standing ovation, an experience that was among the most moving in his public life.

There’s another incident worth recalling.

The Soviet Film Institute had invited Leonard in the mid 1980s to come to Moscow to speak about “Star Trek IV,” which he had directed. Leonard agreed to come on the condition that he be granted free passage to Zaslov, Ukraine to visit Nimoy relatives he’d never met. The Soviet officials refused, so Leonard declined. Then they had a change of heart and caved, and he and Susan visited the Ukrainian Nimoys thus reuniting two branches of his family tree divided eighty years earlier. Who else but Leonard Nimoy could stare down the former Soviet Union and win!?

Over time Leonard became one of the most positive Jewish role models in the world. He cared about all the right things, about promoting the Jewish arts, about peace and reconciliation between people and nations, and about greater justice in our own society.

He and I talked frequently about our love for Israel and its need for peace. He understood that a democratic Jewish state could survive only alongside a peaceful Palestinian state. He was disgusted by terrorism and war, disheartened by Israeli and Palestinian inability and recalcitrance to find compromise and a way forward towards a two-state solution and peace, and he was infuriated by continuing Israeli West Bank settlement construction and by both Islamic and Jewish fundamentalist extremism.

Though keenly aware of, knowledgeable about and savvy when it came to national and world politics and history, Leonard was at his core a humanitarian and an artist, and that was the lens through which he viewed the world.

Among his favorite quotations was that spoken by the 19th century actor Edwin Booth who claimed to have heard the solemn whisper of the god of all arts:

“I shall give you hunger and pain and sleepless nights, also beauty and satisfaction known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these shall you have continually, and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold.”

Leonard did indeed glimpse the heavenly life in his artistic pursuits and in his love for his family and friends.

In thinking of him, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s words:

“Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Act III, Scene 2

I’ve never known anyone like Leonard – he was utterly unique. I loved him and will cherish his memory always.

Zecher tzaddik livracha – May the memory of this righteous man be a blessing.

Anti-Semitism at UCLA and College Campuses Nationwide and the Impact of BDS on Attitudes Towards Jews

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice

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The LA Jewish Journal this week reported that four of nine members of the UCLA student government’s highest judicial body “raised concern about a candidate for the board, Rachel Beyda, who could present a conflict of interest and make her unfit to serve impartially as a judge in the student government’s judicial branch.”

What was the problem with Ms. Beyda’s candidacy? She is Jewish, involved with UCLA’s campus Jewish community and therefore, they claimed, has a conflict of interest should the board vote on a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution targeting Israel.

Debra Geller, the chief administrative officer for student and campus life who oversaw the hearing, inserted herself after the vote and told these four board members that they did not appear to understand the difference between ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘perceived conflict of interest,’ and that virtually everyone, including them, could be seen to have a perceived conflict. The four then reversed their vote, and apologized – sort of.

They said: “We ask the Jewish community to accept our sincerest apology. Our intentions were never to attack, insult or de-legitimize the identity of an individual or people.”  (Daily Bruin, February 20)

The words sound right, but this incident reflects something deeper, more troubling, insidious, and pervasive not just at UCLA but on college campuses nationwide.

Though these four dissenters showed sincere remorse for their initial vote against Ms. Beyda, I question whether they and the UCLA administration understand adequately the nature of the problem.

I try not to speak with hyperbole. I am not one who sees anti-Semites lurking under every bed. I am not a fear-monger. I do not believe that all criticism of Jews or the state of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic.

Yet, our inability to use the term anti-Semitism when it concerns Jews, when we don’t have a problem calling other forms of ethnic and religious bigotry what it is, raises disturbing questions about prevalent attitudes towards Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and the state of Israel.

It is likely that the four members of the UCLA board do not regard their initial position as anti-Semitic. But I believe that it was, and we should call it what it really is.

The multicultural agenda in American liberal circles, that I personally support, includes virtually all other minorities but excludes Jews who, it seems, have been reduced to being simply a successful white American religious group. This attitude belies a deeper understanding of what constitute Judaism, Jewish religious history, Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and the meaning of the state of Israel in contemporary Jewish identity.

This reductionist Jewish definition has the effect of challenging Israel’s legitimacy and feeding the international de-legitimization movement against Israel. It is not only an anti-Israel and anti-Zionist position, but it is anti-Semitic because it is essentially an attack on the right of Jews to define ourselves, and it plays on classic anti-Semitic stereotypes without appreciating how hurtful and offensive these stereo-types are to Jews, and how damaging they are to the fabric of our American multicultural society.

De-legitimizers of Israel have worked very hard over a number of years to promote the belief that the existence of the state of Israel represents a moral injustice to the Palestinians and that even a two-state solution is morally unacceptable. This position is promoted not just at UCLA but on college campuses nationwide, and is having an effect on student attitudes towards Jews and Israel.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week that 54% of American Jewish university students have experienced or witnessed at least one anti-Semitic incident during a single year. These experiences “strongly suggests that anti-Semitism is a nationwide problem,” according to the report.

The attitude of the UCLA administration about what is happening there reflects a national attitude as well. One UCLA official wrote: “My impression, when I speak with students, is that there is more ignorance/lack of sensitivity than racism – and I do try to be on the look-out for racism and other forms of bias.”

Perhaps this is the case with many students, but not all. The problem is the successful conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism fed by the de-legitimization movement as it plays upon unsuspecting and uninformed college students and faculty, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who believe that the perceived underdog, in this case the Palestinians, must be supported regardless of context, merit and truth.

There is a silver lining in this incident. This may create a space on campuses for students and faculty to learn more about Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and Jewish identity, and thereby come to a more inclusive, compassionate and fair understanding of who we are, what hurts Jews, and what kind of attitudes we need to evolve about each other.

Dr. Martin Luther King put it exactly right when he said: “People don’t get along because they fear each other. People fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they have not properly communicated with each other.”

Obviously, this need to know each other works both ways. Jews need to understand Islam, Palestinians and other peoples just as they need to understand us. Now is the time for deeper self-understanding and self-knowledge, for better communication and better listening to the “other.”

Haaretz on Anti-Semitism on College Campuses – http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.644105

LA Jewish Journal – UCLA Judicial Board Questioned on Jewish Background in Apppointment – http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/ucla_judicial_board_nominee_questioned_for_jewish_background_in_appointment

 

Can Israel be a Jewish State and a True Democracy?

22 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice

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One month before the Israeli election, on Tuesday, February 17 in Tel Aviv, hundreds of journalists, political leaders, diplomats, and opinion-makers attended the “Israel Conference on Democracy” sponsored by the New Israel Fund, the Begin Heritage Center, the Israel Democracy Institute, and the ANU movement for social change. Reported on TLVI by Shoshi Shmuluvitz, I thought it important enough to pass the highlights of her report along to you in this blog.

One central focus of the conference was the future of the “Nation State Bill” and how the upcoming Israeli election will determine whether or not the Israeli government will pass this law.

This Basic Law proposal would define Israel as the “Nation-State of the Jewish People.” Introduced into the Knesset by Israeli right wing parties in 2011, its purpose is to prevent Israel from becoming a bi-national state.

The law says that the right to self-determination in Israel would be unique to the Jewish people, that the state of Israel should establish ethnic communities in which every resident can preserve its culture and heritage, that the Hebrew language would be the only official language of the state while Arabic would have special status, that the Hebrew calendar would become the official national calendar, and that Jewish law would serve as an inspiration to Israeli legislators.

Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, a leading organization committed to equality and democracy for all Israeli citizens, described the serious challenge to the nature of the state of Israel that this proposed law presents:

“The Nation State Bill puts the state, which has to be the neutral arbiter for all citizens, on the side of one bloc of citizens, and upends the fundamental principle that was integral to Israel’s founding, that Israel was a Jewish homeland and a democratic state that provided equal citizenship for all. The Nation State Bill would make the Jewish part always outweigh the democratic part, and the democratic part subservient to the Jewish part. This is not only unnecessary but dangerous because the bill recasts the character of the state.”

Avram Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset and a former head of the Jewish Agency, warned that there is a significant distinction between a “Jewish state” and “a state of the Jews.” A “State of the Jews” is a place where Jews can live and be the majority. The “Jewish state” is a state that discriminates in favor of one group against another.

Ahmad Tibi is an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset and one of ten Deputy Knesset Speakers. He describes himself as Arab-Palestinian in nationality and Israeli in citizenship. He observed that Israel runs 3 types of regimes:

The first is democratic for 80% of the population that is the Jewish majority.

The second discriminates against 20% of the population (the Arab Palestinian population who are Israeli citizens) in all areas except voting. He says there is no equality between Jews and Arabs in the areas of budget, education, services, housing starts, and industry.

The third is a non-democracy in the West Bank under the authority of the military administration that treats the Arab non-Israeli citizen population very differently than it does  the Jewish Israeli citizen settlement populations.

MK Tibi said that “A state that runs the 2nd discriminatory regime and the 3rd non-democratic regime cannot gain the status of a true democracy, yet Israel demands that the world recognize it only by the first kind of society that is democratic.”

Tzipi Livni, running with Yitzhak Herzog on the Zionist List in the upcoming election, said:

“The Prime Minister can’t go to a synagogue in France and tell the French that together we’re fighting against ISIS in the name of western values like equality when a few weeks earlier he refused to say that those should be the values of the state of Israel. And then he undermines our democracy, undermines our values, undermines the legitimacy of Israel, and undermines the part of the world that defends those rights.”

Why has this Nation State Bill become such a hot-button issue now?

Sokatch explained:

“There’s a deep-rooted sense of fear and insecurity that creates an atmosphere in which those in power want to stifle dissent and roll back democratic norms to something that is unfamiliar to those of us who want to be part of the liberal democratic family of nations.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he continued, “that they care about the future of Israel; and foremost in their mind is the security of the state. The only way, however, to continue Israel’s future strength is as a modern, liberal, open democratic society that is also a homeland for the Jewish people.”

What is so disturbing about this Nation State Bill is that the value of democracy is being questioned and even assaulted by significant elements of Israeli society, and that not only presents  problems for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, but it erodes the legitimacy of the Jewish state in the eyes of the western world.

Purim Lessons for Jews in 2015

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Divrei Torah, Ethics, Holidays, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice

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It is Rosh Chodesh Adar and that means Purim is coming in a particularly difficult time for Jews and the state of Israel.

Given the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, the brutality and threat of Islamic extremists, the Iran nuclear negotiations, the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the threat of another Palestinian Intifida, the contested Israeli election, the battle for the soul of the state of Israel and the American Jewish community, one can argue that Purim offers us necessary relief on the one hand and intensified angst on the other.

Truth to tell, Purim should make every Jew feel very uncomfortable, despite the joy and care-free spirit of the celebration, the masquerade and sweet hamantaschen. The story of Esther, though celebrating the victory of the Jews of ancient Persia over Haman’s genocidal intentions, has an intensely dark side for us Jews that we ignore at our peril.

The book of Esther is a challenge to liberal Jewish moral values, and it shows that the human being is capable of just about anything:

“…on the thirteenth day of…Adar…the very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power, the opposite happened and the Jews got their enemies in their power…Throughout the provinces of King Ahashuerus, the Jews mustered in their cities to attack those who sought their hurt…So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying;…. In the fortress Shushan the Jews killed a total of 500 men… [and] they disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes….” (Esther 9:6-10, 16)

How do we modern liberal Jews justify Mordecai’s and the Jews of Persia’s blood-revenge? Though the Esther story’s historicity is suspect, this terrifying tale describes what can and has happened to Jews in exile, and it warns what can happen in any society, even Jewish society, when power falls into the hands of one group.

History has shown that our having our own state has not shielded us from committing moral crimes. Pastor Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great figures of the 20th century, reminds us about the dangers of power:

“All power is a peril to justice…and the pride and self-righteousness of powerful nations are a greater hazard to their success than the machinations of their foes.”

Israel is a great democracy, but Israel’s military administration of the West Bank is not democratic. There are two systems are at work in the West Bank; one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinian Arabs.

Though the Jewish response to their Persian enemies in the Esther story is not the story of Israel’s military justice in the West Bank, justice there is compromised by the two sets of standards for Jews and Arabs, and we Jews cannot turn a blind eye by justifying the status quo policy of occupation on the basis of divine right, ideology or security. Peter Beinart put it well this week in Haaretz (February 18, 2015):

“Israel is a decent country composed of decent young men and women who, in the West Bank, are obliged to police people who lack basic rights. And in such circumstances, decent people do indecent things. ‘We are making the lives of millions unbearable,’ declares one former Shin Bet head, Carmi Gillon, in the film ‘The Gatekeepers.’ In the West Bank, Israel has become ‘a brutal occupation force,’ notes another, Avraham Shalom. A third, Yuval Diskin, calls the occupation a ‘colonial regime.’ These men don’t hate Israel; they have dedicated their lives to protecting it…they are discussing the real Israel, not the one [others] have constructed in their minds.”

On Purim Jews are called upon to drink so heavily that we can no longer distinguish between the evil Haman and the virtuous Mordecai.

Do we really need alcohol to remind us that we so easily can assume the identity of Haman in the midst of our stupor? We need only to open our eyes and regard the reality of our situation. Yes, actions in our self-defense as a nation are morally justifiable even though mistakes and excess have resulted in suffering, but our gratuitously perpetrating evil as a matter of policy, which the occupation has become, is not justifiable.

Rather than Purim numbing us with hard drink and masquerade to the truth of our situation and human nature, this holiday arrives each year to remind us of the darkness lurking in every human heart and soul, and that our moral and ethical mandate as Jews, who have been graced with power for the first time in two thousand years, is to be exquisitely sensitive to the suffering of the “other,” to avoid becoming hard-hearted as a people, and to cease the infliction of gratuitous suffering.

Bibi is Irresponsibly Shaking Up American Jewish Bi-Partisan Support for Israel

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity

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The American Jewish community, American rabbis who normally do not speak critically of Israeli actions, members of Congress who have been part of a bi-partisan bloc of support for Israel and the Israeli Prime Minister for decades, are all being tested as never before by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because of his ill-advised, ill-timed and self-serving visit to the United States Congress in two weeks.

Israel’s security has historically depended upon American congressional bi-partisan support and the support of the President of the United States. Though most observers do not believe that the rock-solid relationship between Israel and the United States will ultimately suffer, Bibi has created a mess in Washington, D.C. He may say that his only motivation in coming in two weeks to speak on the unprecedented invitation of Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner only two weeks before a critically important and contested Israeli election is to remind Congress and the American people of the deadly danger of Iran gaining nuclear capability, history suggests otherwise. Bibi used another speech before Congress in another Israeli election campaign to send a strong election campaign message to Israeli voters that he and only he is capable among all candidates and parties for Israeli leadership of standing before the world and protecting Israel from the throng of hostile nations in Israel’s neighborhood.

In this election, PM Netanyahu wants to change the subjects that are in the minds and hearts of Israeli voters who by all polls are far more concerned about the growing economic gap between the rich and the poor, the vanishing middle class, the stranglehold of the Orthodox religious parties on marriage, divorce, conversion and burial in the state of Israel, the badly damaged international reputation of Israel as a consequence of Netanyahu’s policies, the social and political divide between mizrachim and ashkenazim, the growing alienation of non-Jewish Israeli citizens from the state of Israel, the lack of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the growing extremism of the Jewish settler movement, and a host of other domestic issues that this current government has failed to address adequately.

Bibi has come to the conclusion that if he can keep Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas on the front burner and in the minds of Israeli voters, and if he can frighten Israelis into thinking that only he can assure Israel’s security needs, then he will be re-elected Israel’s Prime Minister which is what he wants above all other things including, in my view, the best interests of Israel itself.

A former Israeli Ambassador to Turkey was speaking in Istanbul after the Gaza war to the Jewish community there, and he was asked what Netanyahu is most concerned about.

“Survival!” he said. The crowd cheered and he realized that they misunderstood him. He explained that Bibi wasn’t interested most in Israel’s survival but in his own as Prime Minister, and that above all else he desired to win re-election. The former ambassador was booed.

Yes, PM Netanyahu is deeply concerned about Iran and he has done everything possible to raise the world’s attention to the real threat of Iran becoming nuclear. He deserves credit for this, and I am happy to give it to him. But, he is not alone in his concern. President Obama has brought the western nations along with the United States to stop Iran’s march towards nuclear capability. Bibi, however, trusts no one and especially not President Obama.

We do not know as yet whether or not President Obama and the coalition of nations will succeed in reaching a negotiated agreement on principles with Iran before the end of March. That will be known shortly and then sanctions can be tightened if they do not succeed, which is what the President has promised and the US Congress is prepared to do – with all options still on the table!

PM Netanyahu could have waited until after the Israeli election and after the March deadline for negotiating principles to be determined with Iran, if they can be, before coming to the United States. He could have waited to be certain that President Obama approved the invitation from Speaker Boehner before he accepted it – but no, he arrogantly did not.

Given the way his visit to the Congress was put together by former American Republican operative Ron Prosser, now Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, and Republican leadership who enjoy nothing more than slapping down this President and, while they are at it, driving a wedge between Jewish Democratic congressional representatives and the American Jewish community on support for Israel. It should be clear that Bibi’s motivations to come to the US at precisely this time are largely political as the Israeli election approaches in one month.

The following article from The Guardian describes well the current mood in the American Jewish community, among prominent American rabbis, Jewish organizational leadership, and Jewish congressional representatives.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/14/netanyahu-congress-reaction-jewish-leaders-boehner

Being There – Parashat Mishpatim

12 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Divrei Torah, Health and Well-Being, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

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More than twenty years ago I read a wonderful book the title of which I’ve never forgotten because it states such a profound and obvious truth – Where ever you go – There you are! The book was written by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

The volume is both an instructional guide on how to meditate, how to sit, and how to breathe, how to calm the mind and live in the present, and it is about the physical, mental and emotional health benefits that meditators attain over time.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn wrote that we are who we are everywhere we go, that we reveal ourselves fully all the time whether we’re aware of doing so or not, in all of our relationships, at home and in the work place, in our most private moments and in the crowd.

I read the book when Barbara, our then-young sons and I spent a week one summer in a home loaned to us by friends on Malibu’s famed-Broad Beach.

Each morning I awoke early before everyone else, made a strong cup of coffee and walked out on the sand to a bluff to sit on a weathered wooden bench where I’d look at the ocean, smell the morning salt air, listen to the waves, and read.

The book inspired me to begin meditating, and I did so for a year fairly religiously, and though I haven’t continued in a rigorous way since, I still find that I can, even for just a few moments at a time, settle myself down as I learned to do so long ago and feel refreshed and more present.

I recalled those summer days this week as I studied Parashat Mishpatim and encountered one special verse:

“The Eternal One said to Moses, Go up to me to the mountain – and be there, and I will give you the stone tablets and the Torah and the commandment that I inscribed [that you may] teach them.” (Exodus 14:19)

“עלה אלי ההרה – go up to Me to the mountain, והויה שם and be there.”

A redundancy to be sure! God told Moses to go to the top of a mountain. Once there, where else would he be? And why was it necessary for God to say to him also “be there?”

I would imagine that God wanted Moses to pay special attention, to open his sensual and spiritual antennae as he received Torah that he may absorb it as fully as he was capable as the preeminent and most intimate of God’s prophets. God knew, of course, that Moses was human, that he, like all of us, was distractible.

The Kotzker Rebbe commented that sometimes we expend a great deal of effort to reach an exalted goal – a great job, success, wealth, fame, love, family, friends, community – but once we achieve that which we thought we wanted sometimes we no longer want or need it at all, that it’s wrong and destructive for us.

It may be that we’ve lost so much of ourselves in the climbing that we’re no longer in touch with who we really are, having become fragmented and lost along the way.

In moments such as these, what do we do? I believe we need to remember that no one achievement, no one person in our lives, and no one identity, and certainly not wealth or fame, is ever the totality of who we are as individuals.

The Kotzker taught that the goal of our lives cannot be merely to ascend and to reach for an exalted summit, but to “be there,” to be here now and nowhere else.

The Kotzker continued that since God can be everywhere there never was a need for Moses to have had to go up onto the mountain at all, that all Moses ever needed to do was to stop where he was and achieve an ascent in that very place. There he could have received the Torah.

So too is it for us.

May we be like children awakening in the morning, fresh, alive, vibrant, and filled with wonder at the fact of living itself, at the miracle of simply being here.

Shabbat shalom!

Source for the insights of the Kotzker Rebbe – cited in Larry Kushner’s and Kerry Olitzky’s “Sparks Beneath The Surface,” Jason Aaronson Inc,. New Jersey. 1993. page 91.