On January 3, I wrote about my love for the early morning and posted images that I photographed as I walked in my neighborhood over the course of 2022. With the rain these past two weeks, the mornings have given forth more lovely images that I offer you along with three poems that elicit the glory of morning.

Composed upon Westminster Bridge – William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

“Earth has not anything to show more fair: / Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty: / This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning …”

Dawn – Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

“Day’s sweetest moments are at dawn; / Refreshed by his long sleep, the Light / Kisses the languid lips of Night, / Ere she can rise and hasten on …”

Morning – Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

“The mist has left the greening plain, / The dew-drops shine like fairy rain, / The coquette rose awakes again / Her lovely self adorning.

The Wind is hiding in the trees, / A sighing, soothing, laughing tease, / Until the rose says ‘Kiss me, please,’ / ‘Tis morning, ’tis morning.

With staff in hand and careless-free, / The wanderer fares right jauntily, / For towns and houses are, thinks he, / For scorning,  for scorning. / My soul is swift upon the wing, / And in its deeps a song I bring; / Come, Love, and we together sing, / ‘Tis morning, ’tis morning.”

Dr. Martin Luther King spoke from the bimah of Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles on Shabbat evening, February 26, 1965, five days after the assassination of Malcolm X. Security was tight around the synagogue on that evening. Sharpshooters were placed on the apartment building across the street on Hollywood Boulevard. The Sanctuary was filled to capacity with 1400+ congregants.

Rabbi Max Nussbaum (1908-1974) was the Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel of Hollywood from 1942 to his death in 1974. He was born in Romania, graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Wurzburg, and was ordained by the liberal German rabbinic seminary in Breslau, Germany (on the Polish border east of Berlin) in 1936. He served as a community rabbi in Berlin until 1940 under Rabbi Leo Baeck, the titular leader of German Jewry before World War II.

Rabbi Nussbaum and his wife Ruth were married in Berlin in 1938 by Rabbi Baeck under the watchful eye of the Gestapo. They remained in Berlin in order to give comfort and solace to the Berlin Jewish community as the Nazis escalated their persecution of the Jewish people. When Max and Ruth learned that the Gestapo was planning to arrest him, they fled to Amsterdam in the middle of the night, then to Portugal, bought passage on a ship, and finally arrived in the United States. They met with The New York Times to describe the dire situation of German Jewry and then with the German Jewish Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in Washington, D.C. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leading American Zionist and Max’s mentor and friend, had arranged for him to enter the United States with the promise of a rabbinic position serving a small congregation in Muskogee, Oklahoma in 1940 where Max learned English (Ruth was already a fluent English speaker). In 1942, he was elected Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles.

Max was a strong labor Zionist and an articulate liberal social justice activist, and it was as a consequence of his national and international prominence that he met and befriended Dr. King leading to the invitation of Dr. King to speak at Temple Israel in February of 1965.

Rabbi Nussbaum reminded the congregation that evening that since it was Shabbat, following custom and consistent with Rabbi Nussbaum’s German Jewish respect for decorum, that applause following Dr. King’s remarks would be inappropriate. In his introduction of Dr. King, Rabbi Nussbaum instructed the filled sanctuary: “You will wish to applaud, and you will not do so!”

The existence of Dr. King’s recorded speech, a part of the Temple Israel of Hollywood archives, was discovered by the wider Los Angeles Jewish community in 2006. The Los Angeles Jewish Journal contacted me, as the then Senior Rabbi of the congregation (1988-2019), before the Martin Luther King Holiday weekend to request permission to write a story about it. National Public Radio learned of the speech’s recording from the LAJJ article and requested permission to air it nationally. I happily agreed and the speech was broadcast on the MLK holiday weekend in both 2007 and 2008. The recording is now part of Temple Israel’s annual Martin Luther King Holiday celebration.

The sound quality of the recording is exceptionally clear. The speech borrows from many addresses that Dr. King delivered over the course of his career. He was only 35 years-old when he spoke that night in February 1965.

This blog also appears at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/dr-martin-luther-kings-sermon-temple-israel-of-hollywood-february-26-1965/

You can listen to and read a transcript of his remarks here – http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlktempleisraelhollywood.htm

Judi Rudoren, the Editor-in-Chief of The Forward, reported that Ansche Chesed, a Conservative synagogue in Manhattan, will not recite a prayer for the State of Israel that includes the religious language “raishit smichat gi’ulateinu – the initial sprouting of our redemption” that is called “the signature line from the Prayer for the State of Israel” as instituted by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate after the establishment of the State in 1948 (Ha-Tsofeh on 20 September 1948).

Anshe Chesed’s Rabbi, Jeremy Kalmanofsky, said in an interview with the Forward that he could no longer pray for the success of Israel’s current leaders, ministers and advisers, as this liturgy calls for, since its new government includes right-wing extremists he considers akin to the Ku Klux Klan. He said: “I don’t hope that this government succeeds. I hope that this government falls and is replaced by something better… I just could not imagine us saying this prayer that their efforts be successful. I think their efforts are dastardly.”

I agree. The anti-democratic “religious Zionism” of the extremist right-wing political and ultra-Orthodox parties in the new Israeli government is not the religious Zionism with which we in the liberal and progressive Zionist community identify. Our religious Zionism includes the principle that Israel will remain democratic and the State for the entirety of the Jewish people. We emphasize justice as a precondition for the Jewish people’s settlement of the land as commanded in the Book of Deuteronomy:

“Justice justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and take hold of the land that the Lord your God is about to give you.” (16:20)

Equal justice must remain a core value and foundational goal for all Israeli citizens (Jewish and non-Jewish) and institutions and for Palestinians living under military occupation. The new Israeli government broadcast its intention, however, contrary to Israel’s democratic traditions, to limit the authority of Israel’s High Court and to move quickly towards de-facto annexation of illegal West Bank outposts thereby preparing the way for unilateral de-jure annexation of the entirety of the West Bank. This is not the religious Zionism that we support in liberal and progressive Zionist circles.

Judi Rudoren noted that the American Reform movement includes a different prayer for the State of Israel in its prayer book Mishkan HaTfilah that does not include language that Rabbi Kalmanofsky finds objectionable given the new Israeli government. The Reform movement’s prayer emphasizes the State as the embodiment of the Jewish people’s highest moral and spiritual aspirations:

“O Heavenly One, Protector and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel which marks the dawning of hope for all who seek peace. Shield it beneath the wings of Your love; spread over it the canopy of Your Peace; send Your light and truth to all who lead and advise, guiding them with Your good counsel. Establish peace in the land and fullness of joy for all who dwell there.
Amen.” – Mishkan HaTfilah (p. 377)

In 2005, before the publication of Mishkan HaTfilah, my congregation, Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles, created our own High Holiday Machzor in which we included the following prayer, based upon a prayer published decades before in an early Israeli Reform prayer book:

“Eternal God of the universe: Receive our prayers for the peace and security of the State of Israel and its people. Bring Your blessing upon the Land and upon all who labor in its interest. Inspire those who lead the Jewish State to follow the ways of righteousness. Remove from their hearts hatred, malice, jealousy, fear, and strife. Let them be infused with the ancient hope of Zion and be encouraged by the symbol of Jerusalem as the eternal city of peace. May the State of Israel be a blessing to all its inhabitants and to the Jewish people everywhere, and may she be a light to the nations of the world. Amen!”(Temple Israel of Hollywood High Holiday Machzor, p. 111)

“Religious Zionism” includes also those of us in the liberal and progressive Zionist community in North America and around the world who refuse to allow right-wing Zionist extremists to take sole ownership of the religious Zionist label.

Our prayers for the well-being and security of the people and State of Israel, as written in Mishkan HaTfilah and my synagogue’s prayer book, provide language that transcends particular Israeli governments and embraces the highest moral and spiritual aspirations of liberal Judaism, liberal Zionism, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel’s democratic traditions.

This blog also appears at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-prayer-for-israel-that-transcends-the-new-government/ 

Last week in a Times of Israel Blog, Rabbi Brian Strauss of Houston, Texas accused J Street (a pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy political organization in Washington, D.C.) of being anti-Israel based on a selective misreading of J Street statements and actions. Here is his piece – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/j-street-is-honest-about-what-it-is-we-just-have-to-listen/

J Street’s President and CEO, Jeremy Ben Ami, responded, also in a Times of Israel Blog, and clarified J Street’s policy positions which, according to polls, represent the views of 70% of the American Jewish community vis a vis its support of Israel, its security (e.g. support for the Memo of Understanding granting $3.8 billion military support annually for ten years, support of the Iron Dome defense system, support for the JCPOA, and against BDS), prospects for peace and justice with the Palestinians (opposes Israel’s Occupation policies and the expanding settlement enterprise), and supports democracy in Israel and the United States. Here is his piece – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/j-street-and-what-it-really-means-to-be-pro-israel/

I urge those who are concerned about the historically close and important American-Israel relationship and what J Street actually advocates to read both articles carefully. Also, I suggest that they look at J Street’s website (www.jstreet.org) and read its policy positions, blogs, and press releases, and then come to an informed conclusion about J Street’s positions and advocacy work. They may disagree with positions J Street has taken, but it is important that civility amongst American Jews and a respect for each other’s pro-Israel bona fides be sustained and that name-calling and the questioning of motives vis a vis Israel be rejected.

A disclaimer: I have been a supporter of J Street from its beginnings in 2009. I believe in its mission and advocacy goals before the American Congress and Administration as well as its role as a safe space for pro-Israel liberal and progressive American Jews to express their liberal American Jewish values. I serve currently as a national co-chair (with three colleagues in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Tel Aviv) of the J Street Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet that has grown to 1100 members nationally.

I start each day very early in the morning – usually between 3:30 am and 4:30 am. As I age, my sleep patterns and circadian rhythms have changed. However, the morning hours are my delight. While it is still dark, I read and write, as my head is clearest then. By the time I perceive through my home office-window looking towards the east the silhouette of the trees emerging from the darkness against a lightening sky, I prepare to go out, rain or shine, for a 3 to 5 mile walk in my neighborhood.

We live in the foothills of Sherman Oaks, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, on a small street without sidewalks that feels more like a country road than a city street. We love it here. We bought this modest home at the beginning of 1989, raised our sons here, and can’t imagine living anywhere else.

While on these morning walks, often while it is still dark, I listen to podcasts or music or I simply enjoy the silence. Ours is a very quiet neighborhood. We can hear sometimes in the distance the Amtrak trains signaling their coming into a station, church bells ringing on the hour, the muffled din of traffic on the 101 a mile or two away, mockingbirds singing mating calls in springtime in our backyard trees, owls cooing, and the loud caws of crows. A flock of crows (called a “murder”) lives here year-round and, apparently, loves our neighborhood as we do. At the top of a tall pine tree two doors from our home, during the spring and summer, there sits often a hawk disturbed from time to time during the nesting season by small black birds swinging around him and squawking as they nose-dive towards the hawk on his perch without there seemingly being any effect at all upon the larger bird that sits so regally and still.

I pass the same people and their dogs most mornings, and though I know no one’s name, we wave to each other in friendly recognition. They are all part of the beginning of my day.

I often witness on these hour+ long walks spectacular moon and sun risings. The colors in the early morning sky of bright red, magenta, and orange play themselves off streaking clouds over rain-soaked streets (of late) yet to evaporate with the progression of the day.

When I see a breath-taking image, I take a photograph. Today, I offer some of those images from the last year that I was fortunate to record at the right moment, as many of them vanished within seconds of their appearance. They represent the quiet radiance and calm of the morning’s light.

A joyful, healthy, and peaceful New Year to you all.

It is hard to fathom the inner life of George Santos, the disgraced Congressman-elect from the 3^rd District of New York, as he manufactured virtually everything about his past and identity to create a new persona and win a seat in Congress – his family origins in Europe and the Holocaust, his religion as a Jew, his high school and college education as a graduate of elite schools, his employment history in powerful economic institutions, his considerable wealth and ownership of multiple properties, his mother’s death in 9/11, and his sexual identity.

So many questions have been raised about the character and integrity of this young man; how he thought he could lie so brazenly and present himself so fraudulently to the constituents of his congressional district; why the media and his Democratic opponent didn’t perform due diligence by giving even a cursory check into Santos’ exalted claims about himself and his alleged accomplishments during the campaign; and how the morally challenged leadership of the Republican Party can remain so utterly silent that such a liar is about to become a fellow Member of Congress, though nothing ought to surprise us any longer about the craven power-seeking-at-all-costs-Republican-Party and its Senate and House members in the Trump era.

I have been wondering how Santos could look at himself in the mirror each morning and then go out into the public and brazenly present himself as a fraud about virtually everything that distinguishes a human being. And I have wondered what damning secrets he is covering up that compelled him to lie so flagrantly and with such hubris and dishonorable ignobility.

What is he hiding? What truths about his character has he veiled? What blemishes is he refusing to confess? What failings has he suffered in his short life about which he seems so embarrassed and shame-filled that he felt the need to create an entirely new identity?

The French novelist and politician André Malraux wrote: “Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.” (From his novel Man’s Fate, publ. 1933)

True enough. We all hide some things about which we feel are too personal to share with others. Some of us hold tightly onto our secrets from fear of embarrassment and shame. Doing so, though understandable, carries the risk of damage to our moral integrity, emotional well-being, and relationships with others.

Some secrets are like cancer metastasizing in the soul. They ought to be shared confidentially, at the very least, with one’s closest family or friends or therapist or clergy person who can support and help us confidentially move through the suffering that gave rise to our most self-destructive secrets. Only by acknowledging and talking through the most painful truths in our past can we understand ourselves in the present and release the negative toxins associated with the secret we held onto for so long. Denial, deception, and delusion are hindrances to the nurturing of integrated lives and honest relationships. Self-knowledge and self-acceptance of our vulnerabilities are foundational to self-understanding, emotionally sound and spiritually healthy human beings.

It is unclear whether Mr. Santos understands himself at all. His lies are so egregious that we have to wonder – who is this young man beneath his here-to-fore fraudulent veneer?

We certainly cannot know what secrets he holds that motivated him to falsify everything in his life. Perhaps, he hoped that the pursuit of public office offered him an escape from his secrets and an opportunity to invent himself ex nihilo.

Over time, of course, the character of most public people emerges under the flood lights of celebrity. Though Santos’ deception came too late to throw the election to his opponent (thanks to The New York Times), Shakespeare’s counsel rings true and is sound advice for us all whether we are public figures or live the most private of lives: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” (Hamlet – Act 1, Scene 3)

My wife and I had been holding onto boxes of memorabilia in our garage that belonged to our sons Daniel and David since they left for college nearly 20 and 15 years ago so that one day, when they had homes of their own, they could retrieve the boxes. They collected them last month. As they cleared out an area of the garage, I found one box stacked beneath theirs containing very old and heavy books that I saved when my brother and I moved our mother from her apartment into assisted living years ago but about which I had forgotten were there.

These books once belonged to my father. His parents, immigrants from Ukraine to the United States in the early 1890s, must have purchased these volumes new in 1900 when they were first published. My father was born exactly 117 years ago today, on December 30, 1905. His upcoming birthday reminded me yesterday that these old books were sitting in our garage. And so I decided to open the box to see what was inside.

The box contained 10 volumes entitled “Messages and Papers of the Presidents – 1789-1897,” copyrighted in 1897 and printed by permission of the Congress of the United States (1900). Each volume contains proclamations, letters, speeches, memos, photographs, political cartoons, and reproductions of paintings of all the first American presidents from George Washington to Grover Cleveland.  

Yesterday, I took the ten volumes into the house to preserve them against the cold and heat of our garage, and I looked especially through the papers of Abraham Lincoln, printed only 32 years after his assassination. The volume contains many photographs of him, his wife and sons, his contemporaries and friends, his birthplace and home in Springfield, Illinois, as well as a photo of the house in which he died across from the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. Each volume has similar documents of all the nation’s first 24 presidents.   

These are veritable treasure troves of first documents of American history.

As it happens, I have almost completed reading Jon Meacham’s new biography of Lincoln called “And There Was Light – Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle” (New York: Random House, 2022). I recommend it highly, especially to history buffs.

Jon Meacham is a national treasure in his own right, a prolific historian and commentator on contemporary political affairs. I have read many excellent histories of Lincoln, and Meacham’s is a worthy addition to all those that came before. His book reads like a contemporary narrative with emphasis on Lincoln’s boyhood, self-education, early family and love life, and his legal and political life leading through his single term in Congress, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, his election as President, the Civil War, and his principled decision to emancipate enslaved African Americans. The text includes conversations with his long-time friends, family, cabinet, and generals. Meacham is true as well to Lincoln’s periodic melancholy leading him at several points in his life to contemplate suicide following the deaths of an early love and of his son Willie.

As I read the remarkable story of our nation’s 16^th President, I was struck by Lincoln’s courage and resolve in carrying the union of the country on his back, and his dogged devotion to moral principle in waging war against the rebellious south leading to the elimination of the “peculiar institution” of the enslavement of an entire race of human beings. 

Meacham’s writing is crisp and insightful. Here is but one example in which he describes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

“The Gettysburg Address was an eloquent attempt to frame American politics as not only a mediation of interests but as a moral undertaking. Slave owners portrayed slavery as divinely ordained; Lincoln portrayed individual liberty as God-given. Slave owners invoked the constitution as a shield for suppression; Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence as a higher, older, superseding authority. Slave owners defended an aristocracy of color; Lincoln defending democracy.”

The confluence of my reading Meacham’s biography and my rediscovering the 10 volumes of presidential papers that I recall  from my childhood sitting on my birth home’s living-room shelf, not only is a source of inspiration about one of the greatest figures in American and world history, but a source of loving memory on my father’s birthday 117 years ago. Zichrono livracha.

Haaretz Opinion – Uzi Baram – Dec 28, 2022

Introductory Note: Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Physics concerns “Action & Reaction.” It states that “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” So too in politics. This is what so many non-ultra-Orthodox and non-right-wing extremist Israelis and American Jews are hoping will be the case as PM Netanyahu’s most extreme religious and nationalistic government in the history of the State of Israel takes control of the levers of power and inflicts them upon a largely unwilling Israeli population.  

The following is an op-ed that appeared on December 28, 2022 in *Haaretz by columnist Uzi Baram. He urges Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz to come together as partners and organize against the extremist anti-democratic and fascist leanings of the new government, and on behalf of the majority of Israelis who care about the preservation of Israel’s democracy that the new government threatens to undo.

“Those who voted for the bloc for change are stunned. They are no longer examining the benighted agreements one by one, they’re experiencing a kind of shell shock. Like tourists who planned a trip to an enjoyable vacation site, with moderate temperatures and delightful spots, and upon exiting the plane discover that the temperature is 50 degrees centigrade and haze clouds every attraction.

And the shock has yet to dissipate. Every day we hear reports about horrific agreements, accompanied by pathetic denials on the part of Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s easy to fight a government that posits the annexation of the territories as a supreme value. Opponents of annexation identify the source of the salvo and respond with a war on the parliamentary, public and legal fronts. It’s far more difficult to fight against bombardment from all directions. That is the reason for the shock that sometimes leads to a sense of helplessness.

And therefore this hour is especially difficult for democracy and its liberal concept of human rights – because not only is it being savagely attacked, but at the moment it looks as though there is nobody to defend it. The media transmits the government’s messages and there are no signs of a genuine parliamentary and public battle to confront the medieval doctrines that Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avi Maoz and Orit Strook are trying to impose on us.

However, when the shock dissipates, harsh criticism will be directed not only at the components of the government but also against opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. There are other parties in the opposition, but the “two aces” are the leaders of its largest parties, the National Unity party and Yesh Atid. They have an obligation to answer the question: Where is the opposition? In the cooperation between Ze’ev Elkin from the National Unity camp and Boaz Toporovsky of Yesh Atid? That doesn’t exactly meet the challenges of this period.

Lapid and Gantz must be seen together, preferably falling into each other’s arms and saying articulately and without stuttering: “What was – is in the past. Today we’re together, politically and personally. We have removed all the past residue. We are confronting a thuggish regime change when most of the public is with us. The majority is not interested in annexing the West Bank and imposing sovereignty on the Temple Mount; the majority is not interested in religious or gender discrimination, just as it doesn’t want Maoz to influence its children’s education. Nor does the majority agree to doubling the budgets of the yeshivas and increasing the allowances for married yeshiva students who are robbing the public coffers.

“Some of the citizens in whose name we speak voted Likud, but they don’t support the extremist messianic wave that we have received. Together with them and all the factions in the opposition we will lead a joint struggle, to be conducted in the Knesset and by means of a prolonged and resolute public rebellion. We cannot remain silent when an entire community feels that Yitzhak Goldknopf, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are destroying the landscape of its homeland.”

Such an appearance is necessary and urgent. The coalition in the making must be presented with a united opposition leadership. A clear and honest cooperation between Lapid and Gantz will not cause the downfall of the government, but it will indicate the direction of the struggle and in so doing will foster hope. An opposition will arise with or without them. If considerations of prestige prevent this cooperation, the vacuum will be filled by another movement. In the face of the right’s burning sense of revenge there will be someone who will posit the values of democracy and human rights.”

*Haaretz is a subscription newspaper in Israel and is considered the New York Times of Israel journalism. From time to time I print op-eds from Haaretz such as the above, but also I advocate that serious friends of Israel take out a subscription to the English language on-line site. It is worth the expense – I assure you.

As a progressive Zionist and lover of the people, Land, and State of Israel, I cannot nor will I turn my back on the Jewish State despite the rise of the most extremist ultra-Orthodox and nationalist government in the history of the State that threatens Israeli democracy, human rights, and Israel’s good name.

We Diaspora Jews need Israel as a source of our American Jewish pride for its extraordinary accomplishments to world Jewry and humankind since its founding 75 years ago, as well as the source of our security in Diaspora communities especially in an era in which antisemitism has emerged as a threat to American Jewish well-being and American democracy.

Israel needs us North American Diaspora Jews for our political support in the halls of the American government and for the wisdom we have gained living as a minority in a democracy that respects the constitutional freedoms of religion, speech, and press assured by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. The vast majority of Israelis who oppose the extremist, racist, homophobic, misogynist, and illiberal policies of the new government need us in America for our emotional and financial support.

As the new government of Israel threatens that nation’s democracy despite what the in-coming PM Netanyahu  promises to disallow related to the traditional role of Israel’s judiciary, the rights of LGBTQ individuals, non-Orthodox Judaism, women’s rights, and Palestinian rights, we American Jews have a difficult decision to make.

As I indicate at the top of this piece, turning away from the greatest accomplishment of the Jewish people in the last 2000 years of Jewish history is not in ours or in Israel’s best interest. Visiting Israel, living in Israel, teaching our young people about Israel and sending them to establish personal relationships with Israelis and to learn about Israeli society, and contributing to organizations that support Israel and our own liberal Jewish values is what we must now do with even greater urgency than we may have done in the past.

We American liberal Jews represent 70% of the American Jewish community. Many others who are more conservative also are alarmed as we are by what Israel’s new government threatens to do against Israeli democracy.

I have my favorite American and Israeli organizations that promote liberal Jewish values, justice, compassion, human rights, and peace in Israel to which I have been contributing for years. They include:

The Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA); Kehilat Kodesh v’Chol, my synagogue’s sister synagogue in Holon, Israel; the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ), the umbrella organization for all Reform congregations in the State of Israel; the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the social justice organization of the IMPJ; the New Israel Fund (NIF), an American organization promoting justice and equality for all Israelis; Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights organization supporting Israel-Palestinian peace in Jerusalem; Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli human rights organization; Project Rozana, an Israeli organization that seeks to build bridges to better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians through health; and J Street, a pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy American political and educational organization based in Washington, D.C.

There are many others that one can support. I urge everyone who cares about Israeli democracy, equal rights in the State of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian peace and justice, and Israel’s well-being and good name to direct your charitable donations going forward away from those American Jewish organizations that make no demands upon Israel to maintain and promote its democracy, and give your tzedakah funds instead to other American and Israeli organizations that promote liberal Jewish and Zionist values upon which the State of Israel was founded and upon which Israel has distinguished itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

Note: This same blog under the title “U.S. Jews Cannot Turn Our Backs on Israel” appears at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/us-jews-cannot-turn-our-backs-on-israel/ .

By Ron Kampeas December 22, 2022

(JTA) — More than *430 American rabbis, including some who occupy prominent roles in major cities, are pledging to block members of the Religious Zionist bloc in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government from speaking at their synagogues and will lobby to keep them from speaking in their communities.

An open letter now circulating says they will not invite members of the bloc “to speak at our congregations and organizations. We will speak out against their participation in other fora across our communities. We will encourage the boards of our congregations and organizations to join us in this protest as a demonstration of our commitment to our Jewish and democratic values.”

Netanyahu announced his proposed new government including the Religious Zionists late Wednesday, although its details have yet to be finalized.

Israeli government ministers sometimes speak at American synagogues to drum up support for their initiatives and ideas. It’s not clear if figures who are harshly critical of non-Orthodox Jews, as Religious Zionist leaders have been, would accept invitations from their synagogues even if offered. Nevertheless, the letter’s uncompromising tone and the breadth of the signatories is a signal of a burgeoning crisis in relations between Israel and the U.S. Jewish community triggered by the elevation of the extremists, who won 14 seats in the Nov. 1 election.

Its signatories come from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. There are no Orthodox signatories.

Among the signatories are current and former members of the boards of rabbis in Chicago and Los Angeles; rabbis who lead the largest Conservative and Reform congregations in the Washington, D.C., area; former leaders of major Reform and Conservative movement bodies; the current leader of the Reconstructionist movement; and the rector of the Conservative movement’s Los Angeles-based American Jewish University. The letter was organized by David Teutsch, a leading Reconstructionist rabbi in Philadelphia, and John Rosove, the rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Los Angeles.

The letter outlines five Religious Zionist proposals that it says “will cause irreparable harm to the Israel-Jewish Diaspora relationship”: changing the Law of Return to keep out non-Orthodox converts and their descendants; eroding LGBTQ rights; allowing the Knesset to override Supreme Court rulings; annexing the West Bank; and expelling Arab citizens who oppose Israel’s government.

How much of that agenda will make its way into governance remains to be seen. Netanyahu has said he is confident that he will be able to constrain some of the figures he plans to name to lead ministries.

Among these are Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been tapped to control the police and who has been convicted of incitement over his past support of Israeli terrorist groups and inflammatory comments about Israel’s Arab population; Bezalel Smotrich, who has been accused by Israeli security forces in the past of plotting violent attacks against Palestinians, and who will supervise West Bank Jewish settlements; and Avi Maoz, who has described himself as a “proud homophobe” and has called all liberal forms of Judaism a “darkness,” and who will have authority over some aspects of education.

A number of U.S. Jewish groups spoke out against including the extremist faction in the government while Netanyahu was negotiating with the bloc, and more have done so since he announced the government’s formation on Wednesday. They include the Anti-Defamation League, the major non-Orthodox movements, and the liberal Jewish Middle East policy groups Partners for Progressive Israel, J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

Abe Foxman, the retired director of the ADL and a longtime bellwether of establishment Jewish support for Israel, said earlier this month that he is hopeful that Netanyahu can contain the extremists, but that “if Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”

Some organizations that spoke out in 2019 when Netanyahu considered a coalition with extremists were silent even as others sounded the alarm since the election, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. An AIPAC statement after Netanyahu’s announcement this week said, “Once again, the Jewish state has demonstrated that it is a robust democracy with the freedoms that Americans also cherish,” The Conference of Presidents has not issued a statement.

Orthodox groups have yet to pronounce on the new government. The Zionist Organization of America, which backs settlement building, has indicated it will support the new government.

The American Jewish Committee shifted its tone slightly from before the election, when it declined to speak out. In a statement after Netanyahu’s announcement, it sounded a note similar to Foxman’s, saying it would work with Netanyahu “to help ensure that the inflammatory rhetoric that has been employed by some members of the governing coalition — rhetoric unrepresentative of Israel’s democratic values, its role as a homeland for all Jews, and its unwavering quest for peace — will not define the domestic and foreign policies of the new government.”

The Biden administration has said that it will judge Israel’s government by its policies, not the individuals in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

*The number of rabbis that signed this letter since this news item from JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) was first published is more than 430 (as of January 5, 2023) and climbing. This news item was reported in The Washington Post, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The New York Jewish Week, The Daily Forward, The Algameiner, The Cleveland Jewish News, The Northern California Jewish Press, The Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Religion News Service, The New Arab, WAFA Agency (the Palestine News Service), Middle East Eye, and i24 News. It was discussed on the Podcast “For Heaven’s Sake” with Rabbi Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi.