Open Letter to My Students 72: War and the Murky Middle

Posted on January 10, 2025 | 1 comment

“No one likes middles: reaching middle age, for example, or watching our own body middle expand.” So said the late (and great) Rabbi Dr. Michael Signer, bemoaning the unpopularity of his own area of expertise: the Middle Ages. 

In ethical quandaries too, rather than occupy the uncomfortable middle, we prefer doubling down at one extreme, and then demonizing the opposition, which is doing its own double-down on the other. But by definition,  a quandary contains some truth on both sides. It helps, sometimes, to temper our certainty (on either side) with a viewpoint from the murky middle. 

The war in Gaza is such a quandary. I am a rabbi for whom Jewish Peoplehood is a theological, moral, and spiritual reality; I feel called upon to sustain Jewish peoplehood for the benefit of the world — to be (in biblical terms) a blessing to humanity. In addition, I have lived through enough history to know the necessity of a Jewish State. 

But equally, I know the excesses that ethnic states are capable of; and I am an Enlightenment universalist who seeks that elusive (and probably illusive) quality we call world peace. 

As to the war, the precipitating factor, the October 7 Hamas butchery, has indelibly seared my soul. I know too that if they could, Hamas, Hezbollah and a host of fellow travelers would slaughter every Jew in sight. How, then, can I not support military attempts to eradicate this ongoing threat to the Jewish People? But equally, I cringe at the killing of innocent civilians, so how can I not support moderating the military on humanitarian grounds? 

That is the Jewish quandary of our time. Desperate to avoid the troubling middle, people plunk for one side or the other with every ounce of moral certitude they can muster. And Jews, as they say, are news; so unlike ongoing wars elsewhere, “Israel at war” generates daily headlines that both sides read to confirm or deny their respective position.

Take, for example, the New York Times analysis of December 26, 2024.  

Whether true or false, the Times has often been perceived as biased against Israel. But whatever its editorial policy, Times reporters are exceptional journalists who cannot easily be discounted. What, then do we make of this extensive background piece with the headline, “Israel Loosened its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians in Israel’s Bombing Strategy”?

To be sure, the report suffers from limitations imposed by the question it seeks to answer: whether Israel has been bombing civilians excessively. It doesn’t inquire about the war generally: the hostages, for example.  

But even so, its findings are troubling in the extreme. The Times reports a “severe” weakening of Israel’s “system of safeguards” meant to protect civilians, by expanding “the circle of accepted casualties.” In addition, instead of limiting attacks to those plotted by Israel’s central command, Israel, this time round, empowered field officers to determine bombing targets; and not all such officers operated with the same moral scruples as their superiors. At times too, Israel used heavy tonnage bombs that guaranteed the destruction of entire apartment blocks. In the past, Israel had warned apartment dwellers by “roof knocks,” exploding small charges on the roof before leveling the building, and in this war, such warnings were not always given. So yes, the bombing in this war has been particularly devastating.

But there is another side to things. The report substantiates the carnage of the October 7 attack that Israel understandably saw as “unprecedented,” in scale. It confirms also the fact that Hamas “militants hide among civilians in Gaza” with an “extensive tunnel network” underneath heavily populated areas.

Traumatized by what Hamas had done and promised to do again, Israel felt obliged to uproot Hamas entirely. It therefore widened its military targets to include not just the  Hamas chief planners, but ordinary Hamas fighters and even financial operators who move money back and forth to obtain war materiel. But that required overcoming the Hamas use of human shields. As the report puts it, “The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.” Israel bombed particularly heavily at the beginning, because it wanted to neutralize Hamas before Hezbollah opened up a second front from the north. 

As to roof knocks, consider Shaldan al-Najjar, an Islamic Jihad commander who had orchestrated many attacks on Israel. Israel had tried to kill him in 2014, but failed, because when it warned innocent neighbors to leave beforehand, al-Najjar escaped as well. This time, they issued no warning and succeeded – but with collateral damage.

In sum, the bombing, though not indiscriminate, was horrific. It did not target civilians deliberately, but enormous civilian casualties resulted. It expanded the circle of acceptable collateral damage but there was at least an ongoing existence of such a circle. Israel’s war was understandably severe but the severity took its toll. 

So back to the murky middle. Those like myself, who accept the attempt to dismantle Hamas must also reckon with Israel’s policies that increased civilian casualties.  

Those who champion the Palestinians should meet me in the middle, by at least acknowledging that if Israel has killed citizens who happened to be in harm’s way, it is the Hamas policy of using human shields that put them there in the first place. Hamas bears the blame for beginning the war in a particularly heinous manner, and then waging it in such a way that Israel would have to kill civilians in order to defend itself.

If the reporting is honest, however, the accompanying headline is not. Instead of “Israel Loosened its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians in Israel’s Bombing Strategy,” it might equally have been, “Hamas Fighters Embed War Machine among Civilians, Causing Israel to Expand Casualties.” 

But perhaps that is misleading on the other side. Newspapers of the Times’s stature should avoid headlines that lure either side away from the middle. Imagine the same story introduced by the heading, “Complexity of War Revealed: Civilians Suffer From Hamas Human Shield Strategy and from Israeli Expansion of Bombing Regulations.” 

I have other misgivings as well. If Hamas has been virtually destroyed by now, why is Israel still bombing in the Gazan north? And even if the Gaza strategy is not a case of ethnic cleansing, the West Bank settler movement is; if the settlers have their way, they will transport their ideology to Gaza as well. 

But equally, how is it that Hamas still retains Jewish hostages (truly civilian innocents)? And as to the Times, I would love to see other background pieces of the quality of this one: not just the Israeli failures but the cruelty and genocidal rationale of Hamas as well. 

Meanwhile, I am left with occupying the murky middle. Taking sides with certainty might feel good, but it does not do moral justice to reality. 

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Open Letter to My Students 71:  Why We Celebrate a New Year

Posted on December 31, 2024 | Leave a comment

I no longer stay up late on New Year’s Eve. The Times Square ball can drop without me. But I watch with amazement as so much of the world descends into a sort of drunkenfest – and at inflated prices that can put you into debt. Most cultures have some sort of new year’s bash: The Chinese new year, for instance, with fireworks, dragon dances, and literally painting the town red. We Jews direct our energies into eating and praying – but we make loud noises on the shofar, and we consume enough honey to keep dentists busy for the rest of the year. 

The rationale behind it all is unclear. History of Religion expert Mircea Eliade considered it an outgrowth of ancient peoples’ desire to take refuge in a primeval moment when the connection between ourselves and the gods was patent. Well, maybe. Traditional cultures may revert to God-intoxicated founding moments, but the Times Square crowd is just plain intoxicated.

So perhaps New Year celebrations fortify us as we face the uncertainty of a new year. Judaism famously warns that “All beginnings are difficult” (Mekhilta to Exodus 19:5). And there may be something to that. Google “Beginnings are hard,” and you find a ton of people in agreement. All sorts of examples come to mind: moving to a new school; starting a new job; embarking on a new relationship; undertaking a new project; writing that first line of a school essay.

But I tend to think the opposite. Hard as beginnings may be, endings are usually harder. Making new friends, though difficult, is easier than saying goodbye to old ones. Starting your first job is easier than retiring. Declaring a war is nothing compared to ending it. Moving in with (you hope) the love of your life may have its uncertainties, but the pain is in moving out. I know nothing about what it feels like to be born into the world, but I suspect that dying is harder.

We might conclude that New Year merriment anesthetizes us against the pain of closing the book on the year gone by. But that doesn’t seem right either. I, for one, cannot wait to reclassify 2024 under “Files, Old (Good Riddance).” So the problem with endings is not so much making them happen, but making them happen the right way. Divorces are hard but they can sometimes be amicable; there are even such things as good deaths rather than bad ones. 

A more likely theory, then, is that endings can be positive – if we have reason to believe that they will be followed by a beautiful new beginning. Losing a job is okay if you have a better one lined up. Falling out of love is acceptable if you’ve met the next new flame who will be lovelier. Even dying is less painful if you think you are slated for some heavenly afterlife. 

Endings and beginnings are apparently intertwined. The metaphor of life as a journey works rather nicely. We don’t mind being ever on the move as we age, so long as our leaving one place portends our finding another one. What we dread is the flat earth phenomenon: coming to an end with nothing left to do but fall off the cliff into nothingness. 

Noisy New Year celebrations convince us that the earth isn’t flat; that we can step boldly into a new unknown with assurance that we will land on solid ground; say goodbye to the old because the new will be better. Mind you, there is little evidence to support that hypothesis. Coming off a bad old year and anticipating a new and better one is like suffering some chronic illness for 365 days, but having well-wishers assure you that tomorrow you will be cured. It doesn’t always work out that way. But we cannot long subsist without hope. And, come to think of it, who knows?

The old doesn’t actually die with the new; more likely it persists, like a ghost who visits us nightly no matter how much we try to shake it off. When toxic relationships expire, the toxicity can still linger. We are still dealing with the aftereffects of Covid lockdowns. We yearn for the certainty that painful endings will at least end, so that we can launch a new beginning, unsullied by the past.

That may be what the madness of New Year’s Eve is intended to convey. Out with the old and in with the new. As 2024 becomes 2025, we want so much to have the pain of the past dispelled; and the hope for the future confirmed.

This year, particularly, so much is at stake. Will the Israel-Gaza war finally come to an end – a real end, that provides Israelis with security; and also sows the seeds of betterment both for Israel and its neighbors? And what of Ukraine? The new administration seems bent on ending the war there. But how, and at what cost? Will democracy survive here at home? Will anti-Semitism increase or decline?

The more terrible things are, the more we wish they would end. But what makes those things so terrible is precisely their immunity to solutions. Declaring a “New Year” may be fun for a day, but the day after, we all go back to work; January 2 won’t look all that different from December 31; which suggests that the Jewish idea of making New Year a day for prayer is not all that wrong. At the very least, it is a healthy reminder of reality’s persistent intransigence.  

So here’s to 2025: a prayer. May it arrive with more wisdom than folly. May the suffering of 2024 come finally to an end. May freedom, health and happiness be abundant, and for everyone. May our worst nightmares find no footing, while our happy dreams take root and become reality. Amen.

Will things really work out that way? Probably not, but maybe just a little, and maybe more than we think possible. The start of a new year is at least the time to imagine them. 

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Open Letter to My Students 70: In a Time of Despair

Posted on November 7, 2024 | 3 comments

What keeps us going in times of despair; when (to cite Deuteronomy 28:67), “In the morning we say, ‘If only it were night’, and in the evening we say, ‘If only it were morning.” 

 Or as the Talmud puts it (Sotah  49a), In times of such despair,  “How does the world itself keep going?” 

 For liberals like me, the results of the 2024 election is such a time. We fear the worst. How will we keep going?

Start with brutal honesty. We Jews have reason to fear a revival of right-wing anti-Semitism, such as what occurred in Charlottesville during the first Trump administration. Then too, along with other Americans, we fear that our democracy itself is endangered; that we will devolve into a dictatorship, where even basic rights are threatened. And we worry about the poor, the climate, and the very survival of a world that is democratic and free. Vigilance, then, is the first order of the day, lest the unthinkable become not just thinkable but probable.

But even as we fear the worst, we should remember the Talmud’s caution against jumping to conclusions. For any given set of circumstances, it asks, b’ma’I k’askinan? “What are we actually dealing with?” So: What, really, are we dealing with? We may see something short of virulent anti-Semitism, something short of democracy’s demise, in which case, we survive through patience and persistence: living with what we must (patience) but doing what we can to make a bad situation better, fighting as we always have (persistence) in matters of conscience.

The commitment to honesty along with the question “What are we actually dealing with?” apply also to ourselves. We will have to admit our own foibles, question whether we have fully appreciated the other side of things — the reason, for example, that most Americans, not just the crazies, voted against us. We will need new allies if we are to move the needle on America’s newfound persona. And that will require admitting that not every Trump voter is our enemy. Not every Christian evangelical is also a racist white nationalist. People who disagree with us need not be moral reprobates. 

The “other side” in politics is not the same thing as the “other side” in Jewish mysticism – not all conservatives, that is, are evil incarnate, just as, frankly, not all liberals are the good guys. We can be principled without being doctrinaire, open-hearted but not closed-minded.

Honesty, patience and persistence should be augmented by humility. We should ask not just about “them” but also about “us”:  “What are we actually dealing with,” here in our own camp?

The Talmud offers yet another answer: its own response to the question of how the world is sustained in times of dread. It survives, we are told, because of the Kaddish! Yes, the Kaddish, but not because times are so bad that we should say a mourner’s prayer in advance. In Talmudic times, the Kaddish wasn’t yet a mourning prayer at all. Why then does the Kaddish sustain the world?

Start with a fresh interpretation of the word “world,” derivable from the oft quoted Talmudic precept (Sanhedrin 37,a): “To save a single person is to save the entire world.” The entire world? Really? Surely the Talmud does not imagine that if I save someone I thereby save everyone! More likely it recognizes that individual people are each a world unto themselves, as in the English expression, “My entire world was turned upside down.”

We know how the external world (the cosmos) keeps going. The earth spins on its axis no matter who is president. It is our internal world that that prompts the question, “How does the world keep going.” How do we sustain our internal world when everything we hold dear is on life support — when things are so bad that every morning we yearn for night to fall; and every night we yearn for morning to dawn? 

In terrible times then, it is our internal world that is sustained by the Kaddish – not the Kaddish alone mind you (we also need honesty, vigilance, patience, persistence  and humility). But the Kaddish is its own antidote to despair, and this is why.

The Kaddish is above all an affirmation of hope, and not just hope for tomorrow or next week or even next year, but hope over the long haul. It is the bold contention that however much our efforts are stymied in the short run, however severe our setbacks in any given moment (or even any given lifetime), it is the long view of things that will prevail. The Kaddish images a God of history, an ultimate dominion of goodness, a momentous vision of a distant tomorrow beyond the momentary setbacks of our individual lives. 

The idea of such a “moreness” (the best word I can muster) is the very essence of religious consciousness. It seems also to be indelibly engraved on human consciousness, generally; we are a species that pictures “forever”; wonders about life after death; and recognizes, as Hamlet put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Religious metaphors like a messianic era, the Kingdom of God and the eschaton are attempts to capture this insistence that our life’s projects do not ignobly die when we do. So too are all those eulogies about the good we do continuing on beyond us. Why have liberals chosen instead to imagine that our every effort to ameliorate the world’s evils will succeed without setbacks? 

To be religious is to know that we belong to an order of things that is more than our earthly lives can contain; to know, or at last to suspect, that we are in league with God and part of eternity. 

How will I manage the new era that has begun? Through honesty, vigilance, perseverance, patience, and humility.

And when I tire of the effort that such struggle demands; when I run up against the powers that be; when I wonder whether I am making any sizable difference; I will take refuge in the Kaddish and its promise of moreness, making commutations back and forth from the world of the here and now to the place of forever. 

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Open Letter to My Students 69: A Box of Chocolates?

Posted on October 20, 2024 | 1 comment

Maybe Forrest Gump was right: “Life is a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.”

I think about life at this time of year, with the High Holiday hopes in my rearview mirror and the immediacy of Sukkot upon us  – especially with Sukkot’s mandatory reading of Ecclesiastes – whose topic is exactly that: the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life.

My long-time friend, a Catholic priest, Dick Vosko, invariably sends me his own carefully crafted Rosh Hashanah wishes, and this year, he included Ecclesiastes 1:13, “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under the sky. It is a heavy burden that God has given human beings.” 

The Hebrew for “heavy burden” is inyan ra, variously described by commentators as “obscure” or “meaning uncertain.” So I asked Dick where he got his translation. Following his lead (and adding some research of my own), I discovered several options: 

  • Literally, inyan ra  means “a bad matter,” as if life were a bad joke being played upon us.
  • The classic King James Bible (KJB,1611) and the early American Protestant Bible, the American Standard Version [ASV, 1901]) translates it as “sore travail.” 
  • The old Jewish Publication Society translation  (JPS, 1917) converts the old English “travail” into “task” giving us “a sore task.” 
  • The newer JPS translation (NJPS, 1985) and a standard Protestant Bible (NRSV, 1989) prefer “an unhappy business.” 
  • Dick’s “heavy burden” competed with “terrible burden,” in three other Bible translations: New International Version (NIV, 1984, 2011); God’s Word Bible (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, 1995); andNew Heart English Bible (NHEB, 2008).

However you look at it, this is hardly a cheerful message: Has God really saddled us with “sore travail,” “a sore task,” “an unhappy business” or “a heavy/terrible burden”? Is life a bad joke? Dick chose “heavy burden” because he had in mind the Hamas attack and ensuing war, and thought that for Jews this year, life is indeed a heavy burden. I appreciate his sentiment. 

In context, the inyan ra refers back to the eleven Ecclesiastes verses leading up to it: the ennui that sets in when we are so jaded as to believe that life is nothing but havel havalim, “vanity of vanities [KJB],” “utter futility [NJPS],” or “utterly meaningless [NIV]” (take your pick); because “there is nothing new under the sun,” or (as we might say), “Been there, done that.” Rabbinic midrash[i] focuses on the vain accumulation of wealth and even wisdom. Greed is never be satisfied; we can always have more. As to wisdom, think back to all the stuff you learned in College and how little of it you remember.

The choice of Ecclesiastes for Sukkot is probably just chance. An 8th-century source lists all five scrolls (Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther) as holiday readings.[ii] But reliable manuscripts for that book list only four: they omit Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes was added later on (the 11th century); at some point, scribes who were used to reading it assumed it had always been read, but had somehow dropped out of the 8th-century account. So they mistakenly added it back in.   

In other words, eighth-century Jews were reading Lamentations on Tishah B’av (when the Temple was destroyed) and Esther on Purim (Purim is derived from the Esther story). They also read Ruth on Shavuot and Song of Songs on Passover (two of the three harvest festivals). That left one scroll (Ecclesiastes) unread, and one holiday (Sukkot) with no reading. So the two were later matched up to fill the double void.

Adding Ecclesiastes to Sukkot was consequential. In biblical times, Sukkot was known as the holiday for experiencing joy,[iii] not “sore travail,” “an unhappy business” and a “heavy burden.” To this day, the prayer introducing it (the Kiddush) calls it “the time of our joy” (z’man simchateinu). Does the addition of Ecclesiastes suggest we should hedge our bets — change it to “time of joy and of carrying the weight of the world”? How can life give us family and friends, laughter and love, but also suffering and sorrow; not just all that is good, but much that is bad – even a Hamas attack (on, of all days, Simchat Torah, the day following Sukkot, which will never be the same again). 

But that’s the point: life is not just untrammeled joy. Any given moment of any given day can bring happiness or sorrow, good or bad — exactly what Deuteronomy records (v. 30:15) as God’s own judgement of the human condition: “I have set before you life and good, death and bad.”  We are urged to choose life and good (v. 19) but the tragedy of the human condition is that regardless of what we choose, the bad (not just the good) can come our way.[iv]

Nature itself can be cruel. Even if we somehow reversed global warming, we would still have hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. And regardless of what we choose, other people get to choose too: there are genuinely bad people out there. And sooner or later (we hope later, but it can happen sooner), we die. Life is indeed an inyan ra: not (if we are fortunate) entirely “sore travail” or “an unhappy business,” but for all of us, at times at least, “a heavy burden.” The hardest lesson of all is the realization that we are not in charge down here. 

Forrest Gump was only partly right. Who knows what any given day will bring? “You never know what you’re gonna get.” But it’s not all chocolates!

The “end of the matter,” the final word, as Ecclesiastes puts it (v.12:14), is “Revere God and keep God’s commandments.” That sounds a little too pious for me. It resonates poorly in age when reverence for a supreme anything rings hollow, and when the very idea of being commanded runs counter to our rampant individualism. But beneath those ancient words lies a timeless message: that there is something beyond us to which we owe allegiance, a “something” we Jews call God. We do what we can to choose life and good; even knowing that we will all get sick, all suffer losses, all die someday – some of us sooner than we wish and more tragically. But the nobility of the human condition still stands: we have minds to choose wisdom, hearts to embrace love; a conscience to know good from bad, and a habit learned from childhood to put one foot in front of the other: no matter what the future holds.  

[i] Midrash Rabba to Kohelet 1:13. Cf. Ibn Ezra to our verse, “It is called inyan ra because human being occupy themselves with things that will never prove satisfying.”

[ii] Massekhet Sofrim, 14:1. 

[iii] Cf. Leviticus 23:40, Deuteronomy 16:15, Nehemiah 8:17. And, as the Rabbis remember it, Mishnah, Sukkah, 5:1. 

[iv] On the connection to Deut. 30, see Rashi to our verse. 

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Open Letter to My Students 68: The Weight of a Year Gone By

Posted on October 8, 2024 | Leave a comment

Time has weight and the Jewish year just ending has been the heaviest year in recent memory. Every day brought fresh rockslides of headline news crashing round about us. When you are buried in rubble, you struggle to get out. So I have been struggling. 

The looming presidential election alone has been a heavy burden. How can so many Americans be so cruel as to watch one school shooting after another and still reject all gun control? So deluded as to send death threats to Haitian immigrants because they purportedly eat their pets? So willing to replace democracy with a home-grown version of right-wing fascism?  But liberals must now reckon with an ever noisier far-left coalition that applauds every identity except “Jewish.” 

The state of the American electorate alone would elicit a serious Dayyenu: “Enough, already!”

Eclipsing all of that, however, is the Hamas butchery of October 7, a boulder massive enough to convert the rockslide into an avalanche, as if time itself came tumbling down upon us – and then stopped, refusing to let October 7 slip quietly into the past. Hostages are still imprisoned, or dead. Hamas is still fighting. I wake up to October 7 every day, a nasty Jewish Groundhog Day.

The closest parallel to October 7 was 9/11, which Americans watched obsessively, as if super-glued to TV screens. A direct line connects the two events as chapters in the same story. The mastermind behind 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was schooled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to “liberate” Jerusalem and rid “Palestine” of Jews – in World-War-II parlance, to make it Judenrein. The Holocaust connection is real. Political scientist Matthias Küntzel cites an Al Jazeera speech in which another Brotherhood leader, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi preached the need of every generation to produce its own divinely appointed agent to “punish Jews.” Hitler was one. Islam is destined be the next.[i]

Meanwhile, right wing anti-Semitic parties are gaining power in Hungary, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Here at home, where hurricane victims are cleaning up from inundating floods, Elon Musk’s X carries anti-Semitic charges that “Jews are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery, or even seize victims’ property.”[ii] 

So I struggle with anti-Semitism. 

I have never believed that anti-Semitism is some metaphysical pollutant, indelibly soldered into world culture. The scientifically minded historian in me seeks a causal chain that links Nazi anti-Semitism to Islamic anti-Semitism. Küntzel provides that link. 

But here’s the rub: Having been traumatized by Islamic radicalism in 2001, Americans should have rallied to, and remained steadfast allies of, Israel. Many did, but many did not. I am no apologist for Israel’s right-wing coalition; I abhor the settler-movement on the West Bank; I deplore the Jewish thugs who carry it out. But the Hamas attack had nothing to do with that.  It would have happened anyway. And yet, so many Americans replaced their horror at the Hamas massacre with their vilification of its Jewish victims. Any rational argument accusing Israel of an overly destructive retaliation would at least deplore as well the Hamas attack and call for the release of innocent Jewish hostages. That does not happen. Opposition to Israel is not rational. 

No one I know has cheered the tragedy of children dying in Gaza. But Palestinian activists — even UN agency teachers — cheered wildly at the Hamas carnage.[iii] On October 10, just three days after the attack (before the Israeli response even began) the Harvard Student Body declared “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.”[iv]

They were partly right. Gazans have indeed “been forced to live in an open-air prison.” But who is the culprit? Israel or Hamas? The Modern War Institute at West Point estimates the extent of the Hamas tunnel system to be somewhere between 350 and 450 miles long, and costing “as much as a billion dollars”![v] Canada’s Mackenzie Institute (which specializes in security and military intelligence) details a further eleven billion dollars held by just three Hamas leaders living in Qatar.[vi] How many starving children would all those billions of dollars have fed?

And the rockslides continue. Just yesterday, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas bloodbath, New York Public Radio’s Gothamist Daily reported hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Columbia’s campus, chanting, “Free, free Palestine,” and, “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution.” Read that as “only one solution, violence, violence, by any means possible.” The organizer of this and other protests is Within Our Lifetime, whose cofounder, Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian American CUNY Law School alumnus supports the complete replacement of the state of Israel with one called Palestine.[vii]

None of this is (or should be) actual news. It is a new-year reflection on the heaviness of time and the exacting struggle that it demands from us who are buried under it. How bad can history get? Will the American democratic experiment come to an end? How long can so many well-meaning observers miss the anti-Semitism behind the Hamas/Al-Qaeda Islamism?  How deep does university anti-Semitism go? How much war can Israel manage without losing the peace at the other end?

The Yom Kippur message of human frailty seems especially apt now. I look forward to the sound of the shofar at the day’s conclusion, a long blast that heralds my own task for 5785: to hold out hope on all these fronts, in part by digging my way through the avalanche of the past year, and rescuing memories of the way our lives once were, and the way, perhaps, they can be again. As hard as it is to recall those buried years, I know this much: underneath the rubble lie tales of kindness, hope and happiness. 

When archeologists unearth specimens of the past, they display them in museums for visitors to see. They are a mixed bag: the artistry of the human spirit; but also weapons of war. I am an archeologist of pre-5784, excavating memories of times when wars were fought and people killed, but when, also, optimism ruled; when anti-Semitism was something we studied, not something we feared; when extremes both on the left and on the right were just that – extremes; and when beauty and science and love and laughter were our lot.  

[i] “German expert warns: Islamist and European antisemitism now dangerously intertwined,” Jerusalem Post (September 26,2024).

[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/08/hurricane-helene-antisemitic-misinformation-x/.

[iii] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-n-agency-teachers-cheered-hamas-as-october-attack-unfolded-called-for-execution-of-jews-in-group-chat/; https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinians-celebrate-hamas-attack-as-israel-supporters-rally-in-new-york/.

[iv] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/10/psc-statement-backlash/.

[v] https://mwi.westpoint.edu/gazas-underground-hamass-entire-politico-military-strategy-rests-on-its-tunnels/.

[vi] https://mackenzieinstitute.com/2023/11/hamass-top-leaders-are-worth-billions-heres-how-they-continue-to-grow-rich/.

[vii] Jessica Gould  and Bahar Ostradan, “Hundreds of Columbia students walk out as NYC campuses brace for Oct. 7 protests,” Gothamist Daily (October 7, 2024).

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Open Letter To My Students 67: A High Holy Day Message from Home

Posted on October 2, 2024 | 5 comments

I do like to write about “home,” especially when Rosh Hashanah rolls round and people head home for the holidays. Never mind the reality: broken homes, dysfunctional families, aging parents, and the mystery of undying sibling rivalry. Charles Henry Parkhurst, the reforming Presbyterian pastor who brought down New York’s infamous Tammany Hall, got it right when he said, “Home is heaven for beginners.” 

At the new year we become beginners all over again. Out with the old; in with the new; new year’s resolutions, or, for Jews, t’shuvah, literally, “returning” to God, but also to our childhood selves, the innocence we left behind when we took the wrong turn toward mistakes and misdeeds. Our prayer book calls the holiday yom hazikaron, the day when God remembers us, a somewhat frightening possibility, except for the fact that God, we say, is merciful – like the parents we either have or wish we had; parents, that is, who welcome us back home no matter what we’ve done out there in the world. “Home,” says Robert Frost “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Home is the name we give to the comfort and safety of belonging, while “not at home” means being always on guard against ever-looming disaster. So Rosh Hashanah emphasizes the positive: the guarantee that however much we may have strayed into a world where anything can happen, Rosh Hashanah brings us home to safety. 

But then comes Yom Kippur. If Rosh Hashanah is the guarantee of being back home again, Yom Kippur is a study in potential exile. Just a couple generations back, synagogue goers wept with shame over the misdeeds they might have done without even knowing it; they trembled from the fearful possibility that an obsessive accountant-God kept careful ledgers of it all.  Not that I am advocating that kind of guilt-ridden religion; we are well rid of it. But it did reflect the recognition of what a life poorly led might come to. To this day, we say over and over again on the High Holy Day supplication, Hashiveinu eilekha, “Bring us back to You,”  O God, which is to say, bring us home. An all merciful God must surely have inaugurated the open-door policy of letting us in long before Robert Frost wrote about it.

Even more poignantly, there is that Yom Kippur prayer Sh’ma Koleinu (“[God] hear our voice”) which we are supposed to say as if standing before the almighty Judge and passionately pleading our case. The central entreaty is this poignant line: “Do not throw me out” – the worst case scenario! We’ve completed a year of managing the world outside, a year of struggle, disappointment, and outright pain – which, God knows, this past year has been; and then we make it back home, only to have our parents throw us out. 

The High Holy Days are a frightening bungee jump from on high, where we almost land safely on firm ground, only to get yanked back up to the giddy state of free-fall: home for Rosh Hashanah; then thrown out on Yom Kippur. 

We can, if we like, avoid that roller-coaster nightmare: sit silently through services; give in to the boredom (which is easy to find); and then leave, unchallenged and unchanged. I can hardly blame people for doing that. The liturgy can be impenetrable; the verbiage endless; like getting lost in a Wagnerian opera because you do not understand the German and cannot relate to characters with names like Walktraute, Grimgerde, and Schwertkleite. Services should come with an accompanying program alerting you to the highlights, telling you what to look for, and informing you that prayer is not so much something you go to as it is something you must enter into. You should also be warned that if you mistake the prayers for prose instead of poetry, you will find the service alienating. Yes, “alienating,” itself an echo of exile, homelessness, home-sickness even.

The biggest mistake is focusing on a High Holy Day message of times past, seeing Yom Kippur, say, as a Jewish version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, just a misery-soaked diatribe on human unhappiness, sin, and guilt – which indeed, is what it was in medieval times (and still is, in many synagogues). Too many people leave too early, missing the final N’ilah service, where the day’s desolation gives way to the ecstatic discovery that we really do get to start again. Remade, reborn, and refreshed, we dare undertake another year of exploration “not at home.” Back to business; back to work; back to school; back to an uncertain future but with all the promise of youth at its best; back being young and eager, even if we are old and jaded.

The metaphor of returning home is overrated. In real life, our childhood home is something we grow out of — a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there again. The High Holy Day homecoming too is a temporary fix. It ends. We venture forth again to life. But we manufacture other homes along the way, informed, perhaps, by the High Holy Day drama in two acts: both Rosh Hashanah’s joys and Yom Kippur’s trials.

The adult homes we make must indeed be shelters from life’s storms, but they are never actual heavens, as Pastor Parkhurst wrongly imagined them to be, because as much as we emerge from the High Holy Days with the hope of new beginnings, we ourselves are no longer just beginners. Whether there is some kind of heaven where we eventually find an eternal home I do not know. But until I find out, I happily have recourse to what Sigmund Freud called the reality principle. Life is not a bowl of cherries, but it’s not just sour grapes either. It is a day-by-day grind; but day-by-day joy and satisfaction as well. We will spend next year commuting back and forth from the homes we make to the work we do; and pray that both will be surprisingly rewarding.

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Open Letter to My Students 66: Nostalgia and the State of the World – Why we are the way we are.

Posted on July 10, 2024 | 1 comment

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be – and that’s no joke. So what was it once and what is it now? We should care because it explains the West Bank Settlers in Israel, White Christian Nationalists in America, the right-wing successes of Europe, and even the American Supreme Court.

            The expert on nostalgia was Svetlana Boym, a Jewish émigré from the former Soviet Union, who taught at Harvard, and died too young (just 56 years old). As Boym tells the story,[i] the word “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss  physician, Johannes Hofer, in 1688. He considered it a disease treatable by leeches (OMG), opium (worse), and restful vacations in the Alps (better).  

            “Nostalgia” was his second choice for a name. At first, he tried philopatridomania, which (unsurprisingly) didn’t catch on but which translates as something like “an overly developed love of home.” “Nostalgia” derives from the Greek, algos (“pain, longing”) and nostos (a word denoting a mythic hero’s homecoming). The German Heimweh (“home pain”) captures it exactly.

            So nostalgia used to be a personal yearning to return home to a better time or place. Centuries of diasporan “exile” made Jews the prototypically nostalgic people: for a place (Lashanah haba’ah birushalayim, “Next year in Jerusalem”) and a time (chadesh yameinu k’kedem, “Renew our days as of old”).

            This sort of nostalgia is overall harmless: just the practice of sugar-coating selective reminiscences of the way we think we were: “a romance with one’s own fantasies” says Boym, or (at worst) “hypochondria of the heart.” She labels it “reflective.” It is what nostalgia used to be. But all over the world, nostalgia has now morphed into a different and distinctly dangerous variety that Boym labels “restorative.” Historian Marc Lilla prefers calling it “militant.”[ii]

            Restorative/militant nostalgia seeks not just to reflect on what is lost, but to recover it. It fantasizes conspiracies by enemies who are destroying the old and the good for their own nefarious purposes. Hitler’s Germany is the best example. Putin’s Russia is not far behind.  

            Like pretty much every empire throughout time, restorationists thrive on uniting the power of the state with the ideology of religion. David and Solomon needed their priesthood. Constantine empowered early Christianity. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne. Henry VIII founded his own Church of England. Putin works closely with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch. The racist claim to keeping America white justifies itself because it will be a white Christian nationalism.  

            Both church and state, however, draw heavily on the glue of ethnicity, the good old days when it is imagined that we were all “authentically” the same: minorities are, at best, sidelined; at worst, demonized and victimized. There is little room in Modi’s India for Muslims. Arab Muslims in northern Sudan are even now eradicating non-Arab Muslims in the south. A militant settler movement in Israel cites the Bible to justify expelling West Bank Arabs.

*

            Restorative nostalgia is part of a larger picture: a centuries-long struggle between head and heart, reason (on one hand) and romanticism (on the other).

            The Age of Reason (17th-18th centuries) celebrated the head, with a claim that as much as people may look different on the outside, we are all creatures of reason on the inside — all the same, that is. It gave birth to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) whose philosophy assumes universal human reason and arrives at equally universal human duty. Or, earlier (1685-1750), Johann Sebastian Bach, whose fugues are mathematically precise and appealing to both ear and mind.

            This dependence on reason was behind the French Revolution’s call for universalist values of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; and its mission to end the unreasonable differences in privilege that marked the old order. Napoleon’s intended breakup of that order was a logical extension. Unsurprisingly, the European aristocracies who were threatened by that breakup exchanged head for heart: not universal reason but a romance with ethnic/nationalist tribalism. Germany for Germans; France for the French. Instead of Kant, we got Hegel, who thought the spirit of history was inexorably evolving into its preordained end, the superior German state. Instead of Bach, we got Wagner (1813-1883), whose operas glorify Germanic myths of origin.

            World War I was the natural outgrowth of this romanticized particularism, where each of the warring nations distrusted all the others. And Germany of World War II is a textbook case of restorative nostalgia militarized.

            When WW II ended, the seesaw of head and heart resumed. At first,  reasoned universalism made its comeback. The American variety stressed worldwide democracy and open-market capitalism; the Soviet alternative underscored the interests of the international proletariat. Both sought to remake the world in their own version of a universalist tomorrow. 

            When the Iron Curtain fell, only the American variety survived, and with it, a strengthened European union, globalism unbound, free trade, and capitalism unleashed: all of it, the new gospel for liberal intellectuals.

            But Jobs migrated to Asia; computers replaced people; the wealth gap widened; and religion was sidelined. A deluge of immigrants and the reality of a black president threatened the white ethnics who blamed the liberal universalist era for passing them by. So in 2016, romanticism returned with restorative nostalgia. Unsurprisingly, adherents of MAGA (Make America great again) denounce universal scientific reasoning behind vaccines and masks.

            American restorationists today romanticize the good old days of the 1950s, where (they imagine) America was mostly white and Protestant. The Supreme Court’s fetish with “originalism” is itself rooted in the assumption that the guiding wisdom of our founding fathers will overturn the liberal universalist order and reproduce the golden years when America was already great (never mind the extermination of Native Indians and an economy dependent on black slaves).

            Unlike the right, the woke left has no delusions about returning to yesteryear. But the same return to romanticism informs its claim that aggrieved minorities must hunker down behind “our own kind.” Men cannot understand women; whites cannot comprehend blacks. Hence the rise of anti-Semitism on the right and on the left, both of them romanticized, tribalized, and militant enemies of the universalists’ love affair with reason and the way we are all the same. 

            I love being a Jew; I think the Jewish People matters – but as part of a divine mission where all peoples draw upon their specificities to make their own unique contributions to a better world for all. That makes me an unrepentant universalist. Restorationist nostalgia on the right and romantic tribalism on the left will eventually end, I know. In the meantime, I write letters like this and practice having patience.   

[i] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 3.

[ii] Mark Lilla, “The Tower and the Sewer,” New York Review of Books,  June 20, 2024, p. 14.

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Open Letter to My Students 65: Thoughts on Israel Part 2: The Student Protests in Perspective

Posted on May 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

It’s time to see the campus protests in perspective. Why do students protest? And how does a Zionist like me respond?

            The “why” has many answers. 

            Start with the human urge to matter. When you’ve given or heard your share of eulogies, you realize that except for their immediate families, most people, for most of their lives, don’t live for anything terribly profound. They work, travel, golf, take the kids to the doctor, figure out what’s for dinner, go bowling. But deep down inside, there stirs a desire to matter; and to document our mattering for posterity. American soldiers in World War II scrawled graffiti on European walls announcing “Kilroy was here.” Antique shops still sell grammar school desks where generations of students etched initials into the wooden surface.

            There is also a demographic answer. You need a certain amount of leisure time to worry about mattering, and college students have that. Between 1961 and 2010, the weekly average of hours spent studying dropped from 24 to 14.[i]  Add in class time, and you get, roughly, a 30-hour week. Some 17 hours go into socializing, dating, joining groups, having fun. 

            And there is an existential answer. The practice of musing on what life is all about starts in adolescence and deepens at College, where people read, think, discuss, and debate; and when nothing matters quite so much as deciding who we shall become and with whom we shall become it. 

            I mean no disrespect when I say that student protests are the equivalent of marquis lights on Broadway, announcing the next generation’s coming of age, a young people’s version of “Give my regards to Broadway and tell ‘em I’ll be there.” But it is a Broadway-like presence that is endowed with moral purpose, a proclamation that their existence as appendages of their parents has ended, that they are individuals to be taken seriously. It is also what Emil Durkheim called collective effervescence, the experience of being part of something big, grand and glorious: we are not alone; we are one among hundreds, even thousands, united in a cause beyond ourselves.

            The cause varies: in July of 1908, Young Turks overthrew the Ottoman Sultanate and founded modern Turkey. On May 10/11, 1968, some 40,000 French students marched to champion the Marxism of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. On May 4, 1970, student protests against the War in Vietnam climaxed with the killing of four Kent State students in Ohio. The list goes on and on: Students Against Apartheid in South Africa; student sit-ins in the Jim Crow segregationist south. And now, student solidarity with Palestinians. 

            Not all causes are alike; not all of them turn out, in retrospect, to be equally legitimate or even desirable. The same Young Turks who brought down the Ottoman sultanate later launched the Armenian genocide. France is better off having defeated the Marxists.  

            It’s always tricky trying to learn from history, but a few things seem clear. Student protests come and go. They tend to happen in good weather, often just before students leave school for summer vacations. Protests do have their revolutionaries; they also have an abundance of peaceful and well-intentioned moral activists; but students join for a whole host of reasons, and overall, as in any crowd behavior, most participants have not deeply studied the issues in question. Even the slogans they yell can mean different things to different people.  

            It follows that in the campus protests now roiling our country, we should avoid tarring everyone with the same brush. I will ignore for now the “fellow travelers” who join protests mostly for the effervescent thrill of it all – a not inconsiderable proportion, actually. But even the seriously engaged ones span a gamut of opinions and motivations. Some of them really are bad actors: haters of Israel, anti-Semites who celebrate the Hamas butchery (rapes, murders and all), and would demolish Israel and kill every Jew in it, if they could. But most of the students are in other categories. A good number of them are legitimately horrified by images of Gazan civilians buried under bombed out rubble or lacking medicine, food and water.       

            Whether you agree with the cause or not, some of the students quite legitimately protest in favor of a Palestinian State and, by extension, against Israel’s right-wing government which has done everything it can to make such a state impossible. If I were of Palestinian descent, I would probably do the same thing. And there are lots of Jews involved, Jews who are no less Jewish because they despise the current Israeli coalition and abhor the suffering of innocents in Gaza. I do wish they showed parallel sympathy for the traumatized Israelis who just want to return home and live out their lives without being attacked again. But they are not our enemies; not traitors to the Jewish cause. We know these people. They are our children, our students, our families; They are us. 

            There is much about the protests to deplore: the biased presentation of Israel as the enemy; the group amnesia that conveniently forgets the Hamas barbarism that began the war; the politicized left-wing faculty who advocate rather than teach, enflame rather than instruct. But the Israeli government is, at the very least, complicit, if only because of its West Bank policies that compromised its moral high ground years ago and that continue unchecked each day. It’s complicated, and, as I recall from my own student days, students are genetically endowed to take sides without necessarily reveling in nuance. Their parents and grandparents who have learned to balance complexities should not rush to the ramparts to embrace simplicities on the other side. 

            One such simplicity would be to overgeneralize anti-Semitism as the dominant motivation. We should recognize that one can, sometimes, criticize Israel but still be proudly Jewish. It is also true that even poorly advised protests can sometimes have positive outcomes: the French Revolution’s reign of terror was a horrendous chapter in world history; but “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” still rings true. 

            I believe that Israel must achieve security and safety for its inhabitants; but I worry about the cost to innocent human life, and suspect that Israel is being drawn into the morass of guerrilla warfare that is inherently unwinnable (think Vietnam and Afghanistan) – especially if it leaves Israel without allies and alienates it from the next generation of Diaspora Jews. I am outraged by its failure to reign in the extreme right wing, who do believe in ethnic cleansing, and are trying to finish off the west bank while no one is looking. 

            I believe that this moment in time calls on us Diaspora Jews to strengthen the hand of Israeli protesters against this government. I believe that Israel need not stand alone; it can reaffirm its ties to allies, first and foremost the United States itself. I believe that war is indeed hell; that this war cannot end too soon. And I hope that when it does, it will not be too late for the Jewish People, in Israel and beyond, to regain its moment in the moral sun.

[i] Cf. https://flaglerlive.com/college-study-time/#gsc.tab=0; https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED511233.

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Open Letter to My Students 64: Thoughts on Israel Part 1: I am a Zionist. So are Lots of People Who Say They are Not. Back to Basics. And What I Fear Most.

Posted on May 13, 2024 | 9 comments

This is not the first time the word “Zionist” has come under attack. Back in 1975, 72 nations supported a United Nations resolution that called Zionism “a form of racism and racist discrimination (35 nations were opposed; 32 abstained). The resolution was reversed in 1991. But here we are again, no UN resolution this time round (at least so far), but, instead, international student protesters, many of them Jewish. Most of them have never known a Jewish state governed by anyone except Benjamin Netanyahu – who is part of what I fear most: but more on that later. 

                  So back to basics: What is Zionism anyway? Put simply, it is the belief in the legitimacy of and the moral obligation to support a Jewish state — first and foremost, to protect Jews from persecution, and even outright obliteration; secondarily, to exercise the right of every people to pursue its own religious and cultural artistry.

                  Especially in the light of attempts by Nazi Germany (but also Czarist Russia, Stalin’s USSR, and others) to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth, most Jews I know – indeed, most people I know – are, therefore, Zionists. What even these Zionists may fail to grasp is that a Jewish state is not just a minor appendage to what makes Judaism what it is; the existence of a Jewish homeland has, since biblical times, been a sine qua non of Jewish being. 

                  A Jewish commonwealth of some sort goes back to King David some 3,000 years ago. In medieval times, the area was contested by warring Christians and Muslims, but throughout it all, Jewish settlements of some sort remained, while Jews outside the Land prayed regularly to return “home.” Open the Bible that is central to Judaism, almost at random, and the Land, this land, is already there.

                  The idea of Zionism as a modern nation state, however, is more recent. Pretty much none of the Middle Eastern states existed until after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire that owned most of it was dismantled and the victorious powers (England and France) carved them out: Syria here, Jordan there, Jewish Palestine elsewhere, and so on.  None of them were independent at first; they were all colonial creations. Only eventually did they develop their own sense of nationalistic selves.

                  In the competition for independence there were winners and losers. The various Arab states in the region expelled their Jews – who settled in Israel and were absorbed there as examples of the very persecuted Jews for whom the Jewish state was founded. But the people we call Palestinians faired more poorly. When the surrounding Arab states decided not to admit the existence of a Jewish state, but, rather, to attack it, Arabs within that state were displaced as well. Some fled the war zone, expecting that an Arab victory would enable them to return. But also, the Jewish government under attack by Arabs without feared the rise of Arabs within as a fifth column, and expelled many of them. These are the Palestinians who were not absorbed by neighboring Arab nations, and who have ever since been living largely in refugee camps. Various powers have arisen to represent them, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its successor the Palestinian Authority (PA), first and foremost. Hamas is a terrorist organization that fought the Palestinian Authority and emerged victorious in Gaza, from which it seeks to eliminate Israel and its Jews.

                      But—there is a big “but.” The current Israeli government is itself a corruption of the Zionism that I and my many friends espouse.  My Zionism believes that every people deserves a national home. To be sure, the nationals who inhabit such a home would have to admit the legitimacy of a Jewish state next door, and so far, that has not happened. But the Israeli government has played its own role in discouraging a peaceful solution. Among other things, it has empowered Israeli hyper-nationalists to persecute Arab farmers and take over their land on the West Bank. The current Israeli coalition, in particular, includes religious extremists and nationalist expansionists who are indeed racist and who behave like the fascist thugs of Mussolini’s time.  

                  My kind of Zionism deplores that kind of Jewish government. It accepts the claim of Palestinians to have a home of their own – the two-state solution, as it has been called. Hamas rejects that solution: hence its attack, designed to frighten Israelis away from any Palestinian state at all, lest it too be taken over by Hamas-type anti-Israel and anti-Semitic fanatics.

                  Can you oppose those Israeli governmental policies that you judge as immoral? My Zionism says it is not just possible but mandatory. 

                  Can you oppose Israeli policies yet not be anti-Semitic? My Zionism says you can, as long as your solution is governmental/political policy change, not the dissolving of the Jewish state as somehow illegitimate.

                  Can you oppose the continuing war on humanitarian grounds and still be a Zionist? You can, as long as your opposition does not whitewash away the actual culprits on the other side, Hamas; and as long as you support the principle of Israel’s legitimacy and the right of Israel to protect itself (like any other sovereign nation). 

                  Can you join others to advocate for a Palestinian state and still be a faithful Jew? You can, as long as your partners in protest do not advocate or sloganize about such a state as being a replacement of Israel; and as long as they and you do not imagine that the entire Palestinian condition has been brought about entirely by Israel. International politics is messy; only in misguided ideological posturing is there always a single bad-guy oppressor and a single good-guy victim.

                  I, frankly, do not see how Jews cannot be Zionists. Do we really believe that anti-Semitism is gone for good? That Jews will never need a haven that guarantees us the right of sanctuary, with sufficient independence and means to guarantee it? Are we really in denial about the threat of Hamas, of Iran, or Hezbollah; and their desire to murder every one of Israel’s 7,000,000 Jews? I doubt it.

                  But here’s the kicker: the Netanyahu government’s alliance with the right-wing settlers movement that is systematically menacing and even murdering West Bank Arab farmers, in what truly is an exercise in ethnic cleansing. One argument to oppose the war is the terrible slaughter in Gaza, which less and less looks either militarily or morally sustainable. Another is the immediate need to elect a new government that will roll back the specter of west-bank Jewish fascism. Were the settlers to win, I would still be a Zionist but a theoretical one, supporting a Jewish state, but not the semi-fascist one that it becomes.  

                  Proper Zionism is neither racist nor oppressive. It is the Jewish People’s right to a Jewish state in its historic homeland; to live there in peace and harmony; and to extract from our own experience as an oppressed minority the obligation to oppose the parallel oppression of others.

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Open Letter to My Students 63: Passover Thinking for This Year of Trauma

Posted on April 17, 2024 | 4 comments

The world is broken. And getting worse. So why I am still optimistic?  

            Just a few decades ago, the Iron Curtain fell, a grand coalition for freedom blanketed Europe, even Putin was an American ally, and I wondered then why other people were so pessimistic. 

            The optimistic/pessimistic divide seems to be baked into our brains, some of us leaning positive, others negative. Given both sides’ ability to argue their positions, it is hard to escape the conclusion that reasons follow — they do not precede — our sunny or cloudy disposition. Our predisposition toward one side or the other makes us see the evidence differently.

            Optimism/pessimism can be mapped onto another divide: liberal/conservative. Liberals see a world where change heralds promise; conservatives see a world change implies loss.  

            And indeed, researchers have tracked both optimism/liberalism and pessimism/conservatism to different regions of the brain.[i] We are hardwired to lean in one direction or the other. 

            In 1901/02, William James applied the two dispositions to religion, calling optimism the religion of “healthy-mindedness” and pessimism the religion of “the sick soul.”[ii] James’s nomenclature betrays his own psychological makeup: he suffered intense periods of depression, and wished to be “healthy” like other people. So ignore the unfortunate terminology. His point remains. Pessimistic religion emphasizes the preponderance of evil in human history. Optimistic religion stresses the positive presence of God and the steady evolution toward a better time to come.

            We actually need a balance of both. Evil, after all, is real. Pessimists make too much of it; optimists ignore it at their peril. 

            All of which brings us to the Passover Haggadah, and the story we tell about ourselves this year.  

*

            The rabbinic celebration of Passover began centuries before book culture. With no  written text to fall back on, whatever got said at the seder was made up on the spot – following, however, an agreed-upon outline. “Start with [Israel’s] degradation (matchil bignut); then finish with praise [to God] (um’sayem b’shevach); and seal [the message] with redemption (v’chotem big’ulah). More colloquially, “Tell the story of Israel’s degradation and praise God for redeeming us from it.”[iii]

            But what is Israel’s “degradation” and (by extension) its opposite, “redemption” from it? Two third-century Talmudic Rabbis, Samuel and Rav, debate that point.[iv] Samuel offers the obvious answer. Degradation is “Our ancestors were slaves to Pharaoh,” in which case, redemption is “God freed us” from it. Rav, by contrast, identifies true degradation as “In the beginning, our ancestors were idolaters”; redemption was our conversion to worshipping the one true God. For Samuel, degradation is imposed from without; for Rav, it is what we do to ourselves. Both positions are included in the traditional Haggadah.

            By the Middle ages, a list of things that count as redemption — any one of which would have been enough to merit praise of God — was assembled into a list, called Dayyenu (“It would have been enough”). By then, rabbinic theology had fastened on the centrality of human sin as the cause of Israel’s various historical bouts with degradation; so the crowning act of redemption was seen as the establishment of the Jerusalem Temple with a sacrificial cult that provided atonement. Jews settled down to await a messiah who would build a third Temple, the necessary means to atone sufficiently to end Jewish degradation at the hands of the nations. In William James’s scheme of things, we had become a religion for sick souls. 

            Animated by emancipation from medieval ghettoes and aflame with the promise of modernity, nineteenth-century Reform Jews rejected Judaism’s sin-and-punishment mentality. Their 1908 Haggadah added a Dayyenu line: yes, God “built for us a temple,” but God also “sent to us prophets of truth and great leaders in each generation to bring all hearts nearer to the divine kingdom of righteousness and peace.” In 1923, “great leaders in each generation” was changed to “made us a holy people to perfect the world under the kingdom of the Almighty, in truth and in righteousness.”

            Either way, this modernist version of our sacred story replaced the “sick soul” perspective with optimistic “healthy mindedness.” 

            Is degradation persecution from without (à la Samuel) or something we bring upon ourselves (à la Rav)”? Or a combination of both? Is ultimate redemption dependent on God (forgiveness of sin, bringing a messiah) or on us (acting “in truth and righteousness,” “great leaders in every generation,” being a “holy people”)?

            Rarely have these questions loomed as large as they do this year. The many chapters of the Haggadah’s evolution give us lots of leeway in answering them. Looming over any answer we might choose to give, however, is the Haggadah’s judgment, “Not just once, but in every generation, enemies arise to destroy us [degradation], but the Holy One saves us from them [redemption].” The entire statement is hard to accept as literally true. Anti-Semitism is indeed always around, to some extent, but lots of Jews in lots of generations have lived pretty happy lives. And we would have to expand the idea of divine intervention to include our own capacity for maximizing good over evil.  

            Whatever our story, then, do we emphasize the negative (anti-Semites are always out to get us; there is no progress: first Pharaoh, then Hitler, now Hamas) or the positive (we are empowered to affect redemption; there is progress: from Egypt to Sinai and a promised land; a post-Shoah State of Israel and healthy diasporas; a reconstituted Jewish future when the war ends)? 

            One thing is certain. The Haggadah in all its forms emphasizes redemption. However bad our degradation, we conclude with the image of Elijah the prophet, and “Next year in Jerusalem.” I will end my seder as I always have – as Jews everywhere always have: with the promise of redemption.

            The late Rabbi Michael Robinson (z”l, may his memory be a blessing) recalled visiting Israel and tripping over some loose pavement. Shaken by the experience, he pulled himself onto a nearby bench to recover.  A rather pious-looking man passed by (a rebbe perhaps ?) and asked what happened.

            “I fell,” Rabbi Robinson explained.

            ”No,” said the rebbe, “You got up.”

            The Haggadah reminds us that Jews are the People who get up. 

[i] Cf., e.g., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/#:~:text=The%20volume%20of%20gray%20matter,threats%2C%20is%20larger%20in%20conservatives; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3807005/.

[ii] William James, Gifford lectures, 1901/02; published as The Variety of Religious Experience (1902: Modern Library Ed., New York: Random House, 1994), Lectures 4-7.

[iii] M. Pesachim 10:4,6. Those portions of the Mishnah between “Start with [Israel’s] degradation (matchil bignut); then finish with praise [to God] (um’sayem b’shevach)” in Mishnah 4; and “seal [the message] with redemption (v’chotem big’ulah)” in Mishnah 6 are later insertions. The verbal form (matchil, um’sayem, v’chotem) demonstrate that the three phrase go together.

[iv] Pes. 116a.

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