Today is Day 133 of Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza. I have no voice against it other than private conversation and Facebook posts. Two weeks ago, a friend challenged me, asking why I have been so vocal in condemning Israel, yet remain silent about Hamas’s October 7 raid. I guess the short answer is the same one that Yeshayahu Leibowitz used to give: “I am a Jew.” But that has so many meanings. Here is a first pass at explaining what Israel means to me.
When I was a teenager I was certain that there had to be more to being Jewish than what I saw around me. We celebrated different holidays than my Christian classmates. We ate only kosher food. We attended synagogue services Friday nights, Saturday mornings, and on festivals. I could describe our rabbi as aloof and distant, but I don’t think that does him justice. I think “utterly uninterested in any of us” might be a more accurate description.
The summer before my bar mitzvah I attended Camp Ramah and I had a glimpse of something more. My counselor, Byron, was a student at Jewish Theological Seminary and an assistant to the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who brought emotion and awe to what was then an overly-rational branch of Judaism. Heschel was a towering scholar of Jewish religious thought, and especially of the Prophets. That summer of 1964 he was already a close friend of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and only a few months away from marching with him in Selma, Alabama.
Byron taught us that our daily prayers were to be done with kavanah, which signifies both devotion and intention. He explained that the spirit we should bring to everything we did was an awareness of the transcendent all around us. We studied Tanach (Bible) everyday, specifically Joshua and Judges. Our counselors encouraged us to treat them as difficult: texts. not to master, but to question. That was especially true of our discussion of herem, the instructions to utterly wipe out certain towns in Canaan. This feels especially apropos today in light of the daily reports of new Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank.
Those experiences at camp made me want to add to my daily Jewish practice and to do it with devotion and intention. I began wearing the tallit katan, a garment with tzitzit, the fringes that are commanded in the Torah, on its corners. I began the daily practice of bentsching tefillin, the leather boxes containing words of Torah and straps that the Bible instructs us to put on our heads and arms for morning prayer. I knew nobody in Livingston who did either of these things. Neither my father nor my grandfather did. My friends viewed me as some kind of religious fanatic when they got wind of it. I also read and reread Nine Gates to the Hassidic Mysteries by the Czech scholar Jiri Langer because its stories of rabbis and miracle workers contained the kind of extraordinary transcendence that our synagogue was missing.
Our synagogue teen group was USY. At various gatherings around the region I always saw the high school seniors who returned from spending a summer in Israel with USY. You could recognize the guys at a distance during Shabbat service at any Conservative synagogue by their large prayer shawl, the tallit gadol, which was definitely not the style among the suburban dads and was not the narrow tallit we received as a gift from our parents when we became bar mitzvah. They had a sense of seriousness and purpose and of having experienced something significant and transformational. (A side note: A few years later I noticed the same thing with people in the radical movement who visited Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades! Not the tallit gadol, though.)
I was really excited the summer after junior year when it was finally my turn. My photos of those two months are long gone. So are my letters home. But the little journal I kept is still with me. As I type these words I have pulled it down from my shelf. It is a record of some of what I was thinking. It helps me distinguish between thoughts I actually had then, at 17, and the conclusions I came to later about those experiences. My experience must be understood in the context of the time. It was 1969, just two years after the Six-Day War in which Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Teen-aged me still thought of this as a modern-day miracle, something like Gideon defeating a host of 130,000 with an army of 300 in the Book of Judges. I didn’t know that the Israeli armed forces had been utterly confident that they could do this in three days, or that US military intelligence agreed with Israel’s optimism but thought it would take seven. Nevertheless, certain myths about Israel and the “greening of a desert” that began to reveal themselves to me.
I’ll share a passage from July 14 when we made a quick trip to the Golan Heights:
After crossing the border we were shown how one could pick it out with the naked eye. Brown on Syrian side, green on Israel. Proof positive of Arab laziness. It looked like grazing land . Five minutes later I noticed some really nice fields and orchards and sure enough it belonged to a village of lazy Arabs. Another five minutes and there was a group of lazy Arabs threshing wheat.
I can only hope that the sarcasm of my tone is clear to my reader, that I was blown away by how much like a garden that whole village appeared to me and how awestruck I was by the amount of work that must have gone into cultivating and maintaining it. There were so many times that summer when our leaders and guides went just too far with their “proofs” that Israel was the result of an encounter between “a people without land and a land without people.” That was 55 years ago, but the sheer idyllic beauty of that Syrian village has stayed with me and I think of it every time some willfully ignorant defender of Israel starts bloviating about what we Jews have done with a “barren” land.
That summer was also only two years since Israel had occupied the West Bank and Gaza and it was entirely unclear to me that the occupation was a crime, nor that it would still be going on in 2024. Our group spent the better part of a week staying at Gush Etzion and taking long hikes in the Judean Hills with guides from that community. They shared their stories - alternately joyous and frightening - about having to evacuate their homes in 1948 and then returning in 1967. I didn’t know that over the next years they would become the center of the violent settler movement. I imagined that the submachine guns they carried were for our protection, not to intimidate the Palestinian farmers whose lands we were tramping through. But I had what I guess I can describe as hints, or maybe premonitions.
My journal for July 31 describes a hike along the course of an ancient aqueduct that provided water to Jerusalem. Here is one of those hints I got:
At one point we stopped at a mulberry tree. They were delicious. My hands became stained red. I stretched out by the aqueduct to clean them. Most came off and the remainder turned blue. I caught a tadpole, then threw him back in. The scene by the mulberry tree seemed to be becoming ugly to me. There were just too many people to have discovered one poor fruit tree.
We walked on quite a way. The aqueduct went underground, so we had to cross a field, a hill field with terracing. We had to jump from a stone wall at one point. Rather than jumping, most kids were pushing off from a sitting position - not much good for the wall. As one girl went off she brought a section of underpinnings with her. I then took the task of standing there, directing people away from the damaged section, making them jump from a standing position, giving them a hand coming down.
Then one big kid came along and just barged over the damaged section, completely destroying it. The Arab farmer who owned the field came running up angry. Why couldn’t we walk through someone else’s field? He’d been there for years. I started to repair the wall. The guy said he appreciated it but we should go on. Lee said alright. I felt and still feel incomplete not having repaired it.
I have never forgotten that experience, even for a minute. I can still see it in my memory. I have come to realize that I had no particular skill at dry stone wall repair and so there was no reason for this man to accept my offer of help. I have come to realize that he just wanted us to leave. But my awareness of the arrogance and entitlement that allowed us to traipse across that manicured and terraced hillside has only grown and it fills me with shame. The fact that we were accompanied by an armed West Bank settler and that I failed to see him as that farmer saw him fills me with shame, even though the category of “violent West Bank settler” was not yet a trope.
What strikes me, too, is the way I could walk through that terraced hillside having a little Edenic fantasy while the ugliness of our mere presence in that place should have been clearly visible to me.
I returned home without a dramatically changed view of the State of Israel or of Zionism. I simply saw that there were some serious problems. Some I associated with a kind of over-zealous marketing on the part of either our leaders or the directors of some of the educational sites we visited. Some I attributed to racist individuals. But it took me decades to recognize that these problems were essential to, and embedded in, the very idea of an ethnoreligious state, and particularly one where roughly half the residents were not members of that ethnic or religious group.
There is so much more to say about my experiences and my feelings. I haven’t touched on chanting Eicha for our group at the Kotel in Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av, 1969. I haven’t touched on my ambivalence about setting foot on Har Ha’Bayit. I haven’t gotten near the night I suddenly found myself at a Gramercy Park hotel running security for a public speech by the PLO’s representative to the UN. Over the decades I have separated myself almost entirely from Jewish communal life, in large part over the question of Israel, but there are other reasons, too. Nevertheless, being Jewish remains an essential part of how I understand myself as a person.
It is Day 133 of Israel’s latest and most genocidal invasion of Gaza. I see the Israel acting as an outlaw state. I see the IDF acting as Nazis. And I see American Jews acting as though we, not the Palestinians, are in mortal danger. I cannot pretend that somebody else is doing this, as if it has nothing to do with me. I have written my Congressman, but he is Ritchie Torres and he gleefully fronts for the Israel lobby in Washington. I try to communicate my horror with everybody I know, but they seem either to already agree or to be unmoved. I only wish I had a louder voice.
