Dear Temple Members, 

 For nearly a year I’ve been sharing weekly links to news and opinion articles about Israel, but now I would like to share with you my own thoughts about the current war and its consequences. My intention is not to sway anyone to my way of thinking, but rather to let you know what I’m thinking, wondering, worrying and hoping.

Judaism has no formal tradition of pilgrimage. Unlike Muslims who take on an honorific title after completing the Hajj to Mecca, Jews who travel to Israel have no change of status and are indistinguishable from those who have never been there. But I appreciate that for many North American Jews, visits to Israel and time spent living there are integral to their Jewish identity. A 2021 PEW Research survey found that just under half of Jewish adults in the U.S. (45%) have been to Israel, including 19% who have visited once and 26% who have visited multiple times or have lived in Israel. Whether it was a student year-abroad, volunteering on a kibbutz, a family trip, a guided tour, or a study intensive, for many people their connection to our tradition was shaped and deepened by experiences in Israel. This was not the case for me.

I’ve traveled to Israel only twice: first for a student’s wedding in 2001, when I visited cousins, spiritual teachers, and peace activists whom I had met in the States. I returned in 2009 on a trip with Rabbis for Human Rights in which we learned about a range of social issues in Israel and the West Bank; travel to Gaza was not possible. Both trips were fulfilling and enlightening. What I loved about being there was not that it was Jewish country, but that it was Middle Eastern, with a great blend of cultures and languages and so much history underfoot. 

I arrived there the first time on the cusp of turning 50, already a rabbi deeply rooted in my own Jewish practice. I had fascinating experiences in Israel, but none of them made me feel somehow more Jewish, or more deeply connected to the traditions of my ancestors. It was the opposite. I witnessed inner tensions and stark divisions of Jewish life in Israel as well as the growing enmity between Israelis and Palestinians. I stayed with an older cousin, a sabra (native-born Israeli) whose father was killed in the 1948 war. She vividly described to me how much more open and hopeful the country felt when she was young and used to walk from her home in Jerusalem to Bethlehem for the day without fear of being attacked. That walk was already unthinkable in 2009. I visited a student who had embraced an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle and taught singing in a girls’ high school. The young women were charming, but I was dismayed by their limited understanding of the world and their attitudes toward their Arab neighbors. With a wave of her hand one explained to me that soon mashiach, the messiah, would come and solve all the problems by removing non-Jews from Israel. In that strictly observant neighborhood, though I was dressed modestly, little Jewish boys threw rocks at me and my guide, peace activist Devora Brous, who happened to have long blond hair. Devora explained, “They think we’re Christians.” I kept hoping for an opportunity to go back to learn more, but for numerous reasons I haven’t done so.

As a rabbi and university lecturer, I feel it’s essential for me to study Jewish history and stay current on Jewish issues worldwide, especially in Israel. Quite a few years ago, Israeli cousins guided me to excellent authors in history and politics, and from there I found my way to others and to the English-language Israeli press. I’ve potchkied (cobbled) together a pretty good understanding of the political, social, and religious complexities. I’ve done this from both a sense of duty and also a gut feeling that my sweet, musical, mystical, magical Jewish life in the holy land of Humboldt cannot be insulated from the strife between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Israelis and other Israelis.

And so, as I’ve feared for a long time, it has come to pass that the searing pain of tragic events in Israel and the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank has reached our beloved redwood forest coastal home, and Jewish life here will never be the same. Growing antisemitism in the radical right was a serious problem well before October 7th, and now we must contend with antisemitic vitriol on the left. The white nationalists are the ones with guns, but verbal assaults from anti-Zionism zealots and misguided efforts by well-intentioned but poorly informed progressives can erode the quality of our Jewish life. Many people have told me of rifts in friendships and working relationships since October 7th. As the war grinds on and the horrific question of genocide dominates headlines, things will only get worse.

Some researchers have suggested that Holocaust education of recent decades has not had the desired effect. It turns out that telling kids being Jewish can get you gassed to death doesn’t help them understand Jewish life, but rather gives the impression that being Jewish is distinctly other, strange, and undesirable. I fear that the same thing is happened now: in the popular imagination all Jews will be tied to the horrors of Oct 7th and the present war, either as victims of horrific, unspeakable torture and killing, or as perpetrators of devastating bombing that reigns death on thousands, displacing millions. I wonder: when this terrible war is over, will the public remember how the Jewish community here in Humboldt County and across the country rallied to so many social and environmental causes? Will they recall the friendliness and hospitality we’ve offered in opening our synagogue and our hearts to share the gems of our tradition? Will they keep in mind the generosity of our members and our institutions that have provided assistance for people struggling with poverty or discrimination? Will they think of the bagels, blintzes, latkes, rugelach, klezmer music, singing and dancing they’ve enjoyed with us? Or will all this evaporate and our non-Jewish friends, neighbors and colleagues will think of us only with pity, or with anger, or with both?

I’ve learned a great deal from Eric Alterman’s We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (2022). He writes about the evolution of the US-Israel relationship, particularly the Jewish American connection to the young State of Israel:

Once the “miracle” came to pass with Israel’s founding in 1948, for many Jewish Americans, that was that. They contributed funds to help settle new immigrants, plant forests, and build schools, but they did not much visit, and they certainly did not “make Aliyah”—that is, move to Israel—in significant numbers…

…A fundamental change in American Jewish attitudes took place in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War as fears of a “second Holocaust” gave way to an emotional embrace of Israel that shocked even those who experienced it. Before 1967, save for the years immediately surrounding the founding of the state in 1948, the agendas of America’s major Jewish organizations were shaped by traditional concerns of American liberalism, with a focus on social services together with issues related to racial discrimination and the legal separation of church and state. By choosing liberal causes that were “good for the Jews”’ but not only for the Jews, they managed to elude the traditional divide between Jewish “particularism’ (that is, concern only for fellow Jews) and “universalism” (the desire to “repair the world,” or tikkun olam, in Hebrew), embracing both simultaneously…

…Following the shock of Israel’s smash six-day victory, however, literally everything—race relations, social justice, social services, Jewish education, and anything else you can think of—immediately took a distant back seat to support for Israel. The attachment to Israel became what Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a widely-respected 20th century leader of Reform Judaism, American Jewry’s most popular denomination, compared to “a kind of kidney machine, without which [American Jews] cannot live.”

The other cause that appeared to excite funders and Jewish leaders inspired by the Six-Day War was Holocaust remembrance…The horrific history of the Shoah became inextricably intertwined with arguments in the defense of Israel’s increasingly harsh treatment of the Palestinians and its apparent endless occupation of the West Bank. Jews did not forfeit their liberal beliefs, but were willing to lay them aside whenever they were understood to come in conflict with support for Israel. This transformation reshaped the meaning of secular American Jews’ cultural and religious identities, as these became synonymous with an enthusiastic embrace of Zionism together with angry efforts to excommunicate anyone who dared dissent from this consensus…

…Kenneth Stern, scholar of antisemitism…saw his organization [the American Jewish Committee, established 1906] “sacrifice an instinct for serious thought, discussion and self-reflection in favor of ardent pro-Israel advocacy”…

…The image of an Israeli David fighting off the Arab Goliath…was more misleading than illuminating, but it lived on as a tool for Israel’s supporters in the debates they faced…The debate about Israel’s character began to shift in the 1980s. Tens of millions of evangelical Christians, newly empowered in US politics by Ronald Regan’s 1980 election victory, took up Israel’s cause. In doing so, they joined the mostly secular, mostly Jewish neoconservative pundits and politicos who had seized on an all-but-unquestioning defense of Israel as a fundamental ideological precept.

[You can hear Professor Alterman in a 12/5/23 conversation with Rabbi Avraham Bronstein here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulpDMYXiBhc]

My parents, of blessed memory, did not involve themselves in Jewish religious or cultural life, and neither did I until I reached my late 20s (in the late 70s). I wasn’t aware of the above-described momentous developments in Jewish life as they occurred; I studied all this much later. My own exploration of Judaism was not Israel-centric. I discovered Jewish holidays, music, philosophy, cosmology, spiritual practice, so many treasures, but none of them were dependent on Israel. Some of my teachers had spent significant parts of their lives in Israel, most particularly Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man, z’ichrono l’vracha (his memory for a blessing) and Rabbi Gershon Winkler, may he live to a hundert un tzvanzik—but neither of them nor my beloved Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, z’l’–none of themspoke much about Israel and they neither encouraged nor discouraged travel there. They were preoccupied with traveling within, the inner, spiritual journey of the soul that is not dependent on any particular place but may be nourished by the wonders of nature found everywhere on our exquisite planet, and the wonders of love embodied in every act of kindness. 

As I learned more about the “official” Jewish world in America, I came to understand the role Israel played in so many American lives. Having fallen in love with Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, and attempting beginning Arabic, I longed to spend time in Israel to improve my language abilities, but I wasn’t really interested in learning how to chat about mundane matters in the ancient language that I associate with prayer and meditation. As the years went by, I learned to appreciate the huge differences between being a Jewish American and a Jewish Israeli: family history, ethnic diversity, identity formation, political leanings, military experience, and travel, to name a few. When I was a New England youngster enamored of Shakespeare, we used to joke that America and England were two countries separated by the same language. Now we might say that Jewish America and Jewish Israel are two communities separated by the same religion. We share nearly 3,000 years of history, but within the brief century in which Jews became well established in both the US and Israel, our destinies have diverged in significant ways. And now our Israeli cousins and friends are engulfed in a horrifying war while we Americans struggle to support them yet still hold fast to our moral values.        

In his 2012 study, The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart (a Zionist himself) devotes a chapter to chronicling Netanyahu family history. Beinart points out that Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, (1910-2012), served as personal assistant to Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, (1880-1940), whom Beinart describes as “the spellbinding, romantic, brutal founder of Revisionist Zionism,” which laid claim to land on both sides of the Jordan River including what was historically called Transjordan. We read:

Abba Achimer, one of Jabotinsky’s most militant disciples, wrote glowingly about the battlefield exploits of biblical leaders like Joshua and King David…The problem began, according to Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, with the prophets. Achimer was particularly hostile to Isaiah, who challenged the Judean kings to “seek justice, relieve the oppressed.” The Revisionists, while devouring the Bible’s accounts of Jewish political and military life, often scorned those passages suggesting that Jews were tasked with a special ethical mission. “The Bible says, ‘thou shalt not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,’” wrote Jabotinsky in 1910. “Contemporary morality has no place for such childish humanism.”

This could not be further from my own understanding of Judaism as the legacy of the brilliant ethicists of antiquity, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Hosea and Amos, whose words we still sing in our haftarah selections.

It sheds light on currently unfolding tragedies to understand that Jabotinsky was the philosophical grandfather of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who, Beinart observed a dozen years ago, “dreams to realize the Revisionist dream: a dream in which Jewish ethics no longer hinder Jewish power.” That thought makes me shudder. Though for many American Jews love of Israel constitutes an important means of connection to tradition, for others extreme Israeli policies constitute an insurmountable obstacle, alienating Jews from Jewish identity and practices.

        When I taught Introduction to Judaism at then-HSU, my final exam included a creative writing option: You’re a reporter on religion living 25 years in the future. Write an article comparing the Jewish American community and the Jewish Israeli community and describe the relationship between the two populations. During one brief semester, most of my students learned to understand how the two communities were on very different trajectories and how the religion of Judaism would be impacted.

Where do we go from here? Going backwards is not possible. We must make our way forward into an unknown, difficult, and potentially dangerous future.

I often think about the unique character of the Jewish community in Humboldt County. We tend to be people who place a high value on living close to beautiful sites. Families and individuals who want access to Jewish community centers and federations usually don’t choose to live here. Except for the younger born-in-Humboldt generation, most of us have moved here from elsewhere, removing ourselves from the Jewish metropolitan bubble. I think that here behind the Redwood Curtain we feel buffered from the hustle and bustle of the world, including the distant, tumultuous Middle East. But we’re good citizens of the planet and our physical isolation doesn’t engender intellectual isolationism.

Over the years, our TBE K’lal Yisrael (“Collective Israel”) Committee has provided strong programs focused on Israeli and Diaspora history and current issues. We’ve shown numerous films and have hosted Israeli, Palestinian and Bedouin guest speakers including historians, artists, human rights and peace activists. I’m especially grateful to Rabbi Bob Rottenberg and former Board Member David Boyd for teaching important classes about Israel through OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) at Cal Poly and for their leadership in J Street Humboldt. Several years ago, I attempted to organize a congregational trip to Israel. I had a great itinerary planned, but the costs were too high to be affordable for many of our members and I didn’t want the trip to be exclusive. I’m sorry we never had the opportunity to travel and learn together.

In response to the Second Intifada in 2014, I initiated our Israel Study and Discussion Group at Temple Beth El. For more than two years, we studied the multiple streams of Zionism that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: political, religious, socialist, utopian, and cultural. We observed how political Zionism overtook the others, elevating the founding and building of a Jewish political state over the other visions of what a return to Zion might mean. When the fierce fighting of this war is over, what will we need to study to understand how we got where we are and to orient ourselves to the future? 

        Ten years ago, our Israel Study and Discussion Group included Dr. Marianne Pennekamp, z’l’, who had been a child refugee from Germany. History sprang to life when Marianne spoke about her family’s experiences in the Hapsburg Empire and World War l. A distinguished social worker, in her mid-80s Marianne was attuned to the needs of the young and often pointed out how generational drift played a role in social issues, reminding us of the divide between older and younger generations. That divide is now starkly apparent in attitudes toward Israel and Palestine, with many young Jews delivering harsh criticism of Jewish American institutions and leaders. I felt that tension as we recently worked to prevent the Arcata and Eureka City Councils from adopting resolutions on the war that many of us considered to be marred with anti-Jewish tropes that would cause further painful division in the community or even feed the fires of hate. Some hateful remarks were made at those meetings. But I could hear that for some of the younger Jews in the community, their anguish over the many thousands of civilian deaths and injuries in Gaza carried far more weight than their concerns about local antisemitic rhetoric. How can we support and empower the younger Jewish generation that is confronting the double-headed demon of war and climate crisis? I welcome suggestions.

        Part of me wants to run away from all these problems and find another religion. I would love an excuse to learn Sanskrit, or join destinies with my gentle Unitarian friends, or just stay home and commune with my river and trees. But another part of me wants to dig deep, revitalize my own connection to everything I love about Torah and tradition, read everything I can about Jewish history and culture, learn a new Hebrew word each week, write and sing a new song, do what I can to make the world better, and continue sharing all of this with all of you. 

        Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.

Shalom,

Rabbi Naomi

 PS:I can’ t resist offering a link to an article: Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?