Category Archives: Judaism

“All Who are Hungry Come and Eat:” A Report from a Passover Action at the Gaza Border

Cross-posted with The Nation

In 2017, I spent several days in Gaza as a staff person for the American Friends Service Committee. Although I took away many powerful and vivid memories from that trip, some of the most indelible involved the delicious food that was continuously served to us by our Gazan hosts. Gazans are famously proud of their cuisine, and rightfully so, as it provides them with a palpable connection to Palestinian history and life outside that small 140 square mile strip – to communities in Palestine that their ancestors used to live. As journalist Laila El-Haddad has observed, Gazan food is “a sort of treasure map to a largely invisible, or invisibilized, world of Palestinian history going back well before the 1948 Nakba.”

During the course of our visit, Ali, a member of the AFSC Gaza staff, mentioned more than once that Gazan knafeh (a traditional Arabic dessert) was by far the best in Palestine. When our staff group gathered at a restaurant in Gaza City for our final meal, Ali was chagrined to learn that there was no more knafeh left in the kitchen. Determined, Ali got up, ran down the street to another restaurant, and returned with a huge round plate of the sticky, golden pastry for our table. It was indeed more delicious than any knafeh I have eaten before or since.

I’ve recalled that sweet memory often over the past seven years. When I think of it now, however, I find its sweetness has curdled into horror. As far back as December, human rights agencies determined that Israel “was using starvation as a weapon of war.” According to the World Food Program, Gaza’s food system was on the brink of collapse and the population was facing a “high risk of famine.”

This past March, the mainstream media published shocking, heartbreaking pictures of Yazan Kafarneh, a 10 year old Gazan boy reduced to skin and bones from starvation. To date, it has been estimated that 28 children have died of malnutrition and starvation in northern Gaza. By all accounts, starvation in Gaza has now reached “catastrophic” proportions. Knowing about the Gazan people’s deep pride in their food culture, I’m experiencing deep heartbreak as I read reports that Palestinians in Gaza are now forced to eat grass just to survive.

As a congregational rabbi, I’ve spoken with many people have told me that they are not sure how – or even if – they will celebrate Passover this year. With the genocide and forced starvation of the people of Gaza deepening with no end in sight, they say, it just feels beyond challenging to celebrate a festival of Jewish liberation. To make the moral dissonance even more dissonant, many in the Jewish communal establishment are framing Passover by focusing exclusively on the Israeli hostages in Gaza and call for their liberation from Hamas, with nary a mention of the 35,000 Gazans who have been destroyed in the process through Israel’s genocidal of vengeance.

More than once I’ve been asked, “How can I partake of this festive meal while Israel has been starving Palestinians in the name of the Jewish people?” How can I read about Pharaoh’s oppression of Israelite children when I’ve just read the latest death count of Palestinian children dying increasingly things from forced starvation?

As a political-spiritual response to this unprecedented Passover moment, Rabbis for Ceasefire mobilized and began to organize as action at the Gaza border, to literally bring food supplies with us and demand to that Israel allow us to pass through the Erez Crossing, motivated by Passover’s central imperative, “All who are hungry come and eat!” Our action would include 10 American rabbis, writer/essayist Ayelet Waldman and 30 other Israeli activists – including Israeli rabbis – who have been tirelessly protesting both at the Gaza border and organizing protect presence for West Bank communities targeted by settler violence.

Our action was originally planned for the week leading up to Passover; but when Iran’s missile attack caused the country to go on alert and airlines cancelled their flights to Israel, we almost had to cancel our action. As we read the news, Israel’s escalating hostilities with Iran took front and center The US and the West were rearming Israel and focusing on the threat from Iran – even as Israel continuingly maintained its policy of starvation and bombardment of Gaza. Most alarming were the reports that an Israeli agreement to retaliate lightly against Iran would give them leeway to move ahead with a potentially disastrous ground invasion of Rafah. We bought plane tickets for the next week, determined to make a collective Passover statement that felt more critical than ever.

During our action, we gathered at a preplanned meet-up location, with a truck filled with half a ton of flour. We each shouldered backs of rice and, carrying banners and flags, march in the direction of the Erez Crossing. The Israeli police quickly drove up to intercept us. During that initial stand-off, several of us offered statements. I began with an opening prayer, an adaptation of the “Magid” section of the Passover Haggadah:

“This is the bread of affliction, the bread and food systemically, cruelly denied the people of Gaza. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are oppressed be liberated this Pesach. Now we are here – tomorrow let there be bread for Gaza. Now we are here – next year may there be liberation from the river to the sea!”

Other speakers included Israeli Rabbi Avi Dabush of Rabbis for Human Rights, a resident and survivor of a kibbutz that was attacked on October 7 and Noam Shuster-Eliassi, a well-known Israeli activist, writer and comedian. When our program was over, we pushed forward toward the border. When the soldiers violently attempted to break us up, several of us sat down in the road. During the course of the protest seven of our group: four Americans and three Israelis were arrested.

All of the arrested were fully prepared for this eventuality – the Israelis were in fact veterans at protest-arrests and had previously briefed us on protocol. They were taken to two dentention centers and interrogated for eight to nine hours. The American were told, perversely, that they were being held for “attempting to bring food into Gaza.” All the arrested were released that evening; thankfully the food we attempted to bring into Gaza was not confiscated; as we have previously planned, it was donated to the community of Masafer Yatta – an area in the South Hebron Hills were almost 3,000 residents are resisting the daily threat of demolitions, evictions and dispossession.

While we are satisfied with the attention our action has received, we have no illusions about the current moment in Gaza. Nearly 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza currently face mass starvation and encroaching famine, these words have resonated with unbearably profound force during Passover this year. Hundreds of trucks filled with humanitarian goods have been sitting idle on roads leading into the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt, blocked from entering Gaza by a draconian inspection process that severely limits the number of trucks that can pass through. Inside Gaza, the Israeli has been attacking efforts aid efforts with tragic results. According to the UN, the Israeli military has killed 196 relief workers; soldiers have also shot and killed hundreds of Gazans who venture out to seek food.

Amidst it all, the one agency that has the capacity and infrastructure to effectively distribute relief to the people of Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), has been defunded by the Biden administration. This past January, the Israeli government leveled the still-unsubstantiated claim that 12 UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas’ October 7 attacks in Israel. Though UNRWA immediately fired the employees in question and launched an investigation, the US immediately withdrew their financial support of the agency, which was founded in 1949 to provide support to the hundreds of thousands of refugees created by the establishment of the state of Israel.

In its spending bill this past March, the US government extended its defunding of UNRWA for a year. Though the agency reports it has sufficient funds to operate until the end of May, its ability to operate in Gaza has already been gutted. Last month, Israel announced it would no longer approve UNRWA food convoys to the north of Gaza, where famine is the most. According to its report this month, the agency noted that “a total of 420 trucks food trucks were denied or impeded by Israeli authorities (during the month of March) …Gaza is on the brink of famine, with 1.1 million people—half of its population—experiencing catastrophic food insecurity due to the intense conflict and severe restrictions on humanitarian access.”

Most ominously, Israel continues to amplify its threats to invade Rafah, which would almost certainly result in massive human tragedy and the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. And yet, in the wake our action on the border, I continue to hold out hope. It is clear to me that our border-protest was part of something much larger: the dramatic rise in student resistance on college campuses throughout the US and unprecedented popular Palestine solidarity increasing around the world. For me, this moment expresses the core meaning of Passover powerfully than I have every experienced in my lifetime: in every generation, the cry of the oppressed demands to be heard.

This Passover, I also hold out hope from my own memory of meals in Gaza back in 2017. To be sure, AFSC’s Gaza staff has suffered terribly during this genocidal onslaught – and I’m sure the restaurants and neighborhoods where we enjoyed such delicious meals with our Gazan friends are no more. But I will never forget the tastes of the food that were so graciously served, as well as the communities in Palestine that they represent. And I am more convinced than ever that Israel cannot, try as it may, starve, bomb, or shoot away the Palestinian people’s love for their culture that is so deeply, fragrantly rooted in their homeland: In the words of El-Haddad:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I would go back to, and what I would find, if I returned to Gaza. Most of the landmarks have been destroyed. Gone too are many of the people I cherished. But … it feels like I am the torchbearer now, the family’s keeper of treasured recipes. Like Um Hani (Leila’s aunt, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike), I will cook and I will teach, connecting the next generation of Palestinians to our homeland.

How Do We Celebrate Passover this Year?

The “Jewish Community” Letter to Mayor Johnson, With Commentary

On Tu B’Shevat, Our Call for Ceasefire Affirms the Sacredness of All Life

Guest Post by Maya Schenwar

Remarks by Maya Schenwar, from last night’s Tu B’shvat gathering sponsored by Tzedek Chicago and the Jewish Fast for Gaza. (Maya is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also a coordinator of the Jewish Fast for Gaza and a member of Tzedek Chicago.)

Many of those of us involved in Jewish Fast for Gaza are breaking our fast tonight. We’ve been fasting weekly on Sundays since mid-October, and we will keep fasting weekly until a ceasefire. We donate the money we would’ve spent on food to organizations supporting people in Gaza in this time of starvation and mass death. And each week, we are also reflecting on and renewing our commitment to solidarity with our Palestinian co-strugglers and people around the world who are calling for an end to this genocide, an end to US funding for Israel’s weapons, an end to colonization and apartheid.

When we call for a ceasefire, when we fast for a ceasefire, we are uplifting a call for life. In the months since October 7, I’ve heard many people quote Ruth Wilson’s Gilmore’s sacred words, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” And one of the things Ruthie is saying, with that message, is that in societies where life is actually treated as precious—where they don’t have the death penalty and life sentences and large-scale state violence and state-sanctioned environmental devastation—in those places, violence is less likely overall, the culture is less violent, because life is affirmed.

We should bear in mind that as the US fuels Israel’s genocide in Gaza, here in the US, Alabama is preparing to carry out the US’s first execution via nitrogen gas—which is torture—on the day of Tu B’Shvat.

People are more likely to treat life as precious when their own lives are treated as precious. So we have to create the conditions in which everyone’s life is treated as inherently sacred and irreplaceable. That work is on all of us.

Our Fast for Gaza draws inspiration from the Jewish tradition of fasting as an act of mourning, and it also draws inspiration from Palestinians incarcerated inside Israeli jails, who have launched many hunger strikes to protest their incarceration, and the incarceration of all Palestinians under occupation, to INSIST that their lives are precious.

When Ruth Wilson Gilmore first introduced this idea—where life is precious, life is
precious—she was at an environmental justice conference for youth, where, among other things, the youth denounced the effects of pesticides, including on humans– and of course, pesticides also have impacts on native plants and animals. I think this is significant, for Tu B’Shvat. Recognizing that all life is precious means recognizing our interconnection with all life around us. It means we need to, in the words of Thich Nhat Hahn, “awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” It means recognizing the ways that trees have been weaponized to push Palestinians off their land. It means recognizing Israel’s mass destruction of olive trees.

Trees themselves recognize that where life is precious, life is precious. Forests are social
systems in which trees support each other through their root systems, through chemical signals in their leaves, through the social climate they create. As we celebrate the trees’ birthday today, we can also celebrate their preciousness, the preciousness of all the life they nurture and that nurtures them. And we can express that through our urgent calls for a ceasefire, for Palestinian liberation, and for collective liberation.

When we say ceasefire now, we are also saying environmental justice now. When we say ceasefire now, it is a call for Indigenous liberation now, from Palestine to Turtle Island and beyond.

Ceasefire now can be a call to stop death penalties of all kinds, including this execution that is set to happen in our own country on the day of Tu B’Shvat. Let’s insist on the preciousness of people, and of trees, and of the interconnectedness of all beings.

Chag Sameach and peace to you all.

Reenacting Pharoah’s Genocidal Decree in Gaza

The introduction to the book of Exodus, which we begin reading this Shabbat, has never resonated so deeply or so powerfully for me as it does this very moment.

We’re all familiar with the events that spark the Exodus narrative: a new Pharoah arises over Mitzrayim who does not know or remember Joseph. Alarmed that the Israelite minority is growing, he oppresses them with forced labor – but the more he oppresses them, the more the Israelites increase in number.

Pharoah then attempts to stem the Israelite birth rate directly by ordering the Hebrew midwives Shifra and Puah to kill every newborn boy. When they defy his order, Pharoah orders that every newborn boy be cast into the Nile. Commentators differ on why Pharoah made this very specific decree. Some say that in his paranoia, he believed the boys would eventually grow up to be soldiers and take up arms against his people. Other say his soothsayers predicted the birth of Moses. Still others say Pharoah believed that the Israelite women would intermarry and assimilate into the majority culture.

Whatever the reason, it is striking to note that Exodus’ liberation narrative begins with Pharoah’s efforts to head off the Israelite birth rate. As I’ve noted before, there are powerful parallels between this narrative and the state of Israel’s regard of the Palestinian people as a “demographic threat” to their Jewish majority. But in the midst of Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, I’m finding that these verses now resonate with a brutal – and almost unbearable – urgency.

On November 3, less than a month into Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza, UNICEF, the World Health Organization and other NGOs reported that “Women, children and newborns in Gaza are disproportionately bearing the burden of the escalation of hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territory, both as casualties and in reduced access to health services.” More recently, the UN estimated that “around 50,000 pregnant women are currently living in Gaza, with more than 180 births taking place every day amid the ‘decimation’ of its healthcare system.”

The most devastating details on the impact of this onslaught on Gazan mothers can be read in the South African government’s application to the International Court of Justice, formally accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. I strongly recommend reading this document in its entirety. Though South Africa’s claim was cynically dismissed by the White House as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” its 84 page report is painstakingly researched, citing 574 independent sources. Though it is often near-unbearable to read, I believe it is an immensely important document and deserves the widest possible readership.

Here is a sample of the report’s findings on impact of Israel’s genocidal violence on pregnant women and newborn babies. Please be warned: the following quote it includes very graphic descriptions of traumatic violence inflicted on women and children.

Pregnant women and children –– including newborn babies –– are also particularly impacted by displacement, lack of access to food and water, shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation, and lack of access to health services. These effects are severe and significant. An estimated 5,500 of approximately 52,000 pregnant Palestinian women in Gaza giving birth each month are doing so in unsafe conditions, often with no clean water, much less medical assistance, “in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise”. Where they are able to get to a functioning hospital, pregnant women are having to undergo caesarean sections without anaesthetic.

Given the lack of access to critical medical supplies, including blood, doctors are being compelled to perform ordinarily unnecessary hysterectomies on young women in an attempt to save their lives, leaving them unable to have more children. Indeed, the Minister of Health for the State of Palestine, Dr May al-Kaileh, confirms that the only option facing Palestinian women in Gaza who ‘bleed out’ after giving birth is to undergo a hysterectomy in order for their lives to be saved. The lack of available drugs, such as the anti-D injection –– given to Rhesus negative women on the birth of a Rhesus positive baby –– also seriously impacts the possibility of future healthy pregnancies for affected women.

Premature births have reportedly increased by between 25-30 per cent, as stressed and traumatised pregnant women face a myriad of challenges, including being compelled to walk long distances in search of safety, attempting to escape from bombs and being crowded into shelters in often squalid conditions. Particularly in northern Gaza, cases of placenta abruption –– a serious condition that occurs to pregnant women during childbirth which is potentially life-threatening to both mother and baby –– have more than doubled.

An ever-increasing number of Palestinian babies in Gaza are reportedly dying from entirely preventable causes, brought about by Israel’s actions: newborns up to three months old are dying of diarrhea, hypothermia, and other preventable causes. Without essential equipment and medical support, premature and underweight babies have little to no chance of survival. Palestinian newborn babies have died due to the lack of fuel to supply hospital generators; others have been found decomposing in their hospital cots, medical staff taking care of them having been forced by Israel to evacuate.

On 3 November 2023, the World Health Organisation warned that “[m]aternal deaths are expected to increase given the lack of access to adequate care”, with deadly consequences on reproductive health, including a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births. The impact will necessarily be long lasting and severe for Palestinians in Gaza as a group. By 22 November 2023 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, has expressly warned that:

“[T]he reproductive violence inflicted by Israel on Palestinian women, newborn babies, infants, and children could be qualified as… acts of genocide under Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide … including “imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group”. She stressed that “States must prevent and punish such acts in accordance with their responsibilities under the Genocide Convention.”
(Sections 96-100)

If there could be any doubt as to the question of intentionality behind these barbaric measures, the section immediately following these findings includes exhaustive quotes by Israeli politicians and military leaders that make their genocidal intentions all too clear. Most chillingly, it offers this quote from 95-year old Israeli army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre during the 1948 Nakba — who was called up for reserve duty to “boost morale” amongst Israeli troops ahead of the ground invasion: Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live. . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. (Section 102)

In this week’s Torah portion, the cry of the oppressed Israelites rises up to God, who hears and hearkens to their pain. This year, there can be no more critical question posed by our Torah portion: will God hearken to the collective cry of the people of Gaza?

The answer, as ever, is up to us all.

“In Gaza, Israel is Revealing the True Face of Zionism”

Last week, the board of my congregation, Tzedek Chicago released this statement in repsonse to Israel’s ongoing military assault in Gaza. Although it is addressed to all people of conscience, it contains a specific challenge to the Jewish community at large. I’m immensely proud of the statement, which I hope will be considered seriously even (especially) by those members of the community aren’t ready to heed its words.

Our statement is not so much an academic argument as it is a call to moral action. As we say in our statement, “We are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time…Now more than ever, it is time for Jews of conscience to call out the essential injustice at the heart of Zionism in no uncertain terms.“

The full statement follows below:

The unspeakable violence currently unfolding in Gaza is confronting the Jewish community with the most critical moral challenge of our lifetime.

As of this writing, over 21,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, almost half of them children. According to the UN, nearly two million people have been internally displaced, confining them to less than one-third of the Gaza Strip’s territory. Disease and starvation are rampant, subjecting one in four households into “catastrophic conditions.” As the Secretary General of the UN recently described, “(Gaza) is at a breaking point. There is a high risk of a total collapse of the humanitarian system.”

Together with Jews and allies around the world, we grieve the massive loss of life that occurred as a result of Hamas’ heinous violence in Israel on October 7. We join with those around the world who are demanding the safe return of the remaining hostages currently being held in Gaza. We unreservedly condemn Hamas’ actions on that terrible day – there can be no justification for this brutal attack on civilian life.

We also know there was a crucial, underlying context to this horrible violence. We assert without reservation that to contextualize is not to condone. On the contrary, we must contextualize these events if we are to truly understand them – and find a better way forward.

The violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was a brutal response to a regime of structural violence that has oppressed Palestinians for decades. At the root of this oppression is Zionism: a colonial movement that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish majority nation-state in historic Palestine.

While Israel was founded in the traumatic wake of the Holocaust to create safety and security for the Jewish people, it was a state founded on the backs of another people, ultimately endangering the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians alike. Israel was established through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. And since that time, Israel has subjected Palestinians to a regime of Jewish supremacy in order to maintain its demographic majority in the land.

This ongoing Nakba is the essential context for understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months. Indeed, since October 7, Israeli politicians have been terrifyingly open about their intentions, making it clear that the ultimate end goal of their military assault is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents. One prominent member of the Israeli government put it quite plainly: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” More recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported as saying that he is actively working to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. The problem, he said, “is which countries will take them.”

Israeli leaders are being true to their word: we are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time. As in 1948, Palestinians are being driven from their homes through force of arms. As in 1948, families are being forced to march long distances with hastily-collected possessions on their backs. As in 1948, entire regions are being razed to the ground, ensuring that they will have no homes to return to. As in 1948, Israel is actively engineering the wholesale transfer of an entire population of people.

In a statement last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons warned:

As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse.

In short: Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza is revealing the true face of Zionism.

From its founding, Tzedek Chicago has openly rejected the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. As expressed in our congregation’s core values statement: We are anti-Zionist, openly acknowledging that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people – an injustice that continues to this day.

Since Israel’s most recent military assault on Gaza began, Tzedek Chicago has been a proud and active participant in the cease-fire movement, which has been steadily growing in the Jewish community. This movement is collectively motivated by the Jewish mitzvah of pikuach nefesh – the sacred imperative to save life. At the same time, however, it is critical to assert the Jewish value of “tzedek, tzedek tirdof” – “justice, justice shall you pursue.” Beyond ceasefire, we must acknowledge and call out the human dispossession that is at the root of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza.

Now more than ever, it is time for Jews of conscience to call out the essential injustice at the heart of Zionism in no uncertain terms. This is a critical moment for our Jewish communal organizations as well. We know it is not easy for Jewish institutions to reject Zionism, but we believe it’s critical that they do. In particular, we ask synagogues that are proudly “standing with Israel” to morally reckon with whom they are choosing to stand and consider the real human costs of their position.

There are some Jewish congregations that maintain an inclusive “wide tent” that makes room for both Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. While this may seem like a welcome development, we encourage these synagogues to consider how this inherently contradictory position nonetheless enables the violence Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians. We also invite congregations that publicly support “Palestinian liberation” to be clear about what this liberation will ultimately look like. Will it be a liberation in name only or will it include the dismantling and transformation of the colonial Zionist project once and for all?

The moral challenge of the moment is clear. We invite other Jews of conscience to join us in the creation of a thriving movement of Judaism beyond Zionism. A Judaism that lifts up a diasporic consciousness that doesn’t express entitlement over land. A Judaism that rejects ethno-nationalism, militarism and dispossession and celebrates our spiritual tradition of justice, liberation and solidarity with all who are oppressed.

Let our call for ceasefire be but the first step toward a greater liberation: one that extends true justice and equality for all who live between the river and the sea.

In Solidarity and Shalom,

The Tzedek Chicago Board

Rabbi Brant Rosen

Lifting Up the Torah of Ceasefire in Chicago City Hall

Here are the remarks, below, that I delivered at Chicago City Hall yesterday at a meeting of the Committee on Health and Human Relations as it considered an endorsement of UN Resolution 377, which calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. I was among a panel of community members – which included historian Dr. Barbara Ransby and State Rep. Abdulnasser Rashid – who offered statements at the meeting. In the end, the committee voted unanimously to approve the resolution, which will now go before the entire city council in January.

As has been the case with many local legislative bodies around the county, the politics around the issue of ceasefire has been marked by deep cowardice and toxicity. In October, the city council passed a strongly worded resolution in support for Israel that only glancingly referred to Palestinians – or to Israel’s rapidly escalating military onslaught on Gaza. As it became clear that the very word “ceasefire” was a political non-starter, Alder Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez of the 33rd Ward decided to build support for the UN resolution as chair of the Committee on Health and Human Services. Such is the politics of ceasefire in this horrid moment: it takes these kinds of torturous procedural efforts just to get a city council to call for an end to genocidal violence that has killed 20,000 people, almost half of whom are children.

Due to time constraints, I didn’t read my entire statement. Here are my remarks, in full:

I’m honored to be able to offer these remarks here today in support of this resolution. I agree with so much of the powerful testimony that was given during public comment and I want to thank the speakers for those remarks. I don’t want to go over much of what has been said other than to say I lift up the sentiment of outrage over the genocidal violence that Israel is committing in Gaza even as we speak.

But I would like to speak in particular, as a leader in the Jewish community, to many of the disingenuous and frankly false claims about Jews, about Judaism, about Zionism, about antisemitism that are being lifted up over the past two plus months during this terrible, tragic time. I hope it will at least provide a little bit of context as we start to consider the importance of calling for a ceasefire and our support of this resolution here in the city of Chicago.

We are living, at this very moment, through an extraordinary moment of reckoning. It’s not an understatement to say that the ongoing, unspeakable violence in Israel-Palestine is confronting us with the most critical moral challenge of our lifetimes. I can personally attest that this is most certainly the case in the Jewish community. Hamas’ violent attack on October 7 has deeply traumatized Israelis and many Jews throughout the world. This trauma, however, is not being manifest in one particular way. There are many Jews, myself included, who are deeply grieving these losses, who pray for the safe return of Israeli hostages – but who are also anguished and appalled at the massive violence and trauma Israel has been unleashing on the people of Gaza.

The Jewish community has never been monolithic – and it certainly has never been lockstep on the issue of Israel. And right now, the divisions within our community are becoming manifest in unprecedented ways. For the past two months, day after day, thousands of Jews have been organizing and taking to the streets throughout the country, engaging in relentless acts of civil disobedience to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

In October, there were massive protests in Washington DC, at the White House and on Capitol Hill. In New York City, Jewish protestors shut down Grand Central Station and the Statue of Liberty. Here in Chicago hundreds of Jews and allies took arrest at Ogilvie Transportation Center; last Thursday, on the final night of Hanukkah, hundreds of us marched from Daley Plaza to Boeing headquarters. This was one of eight coordinated Jewish actions that took place across the country that evening.

The events of the past two months reflect an important trend that has long been growing in the American Jewish community. The traditional legacy Jewish organizations, who have typically purported to speak for the Jewish community have become increasingly out of touch on the issue of Israel-Palestine. Over the past two decades, every Jewish communal survey has shown support for the state of Israel steadily eroding in the American Jewish community.

Moreover, the percentage of Jews – particularly young Jews – who identify as anti-Zionist is growing. We are pushing back strongly on the fallacy that Judaism = Zionism – and the deeply disingenuous accusation that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. We hear this claim being made repeatedly by the state of Israel and its advocates in the American Jewish establishment. Here’s but one example: Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, who has been repeating this accusation over and over again in recently said this in an interview with the New Yorker:

Zionism, a desire to go back to Jerusalem, the longing for Zion, isn’t something that David Ben-Gurion came up with. It isn’t something that Theodor Herzl came up with. It has been embedded in the faith and the traditions of Judaism for thousands of years. You can’t open a Torah on a Saturday morning for your daily prayer, you can’t go through a holiday, without seeing these references.

I’d like to address this claim head on because it a deeply inaccurate statement – and in its way, even dangerous. Greenblatt is of course correct that there is an important connection in Judaism to the Land of Israel. And yes, this connection is quite clear throughout the Torah, liturgy and Jewish tradition in general. However – and this is a big however – the notion of creating a political Jewish nation state was never part of Jewish tradition until the rise of the Zionist movement in the 19th century.

Judaism is a centuries-old Jewish peoplehood. Zionism is a political movement of modernity that arose in Europe that sought to radically change Jewish identity and Jewish life. For most of Jewish history, the yearning to return to Zion was expressed as an idealized messianic vision. Some Jews made pilgrimage to the land. And a small minority of indigenous Jews consistently lived in historic Palestine throughout the centuries. But the rabbis fervently opposed the establishment of a 3rd Jewish commonwealth in historic Palestine. They actually considered it to be blasphemous – a “forcing of God’s hand” to create something that could and should only occur in the messianic age.

From the very beginning, there has always been principled Jewish opposition to Zionism. Many Jews have embraced anti-Zionism not as a matter of traditional messianic belief, but as a matter of Jewish moral and political conscience. We recognize that there is a fundamental injustice at the core of Zionism, namely, the creation of a Jewish majority state through the dispossession and oppression of another people.

It is important to note that political Zionism is a form of ethno-nationalism. In other words, the Jewish identity of the state of Israel is predicted on the maintenance of a majority of one particular group of people in the land. Up until 1948, Jews were a minority in Palestine – and this necessarily posed a problem for the Zionist movement. In the end, the state of Israel could only be created one way: through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba. Today, even many Israeli historians agree: the state of Israel was founded through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from their homes and Israel’s refusal to let them return. This is what happened in 1948 – and this dispossession of Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state has been happening every day for the past 75 years.

In 2021, B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights organization released a 300-page report in which it concluded, “The Israeli regime, which controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, seeks to advance and cement Jewish supremacy throughout the entire are.” I want to make this clear: a prominent Israeli human rights organization has said that Israel has created a regime of Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea. This is not an antisemitic claim – it is a claim rooted international law and human rights. This is what it means when Palestinians and solidarity activists call for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea” – they are expressing basic human rights that we all take for granted – or should. And it is not antisemitic to say so.

Are there some individual anti-Zionists who antisemitic? Undoubtedly. But it is disingenuous and wrong to claim that anti-Zionism is fundamentally antisemitic. As I said earlier, there are increasing numbers of Jews, myself included, whose are anti-Zionist as a deep expression of our Jewish values. Torah teaches that all human beings are created in the divine image, that we must seek justice and liberation for all. It teaches that love for Zion is not divine entitlement to a piece of land, but an expression of a Zion consciousness. That the land – like the entire earth itself – does not belong to us but to God, and we are but strangers upon it.

Another central precept of Judaism is the prophetic injunction, “Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” This sacred imperative is what compels us to reject Israel’s militarism or to affirm in any way that Jewish state power will keep Jews safe. If there was ever any doubt, the events of the last two months should make this abundantly clear. It makes us all less safe – Jewish and Palestinians alike. And make no mistake: if this nightmarish war should spread through the region, it will endanger the safety and security of us all.

This why so many of us in the Jewish community are literally taking to the streets, calling for an immediate ceasefire and return of all hostages. This is why we welcome and support resolutions like UN Resolution 377. And this is why we are urging our political leaders, on every level, to join the call for ceasefire. This is moment of deep moral reckoning for us – and for the world. History will judge us by our action or our inaction in this critical moment. And that is why I urge us all to support the cause of justice and peace for all who live between the river and the sea – and for all who dwell and earth.

Again, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today.

How Do We Suspend Our Mourning for Israel/Palestine on Shabbat ?

From my weekly email to Tzedek Chicago members:

According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to mourn on Shabbat: between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday, funerals do not take place and the public aspects of shiva observance are suspended. For many, the very notion “forbidding mourning” can feel harsh and emotionally insensitive. I’ve often heard from mourners who resist this idea of “suspending their grief.” More than one congregant has pointed this out to me over the years: “Grief isn’t something I can just turn on and off. How do I possibly stop my grieving for this one day? Should I pretend that Shabbat will just magically make everything better?”

One way to answer to this question is to understand the difference between grief and mourning. While grief is an emotional state; mourning refers to the rituals and practices we observe to help us manuever through our experience of loss. Of course, we cannot turn our grief on and off, nor should we be expected to. Grief by its very nature cannot be scheduled to our convenience. As anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one will attest, the emotions that attend grief will invariably grip us with unsettling randomness – often when we least expect it.

When we suspend certain mourning practices on Shabbat, however, even in the midst of intense grief, we affirm a life beyond the loss, beyond the pain. Shabbat is our weekly reminder of this: our regular opportunity to experience olam haba – “the world as it should be.” When we suspend these rituals on Shabbat, we make a point of affirming healing during the most painful times in our lives. In some ways, it feels like nothing less than an act of spiritual defiance.

For over a month now, it has been a time of unimaginable, exponential, cascading grief on a scale few of us have ever seen. Israelis and scores of Jews the world over are still experiencing deep shock and trauma over Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7. Even as I write these words, we do not know the full extent of these massacres and abductions – many still do not know if their loved ones are alive or dead, whether they were killed or taken hostage. We are still learning the heinous nature of the attacks that unfolded on that terrible day. How does one even begin to mourn when faced with grief of such magnitude?

Tragically, we were never given the opportunity to learn the answer to this question. Only a few days after this attack, the Israeli government chose to respond with a vengeful military onslaught. metabolizing and weaponizing its grief against an imprisoned population of 2.2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza with nowhere to run. The exponential human loss Israel has unleashed is truly beyond comprehension: to date, the current death toll: 12,000 people, including 5,000 children.

For so many of us, the only work of the past six weeks has been to voice our collective conscience as loudly, as often and as fiercely as possible. We have been bearing witness to the most sacred values of our tradition: pikuach nefesh – saving a life is sacrosanct and tzelem elohim – affirming that all humanity is created in the divine image. All of these values are embodied in the two sacred words we’ve been chanting over and over and over again: “Ceasefire Now!” To end this vengeful, genocidal violence. To negotiate a homecoming for hostages and prisoners. To begin the process of rebuilding and healing through a process of just peace for all.

No, as Shabbat falls this evening, we will not “switch off our grief.” We will not deny this all-pervading, still unfolding pain. But we will affirm a world beyond it.

We know all too well that in moments of brokenness, it is difficult to imagine a world beyond. We know from experience that brokenness, by definition, involves loss. We know that what is broken can never be put back exactly the same way it was. But beyond the loss, Shabbat comes to remind us that no matter what, we never forfeit the chance to rebuild and heal. While grief can break us open, it also has the potential to transform us: opening us up to new visions, new opportunities, new worlds that we never may have dreamed possible.

In this moment, when so much around us seems to be shattering into so many painful shards, let us hold tightly to this truth.

The Radical Audaciousness of a Ceasefire in Gaza Now

As of this writing, Israel has killed over 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza – almost 3,000 of whom are children. (According to Defense for Children International – Palestine, almost 1,000 children are reported missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings.) Israel has cut off all food, water and power to the Gaza Strip. Gazans will soon run out of fuel to run their generators – their last link to medical treatment and drinkable water.

Israel clearly has no intention to end their onslaught any time soon; in fact, they are making their intentions all too clear. Prime Minister Netanyahu: “We will turn Gaza into an island of ruins.” Israeli army spokesman, Daniel Hagari: “We are dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. The focus is on destruction, not accuracy.” President Herzog: “It is an entire nation who are responsible. This rhetoric about civilians being involved is absolutely untrue…We will fight until we break their backs.”

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say we are currently facing the greatest moral reckoning of our time. A genocidal onslaught in unfolding before us in real time – countenanced by the international community and enabled by the US government. There can be no more pressing, urgent need at this moment than an immediate ceasefire to this unspeakable violence.

On the face of it, a ceasefire would seem to be the most morally obvious and straightforward course of action – but alas, the simple suggestion that Israel cease its carnage is tantamount to a radical – even extreme – idea at the moment. The Biden administration has made its staunch opposition to a ceasefire abundantly clear. When asked about the human toll, White House spokesperson John Kirby commented, “It is ugly and it’s going to be messy, and innocent civilians are going to be hurt.” When Biden himself was asked a similar question, he answered that he “has no confidence in the numbers that the Palestinians are using.”

Ceasefire is the last thing on Biden’s mind at the moment. Quite the contrary: he’s asking Congress for $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to enable Israel’s war effort. The only sign of moral leadership in Washington: the “Ceasefire Now” resolution introduced last week by Rep. Cori Bush, which actually asserts currently audacious suggestion that “all human life is precious.” As Bush put it, “We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom. With thousands of lives lost and millions more at stake, we need a ceasefire now.” (The number of endorsers currently stands at 18 members of congress. Click here to urge your representative to sign it – or to thank them for doing so.)

Yes, in the current political moment, simply calling for a ceasefire is considered to be a radically dangerous act. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer lambasted the 18 signers, referring to them as “a very small group of extremists.” UN General Secretary António Guterres was subjected to similar treatment: after he recently called for a ceasefire, Israel’s envoy Gilad Erdan, demanded that he resign immediately, saying, “His comments … constitute a justification for terrorism and murder. It’s sad that a person with such views is the head of an organization that arose after the Holocaust.”

This is what it has come to.

I’m profoundly sorry to say that things are no better in the Jewish community. While it’s not a surprise that the Jewish communal establishment is offering its full-throated support to Israel’s military actions, The response from liberal Jewish organizations, sadly, has been no different. J Street, for instance, has warned Democrats who don’t sponsor a “We Stand with Israel” bill that they will lose the group’s endorsement come reelection time. The rabbinical organization T’ruah has also resisted calls for a ceasefire, issuing instead a tepid call for Israel to “follow the laws of armed conflict to avoid harm to civilians” and a “humanitarian corridor” to be opened so that “critical supplies” can enter Gaza.

For its part, the venerable Boston Workers’ Circle dared to sign on to a call for a ceasefire and promptly found itself facing expulsion from the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council. The organization choose to quit the group voluntarily, stating, “Rather than engage in the lengthy and arduous process to be formally expelled, we are turning our attention to focusing on building a future of peace and justice for all.”

According to the Torah, we must not stand idly by while the blood of our neighbor is being shed. And yet here we are. The world is allowing – if not actively enabling – the mass carnage Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza. Please do what you can: contact President Biden, tell Congress, write to the press. Hit the streets. Shout it to the world:

Ceasefire now!

Seeking Understanding Amidst the Horror in Israel/Palestine

When I heard the initial reports of Hamas’ attacks on Israel this past Saturday, I will be completely honest – my first reaction was “good for them.” Israel had been collectively punishing Palestinians in Gaza for years with a crushing blockade with little to no care from the rest of the world. Now, amazingly, Palestinians had broken free from this seemingly impenetrable open-air prison. With power and ingenuity, they were resisting their oppression, reminding Israel – and the world at large – that they were still here. That they would not submit.

Inevitably, as the news of the attacks trickled in during the course of the day, my emotions turned to shock and grief. Along with the rest of the world, I learned about the sheer scale of violence committed by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians: the largest single day massacre in Israeli history. At last count, at least 1,200 Israelis have been killed and it is estimated that 150 have been abducted and taken hostage into Gaza. Everyone in Israel and many Jews throughout the world, know people – or know of people – who were killed, injured or taken hostage. Like so many in the Jewish community, my social media feed has been filled with heartbreaking pictures and stories of Israelis who have been slain or are still unaccounted for.

Amidst all the grief, however, I was also deeply troubled by the ominous, growing cries for vengeance voiced by the Israeli government and media, and felt a creeping dread over the shattering military response that would almost certainly rain down on the people of Gaza. And now that day has come. Israel has shut off all electricity and water for over two million Palestinians as the military wreaks complete and total devastation on across that tiny strip, attacking hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment buildings. As of this writing, the death toll has risen to more than 1,200, with 5,600 wounded. More than 250,000 people have been rendered homeless – and these numbers will almost certainly rise significantly in the coming days and weeks.

In a letter to my congregation a few days ago, I wrote that “so many of us are feeling layers upon layers of intense emotion, in often confusing and contradictory ways. For Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, I know these confusing contradictions are particularly keen.” Even so, I wrote, we simply must lift up the underlying context of this horrible violence. I continue to hold tightly to this conviction. While the sheer scope of our grief may feel incomprehensible, we simply must find the wherewithal to say out loud that the facts of these events have not only been comprehensible, but in fact inevitable.

Indeed, Palestinians and their allies have long been sounding the alarm that Israel was subjecting Palestinians to a brutally violent apartheid regime with impunity – and that there would be terrible consequences if the international community failed to intervene. Over and over, we’ve been warned about the cataclysmic violence that would inevitably ensue if Israel was not held to account. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it recently, “an entire people (has been) living under this kind of incredible oppression, in a pressure cooker. It had to explode.”

As we attempt to understand the context of this recent violence, I believe it’s utterly critical to know where to plot the starting point – and to my mind, this is precisely where most of the media analyses of the past several days have sadly gone astray. To judge by any number of pundits, this current outbreak of violence began alternatively with the US – Saudi deal or the policies of the far-right Netanyahu administration. While it might be said that any of these causes may have provided the most recent spark, I’ve been deeply disappointed, if not surprised, that precious few of these analyses have even mentioned the Nakba in relation to this latest outbreak of violence.

To be sure, the Nakba was an act of violence and harm that has been reverberating through the land between the river and the sea from 1948 until this very day. To put it simply, for the past 75 years, Israel has been violently dispossessing Palestinians in order to make way for a majority Jewish state. And for just as long, the Palestinian people have been resisting their dispossession – yes, often violently.

It is not by chance that this most recent violence has occurred in and around Gaza. As many commentators have observed, Gaza has in many ways been the epicenter of the Nakba – and of the Palestinian people’s resistance to it. To grasp this fully, it is important to understand the history of this region. Gaza’s narrative did not begin with Israel’s blockade or the political ascension of Hamas. What we call today the “Gaza Strip” was artificially created in 1949, when it became a repository for a flood of ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees from cities and villages in the coastal plain and lower Galilee. Before the Nakba, the population of this small region numbered 60 to 80,000 residents. By the end of the hostilities, at least 200,000 refugees were crowded into this 140 square mile strip of land.

At the time, most of the refugees fully expected to return home – some could even see their towns and villages through the fences. Those who crossed the border to gather their possessions or harvest their crops were considered “infiltrators” by Israel and shot on sight. Eventually, it became all too clear there would be no return. Over the years the tents turned into concrete buildings that grew ever higher along that narrow corridor. The numbers of that once sparse territory have grown to a population today of over 2,000,000 people – at least 70% of whom are refugees.

Following the founding of the state of Israel, many of the original settlements and kibbutzim founded on the border with Gaza were military outposts, most of which were built on top of or near demolished Palestinian villages. In fact, the sites that suffered the brunt of last Saturday’s massacres (including Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Re’im and Sderot) were settlements that were originally established in these locations for reasons of Israeli “national security.”

One such site was Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was flooded by dozens of Hamas militants, and where, according to witnesses, at least two entire families were killed, and two more kidnapped and taken to Gaza as hostages. When I heard about the massacre at Nahal Oz, I couldn’t help but recall that this was not the first time this community had experienced Palestinian armed resistance. Back in 1956, a group of Palestinian militants entered Nahal Oz and killed a kibbutznik named Roi Rotenberg. At the time, this tragedy was keenly felt throughout the nascent state of Israel. At Roi’s funeral, the famed Israeli general Moshe Dayan offered a eulogy, expressing himself with brutal and unexpected honesty:

Do not today besmirch the murderers with accusations. Who are we that we should bewail their mighty hatred of us? For eight years they sit in refugee camps in Gaza, and opposite their gaze we appropriate for ourselves as our own portion the land and the villages in which they and their fathers dwelled…This we know: that in order that the hope to destroy us should die we have to be armed and ready, morning and night. We are a generation of settlement, and without a steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house. Our children will not live if we do not build shelters, and without a barbed wire fence and a machine gun we cannot pave a road and channel water. The millions of Jews that were destroyed because they did not have a land look at us from the ashes of Israelite history and command us to take possession of and establish a land for our nation.

Dayan’s words resonate today with terrible prescience. Decades later, the descendants of this original Gazan generation still remain in refugee camps in Gaza, “gazing though the barrier fences as Israel appropriates as its own portion the land and the villages in which their ancestors dwelled.” Dayan’s eulogy also powerfully described a hypervigilant Israeli mindset that has only deepened throughout the decades. Since the Nakba could not and did not result in the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes, Israel has attempted to control them with a “steel helmet and the barrel of a cannon” for the past 75 years. During this time, Israel has widened its regime of violence in order to contain Palestinians in the occupied territories, subjecting them to a daily context of systemic, unceasing state violence every moment of their lives.

It is also telling that Dayan invoked the trauma of the Holocaust in his eulogy – and today, so many decades later, we can clearly see that this trauma was not limited to his generation alone. If anything, it has been handed down to subsequent generations in way that are all too real and all too palpable. Indeed, we can clearly see this generational trauma at work in Jewish responses to this latest violence, which is being openly characterized as “the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.” It is painfully poignant to consider that these massacres occurred in a state that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust in order to safeguard Jewish lives once and for all.

At the same time, however, this Holocaust rhetoric is deeply troubling given the vengeful fury currently being whipped up by a far-right Israeli government that is demonizing Palestinians with unabashedly genocidal language. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently stated “Israel is fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly.” Netanyahu has promised that Israel’s military offensive on Gaza will “reverberate for generations.” One prominent Israeli general has promised to “open the gates of hell.” And perhaps most chillingly, a member of Israeli Parliament has called for a “second Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”

As I write these words, the Israeli military is mercilessly bombarding the Gaza Strip with a ferocity that is truly terrifying to behold. For the past few days, I’ve been combing social media for their postings from friends in Gaza, as I helplessly watch footage of whole neighborhoods and communities completely destroyed along with their inhabitants. One of the last messages I read came from a friend and former colleague at American Friends Service Committee: “Nothing left to say. More than 80 hours without electricity, water, or internet connection. Communication is very limited with everyone inside or outside Gaza. Carnage everywhere, hard to recognize streets, we are all waiting for the time to die.”

It is not an understatement to suggest that the Jewish community is now faced with a profound moral challenge. Even as we mourn our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no uncertain terms. I cannot say this forcefully enough: those of us who ignore this reality – who mourn the Jewish dead exclusively without even a mention of the massive crimes Israel is actively committing against the Palestinian people – will be quite frankly, complicit in this horrific bloodshed.

Over the past several days, I’ve found myself returning to a famous narrative from this week’s Torah portion: the story of Cain and Abel. In the wake of the first act of violence in human history, God says to Cain, “What have you done? The blood of your brother is crying out to me from the ground! Cursed by the ground that opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother.” From this we learn, among other things, that bloodshed actually has the power to pollute the earth. Later on in the Torah, we will learn that nothing can ever be the same – or considered normal again – when blood is spilled. it must be expiated, or atoned for through a set of very complex and explicit sacrificial rituals. In our day, we can understand these to be acts of reparation, restoration and repatriation. We will only truly make atonement for this bloodshed with very real measures that will restore justice and balance for those who dwell in the land.

As I read this story, I can’t help but think of the blood originally shed in the terrible days of the Nakba, and how it continues to cry out to us all from the ground. I can’t help but think of the immense amount of blood that has been shed since, whose collective cry must certainly be a searing roar, if only we would allow ourselves to hear it. But we will never heed the cry as along as we remain hardened into sides, into “us and them.” In fact, in this week’s Torah portion, there are no “sides” to speak of. There are no nations, no Israelites, no Canaanites, no Amalekites, no Moabites. There is only one common humanity, struggling how to live together in a too often harsh and unyielding world.

Those it may seem more painfully difficult than ever, let us hearken to this voices that have so long been crying out from the ground. Let us respond with understanding, compassion and action. Even amidst the terrible grief, let us shine an unflinching light on the true roots of this violence – and on the vision of a future based on justice and equality for all who live in the land.

With this in mind, I will conclude now with the prayerful words of my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Alissa Wise:

May the One Who Remembers allow us to hold in one hand 75 years of occupation,
dispossession and violence and in the other a future of peace, justice and freedom;

May the One Who is Slow to Anger soften our hearts and our fists helping us to put down the sword even at the height of the arc of our rage;

May the One of Possibility remind us that a future of peace with justice is possible;

May the One Who Awakens Us to Life hold us in our pain and vindictiveness until we set those down for the sake of life;

May the One Who Endures allow us to act for the sake of the coming generations;

May the One Who is Without Limit expand our senses of what is possible as we reach for justice, freedom and peace for us all.

Amen.

Shalom Rav

A Blog by Rabbi Brant Rosen