On November 2 I had the pleasure to engage in a public conversation with journalist/author Peter Beinart in a program co-sponsored by Jewish Currents and my congregation Tzedek Chicago, We explored a wide range of issues arising from the current moral-political moment in Israel Palestine.
I was particularly grateful to interrogate the issues raised by Peter in his recent book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning:”
• Is the Jewish community currently facing an unbridgeable ethical divide?
• Is it possible to make community with Jews whom we believe support – or remain silent over – the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza?
• Does Peter identify as a Zionist now? What is his opinion of the growing movement for antizionist Judaism?
I appreciated Peter’s honesty and willingness to engage over these issues – and many others. The entire program is available on the video recording above.
Mahmoud Al-Fasih holds the body of his three-week-old daughter, Sela, before laying her to rest. (Photo: CNN)
I’m sure there are many people who read what I write regularly (or scroll through my social media feeds) and think to themselves, “What a ‘one-note’ rabbi, just going on and on about Gaza. Why doesn’t he write or talk about other things for a change?”
If I could answer, these hypothetical folks, I’d say, yes there are surely many things in the world I could be writing or talking about. But when you live in a time of genocide – particularly one that is being funded by your government and carried out in your name as a Jew – it seems to me that being “one note” is a moral imperative.
All the more so as Israel’s genocide on Gaza is now in its fourteenth month and the rest of the world seems have moved on – treating Israel’s genocide in Gaza as mere background noise. In such a context, it seems to me, bearing witness – i.e., to remember when others have forgotten – is a profoundly sacred act.
Though it is not being widely reported, Israel’s mass killing of Gazans has been increasing dramatically in recent weeks. Earlier this week, it was reported that Israel’s genocide claimed 77 lives in one day. Two days ago, Israel attacked five journalists in a clearly marked news van outside Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. (One of the journalists, Ayman Al-Jidi, was waiting for his wife to give birth inside the hospital.) It is also being reported that Gazan babies are freezing to death inside their increasingly frigid tent encampments. Truly, in the face of such shameful and shameless genocidal violence, how can we not bear witness?
Remembering Gaza is at the heart of Tzedek Chicago’s new Hanukkah supplement, “Rededicating our Solidarity with Gaza” which highlights a different group of Gazans who have been subjected to grave and deadly harm during the course of the genocide (including journalists and children). Each group is represented here by individuals whose lives and deaths testify to the dignity and humanity of the Palestinian people. We encourage you to read them aloud each night after reciting the Hanukkah blessings bear witness to their stories and sanctify their memories.
Remembrance is also an important theme in this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Miketz. At the very end of last week’s Torah portion, while Joseph was languishing in Egyptian prison, he interpreted the dreams of his cell mates, the chief baker and the royal cupbearer. He told the cupbearer, “Think of me when all is well with you again, and do me the kindness of mentioning me to Pharaoh, so as to free me from this place.” But after the cupbearer is released from prison, we are told, “Yet the chief cupbearer did not think of Joseph; he forgot him.”
At the start of this week’s portion, the cupbearer learns of Pharaoh’s nightmares and tells him, “I must make mention today of my misdeeds.” He then tells Pharaoh about Joseph, the young man in prison who has the gift of dream divination. On the surface, this might be the self-effacing rhetoric of a royal courtier addressing his king. But on a deeper level, his statement could be understood as a kind of confession: admission that he has sinned by allowing the incarcerated to remain forgotten.
Of course, systems of incarceration themselves are inherently sinful inasmuch as they treat humanity as disposable – and too easily forgotten. Whether it is the massive for-profit prison systems, the cages on our border, or the people of Gaza, who have been incarcerated in an open-air prison for over a decade and are now being subjected to genocidal violence at the hands of their captors.
This Hanukkah, let us shine our lights to remind the world of what it would just as soon forget. Let us commit the kind of hope that is rooted in action: toward a world free of prison walls, a world where no one is disposable and the divine image in all is cherished and nurtured and liberated into its full and unfettered potential.
In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Vayishlach, Jacob prepares for a meeting with his long-estranged brother, who is coming to meet him with a retinue of four hundred. Understandably frightened, Jacob divides his family up into groups and sends them ahead separately, hoping to placate Esau with tribute. He then spends the night alone on the bank of the Jabbok River.
During the night, Jacob wrestles by the riverbank with a mysterious man until the break of dawn. When the man sees that he cannot prevail against Jacob, he wrenches his hip at the socket. Jacob demands a blessing from the stranger, who renames him Israel (Hebrew for “wrestles with God”) adding, “you have struggled with beings divine and human and you have prevailed.” Jacob names the place of this encounter Peniel, (“God’s face”), saying, “I have seen a divine being face to face and have survived.”
The next morning, Jacob/Israel approaches Esau. Esau runs to greet him and weeping, they embrace and kiss one another. During the course of their reunion, Esau asks why Jacob had sent him gifts. “I have enough, my brother,” he says, “Let what you have remain yours.” But Jacob insists, “No, please do me this favor by accepting this gift, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.”
There’s so much to say about this short, powerful story. Like much of Genesis, since many characters are representative of nations, we can read it on two levels simultaneously: as a narrative about an extended family and as a symbolic allegory about the relations of nations in the ancient Near East. Here, Jacob represents Israel and Esau is Edom; thus, we are reading both about the struggles of twin siblings and the origins of the fraught relations between the Israelites and Edomites.
Since these two peoples have a largely antagonistic relationship in the Hebrew Bible, classical commentary has not been kind to Esau and the Edomites. The Rabbis famously associated Esau with the Romans, the “wicked empire” who persecuted the Jews before and after the destruction of the Temple. One vivid midrash relates that Esau didn’t kiss but rather bit Jacob in the neck! Jewish commentators later coined the term “Esau hates Jacob,” a reference to (what they believed was) the eternal, immutability of gentile antisemitism.
It has always seemed to me that this complex and poignant narrative of twin brothers struggling toward reconciliation belies this simplistic interpretation of “good Israel” vs. “evil Esau.” I’m struck that the first time we met Jacob and Esau, they are wrestling with each other in utero – and when they are reunited, they embrace. This is not just a simple story about the struggle for personal/national dominance. The struggle we read about here is much deeper and far more profound than that.
I would argue that it is far too reductive – and even dangerous – to view the Torah as a narrative about the heroic Israelite wars with antagonistic nations. Embedded in Biblical tradition, there is a much deeper and more profound portrayal of deep love and solidarity between different peoples who are described as a complex, yet loving extended family. There are numerous examples: Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael reunite to bury their father (as Jacob and Esau do when Isaac dies at the end of our portion). Moses marries Zipporah, the daughter of the Midianite High Priest Jethro (who is his spiritual mentor). Ruth, a Moabite, shows great love and loyalty to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi, and later marries an Israelite, beginning the lineage that leads to King David.
In this fearful current moment, when war and fascism is escalating in too many places around the world, it seems to me that these sacred streams of our spiritual tradition are speaking out to us with renewed urgency. Let us reject the voices in Judaism – and all traditions – that preach the immutability of hatred and war. Let us live up to our inherited spiritual legacy as Israel/Godwrestlers. Let us lift up the Torah of struggle that leads to reconciliation and collective liberation.
Are some places in the world more inherently sacred than others? Or is the entire world itself a sacred place? These questions are at the heart of this week’s Torah portion, Parsahat Vayetze.
As the portion opens, Jacob has fled his home to escape from the wrath of his brother, Esau. Alone in the wilderness, he arrives at a place (in Hebrew, makom) to spend the night, using a stone as his pillow. That night, he dreams of steps reaching from earth to heaven, upon which angels ascend and descend. God appears to Jacob and reaffirms the promise made to Isaac and Abraham, promising to protect Jacob on his journey until he returns home.
When Jacob awakens, he exclaims, “Mah norah ha’makom hazeh” – “How awesome is this place! God was present in it and I did not know! This is none other than the house of God and that is the gateway to heaven.” Jacob then sets up the stone he used as his pillow as a sacred pillar and names the place Beit El (“house of God”).
Centuries of commentators have inquired about the specific nature of this makom/place. Was it just a random spot where Jacob happened to spend the night or was it a sacred place toward which he was somehow guided by God? Our interrogation of this question begs an even deeper question: is the whole world in a sense, sacred space or are there some places in the world that are “more sacred” than others?
The answers to these questions are not, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Most spiritual traditions consider certain locations or sites to be uniquely invested with divinity. It is undeniable that Jewish tradition has traditionally ascribed sacred meaning to a specific land known as Eretz Yisrael. Some commentators say this land is uniquely holy because certain commandments can only be observed there and nowhere else. According to Jewish mystical tradition Eretz Yisrael – and the Temple Mount in particular – marks the very center of the universe.
It does not follow, however, that these ideas ipso facto give the Jewish people entitlement to assert control or dominion over the land (or the people who dwell upon it). On the contrary, I would argue that this sense of entitlement actually betrays the sanctity of the land. Indeed, it is difficult to read this Torah portion in the age of Zionism and fail to note that Beit El is the name of a prominent West Bank settlement that was established in 1977 by the ultranationalist settler group Gush Emunim.
This sacrilegious hyperliteralism also ignores what the Torah teaches us from the very first chapter of Genesis: namely, that the entire earth is God’s divine creation. This ideal became more critical in Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the Jewish people spread throughout the diaspora and created a spiritual system where God could be found anywhere in the world. Notably, the rabbis taught that the word makom is one of the names of God, referring specifically, the experience of the divine that is connected to place. (Or in the words of my favorite movie superhero, “wherever you go, there you are.”)
The Hebrew word for diaspora, galut, literally means exile, but as a famous rabbinic midrash teaches, “when the people of Israel went into exile, God went into exile with them.” Of course, the experience of exile is a universal one: as human beings, we understand that live in an imperfect world that has not yet experienced a complete and lasting justice. Nevertheless, as this midrash suggests, the imperfect exilic state in which we live is still infused with transcendent meaning and purpose wherever our steps may lead us.
As the great Yiddish writer S. Ansky powerfully wrote in his play “The Dybbuk,” “Every piece of ground on a person resides when they raise their eyes to heaven is a Holy of Holies.” That is to say, every place on earth has the potential to be a place of divine encounter. Every place has the potential to be a makom: holy space. Every home we create can be a Beit El – the sacred meeting place between heaven and earth.
I’m sure we all can think of these holy spaces in our own lives: places that are sacred because they were the sites of deep and significant meaning for us; places made holy because of the experiences we experience in them and the sacred memories we associate with them. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore that the entire earth abounds in sanctity – as we read in the book of Isaiah: “The whole world is filled with God’s glory.”
In other words, like Jacob, any place we lay down our heads has the potential to be a makom: a holy place with limitless potential for sacred, transformative experience.
Shalom Rav 