Tag Archives: middle-east

Outside Does Not Mean Alone: A Guest Sermon for Erev Yom Kippur 5785

 (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Guest sermon at Tzedek Chicago’s Erev Yom Kippur service by Tzedek staff member Aviva Stein on October 11, 2024:

Good Yuntif.

I am honored to have the opportunity to speak to you all tonight. I began working at Tzedek Chicago as our Family Program Coordinator in early 2019. In July of this year I became Tzedek Chicago’s second full-time staff person, serving as the community and organizational director for this inspiring congregation.

I am speaking to you now at Kol Nidre of Yom Kippur in the year 5785, as a genocide is being carried out against the Palestinian people. 

For the past many months, and particularly on this day of reflection, as the gates of heaven open wide for our most intimate and vulnerable supplication, my mind keeps coming back to the question–how could we let this happen? 

One answer I keep returning to is that this tragedy is in part a product of the decades-long campaign by American Jewish institutions to build nationalist, dogmatic support for the state of Israel within our communities, and particularly in our children. When reflecting on my own upbringing, the clarity with which I can see the indoctrination of my Jewish education as a young person is chilling.

From my summer camp’s obligatory High School Israel trip, where we dressed up in IDF uniforms and took pictures for instagram, to “Israeli club,” the only Jewish affinity space at my public high school, which I later learned was funded by an Orthodox “youth education” organization, to the march for Israel being an annual youth group event to singing the Israeli national anthem in Hebrew school. When I look back, I see the many ways nationalist fervor a created an ersatz version of Jewish identity for me as a child. I had been taught that being Jewish was loving Israel, and I believed it. By the time I was in college, I had become a successful product of what all that institutional Zionist funding had set out to do. 

I got my first job after college in 2014 as a teacher’s aide at the local Jewish day school. It was sitting in on the daily “Jewish Studies” class, where I for the first time was able to clearly see the ideological manipulation of the Israel education machine. At that point, I did not identify as a Zionist – I didn’t feel I had enough political knowledge to know what that meant. I know now that internalized sense of ignorance is a tool well-used by the zionist establishment – telling us that it was “too complicated” and that “we didn’t understand” was a reliable way to suppress dissent among their targets. At that time I did, though, feel an obligation to the state of Israel as a Jewish person. 

Watching those children create maps of Israel that highlighted popular tourist destinations, making pita on Israel day, and hanging pictures of Jewish men praying at the Western Wall, I had the perspective I needed to question the establishment in which I was raised and in which I was watching these children grow up. Wasn’t Israel a country, just like the US, and wasn’t it a country at war? My family openly objected to the war in Iraq – why not in Israel?  I had questions that I as a young adult knew were too taboo to ask. But I had a new perspective in my position as a teacher of experiential and inquiry-based education: wasn’t being afraid to ask questions an indicator that something was very, very wrong?

That same year, #IfNotNow held its first public action, when a small group of young Jewish activists read the Mourner’s Kaddish in New York City in recognition of the Palestinian lives lost in the assault on Gaza that summer. And, also in 2014, my childhood rabbi, Brant Rosen, left the synagogue in which I had grown up in the wake of his increased outspokenness about human rights violations in Palestine that were being committed in our names as Jews. My questioning came at a moment in US history when objection to the occupation of Palestine in the Jewish community was more visible than ever. Without looking very hard, I was able to find community that ultimately carried me through the process of unlearning Zionism. I recognize that opportunity of being guided in loving, joyful Jewish community towards a Judaism of solidarity as a real gift for my generation, one that was not afforded to so many Jews of conscience in the decades before me. 

My heart breaks when I see the same cycle of propaganda and silencing posing as pedagogy continue in Jewish education today. Six years ago I took a job at a religious school where I felt it was special that I was allowed to teach there while being open with leadership about my politics. It was challenging to work somewhere where I was not politically aligned, but it was a job, and I could manage. In October of last year, something broke in that community. Donors who had made their contributions with strings attached started pulling those strings, and leadership, which had prided itself on a liberal and open perspective on Palestine, quickly adopted the right-wing politics of their biggest donors. This spring, after months of censorship posing as policy, when my coworker was told that they could not wear a keffiyeh for explicitly Islamophobic reasons, we quit. 

I am ashamed of the choice that synagogue made to uphold racism to shield its community from critical engagement with the devastation of Palestine. But my coworker and I were not alone – since March, eleven full and part time staff people at that “progressive” organization have left their jobs. In the past year, Adam and Leah, Tzedek Chicago’s cantorial team, both have left Jewish education jobs in solidarity with Palestine. Around the country, I know of a dozen more people who have left their jobs this past year, by being fired or quitting. There is an epidemic in the Jewish community –young people are losing and leaving their jobs, and the Jewish community is losing the passion, critical thinking, and vitality that their best and brightest brought to their work. So many Jewish organizations are breaking this way – the big tent, so to speak, has collapsed, and Jews of conscience, Jews who say no to genocide and no to Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism and war mongering, find ourselves on the outside. 

But outside does not mean alone. Over the past 10 years at Tzedek Chicago, our membership has seen tremendous growth to nearly 400 member households. Our family program community has grown from four families to seven to more than twenty, and for the past six years, we’ve seen our children build joyful Jewish space rooted in solidarity with Palestine. Our membership has grown as a blended community across generations and our most active members range from movement elders to very young children, all of whom are committed to this new Jewish future we are building together. 

These past 10 years have experienced a blossoming in Jewish communal life beyond zionism not just at Tzedek Chicago but around the world. Making Mensches in New York, Tirdof in Denver, and Makom in North Carolina are all explicitly anti zionist Jewish ritual communities. Organizing spaces #IfNotNow and JVP have become household names. The Jewish Liberation Fund has successfully challenged the status quo in philanthropy and offers grants for proudly anti-Zionist Jewish work (of which Tzedek Chicago has been a beneficiary). Tzedek UK/Ireland is a thriving community. In Chicago, we are now home to two prayer communities beyond Zionism, Tzedek Chicago and Higaleh Nah. There are of course many more chavurot, friend groups, and organizing communities around the country making meaningful Jewish life that reject Zionism. 

So much has changed in the last ten years. And I believe it with all my heart when I say that we have entered a paradigm shift, where the politicized young, queer, disabled and neurodivergent people we have relied on to staff our Hebrew schools and summer camps will no longer accept propaganda and nationalism as normal. We don’t have to. We can choose to work in Jewish organizations that are actually values aligned rather than those that just “allow” us our politics. Of course these opportunities are few relative to Zionist institutions, but I believe we are moving towards a Jewish future where the social norm of Zionism will become increasingly rare, and where communities like ours are not an anomaly but a standard of Jewish communities around the country. 

It has been truly meaningful to see what had felt like such a lonely landscape become so varied and rich. And, as heartening as this change is, it feels essential that we acknowledge that this is nowhere near enough. It breaks my heart that this is considered such a radical concept: a joyful community of people who are committed to a world beyond colonialism and oppression, and who say so, full stop. It breaks my heart that the victories we have to celebrate are about staffing and organizational capacity as we watch the devastation of Palestine in real time.

Twelve years ago I was pursuing a degree in environmental studies, and I remember very clearly a class where we discussed the mounting science pointing to the inevitability of climate collapse, just a couple years after it had become remotely socially acceptable to even use the term “global warming.”

 “Something really big is going to happen,” we said, “and people will realize, something will change, something has to give.” This was seven years after Hurricane Katrina, and two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Still, we found ourselves saying, “something really big is going to happen, and then, and then…” 

This memory haunts me as we consider the fight for Palestinian liberation. Climate collapse is here – I don’t need to list the many ways we experience its consequence. We know it’s here. We are right now seeing the extent of the destruction brought by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, record breaking storms inarguably exacerbated by rapidly warming seas. The consequence of our inaction is here.

The Nakba happened. The ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, creating the largest refugee population in the world, happened. The occupation of millions of Palestinians happened. This year, at least 40,000 people, (though we know in truth many, many more) have been murdered. Entire family lines are gone from this earth and we suffer for the loss of each one of those lives. There is nothing bigger, nothing greater that will awaken our collective consciousness. The consequence of our inaction is here. The unthinkable has happened, and it’s happening right now as we sit here, gathered on this holiest day, the gates of heaven open wide. 

We will never get back the biodiversity that once blanketed the earth, nor the beauty, and freedom and abundance that it provided. And, the earth is not lost. Song birds migrate, leaves change their color, networks of fungus communicate through untold billions of channels under our feet. 

I mourn for the world we might have lived in had those tens of thousands of lives not been lost. The world and our souls are irrevocably damaged by this unthinkable loss of life. 

And, in the face of this unimaginable loss we, as Jewish people, as Americans, as living beings on this earth, owe Palestine our radical imagination. We owe our steadfast belief that Palestine will be free. Palestine will be free, nation states will fall, families will flourish, and we will live in a world where everyone is fed, and everyone is housed, and children will play in river beds and groves of olive trees.

We are painfully far from that dream. Our small successes in the face of unspeakable evil are just that: small. 

Kabbalah teaches that every time a person performs a mitzvah, they bring us that tiniest step closer to Olam Haba, the world to come. I do not believe that a Messiah will come and save us from the world we have created for ourselves. I do believe that when we make visible our refusal to participate in the Judaism of violence and supremacy that is normative in our institutions, we become that small bit more visible to the people who are looking for us. To the young people first entering a critical perspective of Israel, to the people who need to leave their job but don’t know where they can go, to the people who love being Jewish and don’t believe that it makes their safety more important than anyone else’s, they can find us. We’re here.

 And no, the visibility of Jews who reject Zionism will not free Palestine. But our communities are growing. And as we grow, and our voices become louder, and as we send our money and march in the streets and dedicate our prayer and build our power, we bring more and more people into the sacred responsibility of radical imagination. As Aurora Levins Morales writes in “V’ahavta:” 

When you inhale and when you exhale
breathe the possibility of another world
into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body 
until it shines with hope. 
Then imagine more.

We are here tonight, on the eve of Yom Kippur, to release all vows we have not fulfilled and to recommit ourselves to the holy work of teshuvah, of imagining more. Thank you for being here. We will be here. And Palestine will be free, soon and in our days.

G’mar chatimah tova. 

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.