During the summer my husband and I had a
conversion ceremony for our adopted daughter,
Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual
bath where she was totally submerged in a pool
of living water -- living because it is fed in part
by heavenly rain -- and momentarily suspended
as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet
transformed. This ritual of purification,
transformation and rebirth is central to
Judaism and it signifies renewal and possibility.
The day of Jess's conversion was also the day that
Israel began its pitiless bombing of Lebanon and
nearly three weeks into Israel's violent assault on
Gaza, a place that has been my second home for
the last two decades. This painful juxtaposition
of rebirth and destruction remains with me,
weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link
deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews,
between my daughter's acceptance into Judaism
and Israel's actions-between Judaism and Zionism
-- a link that I never accepted uncritically but
understood as historically inevitable and
understandable, is one that for me, at least,
has now been broken.
For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the
Palestinian and Arab peoples this one feels
qualitatively different -- a turning point --
not only with regard to the nature of Israel's
horrific response -- its willingness to destroy
and to do so utterly -- but also with regard to
the virtually unqualified support of organized
American Jewry for Israel's brutal actions,
something that is not new but now no longer
tolerable to me.
I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined
and practiced not so much as a religion but as a
system of ethics and culture. God was present
but not central. Israel and the notion of a Jewish
homeland were very important to my parents,
who survived Auschwitz, Chelmno and Buchenwald.
But unlike many of their friends, my parents were
not uncritical of Israel. Obedience to a state was
not a primary Jewish value, especially after the
Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for
Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not
dependent upon national or territorial boundaries,
but transcended them to include the other, always
the other. For my mother and father Judaism meant
bearing witness, raging against injustice and refusing
silence. It meant compassion, tolerance, and rescue.
In the absence of these imperatives, they taught me,
we cease to be Jews.
Many of the people, both Jewish and others,
who write about Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept
the fundamental humanity of the people they are
writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and
racism. Within the organized Jewish community
especially, it has always been unacceptable to claim
that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are like us, that
they, too, possess an essential humanity and must
be included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to
be "a kind of solution," a useful, hostile "other" to
borrow from Edward Said. That any attempt at
separation is artificial, an abstraction.
By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we
calmly, even gratefully refuse to see what is right
before our eyes. We are no longer compelled, if we
ever were, to understand our behavior from
positions outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline
Rose has written, into each other's predicaments
and make what is one of the hardest journeys of
the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a
living connection with the people we are oppressing,
to humanize them, taking into account the experience
of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are
not preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted
by it. The task, ultimately, is to tribalize pain,
narrowing the scope of human suffering to ourselves
alone. Such willful blindness leads to the destruction
of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating
all possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.
Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate
Palestinians and other Arab peoples into the Jewish
understanding of history? Why is there so little
perceived need to question our own narrative
(for want of a better word) and the one we
have given others, preferring instead to cherish
beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable?
Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish
intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and
injustice almost anywhere in the world and
unacceptable -- indeed, for some, an act of heresy
-- to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor,
choosing concealment over exposure?
For many among us history and memory adhere to
preclude reflection and tolerance, where, in the
words of Northrop Frye, "the enemy become,
not people to be defeated, but embodiments of
an idea to be exterminated."
What happens to the other as we, a broken and
weary people, continually abuse him, turning him
into the enemy we now want and need, secure in
a prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?
What happens to a people when renewal and
injustice are rapturously joined?
A new discourse of the
unconscious We speak without mercy, numb to the pain of
others, incapable of being reached-unconscious.
Our words are these: * " . . . [W]e must not forget,' wrote Ze'ev Schiff,
the senior political and military analyst for the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "the most important
aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist
organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any
price. . . .What matters is not the future of the
Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the Hezbollah positions
in Maroun Ras, but the future and safety of the
State of Israel." "If Israel doesn't improve its
military cards in the fighting, we will feel the
results in the political solution." * "We must reduce to dust the villages of the
south . . ." stated Haim Ramon, long known as
a political dove and Israel's Minister of Justice.
"I don't understand why there is still electricity
there." "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a
terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah. . .
What we should do in southern Lebanon is
employ huge firepower before a ground force
goes in." Israel's largest selling newspaper,
Yedioth Ahronoth put it this way: "A village
from which rockets are fired at Israel will
simply be destroyed by fire. This decision
the first Katyusha. But better late than never." * "[F]or every katyusha barrage on Haifa,
10 Dahiya buildings will be bombed," said
the IDF Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz. Eli Yishai,
Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, proposed
turning south Lebanon into a "sandbox",
while Knesset member Moshe Sharoni called
for the obliteration of Gaza, and Yoav Limor,
a Channel 1 military correspondent, suggested
an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses followed by
a parade of prisoners in their underwear in
order "to strengthen the home front's morale." * "Remember: distorted philosophical sensitivity
[sic] to human lives will make us pay the real price
of the lives of many, and the blood of our sons,"
read an advertisement in Ha'aretz. * "[A]ccording to Jewish law," announced the
Yesha Rabbinical Council, "during a time of battle
and war, there is no such term as 'innocents
of the enemy'." * "But speaking from our own Judaic faith and
legal legacy," argued the Rabbinical Council of
America, "we believe that Judaism would neither
require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice
himself in order to save deliberately
endangered enemy civilians. This is especially
true when confronting a barbaric enemy who
would by such illicit, consistent, and systematic
means seek to destroy not only the Jewish soldier,
but defeat and destroy the Jewish homeland.
New realities do indeed require new responses." * The Israeli author, Naomi Ragan, after
learning that many of the war dead in Lebanon
were children, wrote "Save your sympathy for
the mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our
young soldiers who would rather be sitting in
study halls learning Torah, but have no choice
but to risk their precious lives full of hope,
goodness and endless potential, to wipe out the
cancerous terrorist cells that threaten their people
and all mankind. Make your choice, and save
your tears." Many of us, perhaps most, have declared that all
Palestinians and Lebanese are the enemy,
threatening our -- Israel and the Jewish people's
-- existence. Everyone we kill and every house we
demolish is therefore a military target, legitimate
and deserving. Terrorism is part of their culture
and we must strengthen our ability to deter.
Negotiation, to paraphrase the Israeli scholar,
Yehoshua Porat, writing during the 1982 Lebanon
war, is a "veritable catastrophe for Israel."
The battlefield will preserve us.
The French critic and historian, Hippolyte
Taine, observed: "Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage
equipped with a pair of spectacles that magnify
things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on his
hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of
a coat, all will attract his attention; at this rate,
he will not go far, he will spend his day taking six
steps and will never get out of his room."
We are content in our
room and seek no exit In our room, compassion and conscience are
dismissed as weakness, where pinpoint surgical
strikes constitute restraint and civility and
momentary ceasefires, acts of humanity and
kindness. "Leave your home, we are going to
destroy it." Several minutes later another home
in Gaza, another history, is taken, crushed. The
warning, though, is not for them but for us-it
makes us good and clean. What better illustration
of our morality: when a call to leave one's home
minutes before it is bombed is considered
a humane gesture.
Our warnings have another purpose: they make
our actions legitimate and our desire for legitimacy
is unbounded, voracious. This is perhaps the only
thing Palestinians (and now the Lebanese) have withheld
from us, this object of our desire. If legitimacy will not be
bestowed then it must be created.
This explains Israel's obsession with laws and
legalities to insure in our own eyes that we do not
transgress, making evil allowable by widening the
parameters of license and transgression. In this
way we insure our goodness and morality, through
a piece of paper, which is enough for us.
What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny?
Oppression? Occupation? Injustice? We resist none
of these things, no more. For too many among us they
are no longer evil but necessary and good-we cannot
live, survive without them. What does that make us?
We look at ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew,
a child, whose pain we inflict effortlessly, whose death
is demanded and unquestioned, bearing validity
and purpose.
What do we see: a people who now take pleasure
in hating others. Hatred is familiar to us if nothing
else. We understand it and it is safe. It is what we
know. We do not fear our own distortion -- do we
even see it? -- but the loss of our power to deter,
and we shake with a violent palsy at a solution that
shuns the suffering of others. Our pathology is this:
it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no
longer possess and in our need for persecution of a
kind we can no longer claim but can only inflict.
We are remote from the conscious world -- brilliantly
ignorant, blindly visionary, unable to resist from
within. We live in an unchanging place, absent of
season and reflection, devoid of normality and
growth, and most important of all, emptied-or so
we aim -- of the other. A ghetto still but now, unlike
before, a ghetto of our own making.
What is our narrative of victory and defeat?
What does it mean to win? Bombed cars with
white civilian flags still attached to their windows?
More dead and dismembered bodies of old people
and children littered throughout villages that have
been ravaged? An entire country disabled and
broken? Non-ending war? This is our victory,
our achievement, something we seek and applaud.
And how do we measure defeat? Losing the will to
continue the devastation? Admitting to our persecution
of others, something we have never done?
We can easily ignore their suffering, cut them from
their food, water, electricity, and medicine, confiscate
their land, demolish their crops and deny them
egress -- suffocate them, our voices stilled. Racism
does not allow us to see Arabs as we see ourselves;
that is why we rage when they do not fail from
weakness but instead we find ourselves failing from
strength. Yet, in our view it is we who are the only
victims, vulnerable and scarred. All we have is the
unnaturalness of our condition.
As an unconscious people, we have perhaps reached
our nadir with many among us now calling for a
redefinition of our ethics-the core of who we are
-- to incorporate the need to kill women and
children if Jewish security required it. "New
realities do indeed require new responses,"
says the Rabbinical Council of America. Now,
for us, violence is creation and peace is destruction.
Ending the process of creation and
rebirth after the Holocaust Can we be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth
after the Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when
we seek refuge in the margin, and remedy in the
dispossession and destruction of another people?
How can we create when we acquiesce so willingly
to the demolition of homes, construction of barriers,
denial of sustenance, and ruin of innocents? How
can we be merciful when, to use Rose's words, we
seek "omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?"
We refuse to hear their pleading, to see those chased
from their homes, children incinerated in their
mother's arms. Instead we tell our children to
inscribe the bombs that will burn Arab babies.
We argue that we must eliminate terrorism.
What do we really know of their terrorism, and of
ours? What do we care? Rather, with language that
is denuded and infested-give them more time to
bomb so that Israel's borders can be natural-we
engage repeatedly in a war of desire, a war not
thrust upon us but of our own choosing, ingratiating
ourselves with the power to destroy others and
insensate to the death of our own children. What
happens to a nation, asks the Israeli writer David
Grossman, that cannot save its own child, words
written before his own son was killed in Lebanon?
There are among Israelis real feelings of vulnerability
and fear, never resolved but used, intensified. Seeing
one's child injured or killed is the most horrible vision
-- Israelis are vulnerable, far more than other Jews.
Yet, we as a people have become a force of extremism,
of chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly
sea-addicted to death and cruelty, intoxicated, with
one ambition: to mock the pauper.
Judaism has always prided itself on reflection,
critical examination, and philosophical inquiry.
The Talmudic mind examines a sentence, a word,
in a multitude of ways, seeking all possible interpretations
and searching constantly for the one left unsaid.
Through such scrutiny it is believed comes the
awareness needed to protect the innocent, prevent
injury or harm, and be closer to God.
Now, these are abhorred, eviscerated from our
ethical system. Rather the imperative is to see
through eyes that are closed, unfettered by
investigation. We conceal our guilt by remaining
the abused, despite our power, creating situations
where our victimization is assured and our innocence
affirmed. We prefer this abyss to peace, which
would hurl us unacceptably inward toward
awareness and acknowledgement.
Jews do not feel shame over what they have
created: an inventory of inhumanity. Rather
we remain oddly appeased, even calmed by the
desolation. Our detachment allows us to bear
such excess (and commit it), to sit in Jewish cafes
while Palestinian mothers are murdered in front
of their children in Gaza. I can now better understand
how horror occurs-how people, not evil themselves,
can allow evil to happen. We salve our wounds with
our incapacity for remorse, which will be our undoing.
Instead the Jewish community demands unity and
conformity: "Stand with Israel" read the banners on
synagogues throughout Boston last summer. Unity
around what? There is enormous pressure -- indeed
coercion -- within organized American Jewry to
present an image of "wall to wall unity" as a local
Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion --
at its edges a smoldering flame rapidly engulfing its
core -- for mainstream Jewry does not speak for
me or for many other Jews. And where such unity
exists, it is hollow built around fear not humanity,
on the need to understand reality as it has long been
constructed for us -- with the Jew as the righteous
victim, the innocent incapable of harm. It is as if
our unbending support for Israel's militarism "
requires putting our minds as it were into
Auschwitz where being a Jew puts your existence
on the line. To be Jewish means to be threatened,
nothing more. Hence, the only morality we can
acknowledge is saving Israel and by extension,
ourselves." Within this paradigm, it is dissent not
conformity that will diminish and destroy us. We
hoard our victimization as we hoard our identity
-- they are one -- incapable of change, a failing
that will one day result in our own eviction. Is this
what Zionism has done to Judaism?
Israel's actions not only demonstrate the limits
of Israeli power but our own limitations as a people:
our inability to live a life without barriers, to free
ourselves from an ethnic loyalty that binds and
contorts, to emerge, finally, from our spectral chamber.
Ending the (filial) link between
Israel and the Holocaust How can the children of the Holocaust do such things,
they ask? But are we really their rightful offspring?
As the Holocaust survivor dies, the horror of that
period and its attendant lessons withdraw further
into abstraction and for some Jews, many of them
in Israel, alienation. The Holocaust stands not as a
lesson but as an internal act of purification where
tribal attachment rather than ethical responsibility
is demanded and used to define collective action.
Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome of Jewish
nationalism, of applying holiness to politics, but
whatever its source, it has weakened us terribly
and cost us greatly.
Silvia Tennenbaum, a survivor and activist
writes: "No matter what great accomplishments
were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we
produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses
Mendelssohn and hundreds of others of mankind's
benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- we
look at the world of our long exile always in the
dark light of the Shoah. But this, in itself, is an
obscene distortion: would the author . . . Primo
Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we
slaughter the innocents in a land far from the snow
-clad forests of Poland? Is it a heroic act to murder
a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my
brethren glad and proud? . . . And, it goes without
saying, loyal Jews must talk about the Holocaust.
Ignore the images of today's dead and dying and
focus on the grainy black and white pictures showing
the death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at
Auschwitz and Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. We are
the first, the only true victims, the champions of
helplessness for all eternity."
What did my family perish for in the ghettos and
concentration camps of Poland? Is their role to be
exploited and in the momentary absence of violence,
to be forgotten and abandoned?
Holocaust survivors stood between the past and the
present, bearing witness, sometimes silently, and
even in word, often unheard. Yet, they stood as a
moral challenge among us and also as living embodiments
of a history, way of life and culture that long predated
the Holocaust and Zionism (and that Zionism has long
denigrated), refusing, in their own way, to let us look
past them. Yet, this generation is nearing its end
and as they leave us, I wonder what is truly left
to take their place, to fill the moral void created
by their absence?
Is it, in the words of a friend, himself a Jew,
a "memory manufactory, with statues, museums
and platoons of 'scholars' designed to preserve,
indeed ratchet up Jewish feelings of persecution
and victimhood, a Hitler behind every Katyusha
or border skirmish, which must be met with some
of the same crude slaughterhouse tools the Nazis
employed against the Jews six decades ago: ghettos,
mass arrests and the denigration of their enemy's
humanity?" Do we now measure success in human
bodies and in carnage, arguing that our dead bodies
are worth more than theirs, our children more
vulnerable and holy, more in need of protection and
love, their corpses more deserving of shrouds and
burial? Is meaning for us to be derived from martyrdom
or from children born with a knife in their hearts?
Is this how my grandmother and grandfather are
to be remembered?
Our tortured past and its images trespass upon our
present not only in Israel but in Gaza and Lebanon
as well. "They were temporarily buried in an empty
lot with dozens of others," writes a New York Times
reporter in Lebanon. "They were assigned numbers,
his wife and daughter. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67.
'They are numbers now,' said the father. There are no
names anymore."
"They were shrunken figures, dehydrated and hungry,"
observes the Washington Post. "Some had lived on
candy bars, others on pieces of dry bread. Some were
shell-shocked, their faces blank . . . One never made it.
He was carried out on a stretcher, flies landing on
lifeless eyes that were still open."
As the rightful claimants to our past we should ask,
How much damage can be done to a soul? But we do
not ask. We do not question the destruction but only
our inability to complete it, to create more
slaughter sites.
Can we ever emerge from our torpor, able to
mourn the devastation?
Our ultimate eviction? Where do Jews belong? Where is our place? Is it
in the ghetto of a Jewish state whose shrinking
boundaries threaten, one day, to evict us? We are
powerful but not strong. Our power is our weakness,
not our strength, because it is used to instill fear rather
than trust, and because of that, it will one day
destroy us if we do not change. More and more
we find ourselves detached from our past, suspended
and abandoned, alone, without anchor, aching-if
not now, eventually-for connection and succor.
Grossman has written that as a dream fades it
does not become a weaker force but a more potent one,
desperately clung to, even as it ravages and devours.
We consume the land and the water behind walls and
steel gates forcing out all others. What kind of place
are we creating? Are we fated to be an intruder in the
dust to borrow from Faulkner, whose presence shall
evaporate with the shifting sands? Are these the
boundaries of our rebirth after the Holocaust?
I have come to accept that Jewish power and
sovereignty and Jewish ethics and spiritual integrity
are, in the absence of reform, incompatible, unable to
coexist or be reconciled. For if speaking out against the
wanton murder of children is considered an act of
disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act
of dissent, and where dissent is so ineffective and
reviled, a choice is ultimately forced upon us
between Zionism and Judaism.
Rabbi Hillel the Elder long ago emphasized ethics
as the center of Jewish life. Ethical principles or
their absence will contribute to the survival or
destruction of our people. Yet, today what we
face is something different and possibly more
perverse: it is not the disappearance of our
ethical system but its rewriting into something
disfigured and execrable.
As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a
Jewish state, how do we as a people emerge from
atrocity and abjection, empowered and also humane,
something that still eludes us? How do we move beyond
fear and omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism,
to envision something different, even if uncertain? "How,"
asks Ahad Haam, the founding father of cultural Zionism,
"do you make a nation pause for thought?"
For many Jews (and Christians), the answer lies in a
strong and militarized Jewish state. For others, it is
found in the very act of survival. For my parents-defeating
Hitler meant living a moral life. They sought a world
where "affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is
mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored
and sanctioned, where we as a people refuse to be
overcome by the darkness.
Can we ever turn away from our power to destroy?
It is here that I want to share a story from my family,
to describe a moment that has inspired all of my work
and writing.
My mother and her sister had just been liberated from
concentration camp by the Russian army. After
having captured all the Nazi officials and guards
who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the
Jewish survivors that they could do whatever they
wanted to their German persecutors. Many
survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive,
immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them.
My mother and my aunt, standing just yards from
the terrible scene unfolding in front of them, fell into
each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was
the physically stronger of the two, embraced my
aunt, holding her close and my aunt, who had difficulty
standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never let
go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our
father and mother would say this is wrong. Even now,
even after everything we have endured, we must seek
justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My mother,
still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one,
turned and walked away.
What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation?
It lies ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the
other-the victims we have created-Palestinian, Lebanese
and also Jewish-and the injustice we have perpetrated
as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a
more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary
rather then absolute, where we finally come to
understand that our only hope is not to die peacefully
in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago but to
live peacefully in those homes.
When my daughter Jess was submerged under the waters
of the mikvah for the third and final time, she told me she
saw rainbows under the water. I shall take this beautiful
image as a sign of her rebirth and plead desperately for ours. |
Very nice post and appropriately titled too. Hopefully your post will spread out and have some effects.
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