There will be no Zoom call this Friday. Instead, we will release a conversation I recorded last week with Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller about how he answers Jews who feel that Judaism itself has been corrupted by Israel and the American Jewish establishment’s support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.
Cited in Today’s Video
The Halachic Left’s book of essays for Tishrei, the month that includes Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel speaks with Ryvka Barnard, deputy director of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Emily Hilton, international policy director at Diaspora Alliance; and Jewish Currents associate editor Maya Rosen about Britain’s new sanctions against Israeli settlements.
David Myers on breaking the vessels this holiday season.
William Shoki explains why South Africa has entered the “post-post apartheid” era.
Gilbert Achcar questions whether Israel is really behind US imperialism in the Middle East.
Last week I talked to Omer Bartov about his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong.
Register for Jewish Currents Live on October 11.
I’ll see you a week from Friday
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, one of my favorite organizations is called the Halachic Left. Halacha means Jewish law, and the Halachic Left are a group of people, many of them quite young, who are trying to live their lives in accordance with Jewish law, but also with the principles of the left—principles like equality, justice, especially as it relates to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people.
And so, the Halachic Left has put out a reader for this period of the Jewish year, which is called the Yamim Noraim, the period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There are also essays on holidays that follow this fall, like Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah.
And the essays are really wonderful. In fact, one of the things I find very encouraging about the quality of this young Jewish left that we’re seeing is that I think it’s not only, I think, morally superior, the way it grapples with questions of Jewish moral responsibility to the kinds of ways, the kind of discourse that you see in the Jewish establishment, which is often a kind of warmed over, you know, Israeli propaganda, but it’s also actually just much more substantive, much more serious in the way it engages with Jewish texts than the kind of things you would find in a kind of sermon by your kind of standard-issue pro-Israel American rabbi.
And one essay I found particularly compelling was by one of the leaders of the Halachic Left, a guy named Noam Weinreich. And Weinreich asks a really, I think, interesting question. He says: ‘why is it that most people’—if you ask them—‘have you sinned over the previous year,’ they would say, ‘sure, of course, I know I’ve sinned.’ But then if you ask them to name the specific sins that they have committed, they find it much more difficult. And of course, if you can’t name the specific sins that you have committed, then it’s very hard to actually repent for them and change your ways.
And he makes a distinction between knowledge and understanding. He says: ‘people will have knowledge of what they’ve done , but they may not have understanding of what they’ve done.’ And by understanding, he means: ‘not just knowing disparate facts, but also integrating them in an organized way.’ So, people know what they’ve done, but they may not actually have the understanding to see them in the particular light that would allow them to say, oh my goodness, these behaviors of mine, these were really bad. These were sins. These are things that I need to change the way I behave in the coming year.
And he gives an example from the Hebrew Bible, a famous story, this confrontation between King David and the prophet Nathan. And so, David has had this kind of lustful desire for Bathsheba, and he has sent away Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, to die in war, and taken Bathsheba for himself. And the prophet Nathan comes to King David, and he tells him a story. He tells him the story of a rich man who steals a poor man’s beloved lamb.
And then King Nathan, the prophet, says, what should be the punishment for this rich man who does this? And David says, oh, that man should die for doing something so terrible. And then Nathan says to King David, you are that man. What you have done to Uriah and to Bathsheba is the equivalent of this king who takes this land from this poor man. And when David hears this, he immediately understands that he has sinned and tries to repent.
And I think the point that Weinreich makes is that it’s not that King David didn’t know the facts of what he had done, right? That’s why he immediately could see what Nathan was saying. He understood what he had done to Uriah and Bathsheba, but he didn’t have the understanding. He didn’t put it within the framework of the idea of abuse of power. That’s what the prophet Nathan did. He took these facts, and he organized them in a way that allowed King David to see that what he had done was a profound abuse of power and then spurred a process of repentance.
And I think there’s an interesting analogy between the way, oftentimes, American Jews and Israeli Jews and Jews around the world discuss Israel and the Palestinians. Sometimes, folks dispute particular facts, right? Israel didn’t actually blow up this hospital, or something like that. Or, they’re not actually people in Gaza who were starving. Or, the number of people who were killed is not as many as the Gaza Health Ministry says.
But oftentimes, perhaps even more importantly, people take the same facts, but their understanding is different. Which is to say, the framework with which they understand these facts is very different, right? Their framework for understanding what Israel did in Gaza is self-defense, Israel’s right to exist, rather than a framework of colonial domination, of genocide, of war crimes, etc.
And I think the point that Weinreich is getting at is that it’s really outsiders who are able to take facts and put them in a framework that allows people to move from knowledge to understanding, and then have a recognition of the sins that they have committed, right? They could be individual sins, but they also could be collective sins. It’s famously the liturgy for the Yamim Noraim is in the plural, where people refer to sins in the plural. We have sinned, rather than speaking in the singular.
And I think what Weinreich is getting at here connects to the profound, profound importance of listening to Palestinians in order to gain the understanding of the way in which Jews individually, but especially collectively, have sinned, right? It’s that the prophet Nathan, perhaps because he occupies a much subordinate position in the power hierarchy, right, is able to speak to King David in a way that David was not able to recognize for himself.
Certainly, if Bathsheba herself had been in that role, right, or maybe not, another woman who had had the kind of experience of being dominated and possessed by a man, they also could have done that. In this case, it was the prophet Nathan. But you see in the way, I think, in which people who lack the ability to see their behaviors in a way that conceptually allows them to recognize the sins that they or their community have committed, that if they open themselves up to listening to people who have a different conceptual framework—especially those who see things from the outside, or see things from below—it can spark a recognition.
It may or may not give them new information, but it can allow them to see that information within a different framework, and can potentially puncture this very human tendency to always arrange the information about ourselves in a way that is most comfortable and flattering for us. So, I think Weinreich’s essay offers a very powerful kind of justification for the importance of Jews—and not just Jews, Americans more generally—listening to Palestinians describe their experience as a way of being able to provoke an understanding of the sinfulness of Jewish collective organizations in their support for Israel, or for that matter, the United States and its policy vis-a-vis Israel.
And it is this process of seeking out those who can help us see our own behavior in a way that may be more challenging that’s crucial to activating the process of Tshuva, of repentance, that we are commanded to try to go through this year, both as individuals and as a collective Jewish community.
