Community Blog

          Groovy Teshuvy, y’all. What a year this week has been. What a decade this year has been. What a millennium the past four and a half years have been. It feels like we have been living through one global or national crisis after another for so long with far fewer rests between them than we used. Maybe it’s the rate of news media now, or maybe civilization really is collapsing, but either way it’s easy to feel despair, and thus imperative to remember to hope.

          According to Dr. David Arnow, “In Jewish thought, God shares our hopes to better reflect God's vision, both individually and collectively. We see this in Rashi's comment on ‘Hope deferred sickens the heart, but desire realized is a tree of life’ (Proverbs 13:12). In its context, the verse is clearly speaking about the individual, but Rashi reads it as applying also to the people Israel: ‘The hope that the Holy One had hoped for Israel, the hope that they would repent, ultimately brought Israel to heart sickness when they did not repent. When they fulfilled G-d's desire, that hope was a tree of life to them.’ Abraham Joshua Heschel put it this way, ‘God is in search of man waiting, hoping for man to do God's will.’” I have not yet read Dr. Arnow’s book, Choosing Hope: The Heritage of Judaism, but after reading this excerpt, I immediately bought it. As I said, it is easy to despair as individuals, and giving in to such despair can cause a domino effect. The same goes for Rashi’s view of the connection between hope and teshuvah, as Pirkei Avot teaches: one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah, and one sin lead to another sin. When we do good, and seek good, we inspire others to do the same. When we see others committing acts of kindness and staying upbeat, it can lift our spirits as well.

          That’s not to say there’s no room for sadness or negative feelings. On the contrary, I think Judaism is particularly well-suited for hope and repentance, for returning and growing, for tirelessly working toward Tikkun Olam, because we are not afraid of the macabre. We are a people who often sum up our holidays as, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” – Apologies for mentioning eating today – Obviously, that does not sum up our high holy days, but even so, Yom Kippur is often described as a rehearsal for our death. We get all our anxieties out in front, we air our complaints with one another, we talk about death, we talk about mass death, we talk about survivor’s guilt and the inherited trauma of thousands of years of victimhood. And yet we’re still here, still a growing, living religion, still innovating and sharing our cultural treasures with one another across diaspora. What room is there for despair of the current moment in all that? We grieve, we commemorate, we react, and then we advocate for change and we move forward and we find ways to create joy to celebrate our ongoing survival, as individuals and as a people.

          Over the summer, I worked with a committee of four other DC-area rabbis, and one non-clergy Jewish professional to put together a symposium for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to speak to an American audience about the work toward peace that has continued against all odds since October 7^th, 2023. I did not speak much of this work publicly until it was clear that we had a groundswell of support. The support from other Jewish institutions, the surprisingly large turnout, and the enthusiasm of speakers and even would-be speakers we had to turn away because we were running out of time to allot in the program, all have given me a tremendous amount of hope for our future. But I still felt a lot of anxiety around the event until it was successful and done.  

Over the course of this past year, I have witnessed communities and relationships collapse under the weight of the brutality of two foreign governmental bodies that do not represent their peoples. And yet, as was noted by several of the speakers at this symposium on September 15^th, this is not the case in Israel. One speaker reported that in some ways, Israelis and Palestinians are more separate than they have ever been, but that is not necessarily the same as the division of souls we see in the United States on this issue. It just has become literally more restrictive for Jews to enter the West Bank, and especially for Palestinians to leave the West Bank. But the relationships between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis where they can interact has remained strong. Of course, there was tension and fear in the immediate aftermath of October 7^th, but all the activists who came to speak to us in the U.S. spoke about how much camaraderie and compassion there has been between regular civilians across ethnic lines during this war.

One young Jewish woman studying at an Ivy League college in the U.S. talked about the rise of antisemitism on campus, and how it is easier to video call with her Palestinian friends from MEET, the peer-to-peer program she did in high school, than to talk with American students who have never stepped foot in the Middle East. I had a similar experience 15 years ago. I studied for a semester in Israel during the 2008 ground incursion into Gaza, and things were tense on campus between the Israelis and Palestinians for the first few days of the war, but they found they were able to talk with one another about their fears for their families – this one had a cousin living in Gaza, that one had a brother called up from reserves and sent to combat – and it wasn’t a competition for who was the most aggrieved or who was to blame. It was just about young adults seeing each other as people and comforting one another during a frightening time. I came back to the States and my college had just successfully won a BDS campaign on our campus, the first of its kind. There were protests and counter-protests from fellow students and outside agitators, full grown adults calling and harassing college students, antisemitic graffiti on the library doors, anti-Arab flyers in the dorms. And all I could think at the time was, “I just came from a place where people who are actually deeply, materially affected by this could have a l’chaim and smoke nargileh together after an hour of debating or crying or both, and maintained healthy relationships. Yet, here are these American students, the majority of whom don’t have any family in the Middle East, but they can’t figure out how to have a civil disagreement about a conflict that doesn’t actually affect them directly.” Not that I believe people need to have a direct link to a crisis to care about it or want to help, but some perspective and humility goes a long way in allyship.

As with the Jewish people and their ability to hope amidst a world of despair, I think it is precisely because of the reality of the conflict on Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives that they are able to have more constructive conversations and maintain friendships better than Americans divided on this issue. There’s something about the distance from this violence that distorts our ability to speak honestly about it. When we see threats to Israel, there’s an existential fear that grasps us. But we are not actually physically in danger. Israelis and Palestinians are. And so, we must take our cues from them. Many family members from many of the hostages in Gaza have been clear that a ceasefire and hostage deal is the only way to get the rest out alive, was always the safest way to get them out. Family members attending shiva at the Jerusalem home of the Goldberg-Polin family and artists and viewers at FeelBeit, an art collective dedicated to bringing Israelis and Palestinians together through art, were crossing terraces back and forth to support one another. There is so much hope in that.

Far too often this past year, I have seen American Jews viewing the very mention of the word Palestinian, Palestine, or the sight of the Palestinian flag, as inherently antisemitic. I think step one in following the lead of the people who live in the Land and are begging their governments for peace has to be that we stop this triggered reaction. There are also those who use the words “Jew”, “Zionist”, and “Israel” interchangeably and pejoratively, and that also needs to stop, but I don’t have a captive audience with those people. I can call it out on individuals when I see it and if I feel safe to do so depending on the context, but my reach is limited there. However, as a rabbi, as your rabbi, I am asking you with all my moral authority and spiritual leadership, begging you, to please remember that people are people, no matter what they look like, what country they were born in, or identify with, what language they speak, and what governmental body they may be trapped under. Palestinians have a right to exist and self-identify as such. Palestinian Americans have a right to gather in affinity groups and have cultural fairs just like every other group in our melting pot of a nation. Israelis have a right to exist and self-identify as such. Israeli Americans and other Jewish Americans have a right to gather in affinity groups and celebrate our heritage and our sense of connection to Israel. Neither group has a right to infringe upon the other group’s doing so.

If children at the Parents Circle Family Forum camp can learn to share space as Israelis and Palestinians, if the high school kids from MEET can do it, if the college kids at the Arava Institute can, if the presumably overly emotional artsy types at FeelBeit can do it, then surely adults here in the United States can do it too. As Jewish Americans, we can hold and share space for Palestinian Americans and their supporters without giving up our own safety and beliefs, and we can demand that they hold and share space for us without insisting that they give up their safety or beliefs. There will continue to be bad apples and extremists in both camps, but I truly believe we can do better than what I have seen this past year.

One last story to close with. One of the speakers at the symposium was Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, currently the director of the Arava Institute, and formerly the Chief Scientist in Israel, which made him the highest ranking Palestinian in the Israeli government at the time. He is a brilliant man and a very earnest speaker. When I was a student at the Arava Institute, he was a teacher for some of the higher-level environmental science classes that I did not place into (science has too much math!), so I did not know him well. During a weeklong excursion for the whole cohort, some Americans expressed homesickness that not only would we not home be with our families for Thanksgiving, but that we could not even put together our own Friendsgiving on campus because of the timing of the trip. Dr. Tareq opened up his East Jerusalem home to us and served us a wonderful homecooked meal, approximating as best he could (or his wife could, more likely) a traditional American Thanksgiving feast. It is such a fond memory of him, of that holiday, and of my time in Israel. I insisted upon leading the cohort in Let There Be Peace on Earth, which is my family’s Thanksgiving tradition. And this now is my prayer for us for 5785. May this be a year of peace and hope, and may it begin with us.