Since I returned to Seattle, I've been grappling with the loss of the Kibbutz. I've been living among, and making community with large groups of Jews since high school. For the first time, I'm living in a house where people are friendly, but not interested in doing things together, and none of them are Jews. Without a synagogue, or a desire to go to the "post-college Jewish networking and fun" events put on by the local university, I find myself working on Friday nights, which I find less depressing than Shabbat by myself. When one of my extended family died last week, I said Kaddish by myself, and instead talked about her for a few minutes before eating some dates (a food I will always associate with her) with some non-Jewish friends.
Does it sound sad? It is. It's not overwhelmingly awful, but it does hurt.
When an acquaintance of mine posted a link to a Commentary (a well-renowned Jewish publication) article by Daniel Gordis titled "
Are Young Rabbis Turning On Israel?" I expected a political rant - which, to some extent, it is. Gordis opens with a long description of Yom HaZikaron - an Israeli version of Memorial Day that is far more about mourning than barbecues and shopping. On Yom HaZikaron, Gordis explains, air raid sirens blast twice during the day, filling the entire country with alarm. When Israelis hear the siren, they stop whatever they're doing - driving, talking, haggling, walking - and stand at attention until the siren ends. It sounds visceral, and it is. We Jews have always been good at mourning, good at remembering. I walk with ghosts, and I know it.
Gordis, who emigrated to Israel after founding a rabbinical school in Los Angeles, contrasts this picture of Yom HaZikaron with an email sent around Boston's Hebrew Union College:
“For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”
It is the rare e-mail that leaves me speechless. Here, at a reputable institution training future rabbis who will shape a generation of American Jews and their attitudes to Israel, the parties were treated with equal weight and honor in the run-up to Yom Ha-Zikaron. What the students were essentially being asked was whether the losses on Israel’s side touched them any more deeply than the losses on the side of Israel’s enemies.
Gordis's flaw, as far as I'm concerned, is equating Israel with Jews. Jews are not the only citizens and inhabitants of Israel, and Israelis constitute neither the entirety, nor the pinnacle of Jewishness. Gordis would argue that I merely illustrate the problem; I have a far-too-American slant on things.
Or, maybe, he argues, it's about formative experience.
It was June 1967, and I was almost eight years old. As on almost every night at dinner, our little black-and-white television was tuned to Walter Cronkite. But on this night, my parents didn’t eat. They didn’t even sit at the table. All they did was feed us, watch TV, and pace across the kitchen as the news of the
Six Day War unfolded.
“We’re not hungry,” my parents said the next evening when they did not eat once again, and I asked them why. But how could they not be hungry at dinner time? And two days in a row? My Zionist commitments have some innate root in the simple fact that with Israel seemingly on the very precipice of destruction, my parents couldn’t eat.
But when the students with whom I was speaking shared their formative memories of the Jewish state, the differences were profound. One said that his earliest memory was of the day that all the students in his Orthodox day school were summoned together for an assembly, and they watched as Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty. For another, it was the intifada of the mid-1980s, and the images (again, on television) of helmeted IDF soldiers with rifles chasing young boys who’d thrown rocks.
My formative Israel experience, at least, as far as media goes, is the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995 - the shock, the mourning, but most particularly, the reaction of one Hebrew school teacher.
"Watch carefully, boys and girls," she told us, sitting on the edge of her desk after explaining what happened. "He was one of the very last who really wanted peace. I'm afraid we're going to have more war. But don't worry; Israel has the best army in the world, and we continue to prove it, time and time again."
This sentiment about Israel's military might has echoed through my childhood. When, in third grade, I learned about the Minutemen in the Revolutionary War, I also learned that the Israeli army was designed to mobilize just as quickly. When my grandfather showed me how to use my first Swiss Army knife, he told me that the Swiss and Israeli armies were among the best-disciplined and best-trained in the world.
Is it any wonder, then, that I've grown up to sympathize with people who've been subject to this army?
Gordis would scoff at me. "Where's your pride?" he might ask. "These are YOUR PEOPLE, and they are the BEST." I think I'd point back to his own article to answer his question.
Gordis makes a distinction between what he calls the particular and the universal. Simply put, people who were raised particularly Jewish feel that they belong to a tribe, a different people. They identify with their tribe, practice rituals unique to it, and interact with the rest of the world through that lens. That lens includes the concept of enemies. Universalists, on the other hand, are raised to believe that Jewishness is a part of them; not that they are part of the Jews. They are raised to value the lives of every human being equally.
Of my generation of rabbinical students, Gordis writes:
The right of these rabbinical students to criticize Israel is not in question. What is lacking in their view and their approach is the sense that no matter how devoted Jews may be to humanity at large, we owe our devotion first and foremost to one particular people—our own people....what is entirely gone is an instinct of belonging—the visceral sense on the part of these students that they are part of a people, that the blood and the losses that were required to create the state of Israel is their blood and their loss....
Now, let's consider my upbringing for a moment. I believe I was raised straddling the line between particularist and universalist. I was raised in a mildly observant household; we were pulled out of school for the first days of Passover, lit Shabbat candles, made our own challah, received part-time Jewish educations. I have always believed that being Jewish makes me different, but not better than (okay, maybe sometimes better than) my Gentile neighbors. I proudly explain different Jewish customs and traditions to anyone who asks (and even a few who don't.) I seek out other Jews at national poetry events, and believe that something rich and filling happens when we gather for the "12 tribes reading."
My family also believes in gay rights, are largely pro-choice, feminist, and vote mostly Democrat, but only for politicians who openly support Israel. My mother is Israeli; her family lived in Israel during its formative years (1948-1957), and a good number of our relatives remain there. When I think of the Israeli army, I can't help but think of my cousins, aunts and uncles. Of course I want them to live. Of course I want them to succeed.
But I, too, was raised to value all lives. Maybe it's the influence of growing up around Unitarian Universalists. Maybe my childhood synagogue just wasn't particular enough. Maybe it's my fancy-liberal-college indoctrination. Who knows?
Here's what I do know: here, in Seattle, I miss the easy presence of Jews. I even miss fighting about this exact issue with an old particular housemate of mine. Can I be a universalist and still feel lost and lonely without this community? Can I value all lives equally and still feel like a part of the Jewish people, instead of a person who happens to have Jewishness (like she happens to have brown hair, or a Socialist bent?)
I suspect Gordis would say no. What do you think?
