Warning -- this is going to be an excruciatingly personal column (for a change!) I want to write about the inner process that led me, on June 8, to stand in black clothing in front of the Fort Bragg Town Hall for half an hour before Shabbat. So there's the punchline: I was a Woman in Black on the day of the world-wide Women in Black protest vigils on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the beginning of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
I have written before about my horror at some of the particulars of Israel's presence in the territories, particularly the bulldozing of Palestinian homes. And I have also written and spoken about the timidity I feel giving voice to that horror. It's a peculiar thing for me: people in our Jewish community have a range of opinions about many different political and social matters. Some oppose the death penalty, others support it. Some want cell service in Mendocino, others think it's deadly. People have different feelings about welfare, about coastal development, about free trade, about SUV's and forestry and immigration, not to even mention matters of controversy within the Jewish community. Like everybody, I have opinions about most of these things. Some I hold quite strongly, and some I choose to speak and write about in my role as your rabbi. There is absolutely no issue about which I can't imagine a reasonable and decent person holding an opinion opposite of mine. And, when I take a stand, I often hear those opposing positions voiced by people I like and care about. It never bothers me. In fact I love the ongoing conversation that happens when I write my Rabbi's Notes and then hear people's responses in the bakery and at the post office and, of course, in the shul. It feels joyful and alive to me, the range of visions and understandings, the workings of different people's intelligence and conscience as we all try to figure out how to be in this complicated world.
--with the exception of talking about Israel. For years now I have been aware that I feel trapped and panicky whenever I hear points of view opposing my own about Israel. This is certainly not to my credit, and I've tried to contemplate why I feel so personally endangered in these conversations. Why can't I simply disagree, like I might disagree with a person about the death penalty or welfare, both of which matter quite a bit to me as well? What is it about Israel that makes a normal range of conscientiously-held opinions feel so scary?
As a child alienated from Judaism altogether, I looked at Israel and at zionism the way I looked at mink coats, as an affectation of people whose entire package of values didn't impress me much. My teshuvah, my return to Judaism, was of a more spiritual nature. When I spent my first year of rabbinical school in Israel, I enjoyed the country. I liked being in the places where biblical things happened. I enjoyed being in a community that ran on the Jewish calendar. I got a kick out of street signs and police cars and the price of potatoes all emblazoned with the lashon kodesh, the holy tongue. But I don't think I felt particularly tied to the fate of Israel.
But I have learned since that I am profoundly and personally yoked to the fate of Israel. When I turned back to living a Jewish life, and especially when I became a rabbi, I threw my life energy, mind, vision and time, such as they all are, into Judaism and the Jewish people. And over the years that decision, like any fundamental commitment, gets more and more important and real for me.
In our Wednesday night class this past year we read works by Rav Kook, Martin Buber and Elie Wiesel. I picked these three because I love them, also because of the common thread that they all came from traditional Jewish communities of Europe and ended up elsewhere. I was interested in comparing their journeys "from the old world to new worlds." It wasn't until reading these three beloved teachers side by side that I realized that all are strong, proud, unapologetic zionists. It was Buber's early zionist writings especially that captivated me. He was so idealistic, envisioning with his friends egalitarian, back to the land communities to be developed by small bands of disciplined visionaries. He envisioned full social, economic and cultural cooperation with the indigenous Palestinian residents. He counseled emigrating in small numbers so as not to overwhelm the local communities. Most of all he sought to build "national humanism." "The survival of a nation," he wrote, "is nothing but a necessary premise. But it must survive not for the sake of surviving, of extending its span of life, but in order to fulfill its vocation, in order to realize a great Jewish human community."
Prior to some date in the latter half of the last century, Israel was always for Jews and Judaism a figure of hope. It was a messianic (and Messianic) vision, a place from which would emanate peace and divine blessing for the Jewish people and for the world. Judaism is a religion not only of trances and ecstasy, not only of the world to come, but of life on earth. It is a practical religion as well as an esoteric one. And the pinnacle of that practicality is a vision of a state run by Jews, with divine guidance, in which justice and righteousness are realized in actual policies that affect actual people. The early modern zionism of Buber and A.D. Gordon and Ahad Ha'am, the early kibbutz movement, was no less messianic, even if not couched in traditional religious language. This is part of the genius of Judaism in the world for the last five millennia, this sense of practical hope, the enduring teaching that, if a people follows its God, peace and justice will flow in the world. To commit oneself to Judaism is to buy into this teaching.
So I watch Israel, that pinnacle of hope that divine justice can actually manifest on earth. I see all the same things we are all seeing: the bulldozings, the uprooting of olive trees, the shooting of children, the closures that keep food and medical care from people for months at a time, the same closures driving the unemployment rate up above seventy percent in a lot of the territories, the expropriation of village lands to expand settlements. And I feel like, why am I bothering to be a rabbi or a Jew? It's all built on a false premise. And, when I hear good, decent Jewish people here say that Israel has no other choice than to fire rifles into a crowd of demonstrators throwing rocks, or that there are reasonable reasons to use "limited torture," or that the seizure of Palestinian land to expand settlements and to build roads between them is a security necessity, or all those other reasonable things that many people believe and say, it just makes me die inside. It makes me feel like we should just give away our Torah, sell our shul back to the Baptists and just quit. If the Jewish State is going to be a state like any other, then why am I praying, "Gather us from the four corners of the earth and bring us in dignity to our Holy Land?" Why am I so thrilled that Erica is becoming Bat Mitzvah, that Cassandra is being married under a huppah? Why am I working right now to make a Jewish women's retreat? Why do any of us bother making a Jewish community or a Jewish home or a Jewish life?
That's how it feels inside my heart. My brain is a little more spacious. I can understand that the state of Israel is a refuge for Jewish people in oppressive and dangerous situations elsewhere in the world, now and in the future. I can understand that every people deserves a patch of earth, and that we are no less entitled than the Kosovars or the Timorese to a home of our own, that it is the way of the world to defend one's borders militarily. I can understand that the Arab world, fractured internally, unites around its opposition to the Jewish state in Israel, posing a formidable threat. I can understand that the strategic answers are not simple, that the full disengagement from occupation of the West Bank and Gaza may in fact leave Israel additionally vulnerable. I know with my heart and mind that four million Jewish people live in Israel, including people I know and love, and that their safety is on the line. I know that they are terrorized by acts of murder committed by their Palestinian enemies. I can also understand that, as a people, we are still reeling in terror from the nazis, and that no amount of assurance is enough to assuage that visceral terror. And I can understand that much of the young generation of Palestinians, growing up in the hell of the occupation, really do want to kill Jews.
And I can understand that, to another good and well-meaning Jew these realities are as commanding to his or her heart as my horror is to mine. We are terribly, horribly tied to Israel, to her fate. In a way the fate of our bodies is not even the hardest -- it is the fate of our hope, our soul's commitments, that is at stake. No wonder it is frightening to give voice to all of this.
So it was when I was talking to a Bay Area friend who has gotten active with Jewish groups opposing the occupation. Just hearing about their plans for Jewish demonstrations and actions against the occupation made my heart swell with longing. When she told me that there was going to be a gathering in Chicago for Jews committed to ending the occupation, I felt tears of joy. And I realized two very personal things in that conversation. I realized that I needed, for the sake of my own soul, to speak up more about the injustices of the occupation. And I realized that I was scared to do so because I felt alone. It's easier to take a stand, any stand, if you do so with friends, if you can lean into each other, if you can absorb opposition together. There are other people in our community who also oppose Israel's role in the territories, but I had done little to connect with them.
Then the Junity gathering happened in Chicago, and I started getting e-mails every day about Jewish actions all over the country, in Israel and in other countries. Things began to coalesce around June 8. Women in Black, a group that began in Israel in the first intifada with Jewish and Palestinian women vigiling silently together, were planning vigils in more than a hundred locations. Every day I was getting lists of new vigil locations worldwide. Plans were in shape for a huge one in San Francisco and an even bigger one in Jerusalem. I was thinking, oh it would feel so good to go to San Francisco and be part of such a gathering that shares the outrage and hope of my heart. But I had services to lead and so on.
Then Friday morning, June 8, I got a call from a friend that there was going to be a Women in Black vigil in Fort Bragg that afternoon. I was in a panic! It's one thing to hold a placard in San Francisco, surrounded by hundreds of like-minded Jews, where no one would know or care who I am. It's another thing entirely for the rabbi of a community to stand on the streets of her own town, wearing black and publicly opposing policies of the state identified with her own people. I went back and forth for hours, but finally decided I couldn't live with myself if I didn't go. Only pure cowardice would have kept me home. And it almost did!
I put on my black-wear and headed to Fort Bragg, my heart literally pounding in my chest. When I got there, I saw about ten women standing silently, wearing black, not a placard in sight. Three or four of us, I think, were Jewish. There were some small flyers explaining gently why we were there, but only two or three pedestrians walked by and received them. So in the end of it all, there I stood in front of Town Hall, my inner struggle and resolution apparent to myself alone. But that's fine, I think. It meant a lot to me that the vigil happened, and I respect that silent, non-confrontational style of the Women in Black.
And even more than that, I feel my inner hope returning -- not, I'm afraid, for Israel, though I am always open to being surprised. But because so many Jewish people in so many places are overcoming their terror and speaking their hearts against the cruelty and injustice that so particularly horrifies us when done by our own people. "Ours is not to complete the task, but neither are we free to desist from it." I think there is a new wind blowing in the Jewish world, a rising up of opposition to Israel's occupation. I can in fact understand that good and reasonable Jews will not be happy about this. But I am. For me it is a lifeline between the Jewish people and my own faith and commitment. Hearing that voice, or seeing that eloquent, black-clad silence, makes it seem well worth continuing to pray our prayers and study our prophets and teachers who propose peace flowing from the holy mountain.
Copyright 2001 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Last updated 12/24/2001(rge)