I am writing this at the shul on Thursday, March 20, the first full day of the war on Iraq. Last Saturday night, when I still hoped against hope that today might be averted, I had a dream. In the dream I was sitting on the grass on a hillside. With me were about twenty of my neighbors, some whom I knew and loved, others barely acquaintances. At the crest of the hill, a short distance away, were our houses. We sat together on the grass, knowing that bombs were about to fall, that within the next minutes and hours some of our homes and some of us would be destroyed. We sat still, looking at each other, at our neighborhood, and we waited.
I awoke from that dream fairly certain that the bombs would indeed be launched, and feeling a deeper and more personal horror about this even than in the days before. Between my dream and today, the day when the bombs are indeed falling from the sky, loomed Purim. And ahead of us at the next full moon awaits Passover. As differently as we celebrate each holiday, both are in some essential way the same. In the narratives of both holidays we are cruelly oppressed by an evil political leader. But God intervenes (hidden in the case of the book of Esther, but still evident, says the rabbinic tradition); the enemy and not we ourselves is slaughtered, and we are commanded to feast and celebrate eternally.
News commentators these days keep mentioning that Baghdad, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is "the cradle of civilization." And so it is, at least of the civilization of the West. And if the Tigris and Euphrates forms the cradle, then the Hebrew Bible has to be the grammar school primer, the "Dick and Jane" of Western culture. The Bible, not alone, but centrally and powerfully, has shaped the way that life has been understood by 3000 years of life in the Western world. And within the Bible, from the first rivalry between Cain and Abel to the advent of the hated "new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph" to the confrontations with Amalek to the battles of Saul and David to the rise and bloody downfall of Haman, we see over and over, as if it were as natural as Dick, Jane and Spot, enmity and bloodshed. Indeed we are told repeatedly that God, Godself, is a "man of war," that God commands slaughter, that God hates and destroys, punishes and afflicts, "throws the horse and its rider into the sea." This endless warring is presented as though it were as natural and inevitable as the nuclear family of our childhood primers, built into the fabric of things, so essential as to make life unimaginable any other way.
And maybe enmity and slaughter truly are natural and inevitable. After all, animals fight and kill. Even plants will choke each other when impinged upon. Maybe our scriptures and our prayers simply mirror what is fundamental to the system. There are certainly cultures in our world that seem to be no less warring than any other, despite scriptures that preach peace. Still and all, it is my hope -- obviously, given my life commitment to my line of work -- that religious life, practice and community can help us to rise above, at least for moments, at least with struggle, what is imbedded in the system. It seems like the job of religion to provide some counter-friction, some elevated other possibility, some higher vision in contrast to the basest and most hateful aspects of what seems inevitable in life. It seems like the task of Judaism, specifically, to call Jews towards holiness in this hurting world. So on the morning that I woke up from my dream I made a commitment that I would personally stop teaching that war and slaughter are natural and inevitable and consequently acceptable. I promised myself that I would immediately stop celebrating victories in battle, even ironically, even when they are buried in ritual, even when we deserved the victory. I decided that I would start my own protest movement -- protesting battles that took place thousands of years ago or in the recesses of the Jewish imagination.
Some of you saw my first stepping out with this commitment at Purim -- which was, of course, timed so deliciously and vividly at the exact hour when President Bush was announcing that we would be going to war with Iraq in 48 hours. I wasn't the only one at all in our shul who made this connection. (See Scott Meltsner's impassioned story/poem at www.mcjc.org.) But Purim is pretty easy, actually. In fact it seems clear that the rabbinic tradition is almost as squeamish as I am about the bellicosity and brutality of this particular holiday. Hence the masks, the liquor, the burlesque.
Pesach will be more of a challenge. I'm not quite sure how I will be able to eat matzah and charoset without hating the Pharaoh and his taskmasters, how I'll manage Dayeinu or Hallel without gloating that the Egyptian soldiers drowned while our folks got through the sea alive and well. I don't think that spilling ten drops of Manischewitz will take care of the problem this particular bloody spring. But I've got some time to think about it. Every day since my dream and my personal pledge I realize more and more was that I have colluded, as a rabbi and as a plain old Jew, with the teaching of war. I realize that I do so every time I sing Mi Chamocha ("Who is like our God, shocking and awesome"), when I belt out Aleinu with its anthemic tune ("God has not planted us among the other families of the earth and has not made our fate like theirs"), whenever I read or teach the warring passages of Torah without critique or demurrer. I'm not even sure how to untangle enmity and slaughter from the Judaism I love and practice. It may be one of those threads which is woven so deeply into the fabric that if you pull on it the whole thing will start to unravel. However deeply sexism is entangled in our tradition, you can sometimes see it as embroidered over the top, not part of the fundamental warp of the religion. I don't know whether or not this is true of war.
When I first woke up from my dream and made this resolution, I thought about making a formal vow. But I stopped short. You're not supposed to make vows in the heat of the moment. I may someday again be willing to consider that in our spiritual lives there is some role for enmity, even for the celebration of slaughter. I am even willing to consider that sometime in the future, when the smoke has stopped rising and the blood has dried, I will care less, or differently, or regain my ironic, layered, multivocal way of looking at things. Maybe someday I will see past the shock and horror that I feel today. But in these repulsive and bloody days of decimating the cradle of civilization with bombs, I just can't go on with my business, which happens to be prayer and study and celebration, as usual. May peace -- whatever peace can even mean - come quickly. May Passover bring us to new heights of healing and holiness.
© 2003 Rabbi Margaret Holub
(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)
Updated 04/05/2003 (rge)