I admire the courage of this writing, Sarah, and I hope the essay gets a very wide audience. Admitting a mistake, especially with the level of detail you offer here invites or maybe encourages readers to admit their own mistakes. And once we admit mistakes, we can change our minds, hopefully in the direction of greater justice for all.
You asked, "How have you used your writing to right wrongs, friends? When have you set the record straight, and did it actually serve to create more justice?"
We rarely see the effects of our writings on others, so how can we know whether our writing creates more justice? A person I don't know commented that my recent story on kinship care changed her mind about removing children from struggling families. That was satisfying of course, but I think real change only comes from a groundswell of stories. It's unlike humans to hear or read something once and be forever changed. Most of us require repeated lessons from a variety of storytellers who are sending a similar message. In what ways will your essay be part of a larger groundswell or conversation, maybe about forgiving ourselves or about the courage to change our positions on important topics?
Your writing has very much changed my understanding of the importance of kinship care... though it's also true I've never been in a position to take any concrete action as a result. But I think that even changing awareness does create at least the potential for more justice?
I am really troubled by this posting, Sarah, though I don’t question your sincerity. I was raised to be a very good little Zionist, in fact, in the 1967 war I was very gung-ho to give up my American citizenship and go to Israel and join the Israeli army. I was just on the cusp of 19 years old and very passionate. My aunt, a strong Zionist herself, talked me out of it, for which I have been forever grateful.
By 10 years later I was a Marxist and had gone through quite a wrenching and emotional examination of my own deep attachment to Israel which had been seriously baked into me from the day I was born and through 13 years of religious (“Sunday school”) school - after all, I had been born the same year that Israel was! It wasn’t easy to separate myself from my old ideas, but my new beliefs were not based on my need to impress anyone, nor as the result of cockamamie so-called left-wing ideas, etc. And over the years my antipathy towards the Israeli state has increased and deepened to a truly existential pain.
I am not a practicing Jew nor have I been for many years, but I am a deeply cultural and spiritual Jew especially in the sense that my moral foundation, commitment and impetus to constantly engage in the struggle for social justice is inseparable from the moral foundation formed early on when I was a very true believer. After everything else falls away, that remains. Support for Israel for me is inconceivable and absolutely irreconcilable with everything I believe in.
Which is not to say I don’t understand the fear and growing sense of precariousness I think all Jews in this country increasingly feel. I just can’t see Israel as the answer to that. I think it is a myth built on story desperate violated people told themselves in order to justify what had to happen - and keep happening even until today - to make it a reality. There was just never any way to build a permanent sanctuary on the blood and bones of another population forcibly displaced for it to happen.
In addition to which, whatever happens, Israel will never be “our” country, that is the country of American Jews. Please understand that I speak only for myself and do not judge you or anyone else for whatever choices you make or beliefs you have. But to the extent that rising fascism and antisemitism here in the US threatens us to an even greater extent and could reach the point where being here is so dangerous that the need to flee seems imminent, I don’t know what I would do. Perhaps I am too old to take up arms to join the resistance- but perhaps not. When I hear that frankly pretty scary and rather awful cry of “never again” I do not hear it as a rallying cry to make aliyah to Israel.
So my idea of teshuvah in the ends turns out to be, with all due respect, and appreciation for what you have shared, perhaps quite the opposite. It is to ask again for forgiveness from the Palestinian people for the ways in which I and my family have been complicit in their oppression. (And perhaps because it demands being said even though I wish it didn’t, no I do not think the Palestinian leadership or the Palestinian terrorists are blameless, innocent, “good guys” whatever and I’m not “on their side” . That is another very complicated facet of another very complicated dynamic that I’m not even talking about here.)
Finally I just have to add that I have found excruciating the success with which great swaths of the Jewish community, political leaders around the world and certainly in the US, and the Israeli state have had in conflating Judaism as a religion and Israel as an independent political state which may be under the aegis to some extent of the Orthodox rabbinate but which also has democratic elections and a representative body called the Knesset and is not one and the same as the Jewish religion.
And more to the point does not speak on behalf of the world’s Jews and definitely does not represent all the Jews in the US (which Netanyahu makes every effort to assert) any more than the ayatollah represents and speaks for all the Muslims in the world which everyone understands, or almost everyone anyway.
I greatly appreciate your posting but I couldn’t help but be struck by the deep ambivalence I still feel there as I read it over your feelings about Israel today. Is it not possible to regret and wish to repair the errors and ignorance of the past without having to make a 180°? I think it is without in any way diminishing or detracting from your honest and deeply felt reassessment and regret about the past. In any case, l’shana tova - may you be inscribed for a sweet year filled with apples and honey!
I absolutely understand your position, and I appreciate that your response is thoughtful and considered. I wish very much that we weren't burdened with the ethical nightmare that is the nation-state. But I am also mindful of how many Jewish lives its existence has saved: the Ethiopian Jews who had to be airlifted to safety, the Soviet Jews who had nowhere else to go when they were finally allowed to leave, the Ukranian Jews who did not find the same welcome in countries like Poland that other refugees did when Russia invaded. I'm as horrified by Israel's turn to the right as I am by our own, believe the occupied territories should be returned, and that a fully independent Palestinian state is as close to a just solution as we will find. But I also believe that in this very imperfect world, we are right to embrace imperfect solutions and survive to work toward better days, and would be wrong to prefer the suffering and even murder of Jews from around the world to the ethical quagmire that is statehood.
There are so many better worlds we, as humans, might have built--maybe even some day will build--and I mourn them all. But we live in this one, where we are always staggering toward one precipice or another. Asking Jews to eschew the meager safety provided by Isreal is unjust until we've successfully ensured all refugees can flee danger for safety. If we succeed at that, then perhaps it could be just to call for the abolition of Israel... I genuinely don't know. But until then, I don't see see how it is anything but an insistence that Jewish lives are disposable.
But I also value the very Jewish habit of mind that allows for multiple, conflicting opinion without resolution, and am grateful for your sharing this with me. Thank you.
Thanks for your response, and let me clarify that I didn’t intend to imply that I am calling for the end of Israel as a state or nation. I can understand how you might have gotten that impression because I was not at all clear but the truth is I have never even gone that far in my thinking, that is, what do I think should happen now.
I have to say my thoughts on this have been very self-centric if that’s even a word or makes sense; that is, it’s all about my response, how what is happening and has happened has affected me and my relationship to Israel, to organized Judaism in this country, to my own temple and my ability to even attend services (I am completely unable to do so) and ultimately what and how I think about of myself as a Jewish woman inside all of these terrible and painful contradictions. I am almost phobic about being associated with mainstream Judaism and yet I would never and do not want ever want to deny who I am. Yet I still feel anger and shame.
With regard to Israel, I absolutely cannot disagree with you about the provision of a safe haven although even that has been to some extent a double-edged sword. I think it was while I was at WVWC that I read the memoir of a woman who worked with Ethiopian Jews when they first emigrated and it is not a pretty story; the treatment and discrimination they faced is demoralizing.
I also sometime in the past read a terrific memoir (you have to forgive me, my memory for names really sucks) written by a newspaper reporter, I think for the NYT at one point, whose father was a Sephardic Jew from a remote area of Iran I think, where the native language was still Aramaic. They had lived their whole lives peacefully with their Arab neighbors and the Muslim official who governed their town until the politics of the outside world found even their little village and the Muslim leader was reluctantly forced to expel all the Jews. This was not long after WWII and there were many Jewish relief resettlement agencies, one of which found them and helped them emigrate to Israel.
The son recounts the difficulties he and his family had in Israel, how they were looked down on, had no access to good jobs or good education because they were considered stupid and inferior. But his father was able to break away and get an education and ended up in Southern California where he became a professor at a prestigious university and respected around the world as one of the pre-eminent experts in Aramaic and other languages of the region.
The Ashkenazi Jews in Israel unfortunately do not have the most consistently stellar record when it comes to stepping up. For the Russian and Ukrainian Jews, yes, they are our Landsman (I wish I had italics) but for the Black Ethiopians, and others, not so much. So yes, Israel serves as a promised haven, but if I’m not mistaken, the new government is discussing putting limitations on even that.
So while I am definitely not one with the idea of driving Israel into the sea I have no idea what the answers are. The reality is obviously that Israel exists, it is here and it is not going anywhere and that reality has to be accepted by all parties. The other reality is that things cannot continue as they are and the odds are great that they will get worse before they get better, especially because the US, always so eager to jump in when it sees threats to its own national interests, really has very little reason to intervene and doesn’t really care what happens as long as Israel remains a loyal and staunch ally. As the recipient of the greatest share of US aid on the planet (with the possible exception of Ukraine I suppose) there is no danger of anything changing on that front. The US *could* do a whole lot more but from the way I see it, we have very little incentive to do so.
So it may be that what happens lies to a great extent in the hands of American Jews and that’s pretty scary too. How far can the Israeli fascists go before the Jewish diaspora says Enough! I’m not optimistic. I’m on several FB pages where the same old tropes about the Palestinians are alive and well among the Jews, where ignorance and dismissal of the Nakba is virtually 100% and the willingness to even consider the possibility that it could be true is rejected out of hand, and all Arabs are terrorists by definition.
Of course this aided and abetted by the media in the US across the board, and now with the terrifying and devastating upsurge of fascism and antisemitism in the US, there is even less fertile ground for openness and reconsideration of old ideas. But just very recently I got an email from B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, about forced evacuations going on now, now! Www.b’tselem.org. The problem is that that kind of news gets virtually no coverage in the and is dismissed as propaganda when it does.
So I mean it when I say I am not advocating the destruction of the Israeli state; the clock cannot be turned back nor can its history be painted as 100% without some good.
I think the difference between us is only a question of degree and we can each respect where we land. I am by far in the minority and quite used it! And I can live with it. I think far more important is what the new year will bring, and we can fervently hope that while the gates of heaven are open, the prayers for justice and peace have greater success!
I went through a similar phase in my life, not knowing where I stand on Israel. I too, struggle with the plight that this has placed upon the Palestinian people.
Yes, Anti-Semitism takes different forms. The right has their own strange and twisted anti-Semitic stances. And then, the left has theirs. I think that those of the left are far less dangerous than those of the right, personally, as you've said here.
My journey took a different path. Have you seen "The Believer?" With Ryan Gosling?
Yes, amazing & thank you & I can’t wait to read this essay.
Sarah -- Amazing. Thank you for this
I admire the courage of this writing, Sarah, and I hope the essay gets a very wide audience. Admitting a mistake, especially with the level of detail you offer here invites or maybe encourages readers to admit their own mistakes. And once we admit mistakes, we can change our minds, hopefully in the direction of greater justice for all.
You asked, "How have you used your writing to right wrongs, friends? When have you set the record straight, and did it actually serve to create more justice?"
We rarely see the effects of our writings on others, so how can we know whether our writing creates more justice? A person I don't know commented that my recent story on kinship care changed her mind about removing children from struggling families. That was satisfying of course, but I think real change only comes from a groundswell of stories. It's unlike humans to hear or read something once and be forever changed. Most of us require repeated lessons from a variety of storytellers who are sending a similar message. In what ways will your essay be part of a larger groundswell or conversation, maybe about forgiving ourselves or about the courage to change our positions on important topics?
Your writing has very much changed my understanding of the importance of kinship care... though it's also true I've never been in a position to take any concrete action as a result. But I think that even changing awareness does create at least the potential for more justice?
I am really troubled by this posting, Sarah, though I don’t question your sincerity. I was raised to be a very good little Zionist, in fact, in the 1967 war I was very gung-ho to give up my American citizenship and go to Israel and join the Israeli army. I was just on the cusp of 19 years old and very passionate. My aunt, a strong Zionist herself, talked me out of it, for which I have been forever grateful.
By 10 years later I was a Marxist and had gone through quite a wrenching and emotional examination of my own deep attachment to Israel which had been seriously baked into me from the day I was born and through 13 years of religious (“Sunday school”) school - after all, I had been born the same year that Israel was! It wasn’t easy to separate myself from my old ideas, but my new beliefs were not based on my need to impress anyone, nor as the result of cockamamie so-called left-wing ideas, etc. And over the years my antipathy towards the Israeli state has increased and deepened to a truly existential pain.
I am not a practicing Jew nor have I been for many years, but I am a deeply cultural and spiritual Jew especially in the sense that my moral foundation, commitment and impetus to constantly engage in the struggle for social justice is inseparable from the moral foundation formed early on when I was a very true believer. After everything else falls away, that remains. Support for Israel for me is inconceivable and absolutely irreconcilable with everything I believe in.
Which is not to say I don’t understand the fear and growing sense of precariousness I think all Jews in this country increasingly feel. I just can’t see Israel as the answer to that. I think it is a myth built on story desperate violated people told themselves in order to justify what had to happen - and keep happening even until today - to make it a reality. There was just never any way to build a permanent sanctuary on the blood and bones of another population forcibly displaced for it to happen.
In addition to which, whatever happens, Israel will never be “our” country, that is the country of American Jews. Please understand that I speak only for myself and do not judge you or anyone else for whatever choices you make or beliefs you have. But to the extent that rising fascism and antisemitism here in the US threatens us to an even greater extent and could reach the point where being here is so dangerous that the need to flee seems imminent, I don’t know what I would do. Perhaps I am too old to take up arms to join the resistance- but perhaps not. When I hear that frankly pretty scary and rather awful cry of “never again” I do not hear it as a rallying cry to make aliyah to Israel.
So my idea of teshuvah in the ends turns out to be, with all due respect, and appreciation for what you have shared, perhaps quite the opposite. It is to ask again for forgiveness from the Palestinian people for the ways in which I and my family have been complicit in their oppression. (And perhaps because it demands being said even though I wish it didn’t, no I do not think the Palestinian leadership or the Palestinian terrorists are blameless, innocent, “good guys” whatever and I’m not “on their side” . That is another very complicated facet of another very complicated dynamic that I’m not even talking about here.)
Finally I just have to add that I have found excruciating the success with which great swaths of the Jewish community, political leaders around the world and certainly in the US, and the Israeli state have had in conflating Judaism as a religion and Israel as an independent political state which may be under the aegis to some extent of the Orthodox rabbinate but which also has democratic elections and a representative body called the Knesset and is not one and the same as the Jewish religion.
And more to the point does not speak on behalf of the world’s Jews and definitely does not represent all the Jews in the US (which Netanyahu makes every effort to assert) any more than the ayatollah represents and speaks for all the Muslims in the world which everyone understands, or almost everyone anyway.
I greatly appreciate your posting but I couldn’t help but be struck by the deep ambivalence I still feel there as I read it over your feelings about Israel today. Is it not possible to regret and wish to repair the errors and ignorance of the past without having to make a 180°? I think it is without in any way diminishing or detracting from your honest and deeply felt reassessment and regret about the past. In any case, l’shana tova - may you be inscribed for a sweet year filled with apples and honey!
Lin,
I absolutely understand your position, and I appreciate that your response is thoughtful and considered. I wish very much that we weren't burdened with the ethical nightmare that is the nation-state. But I am also mindful of how many Jewish lives its existence has saved: the Ethiopian Jews who had to be airlifted to safety, the Soviet Jews who had nowhere else to go when they were finally allowed to leave, the Ukranian Jews who did not find the same welcome in countries like Poland that other refugees did when Russia invaded. I'm as horrified by Israel's turn to the right as I am by our own, believe the occupied territories should be returned, and that a fully independent Palestinian state is as close to a just solution as we will find. But I also believe that in this very imperfect world, we are right to embrace imperfect solutions and survive to work toward better days, and would be wrong to prefer the suffering and even murder of Jews from around the world to the ethical quagmire that is statehood.
There are so many better worlds we, as humans, might have built--maybe even some day will build--and I mourn them all. But we live in this one, where we are always staggering toward one precipice or another. Asking Jews to eschew the meager safety provided by Isreal is unjust until we've successfully ensured all refugees can flee danger for safety. If we succeed at that, then perhaps it could be just to call for the abolition of Israel... I genuinely don't know. But until then, I don't see see how it is anything but an insistence that Jewish lives are disposable.
But I also value the very Jewish habit of mind that allows for multiple, conflicting opinion without resolution, and am grateful for your sharing this with me. Thank you.
Thanks for your response, and let me clarify that I didn’t intend to imply that I am calling for the end of Israel as a state or nation. I can understand how you might have gotten that impression because I was not at all clear but the truth is I have never even gone that far in my thinking, that is, what do I think should happen now.
I have to say my thoughts on this have been very self-centric if that’s even a word or makes sense; that is, it’s all about my response, how what is happening and has happened has affected me and my relationship to Israel, to organized Judaism in this country, to my own temple and my ability to even attend services (I am completely unable to do so) and ultimately what and how I think about of myself as a Jewish woman inside all of these terrible and painful contradictions. I am almost phobic about being associated with mainstream Judaism and yet I would never and do not want ever want to deny who I am. Yet I still feel anger and shame.
With regard to Israel, I absolutely cannot disagree with you about the provision of a safe haven although even that has been to some extent a double-edged sword. I think it was while I was at WVWC that I read the memoir of a woman who worked with Ethiopian Jews when they first emigrated and it is not a pretty story; the treatment and discrimination they faced is demoralizing.
I also sometime in the past read a terrific memoir (you have to forgive me, my memory for names really sucks) written by a newspaper reporter, I think for the NYT at one point, whose father was a Sephardic Jew from a remote area of Iran I think, where the native language was still Aramaic. They had lived their whole lives peacefully with their Arab neighbors and the Muslim official who governed their town until the politics of the outside world found even their little village and the Muslim leader was reluctantly forced to expel all the Jews. This was not long after WWII and there were many Jewish relief resettlement agencies, one of which found them and helped them emigrate to Israel.
The son recounts the difficulties he and his family had in Israel, how they were looked down on, had no access to good jobs or good education because they were considered stupid and inferior. But his father was able to break away and get an education and ended up in Southern California where he became a professor at a prestigious university and respected around the world as one of the pre-eminent experts in Aramaic and other languages of the region.
The Ashkenazi Jews in Israel unfortunately do not have the most consistently stellar record when it comes to stepping up. For the Russian and Ukrainian Jews, yes, they are our Landsman (I wish I had italics) but for the Black Ethiopians, and others, not so much. So yes, Israel serves as a promised haven, but if I’m not mistaken, the new government is discussing putting limitations on even that.
So while I am definitely not one with the idea of driving Israel into the sea I have no idea what the answers are. The reality is obviously that Israel exists, it is here and it is not going anywhere and that reality has to be accepted by all parties. The other reality is that things cannot continue as they are and the odds are great that they will get worse before they get better, especially because the US, always so eager to jump in when it sees threats to its own national interests, really has very little reason to intervene and doesn’t really care what happens as long as Israel remains a loyal and staunch ally. As the recipient of the greatest share of US aid on the planet (with the possible exception of Ukraine I suppose) there is no danger of anything changing on that front. The US *could* do a whole lot more but from the way I see it, we have very little incentive to do so.
So it may be that what happens lies to a great extent in the hands of American Jews and that’s pretty scary too. How far can the Israeli fascists go before the Jewish diaspora says Enough! I’m not optimistic. I’m on several FB pages where the same old tropes about the Palestinians are alive and well among the Jews, where ignorance and dismissal of the Nakba is virtually 100% and the willingness to even consider the possibility that it could be true is rejected out of hand, and all Arabs are terrorists by definition.
Of course this aided and abetted by the media in the US across the board, and now with the terrifying and devastating upsurge of fascism and antisemitism in the US, there is even less fertile ground for openness and reconsideration of old ideas. But just very recently I got an email from B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, about forced evacuations going on now, now! Www.b’tselem.org. The problem is that that kind of news gets virtually no coverage in the and is dismissed as propaganda when it does.
So I mean it when I say I am not advocating the destruction of the Israeli state; the clock cannot be turned back nor can its history be painted as 100% without some good.
I think the difference between us is only a question of degree and we can each respect where we land. I am by far in the minority and quite used it! And I can live with it. I think far more important is what the new year will bring, and we can fervently hope that while the gates of heaven are open, the prayers for justice and peace have greater success!
I went through a similar phase in my life, not knowing where I stand on Israel. I too, struggle with the plight that this has placed upon the Palestinian people.
Yes, Anti-Semitism takes different forms. The right has their own strange and twisted anti-Semitic stances. And then, the left has theirs. I think that those of the left are far less dangerous than those of the right, personally, as you've said here.
My journey took a different path. Have you seen "The Believer?" With Ryan Gosling?