I’ve been immersed since birth in deep love for the Hebrew Spirit, specifically for the prophetic lineage within our people. Those who are called to care actively for the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. Those who speak truth to power, and believe in sacred justice, standing up through the ages to religious, political, and financial abuse by kings and priests.
My grandfather, Theodore Friedman z ’ l, and uncle, Hillel Friedman, on my mother’s side, were rabbis, and my father, Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer, his memory is a blessing, was a rabbi too. I’m more of a prophetic rabbit, but that’s an entirely different matter.
My father’s two main mentors, Rabbi H.J.Heschel and Martin Buber, represented the best of this prophetic tradition. Heschel was heir to great Hassidic rabbis and disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, and a brilliant and revolutionary Hassidic theologian himself, a philosopher and a poet. He embodied his lineage, walking hand in hand with Martin Luther King Jr and opposing the war in Vietnam. Buber, the compiler of fantastic Hassidic stories, the philosopher, author of I & Thou, incarnated the ethical values of our people regarding Israel, following in the steps of Ahad Ha’am, among others.
A Bit of Context
In Emet me-erets Isra’el, after he visited Palestine in 1891, Ahad Ha’am made the case that the brutal treatment of Arabs by some Jews could, if not stopped, ruin the prospects of Zionism and rob it of its moral standing and legitimacy. He would oppose Theodore Herzl, and later serve as an inspiration for the bi-nationalist movement—headed by Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem, Buber, Hans Kohn, and others, seminal pioneers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Powerful voices from our people surfaced in modern times. In the sacred justice spectrum of things, and re-linking with the living will of the prophets of Israel, they clamored like Amos the prophet’s: tsedek tsedek tirdof, (justice justice you shall pursue). Non-religious socialists and anarchists in the late 19th century. The Jewish Bund (Russia, and after being banned, Poland), played a significant role between the two world wars, actively fighting Russian and Polish antisemitism, promoting workers’ rights and cultural Judaism, while opposing Zionism, and its colonial collaboration with the British Empire to the detriment of Palestinians and the ruling classes. Their major influential peak ended with their prominent leadership (Marek Edelman) in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A significant number of their members emigrated to NYC in the early 1900’s, where they led some of the big unions (e.g, garment union) and kept Yiddish and socialist Jewish culture alive.
On the mystical and lyrical dimension, I want to include in the mix, the spiritual and beautiful fortitude of Etty Hillesum during the holocaust, who refused until her last dying day in Auschwitz, to be a victim of victimhood or contaminate her soul with vengeful revenge.
In this same vein, Jewish voices continued to echo the prophetic message. Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein (in the late 30’, 40’s, and 50’s), and later on, after the Six-Day War, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, questioning from Jerusalem, the disrespect, slander, violence, and dehumanizing effect of the Zionist movement, the occupation, and the state of Israel, towards the local Palestinian population.
Political Culture
As for my own biography, I was born and raised in Argentina during the times of a horrific dictatorship and human rights abuses, which my father, as a rabbi, fought against. From early on, I joined the Human Rights movement next to my dad - I was educated and aware of the intrinsic systemic injustice towards the global south. The part that empires actively play in the support of dictatorships, the pillaging of natural resources, appropriation of culture, silencing of opposition through subtle propaganda, and the support of state terror, alternatively, in Latin America, Africa, West Asia, and beyond.
The role the USA, the CIA, and Henry Kissinger himself had in killing the democratic president Salvador Allende and installing dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The USA’s direct involvement in Iran’s coup d’etat, of the democratically elected government of Mozadeh in 1953 (after he nationalized Iranian oil), or the United Fruit corporation’s responsibility in ending the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. I also remember as part of my multilayered (north/south and not east/west) education, learning of the horrendous crimes, and totalitarianism of Soviet leader Stalin, and even Lenin’s repression against the mariners of Kronstadt, from the massacres of the Roman empire towards indigenous European peoples, to the slave trade and pillaging of Africa, and the genocide of millions of indigenous people and non-Christians by the European inquisition, in what came to be infamously called, the Americas.
And last but not least, the suffering, persecution, and exile of my own Jewish people for thousands of years. From the Egyptian Pharaoh through Tsarist Russia, the gulags of Stalin, the holocaust by the Nazis, not excluding the trends of antisemitism in the Arab/Muslim world and the left. Antisemitism was consistently prevalent in the fascist regimes of South America and throughout world history until this day, as featured in the white supremacist movement of the USA’s declining empire.
My Spirits’ itinerary
All this to say, I was brought up in a multidimensional version of global narratives, with a solid Hebrew prophetic backbone, not uncommon for a young theater student, son of a human rights-oriented rabbi, underground culture buff, wanna be poet, and conscious sacred justice acolyte like me, in the South America of the 80’s.
Amongst my most impactful and iconic image memories at age 17 is a Jewish Argentinian newspaper cover photo of then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir embracing the murderous Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt, responsible for the deaths of 100000 indigenous people.
My spiritual and emotional itinerary took me out of Argentina and into nomadic adventures around the world, searching for luminosity and healing in Greece and Paris, the counterculture buzz in NYC in the early 90’s, and a big dip into Africa’s and India’s beauty and marvels. I had lived in Sinai for almost one year, hosted and befriended by the gracious Bedouin, just like our ancestors, before moving to the land of Israel/ Palestine, where I lived for 29 years.
I lived, loved, and embodied this message in the beloved land of the prophets. First in the old city of Jaffa, a brief passage through Hod Hasharon, and then the old city of Acco, pioneering the ritual theater collective Metatron. Then residing in the beloved hills of the Galilee, in Amirim, and later on Hararit, with a hiatus at the stunning beach town of Bet Yanai.
Throughout, and since arriving from Sinai in 1993, I didn’t remain idle. I did my best to connect with the most talented and wonderful musicians, artists, healers, educators, cooks, farmers, clowns, and integrate the renewed insights and teachers coming from the Jewish renewal movement in the diaspora. We intended to incarnate our Hebrew culture in a newfound pride of the Levant in Israel. It was in the 90’s that we seeded the Israeli current rehydration of Judaism through its sacred calendar and holidays, integrating the best of embodied academia, the artists, and seeded a renewed vision of the prophetic Hebrew culture for a few thousand avid participants.
Then, as the second intifada erupted, we were called to expand the scope to the healing of the whole Abraham family (not just Isaac’s side). Palestinians, Jews of the land, and internationals through the Sulha Peace Project. I was its initiator, co-founder, and co-director from 2001 to 2009. Again, many thousands of people of all faiths and ethnicities, including Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Druze, Bedouin, Israeli Jews of all sorts, and internationals, made these intergenerational gatherings a reality.
Caveat: The painful critique of this missive is absolutely not devoid of ahavat Israel (love of Israel), albeit, it can only be kosher with a firm commitment to never disentangle it from ahavat olam (love of the world). My love for friends, juicy, amazing, beautiful, and talented ones, living even today in the land of the prophets/ Ard el anbia, is still intact. Never doubt my love for you. You know who you are.
Love the Stranger
In the Torah, it is written 36 times (lamed vav, as the hidden 36 righteous ones that sustain the world) to love the stranger. Because we were strangers and even slaves! in the land of Egypt.
In the Torah, Israel is also depicted as a people with a stiff nape ( back) of the neck: Am kshe oref.
According to the biblical story, Ruth the Moabite had a sister called Orpah - same letters in Hebrew (anagram/tmura) as oref - and was the grandmother of King David.
The midrash (allegorical narrative) tells us that Orpah was the grandmother of Goliath.
The neck and nape, front and back of the narrow strait from where our voice emerges. When it is constricted and tight, it’s ruled by fear and becomes obstinate, locked in, and a slave to our patterns.
We lash out as victims, defending our survival, and forgetting our true message.
Acting out our trauma as eternal victims, blaming anyone possible, and justifying any rogue action on our part, with an attack, a projection, or a distraction.
According to the Baal Shem Tov, Moses’ epiphany at the burning bush in Sinai - take the sandals of your feet because you’re standing on holy ground is the unlocking of his habits, the snapping out of his patterns. Na’al (sandal) from man’ul (lock) & regel (foot) from ergel (habit).
In the highly regarded process of teshuvah in our tradition (repentance, re-turn to the essence of our soul), we look into the mirror to see how we can correct our own actions, be it individual or collective.
It is our job to change ourselves. It is not our job and definitely not part of teshuvah to change the “other”, regardless if they are wrong, unjust, terroristic, fascistic, extremists, or antisemites. The only possible spiritual work we are required to do is on ourselves, not on our enemies.
Spiritual Neoliberalism - Bypassing collective shadow work
It is so common for “spiritual, conscious, new age types” to talk about owning their shadows at a personal level, and to accept readily in a ceremony to focus on their “own” personal work. It is so easy to accept couples’ and sexuality coaches mention individual accountability, and therapists and wanna be therapists of all kinds, use the word “projection” at an individual dimension as a given and accepted truth.
The challenge begins when mentioning collective responsibility and collective shadow; it falls on deaf ears. It is as if it doesn’t exist; we can’t hear it, we can’t talk about it, we can’t deal with it. The collective and national ego is as real as the individual ego. But the virus of capitalism can’t profit from collective teshuva, as it does from a psychoanalyst dealing with your individual problems. The system of patriarchy can’t profit from national healing, as it does from our personal shaman, our individual retreat, and our coach. In this way, we remain strategically and systemically isolated, “every man for himself”, supporting an impossible matrix of individual salvation and healing.
And so, our ancestral victimhood trauma takes over, our national ego becomes a superpower that devours our consciousness, Israel becomes an unquestionable idol of sorts, attached by the hip to our most primal emotional pain body, erasing our awareness. A blind spot as big as Palestinian pain, as big as Lebanese pain, as Iranian pain.
So we say: “Why are you obsessed and highlight only Israel’s crimes…. what about Iran’s misogynist repression? And what about Islamist extremism? What about Hizbollah and Hamas’ acts of terror? What about Sudan, and Russia, and Congo, and China? and the Usa?
As if any of those truly acknowledged horrific crimes absolved any of our responsibility as Jews, to face the horrendous actions done in our name, or through our taxes.
We assert, matter-of-factly, joining the billions of dollars spent by the Hasbarah enterprise and the pro-Israel Lobby, that human rights groups are anti-Israel. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israeli groups like B’Tselem or Breaking the Silence, we disregard as propaganda. Everything ends up being an antisemitic plot of the ignorant “woke” left paid by Qatar. And as we say those words, we erase any sort of possible accountability for Israel’s own actions.
Even though for more than one hundred years, it is self-evident that Israel’s Jewish majority State policy is infested with ethnic crimes. And no, it’s not just Smotrich, Ben Gvir, or even Bibi. It’s the whole cabinet, it’s the opposition too. It’s Benny Gantz, Bennet, and Lapid, it’s President Herzog, it’s the notion of a Jewish state without clear borders or a constitution since its inception, where millions of non Jews have no equal rights (Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza) for decades. It’s the liberal elite, Jewish Israeli pilots, bombing innocent civilians and their homes, universities, places of worship, hospitals, and infrastructure. It’s the vast majority of the Jewish Israeli population that might fight for an independent judiciary and Jewish democracy against Netanyahu, granted, but when it comes to Palestinian injustice in the West Bank…we only hear crickets. The second-hand treatment of Palestinians with Israeli passports at the airport, the massacres in Gaza, in Lebanon, the IDF supporting settler terrorism and pogroms in the West Bank, the demolitions in the Hebron hills, the evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian pain of the expulsion of 750000 refugees in the Nakba,…all we get is a resounding silence.
I’m begging of us, can we let all of this sink into our hearts? Can we breathe all this in for a moment, without excusing it or defending it, or mentioning October 7? Just for the sake of Human empathy, for Betselem Elohim Barah Otam (in the image of God we were all created).
Still, our privileged spiritual neoliberal feelings are hurt. When they attack the state of Israel, we take it personally. When BDS boycotts Israeli products as a non-violent method for shifting the policies of the regime, as was done successfully with South Africa, we feel attacked. We tend to focus on the ignorant fads of anti-Israeli sentiment of the woke left; we cringe and get stuck in the semantics. Words like Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide offend us. Even though these terms have been proven time and again by the ICC, the ICJ, by Jewish and even Israeli holocaust scholars (Omer Bartov: Israel, what went wrong?), and judicial experts. Even though most of these values and institutions were a direct result of the Shoa (holocaust) by the Nazis, and were born in its aftermath as an antidote, as a “never again”, not just for Jews, but for everyone.
And no, we, the Jewish people, don’t own the monopoly on suffering throughout human history. It was never a competition to begin with. We as Jews are not here just to survive. It would be pathetic to claim that we have survived millennia, only to defend ourselves against our enemies. Nothing is sadder than a messenger who forgot their sacred message.
There’s always been a tension in the midst of our people, such as between the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel, the zealots (Pinchas), and the self-immolation of Masada on the one hand, and the striving for interdependence a la Yochanan ben Zakai. The democratization of prophecy (Eldad & Meidad), the learnings of Moses from his Midianite family, and the lineage of the Messiah coming from Ruth the Moabite.
And yes, it is true, Torah can be used in different ways, and to prove different points and purposes. Throughout the ages, and until today, we witness many quotes from the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan, “bah leorgecha, Kum leorgo”(If someone comes to kill you, kill him first) and “tochechah”(accusations and punishment), making the case for the theology of self-defense and survival, lubricated by xenophobia, homophobia, patriarchy, victimhood and paranoia, as representing the core identity of our people and our God.
Therefore, choose Life (Ubacharta bachayim)
In these dire and cataclysmic times, we are being summoned to make a moral choice as a people.
Either we follow our Torah to strive, to live for it, or we attach ourselves to the justification of endless wars, defending our existence just to survive.
Veahavta lereacha camocha (Love your neighbor as yourself)
Psalm 85:11: “Truth and mercy have met; justice and peace have kissed.” This well-known verse integrates truth, love, justice, and peace as divine attributes, bringing harmony to the world.
The message passed down through Abraham from his initiation by the high priest Melchizedek, the first king of Jerusalem, with wine and bread. The confirmation of the Jewish people as transducers in Universal service, pronounced unequivocally by prophet Isaiah, ki beit tefilati beyt tefilah ikareh le kol haamim (my temple shall serve all peoples), striving for peace, for justice, for wholeness. Lo isa goy el goy cherev ve lo ilmedu od milchamah (Peoples shall not raise their sword against each other, nor shall they learn war no more). These verses embody our moral fiber, our ethical prophetic will.
And still, Jewish Israel’s blind spot is as big as Palestinian pain.
Palestinian pain is not seen, not felt, not acknowledged, even after 100000 civilians were murdered in three years, doctors, children, hospitals, schools, journalists, nuns. And as I write this, Israel continues to perpetuate the same tactics in Lebanon and Iran. As the IDF and the government back the Jewish settler terrorism in the West Bank. As Bedouin are being evicted left and right from their villages. As thousands of Palestinian minors are held and tortured for years, some even raped in Israeli jails, without a fair trial by military courts.
We can go on and on about Islamic extremism and terrorism, and I agree they are horrible, but we tend to ignore the systemic realities behind them. Bin Laden was on the payroll of the CIA and the Taliban in Afghanistan, with USA support for fighting against Soviet communism. The government of Israel was propelling the power of Hamas when it had almost none. The self-evident reality is that Hizbollah only became a force after Israel’s illegal invasion of Lebanon, as an aftermath of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila by the Falangists with the complicit criminal support of Israel’s Ariel Sharon. Sharon’s violent entrance to Haram el Sharif in the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, accompanied by about 1000 policemen in October of 2000, triggered the second intifada. I was an eyewitness to that.
It’s hard for us to acknowledge the violence of the Jewish terrorist groups like the Irgun, and the Lechi, and specifically of Beitar’s demonstration in Jerusalem, only 3 days before tarpat (Martin Buber’s: A land for two peoples), the horrible pogrom committed by Palestinians against Jews in 1929 in Hebron. We fail to inform ourselves of the antisemitic laws of Lord Balfour in Britain before 1917, the collaborative efforts of the zionist movement with the polish antisemitic government to send Jews to Palestine (Molly Crabapple, “Here where we are is our land “ - Jewish Bund sources), and the zionist movement’s shameful involvement with the Iraqi police of the farhoud times (British Israeli historian of Jewish Iraqi descent: Professor Avi Shlaim).
Concluding Remarks
I will say it bluntly.
Antisemitism is a sickness. As long as they are jews, antisemitism will exist. It is an abomination.
In my opinion, the way to disempower it is not through counterattack or isolation, but through solidarity with all the other minorities that are being discriminated against.
The fact that there is antisemitism embedded in the anti-zionist, pro-Palestinian solidarity movement doesn’t justify any!!! of the atrocities committed by the state of Israel.
It seems morally callous and ethically incoherent with one of the most highly regarded values in the Jewish tradition, teshuvah, to avoid facing the crimes done in the name of the so-called Jewish state and focus on the “woke” movement’s ignorance.
It is our moral duty as Jews, as children of prophets, to look in the mirror, to do public collective teshuvah, and extirpate from our midst the cancer of Jewish supremacy. It is and will be painful, but if we want to be rightful heirs to the ethically robust and justice-oriented prophetic culture of our people and contribute to harmony and beauty between nations and in our majestic mama earth, we are required to do it.
Our life and moral compass depend on it.Sorry, very long read 🥸…only for those who are really interested- if anyone in this group ends up reading this - please tell me what you think🐚
Pnei Israel - A letter to my people.
I’m immersed since birth in deep love for the Hebrew Spirit, specifically for the prophetic lineage within our people. Those who are called to care actively for the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. Those who speak truth to power, and believe in sacred justice, standing up through the ages to religious, political, and financial abuse by kings and priests.
My grandfather, Theodore Friedman z ’ l, and uncle, Hillel Friedman, on my mother’s side, were rabbis, and my father, Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer, his memory is a blessing, was a rabbi too. I’m more of a prophetic rabbit, but that’s an entirely different matter.
My father’s two main mentors, Rabbi H.J.Heschel and Martin Buber, represented the best of this prophetic tradition. Heschel was heir to great Hassidic rabbis and disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, and a brilliant and revolutionary Hassidic theologian himself, a philosopher and a poet. He embodied his lineage, walking hand in hand with Martin Luther King Jr and opposing the war in Vietnam. Buber, the compiler of fantastic Hassidic stories, the philosopher, author of I & Thou, incarnated the ethical values of our people regarding Israel, following in the steps of Ahad Ha’am, among others.
A Bit of Context
In Emet me-erets Isra’el, after he visited Palestine in 1891, Ahad Ha’am made the case that the brutal treatment of Arabs by some Jews could, if not stopped, ruin the prospects of Zionism and rob it of its moral standing and legitimacy. He would oppose Theodore Herzl, and later serve as an inspiration for the bi-nationalist movement—headed by Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem, Buber, Hans Kohn, and others, seminal pioneers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Powerful voices from our people surfaced in modern times. In the sacred justice spectrum of things, and re-linking with the living will of the prophets of Israel, they clamored like Amos the prophet’s: tsedek tsedek tirdof, (justice justice you shall pursue). Non-religious socialists and anarchists in the late 19th century. The Jewish Bund (Russia, and after being banned, Poland), played a significant role between the two world wars, actively fighting Russian and Polish antisemitism, promoting workers’ rights and cultural Judaism, while opposing Zionism, and its colonial collaboration with the British Empire to the detriment of Palestinians and the ruling classes. Their major influential peak ended with their prominent leadership (Marek Edelman) in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. A significant number of their members emigrated to NYC in the early 1900’s, where they led some of the big unions (e.g, garment union) and kept Yiddish and socialist Jewish culture alive.
On the mystical and lyrical dimension, I want to include in the mix, the spiritual and beautiful fortitude of Etty Hillesum during the holocaust, who refused until her last dying day in Auschwitz, to be a victim of victimhood or contaminate her soul with vengeful revenge.
In this same vein, Jewish voices continued to echo the prophetic message. Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein (in the late 30’, 40’s, and 50’s), and later on, after the Six-Day War, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, questioning from Jerusalem, the disrespect, slander, violence, and dehumanizing effect of the Zionist movement, the occupation, and the state of Israel, towards the local Palestinian population.
Political Culture
As for my own biography, I was born and raised in Argentina during the times of a horrific dictatorship and human rights abuses, which my father, as a rabbi, fought against. From early on, I joined the Human Rights movement next to my dad - I was educated and aware of the intrinsic systemic injustice towards the global south. The part that empires actively play in the support of dictatorships, the pillaging of natural resources, appropriation of culture, silencing of opposition through subtle propaganda, and the support of state terror, alternatively, in Latin America, Africa, West Asia, and beyond.
The role the USA, the CIA, and Henry Kissinger himself had in killing the democratic president Salvador Allende and installing dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The USA’s direct involvement in Iran’s coup d’etat, of the democratically elected government of Mozadeh in 1953 (after he nationalized Iranian oil), or the United Fruit corporation’s responsibility in ending the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. I also remember as part of my multilayered (north/south and not east/west) education, learning of the horrendous crimes, and totalitarianism of Soviet leader Stalin, and even Lenin’s repression against the mariners of Kronstadt, from the massacres of the Roman empire towards indigenous European peoples, to the slave trade and pillaging of Africa, and the genocide of millions of indigenous people and non-Christians by the European inquisition, in what came to be infamously called, the Americas.
And last but not least, the suffering, persecution, and exile of my own Jewish people for thousands of years. From the Egyptian Pharaoh through Tsarist Russia, the gulags of Stalin, the holocaust by the Nazis, not excluding the trends of antisemitism in the Arab/Muslim world and the left. The abhorrence of Antisemitism was consistently prevalent in the fascist regimes of South America and throughout world history until this day, as featured in the white supremacist movement of the USA’s declining empire.
My Spirits’ itinerary
All this to say, I was brought up in a multidimensional version of global narratives, with a solid Hebrew prophetic backbone, not uncommon for a young theater student, son of a human rights-oriented rabbi, underground culture buff, wanna be poet, and conscious sacred justice acolyte like me, in the South America of the 80’s.
Amongst my most impactful and iconic image memories at age 17 is a Jewish Argentinian newspaper cover photo of then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir embracing the murderous Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt, responsible for the deaths of 100000 indigenous people.
My spiritual and emotional itinerary took me out of Argentina and into nomadic adventures around the world, searching for luminosity and healing in Greece and Paris, the counterculture buzz in NYC in the early 90’s, and a big dip into Africa’s and India’s beauty and marvels. I had lived in Sinai for almost one year, hosted and befriended by the gracious Bedouin, just like our ancestors, before moving to the land of Israel/ Palestine, where I lived for 29 years.
I lived, loved, and embodied this message in the beloved land of the prophets. First in the old city of Jaffa, a brief passage through Hod Hasharon, and then the old city of Acco, pioneering the ritual theater collective Metatron. Then residing in the beloved hills of the Galilee, in Amirim, and later on Hararit, with a hiatus at the stunning beach town of Bet Yanai.
Throughout, and since arriving from Sinai in 1993, I didn’t remain idle. I did my best to connect with the most talented and wonderful musicians, artists, healers, educators, cooks, farmers, clowns, and integrate the renewed insights and teachers coming from the Jewish renewal movement in the diaspora. We intended to incarnate our Hebrew culture in a newfound pride of the Levant in Israel. It was in the 90’s that we seeded the Israeli current rehydration of Judaism through its sacred calendar and holidays, integrating the best of embodied academia, the artists, and seeded a renewed vision of the prophetic Hebrew culture for a few thousand avid participants.
Then, as the second intifada erupted, we were called to expand the scope to the healing of the whole Abraham family (not just Isaac’s side). Palestinians, Jews of the land, and internationals through the Sulha Peace Project. I was its initiator, co-founder, and co-director from 2001 to 2009. Again, many thousands of people of all faiths and ethnicities, including Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Druze, Bedouin, Israeli Jews of all sorts, and internationals, made these intergenerational gatherings a reality.
Caveat: The painful critique of this missive is absolutely not devoid of ahavat Israel (love of Israel), albeit, it can only be kosher with a firm commitment to never disentangle it from ahavat olam (love of the world). My love for friends, juicy, amazing, beautiful, and talented ones, living even today in the land of the prophets/ Ard el anbia, is still intact. Never doubt my love for you. You know who you are.
Love the Stranger
In the Torah, it is written 36 times (lamed vav, as the hidden 36 righteous ones that sustain the world) to love the stranger. Because we were strangers and even slaves! in the land of Egypt.
In the Torah, Israel is also depicted as a people with a hard nape: Am kshe oref.
According to the biblical story, Ruth the Moabite had a sister called Orpah - same letters in Hebrew (anagram/tmura) as oref - and was the grandmother of King David.
The midrash (allegorical narrative) tells us that Orpah was the grandmother of Goliath.
The neck and nape, front and back of the narrow straight from where our voice emerges. When it is constricted and tight, it’s ruled by fear and becomes obstinate, locked in, and a slave to our patterns.
We lash out as victims, defending our survival, and forgetting our true message.
Acting out our trauma as eternal victims, blaming anyone possible, and justifying any rogue action on our part, with an attack, a projection, or a distraction.
According to the Baal Shem Tov, Moses’ epiphany at the burning bush in Sinai - take the sandals of your feet because you’re standing on holy ground is the unlocking of his habits, the snapping out of his patterns. Na’al (sandal) from man’ul (lock) & regel (foot) from ergel (habit).
In the highly regarded process of teshuvah in our tradition (repentance, re-turn to the essence of our soul), we look into the mirror to see how we can correct our own actions, be it individual or collective.
It is our job to change ourselves. It is not our job and definitely not part of teshuvah to change the “other”, regardless if they are wrong, unjust, terroristic, fascistic, extremists, or antisemites. The only possible spiritual work we are required to do is on ourselves, not on our enemies.
Spiritual Neoliberalism - Bypassing collective shadow work
It is so common for “spiritual, conscious, new age types” to talk about owning their shadows at a personal level, and to accept readily in a ceremony to focus on their “own” personal work. It is so easy to accept couples’ and sexuality coaches mention individual accountability, and therapists and wanna be therapists of all kinds, use the word “projection” at an individual dimension as a given and accepted truth.
The challenge begins when mentioning collective responsibility and collective shadow; it falls on deaf ears. It is as if it doesn’t exist; we can’t hear it, we can’t talk about it, we can’t deal with it. The collective and national ego is as real as the individual ego. But the virus of capitalism can’t profit from collective teshuva, as it does from a psychoanalyst dealing with your individual problems. The system of patriarchy can’t profit from national healing, as it does from our personal shaman, our individual retreat, and our coach. In this way, we remain strategically and systemically isolated, “every man for himself”, supporting an impossible matrix of individual salvation and healing.
And so, our ancestral victimhood trauma takes over, our national ego becomes a superpower that devours our consciousness, Israel becomes an unquestionable idol of sorts, attached by the hip to our most primal emotional pain body, erasing our awareness. A blind spot as big as Palestinian pain, as big as Lebanese pain, as Iranian pain.
So we say: “Why are you obsessed and highlight only Israel’s crimes…. what about Iran’s misogynist repression? And what about Islamist extremism? What about Hizbollah and Hamas’ acts of terror? What about Sudan, and Russia, and Congo, and China? and the Usa?
As if any of those truly acknowledged horrific crimes absolved any of our responsibility as Jews, to face the horrendous actions done in our name, or through our taxes.
We assert, matter-of-factly, joining the billions of dollars spent by the Hasbarah enterprise and the pro-Israel Lobby, that human rights groups are anti-Israel. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israeli groups like B’Tselem or Breaking the Silence, we disregard as propaganda. Everything ends up being an antisemitic plot of the ignorant “woke” left paid by Qatar. And as we say those words, we erase any sort of possible accountability for Israel’s own actions.
Even though for more than one hundred years, it is self-evident that Israel’s Jewish majority State policy is infested with ethnic crimes. And no, it’s not just Smotrich, Ben Gvir, or even Bibi. It’s the whole cabinet, it’s the opposition too. It’s Benny Gantz, Bennet, and Lapid, it’s President Herzog, it’s the notion of a Jewish state without clear borders or a constitution since its inception, where millions of non Jews have no equal rights (Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza) for decades. It’s the liberal elite, Jewish Israeli pilots, bombing innocent civilians and their homes, universities, places of worship, hospitals, and infrastructure. It’s the vast majority of the Jewish Israeli population that might fight for an independent judiciary and Jewish democracy against Netanyahu, granted, but when it comes to Palestinian injustice in the West Bank…we only hear crickets. The second-hand treatment of Palestinians with Israeli passports at the airport, the massacres in Gaza, in Lebanon, the IDF supporting settler terrorism and pogroms in the West Bank, the demolitions in the Hebron hills, the evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian pain of the expulsion of 750000 refugees in the Nakba,…all we get is a resounding silence.
I’m begging of us, can we let all of this sink into our hearts? Can we breathe all this in for a moment, without excusing it or defending it, or mentioning October 7? Just for the sake of Human empathy, for Betselem Elohim Barah Otam (in the image of God we were all created).
Still, our privileged spiritual neoliberal feelings are hurt. When they attack the state of Israel, we take it personally. When BDS boycotts Israeli products as a non-violent method for shifting the policies of the regime, as was done successfully with South Africa, we feel attacked. We tend to focus on the ignorant fads of anti-Israeli sentiment of the woke left; we cringe and get stuck in the semantics. Words like Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide offend us. Even though these terms have been proven time and again by the ICC, the ICJ, by Jewish and even Israeli holocaust scholars (Omer Bartov: Israel, what went wrong?), and judicial experts. Even though most of these values and institutions were a direct result of the Shoa (holocaust) by the Nazis, and were born in its aftermath as an antidote, as a “never again”, not just for Jews, but for everyone.
And no, we, the Jewish people, don’t own the monopoly on suffering throughout human history. It was never a competition to begin with. We as Jews are not here just to survive. It would be pathetic to claim that we have survived millennia, only to defend ourselves against our enemies. Nothing is sadder than a messenger who forgot their sacred message.
There’s always been a tension in the midst of our people, such as between the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel, the zealots (Pinchas), and the self-immolation of Masada on the one hand, and the striving for interdependence a la Yochanan ben Zakai. The democratization of prophecy (Eldad & Meidad), the learnings of Moses from his Midianite family, and the lineage of the Messiah coming from Ruth the Moabite.
And yes, it is true, Torah can be used in different ways, and to prove different points and purposes. Throughout the ages, and until today, we witness many quotes from the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan, “bah leorgecha, Kum leorgo”(If someone comes to kill you, kill him first) and “tochechah”(accusations and punishment), making the case for the theology of self-defense and survival, lubricated by xenophobia, homophobia, patriarchy, victimhood and paranoia, as representing the core identity of our people and our God.
Therefore, choose Life (Ubacharta bachayim)
In these dire and cataclysmic times, we are being summoned to make a moral choice as a people.
Either we follow our Torah to strive, to live for it, or we attach ourselves to the justification of endless wars, defending our existence just to survive.
Veahavta lereacha camocha (Love your neighbor as yourself)
Psalm 85:11: “Truth and mercy have met; justice and peace have kissed.” This well-known verse integrates truth, love, justice, and peace as divine attributes, bringing harmony to the world.
The message passed down through Abraham from his initiation by the high priest Melchizedek, the first king of Jerusalem, with wine and bread. The confirmation of the Jewish people as transducers in Universal service, pronounced unequivocally by prophet Isaiah, ki beit tefilati beyt tefilah ikareh le kol haamim (my temple shall serve all peoples), striving for peace, for justice, for wholeness. Lo isa goy el goy cherev ve lo ilmedu od milchamah (Peoples shall not raise their sword against each other, nor shall they learn war no more). These verses embody our moral fiber, our ethical prophetic will.
And still, Jewish Israel’s blind spot is as big as Palestinian pain.
Palestinian pain is not seen, not felt, not acknowledged, even after 100000 civilians were murdered in three years, doctors, children, hospitals, schools, journalists, nuns. And as I write this, Israel continues to perpetuate the same tactics in Lebanon and Iran. As the IDF and the government back the Jewish settler terrorism in the West Bank. As Bedouin are being evicted left and right from their villages. As thousands of Palestinian minors are held and tortured for years, some even raped in Israeli jails, without a fair trial by military courts.
We can go on and on about Islamic extremism and terrorism, and I agree they are horrible, but we tend to ignore the systemic realities behind them. Bin Laden was on the payroll of the CIA and the Taliban in Afghanistan, with USA support for fighting against Soviet communism. The government of Israel was propelling the power of Hamas when it had almost none. The self-evident reality is that Hizbollah only became a force after Israel’s illegal invasion of Lebanon, as an aftermath of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila by the Falangists with the complicit criminal support of Israel’s Ariel Sharon. Sharon’s violent entrance to Haram el Sharif in the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, accompanied by about 1000 policemen in October of 2000, triggered the second intifada. I was an eyewitness to that.
It’s hard for us to acknowledge the violence of the Jewish terrorist groups like the Irgun, and the Lechi, and specifically of Beitar’s demonstration in Jerusalem, only 3 days before tarpat (Martin Buber’s: A land for two peoples), the horrible pogrom committed by Palestinians against Jews in 1929 in Hebron. We fail to inform ourselves of the antisemitic laws of Lord Balfour in Britain before 1917, the collaborative efforts of the zionist movement with the polish antisemitic government to send Jews to Palestine (Molly Crabapple, “Here where we are is our land “ - Jewish Bund sources), and the zionist movement’s shameful involvement with the Iraqi police of the farhoud times (British Israeli historian of Jewish Iraqi descent: Professor Avi Shlaim).
Concluding Remarks
I will say it bluntly.
Antisemitism is a sickness. As long as they are jews, antisemitism will exist. It is an abomination.
In my opinion, the way to disempower it is not through counterattack or isolation, but through solidarity with all the other minorities that are being discriminated against.
The fact that there is antisemitism embedded in the anti-zionist, pro-Palestinian solidarity movement doesn’t justify any!!! of the atrocities committed by the state of Israel.
It seems morally callous and ethically incoherent with one of the most highly regarded values in the Jewish tradition, teshuvah, to avoid facing the crimes done in the name of the so-called Jewish state and focus on the “woke” movement’s ignorance.
It is our moral duty as Jews, as children of prophets, to look in the mirror, to do public collective teshuvah, and extirpate from our midst the cancer of Jewish supremacy. It is and will be painful, but if we want to be rightful heirs to the ethically robust and justice-oriented prophetic culture of our people and contribute to harmony and beauty between nations and in our majestic mama earth, we are required to do it.
Our life and moral compass depend on it.