We Need To Talk: To My Jewish Community
It could be said that I’m not the best Jew. I’m an out and out Pagan, a writer and teacher of and prominent voice for earth-based spirituality rooted in the ancient Goddess traditions the prophets so reviled. But I am a Jew by birth, heritage, education and identity, and Jewishness is a core part of who I am and how I respond to the world. As an advocate for feminist spirituality and for reintegrating some of the ancient earth-based strands inherent in Judaism, from time to time I get asked to speak at a synagogue or even give a sermon on a High Holiday. Generally, these are progressive, even radical congregations, and yet too often, because I’m known to be an advocate for justice for Palestine, I've been cautioned not to speak about that particular issue.
“We have close and warm relationships in our congregation,” I've been told. “We want to keep them. On the High Holidays, we don't want to confront an issue that's so polarizing.”
When this happens, I've always declined the invitation to speak, even when I might have actually planned to speak about another topic. While I know how personally painful it has been for me to confront this issue, and how futile and divisive it can seem to raise it, the consequences of our silence are grave.
I do understand the reluctance. Nothing is more difficult to talk about in the Jewish community. The issue is so deeply rooted in our historical trauma then even mentioning it stirs deep, inchoate emotions that do not lead to reasoned discourse. For those of us raised in post war America, Israel was the great shining hope, the one beacon of redemption after the horrors of the Holocaust. How painful it is to come to the wrenching realization that Israel itself is enacting horrors of its own on another people.
This is how I explained it to a group of non-Jews wanting guidance on how to sensitively support justice for Palestine while still welcoming their Jewish members:
Try to imagine that. for your whole life you've been pursued by enemies who want to kill you. You've run from house to house, looking for shelter, looking for safety, looking for a place where you can be yourself without fear, free to flourish and grow. But every time you find a place that offers safety for a while, your enemies reappear and resume their persecution.
Finally, you see someone beckoning to you. It's your relatives. “Hey,” they say, “We have a house, over here. We have a place that's ours, where you can be safe. And it’s our ancestral home, that we’ve reclaimed after a long exile. Now we own it again! We can rearrange the furniture, we can plant the garden. we can decide what to cook, we can make the rules. Join us! Join us!”
imagine the sense of relief, of empowerment, of finally coming home.
But then slowly you become aware of something terrible and hidden. There's a locked room that you're not encouraged to go into. You're not encouraged even to ask about it or talk about it. Maybe one day you peek through the keyhole and discover to your shock and horror that the room is full of people, people who were living in their house before you came. People who've been locked away, because to admit their existence would be to undermine that wonderful sense of finally being home at last.
The situation gets worse. Because those people in that locked room aren't content to stay there quietly. From time to time, they burst out and make your own home unsafe. You hear screams and clamors under the door and pounding fists. They shoot darts through the keyhole, and sometimes bullets.
Mostly the outside world ignores the situation, or staunchly supports your right to the house—in part because they feel some guilt for all those deadly persecutions. Mostly your own people inside and outside the house just don't want to talk about it, because to acknowledge it is so deeply shameful and painful--albeit not nearly as painful as it is to be one of the prisoners trapped in that locked room.
And meanwhile, outside, the climate grows harsher. The old persecutors ramp up their propaganda and the danger level in every other house increases.
Finally one day some of the people in the locked room break through the door. Not all of them--just one or two of the angriest. they rampage through the house, break furniture and kill some of your relatives, take some others back into the room as hostages. They destroy that hard won sense of safety.
And so those who possess the house take a terrible revenge. They enter the locked room, close all the openings, and go on a killing rampage. They cut off supplies of food and water for the survivors. As the death toll mounts, and children starve, many in the outside world begin to turn against the house that they have long supported, including those who never liked any of you anyway and are now grateful for a justification for their hatred.
How the hell are you supposed to feel about all this? Let’s say you’re a Jew who cares about justice, who feels revulsion at the assaults being carried out in Gaza.
How do you untangle the threads of your connection to your own people, your horror at what some of them are doing, your own fear as anti-Semitism makes a global comeback, your sense of alienation from some of your own allies when their vehemence for the Palestinian cause condemns your own family—even when you acknowledge that they probably deserve it, but also suspect some hidden, unconscious anti-Semitism may also be fueling some of the fire?”
Often in my days volunteering on the front lines I'd hear Israelis say “You don't understand! The situation is complex!” “No, no,” I'd say. “It's not really complex. It's simple. Justice is justice. Without justice for the Palestinians, the Jews in Israel will never have true peace or security.”
And yet the emotions are complex. Progressive Jews have been adamant about separating Judaism from Zionism. All Jews are not Zionists, all Zionists are not Jews. Jewish voices and organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have been in the forefront of demanding justice for Palestine. And yet the threads are tangled. Growing up in post war America, support for Israel was woven into the fabric of every Jewish experience, from learning folk dancing in Hebrew school to closing every seder with “Next year in Jerusalem”.
I’ve had to make my own painful way through the tangle. During the second intifada. I volunteered multiple times with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led group co-founded by Jews that supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. I’ll never forget the profound sense of dislocation I felt the first night our group found ourselves stranded inside a refugee camp under siege after dark. The overwhelming thought in my mind was “This is where my mother never wanted me to be!” A part of me felt that I must be betraying everything I’d ever learned from my religious teachers and my family. Another part was frankly terrified—I was in the heartland of the enemy, those who had every reason to hate me. But as we were welcomed into Palestinian homes, as we shared meals with families, as an old man in Gaza brewed me tea and joked about finding me a Palestinian husband, as a grandmother laughed at my attempts to roll grape leaves, as a young woman begged me to read her Tarot cards, as we dove beneath the furniture with children abandoning their homework while bullets thudded into the walls of their home in Rafah, as I over and over again experienced the warm welcome of Palestinian culture where the Biblical command to care for the stranger is still followed, I underwent a profound change. That deep inner construct of My Tribe versus The Enemy dissolved away, along with layers of fear and guilt. I felt a profound sense of belonging, of being part of a common humanity, each of us capable of great harm and great good.
The locked rooms are real. When I was in the West Bank, the Israeli Defense Forces would often commandeer an apartment and literally lock the family in one room while they made their home the base of operations. I’ve sat in at least one of those rooms myself with a family, singing to distract a small boy while Israeli soldiers ransacked the house. Gaza itself has been giant locked room, under siege for almost two decades, under constant assault and control before that.
We need to unlock that door and face what’s inside. Because—well, try this thought experiment:
Consider a child—maybe one of your own, a grandchild, a friend’s child, any random child you see at a playground or holding a parent’s hand in the grocery store. Now imagine that child going hungry. Asking you for food—and you have nothing to give. Begging—you divide your last piece of bread, go hungry yourself, and still you see that beloved child getting weaker, crying, then ceasing even to cry…
If this were happening to your own child, you couldn’t bear it. You’d do anything you possibly could, however desperate, to ease that hunger. But it is happening—to thousands of children in Gaza, some of whom have also lost parents, brothers and sisters, limbs, homes, along with the massive killing of civilians, attacks on hospitals, aid workers, hungry people lining up for bread. And we have to stop it. There’s no strategic calculation, no rationalization, that can justify it. Yes, the attacks of October 7 were horrific, indefensible atrocities. But this indiscriminate revenge goes against everything that is good in Judaism, taints every accomplishment of Israel, violates all the best teachings of our traditions, and it’s making Israel a pariah state. Ultimately, it will destroy any hope of security and peace, for this policy of unchecked retribution, of forcing the innocent to suffer for the actions of the guilty, will only breed more terrorism and revenge.
We have to talk because Jewish voices carry a special weight in this matter. Now, at last, a movement is arising in Israel itself to demand that Netanyahu and his ultra-right allies be thrown out, to call for peace. That movement needs our support. Biden and the U.S. need our pressure to stop supplying weapons for the slaughter, to use all of our power to call for a cease-fire. We need to raise our voices, because if we don’t speak up against the slaughter, institutions will speak in our name to support it.
Passover is coming, when we will sit around the table with family and friends and celebrate our own liberation from slavery—an oppression so traumatic that after 4000 years, we’ll still processing it. Will we sit quietly, avoid disturbing the meal, the sense of belonging and fellowship? Or will we talk, acknowledge the pain and grief and anguish we feel, regardless of what stand we take on the issue, and begin to heal ourselves so we can stop inflicting unimaginable pain on others?