“Because actually the world is not made up of ‘nations’ and fatherlands that want only to preserve their cultural distinctions, and only if it means not sacrificing a single human life. Fatherlands and nations want much more, or much less: They have vested interests that insist on sacrifices. They set up a series of ‘fronts’ to secure the ‘hinterland’ that is their real objective. Given all the millennial grief of the Jews, they still had one consolation: the fact that they didn’t have such a fatherland. If there even can be such a thing as a just history, surely the Jews will be given great credit for holding onto their common sense in not having had a fatherland at a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness.”
These lines from Joseph Roth’s 1927 book, The Wandering Jews, resonates in my conscience whenever I think of Zionism, the State of Israel, and the War on Gaza. In other words, it has been coming to mind almost all the time. A veteran of the Austro-Hungarian Army of the Great War, who had grown up in Brody in what was then Austrian Silesia, Roth had come out of that experience disgusted with Nationalism. Indeed, his greatest novel, The Radetzky March, is very much a story of how parochial nationalisms tear humans apart.
I have been contemplating these words, from Roth’s book about the Jewish refugee crisis in the wake of the Great War and nationalist revolutions which followed because I know that he would be horrified to know that we Jews let go of our “common sense,” and launched ourselves into the “patriotic madness” of Zionism. Indeed, if the War on Gaza, and the debasement of so much of the Diaspora Jewish community into the unthinking lackeys of Israeli aggression has demonstrated anything (and it has demonstrated much), it is that we have lost our way. We have become enthralled to the State of Israel, a relic of the ancient regime, when nations gleefully sacrificed life to take and own land.
Zionism has degraded us all and perverted our culture. As the War on Gaza marches on to four months and 25,000 Palestinian dead, the imperative to move beyond the stale 19th century ideologies that animate Zionism and the State of Israel becomes ever more pressing.
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I didn’t go to Shul on Saturday. It wasn’t really an unusual situation, even though there are few things that I would rather do on Shabbes than join with fellow Jews in worship. But having lived in four cities (and three states) in six years, it has been hard for this wandering Jew to find a community to call my own. I have been in an almost constant state of “shul shopping,” where I try on the practice or liturgy of this or that congregation, and move on until I find something that fits, and then move on to another city when circumstances inevitably demand it.
My own practice is somewhat heterodox, to be honest. I keep kosher, wear a yarmulke, observe all of the fasts and festivals, spend a week every spring eating crackers (with the attendant violence to my digestion), and I do no work or training (I am a runner and cyclist) on Shabbes (though I do post things in social media). At the same time, I take a critical position on Halakha and, like Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, I see our traditions as part of an evolving engagement with history. When pressed to describe my practice, I will often say that I’m “Reconstructodox,” even though I have Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform siddurs on my bookcase, as well as Reconstructionism’s Limot Hol.
What it has meant is that, every time I visit a new Shul I spend a lot of time thinking whether this is the community for me, and a big part of that is how they see the relationship between Judaism and the State of Israel. The sad fact is that the vast majority of Shuls and, as far as I know, all Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox Shuls regard Zionism and Judaism as intimately linked, if not one-and-the-same.
So, I have invariably found myself sitting in the Sanctuary looking up at the bimah, seeing the ark (the enclosure containing the Torah scrolls) flanked with the blue-and-white flags of the State of Israel, and then asked to join in the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel. This is a real thing, and it appears in the siddurs of all the main minhags. And they are all some variation of the prayer composed by the Chief Rabbinate of the State of Israel in 1948:
“Our Father who is in heaven, Protector and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the dawn of our deliverance. Shield it beneath the wings of Your love; spread over it Your canopy of peace; send Your light and Your truth to its leaders, officers, and counselors, and direct them with Your good counsel.
“Strengthen the defenders of our Holy Land; grant them, our God, salvation and crown them with victory. Establish peace in the land, and everlasting joy for its inhabitants. Remember our brethren, the whole house of Israel, in all the lands of their dispersion. Speedily bring them to Zion, Your city, to Jerusalem Your dwelling-place, as it is written in the of Your servant Moses:
“’Even if you are dispersed in the uttermost parts of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather and fetch you. The Lord your God will bring you into the land which your ancestors possessed, and you shall possess it; and God will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your ancestors.’”
I have no objection to Jews-who-happen-to-be-Zionists saying prayers for the State of Israel, or for anywhere else, for that matter. What I object to is the expectation of all the major minhags that, to be a Jew, davening with other Jews, I should say a prayer for the State of Israel, especially one that asks Adon Olam in one breath to “Strengthen the defenders of our Holy Land; grant them, our God, salvation and crown them with victory,” and in the other to “Establish peace in the land, and everlasting joy for its inhabitants.” That seems contradictory to me and, I always wonder, which “inhabitants,” exactly?
To be honest, it nauseates me. It is a kind of Judaism, hegemonic in the Diaspora, that I have come to call “Third Temple Judaism,” where we define our Jewishness in terms of a surrogate Temple establishment – the State of Israel and the IDF – rather in terms of our relationship with Torah, our history, God, or each other. In some ways, it is even, as Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares said even before the State of Israel was born, a kind of heresy.
The evidence of this is the abject failure of the mainstream minhags to see past the State of Israel to the values and principles that we recognize as foundationally Jewish – you know, little things like Tzedek (justice), Tikkun Olam (healing the world), and Chesed (love, compassion, and kindness for all) – in the War on Gaza. Hell, if you visit the websites of the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and the Orthodox Union, you will see no mention of the 23,000 Gazans whom the IDF have killed, and no mention of the oppression of the Palestinian people. But you will be exhorted to “stand in solidarity” with soldiers – and the settlers – who are killing them.
Think about that.
Things a bit different with the Reconstructionists, of course. In my “shul shopping” odyssey, I have visited several Reconstructionist congregations and I have found that, in its “commitment to tikkun olam, to repairing the world,” as “a primary way” to enact Jewishness, the whole Israel thing varies from soft-pedaling Zionism and an embrace of a mythical “liberal Zionism,” to just sidestepping Israel altogether… except maybe as a metaphor for something. Not all Reconstructionist Shabbes services include the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel, still fewer feature the blue-and-white. But some do.
And that’s why the website for Reconstructing Judaism, the organization representing the Reconstructionist minhag in the US, is full of what is either cognitive dissonance or outright schizophrenia. In his blog post on the site at the end of December, Rabbi Maurice Harris wrote of the “Shared Values and Multiple Opinions in Reconstructionist Congregations.” I can understand that Reconstructionism is a big tent and, as such, its rabbis and representatives have to toe a line between differing opinions.
But Rabbi Harris – speaking in this case for their minhag – is literally toeing the line between, as they put it “Those Calling for Immediate Ceasefire” and “Those Opposed to Immediate Ceasefire,” as if continuing to bomb the shit out of Gaza and killing Palestinians is equally likely to “repair the world” as not bombing the shit out of Gaza and killing Palestinians.
Think about that for a minute.
This is where the main minhags of American (and Canadian) Judaism have met the challenge history and failed completely. In their teaching, the real victims of this war that has lasted more than one hundred days, are the Israelis; and while it is true that the State of Israel was attacked, and that Israelis were killed injured, abducted and traumatized, more than three months later, once can only ignore the appalling brutality of Israeli retribution, the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed and injured, the millions displaced and starving through a decidedly un-Jewish rhetorical alchemy. And even the cuddly, welcoming Reconstructionists have nothing to offer apart from a false equivalence.
While this might be the Judaism of the Third Temple, it is not the teaching of the Prophets. It is not my minhag, and it is not my shul. I will keep shopping.
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I was listening to Bireli Lagrene the other day, in utter awe of Romani culture. I grew up listening to my father’s collection of “jazz manouche” records featuring Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli (whom, I know, was not, himself Romani), and it has always been a music that resonated very deeply with me. There are, of course, the tones of Eastern Europe – and thus, of klezmer and Ashkenazi music – in it. And I was always fascinated by how so many great Romani musicians, like Häns’che Weiss, Wawau Adler, and Stochelo Rosenberg had Jewish-sounding names. I always thought of these brilliant artists as kin – maybe not close, but not distant, either.
After all, the Roma and the Jews were both enslaved by the Boyars of Moldavia and Wallachia and, until it was annexed by the Hapsburg monarchy in 1774, in my family’s ancestral home of Bukovina as well. Like the Roma, my Friedman ancestors (though not yet bearing the name “Friedman”) were also slaves almost until the time of the American Revolution. My father explained that this meant that we have a special bond with the Roma people.
We have another bond, of course: the horror of the Holocaust. The Porajmos and the Shoah bind us in a dark kinship of suffering. The Nazis murdered people of many communities – political dissidents, socialists, communists, LGBTQ people, the physically and mentally disabled, Polish slave laborers, and Russian prisoners – ten million people, all deemed unfit to live at all in the Reich. But only the Roma and the Jews were slated for complete extermination.
And, I can’t help but think of that shared legacy when I listen to Django or Bireli; had the Nazis had their way, that music would have been silenced, and these ears would not have been able to listen to it.* That imbues the pure pleasure that I take in listening with the tang of pain that makes Romani and Jewish music so compelling. There is a lament in every klezmer freylekh, and pain in every Romani czardas. It is what makes the music what it is.
And like my people, the Roma have experiences centuries of brutal oppression, as they do today. Like us, they have been Europe’s internal-other, rarely-tolerated trespassers in white Christendom – never to be trusted, and always to be shunned.
As we were for most of our history, the Roma conceive of themselves as a nation without a territory. They have a flag, a national anthem, and even a homeland. Their homeland is in northern India, and while their wanderings over the last 1,500 years have defined Romani culture, they do remember where they came from. See the film Latcho Drom, which traces the history of Romani music from India to Western Europe.
The Roma have a homeland and their cultural memory of it remains in their literature, art, cinema, and music. But they do not demand a state. I have never encountered a Romani movement to create a Romani nation state; indeed, as Ceija Stojka observed in her book Travelers on the Earth, to have a nation state would be to cease being Romani. What they demand is to be treated with humanity and justice, and to take their place as the Roma nation among their neighbors of whatever nation they inhabit.
That is a revolutionary way to think about identity, peoplehood, and national identity. It is something that my people – the People of Israel – should consider, and maybe a lesson that we can take from our close cousins, with whom we have shared so much.
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I encountered the work of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares several years ago, as I was doing a deep dive into my pacifist commitments and trying to find a theory of pacifism that resonated with my political and religious commitments. (The short version is that my pacifism is very much influenced by Tamares, Bernard Lazare, Bertrand Russell, among others.) But one of the things that really struck me about Tamares was that here was a Jewish thinker who lived at the time of the full flowering of pre-Shoah Zionism, a Haredi rabbi from the Polish countryside who had attended the fourth Zionist Congress in 1900, and had experienced the horrors of the post-Great War pogroms, who flatly rejected political, territorial Zionism. He regarded it as a heresy that sought to erect a “national idol:”
“Zion should continue to develop within us that which we have acquired and nurtured in our exile. We have ceased to be like all other nations, and we don’t need to be given back the dubious gift which we have lost.”
Tamares, like Lazare, Richard Marienstras, Simon Rawidowicz, and many others, was a non-Zionist, anti-Zionist thinker from deep within our own traditions, whose voice has been silenced by the maximalist Zionists who have colonized Jewish life. One of the tasks of our decolonization must begin with recapturing these voices and allowing them to be heard again. Ben Yehuda Press published a collection of his works in translation a couple of years ago. This is my review of that volume (from 2021). Please consider adding this book to your library. Tamares is important.
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Image: “Dancing Around the Golden Calf,” Emil Nolde (1910)
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* I mean this somewhat metaphorically, since Django escaped to Great Britain during the Second World War, and my Jewish grandparents had already emigrated to North America by 1913. Still had the Nazis had their way, there would have been no Jews or Roma at all. Anywhere.