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I cherish Judaism as my language of intimacy with God; but God speaks many languages.
I cherish Judaism as my language of intimacy with God; but God speaks many languages.
Sometimes, in political arguments with Palestinians, I would be told: Why are we arguing about who owns the land, when in the end the land will own us both? The identical expression exists in my tradition, too.
To solve our conflict, we must recognize not only each other’s right to self-determination but also each side’s right to self-definition.
We could not remain a democratic state with ethical Jewish values if we became a permanent occupier of your people, nor did we want to. I didn’t return home to deny another people its own sense of home. I hope you will hear me when I tell you I have no intention of denying your claim or your pain.
From our perspective, it’s not the occupation that creates terror but terror that prolongs the occupation, by convincing Israelis that no matter what we do, in the end the terrorism against us will persist.
Palestinian leaders never stop telling their people that Israel has no historic legitimacy as a state. Those leaders have convinced us that this isn’t a conflict, ultimately, about borders and settlements and Jerusalem and holy places. It is about our right to be here, in any borders. Our right to be considered a people. An indigenous people.
I wanted to shout at your hill: It could have been different! Partner with us, and negotiate a compromise! And look at me, acknowledge my existence! I’ve got a story, too.
It seems that the one idea unifying Palestinian media in all its ideological diversity is that the Jews are not a people and have no right to a state.
we are caught in a conflict between two just narratives.
How can we ever reconcile if I don’t exist, if I have no right to exist?
The Torah commands me, “Seek peace and pursue it”—even when peace appears impossible, perhaps especially then.
Now I want to share with you something of my faith and my story, which are entwined. I am a Jew because of history. That is what brought me here, as your neighbor.
To you we are colonialists, Crusaders. And to us you are the latest genocidal enemy seeking to destroy the Jewish people.
Can we, instead, see each other as two traumatized peoples, each clinging to the same sliver of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither of whom will find peace or justice until we make our peace with the other’s claim to justice?
The Hebrew calendar, after all, reflects the natural cycle of this land.
There were ultra-Orthodox Jews of a dozen sects, distinguished by the sizes and shapes of their black fedoras and by the lengths of their black jackets, chanting in the Yiddish-accented Hebrew of Poland and Hungary.
There was Russian and English and Amharic and especially French: Jews from France are our latest wave of immigrants, fleeing anti-Jewish violence in a Western democracy.
Being an Israeli is like awakening into a dream.
One morning I was driving my teenage son, Shachar, to school. Not far from the Old City, we got caught in a traffic jam. I said, “You know, in one sense here we are, sitting in a traffic jam, just like in any city anywhere. But sometimes it occurs to me that the most boring details of our daily life were the greatest dreams of our ancestors.”
They saw exile as God’s punishment for their sins, and so they surrendered to their fate for as long as God decreed.
Jewish prayer became suffused with the longing for the land. As a boy, growing up in a religious home in Brooklyn, I prayed in the winter months for rain and in the summer months for dew—regardless of the weather outside my window, following the natural rhythm of a distant land.
In morning and evening prayers, in grace after meals, I invoked Zion. Before I’d even known the land of Israel as actual place, I knew it as inherited memory.
No Diaspora community suffered proportionally more fatalities on its way to Zion than the Jews of Ethiopia.
Many Ethiopian Jews never even heard of the Holocaust until they got to Israel.
Israel exists because it never stopped existing, even if only in prayer.
Nothing would replace Zion in our hearts, he said.
In his closing speech to the Congress, Herzl raised his right hand and repeated the words of the Psalms, “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.” A year later, Herzl died—at age forty-four, of exhaustion and heart failure.
After the Uganda Plan, there were other attempts to create Jewish “homelands” in various parts of the world—like Birobidzhan, the Soviet fantasy of a Yiddish-speaking Communist homeland on the Chinese border. But every alternative to Zion failed.
The first community to answer the call were the Jews of Yemen. Throughout 1949, an ancient community of over 40,000 was flown home in Israel’s first airlift. Many Yemenite Jews, who had never seen a plane, recalled the biblical promise to restore the Jews from exile “on the wings of eagles” and assumed that that prophecy was being literally fulfilled on the tarmac.
A majority of Israelis today are descended from Jews who left one part of the Middle East to resettle in another. Tell them that Zionism is a European colonialist movement and they simply won’t understand what you’re talking about.
But if by “Zionism” one means the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of renewing Jewish sovereignty in our place of origin, then there is no Judaism without Zionism. Judaism isn’t only a set of rituals and rules but a vision linked to a place.
In the summer of 1982, shortly after Tisha b’Av, I left my home in New York City, boarded an El Al plane, and joined the Jewish people in the greatest dare of its history. I was twenty-nine years old, a journalist, and single. I left my old life behind, without looking back.
But their Jewish identity was under assault by a government policy that banned Jewish education and practice, that was attempting to erase them as Jews. And so we set out to prevent losing them as part of the family.
The denial of Jewish peoplehood is one of the key divides between us. Even Palestinian moderates I’ve known who want to end the bloodshed tend to deny that the Jews are an authentic nation. So long as Palestinian leaders insist on defining the Jews as a religion rather than allowing us to define ourselves as we have since ancient times—as a people with a particular faith—then Israel will continue to be seen as illegitimate, its existence an open question.
Judaism is the love story between God and a people.
The purpose of Judaism is to sanctify one people with the goal of sanctifying all peoples.
For Judaism, then, peoplehood and faith are inseparable. There is no Judaism without a Jewish people.
Because Judaism is intended for a specific people, it can accommodate the validity of other faiths. As a Jew, I have no expectations of remaking humanity in my religious image, and so I feel grateful to other faiths for offering varied paths to God. Islam and Christianity have brought vast numbers of souls into a relationship with God—and, as it happens, with the sacred stories of my people.
There is even the mystical notion that the souls of converts stood at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah along with the rest of the Jewish people.
This is the curse of our relationship: My protection is your vulnerability, my celebration your defeat.
The saddest moment in this country is not Holocaust Day, which we observed last week, but Memorial Day, a reminder that this is a country where parents sometimes must bury their children so that Israel can live. On Holocaust Day, we mourn the consequences of powerlessness; on Memorial Day, we mourn the consequences of power.
We need to respect each other’s right to tell our own stories. That’s why I am writing to you, neighbor: to tell you my story, not yours. If you choose to write in response, as I hope you will, you’ll tell me your understanding of your history.
My definition for the Jews is this: We are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are. That’s why the central Jewish ritual that most Jews continue to observe, no matter how far removed from Judaism, is the Passover seder, the retelling of our ancient origins as a people.
One of the most prominent Palestinian leaders, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent World War II as Hitler’s guest in Berlin, broadcasting appeals to the Muslim world to align with the Nazis and encouraging his hosts to extend the genocide from Europe to the Middle East.
Older, in my twenties, I began asking subversive questions: How do Palestinians perceive this conflict? What is the basis of their argument? Curiosity led to empathy—the great enemies of self-righteousness.
In the war between us, each side had an advantage. Your side had the backing of five neighboring armies. Our side began the war with three tanks and four combat planes. And we were alone.
Remember: We are here only temporarily; don’t be a sleepwalker through your own life—don’t waste your time, caught in the illusion of permanence. And then, abruptly, silence.
Hebron, burial place of Abraham and Sarah, is of course the basis for the Jewish biblical claim to the land. And yet Hebron, too, was a kind of modern restoration: After the 1929 massacre, its ancient Jewish community disappeared.
The young Amos Oz, later to become one of Israel’s leading novelists, wrote a powerful essay that summer warning that there is no such thing as a benign occupation or “liberated territories.” Only people, wrote Oz, can be liberated, not land.
