Dear friends and colleagues working for peace,
I will not be in shul today trying to get in a contemplative groove while listening to a special political program cooked up by the Conservative movement’s rabbinical assembly, defending the invasion of Gaza, demonizing the Goldstone report, and calling for an escalation with Iran.
The cardboard villains and victims, the unrecognizable portrayal of reality, the false piety and the contrived martyrdom would all just make my blood boil. Besides, defiling the sanctity of a practice that for centuries has called on us to look inward and change our behavior – by instead rejecting that call of conscience, rejecting repentance, rejecting justice, being exhorted to actually harden our hearts – all this is diametrically opposed to the spirit of the High Holidays. Maybe I’ll join the rest of my community for taschlich on Sunday.
Many American congregations like ours have chosen this year to make Rosh Hashanah one big Israel defense rally. But Gaza must remain one of our central moral concerns this year because it represents the most horrific aspect of an already horrific occupation by a nation in the Middle East that we so uncritically support and identify with. And by “we” I mean both Jews and Americans.
This imperfect, temporal nation like any other, governed by mortals, defended by fallible soldiers, and guided by the usual mix of both decent and immoral men, heroes and ideologues alike, has been elevated in the Jewish and Western imagination during the last century to being the actual Land of Moses, the land that G-d (and not the United Nations) gave to the Jews. With this gilded baggage, how could Moses’ land ever be corrupt or guilty of wrongdoing?
Discarding inconvenient Jewish history and the admonitions of prophets easily found in any Tanakh, the new Israel remains equally unblemished in sermons during Jewish High Holiday services – perhaps the one place one would expect the Neviim to actually be read. And who but a self-hating Jew like Richard Goldstone would dare to enumerate this nation’s crimes?
This is a tough year for the Jewish conscience. Tshuvah or salve? That’s the stark choice. Organized religion as usual peddles the latter.
So this year I thought I’d recall that very first “self-hating” Jew, the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is actually believed to be not a single person but several in a tradition of conscience and self-correction within Judaism itself. He had much to say on injustice, violence, bloodshed, outright evil, and the spinning of a web of lies to deny it all. This prophetic tradition continues today with men and women of less greatness, but Isaiah was there first. If the Goldstone report hit a nerve today, imagine the impact that Isaiah 59 did “back in the day”:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Bible/Isaiah59.html
L’Shana Tovah!
David
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