Israel Matzav

(Jewishly) value-free rabbis?

Twice on Yom Ha-Zikaron, once in the evening and once again in the morning, the country’s air raid sirens sound. On sidewalks, pedestrians come to a halt and stand at attention, and even on highways, cars slow and stop; drivers and passengers alike step out of their vehicles and stand in silence until the wail of the siren abates. For two minutes each time, the state of Israel surrenders itself to the grip of utter silence and immobility. During that quiet, one feels a sense of belonging, a palpable sense of gratitude and unstated loyalty that simply defies description.

I mused on this fact as I read a recent message sent to students at the interdenominational rabbinical school at Boston’s Hebrew College, asking them to prepare themselves for Yom Ha-Zikaron by musing on the following paragraph: “For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”

It is the rare e-mail that leaves me speechless. Here, at a reputable institution training future rabbis who will shape a generation of American Jews and their attitudes to Israel, the parties were treated with equal weight and honor in the run-up to Yom Ha-Zikaron. What the students were essentially being asked was whether the losses on Israel’s side touched them any more deeply than the losses on the side of Israel’s enemies.

That is a stunning question. Obviously, there are innocent victims on the other side of any conflict. Such is the horrific nature of war. American troops killed many thousands of innocent Germans, Japanese, and others during World War II. But could one even begin to imagine President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying to Americans, while the Second World War was raging and young American men were clawing and dying their way across Europe and the Far East, that Memorial Day ought to be devoted in part to remembering those among enemy populations who died at our hands? There is, perhaps, a place for such memories. That time is when the conflict has abated, when weapons are set aside, when healing has begun. That time did not arrive during FDR’s lifetime, and it has not yet come to Israel.

I wrote to the dean who had written this paragraph, a friend from whom I’ve learned a great deal over the years and whose commitment to Israel and Zionism is sincere. The response was immediate: “It could be that we got this one wrong, I’m not sure yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that we are trying to engage with these issues and with each other with greater openness, courage, and respect than I think has been possible in most other corners of the Jewish community here.”

The heartbreaking point was this: in the case of these rabbinical students, there is not an instinct that should be innate—the instinct to protect their own people first, or to mourn our losses first. Their instinct, instead, is to “engage.” But “engagement” is a value-free endeavor. It means setting instinctive dispositions utterly aside. And that is precisely what this emerging generation of American Jewish leaders believes it ought to do.

Why, after all, would a genuine supporter of Israel ask students to think about Yom Ha-Zikaron in such a fashion? Probably because without such an accommodation, the dean might have had to deal with a small but vocal minority of students who would be incensed at the overly particularist, Zionist, nationalist nature of Yom Ha-Zikaron, at the narrowness of a day devoted to mourning our own dead and not the dead of our enemies.

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The final difference between these young Jewish leaders and those who preceded them is perhaps the most disturbing. This new tone in discussions about Israel is so “fair,” so “balanced,” so “even-handed” that what is entirely gone is an instinct of belonging—the visceral sense on the part of these students that they are part of a people, that the blood and the losses that were required to create the state of Israel is their blood and their loss.

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What too many of these students do not understand is that the Jewish tradition makes a bold claim—the claim that we learn caring, and we learn love, from that which is closest to us. To love all of humanity equally is ultimately to love no one. To care about one’s enemies as much as one cares about oneself is to be no one. There needs to be priority and specificity in devotion and loyalty. Without them, we can stand for nothing. And without instinctive loyalty to the Jewish people, Jewry itself cannot survive.

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What to do with that lexicon is a matter on which reasonable minds can differ. Israelis differ on those questions, and American Jews (and others) can, and should, as well. But when we have reached the point at which future rabbis can insist on boycotting prayer shawls made by Jews in Israel and yet are permitted to remain rabbis-in-training, something has gone horribly awry. When rabbinical students love Israel and care about Ramallah in the same way, the particularism that has been the hallmark of every functioning Jewish community in history has begun to erode. When PLO posters advocating the death of Jews are no reason not to drink a beer and sing “Happy Birthday” in that bar, we have produced a generation of future leaders whose instincts are simply not the instincts that have any chance of preserving Jewish life.

Labels: Daniel Gordis, rabbis

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:53 AM