39 Days of the Omer. That is 5 Weeks and 4 Days.
jdblack Pixabay Oryx
Netzach shebe Yesod
Endurance in Foundation and Bonding
Friday evening May 31 and Saturday June 1
Shabbat Shalom
As I’ve walked today, I’ve finished writing my first public piece about Israel and Palestine. I’ve been working on what there is for me to say for months. This isn’t conclusory. My words are where I am right now as I continue to think and feel and share.
It feels right to share these words today on this day of the Omer, in Endurance in Foundation . . . and bonding.
With gratitude that we are walking together,
See you at Sinai.
Facing East: My Current Thoughts About Israel and Palestine
Rabbi Amy Josefa Ariel
May 31, 2024
Content Guide:
I am writing this for adults.
I made a choice in 2000 to return to the U.S. from Israel, and this is where I continue to live. I am very aware it is a choice because now, 24 years later, I connect almost every day with people who made a different choice. It is one thing to happen to live where we are born and another entirely to actively choose where we live. I didn’t choose to come back to the United States because I agreed more with the government or the politics. I came back because I had a life here that I decided I didn’t want to leave.
Sharing what I think and believe about Israel will have little impact on Israel as a political entity, but I am aware that my words will have an impact on people I love in Israel, and on Israelis I love who live outside of Israel. My words will have an impact on Jewish folks who don’t agree with me - and who in some ways do - who want to know if they, and in some cases their children, are in this way safe with me. My words will also have an impact on people who aren’t Jewish.
I know that.
Even as I feel compelled to write, I am writing with care.
Since October I have mostly shared other people’s words about Israel and Palestine - people closer to or in the center. I have mostly listened. As we continue to count the days until Shavuot, as I prepare programs and classes for summer and as I respond to people interested in having their children take classes with me next year, I feel I need to also share some of my own words.
I believe the way toward peace, security, and stability for all will travel the road of two independent states, Israel and Palestine. I don’t know what that can look like, but I stand with the Palestinians and Jews working together to find a way forward. The existing socio-political reality is untenable. The purported options of eliminating all Jews or all Palestinians from the Land aren’t acceptable options. The alternative of continuing to have what we’ve had and currently have is unacceptable to me. Which means there has to be a fourth way.
It is not for me to figure out or lead that way.
I am not Israeli nor am I Palestinian.
I am not living in the Land.
So, I look to people who are.
There is a movement, a shared movement, of people who do live in the Land who find that the lives of Israeli-Jews and Arab-Palestinians are intertwined, that the Land is a shared homeland, and that the people of the Land have shared interests.
I find this movement compelling.
I am following the work of Standing Together and A Land for All.
I am listening to many people. Jews and Palestinians.
I am listening to people I profoundly disagree with and sometimes hear things that resonate with me.
I am listening to people I generally agree with and sometimes hear things that rattle and disturb me.
I appreciate that I can learn from people and organizations that sit both farther right and farther left than I do.
That’s the way this goes.
Judaism is my #1 fandom.
Everything I do in my life I do as a Jew.
I am committed to Israel, and that in no way negates my commitment to justice for Palestinians.
I support my friends and loved ones in Israel.
I make that support as practical as possible.
I do what little I can to support people I’m one or two degrees removed from in Gaza. I make that support as practical as possible, too.
What I can do is a drop in a vast sea, but I do it.
I do it because even if it doesn’t change where we are it changes me.
I do it because I listen to the teachers who have told me to help whoever I can touch.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy.
I am grieving and angry and traumatized.
I have nightmares, which is to be expected.
Many days I often have flashback-like visions when I think about the survivors of Nova, the dead, the hostages, the rubble in Gaza and the people under it, the Arab taxi drivers in Israel and Palestinian vets in Israel and Jewish Israeli teachers and everyone trying to care for their children and do their jobs in the midst of . . . all of this.
I stretch my compassion.
Compassion - which means to suffer together.
In the past eight months I’ve had a lot of people talk with me openly because I try to hold space for nuance and complexity. I’ve had families share that they are comfortable with their kids asking me questions because I seek to respond to their questions with openness and curiosity and stay focused on how much I care about the kids themselves.
I’ve had some accuse me of being a Zionist and others an anti-Zionist when I’ve said that for Israel to become a State and home for Jews other people whose descendants now identify as Palestinian lost their homes. I’ve been called a self-hating Jew because I’m open to hearing criticism of Israel and often criticize Israel myself, and most of all because I’ve expressed concern for people starving in Gaza and called self-hating as well because I will never be “unified” with Netanyahu about this war . . . or probably anything. I’ve been called a Jewish Zealot because I’ve acknowledged that I have complicated feelings about wanting to have one country in the world with a Jewish majority and because I am worried every day about the hostages still in captivity and those who have been released. I’ve been named Zionist for observing Yom Ha’Atzmaut and anti-Zionist for recognizing the Nakba.
Wait, though. I am also critical of the suspension and firing of Israeli educators who have voiced criticism of Israel during this war or supported Palestinian rights in the midst of it. I critically question conscription and jail time for conscientious objectors. I feel pride when I think about all of the volunteers committing weeks and sometimes months of hours to help with the agricultural crisis in the south. I overflow with love for the people - including my friend and her Arab cab driver - who joined Jerusalem’s subdued Pride parade led by families of the hostages. I continue to worry about and support a 15-year-old Gazan young woman who was in Wisconsin for the school year and who helped her family get out of Gaza and to Egypt.
I am invested in this Land and the people who live there.
What does that make me? I’m not really asking. I know who I am.
For me, the language of Zionism and anti-Zionism, whether with capital or lower-case “z”s inevitably fails. This language fails the way label-language so often fails. Different generations have different understandings of these words. Our backgrounds and current relationships inform both the ways we do and don’t identify with them and what we mean when we use them. One person identifies as Zionist and means they recognize that Israel exists and are at the same time protesting the occupation of the West Bank and trying to get food and supplies into Gaza. Another person identifies as Zionist and says the fires in Rafa that killed Gazan children are a worthy celebration of Lag BaOmer. An anti-Zionist wants all Jews removed from the Land, the elimination of Israel, and Jews returned to . . . where? To Poland? To Yemen? Another anti-Zionist wants justice and equality and two states. Two people, either could be the Zionist, either could be the anti-Zionist, want a negotiated peace, security, and stability. Two people scream “from the river to the sea” and one means one thing and the other means something else entirely.
The categories and the with-us-or-against-us binary don't work for me.
Like everything else in my life, in this I’m informed by being queer.
European Zionism began in the late 19th century and was both idealistic and also about practical survival. Some Jews in Europe dreamt of living somewhere in safety and security. Religious Zionists wanted to be where Judaism began. Cultural Zionists wanted to be where they could establish Hebrew as the common language. Political Zionists just wanted to get out of Europe where whoever was in charge could kill them. More than two million of us - including my family - migrated to North America between 1880 and 1920. A few hundred thousand of us settled in Palestine with the intention of living cooperatively alongside the people who already lived there. Naive? Maybe. Probably.
In Ethiopia, there is also evidence of early Zionism in the 19th century. Abba Mehari attempted a mass aliyah to Jerusalem in 1869 also, as I understand, in response to persecution in Ethiopia.
In other parts of the Jewish world of the 1800s there was Zionism, too, if Zionism is the longing for a homeland for the Jewish people.
Then another version of Zionism came into the mix in the 1920s in response to other things going on in the world that had again sparked legitimate concern for the safety of Jews and Jewish communities. This new Zionism promoted expansionism and establishing a Jewish majority in Palestine and British-controlled Transjordan. It gained momentum in the 1930s and became part of the new government after Israel attained statehood in 1948.
I am empathetic with these ancestors.
Our ancestors in Europe watched one-third of all of the Jewish people in the world die.
Our ancestors in Ethiopia and around the world experienced persecution.
I can feel in my bones why they would want to return to the Land of their ancestors.
Antisemitism has been persistent over more than two millennia. It menaces, harms, and kills Jews. It undermines legitimate efforts to build coalitions around important issues of peace, justice, and human rights - and that includes in relationship with Israel and Palestine. Antisemitism can also be expressed as abandonment, and abandonment of Jews individually and collectively is received as antisemitism . . . and as ongoing trauma.
Perhaps if world events had unfolded differently in the 1920s and 30s, perhaps if Jews hadn’t been murdered by the millions and then almost entirely abandoned by the rest of the world, there wouldn’t have been so much support for the kind of Zionism that has run Israel’s government all of these years since. I have compassion for both the generation of Jews who founded the state of Israel on idealism and survival and also the generation of local Arab people who had very good reasons not to want them to. Both had been manipulated and used by the British and other European powers.
After winning statehood in 1948, Israel became the only Jewish country in the world, but Israel is far from unique as a country with a state religion. Turkey, Armenia, Paraguay, Greenland, Greece, Vatican City, Bangladesh, Malta, Iceland, Laos, Costa Rica, the Faroe Islands . . . there are over 80 countries with state religions or governments that explicitly endorse and favor specific religious affiliation. In 2015 more than 1 in 5 countries around the world had declared a single state religion, typically enshrined in the constitution or basic law of the country.
Israel being the only Jewish country in the world can lead to conflation between Israel as a country and Jews as a people and Jews as people both for everyone else and also for us - for Jews.
Sometimes criticizing Israel is antisemitism - hatred of Jewish people. Sometimes it’s not.
Israel has the responsibility to uphold international law and protect the human rights of those under its jurisdiction, and may be criticized, protested, or face consequences when it fails to meet its commitments including when it is defending its citizens. Israel also exists and isn’t going anywhere.
When I teach about Abraham and Sarah, whether as specific individuals or as an idea, community, or era of Jewish history, we learn about the other people in the lands they traveled. In Ur there was a dynamic and beautiful city where archeologists have found cuneiform tablets with musical compositions and financial receipts. As they walked along the Euphrates, Abraham and Sarah encountered lots of people in the Biblical text. They interacted with Canaanites and others in the area where they settled.
Jews have long been in the Land and other people have long been in the Land, too. I understand the desire some have to want this Land to be all and only ‘ours’. I really do. The reality is, it never has been - including when we had a Temple and a kingdom - and it isn’t now.
Sometimes criticizing Palestinians is racist and Islamophobic. Sometimes it’s not. Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be condemned for murdering, raping, and kidnapping Israelis and foreign workers on October 7th. Hamas should also be criticized for using Gazan civilians as human shields. Both are violations of human rights and international law which do apply to non-state actors. Hamas was elected, chosen, for all kinds of complicated reasons by some number of Palestinian people, but that does not mean all Palestinians are Hamas. Palestinians exist, aren’t going anywhere, and right now civilians are starving to death in Gaza.
I understand the desire of some Palestinians to want all of this Land ‘back’. I really do. The reality is, the Land has never been all and only theirs, either, and it shouldn’t be.
It’s my understanding that neither the current government of Israel nor Hamas are supported by the majority of the people they purport to lead. I am not equating the government of Israel with Hamas or vice versa, that isn’t my point. My point is that *the majority of the people* want something other than what they currently have.
What gets between wanting something different and creating something different?
What gets between me wanting something different and working to create something different?
Honest with myself, I would feel differently right now - viscerally - if on October 7th and 8th and 9th - long before we got to this many days and this many deaths - the international community would have responded to the atrocities . . . if the International Red Cross would have demanded signs of life of the people taken hostage. I would feel differently if I had heard from women’s organizations in October, November, or December speaking out against sexual violence and the mutilation of women and babies and videoed dismemberment of people as a tool of terrorism and condemned naming this violence an ‘uprising.’ I would feel differently if there weren’t still hostages in captivity. I would feel differently if I hadn’t felt abandoned myself by so many of my own non-Jewish friends who never did reach out to check in.
I would also feel differently right now if I didn’t know that Jews prevented food and humanitarian aid from reaching starving people. If I didn’t see so many Jewish people I know and love sharing memes and images that express the feelings I am also having in public space but accompanied with hateful and often racist rhetoric. If I hadn’t witnessed journalists write things celebrating Lag BaOmer like, “The main lighting of the year in Rafah” or post videos of the fire with a caption “Happy Holiday.”
We have to be informed and not controlled by our visceral feelings.
I don’t know what will resolve the conflicts, the violence, the trauma.
I’m listening. I’m learning.
I believe we Jews out here, outside the Land, not in Israel, in the diaspora, have an obligation to listen for and learn about the nuances. I believe that either every person, every single human being, is created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image, or none of us are. I believe that either we find a way to talk with one another as Jews who have wildly different perspectives and understandings about the world and find space for all of us within our communities even when it is uncomfortable and sometimes painful or we will lose each other.
I don’t want us to lose each other.
Israelis are real people - breathing, thinking, loving, traumatized people. Palestinians are real people - breathing, thinking, loving, traumatized people. Sometimes they even love one another. Sometimes they have children together. Sometimes they have the same parents. We need to learn about how Palestinians are seen and treated within and by Israel and also by the rest of the Arab world. We need to learn about why there may not be a single government - not Israel, not Iran, and not the U.S. - that is genuinely invested in a peaceful two-state solution. We need to hear that there are Jews who hate Muslims and Arabs just for being Muslim or Arab, and we need to understand that there are Muslims and Arabs who hate Jews just for being Jews.
We also need to learn about the veterinary clinics and emergency rooms in which Palestinians and Jews work together. We need to learn about the schools that are taught in both Hebrew and Arabic. We need to listen to the Bereaved Families Parent’s Circle and Women Wage Peace and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus and the myriad joint organizations and efforts to build a life together. To have life together.
I made a choice in 2000 to return to the United States from Israel, but I did not turn away from Israel. While there I discovered there was a lot to love and a lot to be disappointed by, a lot to fill my heart and a lot to break it. I’ve had to work to make sure my heart keeps breaking open and not closed, that my heart stays soft. When I pray, I pray facing east. When I teach, I do my best to hold the love and the complexity and the disappointment and the pride and the fear and the hope . . . all of it . . . with honesty.
I do have an agenda.
I want our Jewish kids to know Israel the way we know family.
I want them to know the more they learn the more they will be both disappointed and proud.
I want them to know they can love with a broken heart - that we have to love with our broken hearts.
I want them to know more.
And I want Israel to be something we can talk about and learn about together.
I’ve been learning and teaching about Israel for decades now.
It is one of the ways I pray for peace.
See you at Sinai.
How to say the blessing:
Choose the language that resonates with you the most.
Non-gendered Hebrew based on grammar system built by Lior Gross and Eyal Rivlin,
available at www.nonbinaryhebrew.com
Gender Expansive:
הִנְנִי מוּכָנֶה וּמְזֻמֶּנֶה …
Hineni muchaneh um’zumeneh …
Here I am, ready and prepared …
Feminine:
הִנְנִי מוּכָנָה וּמְזֻמֶּנֶת …
Hineni muchanah um’zumenet …
Here I am, ready and prepared …
Masculine:
הִנְנִי מוּכָן וּמְזֻמַן …
Hineni muchan um’zuman …
Here I am, ready and prepared …
All Continue:
… לְקַיֵּם מִצְוַת עֲשֵׂה שֶׁל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר כְּמוֹ שֶׁכָּתוּב בַּתּוֹרָה וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת
מִיּוֹם הַבִיאֳכֶם אֶת עֹמֶר הַתְּנוּפָה שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימוֹת תִּהְיֶנָה. עַד מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת
הַשְּׁבִיעִית תִּסְפְּרוּ חֲמִשִּׁים יוֹם וְהִקְרַבְתֶם מִנְחָה חֲדָשָה לַיי
… lekayyem mitzvat aseh shel sefirat ha-omer, kemo shekatuv batorah: us’fartem lakhem mimacharat hashabbat, miyom havi’akhem et omer hat’nufah, sheva shabbatot temimot tih’yena, ad mimacharat hashabbat hash’vi’it tis’peru khamishim yom, vehikravtem minkha khadasha l’adonai.
… to fulfill the mitzvah of counting the Omer, as it is written in the Torah: And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the Shabbat, from the day on which you bring the sheaf of the wave-offering, you shall count seven full weeks. Until the day after the seventh Shabbat, you shall count fifty days, until you bring a new gift to the Eternal.
Gender-Expansive Language for God
בְּרוּכֶה אַתֶּה יי אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ חֵי הָעוֹלָמִים אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשֶׁנוּ בְּמִצַוְּתֶהּ וְצִוֶּנוּ עַל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר
Brucheh ateh Adonai, Eloheinu khei ha’olamim, asher kidshenu bemitzvoteh v’tzivenu al sefirat ha’omer.
Blessed are You, Eternal, Life of all worlds who has made us holy with Their commandments, and commanded us to count the Omer.
Feminine Language for God
בְּרוּכָה אַתְּ יָ-הּ אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ רוּחַ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוְּתָהּ וְצִוָּנוּ עַל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר
Bruchah at Yah, ru’akh ha’olam asher kidshanu bemitzvotah v’tzivanu al sefirat ha’omer
Blessed are You, Yah, our God, Spirit of the universe who has made us holy with Her commandments, and commanded us to count the Omer.
Masculine Language for God
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי אֱ-לֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ עַל סְפִירַת הָעֹמֶר
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam asher kidshanu bemitzvotav v’tzivanu al sefirat ha’omer.
Blessed are You, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has made us holy with His commandments, and commanded us to count the Omer.
Count the day and week
Today is the _________ day, which is _________ weeks and _________ days of the Omer.
Today:
הַיּוֹם תִּשְׁעָה וּשְׁלוֹשִׁים יוֹם
שֶׁהֵם חֲמִשָּׁה שָׁבוּעוֹת
וְאַרְבָּעָה יָמִים לָעוֹמֶר.
Hayom tishah u’shloshim yom
shehem chamishah shavuot
v’arba’ah yamim la’omer
Today is thirty-nine days.
That is five weeks and four days of the Omer.
Sefirat HaOmer Blessing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8hCiPI1tMQ