Professor Franks kindly invited me to share this open letter, which makes an important point (see esp. Section IV):
August 4th, 2014
I.
At a wedding celebration dinner a few weeks ago, in place of the usual
light-hearted chatter were grave comments about the unrest in the
Middle East. Some rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip. Israel
was on the cusp of launching a major military offensive. Many,
probably most, of the people at the dinner have close family members
living in the region, and everyone was understandably concerned.
The breaking news that day was of the brutal abduction and murder of
Mohammed Abu Khedair. No one has managed to explain to me how the
murder of this innocent boy, who apparently had nothing to do with any
recent violent or political activity, was supposed to be an act of
revenge for the abduction and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and
Naftali Frankel, but that is how the crime was portrayed in news
reports and spoken about at the dinner.
I watched as one dinner guest heard about the "revenge killing" for
the first time. "Boruch Hashem," he said. This means, "Blessed be
God," and in this case served as a pious expression of the sentiment,
"I'm glad." "There should be more such killings," he continued. He
wasn't asked to leave. No one shouted him down. No one even expressed
disagreement.
II.
People in my professional circles have been blindsided and dismayed by
a flood of statements by Israeli academics and pro-Israel American
Jews that appear to be calls for the Israeli military to ignore human
shields and collateral damage, to brutalize the family members of
enemy combatants, and even to engage in ethnic cleansing. Most of the
attention has been directed to Mordechai Kedar's statement that raping
women would be the only effective deterrent to Palestinian terrorist
attacks (a statement that administrators of Bar Ilan University
defended) and to Yochanan Gordon's opinion piece in the Times of
Israel entitled "When Genocide is Permissible." But there have many
many others, less bizarre but for that reason more dangerous.
I, too, am dismayed, but I have not been blindsided. Any member of the
religious Jewish communities in America can report that statements
like these are made with impunity all the time. Racist sentiments are
so common that people feel that even their deliberately radical
announcements will be accepted as variations on a theme that most
people in the room are already humming.
Let us look beyond the irony that the people subjected to the most
famous genocide attempt in all of history, and who have dedicated
museums and powerful works of art to the horrors of ethnic cleansing,
have also provided an arena where those same sentiments can
brew. Weird as that is, it only distracts us from the more horrible
irony that these Jews have deeply violated their religion in their
misguided attempt to adhere to it. Every Jew would do well to ask
himself today whether they agree with Rabbi Shimon Schwab's 1976
statement in the journal Mitteilungen. "Zionism is not at all
identical with Judaism. In fact it is diametrically opposed to it," he
wrote. "We are Jews who hate racism because we all have been the
foremost victims of racism. We hate racism because all men were
created in God's image, be they white, black, or yellow." I have asked
myself that question, and I have also asked myself whether if I had
quoted these words at the right time, as I should have done, I would
have been met with disagreement, shouted down, or perhaps even asked
to leave a wedding dinner party.
III.
On Thursday there will be a rally in South Bend to demonstrate
American support of Israel. I am glad that my city has public space
for the expression of all sorts of political opinions. I am aware that
a great many Americans support Israel and its current military
endeavors. This is a good opportunity for them to voice their support.
Personally, I do not support Israel. I have serious objections to many
of the activities undertaken in Operation Protective Edge. Some of
them, I think, are downright atrocities. I have similar views about
past military exploits by the Israeli government. And, just to put all
my cards on the table, I have deep objections, some political, some
humanitarian, and some religious, to the very existence of the State
of Israel.
Some readers might be surprised that a Jew would cite "religious"
objections to the existence of the State of Israel, but these
objections are actually well-known. They are based on a fundamental
principle of Jewish faith, recorded in the Talmud, that the exile of
the Jews is a divine decree, and that it is our sacred obligation to
accept this decree, to live humbly in the lands into which we have
been dispersed, never to attempt to resettle our ancestral land by
force or to establish our national sovereignty by our own power, but
to wait in repentance until God redeems us. It is for this reason that
Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky was appointed to speak on behalf of the
traditional Jews of Jerusalem to the United Nations, where on July
16th of 1947 he explained the Jewish theology of exile and desire of
his community to live under Palestinian rule, concluding, "We
furthermore wish to express our definite opposition to a Jewish state
in any part of Palestine."
Deeper still than the sacred duty to accept our exile, traditional
Judaism is simply anchored in an aversion to violence as a means to
solve problems. As the saintly Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan wrote in his
Biblical commentary: "The Torah teaches us not to resist the nations
even when they fight against us. We must follow in the footsteps of
the patriarch Jacob in his encounter with his brother Esau ... All
that happened between Jacob and Esau happens to us constantly with
Esau's children. We must adopt the methods of the righteous Jacob, to
make the three preparations that he made: prayer, a gift, and escape
through war, that is, to flee to safety. As long as we walked on that
well-tread path, God saved us from their hands. But since we have
strayed from the path and new leaders have arisen who chose new
methods, leaving behind our ancestors' weapons and adopting the
methods of our enemies, we have fared worse and worse, and great
travails have befallen us." (Chofetz Chaim al Hatorah, Devarim)
IV.
But it is not my purpose, here, to defend my own opinions about
Operation Protective Edge, the legitimacy of the State of Israel, or
the justice of any particular military campaign. All of these matters
are controversial, and I don't expect to resolve those
controversies. I am writing because I believe four things: that Jews
all over the world are in danger because of growing anti-Semitism;
that most people in the world are prepared, as I am, to describe some
of the military activity by Israel, as well as some of the aspects of
the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as unjust and inhumane; that the
current war has brought to the public eye racist and genocidal
sentiments by members of the Israeli academy, the Knesset, and
superficially religious Jews in America; that many Jews will attend
the rally Thursday in order to "stand with Israel" and in order to
"demand that the U.S. Government give unwavering support to Israel."
For these reasons it is not enough for me to stay quiet. I am writing
in order to disrupt any possibility that the horrible conflation of
Zionism and Judaism become further entrenched this week. And I am
writing to draw attention to the uncontroversial fact that whatever
the merits and legitimacy of the State of Israel and its military
actions may be, it does not speak or act in the name of the Jewish
religion or in the name of the Jewish people.
V.
During the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon, Rabbi Yitzchak Dov
Koppelman, the head of the Rabbinical Academy in Lucerne, Switzerland
wrote these words, which were printed in the Jewish Guardian the
following year:
"We hear terrible news that Jews are being killed, may God spare us,
and this is certainly bitter. [The custom is to recite chapters
of Psalms communally during a time of great distress on the Jewish
people.] Yet I have never seen anyone recite a chapter of Psalms for
the thousands and tens of thousands of Jews who were led away from the
Torah by [the Zionists]. ... No one cries out concerning the Jewish
souls who have been sullied by [them]: 'They are murdering Jews! They
are murdering Jews!' In fact, the crime is worse than murder, for he
who causes another to sin is worse than a murderer."
I always thought that by "sullying the Jewish soul" Rabbi Koppelman
was referring to leading people away from observance of the Jewish
Sabbath, tithes, and prayer. These trends, to me, are painful to
witness happening in Israel these last decades, but they aren't the
sort of thing that I could expect friends outside of my religious
community to recognize as tragic. When I read Gideon Levy's article
"Netanyahu's offspring" earlier this summer, I realized that the
long-term effect that Zionism has had on the souls of many people is
actually much more blatant---something that anyone, Jew or Gentile,
who hasn't lost touch with his or her own soul can plainly see. And I
would certainly rather be murdered myself than to be so spiritually
damaged that I could feel the loss of Mohammed Abu Khedair as anything
other than a tragedy and unspeakable evil. May God comfort his family
and bless those few Jews who visited their mourning tent.
Today is the eve of the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple
in Jerusalem, the greatest calamity in the history of Judaism and the
beginning of our long and bitter exile. The holy rabbis of the century
that saw the rise of Israeli nationalism as a response to this exile
have taught me that I will sanctify God's name if I declare publicly
the Jewish belief that the Zionist mission is a struggle against God's
very will. I will not stand with Israel on Thursday, but I will stand
with these rabbis tomorrow and mourn all horrible wars and senseless
killings together with the loss of our Holy Temple.
Curtis Franks is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Hebrew Orthodox Congregation in South Bend, Indiana.
UPDATE: Prof. Franks asked me to add the following "addendum" to his letter:
The principle thesis of my letter is that it is an error to assume that the State of Israel speaks or acts on behalf of the Jewish religion or the Jewish people. To make this point I emphasized that the strain of Judaism to which I adhere is strongly opposed to racism, Zionist ideology, and the existence of the State of Israel. Others have pointed out to me that some of my wording suggests the following counter thesis: "Adherents to other strains of Judaism, especially those that label themselves Zionist, are racist." I want to state unequivocally that I do not believe this. I also apologize to everyone offended in their perception that I had said this. I have many friends who will describe themselves as Zionist, some of whom consider Zionism an essential part of their Judaism, some of whom are not religious, and many of whom are among the most passionate opponents of racism I know. It is also worth knowing, and in fact strengthens my principle thesis, that Zionism is a polysemous term, and that it is an error to assume that the State of Israel speaks or acts on behalf of people who practice Judaism under the label of Zionism. Again, my letter is a response to the fact that many Jews in my town will soon, as they have in other places, attend a rally behind the slogan, "We demand that the U.S. Government give unwavering support to the State of Israel." Such events can easily give people a mistaken impression of what Judaism is about, which is especially dangerous considering the amount of strong racist rhetoric associated with current Israeli militancy.
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