Over the past month I have had two noteworthy experiences that somehow hang together in my mind, even though they were very different from each other on the surface. Both were, I think, opportunities to explore some of what’s behind our American Jewish masks, at least as I perceive them.
One experience was last Monday, when I attended two protests in support of Israeli democracy. These were in response to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s brief visit to the Bay Area to chat with Elon Musk. The other experience was a couple weeks before that, when I was invited to be the dramaturg – a word I can spell but have never understood – for the Sixth Street Playhouse production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Both experiences made me think about the masks we wear, the longings, fears, and insecurities we hold behind them, and – perhaps – the teshuvah we owe. I’ll get to all of that.
First, the protests. I, along with my brothers-in-law, were among hundreds who gathered, first in Fremont at the Tesla factory and later in the day at San Francisco’s Union Square, to protest the Israeli government’s policies and to support democracy in Israel. I know that what’s been going on in Israel can be hard to track, so let me give you a nutshell.
I’ll begin with a quick Israeli civics lesson, starting with the fact that Israel has no constitution. It has a Declaration of Independence and some Basic Laws meant to be the beginnings of a constitution that never got finished. In the Israeli system, there is no separation between an executive branch and a legislative branch. The party that controls the parliament, the Knesset, also controls the ruling coalition. To form a ruling coalition in a multi-party system, the dominant party has to make deals with other, smaller parties to build a majority. And in Israel, those small parties include rightwing, ultra-orthodox, and nationalist parties. In exchange for joining the coalition, their agenda becomes the government’s agenda.
The only thing preventing a coalition government from doing anything it pleases is the Israeli judiciary. Under the Basic Laws, the Israeli courts have the authority to overturn laws and policies that they see as unreasonable or as infringing upon individual rights and freedoms. To bring us back to the present, the current government is pushing through several bills, one of which has already passed, to restrict the power of the judiciary so that Netanyahu and his partners can legislate whatever they want without without worry that a court will overturn their actions. Limiting or eliminating the power of the courts lays the groundwork for an authoritarian regime, in this moment when so many world leaders seem to have a growing taste for authoritarianism.
I know that when those of us of a certain age think about Israel, we think about a strong, egalitarian society. We remember how Israeli women fought in the military long before American women could. But in Israel today, women’s rights are being steadily stripped away. Women are being prevented from playing public, vocal roles as an “accommodation” to the religious sensibilities of ultra-orthodox men. In many neighborhoods women are being forced to sit in the back of the bus – and I’m not using that as a metaphor. The literal back of the bus. Outdoor concerts by female artists are being cancelled so that ultra-orthodox men don’t run the risk of walking by and accidentally hearing a woman’s voice.
If the Israeli courts are stripped of their authority to check government power, I can tell you what will happen. Women’s public lives will be limited by law. Gay rights, which only exist in Israel because of the courts, will be rolled back. The rights of non-orthodox Jews – Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal – to pray and celebrate as we wish will be even more limited than they are now. Our conversions will not be considered conversions; our marriages not considered marriages; our rabbis not considered rabbis.
This is why Israelis have been marching. For 38 weeks running, Israelis have taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers. Over 7 million Israelis have protested in over 4000 locations. It has been a moving time – desperate, majestic, sometimes playful. But always dead serious.
I attended a protest in Tel Aviv in May, when I was in Israel with our Ner Shalom group. I was surrounded by Israeli flags and rainbow flags and drummers and stiltwalkers. Signs and t-shirts displaying the resistance of women, or queers, of members of the military reserve were everywhere. Protesting outside the Tesla plant and at Union Square had a similar determination on a much smaller scale. In Tel Aviv I was surrounded by Israelis. In Fremont and San Francisco – I was still surrounded by Israelis. The relative absence of American Jews was stunning.
I noticed this absence and was saddened by it. I thought about the ways we American-born Jews have been trained and accustomed to supporting Israel no matter what, even when Israeli governments have done things that have shocked our conscience. So that when asked to speak out – and our cousins in Israel are asking us to speak out – we don’t feel like we have the authority to say anything.
And this is what brings me to my dramaturg gig for Fiddler. My role there was to be the subject-matter expert for the production. To respond to questions like, “Do all the women have to wear scarves on their heads?” “What’s with the fringe on the garments?” And, “Why the big rush before the Sabbath?”
I answered those questions for them. But I also said more. I wanted them to understand the role that this musical plays for American Ashkenazi Jews, at least of a certain generation. In my experience, Fiddler on the Roof has operated as a kind of stand-in for the deep, engaged Jewish culture that our immigrant ancestors largely gave up when they came to America. As we assimilated into American culture, we gave up so much of what made us distinctive as Jews. We lost so much Yiddishkayt – Jewish ways of being that were not about synagogue attendance. Our physical markers disappeared; our Yiddish language dwindled to punchlines.
I know that the experience I’m describing is not the experience of everyone in the room; not the Israelis in the room, nor the Mizrahi or Sefardi Jews in the room, nor of the people here tonight who are not Jewish or have become Jewish only recently. But this is the Jewish world I grew up in, and many of you, I think. Behind our masks of worldly, assimilated Americans, there is an empty place filled with longing for a kind of deeper belonging, a kind of longing for home. Behind our masks there lurks a fear for our safety, a fear that is in our bones. And behind our masks there is an insecurity that as Jews we aren’t enough. We are decent people but inadequate Jews.
When we watch Fiddler on the Roof, tears rolling down our faces, it is that longing for home and belonging that is activated. We feel in those moments like we were plunked down on this continent without content. And Fiddler pours into and fills that gap, at least for three and a half hours plus intermission.
I think the longing, the fear, and the insecurity are all activated when we engage (or don’t engage) around Israel. The feeling that there is something authentic out there that we are missing here: a deeply, immersively Jewish home – a homeland. That is the longing we feel. And we feel the fear that Israel is the only safe place for Jews. And so we must line up behind it as if our lives depended on it. And we feel the insecurity that we don’t know enough to be able to disagree with Israel’s actions, even when witnessing them causes us pain and shame.
This combination of powerful emotions – longing, fear, and insecurity – makes it very hard to say, “No, not that Israel. That is not the Israel I believe in or the Israel I want.”
There are other reasons American Jews hesitate too. Some of us say we don’t engage because we don’t have the right. We don’t live there! And that has always been a common Israeli response to criticism from American Jews. “You don’t live here. You don’t know.” And that is true. We don’t live there. But that’s not the end of it. Israel has asked for our support, demanded our support, our money, and our influence as an American voting block since the beginning of the State. We, as American Jews, have been participants, cooperators, since the beginning. We have had a role and that role gives us a powerful and specific voice. It gives us the opportunity to say, “Our support – our loving support – is not unconditional.” It gives us the opportunity to say, “I will only support an Israel where women are equal. An Israel where queer people are safe. An Israel where I am free be a Jew in my own way and have my Jewishness count. I will only support an Israel that is a democratic home for everyone.”
These are things I feel strongly about. That is the Israel I believe in and want. But when I say, “a democratic home for everyone,” you might perceive an elephant in the room. The same elephant attended the rallies at Tesla and Union Square. Not once at those events did anyone speaking from the microphone utter the word “Palestinian” or “Palestine,” even though there were contingents of Jews attending with signage urging an end to Israeli occupation.
I understood that the organizers were trying to build a broad coalition and so they omit the pieces they perceive to be the most divisive. But still, even understanding that, I felt heartbroken.
Because there is a direct connection between the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the move toward authoritarianism that is threatening Israel right now. In order to keep control of a specific population, limiting its movement and its rights, you have to, what’s the psychological term? You have to dissociate. To proudly build a nation on Jewish principles of kindness and justice and at the same time bulldoze houses and fill wells with cement involves a level of dissociation I can barely conceive. Once you have done that, you have normalized abusive power and normalized disregard for human rights. And that sets you up for the current crisis.
This is not a new thought or a particularly radical one. The prominent 20th-Century Israeli thinker and theologican, Yishayahu Leibowitz, argued as early as 1968 that Israel should immediately withdraw from the territories it took in the 6-Day War in 1967. He foresaw what ongoing occupation would bring about – the violence up and back, and the erosion of democracy and civil society. Leibowitz was praised by some and villified by others, but his ideas were well known and now clearly prescient. One popular meme in the current protest movement is a stenciled image of Leibowitz’s face and under it the words amarti lakhem – “I told you so.”
This is why I truly believe that democracy and occupation are not separate issues. There is no true democracy in Israel while Israel remains an occupying power. Those things cannot go hand in hand. And what I want to say to you is that it is not disloyal to Israel or to Judaism to say, enough. Enough already. Enough.
These are dangerous days for democracy. Our own American democracy is teetering on the brink too. We are careening into an election year for which we are unprepared and in which the risk of authoritarianism is greater than we have ever seen.
We are called right now to be on the front lines for democracy in both places. In both places our voices matter. If Israel wants us to be their rallier of American support, then we need to to lift up our voices. We need to step away from our lifetimes of unquestioning support and step into the prophetic place of moral demand – of Jewish moral demand. And say, “we will not rally behind an authoritarian regime; we will also not rally behind occupation.” And that can be the beginning of our teshuvah for all the silence we’ve kept for so many years while Palestinian lives were made unendurable in our name.
One thing we can do during this Holy Day and in our own personal reflection moving forward is to look behind our masks at the Jewish longing and the Jewish fear and the Jewish insecurity that keep us silent and inert.
First, the fear: we can let go of or at least begin to question the fear that whispers in our ears that Israel is the only safe place. We can hold and honor that ancient fear. We can say, “Yes, I know you and I know why you’re here. But still I will not let you silence me.”
As for our longing and our insecurity – we need to look at those places behind our masks that tell us we are not as authentic as the Jews of Israel and we are not as authentic as the Chabad Jews up the road and we are not even as authentic as the fictional Jews of Anatevka. And that therefore we have nothing to legitimately say.
I know this insecurity is very alive in us. Whenever I am introduced as a rabbi, the Jew I’m been introduced to instantly responds with, “I’m a bad Jew.”
So let me respond to anyone here who has ever said that. You are not a bad Jew. There is no one “right” way to be a Jew. We are Jews of the 21st Century. We live and are rooted in many places in the world. We honor our ancestors but practice a Judaism never conceived by them. We are the inheritors of millennia of Jewish innovation, struggle, debate, rebellion, and redefinition. We firmly hold our place in the Jewish world and in the world at large. Who we are and what we do is not a poor cousin to anyone else’s Judaism. Our voice is beautiful and loud. The moral compass that we Jews bring to bear in our American politics of equality and repair, is right there in our hand when we look at our relationship with Israel as well. Behind the mask and in our bones is our Jewish soul. It’s been there all along, no matter whether you step into a synagogue or not.
Now is the time for us to live into our Judaism – whether it is through ritual or learning or language or song or celebration or hanging out with your Jewish crowd. Being proud, vocal Jews, and doing it in our own way, is not a break with the past. It is, in fact, as they sing in Fiddler, Tradition!
Let us feel the Jewish soul, the pintele Yid, inside us. Let us find the Jewish home, the rootedness we have longed for – let us find it in our own experience, and may it be rich and fulfilling. And from this fulfilled and grounded place, may we respond to the call of the prophet Isaiah: “Cry with a full throat, without restraint; lift up your voices like a shofar.”
Illustration by Irwin Keller.