It’s Erev Yom Kippur. Our Big Night. I know you are, reasonably, expecting me to offer some kind of synthesis or analysis of this last year – what we’ve been through, what’s going on now, and where we might choose to stand going forward.
It’s a reasonable expectation, but this is a rough time; such a tangle. I’ve spent a year on high alert, adrenaline pumping, having to make sense of things fresh every day. A year ago on Yom Kippur, I stood here and spoke about Jewish identity and about the Occupation and about what I think makes it hard for us to speak up. I watched the video of that sermon this week to help myself get in the flow. I listened to myself speaking with the conviction and pacing of a rabbi who has not just spent a year tied in a knot. And I thought, “Oh, I’d rather be him last year than me tonight.”
It’s harder to speak with conviction this year because everything is in motion. Things change every day. And we are more personally caught in the tangle of it. The attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s continuing response have had so many ripples here in the US, and in our local community, and in our families. Breaches in friendships. Tests of loyalty. Leaving us to wonder, “What is my responsibility here? To whom? And to what principles? Is there any way I can help heal this wounded world?”
I have no big, omnibus answer. I am just me, with biases and doubts. But on this tender, openhearted night of Yom Kippur, I would like to tease out and tug on five threads of the tangle, in the hope it might help us in some way hold the “all of it” with greater understanding and compassion.
Thread 1: Zionism. I want to say something in defense of Zionism. Not in defense of how Zionism has come to operate in an actual Jewish State, or whether it should be a principle that we still believe in going forward. But I want to say something about the desperate urge that gave rise to it. Because I know my history. I know about the beautiful and the terrible of the last millennium of Jewish life in Europe. I know about the massacres and the expulsions and the relocations and the blood libels and the Crusades, culminating at last in the Holocaust. I know about the sorry soil of suffering from which Zionism sprouted. So I am unwilling to fault the ancestors who desperately wanted out. So while you know I am full of criticism of Israeli policy, I hold with care our forebears who thought, “Maybe now is the time, and maybe we don’t wait for the Messiah to do it.”
Thread 2: Anti-Zionism. I also want to say something in defense of Anti-Zionism, a phrase that still makes many of us tense up and squirm. Anti-Zionism among Jews has existed for as long as Zionism itself. Many of our greatest Jewish thinkers opposed the idea of Jews moving to Palestine and opposed the creation of a Jewish state, for many different reasons. And most of us here tonight descend from Jews who chose to come to America at a time when there was already a Zionist movement inviting them to Palestine. We descend from people who actively decided to remain Diaspora Jews.
Now while anti-Zionist thought has always been around, we haven’t been super aware of it in our lifetimes. Because the establishment of the State in 1948 gave rise to a Jewish elation that outshone the criticism. We grew up in that elation. Our bodies and our identities were nourished by our pride in what we understood to be a safe place for all Jews.
The state was established and our parents folkdanced in the streets. The refugees from Europe came. The Jews expelled from Arab countries came. The exiles were in-gathered, and there was no going back. The Zionist idea was now suddenly a land and a culture and a government and an army.
But in one form or another, the critiques continued within Israel and among Jews abroad, including the thoughtful work of many with names you would recognize. They might not have always called themselves anti-Zionist, but they tried to take to task a system which, although built on a Jewish utopian hope, was inherently unjust. So at the same time that I defend the Zionism of our ancestors, I also defend the existence of anti-Zionism too. This is not to say that every anti-Zionist critique is fair or compassionate. But my hope is that we can disentangle from our preconceived ideas and meet such words with more curiosity than defensiveness.
Thread 3: Anti-Semitism. I feel we are being alerted all the time – if your inbox is anything like mine – about the rise in anti-Semitism in this country and around the world. And what I have to say here is that I would like us to be cautious and specific about what we identify as anti-Semitism. Because most of the items in my inbox, from fairly mainstream Jewish organizations, do not say what they mean when they talk about it. They do not draw clear distinctions between criticism of Israeli policy and hatred of Jews. Blurring those things together is lazy and often purposeful. It keeps us scared and keeps us silent. And while there is gray area, it is often not so very difficult to see the difference between political critique and anti-Semitism on the Left. Saying that Israel can’t be a land only for Jews is political critique. Saying that it must be emptied of Jews is anti-Semitism.
Sounding the alarm of anti-Semitism whenever critics of Israel speak also draws our attention away from the rightwing anti-Semitism that is pervasive in this country and is on vivid display in this election. And this includes rightwing Christian support for Israel, with the very big money it represents, because don’t think for a moment that they are giving to Israel because they like Jews so much. We need call out anti-Semitism on both the Left and on the Right, and to be specific when we do so. Let us not just presume that critics of Israel are enemies and let us not presume that self-proclaimed supporters of Israel are friends.
Thread 4: Trauma. I’d like to say something about trauma, both immediate and ancestral, and what happens when trauma is left unhealed and unintegrated. Israelis on the whole remain traumatized from October 7 and from the taking of hostages and there has been no healing. And I cannot begin to imagine the trauma of the Palestinians in Gaza and their children. And of course the trauma of Israelis and Palestinians goes much further back than this year. That is why voices from elsewhere in the world, from outside that field of trauma, are essential to help in this process.
Israel has also inherited the trauma of the Holocaust. The state of Israel was created three years after the liberation of Auschwitz. That trauma has been hardwired into Israeli culture and policy, so that every conflict feels existential, everyone looks like an enemy or a potential enemy. I want better for us. I would like to see the Jewish world, and Israel especially, actively work to disentangle from our great wound so that we can make decisions that are driven by possibility and not by wild fear. I would like to see the slogan “Never Forget” replaced with the slogan “Heal, and Remember.”
Thread 5: Peace. Peace as a vision, as a moral stance, as a guiding principle. Our culture tends to treat peace as a quaint fiction, a wish and not a plan. I’d like to suggest that we resist this cheapening of peace and instead hold tight to it. That we hold it as an essential ingredient in every political decision and every personal one too.
Last year, ten days after the Hamas invasion, in the early days of Israel’s response, while we were still waiting to see how bad it would get, I wrote a poem, never thinking it would still be relevant a year later.
In the poem I suggested that more important than taking sides is to place a vision and a practice of peace before us. That in thinking of what we do or say next, we ask, “Does this serve the cause of peace?” And not some remote, abstract peace that someone says we will reach at the end of more bloodshed, but peace in the today and in the tomorrow.
The poem went viral fast, with tens of thousands of reposts. It was quickly and unsurprisingly taken up by Buddhists and Quakers. It was then taken up by people engaged in the field of conflict – civilian peacekeepers in the West Bank, and the Parents’ Circle, representing families of Israelis and Palestinians killed in past violence. I have been told it made some inroads in the Palestinian diaspora. I hope it did. And it travelled around many Jewish circles, but not all. Some American Jews took offense; they saw it as an irresponsible call to do nothing, to sit silent in the wake of the horrors of October 7. I took that critique to heart, because I am very suggestible to criticism, and I worried that maybe I was condoning apathy, or that I was being a disloyal Jew by suggesting that peace was more important than victory.
I no longer worry about that.
It is easy to become discouraged when speaking the language of peace, because you are so frequently dismissed as naïve or worse. The ways of war are more dramatic, more cinematic, more appealingly cynical than the ways of peace. But our tradition tells us to seek peace, and to do so steadfastly. Psalm 34, for instance, famously says, בַּקֵּשׁ שָׁלוֹם וְרָדְפֵהוּ, “seek peace and pursue it.”
Our sages of old wondered why it wasn’t enough for the psalm to simply say “seek peace.” Why add, “and pursue it?” They must mean different things. So they suggested that “seek peace” means in your place. And “pursue peace” means elsewhere. So what? Seek peace here and pursue it in the Middle East? In Ukraine? Elsewhere? Or maybe the close and far is a metaphor. We must promote peace not only when it’s in our comfort zone to do so, but also when it’s a stretch. Or maybe “seek peace” means first articulating the demand for peace, and “pursue it” is what you do after you’ve been told you’re naïve but nevertheless you persist.
“Peace” is not about pretty words and wishes. It is about taking a moral position – a moral position rooted in thousands of years of Jewish values. It means asking ourselves, at every step, “Are my actions and words today serving the cause of the greatest possible peace?”
“Are my actions and words today serving the cause of the greatest possible peace?”
Pursuing peace might also involve risk and loss: “Am I willing to act for peace even if it means less power or privilege or territory for me?”
Placing peace at the center means that peace must not only be the ultimate goal but must be baked into the methods. I do not accept that peace for Israel must require the sacrifice of tens of thousands more Palestinian lives. And if your particular anti-Zionist ideology involves not the dismantling of an oppressive system but the destruction of actual Jews – I want no part of that either. The path to peace must be a peaceful path.
Insistence on peace is the moral imperative of our moment. Peace as a goal and peace as a means. Instead of co-existence leading to peace, we must make peace now and let co-existence spring from it.
There isn’t a lot we can do from here, from this distance, to affect the war there. But we can stand for peace. Pour peace into all the discussions and debates. Insist on peace. To force the question: what is the least violent, the non-violent, way to the next step?
We can support the peacemakers out there, the people working across the divide: the Parents’ Circle, Salt of the Earth, Standing Together. And as an Israeli friend who was caught in the Hamas attack on October 7 and survived said to me this week, we should resist being divided by a vertical chop into an Israeli side and a Palestinian side, and instead draw the line horizontally across the middle into those who want peace and those who don’t. And everything will be clearer.
So now, a year later, and just days after the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter, whose insistence on peace over power made possible Israel’s near half-century of peace with Egypt, I am taking the poem up again. Last year, this poem might have been an embodiment of “seek peace.” This year, with more insistence, it is an example of “pursue it.”
Today I am taking sides.
I am taking the side of Peace.
Peace, which I will not abandon
even when its voice is drowned out
by hurt and hatred,
bitterness of loss,
cries of right and wrong.
I am taking the side of Peace
whose name has barely been spoken
in this winnerless war.
I will hold Peace in my arms,
and share my body’s breath,
lest Peace be added
to the body count.
I will call for de-escalation
even when I want nothing more
than to get even.
I will do it
in the service of Peace.
I will make a clearing
in the overgrown
thicket of cause and effect
so Peace can breathe
for a minute
and reach for the sky.
I will do what I must
to save the life of Peace.
I will breathe through tears.
I will swallow pride.
I will bite my tongue.
I will offer love
without testing for deservingness.
So don’t ask me to wave a flag today
unless it is the flag of Peace.
Don’t ask me to sing an anthem
unless it is a song of Peace.
Don’t ask me to take sides
unless it is the side of Peace.
May we be watchful. May we be compassionate. May we be unafraid. May we be loosened from the tangles. May we seek peace and, that done, may we pursue it.
Shanah tovah.