A rabbi in my community used these words when I challenged his opposition to protests earlier this week: “Israel, like any nation, is not without flaws.”
In the face of the destruction of over 400 Palestinian villages, the permanent exile of more than 700,000 people, and the ongoing mass death inflicted in Gaza, this response is pallid. Like describing apartheid in South Africa as a “zoning issue”.
My moral clarity comes instead from the words of a Holocaust survivor protesting in Israel: “I don’t think we can remember our suffering without acknowledging the suffering of Gaza … It occupies the same place in my heart.”
The rabbi offered more: “Walk with your head high.”
But what if dignity requires that we sometimes must bow our heads? What if the radically Jewish act, at the same time the most truly human act, is to listen more carefully – especially to those whose cries we are most reluctant to hear? To hear of the shrapnel and infections and malnutrition of the Gazan children.
How can we treat one people’s trauma as sacred and another’s as all but non-existent? Justice that operates with such distorted vision is not justice, after all. It is tribalism in moral dress. Ethically speaking, love that cannot feel shame is not love – it is vanity; and nationalism that cannot feel shame is not love of country; it is mere jingoism.
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What to do, too, with the conflation of the identity of the Jewish people with the state of Israel? This is not only a definitional error; it is a theological and moral one of huge significance. Judaism long survived without sovereignty, and even when sovereignty returned, the emergence of Israel did not annul the prophetic tradition that long taught us to hold power accountable, to speak truth to it, and to mourn when justice is denied — even by our own. Maybe especially by our own.
Jewish tradition has never required uniformity of judgment. But it has required a reverence for truth. And above all, it has demanded that we never mistake power for righteousness, or the survival of the state for the flourishing of the soul. As the statement I signed says, “what is happening in Gaza is so catastrophic to Palestinians and Israeli hostages, that any constraint against open criticism is no longer tenable”.
When I think about the possibility of being called a traitor for those words or my words here, I think of this: one measure of our capacity to love Israel truly is our willingness to be ashamed of it when it acts shamefully – not because we hate it, but because we long for it to be better than it has become, for it to act in ways consistent with what is best in our religious and philosophical traditions.
This is not disloyalty. When we speak of “covenant” – the solemn bond between Jewish people and God – we should remind ourselves it includes the possibility of rebuke. Spoken not from outside, but from the beating heart of a people still struggling to be worthy of its deepest moral vision.
Nicola Redhouse is a freelance writer and the author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.
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