I’m Secular Now. Are My Religious Zionist Rebbes My New Villains?
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By Yonah Fredman May 8, 2017
My rebbes are Rabbis Yehuda Amitaland Aharon Lichtenstein, of blessed memory, the roshei yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion, located in Gush Etzion, a cluster of Jewish settlements located in the Judaean Mountains of the West Bank. I studied Talmud from them over 40 years ago, but have since left the derech (path); I no longer keep the Torah and its commandments.
I am at peace regarding the conflict between myself and my rebbes on the issue of Torah. Yes, I reject Torah, but I value Jewish continuity — and since I cannot conceive a Jewish future (worthy of the name) without the input of a heavy dose of Torah, I value the rabbis. The question regarding Torah instead becomes: “Am I the villain in that confrontation?”
I say I am not. True, I value continuity, but I also value the search for truth, which requires radical emotional honesty and radical skepticism. My search for truth may have yielded few fruits, but still I cannot value continuity to the extent of denigrating the pursuit of truth.
Indeed, the project of Jewish continuity seems an imperiled one. Certainly there will be many Jewish futures, particularly assuming the continued hospitality of the American Jewish experience (experiment?). I would project this continuity in two directions: The group committed to Torah and the group for whom their commitments find Torah as a useful focus. As we get further from the big bang of American Jewish life (the Ellis Island immigrant experience) the commonalities of ethnicity are diluted and it is texts and rituals which must become our new commons. There are many ways of pursuing political, psychological and personal goals without involving God, worship, rituals and texts. But let us not in a fit of feigned faith in rationalism deny the deep roots of religion that have been a vital part of the human experience for thousands of years. There will be those who continue to find nutrition and guidance from Jewish texts and rituals. And my rabbis as teachers of Torah have played a positive role improving the chances for continuity.
No, it is not the issue of Torah, where the villainy of my rebbes concerns me; it is the issue of Israel. And regarding Israel there is a conflict for me very near its core:
On the one hand, I value the urge towards Jewish self determination, particularly in the period of 1881 to 1945. It was and is an urge towards survival and life. It is good.
On the other hand, the establishment of Israel involved doing great harm to the Palestinians. This violence done to human beings was, is, will always be wrong.
Part of the Zionist revolution of the new Hebrew man was a rejection of nonviolence as a form of weakness. A Jew like me raised and coddled in the North America of the 1960’s, opposed to the Vietnam War ,would reflexively recoil at the Nakba, the exile forced on hundreds of thousands. I was trained by golus parents, by moral parents, to recoil at such violence. Still ultimately I must give my approval to Zionism on this level: It saved a branch of my family. I had four grandparents (who all died natural deaths), but their families did not all share their good fortune. My two grandmothers lost all or most of their families to the Shoah. One grandfather’s family found refuge in America, but my maternal grandfather’s family found refuge in British Mandate Palestine and that was only because of the existence of Zionism. If not for Zionism those cousins would never have breathed life on this planet. I cannot deny them life.
But the need for a Jewish state does not specify the choice of a location or destination for that state. Why in Israel and not in Uganda or a chunk of Germany? But in the real world the choice is obvious: When building a movement you pick a destination that will inspire rather than a destination that embodies desperation.
But this “obvious” choice leads us to the present tense: constant war. This history also leads us to the present tense: Gaza and the West Bank. Which will lead to the future tense: the American Democratic Party’s future abandonment of Israel. Some time in the future it will reflect its grass roots and not its big donors.
My rebbes Amital and Lichtenstein taught Torah in the West Bank. Of course Gush Etzion is in the Israeli Jewish consensus, whereas Hebron is not. But if one views the occupation as demoralizing, which I do, then the liberal hearts of Amital and Lichtenstein do not matter, their roles in building a yeshiva in occupied territory is essential to the IDF raiding a Palestinian home at two in the morning. It isn’t Levinger (of Hebron) alone whose ideas force the soldiers to wake up that Palestinian family and point weapons in their faces. It is Amital and Lichtenstein as well.
Solving the contradiction between the essential rightness of Zionism circa 1881-1945 and the essential wrongness of the Nakba, 1947-1948, may not be resolvable. But still the occupation of the West Bank is such an unmitigated moral and political disaster, that I have to wonder whether my rebbes were villains.
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