Winter Seminar 2021

Every winter, Hebrew College does a week-long seminar on a topic where students and faculty come together to learn and challenge ourselves: are we living our values in our community? And how do we want to bring those values forward into the communities we will lead as clergy? As my classmate Abi Oshins put it, “Torah without action is just a fancy book club.” This year’s topic was racial justice, and I’m so proud to be part of an institution where not only do they have such a seminar, and not only is it brilliantly organized, but the president asks presenters what more the institution can be doing and TAKES NOTES as they say where our institution misses the mark.

A few things I took with me that I want to remember:

Be willing to be a royal jackass. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and prevent you from making an effort. Know that you will make mistakes, and be prepared to apologize, learn to do better, and keep going.

Looking at when my family hit certain benchmarks, my grandparents were deeply influenced by antisemitism/conditional whiteness. My parents’ coming of age coincided with a cultural transition into white privilege. Their stories shape me, but I can’t ignore how much I have benefitted from white privilege. And just as my grandparents and parents experienced profound shifts in their lifetimes and had to adapt, I have a responsibility to grow and adapt.

I need to stop saying “Jews” when I mean “white Jews.”

The ways white Jews welcome people into Jewish spaces often serve a gatekeeping function (such as asking newcomers to take an aliyah and asking for their Hebrew names, or asking them to explain their background/life story on the Kiddush buffet line). This is particularly off-putting to Jews of color, and we need to give our welcoming committees, gabbis, and greeters other ways to truly welcome people.

We need to avoid tokenism and bring the full richness of different Jewish traditions into our prayer services and our learning. Sometimes this means inviting people and compensating them for what they share. Other times it means uplifting the author or origins of a piece we’re sharing.

I need to educate myself on community safety resources as alternatives to having police or security at the door for High Holidays. We can’t protect our communities by putting some of our community members in danger.

There are all kinds of ways Jewish organizations can support POC organizations, from which vendors they use for events to who they invite to use their space during the week. The goal posts are going to keep moving, just as they have on most social justice issues throughout my entire life, which means at some point most of these things are going to be wildly insufficient or just plain wrong. Go back to a willingness to be a royal jackass. Rinse. Repeat.

A new chapter

So many thoughts and feelings. I keep sobbing, seeing Kamala Harris. I grew up on Free to Be You and Me and children’s books telling me girls could grow up to be anything, and then saw that proven wrong over and over in my adult life. This feels like an affirmation of the world my childhood self was promised. Having a president who begins his inaugural by saying “This moment isn’t about me, it’s about the work that needs doing,” after four years of narcissism, is also incredible. And a powerful inaugural poem I’m going to have to listen to and read over a few times to fully appreciate and unpack. So much work to be done, but now we can do it without a madman in the Oval Office making things worse.

Deserving of Merit

It doesn’t surprise me that the man whining that doctorates only count if they are in medicine has only an honorary degree himself. The people who rush to act as gatekeepers are often the ones who are most insecure about whether they themselves belong: the act of kicking someone else out of the clubhouse is meant to cement their own right to be there. The same man whines that honorary degrees don’t mean what they used to back in his day—again, feeling his own standing threatened, his impulse is to see who he can kick out to prove not only that he belongs, but that he is empowered to decide who is in and who is out.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about academia, the literary scene, the Jewish community, or politics—gatekeeping is a symptom of a poisoned system where people do not feel valued. A healthy system needs people with a variety of specialties in order to thrive. Therefore, there can’t be one single measure of success or belonging for everyone. In a toxic system, members feel their position, power, or identity is threatened, and that the only way to gain or regain security is to throw someone else out. The problem is that once you’ve thrown someone out, you’ve proven people CAN be thrown out, so ironically, you’re now even less secure.

Absolutely, Dr Biden should be addressed by her title. Absolutely, we need to have more conversations about how often we question the credentials of women and other people from marginalized groups. But I’d love it if we could also have conversations about how toxic systems encourage us to attack others when we feel squeezed out, because we need to fix those systems and stop letting the conversation be defined by the insecurities of people who see their privilege and status evaporating.

Tear Them All Down

I’m regularly amazed at how politics in the science fiction community serve as a bellwether for politics in the larger world. Over the past few years, the SFF community has responded to criticism of awards bearing the names and likenesses of problematic figures in clear parallel to the current debate around taking down not just statues of Confederates but of other problematic figures.

 

Making physical or metaphorical icons of real people is always as much an act of erasure as it is one of commemoration. People are complex. Because no one is perfect, icon culture traps us in a zero-sum game: either the person’s work matters or their victims do. Pick one.

 

When the person is still living, this also means the community becomes complicit in and enabling of the person’s ongoing behavior. But even if the person is now dead, icon culture shuts down honest discussion of how that person’s problematic legacy continues to influence us and the systems within which we live.

 

Ideas and ideals can shift, can be interrogated. Icons are (sometimes literally) set in stone. A narrative of what our ideals are or have been, and how well different people succeeded or failed in furthering those ideals, is much more nuanced and able to weather challenges. It allows us to say that Isaac Asimov and JK Rowling are important writers who have had a huge impact on their genres and on the wider world while also acknowledging the pain they’ve caused. It allows us to say that Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that continue to inspire us towards freedom and equality for all, and also raped slaves, enslaved his own children, and planned the removal of indigenous people and the eradication of their cultures, a complex and contradictory mixture which impacted the systems we grapple with today.

 

We need to stop worrying that once we start tearing down icons, no icon will be safe. Icons aren’t history. Icons aren’t real people. We need to dismantle icon culture entirely so we can talk honestly about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Day of Remembrance

Last morning at the Wall with my classmates. It’s been my spiritual center, the thing that’s nourished and maddened me, been the focus of so much of my religious and political life this year. In the middle of morning prayers, I started crying, knowing how long it will be until I get to return.

We went from there to celebrate Yom HaZikaron, the day Israelis remember all those who have died in all their wars, at the Gymnasia, a local high school that predates the founding of the State. To mark the day, the school had candles, pictures, and biographies of every student and teacher in the school’s history who had been killed. Then everyone gathered in the courtyard to hear the names of the dead, which begin with the initial War of Independence and continue through to present day. Each name is followed by where they died, which ranges from, “fallen at the Suez Canal” or “fallen at Entebbe” to “killed by a bus bomb on the highway” or “killed on Derekh Beit Lechem” (a five-minute walk from my house).

The thing about having a memorial service in a high school in a country where everyone does army service is that the bulk of the audience is either kids doing their intake for army service, kids who graduated last year and are currently serving, or grads who have come home to hear the names of old classmates. Everyone knows someone on the list or is acutely aware they could be on next year’s list.

For the most part, the audience was sober, listening to the names, the sad songs, the brief remarks about particular people being highlighted this year, but there were quiet murmurs of friends reuniting, couples cuddling. It felt to me like people had to check out for brief moments when the day got too intense, which I totally understood.

I came to this country in time for the New Year, the beginning of all things. This day of remembrance feels like an appropriately somber goodbye.

A high note

I was determined that the horrific counter-protest on International Women’s Day not be my last experience of Women of the Wall. I went back today. My friend Heather read Torah, and while usually the security guards search our bags to ensure we can’t bring in a Torah scroll to read from (although they often wave the protesters through without checking their backpacks!), this month we got lucky and smuggled one in. It was such a joy to have it here for my last time.

And then we walked to class and got there super late, dealing with streets that were inexplicably blocked off, drivers who ignored stoplights and refused to let us cross streets, and all manner of typical Israeli craziness. I felt like our frustration about the traffic and the time was really a way to vent the tension we had been carrying all morning, waiting to see if we were going to have another violent experience. It was finally safe to feel everything we needed to feel and get it out.

I’m conscious that I’m leaving very, very soon. Everywhere I go, I’m taking pictures of friends, trying to crystallize memories so I can carry them with me. It’s so very hard to leave.

Broken

I’m on line at the pharmacy and this woman comes up, my age, black wig, and picks a fight with someone she says took her parking spot. She yells at us that no one should have a problem with her cutting the line, cows the little old lady at the back who looks like she might say something.

Her daughter has second-degree burns. She was in the attack. She just needs gauze bandages that go on like underwear. She’s yelling at us, snarling. No one is arguing with her.

The pharmacist asks what size. The woman snaps, “I don’t need a prescription, I just need this thing.” I say softly, “She’s just asking what size you need.” “I don’t know, medium? Small?”

In absence of information, the pharmacist hands her an adjustable gauze that can be cut or wrapped as you wish. She stares at it, lost, still radiating anger. “You don’t have the kind that just goes on like underwear?”

I feel in that moment like everyone but me understands that this woman doesn’t need kindness; kindness will shatter her. She needs a place to put her rage, and everyone both gets it and is too choked by their own traumas to do more than bear witness. All I can do is ache for her, for her daughter, for this whole broken place.

Hope rekindled

A week after Hebron, a week after Women of the Wall, I was absolutely not ready to go on a class trip to the kibbutz nearest the Gaza border, named after ten people who died in a helicopter crash. I was still shaking, still angry, and I didn’t want to deal with more racist poison from perfectly nice settlers who just don’t see people they disagree with as human.

Instead, this lovely woman, Roni, talked about why she had helped found the kibbutz and how she drives Gazans to the hospital and uses Skype to forge friendships between their children and hers. She talked about the trauma her children and grandchildren have suffered, the people she’s known who have been blown to smithereens, and the times she’s literally wept for Gazans who are also caught in the crossfire. “I am not the dreamer,” she told us. “The dreamers are the Arabs who want to push us into the sea, because we’re not going anywhere. The dreamers are Israelis who think if we torment the Palestinians for another twenty years, they’ll come begging on their knees for peace, because that’s not happening either. We have to find another way.” Listening to this older woman who had weathered storms and still found reasons to hope and continue to work for a better world renewed my faith when I needed it most.

The kibbutzniks here have decorated their many bomb shelters with mandalas and other art. They make murals out of paint and ceramics which they put on the sniper barrier facing the Gaza fence. On the kibbutz side, they paint the wall to show the wide open spaces they wish they could safely see.

After a week of soul-crushing doubt and despair, I feel like myself again.

Bloody liberation

I’ve talked a little bit about Women of the Wall here before. Every month, on the new moon, they protest for the right to pray on the women’s side of the Western Wall (women are allowed to BE on the women’s side, and pray silently to themselves, but while after many years of struggle they are legally entitled to form a prayer quorum and read Torah, if they try to exercise that right, they are assaulted and their Torah scrolls are confiscated). My mom was a part of the group 30 years ago when they started, and it felt important for me to go every time I was able this year: for me, social justice is how I “pay the rent” for getting the opportunity to study here–it’s not just about me having a great learning experience, it’s about how I can be present for others, for the people who live here long after I’m gone.

International Women’s Day this year coincided with the 30th anniversary of Women of the Wall, so I rose before dawn to join the group trying to pray at the Western Wall as usual, but although I’m always braced for backlash, this time the protesters were far more numerous and violent than usual. The chief rabbi got all the religious girls’ schools in the area to bus their students in before dawn, filling the plaza with thousands of teenagers who had been told to stop us at all cost.

My friend Susan was knocked to the ground, and a girl tried to kick her in the head before Susan’s daughter threw herself across her mother’s body to protect her. Her other daughter was grabbed by the hair and dragged backwards until she threw up. I got more than a few elbows, nails, and fists directed at my back as I worked to protect those who were too frail to stand, and braced my feet again and again against the tidal wave trying to shove us around. I kept an eye out for latecomers trying to join us, welcoming them inside the circle and soothing, “It’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re okay,” in between moments of trying to pray. Ultimately, it was decided that we had to leave for the Torah reading to protect both the Torah and ourselves–normally we endure the shouting and shoving, but this was out of hand even with police and military intervention–and we finished at the egalitarian plaza (in classic “separate but equal” fashion, the egalitarian section does not allow equal access, no way to get close enough to touch the Wall). I was fine until the prayer leaders began carrying the little Torah scroll around for everyone to kiss, a basic ritual I’ve taken for granted since childhood but which is impossible for us at the Wall because of the Haredim and their senseless hatred of us, of their fellow Jews. Then everything hit me at once and I wept.

What sickened me most, what continues to grieve me, is that the Haredim deployed their daughters as child soldiers against us. Because there are only two options: One, they knew that we would never, ever hurt children, no matter how badly provoked, and decided to use our humanity against us. Or two, they thought we were evil people who might fight back, might harm children, and valued their daughters so little that they didn’t mind harm coming to them. I don’t know which is worse.

Someday, we will have the same rights and the same access. Someday, our fellow Jews will learn that religion doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game with winners and losers. This is why we fight.

One bright spot, as I try and hold on to reasons for hope, was that we were joined by a group of men in their seventies, Israeli paratroopers who had liberated the Wall in the ’67 war. One said graciously, “It’s you women who are liberating the Wall.”

Hebron redux

I’ve written about my previous trip to Hebron with Tru’ah and Breaking the Silence, focusing on Palestinian displacement and mistreatment. This time I was on a school trip that blended those aspects with visits to holy sites and interviews with Israeli settlers. I’m not going to repeat stuff I’ve already covered, but understand that those elements were present and colored the rest of the trip.

We got to see a synagogue built in 1540 that is still in use. One of the Torah scrolls within is 500 years old and written on deerskin. I was very torn between the beauty of this space and its testament to the long history of our people here, and the no-man’s-land carved out of Palestinian stores and homes in order to protect the Jewish community that uses this space.

This time, we actually went into the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a building built around a much older cave. The building that protects the Cave of the Patriarchs was built at the same time as the Western Wall, and it’s amazing to see what that architecture looks like when not shattered by war. It’s shared by both Muslims and Jews, since Abraham is the patriarch of both religions. We did a brief egalitarian prayer service in a quiet nook inside, with my classmate Rachel leading beautifully, and no one stopped us; one Haredi guy actually joined in! There are multiple sarcophaguses in the Tomb, supposedly belonging to a number of Patriarchs and Matriarchs, but there is one extra sarcophagus which some claim is that of Esau, Jacob’s brother. The tapestry beside it relates an ancient legend that Jacob’s sons brought Jacob to be buried here only to be confronted by Esau. “Jacob has already used his space to bury Leah. This space is mine.” “You sold your birthright to him.” “I sold my birthright, not my burial plot! I have a right to be buried with my parents. I can prove my claim…” At which point one of Jacob’s grandkids killed Esau in a rage over the delay, unwilling even to listen. The story felt so emblematic of all the painful battles over land in this city, in this country.

We met with the same Palestinian I had met on previous trips, who talked about what it’s like to live here, but we also met with two settlers. One, a spokesperson for the local (illegal) settler community, bragged about different plans for peace he had dreamed up, which were apparently published in the New York Times. All of them involved the Palestinians giving up all right to their homes and either accepting relocation elsewhere in Israel or leaving the country entirely and getting citizenship in one of the neighboring Arab countries. He claimed that in this region, people respect strength; if your plan involves compromise of any kind, they’ll see it as weakness and push for more. He also claimed, with a sly grin, that the soldiers who protect the illegal settlement are a tool of the secular, liberal government and the settlers have nothing to do with them and therefore can’t be blamed for their actions/presence. To which I finally responded, “Cool, so they can leave and you guys will make do on your own?” To which he had no answer. It should be noted that while this guy is the official spokesman of the illegal settlements and talks a good game, he doesn’t live here, doesn’t raise his kids here. He doesn’t have to live with the damage his ideas cause.

Another settler, who does live here, talked about how tense he had been one night when he picked up a Palestinian hitchhiker. He was so nervous about the guy that the whole time, he had one hand on the wheel and one hand on his pistol. He didn’t seem to recognize, even telling us the story, which of the people in that car was in the most danger.