Shavuot: Reb Zalman on the Book of Ruth

Wednesday, May 19 is Shavuot, the Jewish Festival of “Weeks,” that traditionally marked the end of the seven-week grain harvest that began at Pesach (Passover). As such, it was one of the three traditional pilgrimage festivals (including Pesach and Sukkot, which also have agricultural significance). But even more importantly, Shavuot is also the anniversary of G-d’s giving of the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.

One tradition observed on Shavuot is the reading of the Book of Ruth. Why Ruth? There are three reasons. First, the book takes place during the grain harvest. Second, it discusses Ruth’s process of becoming a Jew (in other words, one who accepts G-d’s gift of the Torah). Third, Ruth is identified as the great-grandmother of King David, who died on Shavuot (according to the Talmud).

Ruth and Naomi, by Arthur Szyk (www.szyk.org)

The Book of Ruth is a beautiful story that depicts the love and devotion between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, as well as Boaz’s selfless charity. The Book of Ruth shows how love, loyalty and compassion—whether between family members or complete strangers—can create a sacred community that insulates its members from loss, suffering and deprivation. This simple and unassuming story provides one of the Tanakh‘s great models for how to live in the world.

One of my favorite ways to celebrate Shavuot is by watching Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi read the Book of Ruth. Reb Zalman translates the text into English from the original Hebrew as he goes, while adding his own unique and captivating commentary. Reb Zalman’s retelling is flavored with meaningful observations about Hebrew linguistic features, connections with subsequent rabbinic law, the rigorous nature of stoop labor (drawn from Reb Zalman’s work with Chicano labor leader César Chávez) and more. Throughout, Reb Zalman infuses the story with his own playful sense of humor, while also emphasizing—and, even more importantly, personally manifesting—the admirable quality of chesed (loving-kindness) exhibited by the characters.

The result is a remarkably original, insightful and moving version of the Book of Ruth that is also a journey through (Ashkenazic) Jewish history: from Yiddish humor and Jewish participation in the civil rights struggles in the US, through the hasidic communities and yeshivot of Ashkenaz, through the compilation of the Talmud in Palestine and Babylonia, all the way back to Judaism’s roots in the Israelite tribal consciousness, with its keen focus on G-d, family and the natural world. Honestly, this video never gets old for me. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

There are seven parts to this video. All together, it runs about 35 minutes. You can find all seven parts here. Here is part one:

This video was filmed on Shavuot 5768 (2008) at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard great things from friends who’ve worked there. I’ll have to check it out. So should you.

(Thanks to Velveteen Rabbi for introducing me to this video last year!)

Remembering the Nakba: 62 Years Later

Today is May 15: Nakba Day. Today, Palestians and their allies around the world will commemorate the Nakba (“Catastrophe”): the forcible expulsion and dispossession of roughly 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Today, the UN reports that there are more than 4.75 million registered Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. Of these, nearly 1.4 million live in 58 UN-operated refugee camps. The total number of Palestinian refugees worldwide is estimated to be 5.5 million—the largest population of refugees in the world. Yet Israel has consistently refused to recognize the Palestinians’ right of return, as expressed in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, Article 11. Moreover, Israel’s expulsion and internal displacement of Palestinians continues to this day, albeit on a much smaller scale than in 1948. In a very real sense, the Nakba never really ended.

Facts and figures such as these reflect the enormity of the refugee crisis, but they can hardly convey the intensity and brutality of the Nakba itself. Statistics cannot illustrate the extent to which the Nakba persists as an agonizing and oppressive trauma in the lives of the Palestinians who experienced it, as well as their descendants. Nor can numbers reflect the Nakba‘s incredible influence on modern Palestinian social, political, cultural and intellectual identity. It seems that there is simply no aspect of Palestinian life that remains untouched by the Nakba.

For a more intimate appreciation of the Palestinian experience of the Nakba, I would recommend Al Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (1997), an hour-long documentary directed by Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jansse. Featuring interviews with Palestinian survivors of the Nakba, as well as Israelis who participated in the expulsion operations, the film humanizes the Nakba in a way that statistics never can.

This film is based on The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 by Israeli “New Historian” Benny Morris, who appears frequently in the film to provide historical context. In this book, Morris challenges the official version of Israeli history, which presents the Palestinian exodus as an overwhelmingly voluntary affair initiated after Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, at the urging of the neighboring Arab countries. On the contrary, Morris reveals that the Palestinian exodus began months earlier in December 1947, and that it was driven by a combination of attacks on Palestinians, fear of additional attacks and forced expulsions.

Unfortunately, the film exhibits many of the same flaws as Morris’ work, namely his insistence that there was no coordinated plan of expulsion devised by the Zionist leadership and carried out by its military forces. However, Ilan Pappé refutes this claim in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which argues that the expulsion of Palestinians was an intentional campaign, sanctioned (if not always explicitly ordered) from the top down. As such, the Nakba represents not an accidental side effect of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (as was long asserted) but rather a classic example of ethnic cleansing, which Pappé defines as “an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogeneous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven from…. Later on, the expelled are then erased from the country’s official and popular history and excised from its collective memory.”

Another problem is that the film makes only passing reference to the Deir Yassin massacre: the murder of roughly 100 Palestinians villagers by Zionist paramilitaries on April 9, 1948. The film never describes the massacre in any detail or addresses its significance—a severe and surprising oversight. As Morris writes in Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001:

Deir Yassin is remembered not as a military operation, but rather for the atrocities committed by the IZL and LHI troops during and immediately after the drawn-out battle: Whole families were riddled with bullets and grenade fragments and buried when houses were blown up on top of them; men, women, and children were mowed down as they emerged from houses; individuals were taken aside and shot. At the end of the battle, groups of old men, women, and children were trucked through West Jerusalem’s streets in a kind of “victory parade” and then dumped in (Arab) East Jerusalem.

According to Jerusalem Shai commander Levy (reporting on April 12), “the conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty. Whole families—women, old people, children—were killed, and there were piles  of dead [in various places]. Some of the prisoners [who had been] moved to places of incarceration, including women and children, were murdered viciously by their captors.” In a report the following day, he added: “LHI members tell of the barbaric behavior… of the IZL toward the prisoners and the dead. They also relate that the IZL men raped a number of Arab girls and murdered them afterward (we don’t know if this is true).”

Morris notes that reports of the massacre had a “profoundly demoralizing effect on the Palestinian Arabs and was a major factor in their massive flight during the following weeks and months. The IDF Intelligence Service called Deir Yassin ‘a decisive accelerating factor’ in the general Arab exodus.”

Deir Yassin, and other massacres like it, cannot be divorced from the general process of expulsion. As the quotations above indicate, the Deir Yassin massacre was part of a deliberate effort to liquidate the village’s inhabitants and, more generally, to spread terror throughout the Palestinian populace in order to coerce them to abandon their homes. Not surprisingly, Deir Yassin remains a powerful symbol of the Nakba in Palestinian memory and discourse.

To learn more about the Deir Yassin massacre and its role in the Nakba, I’d recommend this excellent 30-minute documentary produced by Deir Yassin Remembered in 2006:

Given all this, it should be clear why Palestinians wish to memorialize the Nakba. However, the truth of the Nakba is frequently denied by many Israelis, and attempts to publicly commemorate Nakba Day are met with harsh resistance. In May 2009, for instance, the right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party proposed a bill that would ban the observance of Nakba Day and authorize prison terms of up to three years for violators. This controversial bill was watered down (now, groups that receive government funding can have that funding cut if they observe Nakba Day) and was subsequently approved by the Knesset in March 2010. Arab Israeli Knesset Member Taleb El-Sana stated:

[The bill] proves the failure of Zionism, which needs to legislate a law in order to force the Zionist narrative and to rewrite history during which the Zionist movement committed crimes against humanity on the Palestinian people….  The Palestinian people will continue to unify around [this] disaster, which is identical to the destruction of the First and Second Temples for the Jews, and will hold marches in full force until the Zionist movement recognizes its responsibility for the Nakba, until the Palestinian people realize their aspirations for liberty and independence, and until the refugees return to their towns.

Many American Jews are also resistant to formal acknowledgement of the Nakba. On his blog, Sixteen Minutes to Palestine, University of Chicago student Sami Kishawi reports that Hillels Around Chicago began circulating a memo around DePaul University last week, warning of Students for Justice in Palestine’s plans to host a die-in on May 13 in remembrance of the Nakba. The memo states, “In light of the upcoming Palestinian ‘Die-In’ protest tomorrow, it is critical that you be aware of the disturbing events scheduled to take place… in an effort to delegitimize the state of Israel. For many of you, this event may be offensive, upsetting or hurtful as there will be inflammatory language and literature on display. Please know that we are available to provide you with factual information about the history of and current situation in Israel.”

How is it possible that so many American Jews and Israelis could be so desperately opposed to any public recognition of the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948? Why do public displays of mourning and resilience pose such a threat? Ilan Pappé eloquently captures precisely what is at stake:

The inability of Israelis to acknowledge the trauma the Palestinians suffered stands out even more sharply against the way the Palestinian national narrative tells the story of the Nakba, a trauma they continue to live with to the present…. [W]hat the Palestinians are demanding, and what, for many of them, has become a sine qua non, is that they be recognized as the victims of an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also—perhaps far more critically—would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.

The Keys, by Anne Paq (www.annepaq.com)

On Women and Walls: Israeli Feminism and Palestine Solidarity

For more than 20 years, Nashot HaKotel (Women of the Wall) have fought for “the right for Jewish women from Israel and around the world to conduct prayer services, read from a Torah scroll while wearing prayer shawls and sing out loud” at the Kotel (the Western Wall) in Jerusalem. Currently, all these activities are banned by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate, which administers the Kotel and maintains the mechitzah (partition) that divides the men’s and women’s sections. In addition to pursuing legal action, the Women of the Wall gather at the Kotel for prayer every month on Rosh Chodesh—even though they risk harassment, arrest and even physical violence. I have always found the Women of the Wall’s bravery and determination to be remarkable and inspiring.

Anat Hoffman (R) and other Women of the Wall

So I was deeply saddened and disappointed when I woke up on April 20 and saw this message from the Women of the Wall on Facebook:

Tonight in Israel we will celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day). Independence carries the potential for freedom, democracy and equality. We will pray for freedom for women to become equal citizens at the Kotel. Chairperson Anat Hoffman proclaims, “As in 1967, the wall needs liberating. Our task in 2010 is to liberate the Wall again.”

(I later learned that this was not the first time that Hoffman had made this comparison. On January 11, after being interrogated by police, she wrote, “There must be more than one way to liberate the Western Wall. It’s not only a job for paratroopers, a test that ended in the Six Day War of 1967. The Wall as a national and religious site now needs to be liberated from [haredi] control.” Likewise, in an April 14 interview by Womenetics, she stated, “We fought for the Wall in 1967 when we took it back from the Jordanians, and now we’re fighting for it again from the Orthodox.”)

Honestly, I was shocked. A leader of the Women of the Wall was comparing her fight against sexist segregation and violence to the Israeli military’s conquering of Jerusalem’s Old City during the Six Day War! This analogy struck me as factually inaccurate, intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt.

If the Women of the Wall have a right to worship at this holy place in accordance with their own religious beliefs and traditions (and not those imposed upon them by the Chief Rabbinate), then don’t Muslims deserve the same right? As historian Rashid Khalidi notes in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness,

Precisely the same section of this western wall is considered by Muslims to be the site where the Prophet Muhammad tethered his winged steed al-Buraq on the night journey “from the Masjid al-Haram [in Mecca] to the Masjid al-Aqsa [in Jerusalem]” described in the Qur’an (17:1). As such, the spot has long been venerated by Muslims.

Jews and Muslims, men and women sharing access to the Kotel in accordance with their distinct faith traditions would be the real indicator of “freedom, democracy and equality” in Israel/Palestine.

But there is an even darker side of Israel’s “liberation” of the Kotel—one that is rarely discussed. On June 10, 1967—mere days after the Kotel was claimed by the Israeli army—the ancient, Arab-occupied Maghribi Quarter was demolished in order to create a open plaza in front of the Kotel that could accommodate large numbers of Jewish worshipers. Israeli “New Historian” Tom Segev describes this demolition in vivid and heartbreaking detail in his book, 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East:

The people sobbed and wailed, and begged for time to remove their possessions, to which the officer consented. And so, wrote the journalist Uzi Benziman, “with the contractors still busy smashing the [public] toilets, the people struggled to make their way to a gathering point near Zion Gate. They carried personal belongings and household items on their backs.” Some refused to leave their homes. The bulldozers approached and the weeping residents departed only after the walls of their houses began to come down. Floodlights lit up the darkened area. One elderly woman was found beneath the ruins of a wall. She was unconscious and clearly dying, although there were no external signs of injury. She was taken out of the rubble in her bed and efforts were made to help her, beneath the floodlights, among the clouds of dust raised by the bulldozers. By the time medical help arrived, the woman had died.

Destruction of the Maghribi Quarter with the Kotel in the background, 1967

The “liberation” of the Kotel recorded in Israel’s official history and in popular memory is little more than a triumphalist myth. Yes, the Women of the Wall are fighting for access to a holy place. But they are also fighting for access to a real piece of land that was taken by force at the cost of shattered households, ruined families and an old woman’s life. There is nothing holy about that.

This was why I was so surprised by Hoffman’s reference to the “liberation” of the Kotel and her claim that the Women of the Wall were finishing the work of the paratroopers and fulfilling the holy promise of the State of Israel. Clearly, I had made a naïve error in assuming that the Women of the Wall’s feminist and democratic platform implied sensitivity to the Palestinian experience and skepticism toward Israel’s national myths.

And so when I discovered than Hoffman would be speaking at the University of Chicago on April 29, I resolved to ask her why she thought this was an appropriate and useful comparison. After the talk, I approached her and explained my misgivings.

“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” she answered, to my surprise. She told me that she was intimately familiar with the demolition of the Maghribi Quarter and that she considered it a “stain” on Israel’s history. She conceded that the comparison was factually and morally problematic. However, she stood by her belief that if the Women of the Wall could successfully harness the national pride associated with the Jewish “liberation” of the Kotel in 1967, and if they could make Israelis feel personally invested in the Kotel as a national symbol, then Israelis would be less willing to acquiesce to the Chief Rabbinate and to tolerate haredi discrimination against women worshipers.

“So the comparison is strategic, and not ideological?” I asked.

“Precisely,” Hoffman reassured me.

And in a way, I was reassured. I was relieved to know that Hoffman and the Women of the Wall were not so glaringly ignorant of the history of a place in which they are so deeply and spiritually invested. And I could understand the logic of using national pride as a tactic for achieving specific goals. Nevertheless, I am severely troubled by Hoffman’s logic. There is something unsettling about deliberately ignoring grave injustices against another in order to combat injustices against oneself. It’s even worse to perpetuate a triumphalist, nationalistic, even racist discourse in order to further the feminist struggle. Such a strategy seems destined to fail. One’s own liberation cannot and must not be won at the price of another’s subjugation.

In general, I don’t believe that competitions over who is the most oppressed are very productive. How can one measure in quantitative terms the relative oppression of an Israeli woman versus a Palestinian man? Nevertheless, I would contend that Palestinian women in the Occupied Territories are, without a doubt, doubly oppressed. In 2006, the Women’s Studies Centre in Jerusalem released a report entitled, Acknowledging the Displaced: Palestinian Women’s Ordeals in East Jerusalem, which supports this view:

The particular vulnerability of [Palestinian East] Jerusalemite women was apparent in the fact that they were prone to threats from the external militarized Israelis and from internal patriarchal powers simultaneously. The discussion in the various groups showed that fear of sexual abuse, fear of losing the right to get a permit, fear of losing the freedom of movement, and the constant fear around the safety of family members has incapacitated some women… and the overall situation has opened up the likelihood of their falling victim to gender violence….

In this study, our data as well as our observations crystallized for us the new tensions between men and women while Palestinians are constantly at the mercy of the masculinized Israeli military machine. The military seems to be all around women when they stand in long line-ups to collect their social welfare cheques; they watch them and harass them when they go to school; they face them when they cross from one checkpoint to another; and now they are with them throughout the length of the large Apartheid Wall constructed to further oppress, frustrate, and imprison Palestinians. Israeli military institutions are what most Jerusalem Arab women experience every day.

The Women of the Wall may be fighting a mechitzah that marginalizes them as Jews, that criminalizes their religious expression, that restricts them to an ever-shrinking area, and that enforces this status quo with the threat of arrest and interrogation by the state authorities or outbursts of violence by mobs of haredi men. But Palestinian women are combating a far larger and more menacing mechitzah of their own: the separation barrier known to Palestinians as the “Apartheid Wall.” The Wall marginalizes them as occupants of the land. It criminalizes their national identity and their efforts to fulfill their human needs. It restricts them to an ever-shrinking piece of land. And it enforces this status quo with the threat of arrest, interrogation, abuse or even death at the hands of the Israeli military and mobs of Jewish settlers.

Palestinian girls at a protest in Tulkarm, 2003

Does the mechitzah loom so large in the Jewish feminist consciousness that it dwarfs even the Apartheid Wall? I sincerely hope not. If the Women of the Wall want to analogize their situation, they should identify with the oppressed Palestinians on the other side of the Apartheid Wall and not with Israel’s triumphant conquering army in 1967. Would such an approach be popular? Would it win greater Israeli support for the Women of the Wall? Certainly not. But if the Women of the Wall truly wish to redefine what it means to be a Jew in Israel, then they must not sacrifice moral truth for the sake of political expediency. Only then will the Women of the Wall truly embody the prophetic spirit in all its righteous power and divine glory.