This Week: Hear, O Israel
My country is breaking. My heart is broken.
Dear fam,
Over the weekend, I wrote an essay about parenting, and consent, and body boundaries, and anxiety. But I didn’t send it. Not because I don’t want to; my anxiety is not magically healed or irrelevant. I didn’t send it because something far more important is happening. The following is an essay I’ve tried to write many, many times. Writing about Israel — my homeland, the place where I was forged and formed — is the hardest writing I do. I hope you read these words with compassion.
Hear, O Israel.
This morning, like many mornings of late, I awoke afraid. My sleep has been fitful, my dreams populated by impossible situations I’m called to resolve. Two nights ago, I dreamed I’d been betrayed; I screamed and cried and screamed and cried, but no one heard my words. I couldn’t make them understand. I couldn’t. I woke sweaty and spent.
The news has been bad lately. Specifically, I mean the news in Israel. If you’re thinking that bad news is regular news in Israel, you’re wrong. This is worse. So much worse.
Today, Netanyahu’s corrupt and hateful government passed a law to take ‘reasonableness’ out of the judicial process. As my father-in-law aptly pointed out, this is because they want to do unreasonable things, such as appoint a man who was convicted of fraud and bribery when he was Minister of the Interior to the dual positions of Minister of the Interior and Minister of Health.
Outlawing reasonableness is the first step towards a terrifying unraveling. It is also, however, the next step in a chain of events we should have seen coming.
Perhaps chain is the wrong word. It implies a logical sequence, one link after another after another. Easily traceable. Things are a little more messy here.
Nonetheless, we each have our way into the fray. I’m here, in the United States, watching my friends and cousins and aunts and uncles take to the streets. Every day, for weeks and weeks now, I get messages with pictures of my cousins at demonstrations. They’re smiling in the pictures. They believe they are saving the country from a dark, dark nightmare. I pray each day they’re right.
I also know, though, that even if the protesters stop the crippling of the judicial system, a lot more needs to be fixed before we’re out of the woods. This absurdist reality Netanyahu has pushed us into is the most vicious symptom of an illness that must be cured if we want this country to exist in any form.
—
I had just turned eleven when Netanyahu was first sworn in as Prime Minister in 1996. He was a captivating speaker, a firebrand behind the microphone. He’d become famous in the preceding years, mostly for inciting angry mobs against Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who ended up assassinated shortly thereafter. One would think that being hateful towards someone who was subsequently shot to death by a vigilante follower of yours would be a career-ender. But not for this guy. Even then, there was something a little slimy about him. His son, the one infamous for racism and misogyny, went to my grade school a few years behind me. What I remember best about this first term is the bombings. And the claims that he would solve them, that he was the only one who could protect us all.
Spoiler: This was not true.
In order to really protect anyone from anything in Israel, you need to thread a very tricky needle. This means coming to terms with the internal societal rot caused by decades of occupation of, violence against, and dehumanization of Palestinians while simultaneously holding space for the very true and debilitating ache of Israelis who have lost innumerable loved ones to wars and violence. It means taking racists to task and unlearning the biases inherent in the systems while also ensuring the safety of those who living in the system, on all sides. It means systemic economic change, infrastructure investment, a whole swarm of mental health professionals, rebuilding of education systems and roads and societal trust.
Benjamin Netanyahu1 has never been interested in any of that. I don’t know if he ever had principles. Maybe he did believe in a future for the country once. I was too young to know. He left office in ‘99, and made a helluva comeback in the late aughts. Save for a few years, he’s been in charge ever since.
Look where it’s gotten us.
—
Jewish prayer services include the Sh’ma prayer three (ok, really four) times a day: Shacharit, Mincha, Ma’ariv, and Al HaMita. Morning, afternoon, evening, and before you sleep. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One.” These are the last words we think before slipping into slumber.
The Lord is One. Hear, O Israel. “Please,” I scream in my dreams, “please, listen! Don’t you see? Why can’t you see? It’s all wrong, you know it’s wrong, you must know, please!”
But no-one hears. They laugh it off. “It’s not so bad,” the faceless people say, “You’re making a fuss over nothing.”
I whimper. I wake.
—
After the army, I waited tables at a bunch of cafés to save money for a backpacking trip to Southeast Asia before colleges. One day, it must have been 2008-or-so, the servers and shift managers were reading the paper by the bar. Something about violence by Palestinians towards Israelis. I can’t remember exactly. “Ugh, they should just drop a bomb and kill them all,” said my boss, dropping the paper on the bar. The barista and I raised our eyebrows at each other, but remained silent. “What?” she yelled, “All those Arabs want to kill us anyway, we should do it first. Anyways, look — table 14 wants to order.” She pointed. “Go!” I went.
—
The summer of 2006, I was a soldier in the education corps of the IDF. It was the summer of the Second Lebanon War. I spent the summer entertaining children in bomb shelters — 50 or so people in tiny, air-tight rooms. We weren’t allowed to leave the reinforced concrete cubes, but sometimes we opened the heavy, steel doors for air. We had no materials, so we made up clapping games with the children, who were bored out of their minds.
One day, we relented and went out to the yard with a few of the kids — maybe second or third graders? An air raid siren went off. I panicked, the door to the shelter was too far for the kids to run. We had under a minute. I grabbed one child on my hip, another on my arm and ran like a bat outta hell into that shelter. My friend waited ‘til we dove in — I tossed the kids in front of me — before slamming the door shut.
Then we heard the rockets fall on the building next door.
—
This year. In April, “clashes” (which really means violence, terror, trauma, death on both sides). In May, a “deadly escalation,” (things are getting worse, somehow). In June, a “deadly raid,” (more violence, this time time with civilian and military deaths and displacement of civilians)
—
The unraveling of our sense of peoplehood and belonging is not sudden. This has long been in the making. My cousin, Rabbi Josh Weiner, noted wisely that all the Jewish people involved in this conflict are reading the same words and interpreting them is wildly different ways. “That's how words work,” he says, “When Jewish zealots burned houses in the village of Hawara a few months ago and recited the evening prayers, I wondered whether I would ever be able to pray those words again. Who knows? Except that just as poetry should shake you up and not make you feel better, neither should the Jewish rituals just be a source of comfort or strength. They can also make us notice what's wrong with the world, without providing cheap and easy ways out.”
That’s one thing I know for sure: There are no cheap and easy ways out.
On Thursday, some Jews will fast in observance of the ninth of the month of Av. This is, according to tradition, the day on which the two Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (once by Babylonians, once by Romans). On this day, we read the Book of Lamentations — Eikha — which begins, “How can it be? Lonely sits [Jerusalem] / Once great with people! / She that was great among nations / Is become like a widow; The princess among states/ Is become a thrall”
I ask this question now, too. How can it be? How can we have let this become a reality?
The Temples were destroyed because of sinat hinam, a phrase that is always translated as ‘baseless hatred.’ I don’t really like that translation, though. Hinam means something like ‘free of cost’ or ‘in vain,’ depending on context.
Is there ever a hatred that is free of cost? Is there ever a hatred that is not in vain?
I wonder what would happen if those who are so full of hate could, instead, embody the G-dly qualities of chesed and chanina — compassion and forgiveness. What if the G-d we followed was not a G-d of war and conquest, but one of ever-expanding love?
Tonight, very soon, when I pray, I will be thinking of them all. I’ll think of my cousins and friends, who show up daily with babies in strollers and flags and megaphones to demand justice. I’ll think of the children I heaved into the bomb shelter — where are they? Do they protest? Do they believe in corrupt judicial reform? I’ll think of the ministers in this abomination of a government, the ones who claim to speak for me and my loved ones. I’ll be thinking of the Palestinians whose fate is being decided right now as well, despite having almost no say in the matter.
Hear, O People of my Country. Please.
I’ll be damned if I use that man’s nickname, I am not his friend.