On returning home again, Rosh Hashanah, and bravery.
A Reflection from an IfNotNow NYC member
Tikkun Olam Day
I am six years old. It is Sunday morning, and I am standing at a table with my religious school class. We are barely tall enough to see over the table standing up, as our tiny hands braid loaf after loaf of challah dough. Nearby, other grades prepare salads, trays of vegetarian lasagnas, and cookies. All of us our contributing courses for a meal at a local women’s shelter. As the adult volunteers slide the meals into industrial kitchen-sized ovens to bake, we fidget in our seats as a woman tells us about how this shelter has provided her and so many other poor and homeless women with the necessary resources to get back on their feet. This Tikkun Olam Day, a morning dedicated to repairing whatever part of the world we can, is part of the yearly curriculum at my large, liberal, Reform religious school, and I look forward to next year, when I might be able to advance to cooking lasagna, like the older kids. The project completed, we all walk down the hallways, back to our classrooms. Posters of Israeli children playing at the beach line the walls. Yom Ha’Atzmaut is just a few weeks away. We’ll learn the Hebrew words for ice cream and chocolate, and the floors of our carpools will be scattered with plastic Israeli flags.
Nablus
I am twenty-one years old. I feel nauseous, and it’s not from the twisting roads that this van is driving down. I am on my way back to Tel Aviv, where I have been studying for the past couple of months. Today, I have joined a tour group and gone to visit Balata, the largest refugee camp in the entire West Bank, just outside of the city of Nablus. The past twelve hours blur together: the massive, grey security wall. The skeletons of Palestinian olive trees, burned to the ground by settlers. The new playground, built after years of fundraising and organizing by the community, who wanted their children to have a place to play besides the streets, which are narrow and covered with broken glass. The best falafel I have ever tasted, gifted to me by a man with a small cart. The youth center, with classes in film and theatre and art, run by a man who is caught between the IDF and Hamas, but firmly told us “I’m here for the kids” and still works to teach creative, nonviolent means of resistance. The teenage girls, who tell me that when they grow up, they want to be teachers and serve their community, just like this youth leader. The unreliable access to clean drinking water. The kids who ran up to our group, who tried to practice their English and invited us to play soccer with them. The kids who eyed us suspiciously, because most strangers in their community are soldiers.
Back in the van, I think about the few times that my teachers broached the subject of “the conflict,” as they called it. We were told that it was “complicated.” The word “occupation” was never mentioned or defined, nor were phrases like “settlers” or “price tag attacks” or “home demolitions.” We gave our tzedakah to coexistence summer camps, and discussed why it might be difficult for Israeli kids to befriend people who they associated with bus bombings, but never why Palestinian kids might not want to befriend kids who will, one day, be sent off to join an army that sometimes shoots nonviolent protesters and demolishes homes. I think about how I do not know what the solution ought to be, and that there has been wrong done on both sides, and that the geopolitics may be complex, but that the deep injustice of the occupation is not complicated. It is simple in its wrongness. I know that I cannot reconcile what I have learned today, and over the past few months, with what I was taught as a child. An inner sense of trust that I didn’t know I had has been deeply broken.
2014
I return to New York. I finish college, work on a few plays, and start to figure out what my adult life will look like. I desperately avoid any sort of organized Jewish practice. During that year’s occasional family b’nai mitzvot, I smile at my cousins, space out for much of the services, and force myself not to not to scream, cry, or run out of the room during the congregations’ Prayer for Israel. I wonder: ten years from now, will my cousins feel this rage and grief that I feel now? Will they, too, feel nauseous at the sight of the blue and white flag on the bima that once represented an idealized Jewish utopia with beaches and ice cream and soldiers that were tougher, sexier versions of camp counselors, and now also represents an occupying power that demolishes homes and arrests children? Will they, too, ask why their teachers lied to them? Is this sense of betrayal, churning deep in my stomach, as Jewish an experience as baking challah in a synagogue social hall?
Soon, it is summer. Three Israeli teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frenkel, are kidnapped in the West Bank, and Netanyahu’s government waits seventeen days to tell the country — and their families — that they have been killed. A Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, is kidnapped in Jerusalem and beaten and burned to death in the forest. Operation Protective Edge begins. 73 Israelis and over 2,100 Palestinians are killed, almost a quarter of whom are children. One rabbi at my childhood synagogue says that, of course, our hearts ache for the losses on all sides. After a moment to feel self-congratulatory for allowing this minuscule shred of empathy, the rabbi reminds us that, of course, we support Israel’s right to self defense, and because of their friends and family there, they cannot say anything critical. My Israeli friends go to protest the war in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, and they are attacked by fascists with pepper spray and crowbars who scream “death to Arabs, death to leftists” while the police look on. In New York, I hear murmurs of a group called IfNotNow, a movement of young Jews against the occupation and the war. They gather in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, light candles, and say Kaddish for all those killed in this most recent war, Israelis and Palestinians alike. They are called “self-hating Jews” and told to “go die in Gaza.” I sit, frozen, at my computer screen. I am wobbling on the line between numbness and a rage and grief that feel unending, and I have never been so lonely in my life.
That fall, I claim that I have to work at my day job and skip out on Rosh Hashanah services. I spend most of Yom Kippur sitting in the backyard at my aunt and uncle’s synagogue in Philadelphia. I know that the institutions and communities where I grew up, where so many of my loved ones still spend so much of their time and energy, are unlikely to support my anti-occupation beliefs, despite their talk of pluralism and peace. I reject them before they can reject me.
IfNotNow
In January of 2016, I finally attend the first-ever IfNotNow training in New York. We read testimonies from Israelis and Palestinians working against the occupation, we discuss movement strategy and internalized anti-Semitism, and we learn how to plan actions. We also sing, in Hebrew and English and with no words at all, loudly and joyfully, with our arms around each other. A few months later, we plan our Liberation Seders. I help write our script, which we call a haggadah, and I read some of it to the crowd, over a hundred strong, in the lobby of the Anti-Defamation League. We demand, with our voices and our bodies, that our communal institutions end their support for the occupation, while simultaneously building our own, new, Jewish community that works for freedom and dignity for all Israelis and Palestinians. We take a moment to honor those who have inspired us to do this work, and I speak my grandparents’ names out loud. We are all links in a chain, and we know it. I cry tears that are an equal mix of pain, anger, love, gratitude, and pride, but I don’t want to run away or scream. Passover has always been my favorite holiday, and this is the most beautiful Seder I have ever participated in.
Rosh Hashanah
This past Monday, I returned to my childhood synagogue for my first Rosh Hashanah in my hometown since high school. I affixed my IfNotNow button to my sweater, took a deep breath, and walked in.
Back in April, two of the rabbis from my childhood synagogue synagogue saw the videos of IfNotNow’s Liberation Seders. They got in touch with my parents, and asked them to wish me a yasher koach on their behalf. I do not take their kind words for granted, but these same rabbis stand in silent approval when one of their colleagues say that this is “not the right time” to be critical of Israel. This new year will mark fifty years of the Israeli occupation, and if this is not the right time to speak up, I don’t know what is.
The rabbi who spoke about being unable to criticize certainly sees my button when they greet me with a hug, but they say nothing about it, which is exactly what I expect. Most people act as if they do not notice it my button. Still, I feel glad to be wearing it, as one of the rabbis who quietly passed on their good wishes to my parents gives a sermon about the importance of bringing one’s Judaism to work for justice (and to the ballot box) in this upcoming year, and includes colonialism on a long list of societal injustices which we ought to fight against. Just before I leave, someone compliments me on it, and it is such a small gesture, but it feels enormous. There are so many of us out here, and the tide is turning.
So, this 5777, I hope for bravery, for myself and for my community. Bravery to keep doing the work, and to keep working for freedom and dignity for all, both locally and internationally. And bravery not to reject each other, but to hold each other accountable, which is both an act of protest and an act of love.
