Mattot-Masei: Jews I Don’t Agree With
Joseph is with IfNotNow NYC.
When I was being interviewed by the council of rabbis who would approve my conversion process, it’s safe to say I was nervous. It had been two years in the making. I hadn’t read a single novel in that two year period, because I was too busy reading everything Jewish I could get my hands on. Synagogue had become so much a part of my weekly routine, that my friends knew I wouldn’t be making a trip out to the beach with them on Saturday morning. I had lost my longest-lasting relationship partially because of my conversion, and I had to make a second “coming out” to my family. I had invested so much of my life in becoming Jewish — gained so much, lost so much. And it all came down to these three rabbis at this table outside a suburban mikveh north of New York City.
Despite my nerves, I was doing well, I think, at answering questions. I was sitting comfortably with my legs crossed, and I gesticulated gently with each answer, a little flourish here and there. As a high school religion teacher, if there’s one thing I can talk for hours about, it’s religion.

But there was a lull in the conversation at one point and one of the rabbis breathed out deeply. He looked at the other rabbis and there was a pregnant pause.
He furrowed his brow, and I noticed. “You’ve talked a lot,” he said, “in our conversation today about how you have found love and joy and acceptance in your synagogue, but that’s only one synagogue and a pretty liberal one. I want to know how you relate to Jews you don’t agree with.”
I didn’t understand the question. What did he mean, “How do I relate to Jews I don’t agree with?” Suddenly sweaty and motionless, I stumbled my way into an answer. I said something like, “well, I don’t have much of a choice anymore if I relate to them or not — they’re my family now.”
But he wasn’t satisfied with the answer. He asked again: “No, how do you relate to them?” I was confused about what he was asking me. What does it mean to relate to someone you don’t agree with? Being from a large Southern family, it seemed obvious to me that you relate to people you don’t agree with. I don’t get a choice when my mother tells me I have to sit next to my racist and homophobic cousin at Thanksgiving. What was he really asking me?
I asked him to ask it a different way. He said, “There are 6 million people in Israel. What do you think of them?”
It hit me. In my conversion paper sitting on the table in front of him, I had talked about my views on Israel, since that was part of the requirement. I was honest, of course, and maybe lacked some tact in the way that I had described my opinion. Somehow, I hadn’t anticipated being asked a question about Israel. I hadn’t prepared for it. But now that it was flopping there like a fish on the table, it seemed obvious that at some point a rabbi was going to ask me what I thought about Zionism. But this was a really weird way to ask me.
“That’s kind of like asking me what I think about New Yorkers. There’s too many of them to generalize.”
But I wasn’t giving him the answer he wanted, and in truth, I wasn’t answering his question. What he wanted to know was, “do I see myself as a Jew only if I am comfortable with my fellow Jews’ politics? Does the gap between me and more conservative Jews — possibly even Jews who support the occupation — somehow render my adversaries less Jewish in my mind? Is the Jewish settler in the West Bank still my family? How do I reconcile Israel’s attempt to speak on behalf of Jews, on behalf of me?”
To be honest, I don’t remember my final answer to the question. But I remember that it felt insufficient. And his question has been floating around in my head ever since. I can’t get it out.
It’s a question that this week’s double parshot raise as well. In Mattot-Masei, we are confronted with a God-sanctioned genocide against the Midianite people. The Torah details the massacre: “Moses sent them — a thousand from each tribe for the legion. They massed against Midian as God had commanded Moses, and they killed every male. They killed the kings of Midian along with their slain ones. The sons of Israel took captive the women of Midian and their young children and all their cattle and flocks and all their wealth they took as spoils.”
But Moses isn’t satisfied with the massacre. He becomes angry when he sees that the soldiers had spared some of the Midianites, so he tells the troops to kill all the Midians except for the virgin girls, who they may then take as wives. When the Torah details the spoils of this war, these girls are listed among the haul.
The Torah makes it clear the trajectory of this genocide: “Take vengeance for the Children of Israel against the Midianites; afterward you will be gathered unto your people.” In other words, only after the Israelites inflict unwavering destruction on the Midianites will they be able to reach the Promised Land. And indeed, the parshot go on to detail how the land was to be divided among the 12 tribes.
It’s a sobering story to read, and an incredibly difficult one to digest as I read news from Gaza and the West Bank. The parallels hit you in the face when you read these parshot. How do you reconcile an incredibly unattractive story in your scriptures and your love for your religion? How do you proudly be a Jew when so many Palestinians are living and dying under the tyranny of Jewish occupation? How do you relate to Jews you disagree with?
It’s not a parsha that leaves you feeling sure about your Judaism, whether you’re a born Jew or a Jew by choice. If we are Jews, we don’t get a choice in whether this passage is in our scriptures or not. We cannot take scissors to the scroll. We cannot ignore it and we cannot say that it’s just an outdated scripture that describes something that happened long, long ago — something for which we don’t assume culpability. Just the same, we cannot choose to ignore Israel.
It’s been a little under a month since I made my conversion to Judaism official. I’ve been riding the pure joy of finally realizing something that had taken me two years to reach. Morning blessings every day have transformed the way I have gratitude for this world. Wearing a kippah in public has led to some beautiful conversations with strangers. Shabbat has given me much-needed rest. Seeing my loved ones, coworkers, blood family, students and friends all embrace my new practice has made me realize just how loved I am. I have never felt this whole in my entire life — the joys of being Jewish. But like all great joy and all great love, it comes with struggle. I am beginning to see how much Judaism is asking me to wrestle with. I am now part of a vast tradition and practice that has both beautiful and ugly sides, and I’m sticking around for both.
