Delicious
Digg
Facebook
Flickr
Friendfeed
Last.fm
LinkedIn
MySpace
Reddit
Stumble Upon
Technorati
Twitter
Vimeo
YouTube
What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 3 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 3 weeks ago
- More updates...
Who's side are you on anyway?
Tonight…
- for stating that Palestinians had a legitimate right to resist occupation
- for not defending, but simply explaining the use of terrorism as a means of asymmetric warfare (ie., this is what you do when you don’t have comparable weaponry to that of your enemy)
- for suggesting that withdrawl from the territories is a logical first step towards resolution of the conflict
…Yerachmiel first accused me of “fighting for the other team” and then said rather matter-of-factly, “I bet you didn’t even have a bris,” meaning that I must not be circumcised, and therefore, must not legitimately be a Jew.
Apparently, if you believe that the occupation is bad for the Jews and that Palestinians are people entitled to the same rights and freedoms we Jews demand for ourselves, you clearly must not be Jewish. You must also obviously want the Palestinians to commit genocide against the Jews.
Rather than knocking his fucking teeth in, which is really what I wanted to do in that moment, I decided to simply say “goodbye” and walk away.
This is precisely the type of behavior I was referring to when, responding the AJCommitee’s paper on “‘Progressive Jewish Thought’ and the New Anti-Semitism,” I wrote:
From my own experience, I can say that the completely abhorrent and downright nasty way in which staunch Zionists often respond to challenges to their views can result in antipathy towards one’s fellow Jew.
For the next hour, my seething rage left Henry Ford looking amateurish in the art of Jew hatred.
Such behavior is THE definition of a chilul hashem. By desecrating your fellow, you desecrate the name of G-d. Yerachmiel desecrated me, I desecrated him and his kind, and together we desecrated G-d.
Kol hakavod.
***
Yesterday Erez Levanon, a resident of Bat Ayin, was stabbed to death by a Palestinian assailant.
Today an unnamed friend eulogized him as follows:
I am about to say something very un-Erez-like, though it is the truth, which is what Erez was all about. Erez died, and we believe that G-d’s actions flow from goodness and that there is a larger picture. But Erez did not die from Cancer or Diabetes. Erez was murdered for being a Jew in the Land of Israel – by Arabs. Vengeance is in order. We are currently under a government that does not make it possible at this time. But we will not forget, and the time will indeed come.
Moses Maimonides HaRambam, the most respected Torah scholar in Jewish history, once wrote,
“.ùàéï îùôèé äúåøä ð÷îä áòåìí àìà øçîéí åçñã åùìåí áòåìí”
That is, “It is not Torah law to make vengeance in the world, but to make compassion, kindness, and peace in the world.”
In this instance, the occupation has proved to be “bad for the Jews” on two counts:
- It has cost a Jew his life.
- His death was used to justify a compromise of Jewish values.
For pointing out this inconvenient truth, I have been branded a race traitor.
***
I posted the following to Jewschool last week. It further illustrates my point as to the manner in which the occupation has corrupted Jewish values.
Plenty more where that came from here.
***
After all that has been said about the “religious” and pseudo-religious and even halakhic reasons for maintaining Jewish rule over the territories and their Arab inhabitants, and for the annexation of the territories to the state of Israel, I have nothing to add to what already appeared in the Scriptures, the same Scriptures to which national religious fools appeal for support of their lust for conquest. Two thousand six hundred years ago, the prophet Ezekiel foresaw Gush Emunim and the arguments of its rabbis and leaders. His words read as though he knew in advance the words and terms they would use, and he already gave them a reply which penetrates to the heart of the matter.
Then the word of God came to me saying, Son of man, They that inhabit these waste places of the land of Israel speak, saying, Abraham was one man and yet he inherited the land, but we are many; the land is given us for inheritance. Therefore say to them, thus says the Lord God: You eat with the blood and lift up your eyes towards your idols, and shed blood; and shall you possess the land? You stand upon your sword, you carry out disgusting deeds, and you defile every man his neighbor’s wife; and shall you possess the land?
These words were not meant for Ezekiel’s own generation only. He said them to all generations, and especially to the generation of the “liberators of the Holy Land” in our time. The Jewish people has legitimate claims to this country. But these claims have no “religious cover.” To speak of the divine promise to Abraham and his issue as a gratuitous gift, to ignore the conditions of the promise, and to disregard the obligations it confers on the receivers is a degradation and desecration of religious faith.
—Yeshayahu Leibowitz
***
A final point, and one which I had intended to make to Yerachmiel but was too infuriated to do so:
It is often said that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But if you look inside your Tanakh, you will see that it is indeed we, the Jewish people, who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. G-d gives us one chance after another, and we consistently blow it, time and time again.
Indeed, G-d gave us the land of Israel. And we blew it — we turned our backs on him — and he threw us out, and turned his back on us.
We promised to wait out our redemption, but the goyim dealt too harshly with us, as it is said, and we returned to the land with force of arms, and not by His hand alone. And now that we are in the land, we soil it, day in and day out with poverty, exploitation, sex trafficking, arms trafficking, diamond trafficking, rape, murder. That’s before we even get into haredi and settler violence, let alone violence against Palestinians.
Tell me dear friend, to whom G-d has promised Eretz Yisrael, do you really believe G-d is on your side? Does it not appear, all the more so, as a ynet columnist implied last week, that G-d is a Leftist?
What miracle did G-d deliver you in Gush Katif and Amona? What divine intervention did he deliver Erez Levanon and countless other true-believers who fell to Arab sword? The walls of Jericho came tumbling down, “not by force of arms but by My hand alone.” Make no two bones about it: The land is chewing you up and spitting you out.
At what point do you concede that He is not on your side — that His back is still very much turned from you — and acknowledge the consequence that you are not fulfilling His will?
You blame the state? The secular Jews and the Leftists?
G-d delivers the righteous.
You?
You’re being delivered into the hands of your enemies.
Maybe you should open a Nach and read the story of Yehoshua see how you can find the the rights of the indigineous population upheld – the Torah’s perspective is not as 2 dimensional as you make it – also blaming every act of palestinian agression on Israeli policy is equally simplistic – Erev Levanon was murdered while praying by two Jew hating arabs – and Jew hating arabs existed well before the state of Israel came to be – finally, throwing up a video of some drunk teens as examples of the right wing is distortion at its best, should someone video the results of every leftist bong party and parade that as what you represent? Moshe Rabbeinu’s name is not in this weeks parsha , one explanation is becuse he defended the Jewish IDOL worshippers when G-d wanted to destroy them and Moshe said if you do so erase me from your book – this is a lesson to us , dont look for reasons why G-ds wrath should be vented on your brethren , look for reasons why G-d mercy and kindness should be revealed to us all even if some are on the level of Idol worshippers!
The problem with your argument about the occupation and Ezer’s death: you assume that Ezer’s death is because of the occupation. Only the murderer’s know their true motives. Maybe they were raised on anti-semitic propaganda via Hamas, maybe nationalist leftist Fatah ideology, maybe they were pressured by their family because of accusations of collaboration, maybe they read Leopold and Loeb… The logical conclusion would be that if the occupation ended, so would resistence to Israel’s existence. That is a faith assumption-more like the Left’s big fantasty. Israel , in a significant sense, left Gaza and more violence and bombing followed. Projecting leftist fantasties about dignified resistence onto Palestinians who don’t share your humanistic beliefs is as dangerous as the right-wing fantasies you rail against.
I was going to comment, but there’s no point really, the two comments above mine say everything I would have said. probably better than I would have said it.
I just want to talk to you for a second, anyways:
you have to also accept that you *could* be wrong.
I get it, you care about us Jews, you want us to be better, that’s your goal. I understand. BUT, what if we aren’t as bad as you think we are? What if the palestinians aren’t as good as you think they are?
I appreciate your perspective, and I think that there is a place for it in Judaism. (re: the Midrash that says by the splitting of the sea, “I destroyed all of my creations and now you are singing?!”)
Still, what if you are wrong? What is the recourse we would have after we would follow your ideas to their end?
That is my question to you.
—– some points that you are obviously aware of:
* It’s not like before “the occupation” there weren’t massacres of Jews in tsfat and hevron. What was the rationale back then? there wasn’t “poverty, exploitation, sex trafficking, arms trafficking, diamond trafficking, rape, murder.” If you could have lived in Israel back then, would you have come?
* Is there ANY context in which you would accept and recognise that we have spiritual/physical enemies who would like to keep us from Torah and Israel?
* The 10 harugei malchut were killed by people who were flesh and blood, enemies of Judaism and Torah, and Rambam doesn’t diss on those martyrs.
I just hate, Dan, that a terrible tragedy in the backyard of friends (my backyard, for example), has to immediately be an opportunity for a cussin’-filled battle of finger pointing. Why can’t we let a week go by before it gets ugly? Three kids, one of whom i’ve sat next to at the Shabbes table, are now orphans. The tears ain’t dry yet. Neither are my shoes after 3 hours in the rain at the funeral. Let’s just breathe for a moment, quietly contemplate our lives and deaths before going wild on Arab v. Jew, Left v. Right. You want to liquidate the settlements, and some jerk next to me wants to tear apart an Arab village. Christ Almighty, the whole thing is gross….
I havent commented before because I want to respect you, Dan. But every time I see things on your website – videos comments – it seems to me the message is – I believe that the Torah is about compassion and kindness and truth therefore my job is to inflame hatred of right wimg people, settlers, to show videos that prove how evil it is to be right wing, how to find some justification for Jews dying and how to not believe in anything except darkness. I know you better and know you have faith but struggle with it – and that you feel that there needs to be some other answer than the normative “religious” answers. I dont oblect to showing different sides of things, nor to highlighting the plight of Arabs and Palestinians. But of what use is it to sow hatred or to use holy people’s words about Judaism to twist out of proportion and context words and experiences. I believe you are bigger than that – that you hide behind the left wing anti-Zionist propaganda that you post here a real struggle. Be honest with it – show all sides – if you want to air videos like that – air videos of other people from Bat Ayin who are beautiful, if you want ot show demolitions, show also the pain of the children whose father was axed for NO LEGITIMATE REASON!! praying to G-d – someone who was the most gentle human being I have ever met. Or better yet show beautiful things, things that actually move the world twoards tikkun despite the pain and paradox, hope instead of hatred – love instead of anger. Or be silent .
I love you and believe in you and respect you but I am also incensed.
person A holds up a mirror to person B. person B doesn’t like his reflection. person B shoots person A.
i’m not aiming to “inflame hatred of right wimg people, settlers, to show videos that prove how evil it is to be right wing,” and g-d forbid i should ever been seen as seeking “justification for Jews dying.”
i don’t revel in attacking the right. and though i am expressing my displeasure with a particular world view, i’m not trying to increase hatred of the individuals or communities which express that world view, nor bring suffering upon them. i have family members who hold these same views. i don’t want any harm to come to them. no — rather, i am providing evidence of behavior that is wholly detrimental to the jewish people, the jewish state, and the jewish faith — behavior that stems from keeping with our “accepted wisdom” — and saying there is a problem here and we must fix it. i am grieving from our present state and pointing to the teachings of our forebears, saying the road out of this madness lies this way…
while it’s true that anyone can read my blogs, the fact is that i am talking to jews about jews. my goal isn’t to help palestinians for their sake, nor to sully the good name of the jews in front of der goyim, but rather to clean up my own house, to fix the problems in our community for our sake.
you can say “but not like this,” yet the fact of the matter is that little has been achieved in the way of progress without thrusting difficult issues out into the public sphere and calling for action upon them. how long did it take to get traction on the clergy abuse issue? how long was that swept under the rug for, before it was finally dealt with? it wasn’t until jewish bloggers like me forced such things onto the agenda.
look who’s here commenting on this issue? so far every comment has been critical and to the right of my position. yet this exchange right now — this is discourse. this is what i want. i want us discussing these issues openly and honestly with a determination towards positive resolution.
what i’m miffed about — and what i was trying to get across in this post, was that all too often, no matter how calm i am, no matter how polite, no matter how innocent my remarks, i am told that i must be either self-hating, antisemitic, or not jewish.
allow me to explain:
the other day i was having lunch with my friend and his dad. and i was explaining to his dad, i believe that the current policies in the territories are compromising the possibility of maintaining an independent jewish state, and that in order for israel to survive and preserve its jewish majority, it must act differently in its handling of the palestinian issue. again i took the position of supporting israel’s continued existence as a jewish state. yet what he heard was that i was advocating the dissolution of the state of israel because i criticized the occupation.
the very same thing happened with yerachmiel. i advocated what i believe in my heart of hearts to be pro-jewish and pro-israel views, promoting what i believe to be best for jewish survival and advancement. what he heard was a call for the destruction of the jewish people. yoseph had to interrupt yerachmiel several times to insist that he was mischaracterizing everything that i had said and twisting my words into a caricature of a leftist strawman. telling me that i wasn’t a jew was only the icing on the cake.
now raz, you have just engaged in the same behavior. you accuse me of seeking to tarnish the name of good jewish people; or of worse yet, justifying their deaths.
this is what i refer to as rube goldberg syndrome. goldberg’s known for his “inventions,” a series of drawings of crazy contraptions like so:
today, for many jews, when they hear anything critical of israeli policy or of the jewish community, the words filter through their minds and are warped into calls for genocide. when i say, “the occupation is killing jews,” what is heard is that i am justifying the killing of jews. it is a hysterical response that stands in the way of having any meaningful conversation that could bring about a resolution to this matter.
if a man loses control of his car on an icy highway and slams into a tree, and i say, “damn ice man…” did i justify his death?
i feel like i’m talking to a friggin’ wall. which only puts me in company with greater men than i, who likewise chided am yisrael for its misdoings and saw it through its self-destruction.
But of what use is it to sow hatred or to use holy people’s words about Judaism to twist out of proportion and context words and experiences.
to twist out of proportion? raz — are there not three men from bat ayin in prison right now, who were convicted in connection to a string of murders of palestinians, a stockpile of firearms and ammunition stashed in a cave outside kiryat arba, and a plot to blow up a midrassa in east jerusalem?
when talking about iranian president ahmadinejad, jews love to say, “if history’s taught us anything, it’s that when someone threatens to kill jews, you should believe they will.” well, likewise, when people in bat ayin — “the hill of the crazy people” — call for revenge, i believe they want revenge and that they’re willing to pursue it.
if you honestly don’t think that this “liberal attitude” towards engaging in violence against palestinians is not pervasive throughout gush etzion, and totally considered acceptable by the mainstream orthodox community, you are deluding yourself, and so too to the detriment of our entire people.
show all sides – if you want to air videos like that – air videos of other people from Bat Ayin who are beautiful, if you want ot show demolitions, show also the pain of the children whose father was axed for NO LEGITIMATE REASON!!
raz, there are literally hundreds of jewish websites that serve that role. i am the keeper of two out of less than a dozen jewish weblogs that are critical of what’s going on here from a devoutly jewish perspective. and yet still, i often show the beauty of our chevra, when, for example, i celebrate their simchas and do my best to share them with their friends and family across the globe; and when i promote their events; and showcase the design projects i’ve volunteered for them; and mention my love and appreciation for them and the torah they share regularly in my blogposts.
i am sorry your friend died, i truly am.
all i’m saying is, i don’t want any more jews to die. most of all not for a cause so far removed from its original intent that we have lost ourselves in a wasteland of certitudes.
“perhaps we should not have encouraged them to use cordless microphones for they have walked too far from the source and are emitting a lesser frequency.” — saul williams
i want to talk about it. i want to resolve it. you want me to “be silent.” but i cannot be silent. because as we continue to avoid the issue, it continues to get worse. i simply will not allow people i love, respect, and care for — jewish people — to destroy themselves and our tradition because they don’t want to be made uncomfortable.
if you want to learn with me the halakhot of tokhakha and help me find the greatest clarity from which to deliver my rebuke, i am happy to sit with you. however, if you want to convince me there’s no problem here, that there’s nothing to rebuke, i frankly have better uses for my time.
Dan, people seem to like nothing better than the ‘us-them’ game. In this game, nothing beats an attack on moderating, progressive thinkers. As a student of politics/deeply divided societies and political economy, I’ve learned to avoid almost any public gathering that purports to deal with the issues of identity or political resolution in Israel or Palestine. The extremists seem to come out of the woodwork and whether it is Zionist or Palestinian nationalist, it makes me nauseated. I’m a Zionist who firmly believes and defends the existence of a Jewish & democratic state, a practicing Conservative Jew, and a democratic socialist. I’m also in the realist camp that doesn’t believe that Israel and Palestine can be zero-sum. Once one starts thinking about resolution in a tangible way, the question of where partition must occur and where permanent borders will be drawn clearly show that most of the deeper settlements will have to be dismantled. And full sovereignty guaranteed for the full territorial area of the Palestinian state, including their control over external borders. This does present a hard choice for the settlers, unless they wish to be the first Jewish citizens of modern Palestine…but talking about that question is like asking to be sacrificed instead of the ram.
Anyway, I get you, achi. Keep faith and don’t let the truth about a just peace get lost in the ideological propaganda.
UNfortumately Dan you plugged me into one of your boxes – I hold this way, therefore I am accusing you of… I reacted much more harshly to videos that you choose to put on, videos taken ourt of context, not given any background except “The Hell WE have Wrought” or other such illuminating sound love-filled comments. I accept the need for tochecha – and I appreciate much of what you comment about even when I strongly disagree. But you are in denial if you can’t see how the descriptions you give and the energy put out doesn’t also feed negative energy in the world. I do not advise you to be silent nor is it wrong to express protest against wrongs that you perceive anyone, Jewish or not to be doing. I appreciate that. I would think you woudl be mediocre were you silent. I just believe you could be much broader a person were you to realize the paradoxes instead of giving blanket solutions that put the responsibility for death and destruction squarely on a group of people who overwhelmingly have much more restraint than you give them credit for. I left Bat Ayin partially because of my frustration with “A good Arab is a dead Arab” etc. And then Erez dies – a soul who is bringing more peace to the world than you or I ever will, despite him upholding “policies that are detrimental to the Jewish people” as you woudl have us all believe. And I realize that Hashem is bigger than ideologies and systems – including the anti-Zionist ones you espouse – and I saay that word because you think as you have expressed to me that Zionism has been damaging to the Jewish people – and i respect your perspective – dont shy away from it.
I do not think you are self-hating or anti-semitic or anything like that and whoever thinks that is so small they are not worth discussing – but I do think you nbeed to take responsibility for the energy that your postings put out in the world in the name of holy tochecha.
I am sorry for the flack you get that is not truthfully directed or true to Torah or humaneness – but I am angry at the sin’at chinam that I feel some of the things you put out inflame.
Or you could just assume I am another of those right-wing blind inhuman distorters of the Torah and therefore justify boxing me in and not needing to take a deep look inside to the place that you really do believe Hashem is good.
I have more faith in you. I dont think things are simple or that we as a people dont have a lot of soulsearching, but from a place of compassion and most importantly TO a place of compassion. AND i would love to share that place with you, with our differences expressed fully.
One more thing – just because there are other places that speak out beuatiful things doesnt mean that davka on a website that contains a large degree of tochecha those things would not be more powerful.
Dan- Everything is blasts of propaganda from you. That’s what’s so hard to handle. Look at my comment– all I said was that maybe we can all breathe for a moment and mourn Erez instead of launching into a poltical posting the day after his funeral. I wasn’t criticizing your positions, just the methods. I hate the racism/homophobia/blanket Judeocentricism in the Bat Ayin Beit Midrash far more than anything you could say to me.
Remember- Me n’ You organized Nasrallapalooza together. But still you make the blanket statement- “so far every comment has been critical and to the right of my position.” That just isn’t fair reporting, and I think it’s a symptom of what bothers honest, sensitive thinkers like Raz when you make what are often attacks, not merely statements of position. Not the jerks who call you an antisemite for disagreeing, but the people who ARE willing to explore challenging perspectives and ARE on the side of humanity and peace for ALL HUMAN BEINGS…. like me. I hope these HTML tags work.
I am so sorry to hear of the death of one of your compatriots, to hear that he was murdered, not by ‘Arabs’, as was stated in the eulogy, but by an unnamed Palestinian murderer. Does anyone know the motive for this cruel waste of life? Was it, as is assumed, an act of hate-out-of-nowhere, or does this murderer, like the Gazan suicidal murderer in Eilat recenty, have a name, a history, a background?
To ask these questions is not to stand with the murderer – it is an attempt to discover the murderer’s identity, background, and motive behind the taking of Erez’ life.
i don’t know what the police have discovered, but i heard that one of the young men was from the main fmaily clan in the village of Safra (maybe that is a wrong spelling or even pronunciation of the name of the village across the way), and the other fellow was from a Bedouin family that lived in a poorer area outside of the town. They were around 17 or 18 years old. That’s about all I know right now. The names are easily found on Israeli news sites, I am just being lazy at 2am about finding them. I am not sure why you make a correction on the term “Arabs,” Luther. Palestinians are Arabs, right? I mean, if I was arrested running naked through the streets of Jerusalem attacking people with clothespins, it would be valid to say that a “Jew,” “Man,” “resident of Bat Ayin,” “American Oleh,” “yeshiva bachor,” “karaoke king,” “whiny blogger” or “funkmaster” had been arrested. None capture my essence, but all are accurate…