Reflections
D'vrei Torah by Rabbi Ellie Shemtov
Jerusalem of Gold by Naomi Shemer
Avir harim tzalul kayayin Vereiach oranim, Nisa beru'ach ha'arbayim Im kol pa'amonim. Uvetardemat ilan va'even Shvuyah bachalomah, Ha'ir asher badad yoshevet Uvelibah chomah. Chorus: Yerushalayim shel zahav Veshel nechoshet veshel or Halo lechol shirayich ani kinor. (x2) The song I just sang Jerusalem of Gold, was written by Naomi Shemer and sung by Shuli Natan at the Israeli Music Festival on May 15, 1967, shortly before the Six Day War. Only 3 weeks later, the Israel Defense Forces captured the eastern part of Jerusalem and the Old City from the Jordanians. The words of the song describe: The mountain air is clear as wine and the scent of pines Is carried on the breeze of twilight with the sound of bells. And in the slumber of tree and stone captive in her dream The city that sits solitary and in its midst is a wall. Jerusalem of gold and of copper, and of light Behold I am a violin for all your songs. One of my early memories as a child is of a phone call my mother made to Israel during the Six-day war. She was trying to reach her sister -- trying to reach her because back then you didn’t just dial the number and automatically reach your party. It was a bit more complicated. To make an international call, one first had to dial zero to get an operator who would then help you. You could also ask to speak to an overseas operator and then give that person the number you were calling. While I don’t remember exactly what happened, my recollection is that a few hours later, the operator called back and let my mother know the call went through and she could now talk with her sister. Whatever the actual chain of events that resulted in my mother speaking with her sister Rachel were she made the call because one; she wanted to make sure my aunt and her family were ok; and two, she wanted to ask my aunt to put her two children David and Michal on a plane – to come and stay with us in the United States till the war was over. In a typical Israeli response, my aunt said no. Her children would stay in Israel. While it was hard to get news from Israel in a timely manner in 1967, by 1991 and the start of the Gulf War, much had changed. CNN was the first network to broadcast a war. It was the first real war that had live satellite coverage and the first-time viewers could watch a war unfold live.[1] So, when a scud missile landed on the block near where my Aunt Rachel and Uncle Tzvi lived in Tel Aviv, their son David -that same David now living in the United States- watched it land, recognized where it landed and called to check on his parents. It was all pretty much instantaneous. Today, not only can we reach folks in Israel in an instant, we now have multiple ways in which to contact our family and friends there—by phone, text, email, and apps on our phones like Whatsapp. There was a lot of that going when on Oct. 7th 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups infiltrated 22 Israeli towns and army bases, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages. The militants crossed into Israel by land, sea and air and the attack included breaching the border fence, disabling radar and communications towers, firing thousands of rockets toward cities as far away as Jerusalem and seizing military bases. More than three dozen Thai guest workers were killed and hundreds of civilians, homes, and buildings were burned.[2] As we approach the first anniversary of these horrific events, I want to take a step back. I want to take a closer look at some of the disinformation that has been out there, most of it before October 7th, but which has been broadcast much more loudly and frequently since October 7th. We’ll start with Zionism. Zionism is the Jewish movement for self-determination in the Land of Israel. It is the ancient longing of the Jewish people to return to their, to our ancestral homeland. That longing has been a constant theme for the past 2500 years[3] perhaps most famously conveyed by Yehuda HaLevi, the 12th century Rabbi, poet, and philosopher who lived in Muslim Spain. My heart is in the east and I am at the edge of the west. Then how can I taste what I eat, how can I enjoy it? How can I fulfill my vows and pledges while Zion is in the domain of Edom? And I am in the bonds of Arabia. Going back even earlier to the Tanakh, Zion is the name of a hill in Jerusalem as well as the name of the city itself. It is also the name of a Jebusite fortress that King David captured in the 10th century BCE. The term Zion also shows up in one of the more well-known of the psalms, 137: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion. When a Jew dies, mourners are comforted with the words “May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” Few terms however, are more loaded, misunderstood, or abused than Zionism. Depending on how you use it, the word has become a kind of political litmus test: a badge of pride or an insult. And how you use it, or if you use it at all, tends to indicate how you feel about Israel.[4] In her book Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse frames it this way. Zionism is the solution to Jewish powerlessness; Israel is the guarantor of the Jews’ safety. This term Zionism has always been a bit controversial, but the tone of the conversation about Zionism took a sharp turn in 1975, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism. Resolution 3379 went further than any other previous anti-Israel initiative. Whereas prior UN resolutions had stated that racism should be eliminated, the new message was that if Zionism is a form of racism, then it and the state it created must also be stamped out.[5] The resolution never defined Zionism nor did it explain how and why Zionism is a form of racism. Of the thousands of independence and nationalist movements in the world, including Palestinian nationalism, only the Jewish movement has ever had a UN resolution condemning it. The resolution was repealed in 1991 but the damage was done. [6] The modern-day Zionist movement picked up steam in the 1880s. Against a backdrop of violent pogroms and rising antisemitism, waves of Zionists; waves of Jews, immigrated to Palestine.[7] Rural collective communities and urban communities were established in towns built on land purchased – legally purchased, from absentee Ottoman landlords. Many early immigrants found life very difficult and returned home. But many others stayed, purchasing more land, negotiating with the Ottoman authorities and promoting immigration into the growing Jewish community.[8] My great grandfather Avram Yitzhak made his way to Palestine in the early 1890’s and was one of those Zionists who stayed, although my understanding is it took him a few trips back and forth to his home Neshvitz in Belarus, before he permanently settled in Palestine. Avram Yitzhak was a member of the Bilu, which stands for Beit Ya'akov Lekhu Venelkhah, Let the House of Jacob Go.[9] Up until this time, Jews went to Israel for religious reasons and they mostly relied on the charitable contributions of Jewish organizations for their survival. The members of the Bilu, however believed that it was not only time for Jews to live in Israel, but to make their living there as well. Making a living meant farming and owning a piece of land. Despite what many protesters are yelling about Jews stealing land, that is not what happened. Land was purchased and those purchases took place in sparsely populated areas. As a matter of official Zionist policy, the Jews did not purchase land occupied by fellahin, or Arab farmers. Only if a fellah left his place of settlement was there an offer to buy his land.[10] Much of the land purchased was uncultivated, malaria-infested swamps, rocky, or sandy land. It’s a very well-known story about the Jews draining the swamps to rid their towns of malaria. My grandfather Eliezer was one of those responsible for bringing Eucalyptus trees from Australia to drain the swamps in his town of Hadera, where he grew up -- the town my great grandfather helped to found and where my great grandmother died of malaria. Jewish organizations were willing to pay exorbitant prices. For example, rich black soil in Iowa sold for $110/acre while Jews paid $1,000/acre for arid and semi-arid land in Palestine.[11] By 1947, Jews owned 463,000 acres of land in Palestine. Some of that land was purchased from the government, some from churches, and some from Arab landowners. Far from being built on stolen land, Israel is the only state built partly on purchased land. The rest of the land that became part of Israel came from public lands previously part of the Ottoman Empire.[12] Well, some might argue, if the Jews legally bought land, they didn’t legally settle on the land. They were settler colonialists. This is another of the chants heard in protests this past year that Israel is a “settler colonial enterprise.” Colonialism is when a country or empire imposes control and power over other peoples or territories by establishing colonies. Settler colonialism is a specific type of colonialism in which foreign settlers aim to replace the Indigenous population. This “replacement” of the Indigenous population happens in a multitude of ways including genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Zionist movement in the 1880’s didn’t start as an attempt by an empire at colonial expansion. It was a voluntary movement by European Jews fleeing religious and political persecution.[13] Jews are not settler colonialists because they are indigenous to the land of Israel and they never had the goal of eliminating the Arab population living in the region. They accepted the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which divided British Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Historian Barbara Tuchman once described Israel as “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.”[14] In addition, while European settler colonialists settled colonies to enrich their motherlands, and maintained a connection to their home countries to which they could return if they so wished, Jews who came to Palestine had no motherland in Europe to enrich.[15] Then there is that word Palestine. A popular meme on social media that has been making the rounds since last Xmas is that Jesus was a Palestinian. Although many Palestinians today are Christians, Jesus himself was not one.[16] He was born to Jewish parents in a place called Judea, not Palestine. He lived as a Jew, and he died as a Jew. In the time of Jesus, Palestine didn’t exist. In the second century, Judea, which was the epicenter of large-scale Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, was renamed Syria Palaestina—later simply Palaestina—by the Romans a full century after the death of Jesus. The assertion that Jesus was Palestinian is often made in an effort to negate Jewish history, to insist that only Palestinians, and not Jews, have a claim to the land.[17] This absolutist claim provides a seedbed for the radical belief that Jews do not deserve a country of their own in even a part of their ancestral homeland. Jesus may not have been a Palestinian Jew, but you know who was – my mother. As her passport affirmed, Aliza Blumrosen was born in Palestine, before the establishment of the state of Israel. As author Dara Horn writes: The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.[18] While Dara Horn’s words ring true, I would like to end with a more hopeful message – a message written by the former chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory: To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope. Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against escapism, resignation and the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism, the religion of the free God, is a religion of freedom. Jewish faith is written in the future tense. It is belief in a future that is not yet but could be. We have returned to the cisterns, to the market and to the market-place A ram's horn calls out on the Temple Mount in the Old City. And in the caves in the mountains thousands of suns shine - We will once again descend to the Dead Sea, by way of Jericho! Chorus: Yerushalayim shel zahav Veshel nechoshet veshel or Halo lechol shirayich ani kinor. x2 L’shana tova tikatayvu, May you be inscribed for a good year and thank you to Dr. Bill Liss-Levinson for these words -- “May we all find the inner and communal strength to meaningfully fulfill our roles and responsibilities, bringing more Torah, love, peace, compassion, justice and understanding into the world.” [1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/01/politics/wolf-blitzer-gulf-war-iraq-kuwait-cnn/index.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-attack.html [3] https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/zionism-what-the-heck-is-it [4] Daniel Sokatch. Can We Talk About Israel? (Bloomsbury, 2021) 35 [5] https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/is-zionism-white-supremacy [6] Ibid [7] Daniel Sokatch. Can We Talk About Israel? (Bloomsbury, 2021) 40 [8] Ibid. 41 [9] Isaiah 2:5 [10] https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/19th-century-immigration-to-the-land-of-israel [11] https://www.israelanswers.com/blog/was-israel-founded-stolen-land [12] https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/the-myth-of-no-peace-on-stolen-land [13] https://www.jta.org/2024/08/25/ideas/a-literary-critic-on-why-the-settler-colonial-framing-is-deadly-for-israel-and-palestine [14] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/jewish-history-jesus-settler-colonialism-claims/677149/ [15] https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/settler-colonialist [16] Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians - The Atlantic [17] Ibid [18] The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning - The Atlantic Comments are closed.
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