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Ive lived in Israel for 22 years, at Kibbutz Lotan in the Arava Desert for 21. This year has been an interesting one in Israel, this summer has been amazing. Thousands of Israelis moved out of their homes and camped in the streets, for five weeks, in a wave of protest that started against the high cost of housing and ended as a broad cry for Social Justice across the board. There was an exhilarating feeling in the air. Even a terror attack on the Egyptian border near Eilat didnt stop the protests, even the Palestinian rockets that fell on Beer Sheva and Ashkelon only brought a brief lull in the weekly Saturday night protest marches. What were those protests about? People want more than just economic wellbeing. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his great book The Prophets, explores the relationship between spiritual truth and political power, and the clarion call for justice in Biblical Israel. Israels government, it seems to the protestors, is more preoccupied with profits (with an F) than prophets (with a PH). On Israel's streets this summer, in the many 'Tents of Meeting' this call has been ringing out again, demanding that social justice be put at the center of its public agenda. The tent cities have come down and its still too soon to see if anyone will be able to create any electoral leverage out of the summers excitement. The polls are pessimistic, and the next election is scheduled for 2013. Many pundits think the success of the tent protests was rooted in the fact that these protestors didnt speak about the elephant in the room, the Elephant that sits
in the middle of Israel and has paralyzed its politics for forty three years the occupation of the Palestinians. And the American Jewish community is also struggling with how to engage about Israel because of this same elephant. Rabbi Melissa Weintraub has spoken about the three most common avenues for Israel engagement in the Jewish community: Avoidance. In a speech last winter, Melissa said that every one of the organizations that make up the Jewish social justice movement in this country has an organizational policy to avoid discussion of Israel. We cant possibly, they say, build a broad coalition on issues like Darfur, the environment, or poverty, if we touch Israel that troublesome powder keg, perennial elephant in the room. Rabbis of every denomination have voiced fear of saying anything in relation Israel. Rabbis are afraid to get fired for anything they might say about Israel. The second avenue is Mutual antagonism. Attacks and counter-attacks on OpEd pages and in the blogosphere, egged on by media groups from both right and left primed to spring into action in response to perceived criticism on the one hand or defense on the other of Israeli policy. Character assassinations, mutual vilification, reckless caricatures of each others positions, counter-accusations of misrepresentation. Unraveled relationships in families, synagogues, local and national institutional Jewish communities. The third option, she calls collective solipsism (though it really could be called avoidance 2.0). And that is Israel-related advocacy and activism that involves congregating, conferencing, and talking exclusively to those
with whom we agree. That is, the Jewish people splinters into self-affirming nuclei of our respective organizations, each of them morally superior and self-certain, talking past one another, or now and then colliding in frustration and hostility. We each rally, mobilize and take pride in the numbers of those who are with us, while dismissing those who arent as dangerous, ignorant, malicious or loony. These are the three predominant modes of Israel engagement in American Jewish life. To counter this trend, to introduce the radical concepts of LISTENING and CIVILITY, Melissa and a few other young leaders created a new organization just a couple of years ago. Encounter is dedicated to bringing together Jews to discuss Israel, to encounter Palestinians face to face, and to overcome stereotypes, both within the Jewish Community and between the American Jewish community, Israel, and Palestine. Many of us want to engage the next generation in Jewish life. Recent studies document what many of us know anecdotally: a sharp decline among Israel engagement and attachment of those under the age of 35. They tested the marketing of Israel advocacy organizations seeking to assist young Jews on college campuses to defend Israel against its critics. And what they found is pervasive aversion, AVERSION. Israel Advocacy messaging inadvertently turns off the vast majority of Jews under the age of 35. Why? They found that young Jews want welcoming, inclusive settings in which to listen, explore, ask hard questions, and decide for them selves what they think in an open exchange of ideas. Relatedly: They found that young
Jews want to be exposed to nuance and diversity of perspective, not blackand-white thinking. My guess is that these findings are true for many of us in the boomer generation and older. Only our experience of anti-semitism is stronger, our memories of the Shoah and the wars of the 1960s and 70s are not just history lessons. We may have a deep existential fear that our children lack. Thank God, they have not had their lives threatened for being Jewish. Thus their Jewish identity may not be threatened from without. But it may be threatened from within if we do not heed what Melissa Weintraub and her associates say. I made Aliyah 22 years ago because I felt that Israel was in danger of becoming a country with which Jewish youth like me might not be able to identify. Less than a month later, a wave of Russian immigration increased Israels population by nearly 20%. The freedom of Soviet Jews, for which I had protested in the 1980s, brought to Israel a million new voters, unaccustomed to democratic life, easily convinced by demagoguery. My one vote has been drowned out, and young Jews in the US today are increasingly alienated by Israel. This isnt to say they dont care about their Jewish Identity. They care passionately. They engage core Jewish values of feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick. They gather on the holidays, celebrating and studying. Encounter is committed to creating a safe container for right and leftwing Jews to encounter each other with real mutual listening and respect, to sit down in front of the separation barrier together and grapple with what it
means. Often participants claim that our trips are the first time theyve been able to hear other Jews who think differently than them, let alone Palestinians. An orthodox rabbi who participated in an Encounter tour of Bethlehem wrote the following: I realized that while Ive been sitting at home worrying about how my experiences in Bethlehem and Hebron could create negative PR for Israel, my students have been out in the world hearing those messages from a hundred other sources. They hear about it in the news. They hear about it in their public schools. And they hear about it from each other. These issues are on the consciousnesses of young North American Jews. If they dont hear about whats happening from me, theyll hear about it from someone else. Someone who is likely to have a strong anti-Israel bias, and who will present the information without balance and nuance. So last week I shared my Encounter experiences with my Grade 12 class. Many students in the class had decided, based on what they had heard from other sources, to turn against Israel entirely. They were embarrassed about what goes on in the West Bank, and were using that as reason to give up on the whole Israel experiment. They didnt see constructive criticism as an option. They had never heard someone criticize Israel out of love. I was able to model an approach for them that balances a love for Israel and a recognition of Israels mistakes. It was a perspective that they needed to hear. And it was thanks to Encounter that I was able to present it to them.
Our children need to hear us challenging our own thinking, thinking out our most complex problems aloud, and bringing our venerable tradition to bear on them. We must be willing to live with complexity. I dont know if you heard the speeches at the UN last week. I listened to President Abbas speech and found myself agreeing with almost everything he said. And then I listened to Prime Minister Netanyahus speech, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with everything he said, too. Israel is a country. A country with a lot of challenges, indeed, but none of them are as existential as the alienation of Jews around the world. Prime Minister Netanyahu demands recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. This summers protesters demanded that a Jewish state must act Jewishly, caring for the weak and the poor. Israels existence will not be threatened by honest, meaningful discussion within the American Jewish Community. It can only be strengthened, and so can you. Shuva Yisrael return, Israel the haftara of this Shabbat Shuva calls upon us to return, return to our Prophetic values, return to the path of justice and right action. Hillel reads the commandment love your neighbor as yourself as what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. Listening to one another can be a great start. Shuva Yisrael return, Israel, return to civil conversation, return to grappling with a difficult topic, to agreeing to disagree, to accepting one another regardless of our political positions.