Opening Doors- Pesah and Purim Jews

Yossi Klein Halevi, CJN, March 11, 2013

Jewish history speaks to our generation in the voice of two biblical commands to remember. The first voice commands us to remember that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, and the message of that command is: “Don’t be brutal.” The second voice commands us to remember how the tribe of Amalek attacked us without provocation while we were wandering in the desert, and the message of that command is: “Don’t be naive.”

The first command is the voice of Passover, of liberation; the second is the voice of Purim, commemorating our victory over the genocidal threat of Haman, a descendant of Amalek.

“Passover Jews” are motivated by empathy with the oppressed; “Purim Jews” are motivated by alertness to threat.

Both are essential; one without the other creates an unbalanced Jewish personality, a distortion of Jewish history and values.

Part 2

One reason the Palestinian issue is so wrenching for Jews is that it is the point on which the two commands of our history converge: the stranger in our midst is represented by a national movement that wants to usurp us.

And so a starting point of a healthy North American Jewish conversation on Israel would be acknowledging the agony of our dilemma.

Imagine an Orthodox rabbi, a supporter of the settlers in Hebron, delivering this sermon to his congregation: “My friends, our community has sinned against Israel. For all our devotion to the Jewish state and our concern for its survival, we have failed to acknowledge the consequences to Israel’s soul of occupying another people against its will.”

Now imagine a liberal rabbi, a supporter of J Street, telling his congregation: “My friends, our community has sinned against Israel. For all our devotion to the Jewish state and our concern for its democratic values, we have failed to acknowledge the urgency of existential threat once again facing our people.”

When North American Jews internalize or at least acknowledge each other’s anxieties, the shrillness of much of the North American Jewish debate over Israel will give way to a more nuanced conversation.

The good news is that parts of the Jewish community have begun that process. Jews from left and right are quietly meeting across the country, trying to nurture a civil conversation on Israel.

But civility is only the starting point. The goal is to create multi-dimensional Jews, capable of holding more than one insight about Israeli reality.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Avudraham, Ha Lachma Anya

Kol Dichpin- All who are hungry on Passover night, beacause we are not permitted to eat Matza on Erev Pesach should come and eat immediately.

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo- excerpt from "Spilling to Avoid Undesirable Hate", Uri L'Tzedek, Pesach, Food and Justice Supplement

Only in the privacy of one’s home, where one knows he can call for revenge and be confident that he will be taken seriously but not so seriously that it will be turned into reality. Where one can say what he means, let off steam, get it out of his system and be sure that in spite of it all, he would not hurt a fly.

Only with God, the ultimate home, can we unburden our feelings. Only He knows how to deal with human frustrations, and not get carried away. He will know what we really have in mind and whether or not to take action.

Far from what one may think, shefoch chamatcha is not a prayer of incitement. It is a prayer born out of pain, in which we ask God to redeem us from all the hate which we Jews have experienced over thousands of years. To this very day. We just have to let off steam. It is up to Him to decide how to respond. It is not our business to assist Him in this. In fact, it is forbidden to be of any support.

Judaism does not allow any waste. Only in a few instances is one allowed to spill. And just a tiny bit. To teach a fundamental lesson on how to approach life. To learn not to waste our souls or risk our stake in God. Why, after all, is it forbidden to waste? So that we may recognize the overflow of the beauty of life.

Shefoch chamatcha is a prayer spoken at the moment of great intimacy between God and us. A prayer in which we try to master what is inferior in us and grow beyond its words. May this prayer soon disappear from the Haggadah. When hate will cease to exist and there will no longer be need of an outlet for our frustrations. When we will be able to live and let live in pure love. When we will dwell on a word in our prayers and transform it into the realization of our ultimate dream—from feelings of frustration into emotions of love.

RABBI SID SCHWARZ, JUDAISM AND JUSTICE: THE JEWISH PASSION TO REPAIR THE WORLD (JEWISH LIGHTS, 2006) PP. 157-159. Israel: Between Conscience and Solidarity

The fact that the place of Israel in the mind of American Jews transitioned from a source of great pride to one of excruciating moral dilemma in the space of just twenty years relates directly to our understanding of Jewish historical consciousness. Jews are driven by their twin impulses to survive as a people (Exodus) and to help the world be ordered in accordance with a higher moral standard (Sinai). When confronted by the difficult reality that these twin objectives might be in conflict, as was the case in the decades following the Six-Day War, Jews went in two different directions. Some Jews rallied to Israel’s support and redoubled their efforts to protect and defend Israel. Other Jews, no less concerned about Israel’s survival, nevertheless attempted to hold successive Israeli governments accountable for any actions that might be interpreted as an abuse of power or an obstacle to eventual peaceful coexistence in the region. The gap in the perceptions of the respective camps, Exodus and Sinai, was enormous.

The Exodus perception of the Middle East conflict by American Jews was that Israel was subjected to an unfair double standard in the court of world opinion. Motivated by a sense of historical justice, Exodus Jews would claim that the Jews had but one state in the Middle East where Arabs claimed more than twenty. The Jewish state was a haven for Jews surviving the Holocaust and fleeing persecution in the years since the end of World War II. Israel fought its wars to defend itself against Arab aggression, not to capture more territory. There were numerous examples of Arab rejectionism, such as the PLO’s Cairo resolution of 1974, which advanced the idea that Palestinians should accept any offer of territory from Israel with the intention of using it as a forward base to destroy the state of Israel…

…There is, of course, another perception of the Middle East conflict. Quite apart from those critics of Israel who are from outside the Jewish community (and there are many), there are numerous Jewish organizations that have criticized selected actions of the Israeli government or trends in Israeli society… (Such) groups are not unconcerned about threats to Israel’s survival, but they are primarily motivated by the Sinai impulse of Jewish identity. They expect the Jewish state to be guided by the values of righteousness and justice that have guided Jews since the dawn of history. They expect the Jewish state to live up to the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, and to be a country “based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.” They expect that a people, so long oppressed, would look into the eyes of their Palestinian neighbors, identify with their plight, and act with sympathy and compassion.

In terms of Israel-related Jewish organizations, the relationship between the more pragmatic Exodus camp and the more idealistic Sinai camp is often uneasy. The former certainly is far better organized and represents the predominant perspective of the organized Jewish community. The latter often feels itself unheard and disenfranchised by those who have the ear of public officials as representatives of the organized Jewish community. When Israel faces a crisis, as it did with the second intifada, Jewish individuals or groups that are not in step with the communal party line find themselves facing ostracism, if not worse.

Peggy Mcintosh's definition of privelege- "an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious." http://www.winnipeg.ca/clerks/boards/citizenequity/pdfs/white_privilege.pdf