The Jewish people have survived for thousands of years without Israel. But we have not survived for one moment without the power of the question. The recent rejection of J Street by a major American Jewish coalition is a sign of powerful factions of Jews who in an alleged defense of their positions on Israel, have declared a kind of cultural war with the question. In doing so, from deep inside our culture, they declared a war against the very essence of Judaism: cultivating the heart, mind, family, community, and spirit through reverence for asking the question. Despite the fact that my spirituality is not committed explicitly to the teachings of the Torah but more grounded in a universal psycho-social Jungian kind of spiritualism (that is pretty consistent with my hearts understanding of Kabbalah) and despite my left wing definitions of Israel, I am neither a self-hating Jew nor do I reject the need for a Jewish state. On the contrary, I embrace it. But a Jewish state that no longer has room for the question has, for me, lost the essence of being Jewish in the first place. At the end of the day, it is not for me to say what is right and what is wrong (though I obviously try often in Facebook rants), nor is it for me to tell someone if they are acting American or Jewish or what the dictates of a specific religious faith are. And regardless of these limitations, I humbly put forward my belief in the power of the question. I hope to worship the question regardless of whatever uncertainty it may bring. Answers ebb and flow. Any day now, science will use the contributions of a great scientist to negate the theories and explanations posed by that scientist. And future scientists will negate the findings of those scientists. But it is foolish to believe that any one will ever negate the importance of their questions. Judaism has survived because of its commitment to worshipping a God that asks to be questioned. That the current nation of Israel and its current prevailing administration hold more rank than the Divine is an insinuation as blasphemous as it is absurd. If American Jews - myself - included, cannot allow all questions to be on the table, are we truly living out the essence of Judaism? And if we are actively working against the question as I believe this coalition has in regards to J Street - arent we doing more harm to the state of the Jewish people than any outside force could ever inflict upon us? We have survived occupation and persecution by the Romans (one of our own accidentally founded a religion that converted their entire empire into believing in the basic precepts of Torah). We have survived more attempts of genocide than one can name. We have survived the Inquisition, the Crusades, the pograms, and even the Nazis, Third Reich, and the Holocaust that they inflicted upon us. We have survived these unimaginable horrors due to our ability to argue, celebrate, eat, love, and question. But it is the celebration of the question that has allowed us to not only survive but to thrive. That modern American Jews have formed alliances with evangelical Christians that reject any questioning of any thing. That they have rejected J Streets ability to, in their own autonomy as Jews, add to the debate a redefinition of what it means to be pro-Israel....this is the crux of the problem. Yes, everyone has a side and a perspective on this war (including the Palestinians and millions of Arabs and even the fundamentalist Christians whose culture has a legacy of persecuting both Jew and Arab and fundamentally putting us in this mess to begin with). But these differences do not, for me, form the crux of the problem. The crux of the greatest threat to Israel is amongst my own people. I believe in our abilities and the state of the Jewish peoples integral relationship to the question, more than I believe in our possession of a Jewish state. And so that begs the question of what has been revealed in American Jewish culture when J Street was rejected as not mainstream because of the wide questions that a wide variety of Jews have been asking for decades. The question is to be celebrated, wrestled with, sometimes agonized over. But we do not lose our faith in our power to question, or we lose faith in who we are as a people and our holy relationship with the world of the sacred.
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 22:02:20 +0000
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