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American Antisemitism: Right and Left

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I’m less interested in faulting the American Left as a general movement for the increase in attacks against American Jews than I am in understanding the government’s timeline for targeting Jewish citizens and in the question of whether the groups coalescing around antisemitism will drop their opposition to the government and support such state targeting of Jewish people.

There is a lot packed into this and I find neither the Right’s argument that the Left poses the greatest antisemitic threat to American Jewry nor the Left’s argument that Leftist antisemites are an exception to the rule, very persuasive.

Liberation as Historical Fact

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Most blessings conclude in a participle – describing the Creator as the One who does things.

The subsequent blessing after the Shema concludes with a perfect verb – describing the Creator as the One who liberated Yisrael.

This unique praise of God expresses a fact of history: some 3700 years ago, the Creator intervened in human affairs, and both physically liberated an oppressed nation from within the world’s most powerful empire and spiritually (psycho-socially) liberated them from an oppressive worldview and culture by giving them a new, just Law.

In this blessing, we testify it is true: thus is our history and thus is the Shaper of our history.

It is not a matter of personal aspiration but one of historical inspiration.

Our ancestors were, in fact, liberated and they did, in fact, pass on that liberty to us.

And what will we do with that liberty?

First we kneel in wonder.

Then we stand in the presence of the king, who liberated us.

Die or Repent

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It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, right wing or left wing or centrist.

The world seems divided into those who think bad people should die and those who think bad people should repent.

And those who think bad people should die are in the streets and in the halls of power.

Anti-Zionism Is a Form of Antisemitism

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The freedom to fully live by our covenant in the land of our ancestors is an expression of the human right to choose the very order of one’s earthly existence.

It does not preclude other rights or others’ rights – but it is an inalienable right nonetheless.

If you deny my brothers and sisters that freedom, then you are maintaining a prejudiced belief towards them.

Criticism of a policy, of a politician, of a government, of a state is one thing.

So is criticism of the ways in which minorities in diasporas use and abuse the scanty social privileges granted to them in the hierarchical societies in which they’re enmeshed.

But blanket denial of the freedom to fully live by our ancestral covenant in the land of our heritage, free from foreign colonialism, imperialism, oppression, persecution, intolerance, and hierarchies, is something else entirely.

It’s taken decades of thinking and rethinking and rethinking this issue again and again for me to come to the simple conclusion that yes,

***
Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism.
***

May the war in Gaza stop, may Hamas be uprooted, may the hostages be freed, may the occupation end, and may we rebuild our Home – together.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

The Birthright

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The birthright
The voice
The hands
The blessing
The escape
The love
The trick
The work
The feud
The sale
The famine
The slavery
The cries
The memory
The bush
The blood
The frogs
The lice
The swarms
The pestilence
The boils
The hail
The locusts
The darkness
The death
The sea
The passage
The song
The complaint
The food
The rest
The count
The days
The weeks
The purity
The thunder
The lightning
The blast
The fire
The mountain
The revelation
The law
The grace
The covenant

Due Process for Criminals

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If a Nazi, a terrorist, a boer, a fascist raises their hand against you – do what you need to do to protect yourself

But a civil society based on law and order has due process for criminals, not mob violence

Chanting for their death or calling for violence against them is succumbing to their ethos, as immediately emotionally satisfying as that might be

Characterizing this as a matter of freedom of expression both ignores the consequentialist arguments and precedents against unrestrained public calls for violence, and conflates legal permission with deserving a platform

Beginner’s Mind

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Em. E. A9. The list grows. The transitions are slow. My fingers hurt. And i can pluck out the intro to redemption song on a single string.

May it be a stick in Satan’s eye! Forces of evil ain’t gonna stop me from playin 😛

May the return to a beginner’s mind in something soulful and the re-opening of the wellspring of music in my life these days be a zekhuth for me, for my family, for all of Yisrael.

May the hostages be freed, may the war be ended, may the Big House be rebuilt.

What Two States Solve

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Thinking pragmatically about the future of the Land…

Can an additional state, without any state institutions or assets or economy or territorial continuity or independence, really make it?

And what purpose would it serve, if it did actually work and function, that wouldn’t be realized in an inclusive Israeli/Palestinian society?

Tensions Are Not Contradictions

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I wrote something but I corrected myself by the end, so I erased what I wrote and:

Tensions are not contradictions.

We can and must live with tensions.

And faith must be freed from contradictions.

Why the Mishne Tora Threatened Power

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Bar Nativ comes very close in this article.

He definitely gets the main idea of the Mishne Tora – to create a definitive, encyclopedic textbook of the Jewish legal system for practical use – but misses the main point of why such a book is valuable.

Not (just) to resolve disputes by providing information – but in doing so to free Jewish communities from the political monopoly of the Geonate and from the local tyranny of poorly educated rabbis pushing their personal opinions as law from Sinai.

And from this it’s clear why the book faced so much opposition. Not (just) because Rambam’s jurisprudence and Talmudic hermeneutic were opaque to some (but by no means most) of his readers, mamy of whom were often accustomed to a variety of practices and policies at odds with what he recorded.

But because the very existence of the book itself threatened the stranglehold of bad leaders using their knowledge to consolidate power and relying on the relative ignorance of the communities dependant upon them, for their continued social status and position. Publishing an accessible, authoritative guide to Jewish law challenged the local rabbi to justify their decisions against an objective, independent benchmark – and some folks just couldn’t have that.

H/t Nachman Davies

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/maimonides_revolution/