An Open Letter to the Senior Editorial Board of ‘Jewish Currents’

As a past subscriber, I read “Jewish Currents” Journal consistently. Listening to the “Zionism and Anti-Zionism” episode on your podcast, “On the Nose” motivated me to write this letter. I am neither an academic nor a public intellectual. I am a rabbi-educator and have spent the past four and a half decades teaching students, writing curriculum, and working with teachers in a variety of Jewish educational institutions. I grew up in an active Reform congregation and have rabbinic degrees from both JTS and RIETS. My paternal grandparents spoke Ladino, as did my father and his siblings. All of my work has been in diverse, pluralistic settings, with the exception of my rabbinic role in a Sephardic congregation on Shabbatot and holidays. I recount these biographical facts to clarify that my personal and professional life experience has held a thick engagement with Jewish diversities. 

My work has also included working with Jewish Israeli educators to design educational programs in Israel that have enabled me to bring groups of students to Israel twenty times. These programs have included encounters with Palestinians, Druze, Haredi Jews, a range of IDF soldiers including spokes-people for “Breaking the Silence,” meetings with administrators of Israeli-Arab-Palestinian colleges, Israeli elected officials, and representatives of a variety of Christian denominations. I am in constant communication with many Israeli friends who reflect a wide range of religious and political commitments and opinions. One might see my professional work as a vast network of people in educational, social, religious and political positions of leadership, along with a matrix of contrasting experiences, and that together this gestalt  has provided me with an awareness of the complexities and nuances of the founding of the State of Israel and its history. I have summarized my lifework precisely to disabuse you of such a conclusion. As complex and nuanced as I understand the history and current realities of the State of Israel to be, I try to approach every challenge, assumption, and position with humility. I recognize that there are always layers of experience I do not fully appreciate, and that any current abstract framework, lens, or worldview that claims to make sense of the phenomenon of the State of Israel will do history and current realities a disservice. I am writing to you because the frameworks supporting the conversation of your podcast not only does these realities, in my opinion, a disservice, but they are dangerous. 

Since I am neither an academic nor a public intellectual, I cannot build a critical argument and participate in the on-going academic debate about settler colonialism. I am familiar with Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism, along with Samuel Hayim Brody’s devastating critique. I know that there is a debate between the “new historians” (including others such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky) about to what extent the classical zionist thinkers such as Herzl and Nordau, or the early zionist settlers themselves, fit the model of settler colonialism like the cases of the United States, Canada or Australia. I know that Ilan Pappe coined the term, “Jewish Supremacy” when he looked for a way of describing Israeli policy towards and treatment of Palestinians. Finally, I identify the current anti-zionist movement in America that asserts the theological “necessity of exile” as well as the authentic expression and richness of Jewish diasporic life to be part of Jewish responses to the history of and current realities in the State of Israel. 

I am a rabbi, and therefore respond to the language and tone of your podcast from my own rabbinic perspective. So I have several rhetorical rabbinic questions. Are you unaware that the ancient Israelites, then became the nation of Israel, then the Jewish people, throughout all of these historical transformations, wove a liturgical thread of yearning for political sovereignty in the land of Canaan, called Israel in rabbinic sources? 

Every statement I make will, additionally, have an obverse dimension. One can easily find sources in the kabbalistic and hasidic traditions that suggest that yearning is a deeper and more authentic religious response to reality than actualization. Therefore, yearning and actualization, dreams and reality, are constantly held in tension together. I am certain you have considered this.

Are you unaware that the Talmud states unequivocally that “King David did not sin,” and the Tanach describes his transgressions in almost lurid detail, along with the political consequences that then creates a theological framework for understanding the relationship between sovereignty, peoplehood and land? Is it not clear to you that it is precisely the tension between looking to the role models of our people’s sacred history (for that is what cultures generate; they generate sacred histories as pathways for self-actualization and self-understanding) and acknowledging their tragic flaws that spawns literary, philosophical, and theological creativity? 

Are you unaware, during this season of the Days of Awe, that our liturgies are filled with expressions of self-evaluation in the plural? That we as a people will inevitably sin and make decisions that include horrific consequences? That we could lose our sovereignty in the land of Israel as a result of our own sins? And that those same liturgical texts describe a commitment to combatting governments that perpetuate pure evil against humanity at the same time? 

Is it not clear to you that the Maimonidean “Golden pathway” of moderation, then advocated by virtually all the masters of middot throughout the Middle Ages and then the masters of the mussar movement in modern times all counsel shunning the dangers of extremism which currently has infected the entire Muslim world and has penetrated Jewish political leadership in terrifying ways?

I am certain you are aware of everything I have just described. To every dimension of Jewish life throughout the centuries, throughout the entire corpus of Jewish teachings and wisdom, are tensions. There are tensions inherent in the covenantal relationship between humanity and the Creator, between love of peoplehood and love of humanity, between sharing a vision for the world and attempting to build a society that can model that vision microcosmically. You mean, I can only build a Jewish identity as a Jewish human being by seeing the authenticity of either diasporic life or Jewish life in the State of Israel? You mean a nation state (like France, England, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Hungary, and Poland, for example) cannot make decisions that include consequences that injures the spirit of the nation, that they eventually have to confront, that they need to reevaluate over time? The only countries I know that engage that process are Germany and Israel, ironically enough. America is not able to confront its genocidal past. Hamas is genocidal; the State of Israel has made military decisions that have caused untold suffering, like all military decisions. If one believes deeply that the Jewish people, that the Jewish State, has made decisions that violate core Jewish values, one needs to raise the cry, “From the river to the sea by any means necessary” and undermine the very legitimacy of the state? There are no other approaches to dealing with government policy?

What bothers me so deeply about your podcast, and about your journal, is the complete absence of love for the Jewish people. You believe that all Jewish citizens of the State of Israel are Jewish supremacists? That abuses against Palestinians perpetuated by the Israeli government is a reflection of the philosophical and original Jewish aspirations and yearnings to re-establish a sovereign polity in the modern era, now as a nation-state rather than as a kingdom? (Even anti-zionist Haredi Jews believe that the Jewish people should be sovereign in the land–only that the Messiah and not David ben Gurion should be its herald.) Do you really believe that you can appropriate terminologies from other historical movements like the establishment of the United States, Canada and Australia and apply them to zionists? That the culture, visions, historical experiences, religious values of the Jewish people add up to the same as these other movements? And so, you can wipe your hands clean of the disgusting worldview called zionism, because you believe that the world would simply be better off without zionism, without zionists, and without a Jewish State? 

Esau finally returned home, having prepared a meal for his aged, blind father, Isaac, and awaited his father’s blessing. “Your brother has deceived me before you, and I have already blessed him,” replied Isaac. Esau let out a heart-breaking howl and wailed, “Have you only one blessing, father? Have you no blessing for me?” My sense from listening to your discourse and reading the articles you publish, is that you have but one blessing, and it is not for the Jewish people. I understand that you believe that you are writing and speaking in order to save humanity. It is just that from my perspective, your humanity does not include all Jews.

Rabbi Dov Lerea

Riverdale, NY