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Back to the Future with Jonathan Sarna

August 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm | In beliefs, culture, dating and marriage, economics, education, israel, orthodox, politics | Leave a Comment

The more I read of Jonathan Sarna, the more impressed I am with him personally, but the more I fear for institutional Judaism. Sarna is intelligent, considered, insightful and articulate, but he’s also an historian, and my feeling is that movements led by historians and sociologists rather than activists and entrepreneurs are already moving into their exhibit space at the museum.

I bring this up to comment on Sarna’s recent article in Reform Judaism Online, published by the URJ. Sarna has some thoughts to share looking backwards, and a few predictions for the future Judaism, inlcuding:

In the past, economic crises have caused American Judaism to turn inward and away from Israel and its troubles. It has also gutted educational spending, with terrible consequence.
Jewish institutional life tends to benefit from expansions in government services and social safety nets, as these free up significant funds and manpower for Jewish charities and social service organizations.
Expect to see lots of Jewish organizations go under, particularly in the hard-hit Orthodox sector, as we finally learn whose been swimming naked as the tide goes out. Mergers between Jewish instutions will increase, as will mergers between Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

He’s got quite a few others, but I particularly want to focus on Dr. Sarna’s prediction that, as in the 1930s, American Judaism will turn inwards, and disengage to some extent with Israel. As evidence, Sarna cites the fact that fewer Jews are attending summer-long or semester-long programs in Israel.

My main objection to that piece of evidence is that it discounts Birthright Israel, which has sent over 200,000 Jews to Israel over the last decade. Much of the decline in summer and semester programs in Israel can be attributed to the fact that participants in those trips are ineligible for a Birthright tour, and many high-school students in particular have declined to go to Israel with their youth movements, synagogues, or schools precisely because they prefer to go on Birthright for free.

In any case, Sarna also points out that entirely endogamous Jewish couples are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by intermarried couples. If roughly 50 out of 100 Jews marry other Jews, you get 25 endogamous couples. That leaves another 50 Jews marrying 50 non-Jews, and thus you get that 2-to-1 ratio that is simply astonishing. Judaism in America has already been redefined on the ground, and we’re still left sorting out exactly what that might mean.

Aliyah Guilt

August 6, 2009 at 7:38 pm | In beliefs, culture, israel, politics | 12 Comments

On a recent trip to Israel I met up with an Israeli couple for dinner in Jerusalem. They are old family friends who raised three boys in Efrat, one of the early settlements around Jerusalem, east of the Green Line. As always, conversation was lively and interesting, but one topic stays with me still. The husband turned to me at one point and asked “ How do American Jews deal with their guilt over not living in Israel?”

The question took me by surprise. At first, I thought that maybe it was just because my friend is, well, a settler, a right-wing religious Zionist who believes that a Jew’s place is in the Biblical land of Israel. Nonetheless, the expectation that American Jews actually feel guilty about not living in Israel seemed a bit extreme, even for someone the media might characterize as an extremist.

I realized quickly that my friend was not alone, and his opinion was not extreme, it was in the mainstream. The ideology of Zionism had no room for a Diaspora, because Zionism redefined Jewish identity as a national identity, bound to a land. Early Zionists, and even not-so-early Zionists fully expected that the Jews of the Diaspora would flock, en masse, to the Jewish State. It took at least two decades after the birth of Israel for the realization to set in that the Diaspora was likely a permanent feature of the Jewish community.

In recent years, the Jewish Agency has come under criticism for not doing its job well, for being inefficient and bureaucratic, and for losing its way now that the mass immigrations of Russian and Ethiopian Jews are complete. My criticism cuts even deeper. Why should the Jewish Agency be encouraging and incentivizing Aliyah at all? There’s a huge difference between rescuing Jewish communities under threat and trying to convince Jews who are comfortable and secure in their Diaspora communities to move to Israel. It’s not like Aliyah attracts enough people to have any real impact on the demographic struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, Aliyah as currently structured gives incentive to those who have the least to contribute to the State and the most to take from it. Still, most Israelis remain enthusiastic about supporting Aliyah, even as most Americans are unmoved by the prospect.

I think that both Israeli and American Jews have lost their sense of purpose. In the Zionist narrative, Israel was a solution the problem of Jewish oppression in the Diaspora. The vision for the state itself was to be a nation like any other. American Jews are not so attracted to that narrative because they already live in a place where they feel safe from oppression, and where they are able to fully participate politically and culturally in the life of the nation. What’s the point of Israel? Sure, the land is important, but there are nearly 6 million Jews living in it already. What kind of personal responsibility should an American Jew feel in such a case?

Israel, in turn, looks to America and expects Americans to feel a sense of guilt for not living in Israel,, because such feelings of guilt would validate the Israeli national project. But even among Israelis, the certainty about why Israel exists and what purpose it is meant to serve has faded. Many Israelis emigrate, seeking a safer, easier, less tense life. Why live in existential crisis every moment, says this new breed of Israelis? What’s so important about Israel that it is worth all that sacrifice?

I believe that the state of Judaism and Jewish identity is at a moment of great uncertainty. The Zionist narrative is threatened and confused, and its ideological power is waning. But in America, assimilation threatens Jewish identity in lockstep with fading support for and relationship to Israel. The American vision of Tikun Olam and ethical monotheism had strongly influenced American culture, but at the cost, perhaps, of its power as a Jewish identity. I believe that Israel and America need each other, and that they need a shared narrative that dignifies both communities. Both America and Israel need flourishing and vibrant communities, seized with vision and creativity. We need a shared sense of purpose, a shared language, and a shared future. To get there, we will need to step back from all the old expectations and assumptions and open new dialogues, but most importantly, we’ll need to ask ourselves the hardest questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the next chapter of the Jewish story that we’d like to tell?

Why?

July 30, 2009 at 12:10 pm | In beliefs, culture, holidays, israel, jewish denominations, politics, tisha b'av | 2 Comments

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? All around the Jewish Internet, and around the Jewish world, we are asking “Why?” I asked “Why?” last year too. Why do we mourn on Tisha B’Av? What relevance does it have today? Who wants a Third Temple anyway?

Traditionally, we believe that both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’av, hundreds of years apart, the First for idolatry, and the Second for baseless hatred among Jews.

Though we typically say that the First Temple was destroyed because of our sin of idolatry, the idolatry of the day was not a matter of private worship. Religion was an organizing principle of government, social interaction, law, and ritual practice. To worship Molech meant to immolate young children. To worship Ashera meant to participate in orgiastic rape rituals with temple slaves. Idolatry was really a matter of competing lifestyles and ideologies, of competing sects seeking to define Israelite life, culture, and worship.

The same is true of life in the Second Temple. Hellenists, Jewish Christians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Sicarii, Zealots, Essenes, and other sects were characteristic of a highly fragmented social, political and religious milieu. These groups fought between and among themselves, to devastating consequences. But the question remains, why do we call this baseless hatred (Sina’at Hinam) ? The ideological differences between these groups were massive! Issues at stake including how many gods were to be worshipped, whether god was corporeal, what was the role of written text of Torah versus oral traditions of Torah, was religious leadership hereditary or earned, what was the appropriate practice of the Sabbath, and who controlled the Jewish calendar. There’s nothing baseless about the bitter rivalries and conflicts that played out over these issues!

A further question. On Tisha B’av we mourn the destruction of the Temple because the Temple was supposedly the symbol of Jewish unity. Yet the Temple was the very site of the political and religious power struggles described above. The Talmud is replete with stories about violent confrontations and devious machinations occurring in the Temple itself. The building that was destroyed, Herod’s Temple, was an enormously controversial project when Herod, considered and Edomite non-Jew and Roman puppet by many of his subjects, built it only a few decades prior to its destruction. I can mourn over Jewish hatred, but why mourn the destruction of the very forum in which they played out? It took the destruction of the Temple for Jews to consolidate and unite around Rabbinic Judaism, which sustained it for 2000 years!

In the last 2000 years, Tisha B’av has become a catch-all day of mourning. Kinot (mournful poems) are recited for the Crusades, pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust. The last, in particular, has become an important part of the modern Tisha B’av, because it is both so enormous in scale and so recent as to be quite relevant and relatable. People can still find tears for the Holocaust that they cannot find for a 2000-year old Temple ruin. But the problem with Tisha B’av as a Holocaust memorial is that first question I asked, “Why?”. We have reasons for the destruction of our Temples, but what reason do we have for the Holocaust? Last year, I wrote:

We are still mad from the Holocaust. We can find no meaning in it, we are estranged from God, from ourselves, and from our destiny because of it. We drink in all of its memories, we recite very name, stare at every photo, and listen to every story, but we never master it. We cannot bring ourselves to name its causes, to assign responsibility for it, or to reframe our relationship to God around it. And until we don’t change that, the creeping numbness that inflicts us every Tisha B’Av will grow, the distance between our values, our work, our God, and ourselves will lengthen, and we will become a faceless, speechless people with no lesson for the world but silence.

This year, I will try to formulate the beginning of a response.

The Temple is understood as a symbol of unity, even if in practical terms that unity proved elusive. Yet that unity is expressed in some contradictory ways.

The Temple is meant to be a house of worship for all people and nations, but its precincts are restricted. Non-Jews could not enter the main sanctuary at all, and increasing levels of restricted access governed the courtyard, sanctum and inner sanctum.
The pillar of smoke rising to Heaven from the altar symbolized the intimate connection between Man and God, but the smoke itself was produced in the basest way, by burning slaughtered animals.
Priests were to wear gleaming white difficult-to-clean linen garments, symbolizing purity, but would soon be spattered in impossible-to-remove bloodstains shortly after they started their sacrificial work.
The Temple was a site of pilgrimage, where you would gather to see and be seen by God, but when you got there, the closest you could come was the front lawn.
Though the Temple is the site of worship for every Jew, nowhere are the status distinctions between Jews more pronounced. Priests, Levites, and Israelites played very different roles. Wealthy Jews brought different sacrifices than poor Jews. Judges and scholars played official roles. Though all belonged at the Temple site, none were created equal there.
The courtyard of the Temple housed the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of the Jewish people, which sat in between a bazaar and a slaughterhouse.
Although the greatest prohibition in Judaism is idolatry, sitting in the Holy of Holies, on top of the Ark of the Covenant that had held the Ten Commandments, was an idol! The center of all Jewish worship and intention was a statue of two cherubs facing one another.

The Temple’s lesson about unity one of the greatest lessons of Jewish wisdom. Unity is not about universal adherence to one idea or ideal. Judaism proposes that unity is about being able to hold many contradictory ideas in our minds at once, and to be able to express them in our lives. The point to aim at, the point where God’s presence could be said to rest, is between the two cherubs. The universe, and our relationship to God, is fundamentally complex. Life is not a morality play or kabuki theater, where obedience to the form defines right and wrong. But life is also not a solipsistic play, where our own egos and intellects determine morality for the entire universe.

To hold contradiction together requires diversity. One person, alone, cannot, contra Walt Whitman, contain all the multitudes. Judaism requires many sects, many tribes, many schools of Halacha, Hashkafah, and Haskalah. We’ve always had them, and together, as a milling and teeming mass of intellect, spirituality, zealotry, piety, and artistry we’ve expressed our love, awe, fear, passion and intimacy for our Father, Master, Teacher, King, and Beloved, the Breath of Life, the Universal, the Unmoved Mover, the Unknown and Unknowable, and all the other seventy names for God.

Last year, I talked about how the Satmar Rebbe blamed the Holocaust on Zionism, while the Zionists blamed the Holocaust on the Jew of Exile, who could not shake himself out of his existential misery, shake off the shackles of his religious tradition, stand up, declare himself a nation and not a faith, and redeem himself. Both are wrong, but both are right. The answer is not to unify around one pole or the other. Had all Jews abandoned Judaism to move to Palestine, we would have lost the very soul of Judaism in exchange for a piece of dirt and a UN membership. Had Jews not taken to the Zionist dream and built what was to be the State of Israel, the Holocaust might well have ended the Jewish project entirely. And they are not the only ones who are right and wrong. The Reform, who cast away law in favor of ethics, and the Orthodox, who cast away ethics in favor of law, and the Conservative, who cast away principles in favor of compromise, and secular who cast away history in favor of culture, and all the other sects, groups and denominations of Modern Judaism, they are all wrong, and all right, and all need to learn not just to tolerate, but to dignify the other as necessary, as valid, as honored.

Diversity ensures our survival. Without it, we have no mechanism for finding new ideas, for defining new ways to express our core values in a changing world, or for striving for our own improvement and drawing closer to our ideals and our vision of the Divine. Tisha B’av teaches us that baseless hatred is baseless not because there are no core issues at stake between groups, but because each group is striving for a common goal. Each group is working ‘lishma’ for a pure purpose, even as differences abound about how to pursue it or even what it is. Our challenge is to wrap our arms around all of this stiff-necked people with its squabbling and bickering, to love it, to nurture it, and to lead it it to achieve its promise as a light unto the world. So long as we have not achieved that, I’ll have reason to fast on Tisha B’av.

Dealing with Dweck

July 26, 2009 at 2:54 pm | In culture, economics, ethics, halacha, jewish denominations, jewish ethics, orthodox, politics | 4 Comments

I’m not really a current events blogger, but the corruption scandal in NJ raises some interesting questions around a topic I am very interested in: the relationship between the US government and the American Jewish community.

Lots of websites and commenters have been throwing around the term moser to describe Solomon Dweck, the FBI informant who cooperated with authorities to help implicate rabbis, politicians and other notables in the recent sting. A moser, according to traditional halacha, is a Jew who delivers other Jews into the hands of secular authorities. The sin of mesirah is a grave one, and the violator is considered worthy of being killed, even in an extrajudicial manner (as in, vigilante justice). It makes no difference whether those being informed against are innocent or guilty, by the way. The law prohibits turning Jews over to non-Jewish authorities even if these Jews are despicably evil.

It’s easy to understand how Maimonides, for example, who writes in such terms about a moser, might feel so strongly. Whether living in Christian Spain or Muslim Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries, little could be expected by way of justice, fairness, or humane treatment by the prevailing governments and legal systems. Some would argue that the Dreyfuss Affair, the trial and convictions of Julius and (especially) Ethel Rosenberg, and Jonathan Pollard suggest that modern democracies and even American democracy don’t have a much better track record. The point, though clearly an overreaching, is well-taken.

In the modern world, where does this leave us? We know that child-molestors like Baruch Lanner and Yehuda Kolko were left free to ruin more lives and abuse more innocent victims precisely because rabbis in the Orthodox community refused to turn them into secular authorities. These same rabbis also lacked the tools and powers to prevent these men from committing further abuses.

Omerta may be appropriate when secular authorities are capricious at best and violently cruel and antagonistic at worst. Faced with such an enemy, the Jewish community must be secretive, protective, and devious. Yakov deals with Lavan, just such an enemy, b’mirmah, deceitfully. Trust, honesty, and openness must be mutual to be meaningful.

However, in the United States, where Jews live with a government that they too elect, and in a nation that is unprecedented in history for its embrace of Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish leadership, this culture of silence is a corrosive and corrupting influence, particularly when silence is coupled with zero enforceability. Instead of protecting us from an exploitative and dangerous authority, it actually endangers us further, because it encourages corruption, extortion, bribery, and a general disrespect and abuse of the system of laws and justice that protect all of us.

If our communities are built on corruption, we encourage hatred of Judaism by Jews and non-Jews alike. How many Jews felt a sense of revulsion upon hearing this latest sordid story? The Syrian community feels betrayed and slandered. The Orthodox community at large feels a pit in its stomach, particularly as this is the period of the Nine Days, a particularly tragic and mournful time in Jewish history. And the broad family of Jews is sickened as well by yet another story of financial malfeasance that seems to confirm all the worst hatreds and stereotypes still held by some non-Jews, even in this, the fairest of nations.

The answer is a difficult one. If we hold fast with the prohibition of mesirah than we, as a community, are the true criminals, for failing to police ourselves, and for allowing this evil to take root in our midst. Alternatively, we can turn over the powers of investigation and enforcement to the State, and lose some of our dignity, identity and uniqueness in the process. What is for sure is that this is not an isolated incident, and that a culture of corruption and contempt for government and for Gentiles is thriving, particularly in some Orthodox communities. We need to address the moral and economic causes underlying this immediately, lest we breed a new generation of anti-Semites, and lest we fail to treat our fellow American with the full measure of justice and fairness that he surely deserves.

Land, People, and God (pt 1)

June 8, 2009 at 9:57 am | In beliefs, culture, israel, jewish denominations, politics | Leave a Comment

What is Judaism It’s not a race, nor is it just a religion. Ethnicity doesn’t capture the religious elements, nor does nation. The Mordechai Kaplan idea that Judaism is a civilization is sufficiently expansive, but not really specific enough.

The best paradigm for defining Judaism to date is the three-pronged approach. Judaism is a civilization that expresses commitments to the land of Israel, the Jewish people and their culture, and the God of Israel as worshipped through Jewish religion.

Speaking broadly, we can say that throughout history, strong expression of any two of these three prongs has been sufficient to create a Jewish society. Expressing all three, however, requires an intetgrative vision that has proven elusive.

We can divide Judaism, with exceptions, into three time periods. Ancient Judaism, from the Exodus through the destruction of the Second Temple, can largely be seen as Judaism built on Land and God, but not on the people of Israel. The people lived in the Land of Israel and defined themselves around that reality. They also worshipped the Jewish God. What they lacked was a sense of cohesive identity. Tribal identities, local loyalties, and ethnic differences all stood in the way of a sense of united peoplehood.

Over many hundreds of years, Jewish identity emerged, but it took the volution of many new institutions and new ideas. The move from tribal judges to a monarchy, and from decentralized worship to Temple worship were important steps, but progress did not happen in a straight line. The split of the monarchy into Judah and Israel, the establishment of alternate sites of worship , and the evolution of separate holy texts rmained significant obstacles to unity.

The Babylonian exlie and the reforms of Ezra helped create a single sacred text and a shared sense of identity, but Jewish sectarianism of a non-tribal nature replaced the previous tribal splits. Hellenists, Essenes, Baithusians, Samaraitans, Sadduccess, Pharisees, and Christians were only some of the sects that divided Judaism and defeated any sense of common purpose or identity.

The destruction of the Second Temple and the seconf Exile posed an enormous challenge to Judaism, forcing it to reorganize. The Land of Israel was gone, and Judaism reformed around Nation and God. Over the next few hundred years, Judaism would shed most of its sects, divorce decisively from Christianity, abandon Jewish Europe and its Greek coonnections, and recenter itself around a new set of leaders whose authority flowed from their mastery of religious matters. The central institutions of synagogue and study hall brought regular religious practice into a communal space; so different from the Temple in Jerusalem. The cohesiveness of these new communities was such that the lack of a land or polity could be overcome through a strong sense of peoplehood.

This strong sense of peoplehood was reinforced throughout the Middle Ages by the outside. It was very difficult for a Jew to be anything other than a Jew. Full conversion to Christianity was possible, but it carried with it the cost of leaving your entire old life behind. Similarly, there was little social or economic mobility for most of the period.

The Enlightenment changed all that. Among its revolutionary ideas was the notion of history as a tale of human progress. Economic and social mobility, along with a borad redefinition of human rights and a rejection of class and caste systems, birthed the possibility of a person selecting an idenitity rather than being born into one. Religious ideas like predestination were rejected, religious institutions were subject to withering attacks, and the concept of national identity was forwarded to replace religion as a means of uniting people and creating common cause.

Zionism was born in this era. It represents a Judaism of People and Land, wiith no God. The Zionist concept was the Jews were a people like any other, and needed to redeem themselves, retake their land, and live their national destiny on the soil of their ancestors. Religious opposition to Zionism as a forbidden hastening of the Messianic era was deemed archaic – an expression of a Jew so imprinted by the ghetto that he no longer wanted to be free.

Conceptually, Zionism was very attractive,and following the Holocaust, it was seen as proven correct and desparately necessary. So long as the Jewish people felt an existential crisis, Zionism represented an ideology of survival that encompassed and sheltered all that was destroyed in Europe, from the cosmopolitan Jewery of Berlin to the Jews of the shtetls.

Each of the above representations of Judaism is missing something, and is therefor uniquely vulnerable. Thought the State of Israel has been through trying times, by 1973 it was clear that Israel did not face an existential threat to its existence from its Arab neighbors, and its nuclear deterrent capabilities drew the period of widescale, open conflict in Israel to a close.

With survival no longer the only issue, but with Israelis continuing to pay a high cost to live in Israel, it was inevitable that the question would arise – why? Why live in Israel? America had a thriving, secure, robust Diaspora community. Life was easy, there was no army service, or violent neighbors, or random acts of terror. Zionism had not really considered any ongoing role of Diaspora Jewish communities, even as it depended on their ongoing financial and political support. Suddenly though, many young Israelis began to abandon the Zionist dream in favor of personal salvation from the burdens of being an Israeli, and of living in Israel. Theodore Herzl said ‘Im Tirtzu, Ein zo Agadah’ – if you will it/desire it, it is not a dream. Modern Israeli graffiti today attributes a different statement to Herzl – ‘Lo Rotztim? Lo Tazrich!’ – You don’t want it? Fine, we don’t need to have it.’

Some might say that this view is short-sighted, and that the American Jewish experience is unique in history, or unlikely to last. One day, America will become hostile to Jews, and Israel will be needed as a refuge. While this analysis may prove true, its power as an ideology is waning. Israel cannot just be a place to run to, not for those who live there and often feel they’d raather run somewhere else, or those who live elsewhere and will not excuse Israel’s conduct in exchange for a promise of haven that they will likely never need.

And that leaves us where we are today. We need a new vision for Judaism, that can integrate, to some extent, our land, our people and our faith. It must give purpose to our presence in Israel as well as in the Diaspora. It must cast a broad net over all of us, a Sukkah under which we can all shelter, that gives us a sense of commonality and peoplehood. And it must mediate our varied relationships to God and faith. We can’t pick two out of three – we have to integrate all three.

In the next post, I’ll look at the rise of denominationalism as a response to Enlightenment, and the ways in which denominations responded to the Zionist rejection of God by attempting to articulate Godly philosophies of Zionism.

Alternative Models for Jewish Education

March 12, 2009 at 10:03 pm | In culture, education, jewish denominations, orthodox, politics | 12 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of posts about Jewish education, often in the context of the economic difficulties we are currently in. I’d like to just sketch a few alternative models for Jewish education that may be more sustainable than what we’ve got now.

Model 1:

Existing day schools slash costs and give a bare-bones offering. No extra-curriculars (or pay-as-you-go), no AP classes, and a scaled-back Judaics curriculum. High schools run for only three years and graduate students per the minimum state standards (like a NY Regents diploma). Access to education is increased, and quality instruction will still be available, but less will be taught. Students who want to get into top colleges will need to go elsewhere.

Model 2:

Community schools. For this to work, all denominations need to pull together to make the schools attractive to all. Secular studies will benefit from economies of scale, and facilities and overhead costs will be significantly reduced. Judaic studies can be offered on different tracks, so that parents can still have their children study the brand of Judaism they subscribe to. The big obstacle here is aprticipation of the Orthodox, most of whom would not send their children to a co-educational school, or to a school where they might be exposed to ‘heterodox’ children and influences.

Model 3:

Public schooling/Charter school followed by Talmud Torah/Hebrew School. Though this model can be economically affordable, it suffers two major flaws. For the Orthodox, sending your kdis to public school is the only thing worse than sending them to a community day school. For the non-Orthodox, Hebrew schools are usually a 4-6 hours/week commitment. Kids very quickly get the message that Hebrew School isn’t important. Little of educational value ends up being achieved, which only confirms that the exercise is not valuable.

Model 4:

Home-schooling networks. These are great ideas, especially for small communities, but I can’t imagine how these would scale up to meet the needs of large Jewish communites. That said, their existence will particularly benefit the Orthodox, for whom home-schooling wouldn’t carry mcuh of a stigma.

As for me, I would like to see Model 2, the community schools, become the dominant model. Enough already with all of our separate institutions and insistence on ideological purity. Teaching our kids together is the surest and swiftest path towards greater Jewish unity, appreciation of Jewish diversity, and flowering community.

Election Without Direction

February 10, 2009 at 1:23 pm | In beliefs, israel, politics | Leave a Comment

Today is Election Day in Israel, though it’s hard to tell if you’re not actually in Israel. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, even published a story about how foreign journalists are having a tough time selling their stories to their hometown papers.

My theory is that it’s because the elections in Israel are about nothing at all. Israeli society has reached a consensus that there is simply no partner for peace among the Palestinians. Fatah may be willing, but they aer unable to make peace, while Hamas is able, but unwilling. This critical issue that resists characterization as either foreign or domestic policy has collapsed the political space that normally divides right from left in Israel. Instead, we have three centrist parties that have run listless, issueless, and rudderless campaigns. All of these parties are out of ideas, and one of them will find themselves governing without any leadership or goal.

Perhaps now is the time to offer a different idea, and a new coalition for advancing it. Many have previously observed that the project we call Israel is comprised of three pillars: a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state situated on the ancient Biblical land of Israel. So far, nobody has managed to do better than to encompass two of these three pillars at a time.

Right now, for example, we have a Jewish state, whose fundamental character is enshrined, most powerfully, in the Law of Return, that guarantees citizenship to any Jew. We also have a state that wields authority over nearly all of the Biblical land of Israel. What we do not have is a democratic state. Over one third of the people governed by Israel do not have full civil rights, to say nothing of rights of citizenship or even a path to normalization.

The alternative vision is to have a Jewish state and a democratic state, but to release the third pillar by ceding the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians – a two-state solution. While many Israelis are prepared to cede the land in exchange for peace and security, few Israelis believe that giving up the land to the current crop of Palestinian leaders will in fact lead to peace and security. There is also opposition to ceding land under any circumstances not only from Religious Zionists, but also, perhaps surprisingly, from many Russian immigrants.

But what if we chose to give up on that other pillar, the one that guarantees a Jewish state? What might that look like? I think we’d be talking about the bi-national state, or one-state solution.

The one-state solution is not new, but it has a troubled history for supporters of Israel. It has primarily been forwarded by the most vituperative and hateful voices in the far-left, anti-Zionist community. Most recently, the ‘reformed’ Muammar Qaddafi wrote about “Isratine” in the New York Times. But let’s pull away for a moment from the dubious provenance of the idea, and examine it on its merits.

Critics of the one-state solution see it as a ruse – a demographic act of terrorism against the Jewish state. The argument, as forwarded by Alan Dershowitz and others, is that as soon as the Palestinians represent an electoral majority, they will vote to replace the binational state with an Islamic state.

Personally, I find the argument ludicrous and unrealistic. The key assumptions that the argument rests upon are that all Palestinians will vote as a bloc, that they all want to be governed by Islamic law, and that no counterbalance can exist to prevent this kind of parliamentary coup de etat.

None of these assumptions stand up to scrutiny. Palestinians today are already divided between Hamas and Fatah, and would likely be further divided if other options existed. Arabs as an ethnicity are as internally divided as Jews as an ethnicity – the joke that where there are two Jews there are three opinions can be said about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular with nothing lost in translation.

There’s also no indication that Palestinians desire a religious government. Hamas today stands for Islamic rule, but it used to receive its support from Saddam Hussein, rather than from Syria and Iran, and was a largely secular movement. The shift towards Islam has to do with the will of its Iranian backers, not the will of the people. Fatah, the other elected representative of the Palestinian people, is a secular movement. Why would the opportunity to participate as equal citizens in a binational state suddenly turn the Palestinians into Islamic fundamentalists?

Finally, there’s no reason to believe that Palestinians could vote in a brand new government on the basis of an electoral majority. The barriers to such a path are constitutional institutional, and military.

A binational state would need a constitution that protects human, civil, political, and religious rights for all citizens. Such a constitution would also have to enshrine a power-sharing agreement that would allow all the sectors of Israeli society to have their voices heard.

Whatever institutions are crafted by the new state, there can be no doubt that Jews would still wield tremendous power, that would certainly be sufficient to counterbalance the demographic attack strategy feared by some. Jews will still control most of the wealth of the country at the outset, most of its trade and political connections, and will still make up most of its civil servants. That kind of institutional power is difficult to overthrow simply by winning an election.

Should the worst come to pass, however, and we’ve badly misjudged the intention of the Palestinians, their remains an enormous barrier to their success in converting Israel into a Muslim state. That barrier is the IDF. The Jewish population of Israel is and will still be in control of the jet planes, the tanks, the armaments, and of course the nuclear weapons. Whatever changeover we envision, the reins of military power would be transferred very slowly and very carefully.

I think we can also fairly question the demographic threat to the binational state. Right now, Israelis emigrate at a high rate, while Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing to do but have children. In a binational state we could reasonably expect a few changes to these demographic trends. First, some Palestinians would seek to reunite with their families in other countries. Second, a new national identity and mission could well cut into Israeli emigration. Third, Jews in the Diaspora will flock once more to Israel. Some will come specifically because they want to counter the demographic threat. Others will be attracted to the chance to settle in Biblical Israel, and others will want to return home to be part of the new chapter of national life.

The real issue is what is the Jewish character of the state of Israel? Right now, that character is expressed through the Law of Return, but also through government policies that explicitly favor the rights of Jews, even at the expense of citizen Israeli-Arabs, to say nothing of non-citizen Palestinians.

The religious character of the state is a source of intense dissatisfaction on all side. The secular Jews feel coerced by the religious in every facet of their lives, from how and whom they wed to the availability of public transportation on Saturday. Religious Jews separate themselves more and more from the life of the state by living in their own enclaves and ghettos, stoning outsiders who violate their norms, and refusing to serve in the IDF or other national service, even as their communities rely on government handouts to survive.

The true character of a nation should be expressed by its people. Zionism is a floundering ideology. In the absence of a galvanizing external threat, it loses all shape, direction, and definition. Why must Jews be in their own land and have their own state? The need for refuge is one important reason, but for Jews, perhaps short-sighted Jews, who live in Israel, it is not enough. When Miss Israel said that she’d rather live in New York than put up with all the problems and issues of living in Israel, she was excoriated. But she and her generation are voting with their feet. They don’t see a cause in Israel, they just see heartache and heartbreak.

But there is a reason for Jews to live in the State of Israel, in the land of Israel. It’s the same reason that Jews have always had. It’s to unite opposing ideologies – to go through the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in the world spotlight.

It was Jews who fused the diversity of peoples and faiths born in Mesopotamia with the monistic structure of Egyptian society and religion and emerged with a pluralistic, multi-ethnic monotheism. It was Jews who connected story-telling, law, and writing to produce a document that is the underpinning of Islam and Christianity. It was Jews who harnessed the power of dialectic reasoning that emerged from Greece and created a rationalist religious structure that we know as Talmud and Halacha. And it was Jews who took the parochial teachings of one faith and extended its principles of monotheism, Sabbath, and redemption throughout the world.

The mission that falls to Jews today is to bridge between East and West, and to prove that the Western ideals of democracy can be alloyed with the Eastern ideals of faith and tribe. And the best place to do that is in the land of Israel, with all of its mixed population, holy sites, and ancient stories. That mission will define the character of the land, not its demography.

Bracha for the Election

November 5, 2008 at 8:41 am | In culture, halacha, politics | Leave a Comment

Yesterday I posted about what bracha to make over voting. Last night, as I walked down the streets of Harlem, and witnessed the celebrations, the dancing in the streets, and the tears on the faces of young and old, and the words of an extraordinary man booming from out every open car and apartment window, I too spontaneously broke out into prayer. I made the bracha of She-hechiyanu, and I can’t recall ever having more kavana than last night. God bless America.

My Voting Prayer

November 4, 2008 at 10:16 am | In culture, halacha, politics | 1 Comment

Recently, some of the blogs I visit have been posting this prayer, written by Rabbi David Seidenberg, founder of NeoHasid.org. Personally, I’m not so into it. For one, I have a strong preference for re-purposing existing prayers over composing new ones. Here’s my suggestion. When you come to the polling place, and prepare to cast your vote, say the following bracha: Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha-Olam, She-chalak Mi-Kvodo Li-Bnei Adam – Blessed are you, God, King of the World, Who has given a portion of His honor to mankind.

This bracha is the one you say when you see a king, and it is meant to be an acknowledgment that kingship stems from God and is reflected in mankind. In a democratic country, that blessing is appropriate for meeting the President. But on election day we are al kings. We vote and make the decision of who will rule over us, and in my opinion there is no greater Kiddush Hashem in secular society than Election Day. Seeing people freely choosing their government and peacefully transferring enormous power is a reflection of God’s honor as well. Each of us, each of us who votes, is a king, and a reflection of God’s glory in this world.

Now go out and vote!

Game Theory, Israel and the Palestinians

October 30, 2007 at 9:02 am | In economics, israel, politics | 10 Comments

Since the ill-fated Camp David negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat collapsed into an orgy of blood and violence we now call the Second Intifada, many on the Israeli side have abandoned the principle of land for peace. This principle, which became official US policy after Russia hastily agreed to a UN-brokered ceasefire to the June War of 1967 that did not require a withdrawal to pre-war lines, remains the official policy of Israel, the US, the Quartet, the UN, the Arab League, the PA, Fatah; pretty much everyone except Hamas. So why have forty years gone by with no resolution to this conflict?

Along comes Bueno de Mesquita (no, it’s not a name for a delicious new Tex-Mex barbecue sauce, it’s a real person, and he’s a lot smarter than either of us) with an answer for not only that question, but also for the question of how to resolve the conflict.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

(Good Magazine via Marginal Revolution)

Not bad, huh?