Talking About Israel Some More

Back on October 31 of last year, I reflected on my evolving mindset concerning the "other" side of my religious heritage, i.e. Judaism. The first item on my short list was Israel, and how, for many years, I had been convinced that it represented a more advanced moral standard and a higher plane of existence, as it were. More recently, having rejected religion outright, I was finally willing to take a cold, hard look at Judaism and decide whether or not it was worthy of rejection in the same way as Christianity.

I thought I had the issue all tucked in and put to bed with the lights out, but recently, a new angle (new to me, at least) on the subject has taken shape.

Excerpted below is the article from the NY Times - emphasis mine.

A Religious War in Israel’s Army
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting ... exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.

...[T]he left-leaning secular kibbutz movement ... showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.

For the first four decades of Israel’s existence, the army — like many of the country’s institutions — was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility.

“The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies... The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army.”

Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

...[W]hat was evident in Gaza was that the humanistic tradition from which a code of ethics is derived was not being sufficiently observed there.

Mr. Halbertal, the Jewish philosopher who opposes the attitude of Rabbi Rontzki, said ...“The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism,” he said. “They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all.”

This brings me back once again to an examination of what Judaism is to me. I realize now that from the very beginning of my exploration of Judaism, the focus was always on philosophy, scholarship, reason. I recall the pleasure I derived in college from independent reading and study -- the leisurely examination of "the meaning of life," and the historical threads that bound all of like mind -- those who sensed that we, as humans, had the potential to rise above emotion-driven savagery and create a world of thought, beauty and constructive action. But the farther along I went, the more room there was for religion to rear its ugly head. Time and again I was reminded by one person or another, that, oh yes, scholarship is fine, but Judaism is about tradition, which holds that women are "ordained by the almighty to be separate from men and to serve a different function. Women, you see, are holy because they can bear children, and that is your supreme calling. Scholarship is nothing -- men study scripture day and night because they can't bear children..." etc. etc.

So while I tried mightily to cling to the humanistic, reason-bound traditions of Judaism, my lack of grounding in it (that is, the fact that my mother was gentile and therefore I did not have "the birthright" as one rabbi put it), made it very hard to fight back against the growing tide of traditionalism. In college, for example, during my sophomore year when I first began hanging out at Hillel, the campus rabbi was a fairly liberal-leaning, egalitarian sort. At first glance, he gave the impression of being rather old-school, but that wasn't where he was coming from.

But then he left, and a female rabbi replaced him. And then came the backlash. Whereas earlier, our functions had been co-ed, as soon as the female rabbi arrived, the more reactionary elements in Hillel demanded a more traditional setting for our social activities. And so up went the mechitza [that's the curtain that separates men and women in orthodox synagogues]. Soon there was a lot of talk about the "authentic Jewish experience," in which we gals were expected to move to a Chasidic enclave and settle into a "proper" existence of early marriage and abundant childbearing, complete with an ugly wig, ugly shoes, and a lifestyle reminiscent of a Polish shtetl in 1901. The Jewish version of Quiverfull, in other words.

This encroachment of oppressive religion was what drove me far and fast from Judaism. Something in me sensed that it was harmful to my psyche. And since the rabbis I consulted were unanimous in saying that I should never expect any encouragement to convert, that I was entirely on my own in this endeavor, backing away was fairly painless. [The followup question of what led me into Christianity is something I'll have to look at later, since it seems to be a clear contradiction.]

But getting back to Israel -- it's a question that I imagine many Jews are having to grapple with, and it parallels the dilemma that many religious Americans have faced over the last 35 years or so, as the religious right has hijacked some fairly benign and humanistic concepts. Equality, dignity, compassion, unity ... those were the values I grew up with as a nominal Catholic, and I have clear memories of a reaching out between Christians and Jews during the post-war years, up to the late 1970s. Suddenly, religion began overshadowing everything again, emphasizing the differences between groups that had been working so hard to embrace their commonalities.

Finally, the question is being spelled out for people to really look at. What is Israel, and more importantly, what is Judaism? Is it an advanced, lofty, scholarly, humanistic and ultra-modern system of philosophy? Or is it, like other western religions, a regressive, patriarchal political system that endeavors to shackle its followers through fear, superstition and brainwashing?

My rejection of Israel in my post from last October was, I think, born out of the intuition of what it seems to be becoming -- what the New York Times article describes. Click Here to Read More..

Letting Go of My Judaism

For a formerly religious individual shifting toward atheism, one of the hardest processes has to be rethinking all the assumptions that we took for granted for years and sometimes decades. The list of these truisms could fill many volumes, and the Bible is certainly the source of many. From obvious ones like those contained in the Ten Commandments, to more subtle views, such as the role of women, it can take a lot of time and patience to examine each one rationally. On top of the formalized canon, we often grow up surrounded by family members, neighbors, co-congregants at church and classmates all echoing the same opinions and disguising them as fact.

Quite recently, I’ve come to see that I’m not entirely innocent of this. While I’ve been pretty diligent about rejecting the fictions fed to me during my 15 years as a Christian, I now understand that I’ve been equally blinded during the 32 years or so since my freshman year of college, when I began exploring the paternal side of my family tree – the Jewish side.

Even a year ago, I would not have thought to post a blog like this.

Here’s a quick summary of a few vestiges of faith that I have stubbornly hung onto, to one degree or another:

• Everything Israel does is absolutely right, no matter how much the world community protests and no matter how brutal it may appear to an “outsider.”
• Jews are inherently more moral than other people.
• All religious law that originated with Judaism is logical at the core, even if it’s hard to fathom in the modern age.
• All Muslims are the enemy.
• Judaism is in danger of becoming extinct and this cannot be allowed to happen.
• Anybody who voices objection to Jewish practices is either anti-Semitic or ignorant, and these two things are really synonymous.
• My Jewish father lowered himself by marrying my Gentile mother; he came from a better “bloodline.”

Is there a “chosen people?” A year ago I would have said yes. I find it encouraging to have backed away from such a notion on two fronts: As a Unitarian Universalist, I promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the goal of a world community, with peace, liberty and justice for all. And as an atheist, I find it unacceptable to endorse “chosenness.” Unless someone can prove to me that Jews, or any other group of people historically singled out as being exceptional and distinguishable from other humans, actually originated somewhere outside our planet and possess measurable, objective qualities that make them superior to others here on Earth, I will strive to reject any such notions, no matter how deeply rooted they are or how strongly rejected by what some call the “conventional wisdom.”

I’d like to try fine-tuning my previous misconceptions, based on those two principles.

• Israel has maintained something closer to a democracy than the other (Islamic) countries that surround it. However, very much like the United States, it has more recently taken its roots for granted – just because it was originally founded to protect a persecuted class of people does not always make Israel the target or the victim. Sometimes the Israeli government falsely justifies brutality and oppression purely out of fear.
• Jews are not inherently more moral than any other people. There is a strong correlation between a codified scripture and a tradition of reason and our Western democratic ideals. That gives Jews and Christians good reason to view themselves as more moral by nature, but in truth, the morality is a learned one, and the learning process itself is highly imperfect. This particular weakness in my thinking hit me just this morning, listening to the NPR report about the kosher slaughterhouse in the Midwest, whose owner, first name Shalom, is the target of a federal investigation for illegal hiring practices. My knee-jerk reaction was something like “Oh, no, a religious Jew knows better than to hire workers under unfair conditions,” and this was based entirely on all the Torah and Talmud that was spoon-fed to me during my college years. Ideas I simply absorbed as iron-bound truth. In a similar way, I was horrified and let down upon hearing of the infamous crimes committed by child abuser Joel Steinberg, and Ira Einhorn, who murdered his girlfriend and then lived as a fugitive overseas for over a decade. I also know how many people make the opposite assumption: that all Jews are fundamentally evil and greedy. In fact, the way I learned it, all non-Jews are anti-Semitic at heart! I knew a woman some years ago who declared that all Christian churches preach “blood libel” every Sunday. This was so ridiculous, I called her on it, thinking maybe I misunderstood what she had said. But she re-asserted it. That was the end of our friendship.

What we have to get straight, once and for all, is that it’s all too easy for us humans to give in to our baser impulses and act completely in our own short-sighted self-interest and think about consequences later. It doesn’t matter what religion or ethnicity our ancestors were! And we all tend to show favoritism toward those who resemble us. It’s a fallacy in our thinking that keeps us down at a primitive level, rather than allowing us to be elevated to our potential of intelligence.
• All religious law that originated with Judaism may have seemed logical at the time it was set down, but its focus was narrow and imperfect. It was used to justify behavior that was a means toward an end. It is not supernatural in origin! It is not timeless or universal. It may be interesting to study and some of it may be adaptable to our present age, but it must all be viewed with great caution and objectively assessed.
• Side note: Yes, our present system of government is based largely upon Judeo-Christian principles that came before. Some of it’s great; some of it has to go. Keep the good stuff; ignore the stupid and harmful. We can have our democracy without someone else’s theocracy.
• Not all Muslims subscribe to the theocratic, oppressive belief system that is so commonly seen on the news. Like Christians, Jews, and other religious people, they’ve been brainwashed and victimized by the entire religious mindset. All humans can be reasoned with, under the right circumstances, and no one should be condemned just because of a label.
• “Judaism,” exemplified at its best by reason, logic, intellect, study, and discourse, is only in danger of becoming extinct if these qualities are neglected and devalued! We can always honor our ancestry and reflect on its lessons, regardless of who we marry or what culture we adapt to. We have to learn to let go of ethnocentrism if we are to advance the only race that matters to our existence: The human race. Click Here to Read More..

Half a Life Ago

Sometimes it's startling to think about things that happened "some years" ago and to realize just how many years it was.

Today I'm thinking about a college classmate named Ellen, who will turn 50 tomorrow, about 3 weeks ahead of me.

A few years after graduating, we were both in the work force. I had gotten married. She'd been engaged but then broke it off.

Ellen was quite observantly Jewish, and in our four years of college I'd been endeavoring to learn enough about Judaism to make a successful conversion. I abandoned that quest not long before graduation, but Ellen and I remained friends.

Ellen made me slightly uncomfortable, though I had trouble defining the reason at the time. She was simply brought up better. Her parents were sober, middle-class, elegant in a way that my parents were not. In short, I felt inferior. So between Ellen's rather persistent religiosity and the class difference, there was something of a widening gulf.

Doug and I liked to throw big parties and when we did, people would wander through the apartment and end up in the bedroom. We had a waterbed, which was something of a novelty. Despite the immediate impression this may have made, no overt sexual behavior took place at our parties. No one took off their clothes -- it was largely innocent. The worst that ever happened was someone would massage someone's back while everyone else sat around squealing at the "waves."

So in October of 1983, we threw a bash, since Doug and I had birthdays 6 days apart. We lived in Queens, NY; Ellen came across Long Island Sound from Connecticut, where she still lived with her parents. She brought a friend; I now forget who that was, or if I'd ever met her.

The first thing that went wrong was Ellen couldn't find anything to eat. She was quite observantly kosher and most likely there wasn't much of anything being served that would have been "safe." This was certainly a breach of etiquette on my part -- it wasn't like Ellen just dropped in. She'd been invited and I should have been more proactive about serving something appropriate.

Ellen left pretty early, after making a pointed remark about the "goings-on" in the bedroom, and how parties in her home (her parents' home, that is) didn't deteriorate to the level that mine apparently had.

Because she'd brought a gift, I sent her a thank-you note the next day, mentioning that all my friends meant a great deal to me. I hoped this would help her to understand that I didn't appreciate her judging my other friends as degenerates.

I never heard from Ellen again.

I sometimes wonder what she is up to these days. I'd like to apologize for the lack of edible food, and find out what she found so objectionable -- was it just men and women sitting close together, touching? That may have been enough. It would be interesting to see if she's as religious as she was back then.

Twenty-five years ago. Four presidential administrations ago...

Nostalgia is a strange thing. Click Here to Read More..