Dvar torah achrei mot 5784
A few years ago, my dad came back from Cuba, and he brought us gifts. For my son, he brought a soccer shirt. For my younger child Etta, he brought a really ugly dress, which they never wore. And for me, he brought a Che Guevara t shirt.
Now, this might seem like an innocuous gift - Guevara was a revolutionary hero - but it’s a little more complicated for me, someone who studied political science in college, and who read a 700 page book on Che’s formative years called ‘the motorcycle diaries’ . Someone who read and contemplated the concept of violent revolution as a necessary means of social change, and had to ultimately decide whether this was legitimate or not. To wear a che guevara t-shirt for me is no small act - it means on some level that I am ok with violence in the service of a higher principle like freedom or democracy or equality. At some point in my youth, I was ok with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and other change makers. I understand that sometimes, totalitarian or unjust regimes need to be forced to change, and polite conversations over tea don’t always do the job. However, as I got older, and I read and thought more about it – and as I became less and less compelled and convinced that the solutions to societies problems would come about via politics and government. And I became more and more compelled by religion and spirituality as a place for me to find the answers to the problems that plague humanity.
Specifically, I became both religiously Jewish, and something of a limited pacifist. I read and listened to the speeches of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who succinctly described 1960s anti-communist political doctrine by saying ‘we got guided missiles and misguided men’ and described non-violent protest and resistence to oppression by saying ‘we’ve got to meet physical force with soul force.’ I read Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish refugee of WWII who came to teach and preach at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Heschel taught and emphasized the words of the prophets like Ezekial and Amos and Jeremiah. Amos, who once wrote “For they know not to do right, says the LORD, and they store up violence and robbery in their palaces.” And Ezekiel, who once wrote ““Violence has risen up into a rod of wickedness; none of them shall remain, nor their abundance, nor their splendor; nor shall be wailing for them.” - Ezekiel 7:11
This week has been a week for the American Jews like no other. Yesterday on the news, the first radio story was about on-campus protests against the war in Gaza. The second story was about a congressional vote on a bill that gives consequences for antisemitic hate speech. The third story was about Israel’s war and whether the Netanyahu government plan to invade Rafah would go forward. I ask you - when was the last time issues of immediate concern to American Jews led three separate top news items in row? I submit that it may be possible that that has *never* happened. And this question about non-violence - it strikes at two of those stories - both the on-campus protests and the possible invasion of Rafah.
First of all, that’s stressful enough. I don’t like our people being the center of so much attention. I imagine you may have felt it the past few days, weeks, or months, people asking you, as a Jew, your opinion of the situation. I much prefer when topics of conversation are generated by happy confluences of events, such as the odd synchronization of the Barbie Movie and Oppenheimer opening the same weekend.
But we don’t have any choice in the matter. We are American Jews in May 2024. Our children are on college campus filled with pro-Palestinian protests, which are ceasefire protests and palestinian independence protests and anti-Israel protests and anti-zionism protests, although not necessarily all at once. Some of the protests, like at Pitt or Brown or Penn, are peaceful. Others, like at Columbia and UCLA and Cal Poly Humboldt, have turned violent. We are voting for politicians and attending city and county council meetings filled with hate and misinformation, but also filled with justifiable anguish and frustration about the war and about civilian suffering. Our cousins in Israel are fight a war, and inflicting sometimes devastating casualties on the civilian population. We are in the middle of everything.
I have been so overwhelmed by the current situation that I reached out to one of my rabbis this week, Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, who is also author of a Jewish talmudic analysis on civil society and morality called Justice in the City. Rav Aryeh has always been a moral force of clarity for me - I have attended dozens of protests, while Aryeh has been to hundreds. More importantly, he is an arch pacifist - a man who once fought in the Israeli army, in the 1982 Lebanon war, and learned in the experience that war was horrible, and violence is not a solution or a justification for behavior. I asked what he thought of the campus protests; if he was ever shaken in his belief; and if he felt the need, after decades of speaking out against war, to look for different texts or new approaches. To that last thing he replied ‘you should keep saying the same message and using the same texts until every Jew on earth has heard it,’ which made me laugh. I’ve recently been to White Plains New York and Washington DC on my book tour, so clearly I still have many more Jews to reach.
Aryeh described going to UCLA last Sunday to stand between a boisterous pro-israel demonstration and the equally energized pro-palestinian encampment, a place of contention and strife which I hardly can imagine having the patience to endure. But of course, that is exactly the holy place that the righteous must stand in - places where two sides want to meet in hate and misunderstanding on the off chance that they can calm the troubled waters. The demonstrations passed without incident. A few days later, unfortunately, the situation was different. Several so called pro israel protestors charged into the tent camp at UCLA and started throwing punches. To quote the NY Times article from Wednesday, “Late Tuesday, a group of about 200 counterprotesters began storming the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus and tried to pull apart its wooden pallets and metal barricades. The two sides threw objects, got into fistfights and sprayed chemicals in clashes that went on for several hours, according to a New York Times journalist who was there.”
This incident, and others like it, are why I am deeply skeptical of both counterprotests and destructive or violent protests as being effective. Sure, it’s making the news, but not for the right reasons. I think also, as American Jews, we feel confusion when we grew up on a steady diet of civics and democracy in which the first amendment rights of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion were all enshrined as nearly spiritual offerings. I know I hold the 10 amendments to the us constitution only slightly lower in holiness than I do the 10 commandments at sinai - and that’s not simply alliteration and hyperbole. But not all campus protests are the same. As I mentioned, some protests and protestors desire to stop the war and spare the Palestinian civilian population continued suffering, which are messages I can get behind. Other protestors want to dismantle Israel, or possibly even expel our loved ones from their homes and make us refugees once again - messages I absolutely cannot stomach. And there are certainly additional repugnant views amongst the protestors. And their tactics range from teach-ins to marches and to occupying buildings and acts of violence and destruction.
Overall, I want to simply say that violence begets violence, and intolerant confrontations and hateful language begets more hate and intolerance. This applies equally to the war and the protests - we all patiently wait for the bombs and the fists and the batons to stop so that the goshdarn adults can sit down and do what adults do - which is talk through our problems and solve them by dialogue and understanding and mutual agreement.
One of my favorite teachings is from Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka, is on the story of the flood in the time of Noach. He asks - what was so evil in that generation that God had to destroy them all? He answers this way:
These ones oppress those ones and those ones oppress these ones. those ones oppress these ones with the violence of actions. (Bereshit Rabbah 31)
The violent do violence, and bandits commit banditry, and Divine punishment punishes both perpetrator and victim, the robber and the robbed. Why is this? Because the one that was robbed cries out too much, towards this Divine punishment. And as the violent are punished for their financial violence, so too is punished the one that is the victim of violence for visiting retribution in the form of action. You have permission and an obligation to cry out against an injustice that is done to you - but - to a fitting degree, without revisiting the punishment one-hundred fold. Such it is that you need to find a point of humanity in the one that has harmed you with their evil deeds or speech. Even the one that does an injustice to you, you must see as your brother.
In other words, the Alter of Slabodka is teaching us that the cause of violence and suffering in the world is the need and desire for retribution. The decision ‘well they attacked us so we must hit them back’ is the core failing. The first actor begins the cycle of violence, but the violent response and the misguided belief that the solution will come through violence perpetuates the cycle of violence. It is hard, but we must break the cycle of violence. Violent protests are counter productive, and will fail. Violent, indiscriminate, neverending warfare perpetuates the cycle of violence and will fail. We must learn a different way, and we must begin it soon.
This is one interpretation of a verse from this week’s parsha, Leviticus 17:14 - “For the life of all flesh—its blood is its life. Therefore I say to the Israelite people: You shall not partake of the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood. Anyone who partakes of it shall be cut off.” We are a people that hold life - all life - to be sacred. We are uncomfortable with blood, and we do not believe that loss of life is to be skimmed over lightly. Perhaps it goes too far to say we are a non-violent religion. But we certainly are a religion that does not believe in taking the lives of others without end, without cease, without attempting a different path.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader in a time of another war that was also fiercely protested on college campuses. In one of his great speeches, Beyond Vietnam, he said the following:
"A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
May we soon see a day when violence is no longer used as the answer to our questions, and all the nations of the world, Iran and Gaza and Russia, Ukraine Israel and the United States, spend the peoples tax dollars on housing and food and education instead of tanks and planes and bombs. Bimheirah beyameinu, soon in our days, amen.
A few years ago, my dad came back from Cuba, and he brought us gifts. For my son, he brought a soccer shirt. For my younger child Etta, he brought a really ugly dress, which they never wore. And for me, he brought a Che Guevara t shirt.
Now, this might seem like an innocuous gift - Guevara was a revolutionary hero - but it’s a little more complicated for me, someone who studied political science in college, and who read a 700 page book on Che’s formative years called ‘the motorcycle diaries’ . Someone who read and contemplated the concept of violent revolution as a necessary means of social change, and had to ultimately decide whether this was legitimate or not. To wear a che guevara t-shirt for me is no small act - it means on some level that I am ok with violence in the service of a higher principle like freedom or democracy or equality. At some point in my youth, I was ok with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and other change makers. I understand that sometimes, totalitarian or unjust regimes need to be forced to change, and polite conversations over tea don’t always do the job. However, as I got older, and I read and thought more about it – and as I became less and less compelled and convinced that the solutions to societies problems would come about via politics and government. And I became more and more compelled by religion and spirituality as a place for me to find the answers to the problems that plague humanity.
Specifically, I became both religiously Jewish, and something of a limited pacifist. I read and listened to the speeches of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who succinctly described 1960s anti-communist political doctrine by saying ‘we got guided missiles and misguided men’ and described non-violent protest and resistence to oppression by saying ‘we’ve got to meet physical force with soul force.’ I read Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish refugee of WWII who came to teach and preach at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Heschel taught and emphasized the words of the prophets like Ezekial and Amos and Jeremiah. Amos, who once wrote “For they know not to do right, says the LORD, and they store up violence and robbery in their palaces.” And Ezekiel, who once wrote ““Violence has risen up into a rod of wickedness; none of them shall remain, nor their abundance, nor their splendor; nor shall be wailing for them.” - Ezekiel 7:11
This week has been a week for the American Jews like no other. Yesterday on the news, the first radio story was about on-campus protests against the war in Gaza. The second story was about a congressional vote on a bill that gives consequences for antisemitic hate speech. The third story was about Israel’s war and whether the Netanyahu government plan to invade Rafah would go forward. I ask you - when was the last time issues of immediate concern to American Jews led three separate top news items in row? I submit that it may be possible that that has *never* happened. And this question about non-violence - it strikes at two of those stories - both the on-campus protests and the possible invasion of Rafah.
First of all, that’s stressful enough. I don’t like our people being the center of so much attention. I imagine you may have felt it the past few days, weeks, or months, people asking you, as a Jew, your opinion of the situation. I much prefer when topics of conversation are generated by happy confluences of events, such as the odd synchronization of the Barbie Movie and Oppenheimer opening the same weekend.
But we don’t have any choice in the matter. We are American Jews in May 2024. Our children are on college campus filled with pro-Palestinian protests, which are ceasefire protests and palestinian independence protests and anti-Israel protests and anti-zionism protests, although not necessarily all at once. Some of the protests, like at Pitt or Brown or Penn, are peaceful. Others, like at Columbia and UCLA and Cal Poly Humboldt, have turned violent. We are voting for politicians and attending city and county council meetings filled with hate and misinformation, but also filled with justifiable anguish and frustration about the war and about civilian suffering. Our cousins in Israel are fight a war, and inflicting sometimes devastating casualties on the civilian population. We are in the middle of everything.
I have been so overwhelmed by the current situation that I reached out to one of my rabbis this week, Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, who is also author of a Jewish talmudic analysis on civil society and morality called Justice in the City. Rav Aryeh has always been a moral force of clarity for me - I have attended dozens of protests, while Aryeh has been to hundreds. More importantly, he is an arch pacifist - a man who once fought in the Israeli army, in the 1982 Lebanon war, and learned in the experience that war was horrible, and violence is not a solution or a justification for behavior. I asked what he thought of the campus protests; if he was ever shaken in his belief; and if he felt the need, after decades of speaking out against war, to look for different texts or new approaches. To that last thing he replied ‘you should keep saying the same message and using the same texts until every Jew on earth has heard it,’ which made me laugh. I’ve recently been to White Plains New York and Washington DC on my book tour, so clearly I still have many more Jews to reach.
Aryeh described going to UCLA last Sunday to stand between a boisterous pro-israel demonstration and the equally energized pro-palestinian encampment, a place of contention and strife which I hardly can imagine having the patience to endure. But of course, that is exactly the holy place that the righteous must stand in - places where two sides want to meet in hate and misunderstanding on the off chance that they can calm the troubled waters. The demonstrations passed without incident. A few days later, unfortunately, the situation was different. Several so called pro israel protestors charged into the tent camp at UCLA and started throwing punches. To quote the NY Times article from Wednesday, “Late Tuesday, a group of about 200 counterprotesters began storming the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus and tried to pull apart its wooden pallets and metal barricades. The two sides threw objects, got into fistfights and sprayed chemicals in clashes that went on for several hours, according to a New York Times journalist who was there.”
This incident, and others like it, are why I am deeply skeptical of both counterprotests and destructive or violent protests as being effective. Sure, it’s making the news, but not for the right reasons. I think also, as American Jews, we feel confusion when we grew up on a steady diet of civics and democracy in which the first amendment rights of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion were all enshrined as nearly spiritual offerings. I know I hold the 10 amendments to the us constitution only slightly lower in holiness than I do the 10 commandments at sinai - and that’s not simply alliteration and hyperbole. But not all campus protests are the same. As I mentioned, some protests and protestors desire to stop the war and spare the Palestinian civilian population continued suffering, which are messages I can get behind. Other protestors want to dismantle Israel, or possibly even expel our loved ones from their homes and make us refugees once again - messages I absolutely cannot stomach. And there are certainly additional repugnant views amongst the protestors. And their tactics range from teach-ins to marches and to occupying buildings and acts of violence and destruction.
Overall, I want to simply say that violence begets violence, and intolerant confrontations and hateful language begets more hate and intolerance. This applies equally to the war and the protests - we all patiently wait for the bombs and the fists and the batons to stop so that the goshdarn adults can sit down and do what adults do - which is talk through our problems and solve them by dialogue and understanding and mutual agreement.
One of my favorite teachings is from Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka, is on the story of the flood in the time of Noach. He asks - what was so evil in that generation that God had to destroy them all? He answers this way:
These ones oppress those ones and those ones oppress these ones. those ones oppress these ones with the violence of actions. (Bereshit Rabbah 31)
The violent do violence, and bandits commit banditry, and Divine punishment punishes both perpetrator and victim, the robber and the robbed. Why is this? Because the one that was robbed cries out too much, towards this Divine punishment. And as the violent are punished for their financial violence, so too is punished the one that is the victim of violence for visiting retribution in the form of action. You have permission and an obligation to cry out against an injustice that is done to you - but - to a fitting degree, without revisiting the punishment one-hundred fold. Such it is that you need to find a point of humanity in the one that has harmed you with their evil deeds or speech. Even the one that does an injustice to you, you must see as your brother.
In other words, the Alter of Slabodka is teaching us that the cause of violence and suffering in the world is the need and desire for retribution. The decision ‘well they attacked us so we must hit them back’ is the core failing. The first actor begins the cycle of violence, but the violent response and the misguided belief that the solution will come through violence perpetuates the cycle of violence. It is hard, but we must break the cycle of violence. Violent protests are counter productive, and will fail. Violent, indiscriminate, neverending warfare perpetuates the cycle of violence and will fail. We must learn a different way, and we must begin it soon.
This is one interpretation of a verse from this week’s parsha, Leviticus 17:14 - “For the life of all flesh—its blood is its life. Therefore I say to the Israelite people: You shall not partake of the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood. Anyone who partakes of it shall be cut off.” We are a people that hold life - all life - to be sacred. We are uncomfortable with blood, and we do not believe that loss of life is to be skimmed over lightly. Perhaps it goes too far to say we are a non-violent religion. But we certainly are a religion that does not believe in taking the lives of others without end, without cease, without attempting a different path.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader in a time of another war that was also fiercely protested on college campuses. In one of his great speeches, Beyond Vietnam, he said the following:
"A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
May we soon see a day when violence is no longer used as the answer to our questions, and all the nations of the world, Iran and Gaza and Russia, Ukraine Israel and the United States, spend the peoples tax dollars on housing and food and education instead of tanks and planes and bombs. Bimheirah beyameinu, soon in our days, amen.
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