October 13th: Beraysheet
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
The following is Rabbi Ostrich’s Yom Kippur morning sermon.
It has been said that The only thing two Jews can agree on is how much a third should give to Tzedakah. It is probably true, but, ultimately, whatever those two Jews agree on is just talk. It is the giver who decides how much will be given. Regardless of the committee’s opinion, there is autonomy for the individual.
When it comes to the government, this is decidedly not the case. Governmental leaders decide what others will give for the common good, and though each person in a democracy has a voice, once decisions are made, individual autonomy is often futile. Sometimes the sacrifices “for the common good” are spread around for everyone to make, but sometimes those in charge decide that some people will sacrifice for the sake of others. Whether such decisions are fair or not is a matter for debate. The point is that some decide what others will give.
We could take this discussion in many different directions--from the tax code to local zoning, but I think it can be helpful in understanding a big story in the Jewish world, the political turmoil we see in Israel. My thesis? When some decide what others will sacrifice, those who make the sacrifices may stew about it for years and ultimately aspire to political power.
I’m basing my comments on an article by the Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi. I have been acquainted with Yossi for several years, as he is part of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where I study in the summer. This summer, his lectures and classes at Hartman reflected his internal turmoil over the current political situation. In some ways, I feel like I helped birth this article, since I endured several tortured classes where he was trying to organize all the facts into a coherent analysis. Published in The Times of Israel, his article, The Wounded Jewish Psyche and the Divided Israeli Soul, traces much of the current political crisis to two crises most of us have forgotten.
Before looking at these two crises, a word about Yossi. Yossi Klein Halevi was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. A devotee of the famous and then infamous Rabbi Meir Kahane, he was active in the Jewish Defense League for several years. In his twenties, however, he had a change of heart, turned away from that extremism, moved to Israel, and eventually became a moderate voice for peace and mutual respect.
The first forgotten crisis Yossi identifies occurred in 2005 as Israel was disengaging from Gaza. The hard-working and very successful Jewish settlers there were forced by the Israeli government to abandon the farms and homes they had built over some thirty years. There were protests all over the country, and many of the families had to be physically dragged from their homes by Israeli soldiers. For the sake of peace, the government decided that Gaza needed to be given completely to the Palestinian Arabs, and the moshavniks and farmers who had built lives there for some thirty years were the ones chosen to make the sacrifice.
A side issue that just makes the whole episode doubly painful is that, instead of using the Jewish homes and ultra-sophisticated greenhouse systems for their people’s prosperity, Hamas came through and destroyed both farms and homes. The real issue, however, is that the Israeli government promised to help the Jewish farming communities re-establish themselves—rebuild and restart their lives, but this never happened.
The farmers who were dragged from their homes in Gaza were pretty much abandoned by the government and left to piece together relatively impoverished lives. Yossi still believes that disengaging from Gaza was a good decision, but he also sees the deep discontent of those whose sacrifice was not honored or compensated.
The injustice of their situation has festered for some fifteen years and given rise to attitudes and political parties based on disenchantment. Rather than seeing the Israeli government as a problem solver, a number of Israeli Jews see the government as a betrayer. As it turns out, two of the politicians who rose from this deep alienation are Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, the two right-wing politicians who are currently manhandling both the Knesset and Bibi Netanyahu. Ben Gvir, rejected in his youth from the army because of mental instability, is now in charge of Israel’s “Department of Homeland Security.”
An earlier crisis is one most of us never even thought of as a crisis. As Yossi puts it, “...in in the early years of the state...the secular Ashkenazi Labor leadership tried to impose its notion of Israeliness on immigrants, especially from the Middle East, a disastrous mistake for which we continue to pay.”
This campaign had several levels, but first remember that many Muslim countries took the establishment of Israel as an occasion to drive out their Jewish populations. So, not only were Jewish refugees pouring in from Europe, Jews who had been residents in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, and Persia for over a thousand years were also on their way.
The government decided that the new nation’s social fabric would not be well-served if there were too many Mizrachi (non-European) Jews. It was too late to stop the mass influx of Syrian, Iraqi, and Persian Jews, but the Moroccans had not yet arrived. So, the Aliyah agencies diverted large numbers of Moroccan Jewish refugees and sent them to Europe--to the displaced persons camps formerly occupied by Holocaust survivors. It took some Moroccan Jews over two years to get from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.
Then, when they finally arrived in Israel, they were sent out to the middle of nowhere. David Ben Gurion realized that the largest part of Jewish territory, the Negev in the south, was the least inhabited and that building the country mean settling people there. So, without asking or explaining, he had these new Moroccan Jewish immigrants loaded on busses and sent to their “new homes.” They were bussed at night to “development towns” and left there. When they awoke and emerged from what they thought were temporary huts, there was no town, and they were left on their own to build communities. Eventually, these involuntary pioneers built the development towns of Arad, Dimona, Yerocham, and S’derot, but they and their children have not forgotten the callous and manipulative ways that the government used them. Years later, when the Ethiopian Jews came, they were also shipped in large numbers to these out-of-the-way development towns. People in the upper echelons of the Israeli government decided that these towns needed to be built up—and that these newcomers were the ones to do the building.
Some of these development towns are also border outposts. An example is S’derot, located less than a kilometer from Gaza and Hamas, where its predominantly Moroccan and Ethiopian residents spend their days thinking about how far they are from bomb shelters. That these people have deep and abiding resentments about government largesse should not be a surprise.
As Yossi Klein Halevi observed before, the Modern Jewish State began with a particular Israeli identity in mind and worked very hard to impose it on everyone in Israel--a strategy that left many with feelings of alienation. Not every Israeli is Ashkenazic or a Socialist or an atheist or a Kibbutznik. The ones in power from 1948 to 1977 were, but all those who were not—Jews from the Muslim countries, non-Socialist Europeans, and the ultra-Orthodox—eventually developed political power and were a big part of what brought perennial minority leader Menachem Begin to power in 1977. Though there have been some Labor-dominated governments since, most have been decidedly non-Socialist, and today the Left in Israel is virtually unrepresented in the Knesset. And even though the Likkud and similar Conservative parties were supported by the perennial minorities, they too assumed an Ashkenazi and secular dominated paternalism. Left or Right, governmental arrogance has left many in the margins.
In the current government, in particular, the power of the ultra-Orthodox, the settler movement, and the permanent underclass of Jews from Muslim countries are on display, and their energy is anything but conciliatory or cooperative. They have the power they have long craved, and their attempts to remake the legal system are evidence of long-simmering resentments and a sense that the government is not their friend. Since previous governments were not their friends, they see no reason to be friendly to their political opponents. They have the power now, and they are intent on using it for themselves.
Yossi Klein Halevi believes that they have over-played their hand—that the enormous public demonstrations against the judicial changes and against the vengeful wielding of power will soon doom the current coalition. Israeli democracy will recover, but the festering mistrust that gave rise to this power-grab should not be ignored. In democracies, government is ultimately at the pleasure of the governed, and, if the government wants to be perceived as the people’s “friend,” it needs to act like one.
Yes, the hard decisions of leadership do involve choosing who will make the sacrifices for the common good. And many of those strategies—developing the Negev, giving Gaza to the Palestinians, trying to mold an Israeli identity from all the Jewish identities the immigrants brought with them—all made sense. But there were human costs along the way, and failing to acknowledge them or give recompense to those who made the sacrifices has created an atmosphere of disenfranchisement.
The irony is that many of these marginalized groups have achieved power and status. Though discounted at first, the Moroccans and other Jews from Muslim countries have made great progress economically, culturally, and politically. The ultra-Orthodox, though clamoring for more, have significant government subsidies, ample school funding, exemptions from military service, and control over their neighborhoods. Even the settler movement is not as oppressed as they claim. The vast majority of “settlers” live in cities with apartment buildings, commercial districts, excellent infrastructure and internet access, and high-level security. Their “oppression” comes from critics on the Left and international objections to the continuing Occupation—and, of course, from the continuing hostility of Palestinian terrorists. The Israeli government is not their enemy, but many settlers project the difficulties of their lives—and the refusal of the majority of Israelis to embrace religious fundamentalism—onto the government and are trying now to use their government to solve their problems.
This strategy will fail, and Israel’s democracy will survive, but the re-emerging coalition of sanity must not forget the legitimacy and history of the formerly disenfranchised. Among the most important insights I heard when I was in Israel this summer is the following. Polarization results from treating one’s political opponents as enemies. When the Moderates regain power, they need to treat their vanquished opponents as neighbors and fellow citizens, looking for just ways to cooperate with them and to help them in their lives. In short, if the government—whoever is in control—wants to be perceived as the people’s friend, it needs to act like a friend.