There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.
There are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.
So, says the Torah, remember in order not to forget.
This week is Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance. Just before Purim, we are called to read three additional lines of Scripture. Deuteronomy instructs:
Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt [… ] You shall erase the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.
Remember… erase the memory… do not forget.
Is the demand to remember not contradicted by the insistence on erasing the memory?
Is the commandment to remember not exactly the same as the one not to forget?
Perhaps not. There are ways of remembering that encourage forgetting, and ways of forgetting that make you remember.
Alan Bennett’s play, The History Boys, is an exploration of what it means to teach history, and what we can learn from it.
In a powerful scene, the newest teacher, Tom Irwin, takes his sixth-form grammar school students on a tour of a war cemetery.
As they walk, he tells them:
The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn’t want war. Yeah, there’s an arms race, but it’s Britain who’s leading it. So, why does no one admit this?
That’s why. The dead. The body count. We don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning’s veiled the truth. It’s not “lest we forget”, it’s “lest we remember”. That’s what all this is about -the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence-. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
The truth to these words is palpable. In every village square throughout Britain there is a stone column, inscribed with names. The Cenotaph is so finite. Its concrete defies questions. You cannot ask it: what did they die for?
As we lay wreaths, the liturgy intones that the war dead “made the ultimate sacrifice.” These words carry such gravity that you forget it was a conscript army. You dare not ponder: who sacrificed them, and for what cause?
Then, there is silence. So much silence that you cannot hear the echo: was it worth it?
Real memories are not fixed. They are fluid and living, constantly opening up new interpretations and interrogations. When you really remember, you pore over the details with others, seeking perspectives you missed, guided by a quest for greater understanding. You always want to know what you can learn from it, since the memory teaches something new to each moment.
But, as Alan Bennett’s character teaches us, that is not what happens with certain war memorials.
They are ways of remembering in order to make you forget.
There are, too, ways of forgetting to make you remember.
In 1988, the Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Elkana, wrote an article for HaAretz called The Need to Forget. Not long after its publication, this article entered the new Jewish canon as one of the most challenging and profound commentaries on Shoah memorialisation.
In it, he warns against the danger that Holocaust consciousness poses to Israeli society.
He writes:
I see no greater threat to the future of the State of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust has systematically and forcefully penetrated the consciousness of the Israeli public.
Reflecting on the school trips to Yad Vashem, Elkana comments:
What did we want those tender youths to do with the experience? We declaimed, insensitively and harshly, and without explanation: “Remember!” “Zechor!” To what purpose? What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate. “Zechor!” can easily be understood as a call for continuing and blind hatred.
So, says Elkana, while the rest of the world may need to remember the Holocaust, the Israelis needed to learn to forget it. They needed to uproot the injunction to remember “to displace the Holocaust from being the central axis of our national experience.”
Elkana’s invocation of forgetting is also an invitation to remember. Forget the past in order to remember that we have a future. Forget the cruelties inflicted on our people in order to remember that we are greater than our misery. Forget the wars in order to remember the possibility of peace.
Elkana is not talking about an alternate reality where everyone wakes up tomorrow with amnesia about the last hundred years of history. He is talking about an active process of forgetting: forgetting by asking new questions and building new memories.
These are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.
There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.
But, the Torah tells us: remember in order not to forget.
What type of remembering would this be?
A full remembering, the type repeated twice by our parashah, the kind that forces you not to forget.
This remembering, then, must be one that always asks questions and returns to itself. A history that invites constant revision and ever wants to teach new lessons.
For the last sixteen months, Israel has been gripped by war. It has been unavoidable as its details have filled our news feeds and lives.
I know it is too soon to start the painstaking soul-searching involved in real remembering.
But it is plenty early enough to forget.
Already there are those who would like us to forget, so that they can eschew their own accountability.
How easily we can be made complicit in their acts of wilful forgetting.
So I have been considering how to fulfil the Torah’s commandment to remember.
I want to remember in fullness and complexity, always returning to new questions.
I want to remember all the suffering, for there has been so much suffering.
I want to remember all the dead. Every name. There are so many names.
I want to remember all those responsible. Every name. There are so many names.
I want to remember all the alternatives, because there have always been so many options, and there are still so many other ways.
I want to remember completely who I have been, who we have been, at best and at worst throughout this whole time.
“How many more signs do you need that God is not there?”
This was the question one congregant asked last week when I went round for a cup of tea. In fact, a few of you have asked similar things recently.
None of you was asking out of arrogance or triviality, but expressing a real despair at the state of the world. The ongoing war, which has claimed far too many lives, is enough to incite a crisis of faith in even the most devout believers.
Why will God not just stop the war? It is a serious question, and one that deserves a serious answer.
How desperate are we all to see a ceasefire, to see Gaza rebuilt, to see the hostages returned home, to know that the Israelis will no longer hide in bomb shelters, to know that no more people will be rushed to hospitals, to see an end to all the violence and bloodshed?
And it goes deeper than that. How much do we all wish that none of this had ever happened; that there was no war for us to wish to end?
In our anguish at the cruelty, we cry out to the Heavens. There is no answer from On High, so we wonder if there is Anyone there listening at all.
I will not be so presumptuous as to imagine I have the answers. I do not know the nature of God and can give no convincing proof of how our Creator lives in this world. In fact, if I found anyone who thought they did, I would consider them a charlatan.
The great 15th Century Sephardi rabbi, Yosef Albo, said: “If I knew God, I would be God.” We are, all of us, animals scrambling in the dark, as we try to make sense of the mystery.
But we come to synagogue so that we can scramble in the dark together, feeling that if we unpick the mystery in community, we will get further, and develop better ideas. Allow me, then, to share some of my own thinking, so that we can be in that conversation together.
How many more signs do you need that God is not there?
In our Torah, there were times when God did indeed show signs of presence. In the early chapters of Genesis, God walks through the Garden of Eden in the cool of day. At the exodus from Egypt, God came with signs and wonders and an outstretched arm. As the Israelites wandered in the desert, God appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
This is the kind of sign that we might want from God now, then.
At a hostel in Jerusalem, I met an evangelical Christian who was absolutely convinced that everything happening in the Middle East was already foretold by the Bible and that God was about to rain down hell on the Palestinians and then all the Jews would finally accept Jesus.
Suffice to say I do not think such a God would be worthy of worship.
And I highly doubt this is the kind of divine intervention any of us would embrace.
Is there an alternative way we could wish for a sign?
Some great indication that Someone greater than us is involved in the story and cares about human suffering. Perhaps just a gentle hand to reassure us everything will be OK.
Deep down, most of us know that no such sign will come.
God did, however, send another sign in the Torah. A sign, perhaps, not to look for signs. A sign that God was not going to get involved, no matter how desperate it all seemed.
The rainbow.
At the start of the story of Noah, the world was filled with violence. Everyone had turned to war – nation against nation – all against all. The entire planet was rife with destruction.
God slammed down on the reset button. God sent a flood so catastrophic that it killed everyone bar one family. The flood was like a thorough system cleanse, designed to strip the earth back to its original state and allow Noah to rebuild.
Then, as soon as the rains had stopped and the land had returned, God looked at the devastation, and swore: “never again.”
God promised Noah: “I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
God hung a rainbow in the sky, and told Noah it was a symbol that there would be no more divine interventions:
“When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
The rainbow, then, is a sign that God is there, and a sign that God will not get involved. Even if humanity goes back to being as violent as it was in the Generation of the Flood, God is not going to step in and destroy as at the start.
If the rainbow is a sign that God will not come and strike people down when the world is in crisis, it is also a sign of the other half of the covenant. Human beings must now be God’s hands on earth. We have to be the ones to do what we wish God would.
For Jews in the rabbinic period, every rainbow was a reminder to them that God would not act, so they had to take the initiative. They would look up at the sky and say “blessed is God, who remembers the covenant.”
According to the Jerusalem Talmud, no rainbow was seen during the entire lifetime of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai. He was so righteous and brought so many others to do good deeds that there was no need to be reminded any more of the covenant. Bar Yochai was one who acted so much like he was God’s actor on earth that even God did not need to send reminders.
The idea that human beings had to be God’s hands became even more important in the post-Holocaust world. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits escaped from Germany in 1939 and went on to become one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of the 20th Century. For him, a traditional religious Jew, grappling with the enormity of the Shoah, he had to find a way to deal with God’s seeming absence at Auschwitz.
So, Rabbi Berkovits said, the problem lay not with God’s inaction, but with humanity’s. In his book, Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits wrote:
“Since history is man’s responsibility, one would, in fact, expect [God] to hide, to be silent, while man is going about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God’s convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.”
What Berkovits is saying is that it might be in God’s nature to prevent catastrophe, but it would undermine human nature if God did. In order that people can realise our freedom and our full potential, God has to stand back.
It seems that, in almost every generation, Jews are asking why God does not intervene to stop violence.
In each generation, we find an answer: God does not intervene, because that’s our job.
It’s not that any of these classical sources doubt God’s existence or question God’s presence. They just don’t think it is God’s responsibility to act. It is ours.
There is no flood coming to wipe out war or lightning bolt coming from the sky to strike down the wrongdoers.
We began with a question.
How many more signs do you need that God is not there?
Perhaps we can now reframe it positively.
How many more signs do you need that you must act?
God is not going to stop war. So we have to do our bit to bring it to an end.
Even in our small corner of the world, we have to do all we can to push for peace and justice.
So, on the days when you find yourself looking for the sign, you be the sign.
You need to be the sign to somebody else that there is hope in this world.
Imagine a courtroom. Picture those big wooden panels that line the grand hall of a traditional Crown court. The deep reds of the carpets. The judge sitting loftily on a bench, at the front, draped in black gowns, donning that full-bottomed wig. And all the lawyers surrounding you, speaking Latin and legalese, bewildering you with their words.
You have not been here before, but, suddenly, you find your life depends on your correct participation. You will have spent extra time ironing your clothes and polishing your shoes. You may have spent weeks picking out an outfit. Perhaps you already know what you would wear.
How does it feel to stand trial here? Is this somewhere you want to be? From here, how much do you think you will learn and grow? And do you think there might be a better place where you could improve yourself?
This is the metaphor we are often given for Yom Kippur. The Heavenly court and the earthly one. The trial of our souls. The God of Justice, who sits in judgement over us.
We beg for clemency:
סלח לנו – forgive us
We announce our expectation of a just verdict:
סלחתי כדברך – I have forgiven according to your plea.1
We rejoice in the judgement:
אשרי נשוי פשע כסוי חטאה – happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sins are pardoned.2
This is the courtroom of our hearts.
C. S. Lewis, the great 20th Century English author, famed for his Chronicles of Narnia, picked up on this aspect of our thinking. When he wasn’t writing beloved children’s novels, Lewis dabbled in biblical studies as a lay Anglican theologian.
C. S. Lewis writes: “The ancient Jews, like [Christians], think of God’s judgement in terms of an earthly court of justice. The difference is that the Christian pictures the case to be tried as a criminal case with himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as plaintiff (sic). The one hopes for acquittal; the other for a resounding triumph with heavy damages.”3
Now, Lewis is no antisemite. In fact, he repudiated the hatred of Jews, long before it became fashionable to do so.4 He is eager to point out that, at his time of writing, immediately after the Second World War, the Christian had much to atone for, and the Jew had much to charge against God.
In many ways, he has us down. We do indeed take this as an opportunity to bring all our charges against God, and to vent our grievances against the injustice of the universe. Lewis is talking about ancient Israelite religion; the religion of Scripture.
Lewis would, I’m sure, willingly acknowledge that we modern Jews also share much in common with modern Christians, in terms of our admissions of guilt and prayers for pardon.
C. S. Lewis has astutely picked up that we see all this as a trial.
But where he errs, I think, is in his understanding of what an ancient Jewish court was. The tribunal of our ancestors looked nothing like the judge’s dock of today.
A metaphor that worked so well for poets and liturgists many centuries ago can become quite damaging when it is used with the projection of our criminal justice system.
Where today, a court can dole out sentences of imprisonment, the goal of the ancient court was about restitution and social harmony.
Where today, the court expects to find a person innocent or guilty, the ancient court sought to make sure everyone felt like they had a place in their community.
The focus of our sacred writings is to create a society based on compassion, community accountability, and healing.
When we rethink what justice looked like for the authors of our Torah, concepts of trials, pardons, and sentences start to look very different. By seeing the court through ancient eyes, we can re-imagine the trial as a process of growth and healing.
We get mere glimpses of what the earliest courts might have been. In the book of Judges, the archetypal ideal of the judge is Deborah, the prophetess. Her court is a base underneath palm trees in the hill country. We receive an image of her sitting there, while Israelites come up to have their disputes decided.5 Her court was one where people came to negotiate and be heard, but there is no indication they came to be punished. This was in the time of the Judges, the earliest of Israelite civilisations.
Later, however, ancient Israel developed a class system and a monarchy. With a state system came power and punishments. In the book of Samuel, King David pursues after the city of Avel Beit-Maacah, threatening capital punishment against everyone who rebels against him. Here, an unnamed elder-woman comes out. She admonishes the general, saying: “we are among the peaceful and faithful of Israel, will you destroy God’s inheritance?” She rebukes them with a reminder of the old system – that, before there were kings, people used to come and talk out their issues in the city. The generals agree to spare the city, providing they can enact punishment against one ringleader.6
From these two stories, we can garner an insight into what justice may have looked like in the earliest part of the biblical period. The first thing we notice is that women were leaders. This, then, may be a justice system from before patriarchal power was cemented. We also do not detect any hint of crime and punishment. Instead, the courts seem more like public cafes, where experienced negotiators help community members talk through their problems. If this is correct, we are looking at a very different type of court.
Still, courts did develop in ancient Israel, but not like those of today, nor even of the surrounding empires. In our narratives, most of the times that characters are imprisoned, it is outside of the Land of Israel, by a Pagan power, and unjustly.
Joseph is sent to prison in Egypt on trumped-up charges without any due process.7 Samson the warrior is sent to toil at grinding grain in the jailhouse by the Philistines, not because he has done anything wrong, but as a prisoner of war.8 When the Babylonian rulers send Daniel to the Lion’s Den, it is because of xenophobic laws that stop him practising Judaism.9
Our Scripture treats prisons as something foreign, where good people are sent for bad reasons.
Even when we do see examples of prisons in Israel, they are always treated by the Torah’s authors with contempt. Three of our prophets are sent to prison: Jeremiah;10 Micaiah;11 and Hanani.12 In every single case, this is a monarch warehousing a prophet because they are speaking truth to power. In the Torah’s view of justice, it is hard to see how prisons could have any meaningful role at all.
That does not mean this was a world without punishment. Scripture presents exile, flogging, and even death as options for what might constitute justice in the ancient world.13
Yet, based on our commentaries and traditions, we have the impression that such penalties were implemented only in the most egregious cases. What somebody had to do was so heinous that the death penalty would almost never actually occur.14
In the Mishnah, we read, the court that puts to death one person in seven years is bloodthirsty. Rabbi Eleazar Ben Azariah takes it even further, saying, ‘One person in seventy years.’ Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say, ‘If we had been in the Sanhedrin, no one would have ever been put to death.’15
What kind of justice system was this then? No prisons, no death penalty? No patriarchy, no punishments?
The ancient court sounds more like people just sitting around having a chat.
What if it were? What if, instead of biblical justice being all about burning and smiting, it was mostly about negotiating and feeling? How would that change how we look at our tradition? How would it change how we approach our relationship with God?
Perhaps I am over-egging how different the biblical court was. If so, bear with me.
I am well aware of how terrible some of the Torah’s punishments were. I am also conscious that what I am describing is so outside of our reality as to make it feel fictitious. If the world of restorative justice I am describing never really existed, please at least indulge me in entertaining the possibility that it could.
We are not, in this room, coming up with a proposal for how to govern Britain. We are just asking what metaphors work when we think about how to hold our own hearts on Yom Kippur. For me, the metaphor of court cases has proven really problematic, and I am looking to explore new ones with you.
The problem of the courtroom metaphor initially struck me quite suddenly. I was talking with my therapist about an issue that I felt kept coming up in my own behaviours. I said: “I’ve got another case to talk about…”
He looked around the room and said “you know you’re not on trial here, right?”
I think I had expected, on some level, that, through counselling, I could be acquitted or found guilty for all my past deeds and thought patterns.
I had built a prison in my own heart, to which I could sentence the parts of myself I liked least. I had conjured up a jury in my head, who would judge all my actions, according to the standards I had set myself. According to the standards I imagined God has set for me.
What was I doing? The point of therapy is not punishment or exoneration. It’s to learn and grow, and find ways of being better in the life I actually have. The point is not to condemn or discard my negative traits or past mistakes. The point is to work towards loving all of myself and learning from all I have done.
Perhaps you can relate to this. Have you imagined how you might punish others, or cast them into our prison in your heart? Maybe you even seek to punish people or get them out of your life. Maybe you, too, have hoped there were parts of yourself you could lock away.
We cannot apply the carceral system to our spirit. When we are doing wrong or feeling guilty, we must be free to look ourselves in the eye, and change willingly.
Is this not what God wants from us, after all? That we make amends, grow, become better. That we embrace ourselves and each other. That we turn from our ways and live.
If, then, we are in a court with God, we should make it one where we are in conversation with a loving elder, not facing a law lord who seeks to punish and acquit.
So, let us imagine a new court. It is not the court we thought into existence at the start of this sermon. It is a very ancient one, where our ancestors went thousands of years ago. Deborah’s court.
You are in the dusty scrubland of Canaan, and a few yards away you can see an oasis. People are gathering around it to fetch water. They are laughing and catching up and telling stories. They are feeding their livestock: sheep, goats, donkeys, camels.
At the edge of this well is a row of palm trees, and the tribal leaders sit, drinking sweet tea. You cannot go to prison. There is no prison. You cannot be acquitted, because nobody thinks you are guilty. You are just a person, a member of the community, looking for a way through a problem. The goal will be to find a solution that benefits everyone, and that sees maximum spiritual growth.
When you come away from this court, you can say “happy is the one whose sin is forgiven.” You don’t mean that you are relieved because you thought you were in trouble. You mean you are jubilant, because you are at peace with yourself, your community, and your God.
Let this be your court. Let this be the place you take your heart over Yom Kippur.
Come before God, not as a claimant nor a defendant, but as a congregant, seeking growth.
And thank God that there is no prison in your heart; only an opportunity for ongoing healing and change.
May this be where we judge ourselves. May this be where we judge others.
In 1922, archaeologists dug up a site in modern-day southern Iraq. There, they found incredible spans of gold and sophisticated armour, and Iron Age Sumerian artefacts, encased within stone walls. They dubbed this place “the Royal Cemetery of Ur,” an ancient Babylonian mausoleum.
On that site, they also discovered evidence of hundreds of human sacrifices. Among the human sacrifices, a considerable number were children.
Nearly all of the skeletons were killed to accompany an aristocrat or member of the royal family into the afterlife. Some had drunk poison. Some had been bashed over the head with blunt objects. After their death, many were exposed to mercury vapour, so that they would not decompose, but would remain in a lifelike posture, available for public display.
Excavations from the Royal Cemetery at Ur
This site dates to sometime around 2,500 BCE in the ancient city of Ur. According to our legends, another figure came from the ancient city of Ur sometime around 2,500 BCE.
His name was Abraham.
In the biblical narrative, Abraham wandered from Ur to ancient Canaan, where he began to worship the One God, and founded Judaism.
The world in which Abraham purportedly lived was rife with child sacrifice. Across the Ancient Near East, archaeologists have uncovered remains of children on slaughtering altars. They have found steles describing when and why they sacrificed children. They have found stories of child sacrifice from the Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, and Assyrian civilisations.
So problematic was child sacrifice in the ancient world that our Scripture repeatedly condemns it. The book of Leviticus warns: “Do not permit any of your children to be offered as a sacrifice to Molech, for you must not bring shame on the name of your God.” The prophet Jeremiah describes disparagingly how the Pagans “have built the high places to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal.” In the Book of Kings, King Josiah tears down the altars where people are sacrificing their children.
Abraham put a stop to the practice of child sacrifice. It seems to happen suddenly, and without warning, and with even less explanation. No reason is given why he abruptly ended all the cultural deference that had gone before and opposed an entrenched religious practice.
The question we now must ask is: why?
One reason that comes to mind is that it is so obviously immoral. Surely it should be self-evident that you don’t kill kids! But that wasn’t obvious to all the people around Abraham. And that wasn’t obvious to traditional commentators, either. In their world, the morally right thing was always to obey God.
Fresco of the Binding of Isaac at the 3rd Century Duro Europos Synagogue, Syria
A traditional reading says that Abraham stopped child sacrifice in obedience to God. In the story we read today, Abraham is called upon by God to go up on Mount Moriah and slay his son. Only at the summit, when he holds up his arm to murder Isaac, does God stop him, telling Abraham that he has proved his devotion to God by not withholding his son, and that he does not have to kill Isaac.
Yet there are several problems with this story. If we adhere to the traditional reading, God still wanted child sacrifice, and felt that doing so would prove Abraham’s devotion. In fact, nearly all traditionalist readers interpret it this way,saying that obedience before God should be a sacred virtue. A conservative reader of the Bible says that the moral of the story is that we should be subservient to God, and do what we are told.
God said not to perform child sacrifices, so we no longer do. That would mean, then, that if God had said child sacrifice was permitted, we would still be doing it.
In 2007, the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm offered a radical reinterpretation of the story of the binding of Isaac. The story, Dr Boehm argues, is not about Abraham’s fealty to God, but his disobedience. Dr Boehm shows how, reading against the grain of traditional interpretation, this is not a story where God changes tact and decides not to ask for child sacrifices anymore, but where Abraham rebels against authority and refuses to commit murder.
For Boehm, what was truly radical about the Binding of Isaac was that it set out a new set of values, completely at odds with those of the Ancient Near East. Where other cultures practised child sacrifice because it was part of their established culture, Abraham resisted and put life above law. Where others encouraged obedience to authority, so much that poor people could be killed in the palaces of Ur to serve their masters in the afterlife, Abraham made a virtue of rebellion. For our ancestor Abraham, refusing to follow orders, even God’s, was the true measure of faith. By not killing, even if God seemingly tells you to, you show where your values really lie.
This is not a story about obedience, but rebellion. And that message – of resistance against authority in defence of human life – has much to teach us today.
Boehm reconstructs what the archetypal story of child sacrifice was in the Ancient Near East. Across many cultures and time periods, there was a familiar refrain to how the story went. The community is faced with a crisis: some kind of famine, natural disaster, or war. The community realises that its gods are angry. To placate the gods, the community leader brings his most treasured child and sacrifices him on an altar following the traditional rites. Then, the gods are pleased and the disaster is averted.
We can see that the biblical narrative clearly subverts the storytelling tradition that was around it. In other cultures, the community leader really did sacrifice his special child, and that really did please their Pagan god. In our story, the community leader does not sacrifice his special child, and the national God proclaims no longer to desire human sacrifice. This is already then, a bold message to the rest of the world: you might sacrifice children, but we will not.
Boehm takes this a step further and looks at source criticism for the text. Most scholars of Scripture accept that Torah is the work of human hands over several centuries. One of the ways we try to work out who wrote which bits is by looking at what names for God they use. Whenever we see the name “Elohim” used for God, we tend to think this source is earlier. Whenever we see the name “YHVH” used for God, we tend to assume the source is a later edit by Temple priests.
The story of the binding of Isaac is odd because it uses the name “Elohim” almost the entire way through, until the very end, when the angel of God appears and tells Abraham not to kill Isaac. That means that most of the text is from the early tradition and only the very end part, where the angel of God tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, comes from the later priests.
So, Boehm asks, what was the earlier version of the text? If you take out the verses where God is YHVH and have only the version where God is Elohim, what story remains?
Well, in the version that we know, where both stories are combined, an angel of God calls out and tells Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac. That’s the bit where God is YHVH. If you take that out, and have only God as Elohim, Abraham makes the decision himself. No angel comes to tell him what to do. Next, if we cut out the parts where God is YHVH, there is no praise from the angel, telling Abraham he made the right choice. Instead, you get a story where Abraham deliberately disobeys his God because he loves the life of his son more.
Adi Nes, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, 2004
The earliest version of the text, before the Torah was edited and a later gloss was added, is one in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac, goes all the way up Mount Moriah, and then refuses. Without prompt or praise from God, Abraham decides to sacrifice a ram instead of his son. In the earliest version of the biblical narrative, when source critics have stripped away priestly edits, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and Abraham rebels.
The earliest version, then, is an even more radical counter-narrative to the other stories of the Ancient Near East. Not only do we not sacrifice children. We also recognise that sometimes you have to say no to your god. In this version, rebellion is more important than obedience, especially when it comes to human life.
This isn’t just a modern Bible scholar being provocative and trying to sell books. In fact, Boehm shows, this was also the view of respected Torah scholars like Maimonides and ibn Caspi. These great mediaeval thinkers didn’t think of the Torah as having multiple authors, but they could see that multiple stories were going on in one narrative. One, they thought, was the simple tale of obedience, intended for the masses. But hiding between the lines was another one, for the truly enlightened, that tells the story of Abraham’s refusal.
Boehm terms this “a religious model of disobedience.” By the end of the book, you go away with the unshakable impression that Boehm is right. True faith, he says, is not always doing what you think God is telling you. Sometimes it is reaching deep within your own soul to find moral truth. Sometimes you really show your values by how you defy orders.
In his conclusion, Boehm takes aim at Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, an American religious leader, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Rabbi Riskin had said, in his analysis of the binding of Isaac, that Abraham was a model of faith by his willingness to kill his son. Riskin insisted that he was willing to sacrifice his own children in service of the state of Israel.
This, says Boehm, is precisely the opposite of the message of the binding of Isaac. The point was not to let your children die. The point was to bring a final end to child sacrifice. The point was not to submit to unjust authority, but to rebel in defence of life.
Rabbi Riskin does not realise it, but by offering child sacrifice, he is really advocating for the Pagan god. He is describing the explicitly forbidden ritual of allowing your children to die.
Abraham thoroughly opposed these false gods who demanded ritual murder. They were idols; and child sacrifice a monstrous practice that we were supposed to banish to the past. The very essence and origin of Jewish monotheism is its thorough rejection of killing children.
Boehm could not have known how pertinent his words would become. This year has been one of the worst that those of us connected to Israel can remember. Beginning on October 7th, with Hamas’s horrendous massacres and kidnappings, the last Jewish year has seen us rapt in a horrific and seemingly never-ending war.
This year, thousands of Israelis were killed. This is the first time in a generation that more Israeli youth have died in war than in car crashes. Reading through the list of names, it is remarkable how many of the soldiers were teenagers.
That is not to even mention the 40,000 Palestinians whom the IDF have killed. According to Netanyahu’s own statements, well over half were civilians. Around a third were children. As famine and food insecurity rises, the risk of deaths will only accelerate. It has been agonising to witness, and I cannot imagine how painful it has been to live through.
Yet, during my month in Jerusalem, I saw that the voice of Abraham has not been extinguished. There are few groups I hold in higher esteem than the Israeli peace movement. Against untold threats and coercion, in a society that can be intensely hostile to their message, they uphold Abraham’s injunction against killing.
One of the leaders of the cause against war was Rachel Goldberg-Polin. On October 7th, her 19-year-old son, Hersh, was kidnapped by Hamas. His arm was blown off and he was taken hostage in Gaza. From the very outset, Mrs. Golderg-Polin argued fervently for a ceasefire and a hostage deal that would bring her son home. She warned that the only way her son would come home alive would be as part of political negotiations.
At the end of August, as Israeli forces neared to capture Hersh as part of a military operation, Hamas shot her son, Hersh, in the head.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s refusal to give up hope, refusal to sacrifice her son, and steadfast insistence on peaceful alternatives is a true model of Abraham’s faith.
Israeli peace protestors
And it involves serious rebellion too. When I met with hostage families in Jerusalem, I was shocked to hear how, for protesting against the war to bring their families home, they had been beaten up by Ben Gvir’s police. I saw this with my own eyes when I marched alongside them. People shouted and jeered at them, and the police came at them with truncheons.
In July, when I went with Rabbis for Human Rights to defend a village in the West Bank against settler violence, we were joined in our car full of nerdy Talmud scholars by a surprising first-timer. A strapping 18-year-old got in to volunteer in supporting the Palestinian village. What was most remarkable was that he himself lived in a West Bank settlement.
He explained that he had refused to serve in the military. He did not know that others had done it before, or that there were organisations to support Israeli military refusers. Instead, he said, he thought to himself: “if I don’t go, they won’t kill me; if I do go, I might kill someone.” What could be a truer expression of Abraham’s message: no to death! No to death, no matter the cost.
He really had to rebel. For refusing to serve in the war, the conscientious objector I met spent seven months in jail. Still now, there are dozens of Israeli teenagers in prison because they would not support the war.
Throughout my time in Jerusalem, I attended every protest against the war and for hostage release that I could. One of the most profound groups I witnessed was the Women in White, a feminist anti-war group going back decades. One of these women, with grey hair and the look of a veteran campaigner, held a placard that read in Hebrew: “we do not have spare children for pointless wars.”
Is this not exactly what Abraham would say? We will not sacrifice our children on the altar of war!
Theirs is truly the voice of Abraham, the true voice of Judaism. It is the voice that opposes child sacrifice. Theirs is the voice that upholds the God who chooses life.
Talmud tells us that, when we blast the shofar one hundred times on Rosh Hashanah, we are repeating the one hundred wails of Sisera’s mother when she heard her son had died. Sisera was, in fact, an enemy of the Israelites, who waged war on Deborah’s armies, and was killed by the Jewish heroine, Yael. Still, at this holy time of year, we place the grief of Sisera’s mother at the forefront of our prayers.
We take the cry of every mother who has lost a child and we make it our cry.
Thousands of years after the Sumerian Empire had ceased existing, archaeologists dug up its remains, and saw a society that practised child sacrifice. From the very fact of how they carried out murder and permitted death, the excavators could tell a great deal about what kind of society this was. One that killed people to serve their wealthy and their gods.
One day, thousands of years from now, historians may look upon us too, and ask questions about what our society was like, and what we valued. May we take upon ourselves the mantle of Abraham.
May they look back and say that we chose to value life. May they look back and see that our people despised death and war. May they look back on us and see a society that practised faithful disobedience.
Occasionally, I hear Jews complain that everyone is obsessed with Israel. It’s true: this country gets way more coverage than pretty much any other. The coverage of the war on Gaza greatly eclipses anything broadcast about Yemen, Congo, or Sudan.
But can we really be surprised? More than a third of the world considers this land to be holy. Jews pray in this direction three times a day. Muslims believe their prophet ascended to Heaven here. Christians believe their god was born here. For the Bahai, their founder died here.
I do not think it is controversial to say that this land is, in some sense, sacred.
It is not that this country has any more God in it than anywhere else. Religious Jews hold that the Divine Presence departed from here with the destruction of the Temple, and that God’s place is now as dispersed as Jews are throughout the world.
But for at least the last 2,500 years, religious believers have invested their hopes and directed their prayers here. That decision to imbue the land with holiness surely has an impact.
Since the late medieval period, Jews have held that there are four holy cities in the land: Jerusalem; Tiberias; Hebron; and Tzfat. As a result, people have decided to be buried in them, retire to them, have their remains moved to them, pray to them, and study in them.
Having finished my volunteering in Jerusalem, I did what a good religious Jewish boy does. I went with my boyfriend on a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Tzfat.
We took a long bus ride through the hillsides, past the holy Mount Meron and along the Sea of Galilee into this beautiful blue city.
For centuries, this town has been considered an important religious site for Jews. Almost everything a worshipper would recognise from Friday night prayers began on these ramshackle cobbled streets. Mysticism was born here.
The Shulchan Aruch, the most important law code for observant Jews, was written here. That was what I was really excited to see: the synagogue where its author, Rabbi Yosef Karo, composed his authoritative work of religious law.
This law code holds a deeply special place in my heart (as it does for most religious Jews). My copy was gifted to me by my mentor, Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner. She studied the codes with my grandfather, who loved halachah more than any Liberal Jew of his era (or since, probably.)
It also holds a deep connection for my partner, Laurence. He is a direct descendant of Rabbi Moses Isserles, who wrote a gloss to the Shulchan Aruch, called the ‘Mapa’, which turned it into the definitive law code for Ashkenazi Jews, especially his Lithuanian ancestors.
Laurence’s ancestry is a source of great pride to me, although he still has really no idea what the significance is.
Nevertheless, I think our backgrounds have contributed to why we connect so well. Because of our upbringings in the Liberal movement, and our ancestors who cared so much about Jewish law, we both see our Judaism in ethical terms. We regularly have moral conversations about what to eat, how to handle workplace difficulties, where to give charitable donations, and how to run our home.
When we first started dating, we had long conversations on our hikes over questions of Jewish medical ethics, like euthanasia, organ donation, and brain-death. In all of these, we refer back to our principles as religious Jews, and to the great writers on these ethical questions, like Rabbi Karo.
When we arrived at the Rabbi Yosef Karo Synagogue in Tzfat, it was shut. It hadn’t been open all day. It hadn’t been open for months. It would not be opening again any time soon.
In fact, everything was shut. Not a single art gallery, synagogue, or museum was open. We were lucky enough that one coffee shop was open in the Old City, where we got a drink, and found out what was happening. Nothing was open because there was nobody to open it for.
The northern towns have been entirely evacuated for fear of rockets from Hizbullah. No pilgrims have come for a long time, fearing for their safety. There are no tourists stopping by to look at the shops.
From the perspective of the locals, the central government has abandoned them. While the military successfully intercept nearly all the missiles from Lebanon, there has been no material support for the pious Jews who live and pray here, completely dependent on tourism.
When we first got here to the north, we felt like we could barely tell there was a war on. There were so few guns and next to no propaganda posters. It turns out we were looking for the wrong thing.
What we had not noticed were all the absences. All the missing shops, traders, youth trips, international tourist groups. There was nobody speaking English, Chinese, French, or Russian. Now the absences are the most gapingly obvious things here.
For many years, critics of Israeli nationalism have warned that arrogant militarism offered no hope for the Jewish people. For this, we have been accused of being traitors, bleeding heart liberals, communists, terrorist-enablers, and doe-eyed dreamers (usually by exactly the same people.)
I wonder if they will begin to see that it is precisely their hubris and warmongering that is destroying them.
This war is bankrupting them; their economy is in tatters; they are isolated and facing criminal charges in the Hague. Many Jews now look to this land with horror and fear.
Before the founding of the state, the mainstream religious position was one of opposition to Zionism. At that time, Orthodox leaders warned that building a military state would strip the land of its holiness. For them, this was an existential and mythical claim, borne partly out of their objections to secular modernity.
Today, however, it takes on a new meaning. The land is imbued with holiness because people have decided it is so.
Without pilgrims, even the shrines of great rabbis lose their significance. In the shadow of constant war, the place is stripped of its sanctity.
I am left wondering: what happens to the Holy Land if people can’t see anything holy here?
Noah knew that the Garden of Eden was the Holy of Holies, and the dwelling-place of God; and Mount Sinai was the centre of the desert; and Mount Zion was the centre of the navel of the earth. These three were created as holy places facing each other. – Jubilees8:30
My soul looks to God as a nightguard watches for the morning. – Psalm 130:6
I used to think the night guard was watching for the dawn with eagerness, excitement, and trepidation.
I just did a night shift watching out for army vans and settlers in the village of Umm al-Khair.
Now I know that the night guard simply greets the dawn with a weary sigh.
The last time I was here, we came to see the ruins of their destroyed homes. After we left, settlers and military shot at them.
In the short time since, the settlers have ramped up their aggression. They come in large, fanatical groups to terrorise the neighbourhood.
Night is a time when they feel most at risk. They also now have the added fear that the army, which is now entirely comprised of military reservists from the Hebron settlements, will come and carry out late night arrests.
So the locals stay awake, watching. They say they cannot sleep anyway. If they shut their eyes, fear is waiting in the dark.
The Talmud teaches that there is a state that is neither asleep nor awake. A rabbinic colleague once compared this to breastfeeding a newborn in the night. Now I know another version of this non-sleep. Fear.
I could not sleep either. We were supposed to sleep in shifts of a few hours. I lay down for about four hours.
A local boy stayed up with us to practise his English through the night. He wants to go to university. He hopes he will have passed his exams, but he’s worried, because he was distracted during the maths test, as his house had just been bulldozed.
We watched for every vehicle, every sign of activity, praying that the night would be “boring.”
When dawn broke, the children flooded into the playground where we had been camping out. I spun them round on the merry-go-round and pushed them on the swings.
A five-year-old came up with a cheeky grin and wanted to tell one of the international activists something. She took out an app on her phone that translated for hi.: “Gaza is my family, they are being bombed by Israel.”
In the light of day, I could see the human impact of the occupation. Kids – normal, sweet kids – who already know they are under siege.
Destroyed homes. Murals on walls professing the village’s resilience. Women cooking breakfast and men pouring cups of tea for activists who stayed the night.
Dawn will come to this sacred scrubland.
I know that morning will one day come, after decades upon decades of occupation and war.
But daybreak will not be the moment when all is set right. It will simply be when we take stock of what happened in the night.
In the daylight, we will see all the bodies of repeated catastrophes and finally be able to mourn them.
When dawn comes, we will see all that has been destroyed, and we will realise how much work has to be done to heal and repair.
I will wait for morning to come to Palestine-Israel just like the night guard waits for the first rays of daylight: restlessly, anxiously, hoping there will be enough remaining to begin the processes of reconciliation and rebuilding.
Dawn will surely come, but that will only be the beginning.
Wait, O Israel, for God, for God holds love and redemption. It is God who will redeem Israel from all their sins. – Psalm 130:7-8
Needing to use the toilet when you’re out and about is always embarrassing. After days going between different spots without returning to the hostel, it is inevitable.
But that embarrassment is multiplied tenfold in the home of a West Bank Palestinian. There, water is too scarce a resource to be wasted. The cistern is never full and needs to be filled up only in extremis. You can imagine my horror at being the cause for such a use of water when visiting people in Nablus.
You can recognise which homes are Palestinian in the West Bank because they have enormous water tankards above their rooves, which they fill up whenever possible. Unlike the settlers, they are cut off from the grid and cannot access basic running water.
Consider what this means for people. Clean drinking water is hard to come by in a valley thar, yesterday, reached highs of 44°C. You have to severely ration showers in the dustiest place I’ve ever been.
Yesterday, all the Bedouin men were called up to fix a problem. There was a leak in one of the water tankards by the grazing pastures. It was a hole at the bottom of the barrel that was spilling out the region’s most precious resource. Just a small gap, but enough to risk livelihoods.
They got all their resources together over a few hours in the hottest part of the day and patched it as best they could. It will do for now, but it will not last.
It is so unjust. The authorities could simply hook them up to the water supplies. Only meters away, Israelis are having baths and watering lawns.
Yet the Palestinians cannot even access water on their own ancestral lands, as an entire machinery seeks to destroy them.
Isaac returned and dug water-wells that were dug in the days of Abraham his father, which the Philistines had stopped up after the death of Abraham. He gave the wells the names that his father had given them. But when Isaac’s servants were digging the wells in the valley, they found there a spring of fresh water. The shepherds of Gerar argued with the shepherds of Isaac saying: “this water is ours!” Genesis 26
“Nothing that happens here is transcendental. It is just about who gets to live in and farm these hills.”
In the Jordan Valley, there is a vague tedium for we who do protective presence. We are not farmers, and I suspect I would be fairly useless at the tough manual labour these men and women do from dawn until dusk.
Once we have entertained the children, read our books, and drank enough caffeine to feel slightly buzzed, all that is left to do is talk.
My Hebrew is weak, and Arabic limited to basic conversation words, so I can only really talk properly with the one English speaker, an Israeli activist who comes here every week to support these Bedouin families.
He does not understand why international Jews care at all. “If I could forget this place, I would.”
True, it is a humanitarian catastrophe and a deep invasion of people’s basic right to life, but it is deeper than that.
We are contesting what being Jewish means. Is it these settlers, deploying the power of a large military to attack and displace the Palestinians? Is it the police officers who randomly arrest shepherds as an intimidation tactic? Or is it the ethical practices and God-fearing mentality we have developed over three thousand years?
“You (Diaspora Jews) think about us so much, but we don’t think about you at all. If anything, we have contempt for you, with all your bagels and tefillin.” (I have, indeed, brought my tefillin, and the gefilte fish I am eating look to him like weird hangovers from a shtetl past.) The whole business of our exilic life looks bizarre.
“You have to understand,” he says, “Israel is a modern European country, and like any modern European country, it hates Jews.”
I know what he means. Not, of course, the modern Israeli Jews. Not the army officers in my hostel who are sharing misogynistic stories of their sexploits. Jews like me, with our effeminate affinity for books and ideas.
Before starting work for Rabbis for Human Rights, my interlocutor had only heard of Reform Judaism as a punchline. In fact, in the context of Israeli society, where rabbis are normally seen giving blessing to bombing campaigns, even the concept of rabbis who stood up for human rights sounded like a joke.
In my own context in Britain, Judaism is so obviously a contested site. The debates about what antisemitism is are just as much debates about who is Jewish, who has the power to make pronouncements about it, and what being Jewish means in the context of the divisions at the heart of an imperial core.
In a way, holding onto Diasporic Judaism is a fundamentally conservative project. We are seeking to protect old institutions, like synagogues and Talmud study, from the unbearable weight of a modernity that sees no role for them.
Yet, even there, we are contesting what being Jewish means. Will it be complicit, for example, in the subjugation of women and silencing of queers, or will it be instrumental in their liberation? Will we be Britain’s best model minority who acquiesce to every part of nationalist capitalism, or will we be key to resisting it?
On Shabbat I hung out with an Israeli rabbinic student with whom I have quickly become friends. She is very active in the resistance and proudly part of the radical left. “Being Reform here is very edgy,” she tells me.
The idea of a feminist religion seems a contradiction in terms. Here, religion, state power, and patriarchy are synonymous. It is hard for most Israelis to imagine how faith could be counter-cultural.
Yet the Reform Jews exist in Jerusalem, where they demand a different definition of Judaism. On Saturday, they made havdallah outside the President’s residency before joining the protests against war. I have seen how their spiritual practices maximise Judaism’s emancipatory potential.
So there is a fundamental question, when we come to do Palestinian solidarity, about what being Jewish means.
And I worry that we are losing.
I do not feel any certainty that my Judaism – this collection of Diasporic religious practices rooted in struggles of oppressed people – will win against the forces of chauvinism.
So I think my Israeli friend is wrong. There is something transcendental happening here. Across borders, we Diaspora Jews and they Palestinians have been joined to each other. Neither intended it but we are connected.
And if they cannot survive colonisation, I do not know if we will either.
This is what Hashem of Hosts, the God of Israel, says to those in Diaspora who have been exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat from their fruit. Take wives: have sons and daughters; multiply and do not decrease. Seek the peace of the city where I have scattered you. Pray to God on its behalf. In its peace, may you find peace. – Jeremiah 29
Last night, Eid Alhad’lin spoke on Zoom to Rabbis for Human Rights from Masafer Yatta, and explained what was happening to his village.
The settlers have cut off water and electricity, demolished homes, and shot people.
I met them last week. Their leader gave a talk to European diplomats in Arabic, then a younger man explained the situation in English. An elderly woman clutched her cane and talked to the women about the sexual harassment she has experienced from settlers.
Not long after we left, the settlers shot them, apparently as reprisal for talking to internationals. The problem, however, was not that we had been there.
It was that we had left.
There was a time when the villagers in Umm al-Khair could call the police for support or rely on the army to stand in their way. Now, if the police come, they will fit the residents for crimes and arrest them. If the army come, it is more likely that they will shoot the villagers. The settlers, too, now have guns and military uniforms.
After the settlers had shot the Palestinians, it seems the army came back to shoot them some more. When ambulances came, settlers prevented them reaching the wounded. It was a wonder the ambulance came at all. Everything in the south Hebron Hills is now geared towards expanding Jewish territory and displacing Palestinians.
The only thing that is preventing greater violence and deeper ethnic cleansing is the presence of internationals and Israelis. While they are being watched, the settlers and the army hold back.
It is, by no means, a solution, but it is the only thing in the power of ordinary individuals.
In order for it to work, however, it needs 24/7 presence from human rights activists in every village. My time here has been quiet, mostly because the village we are supporting has that constant support, predominantly from retired Israelis.
Masafer Yatta has retained a strong international presence, but in the moments where they have been left unsupported, they have experienced dire crisis.
So where are all the internationals? When I talked to Saleh in Sheikh Jarrah, he shared what an outpouring of support they had received around 2008-2009 (when I first became politicised on the issue). But where are they now?
In theory, the entire area should be swamped by radicals and peaceniks. There are millions of tweets about the issue every day, and thousands of demonstrations worldwide. If even a fraction of the people who shared links on the Internet or marched in the big cities would come and do protective presence work, the situation here would look very different.
There are so many organisations doing this too, and all are struggling to recruit. Join women’s groups supporting the olive harvest. Come with the ISM. Come with the Jewish Centre for Non-Violence. Or Tzedek Torah. I don’t care. Find the group that works for you and get out here.
You can be any age. Plenty of the activists are either university students or retired people.
You don’t have to speak Hebrew or Arabic (though I recommend learning a little).
And, yes, it is dangerous, obviously. Not long before I came out, two Israeli activists were shot. You need to be realistic with yourself about what risks you can take and what it means to you.
But we really do need people.
The settlers have realised that, with fascists in the coalition government and the window of the war in Gaza, they have an unprecedented opportunity to destroy villages and get away with it.
You have the power to reverse that tide.
Get out here.
The Eternal One is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? God is with me as my helper. I will see the downfall of those who hate. – Psalm 118
Until this morning, I had avoided the Old City. I am not sure why. I think there was some feeling of indignation in me; a certainty that there is nothing sacred about the Western Wall.
I come from a Liberal Jewish tradition that runs directly counter to such national religious architecture. The Diaspora is our permanent home; the synagogue is our replacement Temple; the Shabbat table is our everlasting altar to God.
I have prayed twice (I think) at the Kotel. It means going through body scanners and security checks through the army to stand underneath nationalist symbols surrounded by men. Nothing about it feels sacred.
This morning, however, I joined the other yeshiva bochers from CY and went down to the egalitarian section of the Kotel: Azarat Yisrael. There, there are no army checkpoints or flags. It looks more like the site of an archaeological dig. Propped up by scaffolding that snakes round towards the ancient site, it is a little oasis among ruins.
Ruins is exactly what they are. There is nothing polished about this section of wall. Broken rocks everywhere. Weeds growing in the nooks. Smashed up slabs. It looks like the site of a disaster, as it should.
On these liminal stones two thousand years ago, an ancient cult was destroyed because its adherents rebelled against a mighty empire. From then on, there was no more priesthood or ancient Israelite religion. The ruins are testament to all that was lost.
And out of that disaster came something new. Prayers replaced sacrifices; rabbis replaced priests; and the grand courtyards were replaced by storytelling.
Now the stones are a testament to the power of memory – how, by holding onto meaning, civilisations can endure beyond their physical structures.
Yesterday and Monday, I was back in the Jordan Valley doing protective presence with Bedouin families.
Their rubble is more recent than this.
Their rubble is the dirt tracks they take their goats down while settlers ride big cars down paved roads. Theirs is the ruins of their tents from settler invasions; the lack of running water while Israelis draw baths in villages above them. Theirs is the accumulating rubbish that nobody will come to collect.
I was slated in the Jewish Chronicle for signing a letter with the other rabbis that called this apartheid. What other word is there for it? What else can you call it? The only thing they have in common is the army, and their guns are aimed from the settlers towards the Palestinians.
The Bedouin have already had much of their culture reduced to rubble. Before the British imperialists arrived, they traversed the entire trans-Jordan, shifting their herds with the seasons. Then the people were walled in; confined to borders they’d not before known; deprived of the culture they had built.
What remains for them now is a rubble of their civilisation. A small enclave where their families can keep chickens. And even that is being taken away from them.
Across their land, settlers have planted Israeli flags. They are signs to remind them of their humiliation. They are only there as symbols that the Palestinians have been conquered, and will be conquered further.
Out of this destruction, they build their own semiotics, so that something of them cannot be destroyed. Kheffiyes wrapped around their heads. Necklaces with the historic lands bearing the Palestinian flag. Songs they teach their children: “I am a Palestinian; my blood is Palestinian.”
I realise now that we are not really here to prevent the destruction. That does not seem within the power of a few non-violent humanitarians. We are here to be witnesses.
We are here to see how a culture is being destroyed. We are here with a memory, which we have held since a Temple was broken two thousand years ago, that they cannot destroy a people entirely. They cannot destroy your spirit.
We are here to say: your lives are worth living and your culture worth defending.
We are here to assist in the building of memory, so that not everything can be destroyed.
May they remember, even in the rubble.
One who cries out over the past prays in vain. And if you are walking on the way and you hear a scream from the city and you say “may it be God’s will that such a scream does not come from my house” – that prayer was delivered in vain. – Berachot 54a
Sim Lev 