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Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. We’ll talk about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party, and the politics of Israel-Palestine in the age of Gaza and Trump. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

USAID, Cindy McCain of the World Food Program, and even Israel’s own officials refute the claim that Israel had to shut off aid to Gaza—and shut down the UN food distribution system— because Hamas was systematically stealing aid.

Nir Hasson’s report in Haaretz on Israel’s starvation of Gaza.

Gideon Shimoni’s Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa.

Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai’s blessing to his students in Tractate Berakhot of the Babylonian Talmud.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Elisheva Goldberg writes about the Knesset’s effort to impeach Israel’s most prominent Palestinian legislator, Ayman Odeh.

I spoke to Public Radio’s “The World” about antisemitism and on CNN about the starvation in Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I talked to University of California at Berkeley historian Ussama Makdisi about being targeted by Congressional Republicans.

Alonso Gurmendi on the claim that Israel isn’t committing genocide because it could be killing more people.

When American Jewish groups called out a genocide, in Myanmar.

Correction

In last week’s video I said that Kishinev (now called Chishinau), site of the infamous 1903 pogrom, was in Ukraine. That was wrong. As my friend, the political scientist Rajan Menon explained to me: “In 1903, it was part of the Bessarabia Governorate of the Romanov Empire but not part of the Empire’s Ukrainian territories. From 1940 onward, having been part of Romania from the end of World War II, it became part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR.” It is now the capital of the Republic of Moldova. My apologies.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, this is the time of year when many rabbis begin to think about what they are going to say in their Divrei Torah, in their sermons on the yamim nora’im, the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which come in the fall when they have their largest audiences, and what do they want to say about what Judaism calls us to do? And as I think about those rabbis thinking about what they’re gonna say in their most important words of the year. The question that occurs to me is: do our rabbis believe in God? Because it seems to me, if you believe in God, and you believe that human beings—all human beings, Palestinians included—are created equal, b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God, and you see what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you have no choice but to speak out as forcefully as you can against this.

I would encourage the rabbis, any rabbi who’s thinking about what they’re going to say, to just spend a couple of minutes—it really only takes a couple of minutes—watching a video, or listening to a doctor who has worked in Gaza, or listening to some of the reporters who’ve been in Gaza. Within less than a minute, I think, when I do this, I’m just rendered utterly speechless by the horror that is now before us and is not hidden. This is not the Shoah. This is not a time when technology meant that we could not see these things. We can see them very easily if we want to.

Just a couple of quotations from an essay in Haaretz by Nir Hasson. He talks about a doctor in Gaza who says that tens of thousands of people, mostly children, are what he calls moving skeletons, whose organs are collapsing, and have already entered the final stage of hunger. He quotes from a video of a man, a starving man, his pants held up by a rope, who is kneeling in the sand, trying to gather flour that was spilled in the sand. And the man is saying in the video, ‘I have 10 children, and they haven’t eaten anything for a week. I’m trying to sift the flour from the sand.’

So, I think the question for our rabbis to ask in the face of this is whether they believe in God. If the rabbis genuinely want to claim that this is Hamas’s fault, then they’re simply lying. They’re lying. Because we now have claims from both USAID, and from the United Nations, and Cindy McCain of the World Food Program, and from Israel’s own officials that there certainly might have been incidents of Hamas or other people, you know, stealing aid. Because, after all, when people are starving, people will try to get that aid and take it for themselves. That in fact, the claim that Israel had to deny aid for 3 months, and had to shut down the UN system of distributing aid at 400 distribution centers, and move to this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has only 4 distribution centers. The claim that Israel had to do that because Hamas was systematically stealing aid is just a lie. It’s a lie that is now being refuted even by people inside the Israeli government, according to the New York Times.

So, if we dispense with that, and rabbis ask themselves, what is God asking for me in this moment? It seems to me the question is one has to speak. And the reason I ask whether these rabbis believe in God is that when I hear from rabbis, and I hear from people who have talked to rabbis about what they don’t speak, what I hear again and again is they are afraid of their response from their congregants, that they’re afraid that there will be people in their communities who get very angry at them, and perhaps who even imperil their jobs. And it seems to me this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a rabbi is supposed to do. That, yes, of course a rabbi needs to be concerned about what their congregants, what Jews feel. But their fundamental, their higher obligation, is to try to wrestle with the question of what God wants for them.

In the Talmud and Masechet Brachot, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai, who is dying, speaks to his students, and the students say, ‘bless us.’ And the blessing he gives is: ‘may it be God’s will that the fear of heaven should be as important to you as the fear of human beings.’ And the students say, ‘is that all? That’s the blessing?’ And he says, ‘would that you were able to attain this level of spirituality, you can see how difficult it is, because when someone wants to commit a sin, they say, I hope no one will see me, placing his fear of human beings above the fear of God, who sees all.’ The fear of God who sees all. Rabbis, it seems to me, are far too afraid of what their congregants will say about them, and not nearly afraid enough of what Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai encouraged his students to be fearful of, which is their encounter with God.

You know, I often think about these things because of my own family background against the background of apartheid South Africa when so many South African rabbis used the excuse of not wanting to be out of touch with their congregants, to keep silent in the face of horror. And there’s one particular story that stuck with me. This is from a book called Community and Conscience about Jews in apartheid South Africa by Gideon Shimoni. And he tells the story of a Reform rabbi named Andre Unger, a 25-year-old young Reform rabbi in the city of Port Elizabeth, actually, the city where part of my family comes from.

And in 1955, Andre Unger said publicly that race hatred is an atrocity. And he spoke out about something called the Group Areas Act, which was the deportation of large numbers of Black South Africans from urban areas into remote areas so that these urban areas could become white-only areas. And Andre Unger said the Group Areas Act is a despicable atrocity. And what happened after Andre Unger said this? The Eastern Providence Board of Jewish Deputies, the Jewish communal organization in Port Elizabeth, said he had spoken neither for his own congregation nor for South African Jewry as a whole. They said, basically, he was wrong because he didn’t speak for his community or for South African Jews.

And the chief minister of the United Progressive Jewish Congregation, so the kind of most prominent Reform rabbi in all of South Africa, a man named Moses Weiler, condemned what Unger said, because he said, ‘a rabbi who was not one with his congregation was a failure.’ That a rabbi who does not represent and speak for his congregation is a failure. And this young Reform rabbi, Andre Unger, was forced to leave the country.

And so, the question that I would urge American rabbis to sit with in this period, now moving into the yamim nora’im, is do you want to be Andre Unger, or do you want to be Moses Weiler? Do you want to stay on the right side of your congregants, or part of your congregants, or do you want to be able to honestly face God? Because that is your fundamental obligation. Andre Unger was forced out of South Africa. You could potentially risk your job. It’s not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world will be in your final moments as you, a person of faith. Contemplates your encounter with baraku, with the Almighty, to think in those final moments, that in a moment of unprecedented horror, in a moment of what more and more legal scholars consensus believe is a genocide, that you held your tongue. You should be afraid of that.

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