My great grandfather Solomon began his life as a rabbi at Etz Chaim Yeshiva in Jerusalem under the waning rule of the Ottoman Empire. In 1910, he arrived in New York aboard the steamship Chicago, a gifted young rabbi with a battered menorah in his suitcase who would go on to found the Breed Street Shul in Los Angeles. In his son's home, and then his grandson's, that menorah accumulated the wax of three generations, until it was passed to me. Today, it once again sits in the home of an immigrant, having made a different journey across a different ocean in a different suitcase, as I myself make a new life in a new country with a new language upon my tongue.
The fact that my great grandfather emigrated in 1910 is significant. The Jerusalem he left behind was a squalid backwater of a misruled province of a crumbling empire, home to perhaps 15,000 people. That year was the height of the Second Aliyah, during which tens of thousands of Jews poured their flesh and blood and dreams into Theodor Herzl's blueprint for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Why, then, did this ambitious young scholar of the Talmud set his course in the opposite direction?
Let us try to consider the city of Jerusalem from his point of view. To him, the city was not a symbol or an ideal, it was a physical place full of real people. He breathed its stinks, felt its chill and warmth, and suffered its problems. Over the more than five thousand years that city has stood on the plateau of the Jeudean mountains, history records only 563 years under Jewish law. Even that requires an elastic definition of "Jewish" and "law," as it includes centuries of vassalage. Jerusalem was built not by Jews but by Canaanites, and has belonged to other peoples and other faiths for more than 90% of its history. This historical fact is perhaps no more than words on the page to you and I, but it was tangible reality to young Solomon. Jerusalem's history was to him as real as the smell of his coffee, the softness of the carpet beneath his feet, the lilt in the voice of the muezzin announcing salah from the minaret. At a moment when millions of Jews around the world were pulling up stakes to seek the shining city on the hill, he stood on the very stones of Jerusalem and saw Jerusalem on the banks of the Hudson. And so, the menorah went into the suitcase.
As a rabbi, Solomon was intimately familiar with the history of our people. Twice before, Jews have had their own kingdom. Or maybe thrice, depending on those elastic definitions. While we celebrate that history, those states were nothing special. They rose and fell among hundreds of small, morally bankrupt Bronze Age tyrannies. Our ancient ancestors practiced slavery, torture, genocide and imperialism, and named them virtues. They were no more and no less noble than any other civilization of that bloody era. It is for good reason that most Bronze age kingdoms hold little interest or value to their modern descendants. Who today practices Ugarit law, or composes Amorite poetry or makes offerings to Hittite gods? It is surely worth remembering them, but do the values of those societies have a place in the modern world? No. They do not.
This is also the case for our people. Under Jewish kings, what we would today call "faith" was indistinguishable from the wretched politics of tawdry little dynasties and the petty whims of their bureaucrat-priests. Our books of law that so venerate those men were not just composed under occupation and exile, they were carefully set down in writing and transmitted to us across an ocean of time because of occupation and exile. Every achievement of Jewish philosophy, science, art, music, literature, law and politics was accomplished in diaspora, in the centuries after the destruction of the ancient Jewish states. Our texts and our scholarship tell the story of who we once were, but it is our responsibility to live the story of who we are.
It is difficult for me to find fault with the Jews who joined the Aliyah. My heart is with the survivors of pogroms, massacres and purges. It is not a sin to hope, or to hang one's hopes on the dream of a city one has never seen. It is not a sin simply to be wrong.
The young rabbi who walked away from Jerusalem against the euphoric rush and tumble of the Aliyah enjoyed a privileged perspective that the settlers did not. He was able to weigh the promise of Herzl's Zionism against his own lived experience as a youth who grew up and studied in Ottoman Palestine. His education afforded him the power to weigh the story of Zionism against a deep, carefully cultivated knowledge of Jewish law and history. Like the majority of Jews of his time and the majority of Jews today, he was unwilling to shackle his future to a political movement that misremembers our past.
Zionism is little different from other extreme ideologies of the early 20th century. It bypasses memory and reason with an emotional appeal that taps into very real trauma, it derives its power from the fermentation of that trauma into grievance, self-righteousness and bitterness, it accomplishes both of these things by superimposing a romanticized and substantially fabricated story of the past upon the very real present, and it does all of this for the singular purpose of marshaling otherwise decent people to the cause of committing and tolerating acts of cruelty. It is, plainly, a species of fascism.
I don't blame you if you doubt this. On the surface, a homeland seems like a benign thing to wish for. In the privacy of your imagination, it's easy to picture how it would be comfortable to live among people who share your culture, your language, your ideas and your values. In the realm of the mind, we are free to dismiss logic, and with it all of the ugly corollaries and contrapositions that would spoil that seductive picture. For example, in order to live among other Jews, what must become of the gentiles in your life? For example, if it is acceptable for Jews to wish to live among other Jews, is it acceptable for German, Afrikaner, Hutu or Serbian people to wish for the same? For example, where is the actual land supposed to come from, and what is to become of any gentiles who happen to live there? Once you start asking yourself these questions, it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that the desire for a homeland is anything but benign. Plainly spoken, it is the desire to remove gentiles from your presence, but phrased in a way that allows you to continue to believe that you are a good person.
When we say over Passover dinner, "Next year in Jerusalem!" we are not literally talking about that pile of blood-soaked rubble heaped beyond the shore of a toxic lake, nor the modern city that bears that name today. For centuries, Jews have yearned not for our own nation, but for justice to flourish within the nations where we actually live.
Our connection to and claim upon those lands is no more or less legitimate than the dozens of other peoples who, like us, have also seized it by conquest, expelled the previous inhabitants at spear-point, lifted cities from the desert, and planted olives for their grandchildren. We aren't even the only people to have conquered it and lost it more than once. To name Israel the Jewish homeland is to elide most of the land's actual history, and almost all of our own.
Nevertheless, a Jewish state now stands among the nations. It is Jewish voices who lead it, and Jewish hands who carry out its will. And so I ask, does justice flourish there? Is the achievement of Herzl's vision something that should be celebrated? This Jew reminds you that a democracy is, by definition, a government chosen by the people it governs. What can we conclude about Israel's democracy, given that millions of people are held under Jewish guns in a condition of "statelessness" for the sake of insuring Jewish majorities in the Knesset?
Of course, the reasons for this are myriad, and the history is complicated. There is, however, nothing complicated about the immorality of responding to immorality with immorality of your own. It does not matter how justified your anger is. This Jew reminds you that in Gaza, most children under five are spending entire days without eating anything at all. Hamas is not "making" Israel stop food deliveries. That is Israel's own policy. It does not require a shining moral character to perceive the leveling of hospitals and the butchering of ambulance drivers for the criminal barbarism that it so obviously is. One does not need to undertake deep study of the Talmud to understand that there can be no righteous reason to dismember children with high explosives. Yet, it is precisely these monstrous absurdities that Israel's leaders would have you believe.
On a practical level, I do not pretend to know what kind of proposal it would take to undo a century of error. Where borders are drawn, whose names are printed on which passports, and which states have a say in these things, are all extremely important questions, but I have little to add to those conversations. I do not live there. The only thing I can add to the conversation is to point out one very simple thing : Herzl was wrong.
A century ago, we were sold the idea that a Jewish state would be a refuge for Jews who settled there, and a defender of Jews abroad. Today, Jews everywhere endure violent retribution for Israeli atrocities, and the Israeli state itself actively persecutes Jews who speak out against it. That alone would be enough to reject the Zionist proposal, but it is so much worse than that. Herzl was not only wrong in the sense of being incorrect, he was wrong in the sense of being in the wrong. There were, and still are plenty of reasons for Jews to pack their bags and seek better lives abroad, but ridding ourselves of gentiles is not one of them. The plainspoken promise of a Jewish state is a life without gentiles, and that is a profoundly sinister thing to wish for.
The Talmud teaches us that it is not a sin to feel anger and rage and fear and despair when Jewish children are kidnapped and killed. God grants us the privacy of our own minds and hearts, within which our will may reign as it pleases. Whether you believe it is by divine or mortal authority, our tradition is extremely clear on the point that human beings are to be held to account for our decisions and for our actions. The anger in your heart does not condemn you if you have the moral courage to stay your hand, and it offers you not a shred of absolution should you fail. Israel stands before the law of our ancestors, and it is for its actions, not its ideas or hopes or dreams, that it must be held to account.
I beg you from the bottom of my Jewish soul, do not let the government of Israel speak for us. Do not let its leaders act for us. These are the very worst our people have to offer the world. I urge you to condemn them. Reject them. Hold them in disgust and contempt. I would not sacrifice a single Arab child for the future of a Jewish state, and neither should you. I reject this stupid, cruel vainglorious folly.
It is not a sin simply to be wrong, but is without question a sin to do wrong.
L’shana tovah u’metukah.
七令和九月二十四日
京都 日本