"I'm so glad you got cancelled ... "—the heaviness of Pesach when Jewish history has become the Jewish present
Abroad, the conversation is about Iran, and Gaza and the hostages. Here, there's all that, but also just raw, sometimes unbearable, sadness. And that limits the kinds of people we can talk to.
I mentioned this in my Pesach-Seder-audio that we sent out yesterday, but obviously not everyone listens to those, so I’ll permit myself a repeat of the following image here.
I was flying back from NYC to TLV last Wednesday night. When I got to check-in, Natan Sharansky was right behind me, and after catching up a bit, we got to talking about whether the flight would actually leave: there were rumors that Iran might strike Israel. Would a plane actually fly into that?
A few minutes later, I saw Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin, parents of Hersch, who has been held hostage after being grievously wounded on October 7th.
Hours later, somewhere over the Atlantic, I looked up and saw that Natan had gone over to stand in the aisle next to Jon’s seat, and was bent over, in intense conversation with Jon. I obviously have no idea what they were talking about and it was not my business, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the unbelievable heaviness of Jewish history held in the image of that conversation.
There was Sharansky, liberated all those years ago from Soviet prison, some of it in solitary confinement. And there was Jon, whose son is now imprisoned, not yet liberated, God only knows with whom, or what. A story of redemption and liberation, standing next to a story desperate for redemption and liberation.
At at certain point, I just looked back down at my laptop. Even watching them talk from a few rows away was too much to bear.
In many ways, everything here is too much to bear.
Like Jews abroad, Israelis are talking about what Israel might or will do in response to Iran, what Iran might or will do in response to us, what’s going to be happening in the skies as we’re having (or trying to have) a Seder. There’s a bit of talk about the Rafah invasion that was apparently just about to start a few days ago, but got delayed when the IDF had to focus on defending against the Iranian attack.
And there is incessant heartbreak about our impotence regarding the hostages.
In that regard, I imagine that the conversations are very similar, here and abroad. But I know—because I was just there twice in the past few weeks—that the conversations are also very different. Here, the air is thick with sadness. Here, things are heavy in a way that they simply can’t be elsewhere. It’s no one’s fault—it just that the hostages are the kids and the sibs and the parents of people we know, the soldiers are our kids, the skies are exploding over our homes, and we’re the ones who will or won’t get through the Seder without sirens.
That’s not a critique. It’s just very, very different.
I was at a meeting of a government ministry a couple of weeks ago, about 15 people discussing whether there were opportunities for Israelis and American Jews to rebuild bridges in light of October 7th. At the beginning of the day, we went around the “U” and people were asked to share how their work has changed since October 7. We were about 2/3 of the way around, when one woman said, before speaking about her work:
I’ll say something about my work in a minute. But first, I think we should just note how unbelievably sad it is in this room. Twenty minutes ago, we were all having coffee, delighted to see each other again, happy to be working together. And we still are. But this opening conversation has made everything in this room just feel so, so sad.
For a moment, no one moved. Or spoke. I thought one or two people were going to cry.
And then we went back to work.
That’s life here. But that’s life only here.
You think that somehow you’ve learned to cope with the sadness, when all of a sudden, you watch something on TV or wherever, and it all comes flooding back.
The following video isn’t new, but it’s the sort of thing that one still sees here regularly. A new angle. A different kind of pain. Scabs pulled off the soul long before the soul has healed.
I think that it’s the radical difference between here and everywhere else that was going through my wife’s mind as we were having Shabbat dinner this past Friday—safe room on the other side of the wall, already stocked and ready—when she said, out of the blue, “I’m so glad you got cancelled. I wouldn’t be able to bear being there.”
We’d planned on being in the US at a Pesach program this year — to be with our kids and theirs kids, to get out of the country, to take a deep breath. (We’d made the plans long before October.)
Then, though, I got an email from the people running the program that read (in part, so as to leave identifies completely oblique):
I’m reaching out because I’m sure it comes as no surprise that your op-ed … was sent to me by some … asking if you are still coming to the Pesach program. … there will be both scholars and guests who are part of T’ruah … so it would be naïve for me not to expect that it will become a topic of discussion in sessions or in contention general.
Yes, I had taken on Tru’ah—an organization of left-leaning rabbis and cantors who, to my mind, have been absurdly unfair to Israel since October 7— in that Times of Israel Op-Ed. I’d cited, as but one example of many, the tone that Tru’ah’s leader had used in this piece:
“Our hearts are broken by the bombing of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, which killed approximately 500 people, many of them children. Civilians fleeing their homes, as well as medical and rescue teams, had taken refuge at the hospital, believing it to be safe. We call for a thorough, independent investigation into this horrible tragedy.
“As we await independent confirmation of who was behind the bombing, we uplift the voices of Palestinians all over Gaza who are suffering a humanitarian disaster. Nearly 1 million Gazans are children, and the international community has a responsibility to intervene and ensure their safety. We welcome President Biden’s announcement today that Israel will allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from Egypt. This aid must be extensive and quickly distributed; time is of the essence.
“Collective punishment is a violation of international law. We echo the many family members of victims of Hamas’s attacks who — even in their grief — are calling for the Israeli government to de-escalate and prioritize the safe return of the hostages as well as humanitarian relief for civilians in Gaza, knowing that seeking revenge will only result in more innocent lives lost and more families in mourning.
It’s of course not about revenge. It’s about annihilating the enemies who want to rape our children, murder our parents, destroy our home. And not one bit of that is an exaggeration, as we all know.
That was way back in November. Since then, what has Tru’ah had to say? In a March 8 open letter to President Biden, Tru’at wrote:
As rabbis and cantors, we have wept and held our communities through the trauma of October 7, when Hamas militants murdered more than 1,200, kidnapped more than 240, and raped and sexually assaulted untold numbers. We have been alarmed by increased antisemitism, including violence and violent threats against Jews and Jewish institutions.
…
Our hearts are broken by the deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza — the majority of whom are women and children who bear no responsibility for Hamas’s crimes. The IDF’s extensive bombing campaign has destroyed over 60% of Gaza’s buildings, hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza are at risk of starvation, and disease runs rampant. Without an immediate influx of food, water, medicine, and fuel, and the restored operation of hospital and sanitation facilities, we fear the population could be decimated.
There is no question that Hamas has repeatedly and deliberately endangered the lives of their own people — including through using civilian structures to house weapons and fighters — but that does not permit Israel, legally or morally, to lay the full responsibility for the unimaginable suffering of a massive population of trapped civilians at the feet of Hamas. We are grateful that you have insisted Israel provide assurance that it is using U.S.-provided weapons in accordance with international law and is not obstructing humanitarian aid, just as other recipients of security aid are required to do.
We ask you to continue your efforts to ensure that Israel does not invade Rafah, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has threatened to do. An invasion of one of the last refuges in Gaza, where approximately 1.4 million Palestinians have gathered after fleeing fighting in other parts of the Strip, will bring unbearable casualties.
Note the language, which can’t be accidental. “We wept and held our communities through the trauma of October 7,” but “our hearts are broken by the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza.”
One causes weeping, and one causes broken hearts.
That’s why my wife is glad we’re not going.
With all the pain here, many of us simply need to be with people whose hearts are broken by the same thing.
That email about Pesach came in literally as my wife and I were walking out the door to have dinner in Jerusalem with three other couples, all of them major players in the American Jewish professional and philanthropic communities. I hadn’t really had time to process the note, but was obviously thinking about it. And our dinner partners were all very, very smart people. So I pulled up the email on my phone, passed it around and asked, “what do you make of this?”
As the phone made its way around the table, one woman read the note and said, “Oh, they so clearly want you to pull out.” A few minutes later, another read it and then she said, “Definitely, they want you to pull out. But don’t make their lives easy. Make them sweat for it.”
I didn’t push back (she’s very smart, and wouldn’t have given up easily…), but I had already decided. I knew I wasn’t going to spend Pesach with Tru’ah people. They have every right to their views, and they might be perfectly nice people. And the institution in question had every right to invite them.
But I also have every right — and every emotional need — not to have what to me is sickening even-handedness in the air on my Festival of Freedom.
I pulled out, immediately.
So amongst the Israel-side of our family, we’ve started kiddingly calling that the “time I got cancelled.” (Yes, I know that that’s not technically accurate, though I suppose it might have come to that.) And that’s what my wife was referring to when over challah and soup, she said, “I’m so glad you got cancelled.”
Sitting at our dining room table, getting ready to be bombed by Iran, one hundred meters away from the synagogue that one of the hostage’s families attends—the mere thought of flying across the Atlantic to spend Pesach with those who think what Tru’ah thinks was, well (I’ll be kind) … unappealing in the extreme.
Liel Leibovitz captured the chasm between these liberal Jews (who have virtually no “skin in the game” of course) and Israelis in an excellent recent piece in Commentary Magazine:
… [Jonathan] Glazer’s speech [at the Oscars] was stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal Judaism.
In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael, both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that the killing stop.
You could spend hours, days even, amusing yourself by tearing this worldview to shreds…..
Leibovitz further said, completely correctly:
“Americans, including most American Jews, are asking what Israel’s plan is for the day after. To Israelis, the question seems obscene. They’re not focused on who will govern Khan Younis when this is all over, or on what to do with the Gazan refugees. They’re focused on surviving, a task that, right now, calls first and foremost for the casting off of three decades of illusions and for the absolute annihilation of their enemies.”
The absolute annihilation of our enemies is not going to come any time soon. Six months in, Hamas, by far the weakest of our enemies, is holding firm. I imagine we’ll eventually go into Rafah and wipe out those four battalions, but maybe not. I certainly don’t know when. And I can’t even imagine what might be the costs we pay for trying to get it done.
The absolute annihilation of Hezbollah isn’t coming anytime soon, but Leibovitz is right—our citizens who live in the north can’t live this way anymore. Neither, for that matter, can any of us—given that Hezbollah can hit us all.
The absolute annihilation of Iran isn’t coming any time soon. Many of the people I know here will be relieved if whatever they do after whatever we do doesn’t become something that is bigger than we want, bigger than we can deal with.
But yes, Liel Leibovitz is right. Those of us who are not policy-makers are not thinking very much about Khan Younis. And we’re not thinking very much about Gaza, whether the number is 20,000, or 30,000 or more. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that our hearts are shattered.
Yes, our hearts, too, are broken. Our hearts shattered by the thought of what the Seder will be for the families of 133 people who haven’t been heard from or seen in half a year. What is it going to like around that table? Could anyone possibly sing anything at all?
Our hearts are shattered by the images of what might be happening to the Israeli women in that hell.
Our hearts are shattered by what it could mean for the future of the Jewish people if the next Iranian attack doesn’t get repelled as effectively. Our hearts are shattered every time we drive south and know that with one quick exit, we could be at the now sacred ground where hundreds of purely innocent young people were savagely murdered by barbarians in support of whom American college students (some of them Jews) now protest.
Our hearts are shattered by lots of things.
Tru’ah people have every right to have hearts broken by Gaza.
And we, thankfully, have every right to stay right here, at home, far away from that, a free people in our own land, in the one place that almost everything that matters for the future of the Jewish people is going to unfold.1
Chag same’ach.
WEDNESDAY (04/17): Rabbi David Stav is to many people one of the most venerated religious figures in Israel. Once a candidate for the Chief Rabbinate, he exerts more influence than almost anyone else calling for a more embracing, inclusive, moral and Zionist Orthodox Judaism. We got together to speak about the drafting of the Haredim, a move Rabbi Stav strongly supports.
As rumors are now beginning to leak that Netanyahu and the Haredim have reached a compromise that might call for the drafting of as many as 25% of the Haredi eligible young men, the issue could well take on heightened importance, and we’ll hear Rabbi Stav on why the current situation is one of the Haredim stealing from the country in four different ways. As usual, we’ll post a segment for everyone, and the full discussion along with a transcript for our paid readers.
THURSDAY (04/18): Given that there will likely be developments vis-à-vis Iran, our schedule for what we planned to cover on Thursday may change.
As we’ve mentioned for the past several weeks, we will be taking Passover off as people will be vacationing and traveling.
While we are taking off for Passover, though, there will be still be 133 hostages stuck in hell, whose families do not get a moment of reprieve from the anguish, heartache and fear they’ve been living with for six months. Pray for them. Pray that the captives reutrn home soon, so that they and their families can begin to heal.
Remember that according to most serious estimates, in 75 years (not all that long from now), the UNITED NATIONS PREDICTS that there will be 24,000,000 Jews in the world, of whom 20,000,000 will live in Israel. This is worthy of a whole other discussion, but we can start with this: “The Jewish population worldwide will be back to pre-Holocaust numbers by 2050. It will take us about a century to recover from the Holocaust. … By 2050, two-thirds of world Jewry will be in Israel. This will change the nature of world Jewry, Judaism as a whole, and the Jewish religion.”
Bucking an international population trend that predicts a worldwide population crash towards the end of the century, Israel’s population is expected to grow to 24 million people by the year 2100, according to a United Nations report. If this does come to pass, it will be the only country in the world to triple its population by the end of the century.
According to Passig, this tremendous growth of Israel’s population will have significant implications for what exactly a democratic Jewish state will mean … It will bring about another mindset. We can already begin to see the beginning of these challenges in early part of the 21st century, as we see the seeds of confrontation growing within Israel as it grapples with being a democratic Jewish state with large minorities.”
Not all Jews in the US, share the sentiments of Truah or the Jewish left, aka woke dopes. A large part of us are embarrassed by these spineless, useless tokens. Tru'ah, by the way, supported, and met with, the terrorist family of Nabi Selah, and refused to meet with the parents of Malki Roth killed by the S'barro bombing (the terrorist who committed the massacre came from Nabi Selah). They have always been garbage and they will always be garbage. Just because they have the title "rabbi" doesn't mean they are to be respected.
A large part of us are proud of Israel, understand what she needs to do and support her. We understand the threat to Israel. We know that the survival of the Jewish People depends on a strong Israel and we weep, and pray with our Israeli cousins that Hashem protects them.
We actually aren't focused on the day after in Gaza. We know that Israel has to first get rid of Hamas and then turn her attention to Hezbollah.
Some of us in the US understand and know Jewish history.
Don't lump every Jewish-American into 1 basket please.
We should have learned after the Dreyfus Affair that assimilation and appeasement do not keep us safe.
I did not learn. I have been a liberal Jew my entire adult life.
On October 7, even before Israel had retaliated, social media was inundated with posts that said "Death to Israel!" and in the next breath, "Death to the Jews!" Meaning death to Jews worldwide. I used to say, "Israel is a foreign country, I do not vote there, I do not have any control over its policies." October 7 showed me that in the popular imagination, there is no difference between Israel and Diaspora Jews, and the fate of Israel *is* the fate of Diaspora Jews. October 7 told me that in the popular imagination, everything the _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_ says is true, and that especially on the left, all the responsibility and all the blame for all the suffering of the world lies at the feet of the world's Jewry, and the only solution is the Final Solution. October 7 told me that the people I've been fighting for my whole adult life, people for whom I agitated for justice, always hated me, personally. That when Jews contribute tsedakah to help the unfortunate, the unfortunate call these "tentacles" seeking power and domination. October 7 told me that although I've been a feminist since I was 12, feminist groups don't consider me worthy of human rights because I'm actually not human.
Yesterday was my father's yahrzeit. I dearly loved my father but fought his political ideas my whole life. I found his level of antisemitic paranoia intolerable; I could not live that way. On October 7 I realized he had been right and I am so sorry I fought him. I was trying to do right by all people. I didn't realize they would not consider doing right by us.
Assimilation and appeasement are galut strategies and they never really worked. American Jewish groups that denounce Israel to show that they're the good kind of Jew are kidding themselves. The only good Jew is a dead Jew. And the only Jew with a chance is a Jew that can fight back. We need to support Israel with everything we have. Am Israel chai.