Fear and Self-Righteousness

Dear friends, 

My favorite moment at our Shabbat two weeks ago, which fell on World Jihad Day, was when I asked whether people were scared to come, and Ricky, a community elder, with no hesitation yelled out “No!” About half of the crowd had their hands raised, admitting they came despite their fears. Fear showed itself to be a prominent feature of this war from the very beginning. While Arab Americans who have spoken their opinions in public have lost their jobs, Jewish students in Cooper Union were closed into the library with a mob of anti-Zionists banging on the windows. And of course, six-year-old Wadia Al Fayoum z”l who was murdered in Illinois (police is saying that it appears as though the murder of Samantha Wohl in Detroit last week “had nothing to do with anti-Semitism"). Whether you’re Jewish or Arab in America you are probably experiencing at least a minimal level of fear.

What does that do to us?

Not only does it make us fidgety, nervous and reactive, it also makes us speak and behave in ways that we normally wouldn’t. The national traumas have risen to the front level of our hearts. These fears often translate into justification of actions we would normally consider wrong.

What I’m hearing around me is primarily talk of right and wrong. Words like justice and injustice fill the stratosphere. “kidnapping children is a justified means of resistance.” “Killing 750 people in one night is justified in order to protect our people against further attacks.” These are very common attitudes among people who normally abhor hurting innocents.

A lot of the people I speak with in Israel and Palestine are not talking about justice. They don’t claim to be morally right, nor do they categorically call the everyone on the other side wrong. Most of my Israeli friends even admit that if they were Palestinian they would likely resist in some way. And many of the Palestinian voices I hear understand the Israeli need for self-defense. Even if they both reject the methods the other side is currently using, they understand this not as a battle between right and wrong, but simply a battle for survival. The terms right and wrong are relevant to the war of opinions, when Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for their physical lives, and my guess is that their leaders would behave in similar ways whether they thought they were in the right or not.

One thing I learned growing up in Israel is that there is a huge difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. Righteousness is an attitude that we hold easily when we don’t feel like we’re under attack. Self-righteousness is what happens to us when we act against the righteousness in our core, because we feel we have no choice. In an anguished act, we attempt to explain ourselves to ourselves. When our inner core, who knows full well that there is no just way to kill a child rejects our excuses we spiral off loudly into the world. It’s an expression of deep failure, of a terrible disappointment with the world, with God, with ourselves.

This has been the story of this conflict from the very beginning. Two nations, both of whom are filled to the brim with life-loving righteous people, are pushed to acts of destruction, inhumanity and violation of their core instincts for the sake of their physical survival. Biden spoke of Golda Meir’s idea of the Israeli secret weapon: “We have no place else to go.” That’s true for Israelis, and true in a much more concrete way for Gazans.

We can of course argue over the limits of right and wrong, and about how helpful or destructive these self-righteous acts of hideousness are. But I’d like to suggest what to me is a more constructive approach for those of us here in the diaspora.

Traditionally, diaspora communities play the role of cheerleaders for their home nations. As a gross generalization, Jews have gone to pro-Israel rallies and Arabs to pro-Palestine rallies. This is directly connected to the fear for our people over there. But we have a responsibility to remember that whatever fear we may be experiencing – real though it may be – is nothing in comparison to that of escaping bombing, shooting, kidnapping and murder over there.

Diaspora communities in times of war could be playing a different role. We could be using our insider perspective not to yell and scream but to educate those around us who don’t understand what antisemitism is, what the occupation is, what the State of Israel has meant to Jewish people, and what the Palestinian experience has been in the last century. And we could be using our outsider perspective to restrain our own communities back home, who are acting out of fear for their lives. Since co-existence between Jews and Arabs is easier far away from Israel/Palestine, we could be offering examples of how to do that. We could be reminding everyone back home of the righteousness in their core. We could be talking about what comes after this war, which might yet make some of the blood and tears come to something positive.

I’m not saying this is easy. It’s not. But as we ask ourselves: what is our task? Let us not forget the core tenets of our faith, the humanity that bursts forth out of the commandment “Do not murder.” I think that even those of us who stand in complete support of Israel could be doing it out of an attempt to preserve not only the physical survival of our people, but its ethical core. And those of us who are in complete opposition to Israel’s actions could be doing it with compassion for those soldiers risking their lives for their community’s survival.

This all takes a tremendous degree of humility and expansiveness, but if we can’t hold multiple perspectives we are failing our tradition and failing ourselves. If 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz can shake the hand of her Hamas captor as he sends her back home, we here can certainly work toward a less inflammatory conversation in the US.

In this week’s Haftarah we again hear words of consolation and encouragement from the prophet Isaiah:

הַחֲרִ֤ישׁוּ אֵלַי֙ אִיִּ֔ים וּלְאֻמִּ֖ים יַחֲלִ֣יפוּ כֹ֑חַ יִגְּשׁוּ֙ אָ֣ז יְדַבֵּ֔רוּ יַחְדָּ֖ו לַמִּשְׁפָּ֥ט נִקְרָֽבָה׃

Stand silent before Me, you islands

So nations can renew their strength.

First, approach. Then, speak.

Then we might come close to one another,

And move together toward a conversation.

Isaiah offers us a beautiful challenge: Let us not be islands yelling out our self-righteous noise, but humble, forward-looking communal messengers of hope.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha