Meet Ben Gvir

Dear friends,

I try to avoid electoral politics in my writing. I’m not a political authority of any type. But this week’s election in Israel carries both cultural and spiritual messages that are relevant to American Jews, and offer lessons for Americans in general.

You’ve likely heard by now that the winner was Benjamin Netanyahu. Though he will likely manage to escape punishment for his crimes and run the government, he is not the big winner. The person who has become perhaps the most powerful person in the country, upon whom governments will rise and fall, is the head of the party called Jewish Power, Itamar Ben Gvir. This won’t be fun, but I’d like to introduce him to you, since in essence, 70% of Israeli Jews (including those who voted directly for him and others who voted for parties willing to make a coalition with him) voted for a government that he holds tremendous power over.

Some of you will remember the name Baruch Goldstein. He was a doctor from Brooklyn who moved to Hebron, and on Purim day, 1994 entered the mosque inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and murdered 29 Muslim worshippers. I remember the discussion the following day in my Jerusalem high school, in which most of the class expressed outrage, but in which one kid, Motti, expressed complete support for the killing. That’s the position Ben Gvir took as well. The following year on Purim he dressed up as Goldstein. Until this recent campaign, with his attempts to portray himself as slightly more moderate than he is, Ben Gvir had a poster of Goldstein hanging in his home. There’s a video of him in 2020 standing by that hanging poster in his living room, holding his baby girl and saying to her: “He’s a tzadik, a righteous man, a hero.”

Ben Gvir had a teacher that some of you will have heard of as well. His name was Meir Kahane. Another Brooklynite who became a member of the Israeli Knesset until the court outlawed his party because of its outright racism and hate. That party, Kach, is currently on both the US and Israel’s list of terrorist organizations. Kahane espoused Jewish supremacy. He advocated the forced transfer of all Arabs from Israel. It was in those years that the chant “Mavet La’aravim,” “Death to the Arabs,” became commonplace. Last night some were chanting it when Ben Gvir took the stage to celebrate his victory. Ben Gvir is the first to admit that there are close to no differences between his party and Kahane's.

It’s not just Arabs Ben Gvir dislikes. He was a big supporter of the infamous “Smolanim bogdim” campaign, in which people hung signs that read “Leftists are traitors.” Ben Gvir, an attorney, represented one such person in a lawsuit against them for unfurling such violence-inducing language in public. Recently, Ben Gvir clarified the same thing about Arabs and leftists: not ALL leftists are traitors, nor are ALL Arabs terrorists, he said.

In a similar move, he recently called LGBTQ people his “brothers and sisters.” In 2016, though he said that “they have no place, neither in Jerusalem nor in the State of Israel.” His reasoning is germane: “(the state) must have a Jewish character.”

In this “Jewish character” lies what I perceive to be the deeper lesson we can learn on this side of the world.  According to its website, Jewish Power supports “enacting meaningful reforms to the systems of power in order to strengthen the Jewish character of the State of Israel.” He means to gut the Supreme Court and the entire democratic structure of the state. And has the support of the other parties in the Israeli right. It is this same “Jewish character” that drives his reasoning for banning MK’s who “undermine the state” from serving. There are a few such MK’s on the left who Ben Gvir has already said should be expelled from both the Knesset and the country. Some of them he has called “terrorists.” This is a word he uses for a wide range of people. One of his main election pledges is to instate a “death penalty for terrorists.”

In a way, all of this is noise. He’s the type of character, the likes of which we certainly have here, who invites a lot of bla bla bla in the news. The difference is that Israel is a place in which things are immediate and close. Ben Gvir isn’t David Duke who sits tucked away in his lair making statements. My friends have bumped into him in Hebron, in Sheikh Jerrah, in the South Hebron Hills - all places where real people are being actually kicked out of their homes in large numbers, actually physically attacked, actually killed. This is a place where things get real quickly, where a statement about the Jewish nature of the state is translated into subjugation and suffering. If Ben Gvir becomes the Minister of Internal Security as is expected (despite the fact that he never served in the army because they said he’s too racist!) he will have a very real impact over millions of people’s lives.

What is this “Jewish character” he’s talking about? I hear “Jewish character” and think of Mel Brooks. To Ben Gvir it evokes supremacy over other nations. To me, if a Jewish state has a purpose it’s to be a home for the wanderers, a refuge for “the stranger, the orphan and the widow.” Ben Gvir’s teacher stated it like this: “The purpose of the State of Israel is revenge against the nations. There is no greater or more just attribute than revenge, for it gives life to God.”

This election suggests that “Jewish” means something radically different to the majority of Israeli Jews than it does to us. This last Knesset had a self-defining Reform Jew for the first time, Gilad Kariv. When Kariv walked out on one of his speeches, Ben Gvir said: “I was so happy that the one who represents those who want to destroy all of what’s holy to Jews doesn’t want me in the Knesset.” He’s talking about us!

Yes, there are millions of Jews in Israel who we align with. Yes, the incoming Prime Minister does not believe, like many in his future cabinet that the law is secondary to the Torah. Nonetheless, as Israel embraces Ben Gvir, we are associated with his version of Judaism.

That is why in moments like these I often find myself struggling to pray, study Torah, or do anything Jewish, simply because of the association with the abhorrent face the Jews have put forward. I wonder whether the decline in religiosity in America in general has more to do with changing philosophies, or with the public face of religion. If religion means no right to choose, so I don’t want to be religious. If religion means subjugation of women and LGBTQ people, how could I be religious? If religious means not believing in science, why would I be religious? Though it’s not just a Jewish problem, when I see those who claim to represent me behave distastefully, my instinct is often to disassociate from the Jews altogether.

There’s one Jewish person I know who’s seen it all. His name is Norman Lear and he’s a hundred years old. 10 years ago he said to me: “It’s time to take religion back in this country.” I thought of those words when the election results rolled out Wednesday morning. I knew then that my faith is my own, and that it is connected to the source of being and truth as strongly as anyone else’s. I also knew that my faith world commands me to pray on such a day, and to study Torah, and to not hide who I am.

So eventually I did manage to do some studying that morning. I put on my kipa with a mix of sadness and pride, fatigue and strength, and opened a book of Torah interpretations by one great Israeli, Nechamah Leibovitz z”l. She was expounding upon the episode in this week’s Parashah known as the Brit Ben Habetarim, or the Covenant of Parts. Abraham splits several sacrificial animals into two parts and is told to pass between them. A vulture comes down and tries to get at them, but Abraham shoos it away. The commentators see the vulture as those who try and stop us from performing the sacrifices, from doing what we do as Jews. Leibovitz writes:

“If they succeed in cutting the connection between this nation and her god, and if the Torah will - God forbid - be forgotten from Israel, there will be no existence any longer for this nation.”

We liberal American Jews are such a nation, and must never let the connection with our God, or vision, or truth be cut, lest this beautiful thing that we’ve created be lost. We are not one iota less Jewish than Ben Gvir or any other Jew, even the most supremely extra ultra orthodox.

The Jews who believe in this other version of “Jewish” that has many elements we find distasteful are also a nation. They stand on the other side of the aisle. Between us is poor Abraham, shooing away the vultures like some kind of optimistic Sisyphus.

My rabbi tells me we are one nation, not two. He says that Ben Gvir and Mel Brooks are both inside of us, just like they exist outside of us, and our job, like Abraham’s is to contain both. We are commanded to do what we can to rid ourselves of our inner demons, and our society of the external ones. One of the best ways to do that is to be who we are, no matter who is embarrassing and defaming our public face. Another is to look reality in the face. This was our challenge this past week. And this will be our challenge this coming week. And the week after that.

Yair Asulin wrote in Haaretz yesterday that “the failure of the ‘change block’ (the side that lost the election) was the failure to be able to look reality in the face, to listen to it without judgement, without thinking that we know everything, without imagining that the truth necessarily exists on our side.” He goes on to suggest, like several other left wing thinkers that this moment offers a rare opportunity to create a new, compelling vision for the country. But he offers a warning to go with it:

“Abandoning “god” to the hands of those who abuse it for bad purposes, without understanding how elemental this feeling is in many people’s consciousness, how critical a player it is in any new social story or any new movement that seeks relevance; that abandonment is one of the greatest sins of ‘the change block.’”

In the face of the rise of Ben Gvir and the vengeful faith he espouses, let us not abandon our God of compassion, and stand tall for the Judaism of equality, care and justice that we know and love.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha