I am Jewish.
I claim the heritage of the Jewish people, these unique people who have made an indelible impact on this world, and continue to give their gift. Accomplished, celebrated and decorated; accused, reviled and persecuted. Everywhere and nowhere.
My mother is Jewish. She was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, a Jewish neighborhood in a Jewish city, and was raised by a Jewish mother and grandparents. They spoke Yiddish in the home. Her father was from a well-heeled protestant family in Detroit, and his own personal demons and a wanderlust meant that he left the family when my mother was two, never to return.
When my mother was a child she didn’t know that Jews were a minority, surrounded as she was by the largest concentration of Jews in the world, a product of the immigration of more than one million Eastern European Jews to New York City between 1880 and 1920, two of which were her grandparents. Her grandfather was an acclaimed Yiddish poet, critic and newsman, and her mother was a celebrated painter. They were their own type of Jew; artists and rebels. My mother is the matriarch of our little nuclear family, and continues to be a foundational influence in my life.
I always knew I was a Jew, however I found it hard to fully claim, bearing as I do, the surname of my midwestern protestant father. Surrounded by Epstiens and Cohens, I was a Turner. And more than that, when I was with my Jewish friends I didn’t fit into their obviously inborn and natural expression of being a Jew, not carrying the obvious markers of Jewishness in appearance and character. These Jewish traits which I won’t attempt to describe here yet everyone who has either lived or loved a Jew would know. Every people has traits which broadly shape it, broken in countless individual instances, yet still forming the expression of a distinct culture. In my family we always joked that my brother got the Jewish genes and I got the gentile genes. No one has ever known I was a Jew before I told them and when I do it's often met with surprise.
Yet as I grow older I see more and more that it means something. That I may not be apparently Jewish in the facade yet I am shaped deeper in the foundation. I am drawn to Jewish people, I feel comfortable with them and I count many among my close friends. I am proud to carry the spirit of Jewishness; not afraid to stand apart, to feel fully and think deeply, to speak one's mind, to go a little further and dive deeper to seek truth and to stand for something.
Taglit-Birthright Israel is a not-for-profit educational organization that sponsors free ten-day heritage trips to Israel for young adults of Jewish heritage. My brother attended Birthright Israel in 2006 at the age of twenty. Distracted by other concerns I dragged my feet until I passed the age limit of twenty-five. However a couple years later I was given another chance, the age limit being raised to thirty-two. I decided I wouldn’t miss my last chance for this generous gift, and during the first year of the pandemic I applied for a trip. It was cancelled and rescheduled twice due to COVID, but finally in February 2022 as the Omicron variant pushed out its more virulent cousins, I saw my chance and before I knew it I was on my way. At age thirty-three I was surely one of the very oldest who had ever taken the trip, and given that the 26-32 age bracket will be discontinued after the 2022 summer season, I will be one of the oldest to ever participate in Taglit.
Half of us met at the San Francisco airport, the other half flew out of JFK and we all met in Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. With masks on for most of the first day or so, we scoped each other out and got a sense of the personalities and dynamics of the group. It turned out to be a group of bright and good-natured young Jews, and we enjoyed our time together. We settled in kibbutz Afik in the Golan Heights, our home for several nights.
The first couple of days around the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights were mostly spoiled due to inclement weather. The scenery wasn’t visible due to a heavy fog, and rain and cold weather dampened our spirits. I began to wonder whether I’d chosen the wrong season to travel to Israel or perhaps, always having traveled independently, that conventional tours were inherently disappointing. However our masterful tour guide Irad, a veteran of decades of the tourism industry, kept our morale up with his humor and unflappable persistence to finding alternatives to the planned program.
Soon the weather cleared and we were on our way to the ancient city of Jerusalem. We toured old Jerusalem, and from a central vantage point we were told some of the amazing intertwining religious history of this special place. As we stood there it seemed to me that most of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, occurred in this tiny section of land.
We made our way to the western wall. As I washed my hands in the fountain and followed the path to approach the wall, my mind emptied and peace, clarity and strength overtook me. This is a genuine religious site, with true spiritual power.
The next morning we visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. It may sound strange, yet it was this stop on our tour which I looked forward to the most. When I was growing up my father was fascinated by the Holocaust and he was always reading one of those incalculably dark and unfathomable books, some of which I read at a young age. I reread Elie Wiesel’s Night on the flight over and I couldn’t stop reading it until it was finished, so gripping was its description of young Elie's loss of innocence and faith in the face of unimaginable circumstances.
The Holocaust is a tremendously powerful symbol for human nature, something so unbelievable and hard to grasp, and yet so recent and well-documented that it resists objectification; it resists being relegated to a past in which humans seemed to hold primitive and inscrutable motivations. It is a tragedy which belongs to us, to our era of history. It holds up a mirror that we cannot escape, which shows us our basest tendencies, along with flashes of our most admirable qualities of love and courage. When we read about the Holocaust, when we hear from its survivors and see it in images, we cannot help but see ourselves in both its victims and perpetrators.
Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, General Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied, and he invited media to document the liberation of the camps. Due in large part to his foresight we are able to witness the camps as discovered by the liberating forces. In Yad Vashem we are able to view this documentation, along with many other multimedia presentations.
What I see is a people violated; morally and spiritually violated beyond imagination. Twisted and wasted bodies devoid of all dignity. Some with life left in them, others laying in piles moved about by dirt movers. The Holocaust was not primarily about death; in a hellish reality, death can be a mercy. Rather the Holocaust was about metaphysical violation up to the moment of death, and worse the violation of those who survived, who can never escape their memories; the integrity of their spirit broken by a cruelty and suffering so enormous and unspeakable that they can no longer hold the world in loving embrace. After such an experience, often for the rest of one’s life confusion and darkness masks the natural love of the world. Only a truly extraordinary individual can keep their spirit intact while undergoing such a nightmare. But human rights are not upheld for the extraordinary individual. Human rights are for us ordinary mortals, and for those of weak spirit, who deserve dignity as much as any.
Ideology is the greatest violence the world has known. The cruel ideology of Hitler was carried out by those who were willing. The force of ideology is an extremely powerful one, and the further it is carried out the more its inherent cruelty and absurdity is exposed. Yet the barefaced absurdity and barbaric monstrosity of Auschwitz/Birkenau existed. Day after day the machinery of death ground on; to the bitter end the Nazis carried out their goal of exterminating the Jewish race. They created a world census of Jews in every country, and after the cleansing of the European content, they planned to rid the entire world of Jewry. Yet as grand a scale of destruction as was perpetrated it all started in the mind as a concept, as a system of ideology which was created to make sense of suffering, in this case the suffering of the German people.
In the last room of Yad Vashem is the archive of names, where the name of each victim is recorded, with a symbolic grave excavated deep into the earth. Each being is so precious, a child of God deserving honoring and respect. An estimated one and half million victims have not yet been named. I thought of my great-grandfather's family who perished and the thought that I may be able to add a name to this archive made me break down, lean on the railing and shed tears.
After Yad Vashem we tour the national cemetery. We see the graves of the founders and political leaders of Israel and of her fallen soldiers. We make a special visit to the grave of a young American who made aliyah, Jewish immigration to the homeland, who served in the IDF and was killed in action. It's the only moment when I felt we were presented with brazen propaganda in the form of this martyr symbol for American service in the Israeli military.
We stayed in a Bedouin tent for the night and met some camels. Before sunrise we climbed the Roman ramp of Masada, an ancient citadel. In the excavated synagogue, I participate with a group in a meaningful bar mitzvah ceremony, twenty years after the traditional age this rite of passage is undertaken. Later in the day we take a dip in the Dead Sea. We are hitting all of the important tourist spots of the country.
The next morning we visit a moshav, a farming community and get a taste of the innovative desert agriculture of Israel. We are very near the Gaza Strip and are showed an example of one of the improvised rockets which terrorists groups started launching from Gaza twenty years ago, slowly increasing their capability until they were able to reach the metropolitan centers of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. We are also shown an example of a rocket defense device which, with the help of state-of-the-art technology, chases down the rockets in mid air. The missile defense is a thousand times more expensive than the rockets they defend against. The presenter expressed a bitterness about the rocket attacks, which is understandable of course, however there was a general patronizing attitude towards the Gazans which I took note of.
I admit before traveling in Israel, I was largely ignorant about Israeli culture and history. I had some very good Israeli friends and enjoyed their bright, strong minded and energetic demeanor. I had heard the phrase “peace in the Middle East” yet I didn’t quite realize that it was referring to issues specifically involving Israel. I just thought generally there was a lack of peace in the Middle East, however as we went along the tour I started to piece together the history and the current ongoing conflict simmering between Israel and the Arab region.
Our tour guide, a proud veteran of the Israeli Defense Force, told us offhandedly that the creation of Israel in 1948 was called "Al-Nakba" by the Palestinians, translated as “the Catastrophe.” To my ears he shared this revelation with a tone of incredulous exasperation. 'How can they be so dramatic?’ He seemed to imply. Yet this word rang in my ears and to me it said everything. There was something very real which was being hidden, a deep suffering and tragedy which was expressed in this one word.
We stopped by a lookout point several kilometers from Gaza, and heard a little of the situation there. Even from a distance I could see how densely developed it was, and I sensed an atmosphere of forcibly contained energy, like a powder keg. I had a couple conversations in hushed tones with my fellow participants but we were unable to come to any conclusive understanding. We asked one of our Israeli comrades about Iran-Israeli relations. He exclaimed, “They hate us because we are Jewish!” I began to feel a little paranoid, like there was some underlying tension that no one would directly address.
I was saved the next day when our tour guide handed the reins to Ihab Balha of the Orchard of Abraham’s children preschool in Jaffa, the historical Palestinian section of Israel’s largest city Tel-Aviv. We were given a tour of the school which integrated Jewish and Arab children and minders, a very unusual practice. The children blissfully played in the garden where pet birds and goats rested in cages. Ihab’s manner was one of self-contained confidence and enjoyment. He is a Sufi teacher and leader in the Arab-Israeli peace movement. He spoke about a long meeting he had with the Dalai Lama in which His Holiness, who chose him as a promising vessel for peace in the Middle East, gave him instructions for his peace work. Additionally Chris Martin of Coldplay is an important supporter and collaborator.
He spoke about his father’s experience of the creation of the State of Israel, which included the death of his aunt, and the forced exile from Jaffa and scattering of his family across the Arab region. As a boy his father ended up alone in a refugee camp in the Sinai peninsula. He returned to Jaffa when he could, however his deep trauma and resentment from the catastrophe of his childhood remained with him lifelong, which he instilled into his son Ihab.
As a young man Ihab held a strong hatred of Jews for what they had done to his father, his extended family and his ancestral nation. However a chance encounter with a Jewish man at a restaurant where he was working led to a friendship and a series of conversations which caused a change of heart. Having seen into the heart of at least one Jew and seen a humanness identical to his own, he could no longer hate Jews. He became active in the peace movement and in his mid-thirties, fell in love with a Jewish woman, named Ora, married and started a family. To this day, inter-religious romance is quite rare and is a strong taboo. He shared with us the story of their romance and the slow resolution and acceptance of his family. His father is still alive, now in his 90s, and lives in the house above the Orchard of Abraham’s Children. Ihab is an innovator in integrated education and continues to push for a wider practice of integration.
I shared with Ihab and the group a reflection on the importance of racial integration of schools in the United States for resolving racial conflict and of my own personal experience of the benefit of growing up with black children. Once you learn to befriend and love someone as a child it remains with you lifelong, and I feel that this is surely an important step in finding a way forward in Israel.
Ihab and I had a short conversation after the meeting. I thanked him for his presentation, which went a long way towards resolving a conflict that had been growing in my heart. I also thanked him for sharing about his experience with al-Nakba and he agreed that most Israelis try to diminish its importance or question that it even occurred. He showed photos of himself with His Holiness, and I could tell their meeting was a formative experience which he continues to draw strength from. I asked him if I could follow up with him after my Taglit trip was over and he invited me to a peace conference in the desert.
Starting in 1948, at the withdrawal of British forces in Palestine and the creation of the Israeli state, an estimated 700,000 Arabs were forcibly exiled and displaced and an additional 30,000 killed. Where else in the world in recent memory has a land not only been occupied and subjected to all the standard exploitation and humiliation of imperialism, but actually systematically emptied of its inhabitants? The foundation of Israel was a state-organized mass effort of ethnic cleansing. Of course there isn’t peace. As an American I cannot cast the first stone, my own country having been founded on the same original sin, a similar form of displacement of the indigenous people of the American continent.
However the Israeli state seems to be embroiled in all of the denial and defensiveness of a thief at trial claiming his innocence, or worse a murderer with blood on his hands at the scene of the crime. The IDF began to seem less like an army, and more like a security force defending a massive theft of land, of wealth, of memory and history. I remembered a friend of mine, an American defender of Israel, who bristled at my offhanded mention of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It shocked me at the time, but I now realized it was the defensiveness of someone who deep down, perhaps subconsciously, knew he was defending a great sin; one that was somehow necessary and justified to him. Yet his quick temper revealed his conflicted conscience.
I had not known that the founding charter of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda called for the expulsion of the Jews from Israel and American military from the Arab region and the founding of a pan-Arabic Islamic state. Why did no one tell me that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were about Israel? This event had such a profound effect on my life, yet I had never learned the motivation of the attackers. I only knew of a broad and nebulous anti-Americanism.
I believe in a Chomskyist universal humanism, seeing every being with the eyes of compassion. Through understanding, compassion can grow and mutual benefit can be created. Hatred feeds on misinformation and denial, compassion feeds on truth. I also believe in the principle of satyagraha, Gandhi’s “truth force,” the motivation of his nonviolent resistance to the British regime in India, mirrored in my own country in the life and example of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I do not believe that violence can lead to peace. In all of the history I have discussed I see a chain of violence leading to violence. I see the great suffering of the German people after the Versailles Peace Accords leading to violence against the Jews of Europe, which led to violence against the people of Palestine, which led to the rise of Islamic terrorism. Hurt people hurting people.
I began to feel I was in a truly racist country, one in which the hatred and harm of a people, the Palestinians, is justified in countless ways. However just as I love my own country, founded as it is on the dual sins of genocide and slavery, I can love Israel and pray for its flourishing.
I received from Bari Weiss the metaphor of the birth of a child. It is moral and permissible to discuss whether or not to conceive a child before it is born, however once a child is born it is immoral to discuss whether it deserves to live. No matter the circumstances of its conception and birth, each child deserves to be supported, protected from harm and threat and given all the chance to thrive. Israel is the child of the metaphor, and like every other country that exists, it deserves to exist. However I cannot pretend to ignore the circumstances of its founding. There must be some form of reckoning, at least symbolic. All of the other endless complications, mixed motivations, and conflicting interests can exist, however the basic truth must be remembered. Both truths can and must coexist: both that Israel should not have been founded in the manner that it was, and that it deserves to exist and flourish.
For ultimately the essential motivation of the foundation is Israel was love; for family, for the precious community, a space where young ones can thrive. For precious Jewishness; not only a religion, a race or ethnic group. A people. A gifted, unique and precious people, with many gifts for the human family. Hated for their differentness, yet this very distinctness holds their gift.
The tour finished with a goodbye dinner in Tel Aviv's Carmel Market. I separate from the group and am picked up by my friend's work truck and driven south of the city to his family's farmstead and orchard on a moshav. After a few days of rest and relaxation, I head to a peace conference in the Arava desert which Ihab invited me to after his presentation.
Held at a Tibetan Buddhist center and monastery, it brings together Jewish leaders, along with Druze, Muslim, Christian, and secular scholars. The hall is packed with Arabs bused in from Palestinians controlled areas, along with Jews, Buddhists and peace-lovers of all stripes. A Palestinian musical group plays their traditional music and talented young singers soar with Arabic melodies. I meet Ihab and Ora and we share a laugh at the incongruity of settings in which we met a few days apart.
I leave the peace conference the next day due to a lack of translation for English speakers. After a few more days with friends in the countryside and in Tel Aviv, along with several days of isolation due to an asymptomatic covid infection, soon I am on my way back home. As I sit in the airport waiting for my flight, my mind is a swirl with the whirlwind of impressions I've taken in during this short trip. It was a powerful and truly enjoyable experience, with many lessons and lasting memories.
All my life Jewishness has shown itself here and there. In particular people, particular families, particular days and events where aspects of Jewishness are celebrated. In Israel I found a place where everyone you see is Jewish, where Jewishness has been given a place to live and thrive. I see in Tel Aviv the shtetl, where the precious community, once lost, has been built anew. In the young Jewish women with their bright eyes and curly hair, and the cherubic babies in their strollers, I see the survival of Jewish people against all odds, in spite of centuries of barbaric persecution.
Can I blame the Jewish soldier as he cast Palestinians from their homes in 1948, dragging out a few young ones to murder in cold blood in view of the town, ordering the rest to evacuate? In his mind's eye he held his mother, his father, his grandmother, his pals, his lover. His hated and destroyed community, so unutterably beautiful and precious to him, which had been given a chance to find a new home.
Of course I cannot blame him as I cannot blame the Palestinian who mourns the loss of his own ancestral home and community, sending homemade rockets from Gaza to Tel Aviv intent on indiscriminate murder. I cannot blame any of them for their broken heart, their grief and downtrodden spirit, crying out for home, for love, for rest. I cannot blame the Nazi who felt that his only chance for these same values was to murder those whose distinctness he reviled, his gross ignorance and misunderstanding twisted by propaganda. I cannot blame any of these. I can only cry; I can only have my own heart broken over and over and over. In heart break, in crying until I can no longer cry, this is where I can find compassion for everyone. For we must find a universal compassion or we will not survive.
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