Oasis Songs: Musings from Rav D
Friday, August 2, 2024 / 27 Tammuz 5784
Summary: There is a complex interplay between the Torah’s prohibition against murder and its allowance for war, highlighting the emotional and moral challenges this duality presents. The ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict forces us to confront these difficulties and reconcile different notions of justice, while maintaining a questioning mindset to navigate these tensions. Ultimately, I advocate for embracing the power of questions as a path to openness, connection, and love amidst ongoing conflict and suffering.
Reading Time: Eight minutes
This past week, as I was studying the weekly parashah, I got intellectually, morally, and politically stuck by a verse in this week’s Torah portion.
In Numbers 35:33, the Torah instructs us: “You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of the one who shed it” (New JPS translation). The Torah repeatedly commands us not to kill, even as it also describes war as a necessary and sometimes permissible answer to human conflict. How does one live with both of these truths? This is a difficult tension. In recent times, I have attempted to escape its emotional demands by taking a hiatus from the news. It is important to take breaks, so long as we recognize that eventually we need to return to what is in front of us. But it’s not easy, so it felt worthwhile to explore this tension at length. What follows will not be a political or even a military analysis of this moment; those responses can readily be found elsewhere. Rather, it is an exploration of being human under very difficult circumstances.
Getting stuck is normally an invitation to go deeper, especially as we mark three hundred days of the Israel-Gaza war during a week in which both Ismail Haniyeh and Fuad Shukr were assassinated by Israel. The heartbreak of this war weighs heavily upon me. The sacrifices it has demanded, the blood that has been shed, the fractures it has made apparent in both the body of the Jewish Americans as well as the body of the larger American people, are excruciating. In Israel and Gaza, things are no different.
It’s been said, often on bumper stickers, sometimes at rallies, that “war is not the answer.” What doesn’t fit as easily on the back of a car just as often is that, “diplomacy is not the answer,” “peace is not the answer,” or “a cold truce or ceasefire is not the answer.” Let’s be clear. When the great Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. penned that phrase, it was within a larger speech arguing that we could choose between “nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation,”1 one in which humanity must seek an overriding loyalty and unconditional love for all mankind. Grounding all of this is Reverend King’s belief in universal justice. These sentiments deeply resonate with me; I want them to be true. Yet many other civil rights leaders disagreed with King’s approach, often from a strategic viewpoint.
My critique of the Reverend’s beautiful, powerful, and hopeful vision flows out of a different concern. While anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Marilyn Strathern have noted that while all societies believe in certain fundamental principles of justice, their research also highlights how often our notions of justice, fairness or reciprocity are culturally conditioned. As one small example, should justice be embedded in individual human rights or in the rights of the collective? Each of these assumptions generates very different results. For example, looking at Hamas’s ideology, the concerns of a future collective of Palestinians not yet born and their (imagined) right to all of the land justifies any sort of action or sacrifice in the present moment and indeed for as long as it takes to achieve those goals on behalf of a Palestinian (or Pan-Arabist) collective. When two peoples operate out of radically different notions of justice, we have to at least take seriously the possibility that diplomacy and ceasefires may indeed not be the answer but only an invitation for greater future carnage. This is difficult to entertain, in particular because it can make us feel stuck, thus more likely to give in to despair.
Part of the American national character has historically been our can-do attitude, a belief that we can keep innovating, creating our way to a better future by overcoming any problem. American optimism has sometimes been achieved by uprooting ourselves from history and tradition, which is not a price all cultures are willing to pay. Although this quintessentially optimistic belief has come under attack in recent years, it continues to define us, even if many Americans have soured on the concept. Because of this almost intrinsic part of our identity, the notion that peace or a ceasefire might not provide the answers we seek—might not actually generate a durable peace—is very difficult to accept, yet it demands serious consideration. This is not a hawkish call for more warfare, which I don’t want; it’s simply an observation that sometimes peace doesn’t change the underlying dilemma, meaning that it lays the ground for further war.
All of this reminds me of the title of Sartre’s one-act play, No Exit, which explores the themes of self-deception and the responsibility of freedom, while introducing a line that has made its way into popular culture: “hell is other people.”
It’s been decades since I read this, so forgive me if my memory isn’t up to snuff, but three individuals who hate each other have been sentenced to an eternity in hell. Rather than being tortured by the flames and fires that so often are used to depict the underworld, they are locked in a windowless room with no mirrors and from which there is literally no exit. In part, their torment consists of having to deal with one another, but the absence of mirrors highlights an additional aspect of their punishment, for it symbolizes that they can only come to know of themselves from the very people they despise.
There is something here that seems very apropos of this hundred-year war between the Palestinians and Israelis. I have sometimes worried that a large part of contemporary Palestinian culture is not self-directed—the sort of cultural production that occurs by looking in the mirror—but resides in its opposition to Israel.2
Increasingly, fundamentalist forces within Israeli society seem to be embracing a similar dead end. So long as this remains the case, hell indeed seems to be other people, producing a situation in which it is very difficult to find an exit.
In conversations with countless people, as well as in my research, many of those who point to an exit seem to imagine that their notions of justice and the theories that support them are universally ascribed to. This seems disrespectful to the cultural autonomy of other societies, even as it is a form of ideological violence. If “my ideas are right, and your ideas are wrong,” then how do we find an off-ramp that might lead us a bit closer to the Reverend King’s beautiful conception that would “transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood?”3
Ultimately, the act of questioning is itself the best answer I can discover for myself. A question is what keeps us engaged: it prevents us from retreating to the complacency of simple solutions that have a failed track record or accepting the complacency of being stuck. To question is to remain committed, curious, engaged, uncertain. When we dedicate ourselves to the question, we embrace a growth mindset that is a key component of enhancing the virtue of humility. Even more, the question is itself an important source of love. By asking questions, we express a desire to know others, which is a foundation for love and intimacy. If memory serves, the research of the influential psychologist of relationships, John Gottman, emphasizes that by asking questions, we show that we value the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
The strongest and most subtle political, military, and philosophical minds have done their best to find the exit strategy to the intractable series of conflicts that embroil the Middle East. What that indicates is that they don’t yet have a suitable answer. How much more so the rest of us! Because of that, I don’t understand those who double down on the beliefs they already have: Isn’t that the classic definition of insanity?
Judaism and Jews celebrate the power of the question, often because of the intellectual freedom it provides while making space for individual thought. Those are valuable reasons, yet increasingly they seem of secondary value. In a world on fire, it becomes important for everyone to find a way to live with and experience joy and love, even amid suffering. If we wait till suffering ends before we let love in, we will be trapped in a windowless room for all eternity.
When we embrace the question itself as the path to openness, love, connection, vulnerability, and spiritual deepening, we won’t make the terrible tensions of being human disappear. But like a blast of WD-40 on a rusted bolt, living our lives as a question is the sort of deep faith that can loosen us up, freeing us from the bonds of hatred and certainty. It might also allow us to incline our ears so that, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., we, too, might hear the first plaintive notes of that beautiful universal symphony for which we all long.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rav D
1 This and all other MLK quotes herein come from “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Delivered 4/04/1967. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
2 This will seem controversial to some, but numerous quotes from Palestinian leaders over the year make this claim:
a. “I don’t think there is a Palestinian nation at all. I think there is an Arab nation. I always thought so… I think it’s a colonialist invention – a Palestinian nation. When were there any Palestinians?” – Balad party founder Azmi Bishara, Channel 2, 1996.
b. Zuhair Muhsin, the head of the PLO’s military department was quoted in the Dutch daily newspaper, Trouw, on 31 March 1977: “The existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes…The founding of a Palestinian State is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel and for Arab unity…After we have attained all our rights in the whole of Palestine, we must not postpone, even for a single moment, the reunification of Jordan and Palestine.” (https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-190014/).
The fact that a careful researcher can uncover dozens of such quotes from top Palestinian leaders is brought here not to deny a claim to a second Palestinian state (Jordan being the first), but to highlight the profound insight about identity that Sartre offers in his play.
3 See note 1
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