The Facts on the Ground

Israel has been involved in an illegal occupation of Palestinian territories for decades, including governing through an apartheid system. The modern state of Israel, under right-wing, nationalist extremism, is presently engaged in a project of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the Palestinian territory west of the Jordan river. Twenty thousand dead, the majority civilians, and of those civilians, a majority are women and children. Just today as I prepare to publish this post, Israel has increased ground operations in Central Gaza, including within refugee camps, and these operations are expected to last “many months.” Military action must be halted and a durable ceasefire negotiated in exchange for the release of hostages.

Israel’s actions are not bringing safety to Israel and certainly not to global Jewry. I was already receiving plenty of antisemitic comments online long before October 7 because of the biblical studies content I produce online, from a Jewish perspective. That rhetoric has only increased over the past couple months:

Violence only begets more violence, war crimes only begets more war crimes. Linking the fight for Jewish safety with a campaign to annihilate Palestinians makes Israeli Jews less safe by ensuring another cycle of violence. And it threatens the safety of Jews across the diaspora, who are being targeted by the blowback to this military operation by those who wrongly conflate all Jews with Israel.

The Forward

What’s more, I can feel the dividing lines in the Jewish community continue to fracture over Zionism. As someone living in a geography with a very small Jewish community, placing myself outside the party line by criticizing Israel is a difficult price to pay. What is especially frustrating about this division within Judaism is the strange bedfellows it makes. AIPAC invited Trump to their convention in 2016. The March for Israel in DC invited John Hagee to speak. Netanyahu chose to frame the military action against Hamas by appeal the the Biblical story of Amalek–a story in which Gd calls for a genocide against the Amalekites. House republicans are passing resolutions declaring anti-Israel sentiment to be antisemitic.

It’s like the past several years of mainstream Israeli engagement are bookended by Trumpian authoritarianism, a bigoted Christian Zionist, and Bibi using the Bible to justify war. I can’t imagine sharing a bed with Trump, Hagee, and Stefanik, but this is what so many of my fellow Jews are doing. It’s bizzaro world, with grave consequence.

Shabbat Shalom

Sometime in October this year, my spouse posted a picture of one of our boys lighting shabbat candles on a Friday night. My spouse, who is not Jewish, is supportive and encouraging to both see me pursue my traditions and to incorporate them into our daily home life with our three boys. Their names are traditional Hebrew biblical names. In our predominantly conservative state, people often assume that we’re really Christian. It turns out, as I’ve joked, we’re just a little Jewish!

We live just south of a medium-sized Midwest metropolitan city. We can’t drive half a mile in any direction without seeing a church, but if you want to go to synagogue, the total count in the entire metropolitan area is four. Jews are a small subset of the population. In our city, the entire Jewish population makes up only 0.4% of the total population–yes that’s point four, not four percent. Less than a percentage point. And not only do we feel the isolation in our community, we also feel that we are not ensured safety. New neighbors moved in next door about four months ago. They’re Jewish! We were excited to have a shared tradition right next door. One of the first questions they asked us was whether it was safe to decorate for Hanukkah and display Shabbat candles in their front window. For context, the neighbor a few houses down recently traded out his American flag garage door wrap with one that says Merry Christmas. Neither of these symbols, especially when draped across the entire garage, project a sense of pluralism and multiculturalism.

At any rate, in part because of this small community size, it’s usual for us, and I think other Jewish families, too, to send up a Shabbat Shalom greeting on Friday night as a nod to our siblings. We did not choose to post a Shabbat themed status update that Friday because of the attacks of October 7. We posted that Friday because we post a lot of Fridays, for the reason mentioned. That Friday, though, we received a critical message on social media in support of Palestinians.

This was immediately alarming to me. Not because we are not pro-Palestinian human rights. My first trip to DC to advocate for Palestinian human rights was in 2014. I’m not new to the issue, and I’m not new to Jewish people who I love and respect throwing some shade because I, “don’t really understand.”

The alarm is this: A family engaging in the home practices of a closed religious system has nothing to do with the actions of the modern nation state of Israel. In fact, as I’ve discussed right here on this very blog, the actions of the state of Israel are totally averse to Jewish values (for example, “Prophetic Critique of Israel” and “The People (not the State) of Israel”). Conflating the actions of Israel with our family’s Shabbat tradition signaled to me right away that the critique of Israel was going to devolve into antisemitism. Of course, critiquing Israel is assuredly not antisemitism, yet critiquing a Jew for lighting Shabbat candles assuredly is. It’s commonplace now for any piece of Jewish online content to be bombarded with comments of #FreePalestine.

Hear me on this: The call for a Free Palestine is not antisemitic. But to react to any piece of Jewish content, regardless of its subject, with comments about Palestine makes the same fatal error of equating Israel with Jewish people and/or Judaism. 

Similarly, it’s become fashionable to claim that Jews are not indigenous to the land because most of us are from Europe. Again, this is a conflation of Zionism and Jewish people. The Zionist debate is welcome to dispute indigeneity, but the Ashkenazi blood that ends up in America is a very real consequence from Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. The persecution and attempted genocide of Jewish lives for generations is historical reality. Imagine being Jewish while watching neo-Nazis wave flags and chant, “Jews will not replace us.” Friends, it’s not a feeling of security. Does this excuse Netanyahu for his project of ethnic cleansing? Obviously no. Yet, would large factions of people in America prefer that I didn’t exist? Yes. This returns us to the point made in the opening section about backlash to Israel’s actions making Jews less safe. And it’s on this historical understanding of Jewish people and Judaism to which I now turn.

Jesus Under the Rubble

I traffic comfortably in Jewish and Christian settings. I identify as a Jewish person, grounding that identity in the tradition of matrilineal descent through my mom’s family, not to mention my study, participation, and ground for meaning-making that I find in Jewish spaces. Now here comes the universe’s sense of humor. My dad is a mainline Protestant pastor. In fact, these blended traditions may be one of my favorite things about myself and our family. I’ve described myself as a paradigmatic diaspora Jew–a tradition of blended identities. To my Jewish siblings who would raise halachic (Jewish legal interpretation) concerns, I’ve always felt confident to say that were it not for me teaching our boys about our traditions, I could be a broken link in the chain of our people. Is gatekeeping the faith more important than negotiating with our tradition for a new generation?

I am deeply involved in justice work within a progressive mainline protestant (i.e., Christian) denomination. For this reason, my inbox fills with justice calls to action from both Jewish and Christian action networks. The powerful Jesus Under the Rubble imagery has gripped justice spaces with the compelling suggestion that were Jesus born (in Bethlehem, as the narrative goes), he’d be born under the rubble. Bethlehem is located in a  modern day Palestinian territory. Jesus under the rubble has become a call to action for Christian communities to stand with their Palestinian Christian cousins. I support this clarion call, with some consideration that we must address. We must be careful not to erase Judaism from an occupied Jesus.

This blog and my active presence on TikTok centers around a casual slogan: Christian texts, Jewish context. My work is to discuss Second Temple Period Judaism and the Scriptures of Israel as the practical and cultic background to the first century Jesus movement. I often discuss the prophetic accounts that were used by the anonymous gospel authors to construct their documents of proclamation about Jesus. This effort has brought me plenty of terrible and hateful rhetoric from some Christians, but mostly it’s brought naive “matter-of-fact” comments from Christians who are not being intentionally hateful; rather, they simply see Jesus as a fulfillment of prophecy who came to correct the foolish Pharisees. It’s not overt antisemitism in most cases. A plain reading of the gospels certainly portray the “Scribes and the Pharisees,” foils to Jesus, as hypocritical legalists who are too clouded by their traditions to see Jesus for who he is.

I don’t fault most mainline Christians for this. It’s pretty standard Christian theology that without a more examined and academically informed view of scripture falls naturally out of a reading of the gospels, especially the fourth gospel. While I won’t run up the word count to dive into all of this (last week’s Sunday Post is a nice example of my approach), I think the going Christian view is that the usefulness of the Bible is to reveal Jesus, plain and simple. Of course “the vengeful Old Testament Gd” and “the Loving Gd of the New Testament” is a tired trope. The outcome of this common view is that Judaism is either fulfilled, replaced, or superseded by Jesus. In short, Christianity has a funny way of erasing its Jewish roots.

We do not need to be too fanciful to imagine, What if Jesus were born today? Because the question is not wholly hypothetical. Jesus was born under occupation: Roman militarized occupied Judea and Samaria. Yes, in Bethlehem, at least by the construction of the gospels–documents that I don’t think we historicize; rather, we read them for their rhetorical and theological significance. See, the author places Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem to connect Jesus to the House of David and the prophecy about the messiah descended from the same. Jesus becomes the figurehead of Christianity, but the gospels that proclaim him are Jewish literature tapping into Jewish theology, drawing from the “Law and the Prophets”; the Scriptures of Israel. Again, in Roman occupied Judea. Rome is actually instrumental in the naming of Palestine:

In the early 2nd century CE, the term “Syria Palaestina” (literally, “Palestinian Syria”) was given to a Roman province incorporating Judaea and other territories, either before or after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135.

Wikipedia

Yes, if Jesus were born today, he would be born under the rubble, and he would be born a Jew, as he was. I support the Jesus under the Rubble imagery and its attendant call for justice. What I caution us against, though, is erasing Judaism from the occupied Jesus. Christianity would not come for a couple hundred years after Jesus’ death.

Jesus under the Rubble is a strong call for Christian communities to join their Palestinian counterparts in the call for ceasefire in Palestine. And so too, should we understand that being born under the rubble is not unique to 21st century Christians. There under the rubble in Palestine is also the remains of the Second Temple that shaped Jewish life for more than 500 years until the Roman Empire razed it to the ground in the first century and slaughtered tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children in the three year “Jewish War,” as Jewish-Roman historian Josephus called it. This does not justify the present action at the hands of modern Israel, but when we look upon Jesus under the rubble, we must be careful not to erase Jesus’ very real Jewish identity, and we must not see atrocities as the fault of “The Jews.” 

Yes, it is the modern nation state of Israel exacting such horror, and yes, we must continue calling for an end to the ethnic cleansing and condemn the US military-industrial complex for its role. This much is clear. And this is the present threat before us. And still, when we erase Jewish history from the history of the region, we risk leaving world Jewry out of shared liberation. We must stop the ethnic cleansing. Full stop. But when looking to rightly criticize Israel, criticizing a family gathering around shabbat candles just ain’t it.