Hitzonim | Outsiders

“But sometimes, we confuse vulnerability with powerlessness.”

Mikhael Manekin

On the Diaspora, In Diaspora

The title of today’s post and its content nods to a recent On the Nose podcast episode, “Israel’s Emerging Religious Left,” that I’m attempting to retool for the diaspora. As I’ve said, I’m a paradigmatic diaspora Jew in so far as we also retool our understanding of diaspora. That’s two retoolings in the first paragraph!

Diaspora suggests a homeland-centered meaning, namely, that those in diaspora are those living outside of the land, but I challenge this definition because it presupposes that living within the land is the normative state, and so, living outside of it requires a designation: diaspora. Indeed, the default state of diaspora has been the case ever since the destruction of the Temple in the first century. That’s 2,000 years of diaspora, so long as we take the land-centric definition as the correct one.

What would it mean to redefine diaspora without reference to a homeland? That is the dangerous question to ask because that is the question that leads to the fraught issue of Zionism. Fraught because we’ve been busy arguing over Zionism while a genocide unfolds in real time in front of us. If diaspora assumes land as the default state, then Zionism is necessarily the default position. It’s nearly a tautology.

I’m dubious of the notion that different varieties of Zionism somehow escape this equivalence, at least so long as they include reference to a land. Defining land residence as the normative stance for the Jewish people requires that such a land for Jews exists, and establishing a land for only Jews is the Zionist project. I guess to avoid this is to share land, where Jews inhabit the land with others, but it isn’t tenable to call this a Jewish homeland if it is shared. Like John Kerry said in 2016, “Here is a fundamental reality: If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, but it can’t be both.” Can Zionism tolerate a state that is not exclusively Jewish? Maybe that’s a conceptual question for think tanks and policymakers, but if the ground truth has anything to say, the answer is no. The illegal occupation has bred extremism from the oppressed and fueled militarism from the occupier. I can hardly look at the destruction wrought by Israel, but we must look, both to bear witness to the horror as a sign of deep respect, if not shiva, for our slaughtered Palestinian cousins, and also because we must see for ourselves what Israel is doing in our name.

I see no way forward but through the political solution of two sovereign, self-determined states.

Our Own Historical Striving for Freedom

Violent uprising should not surprise us. Our own history valorizes extremism in the face of occupation. What is the Exodus narrative but liberation achieved by violence? Or the story of Purim, an uprising in response to state sanctioned slaughter? Or Hanukkah, the Maccabean revolt to expel the Seleucids who occupied the Temple? Or the Jewish War against Roman occupation that led to the Temple’s destruction between 66-70 CE, or the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 130s CE against the same occupying empire?

The stories we tell about ourselves are stories of uprisings against occupation, striving for our own freedom: “The slogans on the Bar Kokhba coins proclaimed the ‘Freedom of Israel’ and ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem.’” What does it mean that Bar Kokhba, speaking against Roman occupation, called for “Free Israel” when those occupied by Israel today call for “Free Palestine”?

We should not be so surprised that occupation breeds extremism, when our own Jewish year celebrates several incidents of uprising against power. What do we learn from these major and minor festivals? One lesson is the joy of freedom, so why then would we not treat calls for a Free Palestine to be consistent with our values rather than the existential threat so many would lead us to believe? Truly, a ceasefire would have already been proclaimed if we were honest about connecting our own yearning for freedom to that of other occupied groups, including Palestinians. I see nothing more Jewish than a free Palestine.

Resilience and Existence

I said earlier that I am, “a paradigmatic diaspora Jew,” and I proclaim this because I was born outside the land, I’ve never been to the land, I was not raised Jewish, I come from an intermarried family, I have formed my own intermarried family, and our observance is nominal at best. I traffic in Christian spaces, and I’ve been writing mostly to Christians for years. Does this make me less of a Jew?

That question lacks bearing in our tradition. One’s identity has nothing to do with one’s observance. And those who would police the boundary markers of our tradition, I would argue, are out of touch with our tradition. We are Bronze Age people with mixed ancestry. During the return from Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE, a campaign of religious purity sought to break up our own families. The Hasmonean dynasty attempted the same three centuries later. Near the waning days of the Second Temple period a century after that, we actively bent our tradition to a Hellenized worldview, and into the second century, we influenced Greco-Roman culture in return. Our messianic sects contributed to Christianity in the third century, then we hid our identities during Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, and the Shoah. Three thousand years of Jewish expression has rarely, if ever, been a monolithic group of univocal belief and secure identity.

Ironically, it’s been my engagement with Christian texts, providing the Jewish commentary, that has emboldened my Jewish identity. Looking to my ancestral lineage through mom’s family, I’ve struggled for community within our people. The deeper I engage with our commentaries, cultic traditions, and culture, the more affirmed I feel.

While I was writing weekly posts about the historical context of the gospel accounts, my own identity further revealed itself to me. The mass atrocities of the political state have solidified it. Nothing has secured my identity so much as my repulsion to the actions of modern Israel, for precisely the reason that those actions speak so strongly against the core of who we aspire to be, not nationalistic, but a community mostly to itself, living in foreign lands. The stories of hidden Jewish identities only to be rediscovered a generation or more later is a testament to the strength of our resilience, not a threat to our continued existence.

Diaspora and a Religious Left

Our sacred texts, our sacred tradition of debating those texts, our cultural artifacts, our resistance to assimilation, our desire to be respected as being set apart, and our ability to define our commitments on our own terms are what make us Jews, and these are identity markers that have little to do with a homeland. We are a diaspora people, full stop. Do we redefine diaspora without reference to the land? Maybe we redefine diaspora not as a negative definition that is defined by what it is not but as a positive definition that expresses who we are: A people with a shared narrative that has been crafted over thousands of years, shaped by our own malleability and resilience.

A great flood story like the Ugaritic texts; a storm god like the Canaanite Baal applied to the YHWH of Israel; a list of commandments in our decalogue that reads like the Code of Hammurabi; an exodus that is arguably derived from the Midianites; messianic ideas and divine reward and punishment that reflects Hellenism; Rambam’s doctrinal 13 Principles influenced by Aristotelian thought; post-Enlightenment nation-state politics and European colonialism that influenced modern political Zionism, and on and on. Somewhere in all of that cultural exchange is the Torah, including the oral tradition.

A point of that podcast linked above is that the horror of the genocide is beyond the resources of our plain language. It is the language of sacred texts and prayer that are filling the void in meaning. Maybe that is also the story of the Jewish people.

I’ve never felt more Jewish. Never been so connected to our texts. Than I am in this moment that I see the hawkish militarism and nationalism of so many of us beckoning us away from justice. Is it not the very best that I can do to affirm who we are than let my shabbat candles burn brightly in the front window of our home while actively calling for ceasefire? In this war, we are not Bar Kokhba, we are Rome.

Sharing this with you takes vulnerability but not abandoning power. Instead, embracing diaspora and committing to the Jewish lives we build in the wild is the most empowering thing I think we can do. Do not be led to believe that a pathway to two states is blocked. Do not let fear define your response when the joy of freedom is our tradition. I worry the greatest threat to the continued existence of the Jewish people is not from resistance movements but is from Zionism itself. We must explore that reality, and hard as those conversations can be; as much as it may demand that we admit when we’ve been wrong. We must not confuse vulnerability with powerlessness.