Jerusalem – A Point of View (by Dalia Landau)

As predictable as it might have been, still the announcement by the U.S. government about Jerusalem, shook the world.The question is why?

Jerusalem – a point of view

by Dalia Landau

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Nothing new. Personally I do not need confirmation for what is a known fact. However, better  keep silent than acknowledge half a truth. If we as Israelis claim that we are here to stay, the Palestinians are also here to stay. They too, together with the whole Muslim world, feel connected to what Jerusalem represents for them as a Holy City. However, while for the rest of the Muslim world she is an abstract symbol, for the Palestinians, just as for us, Jerusalem is both a symbol and a living reality. East Jerusalem, with the villages surrounding it is inhabited by Palestinians. If the statement of the U.S. were presented by, at the very least, expressing the hope that East Jerusalem be the capital of Palestine, we might have seen vision and courage in that statement. Making a one sided declaration, which completely overlooks the sensitivities of one of the parties in a conflict, still the U.S. claims to be a broker for peace.

 

Now, unfortunately, there is yet again danger of escalating violence on the local level here in the holy city.  Yet, Beyond current politics,  Jerusalem is a place where civilizations have been clashing for millennia- greedily vying for possession– of what? Of Holiness?

 

I do not think that symbols, as important as they are for meaning and identity, are worth one drop of  blood-shed–nobody’s blood. Shall we allow yet again this central symbol to become more important than human life?

 

Beyond right and wrong and who ‘owns’ Jerusalem and who was here first, and whose Temple Mount it is, whose Rock, in whose jurisdiction lies the ‘Foundation Stone’ of the world, this or that square centimetre of the Western Wall compound, there is  The Holy One who cannot be possessed. We thirst for holiness but we cannot posses it. Yes, we can hold on to a few stones for a while…

 

Amidst all this, Advent is here, Hanuka is soon approaching, which is a reminder of a current which flows, a flame which always burns.. one candle and another and a third and yet another.

With blessings,

 

Dalia Landau,
Co-Founder
Open House Ramle

If The Worst Should Happen! (by Rev. Dr. Eric Smith)

(My feelings overwhelm and my thoughts run amok, but the words are not flowing as of yet … thankfully, the words of my friend and colleague, Dr. Eric Smith, feel right to share with you.- R.Mo )

The cover of Time Magazine for the week of November 14 has a photo shopped picture of candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton holding a sign that reads, “THE END IS NEAR”. Of course the Time Magazine cover was alluding to the fact that the most contentious and negative Presidential Election in recent memory was coming to an end. However for some Hillary Clinton supporters the cover turned into an ominous prophesy I am sure many Clinton supporters went to bed on Election night in shock and thinking “Oh No The End Is Near.” No doubt an equal number of Trump supporters would have felt the same way had Clinton prevailed.

To my broken hearted sisters and brothers who went to bed thinking the election of Donald Trump is the worst thing that can happen, I say take a proper perspective about the election.
If you woke up this morning without a diagnosis of Cancer, HIV/AIDS or any number of other health issues, then the worst did not happen.
If you woke up this morning and found your children home and safe, then the worst did not happen.
If you woke up in a country (which you did) that did not have the military seize power overnight and declare marshal law and the elections invalid, then the worst did not happen.

In other words, stop acting like the world has slipped beyond God’s control. Remember on November the 8th 2016 the country elected a president not a God. So if, by chance or happenstance, the worst should happen remember what God told Moses to tell the children of Israel who were caught with the Red Sea in front of them and the Egyptian army behind them. “Go Forward!”

We are not called to sit down and whine. We are called to “Go Forward” with an agenda that includes a voice for unity not divisiveness. We are called to “Go Forward” with the agenda to lift up girls and women not treat them as sexual conquest for men with power or star power. We are called to to “Go Forward” with the agenda to remove ridicule and stigma from those with handicaps. We are called to “Go Forward” with the agenda to fight for full inclusion in the church for all people in the LGBTQ community. We are called to “Go Forward” with our agenda to promote “Interfaith Dialogue.” As Hillary Clinton put it, “we believe that the American dream is big enough for people of all races and religions, for men and women, for immigrants, for LGBT people and people with disabilities.” Therefore, God and the American Dream calls us to “Go Forward!”

We are called to “Go Forward” because “The End Is Not Near” and it is not here. We are called to “Go Forward because God is still in control. So if by chance or happenstance the worst should happen, remember these words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Admitting the weighty problems and staggering disappointments, Christianity affirms that God is able to give us the power to meet them. God is able to give us the inner equilibrium to stand tall amid the trials and burdens of life. God is able to provide inner peace amid outer storms. This inner stability of faith is Christ’s chief legacy to his disciples. He offers neither material resources nor a magical formula that exempts us from suffering and persecution, but He brings an imperishable gift: “Peace I leave you.” This is the peace which surpasses all human understanding.”

The worst has not happened, but if by chance or happenstance the worst should happen, I say in the words of an old Negro Spiritual, “I must go on. I will go on to see what the end might be.” The end God has in mind is the best thing not the worse thing that could happen. So “Go Forward!”

From Peter Beinart: An American Jewish Trump Emergency

Time to form an American Jewish Emergency Committee Against Donald Trump … A mobilization would counter the shameful acquiescence to Trump in some corners of the American Jewish establishment.   By Peter Beinart | Jun. 22, 2016

In dangerous times, American Jews have a tradition of forming “Emergency Committees.” In 1939, fearing that World War II would imperil the activities of the London and Jerusalem-based World Zionist Organization, representatives of America’s major Zionist groups formed the Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs. Later renamed the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs and then the American Zionist Emergency Council, it operated until the establishment of the State of Israel. Meanwhile, in 1943, Ben Hecht and Peter Bergson created the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews in Europe to pressure Franklin Roosevelt’s government to do more to rescue Jews engulfed by the Holocaust. In 2010, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and some like-minded conservatives created the Emergency Committee for Israel to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish agenda.

But more than a year since Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, and several months since he became the presumptive Republican nominee, there is still no American Jewish Emergency Committee against Fascism (or bigotry, or whatever name you choose to describe Donald Trump’s attacks on American Muslims, Mexican immigrants, an independent judiciary and a free press).

I hadn’t thought about this absence until last Shabbat, when an idealistic young Orthodox rabbi named Joshua Frankel came up to me during Kiddush and proposed creating one. His vision is to create a network of rabbis and lay leaders across the country so that wherever Trump speaks, there is always someone to protest, in Judaism’s name.

Of course, some American Jewish groups have already criticized Trump. The Forward’s Nathan Guttman reports that between last December and this May, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Trump’s statements at least five times. The American Jewish Committee called his proposed registry of American Muslims a “horror movie that we Jews are quite familiar with.” The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism organized a walkout of Trump’s speech at AIPAC. The Jewish social justice group Bend the Arc led anti-Trump protests just this week. And earlier this month, four prominent rabbis—one Orthodox, one Conservative, one Reform and one Reconstructionist—jointly declared that “Men and women of faith should indeed form a coalition to denounce the racism and bigotry that Trump spews forth and inspires.”

These protests are laudable. But they’ve been episodic. Frankel’s idea is to create something continuous, a protest that does not end until Trump’s presidential bid does. By challenging Trump wherever he goes, rabbis could use his campaign to rouse their own communities against bigotry. After protesting a Trump rally, some might take their congregants to a solidarity event at a local mosque. Others might help immigrants register to vote. The goal would be a rolling mobilization in which thousands or tens of thousands of American Jews join the struggle to defeat the most openly bigoted and authoritarian major party nominee in modern American history.

Such a mobilization would counter the shameful acquiescence to Trump in some corners of the American Jewish establishment. It would counter AIPAC’s decision to invite Trump to speak, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ failure to issue a single press release condemning him and Sheldon Adelson’s pledge to spend as much as $100 million helping him get elected.

It would show that American Jews take seriously the Torah’s 36 injunctions to remember the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. And it would put Jews on the right side during a moral crucible that Americans will remember for decades. Mexicans and Muslims will not always be the reviled outsiders they are in America today. One day, the children and grandchildren of the people Trump is demonizing will be highly integrated and politically influential and they will remember who defended their communities when they were under siege.

In defending Mexicans and Muslims, American Jews will also be defending ourselves. Trump is a bigotry entrepreneur. He looks for racial, ethnic and religious resentments that are being underserved by the political class. Today, Jews are not a primary target of those resentments. Nonetheless, Trump’s supporters have generated more public Jew-hatred than any campaign in decades. If you loathe “hyphenated Americans” and yearn to restore the hierarchies of 1950s America, chances are Jews may bother you too.

In the mid-twentieth century, American Jews participated in the civil rights movement in astonishing ways. The American Jewish Committee funded the research into the effects of segregation by African American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark that helped sway the Supreme Court in Brown versus Board of Education. In the 1940s, notes J.J. Goldberg in his book, Jewish Power, the American Jewish Congress employed seven lawyers working to fighting segregation, more than either the Justice Department or the NAACP.

The reason was enlightened self-interest. American Jews knew that, as a conspicuous minority with a history of persecution, they would benefit immensely if America became a more equal, tolerant society. Conversely, they knew that if African Americans failed in their struggle for equal citizenship, Jews might also fail in theirs.

The same is true today. An election like this comes along once or twice a lifetime. Let the Trump campaign be an opportunity for American Jews to show our children the kind of people we still are.

Avraham Burg on the Kidnapped Israeli Young Men

I find my heart filled with anguish as I pray for the safe return of the three young Israeli men who were kidnapped this past week.  The anguish only grows as I observe the myriad of reaction from Jews, Palestinians and the rest of the world.  As I struggle to identify and express my own thoughts and feelings, I find perspective in the candor and integrity of the words of Avram Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament).   – R.Mo

The Palestinians: A kidnapped society
We are incapable of understanding the suffering of a society, its cry, and the future of an entire nation that has been kidnapped by us.
Ha’aretz/| Jun. 18, 2014 | 12:09 PM | By Avraham Burg

Our hearts are in pain over those three teenage boys whose identities we did not even know a moment ago, but who now belong to all of us. Each of them looks like my own son, the son of every one of my friends and their friends.

Like many people, I hope with all my heart that the moment will come when we see them alive among us, and that all this tension dissipates into blissful relief. I hope, with real trembling, but I cannot and do not want to ignore the silenced truth that surrounds their kidnapping.
Those three boys are truly unfortunate. They are unfortunate because of the trap of fear in which they have been captured, the uncertainty and the fact that their lives are in great danger. Our hearts are in pain, and go out to them and their families because of how, in a single moment, they had to step into the glare of publicity. And these teenagers are unfortunate because of the lie in which they have lived their lives — lives of supposed normalcy that were built upon the foundations of that greatest of Israeli injustices: the occupation.
Now let us turn from their wretchedness to our own. For us, a dramatic or traumatic event is always a very clear, refined and transparent moment. All the plans and failures, the fears and hopes, burst out.
Here are Israel’s shallow prime minister and the bumbling police, the masses who cling to futile prayers and not to a moment of human peace. Here are the country’s hypocritical chief rabbis, who just a month ago demanded promises from the pope regarding the future of the Jewish people, but in their daily lives remain silent about the fate of the people who are our neighbors, trampled beneath the pressure of occupation and racism under the leadership of rabbis who receive exorbitant salaries and benefits.
Suddenly everything erupts, is expressed in its very essence, emerging from the darkness into the sunlight. This is precisely the moment to examine intentions — because, as said, everything is out in the open.
First, Netanyahu’s hollowness. Not much needs to be said about it. After all, he is the one who guided all the Israeli-Palestinians talks into the tight corner of the prisoner release issue. He is also the one who, with his own words, violated Israel’s commitment to release the last group of Palestinian prisoners. He is also the one who maneuvered the Palestinian Authority into the corner of unifying with Hamas.
So what exactly is he complaining about, with his dramatic and schmaltzy comments and gestures? His immediate, conditioned, unconsidered response shows that he was just waiting for this moment, if only to say “I told you so.” And now that he has, the real question surfaces: What exactly is he telling us? The painful answer: Nothing at all.
Israel’s left wing, too, which is supposedly dignified, has become the gaping mouth of the carp stuffed with some sort of gray substance, lying on the Passover seder plate of the gluttonous right wing. The latter, too, are embroiled in a disgraceful fight over a piece of the pie of legitimacy that belongs to the sticky consensus.
How can it be that not one of them has gotten up and said: Everyone who is on the other side of this black line bears the responsibility. It is not pleasant, but it is the truth. And it is never pleasant, after all.
Before there is a kidnapping — why talk? Nobody is listening anyway because things are quiet. And the moment they kidnap, we must not talk (as the executive director of Peace Now said), since our kidnapped ones are gone. And once it all ends (in what could be, God forbid, a personal tragedy or a collective tragedy that nobody cares about), why should we talk? Everybody is busy once again with Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, the FIFA World Cup or the next scandal.
So this is also a pure moment of insulation. Not the insulation of homes which we are used to, but the insulation of hearts. Few people on the right and the left – except for Gideon Levy, Uri Misgav and a few other cautious and frightened commentators – are trying to grasp the deep roots of the kidnapping.
We absolve ourselves by saying, “They handed out sweets” after hearing about the kidnapping. Their happiness makes us glad, since the happier they are over our suffering, the more exempt we are from taking an interest in them and their suffering. But there is no way around it: This is a sort of happiness that demands deeper study and understanding.
All of Palestinian society is a kidnapped society. Like many of the Israelis who performed “significant service” in the army, many of the readers of this column, or their children, entered the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night by surprise, with violence, and simply took away the father, brother or uncle, with determination and insensitivity. That is kidnapping, and it happens every day. And what about their administrative detainees?
What is all this if not one big official, evil and unjust kidnapping that we all participate in and never pay the price for? That is the fate of tens of thousands of detainees and others under arrest, who stayed, or are staying, in Israel’s prisons – quite a few of them for no good reason, falsely imprisoned on false pretexts. The vast majority of them have been exposed to the appendages of military justice, and none of us cares a whit.
All these things have turned the topic of the prisoners into the main subject in the lives of the occupied society. There is not a single household without a detainee or prisoner. So why is it so difficult to understand their joy and our pain, fears and worry notwithstanding? It was, and can still be, otherwise.
However, as long as the Israeli government shuts all the gates of freedom, flees from all real negotiations that could solve the conflict, refuses to make good-will gestures, lies and blatantly violates its own commitments – violence is all that remains for them.
It has already been proven any number of times that kidnapping sets one free. It seems once again that Israel understands nothing but violence. What does that say about us? This response of ours — which ranges between “They deserve it” and “They are all terrorists,” to “I am following orders” and “I did not know what was going on” — says more about us than it does about them.
Despite the enormous and inspiring success of Breaking the Silence (an NGO that collects testimony from soldiers who’ve served in the West Bank), our own total silence is still the loudest thing around us. We are willing to go out of our minds over one odd and troublesome Pollard, a lone kidnap victim or three kidnap victims, but we are incapable of understanding the suffering of a whole society, its cry, and the future of an entire nation that has been kidnapped by us.

This, too, needs to be said and heard during this moment of clarity — and as loudly as possible.