I just read this about an hour ago,
Rabbi Dev Noily’s grandfather, Jehudah Noily, was an enthusiastic Zionist. (Photo/Courtesy)
BY RABBI DEV NOILY | APRIL 26, 2024
Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.
Editor’s note: With Israeli Independence Day approaching, we are publishing in the coming days a series of op-eds on the contemporary meaning of Zionism.I keep one small photograph on my desk. It’s of my grandfather, whom I knew as Saba. Whenever I write or speak or even think about Israel/Palestine, I must be able to look him in the eye.
My saba was a kind-hearted, hard-headed, soft-spoken, straight-backed man who towered above me at 6 feet, 2 inches. In Europe, he encountered both subtle and bone-breaking antisemitism and, dreaming of living safely and freely as a Jew in the modern world, he joined the Zionist Scouts. When my father was a baby, in 1933, my grandparents moved their young family to Palestine.
On my phone’s home screen I have a picture of my son, now 24 and a budding scholar of medieval Judaism. He is a lover of Torah, Hebrew and Jewish sacred text. He has visited and lived in Israel/Palestine. And he is clear-eyed in his commitment to diasporism and anti-Zionism, as are nearly all of his peers. He understands Zionism in the context of the European colonial projects that have decimated people, lands and cultures the world over. He has witnessed firsthand the brutality and injustice of the occupation.
For my grandparents, Zionism was an impossible dream that, in its spectacularly surprising realization, transformed a life of persecution into one of liberation. For my son, Zionism is the ideology underwriting a brutal system of oppression, imposing on Palestinians the very same kinds of systemic abuses of power and humiliations and violence that his great-grandparents fled.
For me, both of these are true.
I’ve wrestled with Israel/Palestine since my teens, when I first began to hear Palestinian narratives. I am a diaspora Jew, and many years ago I renounced my “right of return” in a symbolic gesture to reject the notion that I should have a “backup country” that I’ve never called home, while Palestinians have no access to, or freedom in, the lands their families have lived on for generations.
I’ve been blessed with a life of great privilege and relative safety, and I don’t know what it’s like to have a loved one violently taken hostage or to have dozens of my living relatives killed in a single night of bombing. I carry the weight of my personal debt, both for my grandparents’ escape from Europe to Palestine, and for my family’s role in the dispossession of Palestinians from their land.
I’ve wrestled with Israel/Palestine since my teens, when I first began to hear Palestinian narratives.
Kehilla Community Synagogue, the Piedmont congregation I serve, includes members with many relationships to Israelis and Palestinians: the family of a hostage who at this writing is still unaccounted for, intimate friends of Gazans whose entire families have been slaughtered, grandparents of Israeli grandchildren, a group that’s in ongoing relationship with the besieged Bedouin Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair in the West Bank, and many more. Ours are just a handful of stories among millions that Israeli Jews, Palestinians and those who care for them carry in our hearts and in our bones.
Each of these stories matters. Each is true. Each fills a life with experiences, memories, loyalties, passions, grief and the wounds of current and historical trauma. Each of us is making sense as best we can of our world, of what is given to us and of what is being asked of us. And, as is always true, people’s grief and struggles are played on and manipulated by political forces and those in power, often in ways that seek to pit us against each other.
For me, Jewish identity is a gift that connects me to being alive, through millennia of Jewish spiritual teachings and practices. Those teachings overwhelmingly lift up compassion over harsh judgment, reconciliation over escalation, humility over entitlement, self-reflection over blame of others, peace over violence, love over hate. The Torah teaches us again and again to love the stranger as ourselves, not to oppress the stranger because we know the bitterness of that experience and to place the highest value on human life.
None of these teachings assumes ease in their fulfillment. On the contrary, they acknowledge the extreme difficulty and often steep price of this path. As Hillel taught, “In a place where no one is a human being, strive to be human” ( Pirkei Avot, 2:5).
Since Oct. 7, I’ve sought to hold the truth of each of our stories and to see the humanity in all who are caught in this nightmare, as a path to holding onto my own humanity. At the same time, we are witnessing a historic shift that, while triggered by the heinous Hamas attack, is marked now most indelibly by the Israeli government’s disproportionately brutal destruction of Gaza and its increasing oppression of Palestinians under its authority in the West Bank.
Amos Goldberg, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently wrote: “Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain for the ‘most horrible of crimes,’ which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, this is the way it will be viewed in history’s judgment for generations to come.”
However we name what is happening, we have to face that it is happening. When we elevate the suffering of our own people over that of all others, when we consider our safety to be of such exclusive importance that we feel entitled to cross any line to reach for it, when we allow ourselves to filter our compassion — letting it flow to some people and groups but not to others — we lose our connection to our humanity, and our connection to the whole of creation.
Today, I imagine the Source of Life weeping for all of us wounded and wayward children, calling us all home to turn our hearts toward love and healing. |
