- Homeless Friend
- Jul 16, 2007
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Ive been watching former bernie guys twitter because hes been having a huge meltdown about israel, and I figure hes about as as far left as the political establishment allows. so its cool watching the intellectual tailspin/liberal deciphering of these current events and trying to decide their path forward. (its gonna be the status quo)
https://x.com/davidsirota/status/1726773132835299411
Ezra Klein Show posted:
Everything I’m about to talk about is hard to talk about. It is hard to talk about because it’s personal to me. It’s hard to talk about because it’s happening in the midst of an active hellacious war. And it’s hard to talk about because even when there is not a war, this is just hard to talk about.
Maybe I’ll start here. I think something we’re seeing in the politics in America around Israel right now, I think it reflects three generations with very different lived experiences of what Israel is. You have older Americans, say, Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was weak and small, when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.
They have a lived sense of Israel’s impossibility and its vulnerability and the dangers of the neighborhood in which it is in. Their views of Israel formed around the Israel of the Six-Day War in 1967, when its neighbors massed to try and strangle Israel when it was young, or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when they surprise attacked Israel 50 years ago.
Then there is the next generation, my generation, I think. And I think of us as this straddle generation. We only ever knew a strong Israel, an Israel that was undoubtedly the strongest country in the region, a nuclear Israel, an Israel backed by America’s unwavering military and political support. That wasn’t always true, at least not to the extent now. In his great book, “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron David Miller points out that before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel ranked 24th in foreign aid from the US, 24th. Within a few years of that war, it ranked first, as it typically has since.
We also knew an Israel that was an occupying force, a country that could and did impose its will on Palestinians, and I don’t want to be euphemistic about this, an Israel in which Palestinians were an oppressed class, where their lives and their security and their freedom were worth less. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the moral horror of that occupation was widely recognized. We knew an Israel where the leaders were trying imperfectly, but seriously and continuously, to become something better, to become something different, to become in the eyes of the world what Israel was in its own eyes, a Jewish state, but a humane and moral one.
And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi described on the show recently, that peace movement collapsed. The why of this is no mystery. The Second Intifada, the endless suicide bombings were a trauma Israel still has not recovered from. And they posed a horrible question, to which the left, both in Israel and in America, had no real answer then or now. If your story of all this is simplistic, if it is just that Israel wanted this, it is wrong.
But what happened then is Israel moved right and further right and further right. Extremists once on the margin of Israeli politics and society became cabinet ministers and coalition members. The settlers in the West Bank ran wild, functionally annexing more and more territory, sometimes violently, territory that was meant to be returned to Palestinians, and doing so with the backing of the Israeli state, doing so in a way that made a two-state solution look less and less possible.
Israel withdrew from Gaza, and when Hamas took control, they blockaded Gaza, leaving Gazans to misery, to poverty. Israel stopped trying to become something other than an occupier nation. It became deeply illiberal. It settled into a strategy of security through subjugation. And many in its government openly desired expansion through expulsion. And so now you have this generation, the one coming of age now, the one that has only known this Israel, Netanyahu’s Israel, Ben-Gvir’s Israel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the panic in the Jewish community, about what gets short-handed as antisemitism on campus. And there is antisemitism on campus and on the left and on the right — always has been. But to read only the most anti-Semitic signs in a rally, to hear only the anti-Semitic chants, can also obscure what else is happening there. If it’s just antisemitism, then at least it is simple. They just hate the Jews. They hate us. They always have. They always will.
But a lot of what is happening at these rallies is not just antisemitism. A lot of it is a generation that has only known Israel as a strong nation oppressing a weak people. They never knew a weak Israel. They never knew an Israel whose leaders sought peace, showed up to negotiate deals, who wanted something better.
And I am not unsympathetic to the Israeli narrative here. I believe large parts of it. We have an episode coming soon on the many failures of the peace process. And the Israelis who say they did not have a partner, they are right. But that does not justify what Israel became, and there are consequences to what it has become.
There is this Pew survey in 2022 that I find really telling. It found that 69 percent of Americans over age 65 had a favorable view of Israel, but among Americans between ages 18 and 29, young Americans, 56 percent had an unfavorable view. As it happens, American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever.
And there are many of us who warned of this exact thing happening, who said, if you lose moral legitimacy, you will not have the world’s good will when you need it most, who said it is a problem for the Jewish state to not be seen, to not be a moral state. That it is a problem geopolitically, and it is a problem spiritually because for Jewish-Americans — and I am one — Israel isn’t simply a question of politics, it is the Jewish state. So what does what Israel is say about Judaism? What does Judaism say about it?
This has been an almost exquisitely uncomfortable space. To believe Israel had become something indefensible on 10/6. To know that it needed defenders on 10/7, to know that antisemitism is real and every century seems to have its era of butchering the Jews. To believe deeply that Jewishness is about how we treat the stranger, is defined by the lessons of exile, and to see the Jewish state inflicting exile on so many. To value all lives and see so many of our one-time allies devaluing our own.
Throughout these last few months, I’ve been extremely moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s IKAR synagogue. She has a book coming out called “The Amen Effect,” which you can and you should pre-order. I’ve read some of it.
But I got to know her through these sermons, which did something very few people have been able to do, at least for me, which is to find a prophetic voice rooted in the Jewish tradition that can hold this complexity, these questions of Israel, both in critique and defense, of Jewishness, of liberalism, of antisemitism, of identity. And so I asked her to come on the show to try to talk through topics. And to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable talking about it all. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Rabbi Sharon Brous, welcome to the show.
sharon brous
Thank you, Ezra. It’s good to be with you.
ezra klein
So on Yom Kippur this year, Sept. 25, a few weeks before Hamas’s attack on Israel, you gave this searing sermon about Israel’s occupation and its increasingly right-wing government and what it is becoming. And I’m just going to play a clip of it here.
^ archive clip
SHARON BROUS ^: Telling the truth, very simply, is essential to healing. We must tell the truth about what is happening, where we are, and how we got here. I’m speaking right now, especially to those among us, who, like me, see in Israel a miraculous, national renaissance.
We who celebrate the astonishing revival of the Hebrew language, who take great pride, not only in the safe haven, but also in the start-up nation, the flourishing of Jewish art and ideas and culture, the rebirth of academies of Torah learning, the bounty and the promise, the beauty and the bravery, even or especially in the face of grave threats, the realization of the Jewish national liberation project.
All diagnosticians must take a serious effort to set aside our cognitive biases and see what is truly before us, rather than what our implicit bias orients us toward. But when we do, only then do we see that this government and its maximalist agenda are the natural outcomes of a growing extremism in Israeli society, manifesting most egregiously in more than a half century of occupation.
56 years of too many people allowing our own trauma and fear to justify the denial of basic rights, dignities, and dreams for millions of Palestinian people living under Israeli rule. Decades of justifying an unjustifiable status quo as the only reasonable response to the failures and missteps of Palestinian leadership and the violence of Palestinian extremists.
Many of us have spent years trying not to look. We don’t know because we don’t want to know because the world is sometimes cruel and unfair to Jews, and yes, delivers to Israel disproportionate opprobrium among all the bad state actors. We don’t want to know because we don’t want to fuel antisemitism, because accepting the reality of Palestinian suffering under Israeli rule means accepting that the Jewish people can be not only victims, but also victimizers. ^ END CLIP ^
ezra klein
That’s not the kind of sermon you hear in a typical American synagogue. I mean, not now, of course, but not before Oct. 7 either, and particularly not on Yom Kippur. So why did you decide to make that your sermon?
sharon brous
Israel was the great dream that the Jewish people held through 2,000 years of exile and oppression and persecution and pogrom, and ultimately, genocide, that there could be a place in this world where the Jewish people could be safe and where our Jewish values could actually thrive not only behind the doors of the synagogue or the beit midrash, the study hall, or the schools, but actually, in the public square.
And in many ways, the establishment of the state of Israel was miraculous for that reason. And it’s precisely because I think it matters so much that I’m so deeply worried about the ways that these growing illiberal trends, these growing undemocratic and un-Jewish trends in Israel are actually undermining that dream.
And my call was, as an American rabbi and speaking to an American Jewish community, what is our responsibility? Are we to stay on the sidelines here and essentially just kind of keep our mouths shut? Or must we cry out in a time of moral crisis when our own families and friends and colleagues in Israel are essentially begging us to step into the fray? And obviously, I come out on the side that, yes, this is our central obligation.
I said in the sermon that we have to fight against Jewish ideological extremism with as much passion and as much fervor as our grandparents fought for the establishment of the state in the first place after witnessing their entire families and communities decimated in Europe, that we needed to dedicate that much resource into actually fighting for the future of Israel as a democracy and as a just state.
ezra klein
You went on to talk about a ceremony in Israel earlier this year on their national remembrance day. Can you tell me about that, the stories you heard and what you saw then?
sharon brous
So for the past many years, Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living in the West Bank who have lost loved ones in their immediate family, they have formed an organization where they come together to share their grief. And for the past several years, they have met on Yom HaZikaron, on Israel’s day of remembrance. This is a really sad day in Israel. The whole country essentially stops in order to grieve those people who died since the founding of the state, whether serving in the I.D.F. or through acts of terror or other acts of violence.
And the idea behind the joint commemoration is that if we are going to live as neighbors, we have to learn how to share our grief so that we can collectively build a shared society and a shared future. So one of the stories that was shared was by a man named Adel Abu Badawiya, who told about this terrible tragedy that had happened years ago. He lived in Jenin with his family, and the I.D.F. came into Jenin for some action.
The children of the refugee camp where they lived all fled when the soldiers came in. And his little brother, Majid, was five years old at the time and was really terrified of the soldiers and ran away. And the family afterwards couldn’t find the little boy for many hours. And they were searching everywhere for him. And finally, they discovered his body in a refrigerator. In his terror, he had hidden there in order to escape these soldiers, and then he couldn’t get out. And he died in the refrigerator. It’s just a terribly tragic, awful, awful story.
Among the Israeli speakers who spoke was a professor from Tel Aviv University, a man named Yuval Sapir, who talked about his sister, Tamar, who was a young newlywed in the ‘90s, when a Palestinian man blew up the bus that she was riding in downtown Tel Aviv. And many of us have memories and some of us even friends and loved ones who died in the era of bus bombings in the late ‘90s and the early 2000s. And he talked about the black hole that opened up when his beautiful sister died.
And there are many other stories like this. And to think, these are the people in this conflict who have lost the most. And they are willing to stand together and to offer their stories as a testament not only to what they’ve lost, but to what they hope can be recovered, which is some kind of shared sense of humanity, even from the depths of the darkness.
What happened this past year — and for several years, it’s been extremely controversial because many people in Israel feel that this is a sacred day to honor Jewish pain and not a time to be building bridges with Palestinian neighbors. But this past year, the protests were worse than they had been before. Thousands of people gathered together in Tel Aviv for this joint forum, and there were protesters who were outside, who were honking horns and screaming and protesting, doing everything they could, essentially, to drown out the words of the speakers.
And this is particularly heartbreaking because what you have is Palestinians who are standing up in this forum and Israeli Jews standing up to share the stories of the deaths of their loved ones, and how their hearts are shattered and how, even still, they hold the hope of a better future. And their voices are being drowned out by these protesters who are so threatened by the idea of shared grief, that they really want to shut it down at all costs.
ezra klein
I took the center of this sermon as not being the critique or description of what was happening in Israel. I took it as being about what people in your congregation, and more broadly — and I’ll put myself in this category as well — were doing with it. And to quote you here, you said, many of us have spent years trying not to look. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
And that that approach to resolving this almost unbearable cognitive tension here, cognitive dissonance, simply looking away — I’m Jewish, I’m not Israeli. I don’t have traction on this. I’m not there. I’m not exposed to what they’re exposed to, and I don’t have a vote. I think that became very common.
I’d like to hear you talk a bit about that — about watching that happen among people you knew cared about this issue, and how you were trying to speak to that.
sharon brous
First, I think that the fear of being an American Jew or a diaspora Jew and speaking out against Israeli policy or a rightward trend in Israeli politics or Jewish religious extremism is legitimately scary. We understand how antisemitism works in the world. And we understand the way that Israel does receive disproportionate opprobrium among all bad state actors in the world. And so it’s scary to speak out and to feel like we might be contributing to a dynamic that is fundamentally unfair and unfair to our family.
So that’s the first piece, but even more than that, I think for many American Jews, the obvious response to Israel’s rightward shift over these years was just to disengage and invest as much as we could in the fight for racial justice, economic justice, climate justice, all of the things that we feel are central to our own self understanding and to our understanding of the kind of world we want to build, wherever we were. And so what we saw was a profound disengagement from Israel that essentially frayed the bonds between these two communities.
This is a very small global Jewish community, and the two great population centers are Israel and the United States. And the rift that we’ve seen between the two communities has been real and profound and is a values rift. And that’s something that has been very worrisome over the course of the last couple of years.
And I believe that this anti-democratic trend is not only anti-democratic, but it’s fundamentally un-Jewish, that the values that are core to our self-understanding as Jews in the world, which we derive both from Torah, from thousands of years of Jewish tradition and from our history, our history of persecution, of exile, of genocide, that we have formed a core set of values that are being undermined by those voices that come from the extreme in Israel.
And even as those voices have become more dominant in the government, I do not believe that they are representative of the population of Israel. And the proof text to that is that I don’t know another country in the world that has had this kind of civil disobedience that stopped literally only because Oct. 7 happened, and it wasn’t safe for people to gather en masse in the streets. And everything kind of shifted in that moment.
But I don’t know of any other place that we can point to where the people have risen up with such fervor week after week after week, for ten months straight, in order to say, you do not represent me. So I don’t think it’s fair for the world to characterize Israel as taking this dramatic, hardline, messianic, ethnonationalist turn, but rather, that there is a very significant, dangerous core that has risen in power and found its way into the Knesset, into the halls of power, and found its way into the street. And it’s our job to make sure that they don’t become representative of the population.
ezra klein
You called this anti-Jewish. And one question I want to ask because it’s a question that I’ve been wrestling with is whether that’s true. When you look at Israel, it’s the most observant, the most religious Israelis who are the most comfortable turning Israel into this entity that you fear, that I fear, that many of them see, the religion that we share, although understand differently, as a call for conquering biblical lands, as a demand for a kind of strength and sword.
You’re a rabbi. There are, obviously, rabbis on the other side of this. What are you reading differently than these, to be fair to them, very learned rabbis there are seeing?
sharon brous
Yeah, this is a really important question. Every person of faith is engaging in an act of interpretation and choosing what texts to prioritize and how to read and interpret those texts. And my choice is to read that the first and most important thing that we learn about human beings in the beginning of the Book of Genesis is that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim, “in God’s own image.”
And the way that our rabbis read that 2,000 years ago was that every single person has infinite worth, that all people are fundamentally equal, and that every single human life has something unique to contribute in this world. That is the core premise, the starting point for my faith and for my religious life. And I didn’t derive that from some 1990s feminist rereading of the tradition. That comes from the Book of Genesis, chapter 1.
And then if you take a step back and look at the five Books of Moses, if you look at our core sacred literature, the Torah, you see that four of the five books of the Torah are dedicated to the experience of our people, the Israelites, walking from out of degradation and enslavement and barbarity and human cruelty toward the promised land on a quest to build a just society.
And that story, that core narrative, lives at the heart of every Jewish ritual, every single Jewish holiday. It is at the heart of our prayer services. There’s not a morning, afternoon, or evening prayer where we don’t recall the exodus from Egypt. And it is delivered, not only as a narrative, but a narrative that is tied to specific moral action, which is, you are strangers in the land of Egypt. Do not oppress the stranger. You were strangers in the land of Egypt. You know the heart of the stranger. And you are strangers in the land of Egypt. You must love the stranger, protect the stranger.
And that is the source of my Jewish faith. Maybe I am reading our tradition wrong, and those extremist, messianic figures deep in the West Bank who are teaching soldiers that they need to wipe out the enemy, maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. If that’s the case, I will have a very hard and honest conversation with the Holy One on the day of judgment.
ezra klein
Something you said a minute ago has to do with the experience of Jewishness, which is very important to the way I understand both the tradition and its teaching, that Jews are an exiled people. Jewishness is a religion formed out of displacement and oppression.
And over the past decade, 15 years, after the collapse of the Israeli left, after the collapse of the peace process — and I don’t take anything away from how difficult and terrifying it is or was to be in Israel in this period and how confusing it is to know what to do next when peace offers were met with violence, but to settle into a kind of comfort with becoming the inflictor of displacement and oppression while still being the sole Jewish state, it made me wonder a lot about what this all meant.
If you were to say what makes, I think, Jewish people or Jewish thinking exceptional, I think it had a lot to do with those lessons of exile that’s so core to the tradition. And then when it came to it, when fear and strength collided with one another, they didn’t seem to make us act any differently than anyone else through history would have.
sharon brous
Well, I think there are two great lessons from history. One is eventually, in essentially any historical context, at some point, live long enough in a place, and eventually, the Jews will be excommunicated, exiled, pogroms, persecuted, or genocided. And forgive me, I mean, not to grossly oversimplify Jewish history, but there are trend lines that we have to notice here.
So what we learned from that, on one hand, the Torah explicitly demands that we learn from that experience in Mizraim in Egypt. You know what it’s like to be the oppressed minority. That is built into your self-understanding. Bring that with you wherever you go, whether that’s to Los Angeles or to Brooklyn or to Paris or to Tel Aviv. So that’s one side of the message.
The other side is, if I am not for myself, who will be for me? The fact that Jews have suffered so profoundly, historically, in so many places, across so much time, has taught our people that the world is a hostile place that doesn’t actually care about Jewish life. Sometimes that hatred of Jews will be overt. Sometimes it will be latent. Eventually, it almost always surfaces. And there’s a very deep, psychic trauma that comes from holding that history.
I can frame the tension in another way, which is, there is an entrenched Jewish mentality that comes from the Book of Numbers [HEBREW] that we are a people that dwells alone in a part that the world does not understand us and never really will, fundamentally. And therefore we need to do what needs to be done. That’s also a lesson from history. Or on the other side, the lesson of [HEBREW]— it’s not good for a person or for a people to be alone in the world. And our work in the world is to be bound up in the bonds of life.
And that’s another tension that I think appears in the Jewish community. Do we see ourselves as fundamentally alone, and therefore, primarily responsible for taking care of ourselves? Do we see ourselves as fundamentally a part of humanity, and therefore, see ourselves as responsible for building a better world for everyone? And what happens when those two values seem to be in conflict with one another?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ezra klein
So that is where and I think it feels weird even to try to inhabit that space now, but that is where your sermon was, where I think a lot of us were prior to Oct. 7. Then push forward a few weeks. Hamas attacks and kills 1,200 people in Israel, takes hundreds more hostage. There are social media videos of the most astonishingly traumatic executions of Jewish people that I think any of us have seen in modernity.
And there’s also, at the same time, this explosion of rationalization of it, of justification for it. And this is where I began paying attention to your sermons in this period, because somebody sent me one of yours, that talked about what you call the existential loneliness of the Jew in that moment. So what was that loneliness?
sharon brous
As you said, the violence of Oct. 7 was absolutely staggering. And I remember thinking in those early days, could we fathom another civilian population anywhere in the world of any other nation in the world in which massacres at that scale would lead not to some kind of condemnation, but instead, to celebration in the street? And I actually don’t believe that we can fathom such a thing.
And I think that part of the loneliness, especially for those of us on the left, we felt like we were part of an anti-racist movement. We felt we were part of a movement working toward a just society. And obviously, in those spaces, any kind of atrocity committed against a civilian would be outright condemned.
And I think what it has awakened in many American Jews is a very painful acknowledgment that we thought we were part of a movement. We thought we were part of a world view that now it’s clear doesn’t think that we are part of it. And that’s very, very painful. And that’s really something new for this population.
ezra klein
And it’s actually something you say in that sermon, that sometimes it can be easy to miss who was there because it was so shocking who wasn’t. For everything we’ve been talking about, I think the answer to this community of Jews in America who are liberal, who want Israel to be more liberal, who think there are other ways forward, has always been — and I mean, this is a big split, both generationally and geographically in Judaism, you’re naive. You don’t live here. You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what these people are like. You are naive. The world you are painting would be nice. It is not possible.
And you would hear it often from older Jews. You did not live through what we lived through. You think you are safe. You are not. You’re naive. We have to be strong. We have to, at times, be brutal, because if we are not, this will come back, and it will kill us. And I do think one reckoning, one very difficult reckoning I’ve seen a lot of people going through is, was I naive? Were these other voices right?
sharon brous
I have been asking myself that question from the moment that I heard what was going on in Israel on Shabbat morning, Oct. 7. And here’s how I have come to understand it. Many of the people who have been critical of me as a progressive rabbinic voice in America, of me and my colleagues, accused us, for years, of downplaying an antisemitism that they believed was always a part of movement spaces and a part of the broader population.
And on some level, they were right. I really wanted to believe that there’s not a Nazi hiding under every rock. And so I saw hints of really problematic ideology hovering under the surface, and I fought very hard to believe that those were only small exceptions and not reflective of a bigger, looming catastrophe.
And also, I was right. And we were right. Because given the ever present reality of that latent antisemitism previous to Oct. 7 latent, the only thing that we could do is reinvest in relationships and double down on the work and recommit ourselves to building a shared future there and here that is a just future for everyone.
ezra klein
Your next sermon was built around a reading of the story of Avraham and Lot. Tell me that story and what you took from it.
sharon brous
This is the story that comes in the Book of Genesis when Avraham has established himself in the land. And he came with his nephew, Lot, and with his wife, Sarah. And Avraham we meet him many times in the course of this Torah portion. It’s called Lech Lecha. And we meet him as a husband, as a father, as a businessman, but once his nephew, Lot, is kidnapped — he is abducted in the war between the kings — all of the sudden, Avram’s — he’s called Avram at that time.
Avram’s identity shifts. He’s no longer just a husband, a son, a warrior. He’s now a Hebrew. And so the question is, what does it mean to be a Hebrew? And what does it mean for a moment in time to shift our own self understanding? I’m looking at Genesis 14:13, Avram Ha’Ivri, Avram the Hebrew.
The way that I read it this year in light of Oct. 7 is that there are certain wounds to the spirit that are so profound that they actually prompt a fundamental change in our identity. That once this wound hits, we see ourselves differently than we did before, a shift in our own self understanding.
And I see this. I’ve seen this in many American Jews, who describe that after Oct. 7, they understand themselves differently. There are people who have never stepped foot in a synagogue and who would never take their family vacation to Israel, who, all of a sudden, say us and we when they’re talking about what happened on Oct. 7 and afterwards, who are talking about being a part of this people in a way that even takes them by surprise. We have been changed by this moment.
And my argument in that sermon was that there are two sides to this new identity. There certainly were for Avram. One side is he realizes how profoundly attached he actually is to his family. And for the sake of the story, let me remind us that Avram and Lot are a little bit estranged from each other. And even still, his estranged family being taken captive awakened something in him that helped him understand that he was responsible, he was the one who was responsible for getting Lot back from captivity, which he ultimately does. He’s able to bring Lot and all the other captives back.
And there’s another element to the identity of the Ivri. So right after Lot returns home, the text says [HEBREW]. God says to Avraham in Genesis chapter 15, verse 1, don’t be afraid, Avram. And it’s kind of a funny thing for the Torah to be saying, don’t be afraid, because what would he be afraid of? He’d just won the war. The war is over. He’s back in peacetime now. His nephew is home safely. Why would he be afraid? And the rabbis say — and this is 2,000 years ago — he was afraid because maybe there was one righteous innocent among the people that he killed in order to get his captive nephew home.
And so what I understand about the identity of the Hebrew, to be an Ivri, is to understand the depth of connection, obligation, responsibility, that we have to our family, even our estranged family, and at the same time, to live with the constant awareness that our actions could cause great harm to others. And our work in the world as descendants of Avraham is to do everything in our power to minimize harm to other people. And that felt like the call of this moment for me.
ezra klein
Well, what I hear in that is these two very deep sides of not just Judaism, but many traditions and many groups, which is, for lack of a better term, the tribal and the ethical having very deep, visceral commitments to your own kin, however you define that, and how you balance that, then, with an ethical, a creedal, a spiritual code that, in theory, is binding you to each other. And I guess as a question of practice, not just a question of teaching, how do you understand doing that?
sharon brous
It’s very hard to hold both of these truths at once. And when we’re in trauma and in grief, and we are grieving now, we are in avelut. We are in a time of mourning, it’s really important that we take care of our hearts. And not all of the work can be done at once. And so I fully understand a kind of temporary retreat into the tribal and away from the universal for the moment. The danger is staying in the tribal.
The research on this is quite extraordinary because it shows that the deeper our tribal connections, the weaker our connections to those outside our tribe. And what I’m actually asking of myself and of us is that we strengthen our tribal attachment at the same time that we strengthen our universal attachment. And it’s extremely challenging to do it. And so I have just taken it upon myself these last five weeks to continue to remind our Jewish community that we can be tribal in this moment.
We can and we must engage in the side of the identity of the Hebrew that takes care of other Hebrews right now. That’s part of what it means to care for your family. And it can never end there because ultimately, the problem of the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small. And we know the pain of the worlds drawing the circle of their family small enough that it excludes us. We must not exclude others ultimately.
ezra klein
This reminds me of one of the threads from the sermon you gave a week after Oct. 7 about trying to walk this line. Just an overwhelming feeling for many Jewish people in that moment was deep sense of fear and isolation, and that if the world is this dangerous, then I have to act accordingly.
And you said that we who have been excluded by the narrow scope of others’ moral concern must not narrow the scope of our moral concern to exclude others. And you went on to say, just because others have lost their drat minds, we must not lose our drat minds. Tell me about walking that tightrope for you.
sharon brous
We know what loneliness and isolation does to the human heart. We know, just on an individual basis — and I’m very invested in the work and thinking of Dr. Vivek Murthy right now about loneliness. We understand now what loneliness does to the spirit and to the body of a person experiencing it. Loneliness kills us. It’s a sickness in us. And it hurts our hearts physically and spiritually. It makes us retreat. It makes us behave badly.
Now imagine that on a collective scale. My concern is that right now, the existential loneliness, combined with the utter anguish and shock of the atrocities that were committed, combined with the fear that comes from the scrawl on my neighbor congregant’s garage that says, “Feed the Jews to the pigs.”
When we encounter this kind of overt antisemitism, and so we’re now dealing not only with loneliness, but also with a very real fear for our own safety and security, my fear is that we lead not with our best moral thinking. When we experience how incredibly painful it is to see that our own lives and our family’s lives do not matter to many, many people in the world, that many people, including those who we thought were our allies and our friends, do not shed a tear when our elders are abducted and taken into captivity, what we must do, in addition to fighting to get all of those who are captive home immediately, but what we must do is heart work. We have to make sure that we don’t close our hearts.
Because there are also many, many people who don’t think that Palestinian lives are worth anything and who don’t shed a tear when Palestinian children die. And so how can we, who desperately cry out for the world to take Jewish suffering seriously, not also have our own hearts break when Palestinians are suffering? It makes no sense. And so we must also make sure that we extend our circle of care and concern to include the innocence on the other side of that border, who really have nothing to do with this conflict and whose lives are in absolute misery right now.
And I know how hard it is to do that at the same time because there are very few people who are actually shedding tears when both Israeli Jews and Palestinians are dying. There are very few people who are doing that. And it feels to me, that is the essential struggle of this time, because I don’t frankly want to hear from the people who are in the streets, who are shouting about decolonizing Palestine, who do not shed a tear when Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old warrior for peace, who dedicated her life to peace, is murdered by Hamas. If your heart doesn’t break for Vivian Silver, then don’t tell me what you think my heart should be breaking for.
And the same is true on the other side, for the people who are absolutely devastated by losses to Jews, but then feel it’s offensive to even report on the Palestinian children who are dying in Gaza. I’m sorry, but we have lost our moral center. What we have to do is expand our scope of moral concern to find the humanity in one another again. That is the call of our time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ezra klein
You talked about going to Israel shortly after the attacks and bearing what you called “sacred witness.” What did that term mean for you?
sharon brous
I went to Israel two weeks after the massacres. And I went because I had a planned trip. My niece became bat mitzvah. They live outside of Tel Aviv. It was a very scary and hard time and is for their family. And my presence, it felt, would really matter to them in that time. And I went because I wanted to see and to hear and to stretch open my heart to the depths of the horror of this reality so that I could come home and share with my community what I had experienced.
The survivors from a kibbutz at the border called Kfar Aza, most of them were relocated to a kibbutz outside of Tel Aviv because about 40 percent of Kfar Aza, this very peaceful kibbutz at the border, was burned to the ground. And many, many people died, and many were abducted. And so I went to this kibbutz, and I walked around the place in order to speak with and meet with survivors, people who had themselves barely made it out alive. And almost every person there had lost at least one immediate family member. And many had family members who were in Gaza abducted.
And as I speak about in the sermon, I was toured around this site by two guides, who showed me these picnic blankets surrounded by maybe 10 or so people sitting in plastic chairs. And one of the guides said, this is shiva. And then the other guide corrected him and said shivot — this is many shivas happening all at once. And there were about 100 shivas. A shiva is a house of mourning. It’s when after a loved one dies, friends and family come over to sit and tell stories and comfort the bereaved.
And in this case, from this community, there were hundreds of people experiencing the death of immediate loved ones all at once. I felt, when I walked around this kibbutz, that I was in a D.P. camp after the Holocaust. The depth of human suffering, people walking around with bandages around their heads, bandages through their hands because many of them had been locked in the safe room for up to 35 hours, waiting for the I.D.F. to come and rescue them, and Hamas had shot through the doors. And so many of them had their hands shattered.
Just looking at the depth of sorrow and human suffering was profoundly humbling. And I felt it was important for me to see it and experience it, and to have my heart broken again and again by hearing stories that people were sharing so that I could share back here that perspective with my community.
ezra klein
This felt to me like the connecting thread of these three sermons, going back to the one about Israel’s government before the Hamas attacks. That in each of them, I saw, at its core, an argument about the importance, at least right now, as a political act of simply bearing witness of not just looking, but seeing, of not turning away, not turning away from what was really happening in Israel, not turning away from what was really happening in the antisemitism and cruelty of the response many had to Hamas’s attacks, of then not looking away from how complex this was all going to be and is to hold and to navigate. And so I wanted to ask you about that, about that idea of bearing witness of seeing, of holding, as a political and spiritual practice.
sharon brous
So there is a Mishnah, an ancient rabbinic text in the code of law that was codified 2,000 years ago, that tells the story of what would happen when the people used to go up to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And imagine Mecca, like hundreds of thousands of people coming at once on a kind of sacred pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They would ascend the steps to the Temple Mount, and then they would go through this arched entryway. And they would turn to the right, and they would circle around the perimeter of this courtyard.
And then they would exit essentially right where they had come in. Except, the Mishnah says, for someone who’s broken hearted. That person would go up to Jerusalem. They would ascend the steps, walk through the arched entryway, but they would turn to the left. And every single person who would pass them coming from the right would have to stop and ask this simple question, [HEBREW], what happened to you? And then the person would say, I’m brokenhearted. My loved one just died. I’m worried sick about my kid. I found a lump.
And the people who are walking from right to left would have to stop and offer a blessing before they could continue on their pilgrimage. And I just want to think about how profound the insight is in this ancient ritual because if you spend your whole life dreaming of going up on this sacred pilgrimage to the holiest site, the holiest place on the holiest days, and doing your circle around the courtyard, the last thing in the world you want to do is stop and ask the poor guy who’s coming toward you, are you OK? What’s your story? What’s going on with you?
And yet central to your religious obligation, in fact, the only religious obligation you have that day, is precisely to see this other person in their suffering, to ask them what their story is, and then to give them a blessing. And if you’re broken, shattered, the last thing you want to do is show up in this space with all of these people and go against the current in such a public and visible way. And yet, you’re obligated to do that.
And so I think the rabbis kind of captured this very sacred and profound, psychological and spiritual tool for us, which is to say when we are suffering and when we’re hurting, we need to be seen by other people. We need somebody to say, tell me about your pain. Help me understand what’s going on for you. And we need to be blessed.
And that’s why the loneliness of this moment feels so profound for so many Jews because we feel like, wait, we often ask people, tell me about your pain. Tell me about your suffering. How can I be a good ally? How can I stand with you in solidarity? Why aren’t people asking us? And it’s a reminder for us that we have to reinforce our commitment to living in a world in which we can see each other in our pain.
And when we’re walking from right to left, because we’re OK that day, not to turn our eyes away and our hearts away from the poor person who’s walking toward us who’s broken that day. Otherwise, our humanity is lost to us. And it doesn’t only hurt the person who’s broken. It hurts the whole society. It, frankly, hurts our democracy. It endangers our democracy when we’re unable to actually engage one another’s pain because we feel that our cause is so righteous. Our work is so holy, so important that we’re going to keep circling from the right, even though there are all these people who are quietly walking in the other direction, saying, please, please see me. I’m hurting right now, and I need you to help me in this moment of my pain. I need you to help me by bearing sacred witness to my heartache in this moment.
ezra klein
That’s very beautiful. And then always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
sharon brous
The first is Abraham Joshua Heschel’s seminal work, “The Prophets,” which, for me, in the course of my rabbinate was an absolutely transformative book to help me understand not only our prophetic tradition, but really what’s demanded of us in a time of moral crisis. And it’s a book that I think about literally every day.
The second is John O’Donohue book, “To Bless the Space Between Us.” It is just sublime and beautiful and enchanting and reminds me of my own humanity and of other peoples of our ability to bless each other with love. And he says we’ve fallen out of belonging. What does it mean to create a new reality in which we really understand how much we belong to one another?
And the third, I would say, is a novel written by Yaa Gyasi, “Homegoing,” which I really think is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It is this epic story of generations, of the descendants of two sisters from Ghana, the impact of violence and enslavement and multigenerational trauma. And it’s really also a story of hope and survival, and I’ve read it many times. And each time, I have this sense I’m so honored to be turning these pages right now and taking in this story. So those are my three today.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ezra klein
Rabbi Sharon Brous, thank you very much.
sharon brous
Thank you, Ezra.
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Nov 21, 2023 03:08
