Debra DeLee, the head of Americans for Peace Now, seen at left with President Obama, sent out a disturbing letter for the high holidays. Here’s the key excerpt:
In Israel, government minister Moshe Ya’alon used the word "virus" to describe Shalom Achshav, the Israeli Peace Now movement. These words discourage civil debate and contribute to a climate in which violence may explode.
Just this week, I was saddened and alarmed by another "Glenn Beck moment." I received, on the eve of our holiest days, an email from someone I had gone to public school with. We had also gone to Hebrew school and Sunday school together. His father had bowled with my father in the same B’nai Brith league, and his mother and my mother served together in Hadassah and the temple sisterhood. I was quite excited to see the name of someone I had not seen in many decades in my inbox. Imagine my surprise when I read the message:
"May the G-d in heaven curse the enemies of the Jewish people and Israel in APN, particularly Debbie Epstein DeLee."How sad that someone who had shared so much of my early life could not find a civil way to share a different view with an old friend who shares a love of Israel, but who has a different view of how to ensure its survival. What terrible hatred could motivate such words and such actions?
I, for one, wished him a healthy and peaceful New Year. I then promptly made a contribution to APN in his name to remind him of the Talmud’s interpretation of a wise person.
My heart goes out to Debra DeLee. I admire her response to the asshole; and I am grateful to her for sharing this. It is part of the necessary conversation inside the Jewish community, and outside it, too, about the censorious quality of Jewish life. This is the reason that Jewish Voice for Peace started the great site Muzzlewatch: because of Jewish censoriousness. It is the reason that the Israeli government tried to shut down Breaking the Silence in July, censoriousness. It is the reason that Judge Richard Goldstone, a Jew who has supported Zionism, is now being smeared by Netanyahu himself at the U.N. as a believer in a flat-earth and a defender of terrorism– because of censoriousness.
Censoriousness is the reason that this blog left the New York Observer and is the reason that non-Zionist views have made so little headway in the Jewish mainstream. It’s the reason that Dana Milbank condemned Walt and Mearsheimer as anti-Semites in the Washington Post.
It is a problem that Jews have to deal with; and DeLee’s brave letter to a community of Jews and non-Jews shows that we are dealing with it. Yes, of course; you get two Jews in a room and you have three opinions. But what if one of the Jews isn’t in the room? He is standing outside the room. Well he has no opinion at all. Ask Spinoza, who got excommunicated. Ask Norman Finkelstein.
Michael Walzer said words I always quote on this blog about the historical Jewish achievement as a legal/religious community. At the Center for Jewish History a couple of years ago, he slamdunked Ruth Wisse’s assertion that Jews aren’t good at politics. "We sustained a national existence for 2000 years without territory, sovereignty, and without coercive power… That is an extraordinary political achievement… one that has not been studied enough, or appreciated enough." Walzer went on to say that we’ve done a lousy job of governing other people, a noble statement by a bend-over-backwards supporter of Israel; but today I’m focused on Walzer’s achievement claim, and I think it’s somewhat wrong. The idea that Jewish authorities have not possessed "coercive power" is simply wrong. Indeed, that is how we have sustained self-governance for so long. Because of Jewish law steeped in religion, the curse from God that guy brings on DeLee.
That law is the reason I will feel guilty tomorrow for not being in synagogue all day. That law is the reason I felt a tiny tiny tremor of guilt last night for eating scallops (God said, only fish with fins and scales are to be eaten; nuts). It is the reason I have a leitmotif of anguish over the best thing I ever did, found my wife, a non-Jew (and yes I work that anguish on this site to a faretheewell). Because of Jewish law and governance, that’s why.
That is coercive power. As the Jewish community wrestles with its real power in the modern world over the lives of others, not just Jews, the power to intimidate dissenters is something we must take on.
