A little more about religious community and the necessity of Jews working with Christians on Israel/Palestine. I grew up with complete suspicion of “the Christians.” It was very cultural. The Jesus statue outside the Catholic church on the road I walked to to get to my kindergarten gave me the willies, bland and savage. Though my mom, god love her, had a reproduction of the Rouault painting of the Crucifixion because it was great art. Still: they were Christian and they had let the 6 million die. And Christians weren’t as smart as Jews, didn’t have the evolved values of Jews. Just read The Alien Corn by Maugham, and he captures the incredible artistic sensitivity of my people, and the sense of superiority. My family looked with disdain on “WASPy Jews.”
Fast forward. In my adult life, Christians have led me. I married a Christian who is just way out there spiritually; I believe Jimmy Carter’s statements about Israel doing state-sponsored terrorism, and Palestinians doing suicide terrorism, are morally beautiful; and my own mother-in-law smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital on a church group visit to Palestine a few years back. These people have provided greater leadership to me than my own community, by and large, which checkered with neocons and other parochial Zionists, has prevaricated and rationalized, and argued that black is white– and then compelled their children at Ivy League schools to argue to their friends that black is white (c.f. young Joel Pollak modeling Dershowitz’s dancesteps). When the brand new alternative lobby, J Street, says that Jerusalem is the Israeli capital, and not a word about Palestinian Jerusalem, that is prevarication to placate religious extremists in the Jewish midst.
Where am I going? I’ve been thinking of writing a book called Flesh of My Flesh, which is a biblical description of marriage. I’m assimilating. I feel more Jewish than ever, because my wife honors that in me, but I’ve broken law after law of the rabbinical code, mingled my life utterly with Christians. I am not telling other Jews to assimilate. Everyone has their path. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat. And I know many Jewishy Jews who are doing great work here. But I want to claim the goodness in my American anti-halakhic choice (which is the same choice that 62 percent of American Jews under 35 are making, for whatever reason), and also quote Michael Walzer, one of my earliest teachers, at Harvard, years before he began studying Hebrew, who last year said of Jews, that for 2000 years they had sustained a national existence thru thick and thin. “We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were]
semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the state of
Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is
something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not
done terribly well.” A wise wise statement. And my response is that In the state of America, where I am living my life and not feeling exiled, the Christians I am close to are spiritual heirs to the Christians who were vigorously opposing slavery 150 years ago.
