Asserting Jewishness
I have been meeting with representatives of a very large and diverse group of Jewish organizations to help plan the CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice) observance of Tisha B’Av. I strongly urge you to attend this prayer service. For details and to register go here. While CLUE has used Tisha B’Av as a time for political rallies before, this year the resonance between the substance of Tisha B’Av and our current situation here in Los Angeles, and in downtown all the more so, is very strong. CLUE’s primary interest in Tisha B’Av is in regards to the issue of immigration rights, an issue that we strongly agree with them on. working with them seems like the best angle, compromised as it is, to support our downtown community.
It has been interesting working with the array of individuals who have come together to work on this event. I feel like I am the least comfortable wearing the political advocacy hat of all of them. In a conversation with one of my teachers, who regularly involves themselves in political activism I was recently told, “I thought you weren’t political.” I was pretty taken aback by this observation. At best it seemed to imply that I was a milquetoast who had no strong opinions worth mentioning. At best. See: https://www.dernister.org/newsletter-columns/6oexkbuvurrfmnt4joruvt9rsxb00d
It is true that I prefer not to speak with a “political” voice. I do believe that, as a Rabbi, coming at those who speak to me, or happen to be within earshot of me, with guns blazing, riding down from my self-perceived moral high ground, is not the best way to move anyone who might not already agree with me wholeheartedly. Maybe I would feel differently if my parents had named me Jeremiah or Isaiah. I didn’t become a rabbi to become a political operative. Politics are blunter tools than the tools of the broad Jewish tradition.
Over the past few weeks I have been reading (and re-reading) Shimon Dubnow’s work on Nationalism and on the writing of Jewish History. As I previously discussed, he felt that the best path forward for the Jewish people was, what he refers to as Autonomism. Jewish autonomy was his answer to the challenge of preserving a Jewish future in a world where Jews have accomplished civil emancipation and acquired full and equal civil rights in the places where they live. Emancipation, up to that point had been offered as a compromise. In the French formulation: “Give all the rights to the Jews as men, but give them nothing as sons of a specific nation!” Many Jews happily accepted this compromise. They did their best to assimilate into French, or German society and become Frenchmen or good Germans.
To Dubnow, this kind of assimilation did violence to the Jewish soul and to the Jewish people. Jews were not French or German. They were Jews, themselves already a nation. Assimilation proved an imperfect version of a Jewish future. Repeatedly in the countries where Jews had been legally granted civil rights, there were reactions that reminded Jews that they were not going to be allowed to melt into the larger nation that they wanted to be a part of. They would continue to be viewed as other.
The response to this was the rise of the Reform Movement, the Wissenschaft des Judentums school of historical and philological research and the Modern Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch. To have rights as men, Jews had to assert their rights as a nation. Dubnow’s accomplishment is in recognizing this as a consistently arising element in Jewish history. He believed that the creation and maintenance of Jewish institutions and of a certain amount of self-government was needed in order for Jews to thrive. This had been the case before emancipation. Emancipation hadn’t changed that fundamental element in Jewish history.
Dubnow had to redefine nationalism in order to make his argument fit. Nationalism was understood to refer to a group with a piece of land that they were tied to and a mythology of that relationship. Jews lacked the land, even if they did have the mythology. However, culture was the real Jewish homeland, rather than real estate. To him, Jewish nationalism had evolved to a higher form of nationalism. It is part of his understanding of the evolution of nationality as a three step process. He admits that all of the motion isn’t always towards the higher state.
There is a truth in the way that Dubnow looks at the history of the Jews as a nation that I find compelling. However, the existence of the State of Israel, in the state that we find it in now, begs the question of whether or not that highest form of national evolution can be maintained when a nation is attached (or reattached) to a piece of land. Perhaps that requires a fourth stage in the process of national evolution that Dubnow hadn’t worked out.
And this brings me back to our plans for Tisha B’Av morning this year. CLUE is an interfaith organization, but this program is almost entirely a Jewish activity. It is very important for Jews to show up on the issue of immigrant rights. Jewish history is a history of immigration, forced and voluntary. The status of Jews in the various countries where they live today is not uniformly settled or satisfactory. There have been ICE round-ups here focusing on Israeli immigrants. Brown Jews regardless of their immigration history or status have good reason to be anxious. The attendance at the Spanish speaking Jewish congregation in Downey has fallen by half in recent weeks.
While it is useful and important to work with others, it is also important to assert our own values and our own history in the way we work with others. We need to be seen for ourselves. As Dubnow points out over and over again, only the Jews are asked to set aside their own concerns in the struggle to bring about social change. The social justice world has grown very comfortable insisting that only certain kinds of Jews are welcome. Regardless of the specifics of my politics, this is a demand that I refuse and has kept me from the kind of active public engagement that I used to have. This has not been my experience working on the CLUE Tisha B’Av observance.
It was important for me that we keep the event focused specifically on immigration justice and an expression of that through a Jewish lens. I feel that we have accomplished that in the planning stage and I expect that we will accomplish that on the day. It would be great if more of the Christian clergy involved with CLUE were going to be there on the day. The original plan, which I argued against, was to gather in the afternoon, but the morning service includes the reading of Eichah and I felt that Eichah carried the Jewish response to our moment in Los Angeles and downtown in as powerful a way as anything in our tradition. Sadly, Tisha B’Av this year falls on Saturday night through Sunday day. I don’t feel that I have the right to ask the Christian clergy to compromise their expression of their faith, just as I resist the demand that I compromise mine.
