Rosh Hashanah while Israel is at war

The BBQ Pit
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This is not a rant, and I’m hoping this thread is moderately civil, but I felt the style of the pit is better suited for plain talking about both the Israeli situation and the response of the US Jewish community.

I am a member of a Reform Jewish Congregation, and I’m active enough that I was included in two of the group aliyot this morning. (The rabbi likes to call up groups who have done various things.) But I don’t go to a lot of services. I volunteer in groups helping refugees (the first family we sponsored, Syrian refugees who arrive right before Trump shut that down, are now established enough that they are sponsoring some of their relatives!) and cooking for our “meals on wheels” program, which sends high-quality meals to sick congregants, to a local community college with a lot of students who suffer food insecurity, to a pediatric clinic that serves a poor population, and similar places. Judaism teaches that it’s our job to help God complete creation by making the world a better place, and that while none of us can solve all the problems in the world, we can do something to improve some of them. But other than volunteer stuff, I’m mostly a high-holy-day Jew. So I was curious what the rabbi would say about Israel. (He usually talks politics and public service on Rosh Hashanah, and sticks to more personal things for Yom Kippur.)

He addressed Israel early, saying he’d split his sermon into two, one about Israel and the other more spiritual. (Then we ran late, and he only hit the elevator pitch of his other sermon.)

He pointed to a chair on the bima (the stage, where the service is held) that was put there to remind us of the hostages. Apparently, the custodial staff adds a piece of tape every day. It looks pretty shaggy. :cry:

He talked about the origin of Zionism. Herzl, an assimilated Jew, who thought of himself as Viennese, went to France as a reporter to cover the trial of Dreyfus, an assimilated Jew who thought of himself as French. When he heard the crowd outside the trial shouting “kill the Jew”, he decided that assimilation wouldn’t work, and the Jewish people needed their own homeland. Herzl went on to found the Zionist movement.

He said that Zionism isn’t colonialism, because to colonize you need to be from a nation whose scope you are extending. “The British colonized north America, and that’s why we are speaking English”. He framed the Israelis as an indigenous people trying to live in their traditional lands. (I still think it’s wild to characterize Jews as indigenous to Israel. I mean, hell, if you believe the Bible, Abraham moved there from somewhere else. And if you don’t, well, Israel has been conquered and settled so many times by so many people that I can’t imagine anyone has much DNA of whoever was actually indigenous there. And also, everyone in the world shares some of that DNA.) He didn’t mention that the Palestinians surely have as strong a claim to being indigeous as the Israelis, but he did mention several times that it’s okay to criticize Israel, that Israelis routinely criticize Israel, and that Judaism (at least US Reform Judaism) teaches that it’s wrong to rejoice in anyone’s suffering, even the suffering of your enemies. For instance, our Haggadah, which we read every year during Passover, specifically calls out that the Israelites were wrong to rejoice in the drowning of the Egyptian armies in the Red Sea, who are also children of God.

But, he continued, Hamas and Hezbollah are both explicitly committed to eradicating the Jewish presence in the middle east. And he quoted some of their documents demonstrating that. He reminded us that when people call for “freeing Palestine from the river to the sea”, they mean freeing Haifa and Tel Aviv of Jews.

He spoke of the difficulties our sister congregation in Israel is suffering, and he ended by asking us all to face the Israeli flag and sing the Israeli national anthem.

The rest of the service was a pretty typical Rosh Hashanah service, except we added a few extra prayers for peace, peace for Israel and for all the world. And he trimmed out a little at the end, because we were out of time, and people were beginning to arrive for the kids’ service.

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Thanks for that post, @puzzlegal.

And may the new year be better for us all. Including those on all sides of that conflict; unlikely as it seems now that that will happen.

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Your rabbi sounds like a pretty badass and based dude.

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Thank you for conveying your rabbi’s thoughts, @puzzlegal. What do you yourself think?

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DNA really has very little to do with it.

It’s about culture, not blood.

Judaism as both religion and culture arose in ancient Israel, as well as in the absence of Israel. It didn’t just happen to occur there; it arose specifically as a result of the context it found itself in.

Judaism in its original incarnation as the faith of a bronze age agriculturalist civilization is inextricably linked to the specific part of the Levant where Judaism arose. You see this, for example, in the four species of Sukkot, or in Shavuot as a harvest festival.

In much the same way that many indigenous faiths and customs rely on and celebrate the native plant and animal life of their homelands, so does Judaism.

Judaism was transformed by a pivotal experience: the Babylonian exile. During this period, Judaism was severed from the land; but the people did not simply disperse and assimilate into Babylonian society; they banded together and adjusted their traditions for a life in exile. This wasn’t unique to the Jewish people, and the Persians sent other groups home as well, when they toppled the Babylonians. But for Judaism, this transformative experience allowed it to survive the Roman exile, and the rise of Christianity.

During that whole time, Jewish communities outside of the land of Israel maintained their connection to it anyways, through continuing to celebrate holidays focused on its history and on the land itself.

Let me try a different approach: one of comparison. You mention English people. Where are they indigenous to?

Well, the English people arose as a unified culture out of a melting pot of foreign cultures that successively conquered the British isles.

There were the native Britons, who got conquered by the Romans and had their cultural trajectory altered, but then the Romans mostly left; but the Anglo-Saxons showed up from Germany and northern Europe and conquered to stay, and then they were conquered by the Normans who set up shop as the elites but didn’t totally replace or fully intermingle with the locals… And out of that hodgepodge eventually came the English.

I think it’s undeniable that the English are native to England, because that’s where their culture formed. If most of them descend from Germanic peoples, that doesn’t really matter, because that’s not their culture anymore.

On the other hand if the Normans still ruled England as a distinct overclass today, 1000 years later, I don’t think it would be wrong to say that they are not indigenous to England.

Likewise, Palestinians aren’t indigenous to Israel because of DNA, and if you could just prove that a critical mass of them actually migrated from Egypt under Ottoman rule, PSYCH, you’re not native anymore!

Palestinians are indigenous to the land insofar as “Palestinian” is a distinct cultural identity that evolved in that particular place. It doesn’t matter what percentage of their ancestral DNA comes from what portion of Ottoman Syria; it matters that they consider themselves distinct from other Arabic cultures, that Arabs belonging to those cultures consider them distinct, and that the world at large recognizes the distinction.

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You and i define “indigenous” very differently.

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So where do you think the Jewish people are indigenous to?

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No where. I don’t think the English are indigenous to anywhere either.

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Well, that’s what Hitler said, too. That we are a homeless parasitical culture.

??? That makes no sense to me.

Until we have an ethnicity that emerges entirely from decentralized people across the Internet or something, every culture is indigenous to somewhere.

The English very clearly arose in England; why wouldn’t they be indigenous to there?

Are the Britons indigenous? They weren’t the first humans on the island either, and they were also a different culture that came to the British Isles and evolved into something new there…

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The Native Americans came from somewhere else, too. Not to mention how most of them no longer live on their ancestral lands and the vast majority of them also have non-native ancestry. Are they indigenous to the Americas?

Of course they are. Obviously. Just as Jews are indigenous to Israel.

Besides, on a deeper level, all human culture is a fiction, just like all human history is a fiction. It’s all just stories we tell ourselves. Who cares who the people who provided our genetic codes were? They’re not us. We’re all just clumps of protein with pretentions, after all. What matters is what we believe, and I believe that I’m living in my nation’s homeland.

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Not to mention, given the Law of Large Numbers and human infidelity rates, it is almost certain that every lineage is, when you go back far enough, at least a little fudged…

Amen.

Shana Tova, Alessan!

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Over the past year I’ve become a member of my local Reform synagogue and I, too, went to a Rosh Hashanah service this morning, but with a few differences

Yeah, that empty chair thing has become a thing over the past year. On the other hand, the one we have is kept neat and tidy without adding counting markers to it. It had/has a picture of a specific hostage on it. The first young man was a relative of some of the people in the congregation. When that young man was found dead his picture was replaced with that of one of his friends. Weekly services include a brief prayer for release of captives along with prayers for the deceased and for the benefit of those ill. It’s slotted in respectfully and not hit-you-over-the-head-repeatedly.

No speeches on colonialism from our rabbi. No politics. No editorials on war. We do get prayers for peace and for the end of suffering of innocents on both sides. The rabbi does have to walk a fine line as we have a full range of opinions in the congregation. Outside of formal services we have had some discussions (done cautiously, carefully, and amazingly calmly) about how one can be in favor of the idea of Israel and a homeland for the Jews while at the same time being very unhappy with the current state of affairs in the middle east and critical of government decisions.

Huh.

Our rabbi has spoken of the difficulties the relatives of members of our congregation our experiencing but I can’t imagine him asking anyone to sing any national anthem. He really does keep the politics out of the pulpit.

I think the Jews lost their claim to the Levant 1800 years ago. It sucks that it leaves them without a homeland. Conquering the people living in the Levant in the 1940’s doesn’t change that. The Tanak is not a property deed. The war that created modern Israel displaced the people who had been living in those lands for a very long time.

Every culture originates from somewhere.

I had great-grandparents born in Russia, Germany, and Ireland. That fact does not give me claim to land in any of those countries. Why would having ancestors born 1800 years ago in the Levant give me title to land there?

That, to my mind, was the big problem with Zionism - it pretended there wasn’t anyone else with legitimate claim to the land modern Israel stands on and that’s just not reality. They weren’t content with just moving there and fitting themselves into the current situation, they went and took it over by force. And can’t seem to understand why the people who had been living there for generations were pissed as hell as being displaced from their lands and livelihoods.

Does it suck being a dispossessed culture? Sometimes yes. That doesn’t make it OK to go and displace a bunch of other people.

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Are we talking about the Jews or the Palestinians?

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So what’s the arbitrary point in history you’ve picked and decided that if you were a landless loser of history you shall remain a landless loser forever?

And how come the Palestinians, who also didn’t have a state at whatever year you care to pick, get one, but we do not?

Ah, I can tell you have no idea what the history you’re talking about is. Excellent, this should be good.

Israel was founded by secular socialists who would agree with you on that.

Yes, the first world war was indeed terrible, and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire did lead to a lot of people being displaced.

Or were you not referring to the First World War as “the war that created modern Israel”? Your ignorance is showing again; the Israeli War of Independence was fought after Israel was created, not by war, but by decree of the United Nations, per Resolution 181. This resolution would also have created Palestine, mind you, but Egypt and Jordan had other plans for that land.

Again, you have no idea what you are talking about. If you are interested in educating yourself, I can strongly recommend Sam Aronow’s channel on YouTube, which goes into the actual history of Zionism (and Bundism, and the rest of Jewish history, depending on which videos you watch!).

Gee whiz, if only there was some way to come up with a solution that doesn’t leave any culture dispossessed!

Let’s see, there are Jews, let’s call them J. And there are other cultures, let’s call them C. What if we created a number of States equal to the number of cultures, J + C?

Ther Jews are a culture, so let’s make J equal to 1. So we need some kind of C+1 State Solution.

If someone can solve for C, we could all be happy!

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We are obviously talking about the Turks, who were violently dispossessed of the land by the Colonialist British and French in order to cut it up and give it to Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Jews, Egyptians, and so on - all dispossessed people with no land of their own.

It sucks that they didn’t, but that doesn’t make it OK to take away Ottoman land and give it to them!

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Everyone came from somewhere else. I usually use indigenous to refer to the first group of people to have colonized a patch of land. And sure, let’s go with culture, not genes, that makes sense. I think the Basques and perhaps the Sami may be indigenous peoples still in Europe. The Etruscans were probably indigenous, but were pretty much wiped out by the Romans.

The Jewish origin story in the Jewish Bible says that the Israelites weren’t indigenous to Israel, but conquered it from the Canaanites.

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Apparently there’s a fixed number of years, somewhere between 80 and 1800, at which adverse possession kicks in and you’re no longer entitled to get your land back. It must also be less than 190, since nobody is arguing that Georgia needs to be returned to the Cherokee.

We’re gonna need to consult an actuary.

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Seriously?

It was wrong for the Jews to force out prior residents of their current lands. It would be wrong for Palestinians to turn the Jews currently there into 4-5 million refugees.

At certain point in life I had to come to terms that the US resides on stolen land, that those lands were taken by force, treachery, and broken treaties. I had to come to terms with the fact that millions of humans beings were held like livestock in this country and treated like property for centuries. There was a lot of wrong done in the past by my country, there is still wrong done my this country. A lot of it can’t be fixed, the best that could be done is to stop doing bad things - stop oppressing the descendants of slaves, actually honor treaties with those Natives that are left.

Israelis can’t seem to admit that their current nation did bad things in the past, and still does bad things. A lot that can’t be fixed, the only thing that could be done is to do better going forward. So far, I don’t have much hope of that but I’d be delighted to be proven wrong on that.

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I actually think it should be about 20 years, and that’s why i support the state of Israel. But I’m an actuary, and can assure you that actuaries don’t have any special knowledge of this area.

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That is a very, very narrow definition that, with sufficient archeological research, can lead to absolutely nobody being indigenous to anywhere. I mean, what about Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Erectus? There were here before us all. Were they people? Are they the actual indigenous people of the world?