The destruction of Gaza

Sometime during the spring of 2010, not quite three years after my retirement from Temple Habonim in Barrington, Rabbi Andrew Klein, my gracious successor, invited me to deliver the sermon at our upcoming Yom Kippur morning worship and on all succeeding Yom Kippur mornings until his retirement.

I began my first High Holy Day sermon as a retired rabbi by saying:

“Peter Beinart, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, wrote an article which appeared in the June 10 issue of The New York Review of Books titled ‘The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.’ Beinart’s piece created quite a stir both within the American Jewish community and beyond our borders; by and large, readers on the left applauded Beinart’s audacity, while a number of those on the right were apoplectic – accusing Beinart of being a self-hating, anti-Israel Jew.”

I continued: “Beinart writes that ‘Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberals.’ He goes on to say that ‘For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.’ ”

Beinart proved his prescience when he included in his article the following words: “…the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism.” Remember, Beinart wrote this back in June of 2010!

Earlier this year, Beinart published his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.” As you can probably deduce from the title, Beinart considers the combined actions of the Israeli government and military to be morally inexcusable for the destruction of Gaza – at latest count, the deaths of more than 50,000 men, women and children, the vast majority civilians; more than 113,000 wounded, often catastrophically; the obliteration of homes, hospitals and schools; food shortages leading to near starvation; and on and on. It is, of course, historically true that we Jews have often been a victimized people; but our being victims does not grant us immunity from the crimes we have committed.

Throughout his brief and angry book. Beinart insists that we Jews must never use our victimhood either to excuse or to brazenly deny our moral failings. As Beinart says in one way or another over and over again, here quoting the poet W. H. Auden: “ ‘Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.’ but in the case of Israel, many Jews claim not to know, because that would require acknowledging that evil resides not only in our enemies – Haman, Amalek, Hamas – but in us and in the state that speaks in our name.”

Over the years, Beinart has become ever more assertive in his argument that just because we Jews have been victims in the past, are still victims in many places today and will, most likely at times be victims in the future does not exempt us from our own moral culpability; and Beinart and his family have paid the price for telling his fellow Jews what they don’t want to hear:

“It is hard to talk so frankly today. In many Jewish communities, even many Jewish families, suggestions that Oct. 7 stems from anything but Hamas pure evil is a ticket to excommunication. Soon after the massacre, one of our closest family friends asked my wife whether we believed that Israel bore any responsibility for the carnage. She answered yes. He said that he would never speak to us again.”

Clearly, Beinart’s latest book, as its subtitle suggests, is his reckoning with the destruction of Gaza; but, just as importantly, the book is also a reflection of his decades-long struggle with what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century. Peter Beinart’s “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” though published in 2010, continues to strike a raw nerve among us Diaspora and Israeli Jews precisely because he had begun to uncover radically competing visions of who we are and who we should be as a Jewish people – competing visions greatly exacerbated, as his recent book points out, by the destruction of Gaza.

On the one hand, there are those among us who insist that after Auschwitz and after Oct. 7, 2023 we can and we must do whatever it takes to ensure our survival, even if this means being forever distrustful of strangers – even if this means being forever distrustful of all non-Jews, since from the perspective of these members of our Jewish community, much of the world wants us dead. In such a world, our only defense is military power. To quote Beinart one last time from his 2010, article, this is a mindset in which “Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves.”

But there is a competing vision of who we are and who we can be – the liberal democratic vision enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, its Hakrazat Ha-atzma-ut, a vision of a Jewish State and a Diaspora which “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel.” According to its founding document, the Jewish State “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”

In his latest book, Beinart continues to insist that the task of liberal Jews living here in the Diaspora as well as in Israel is to keep Israel democratic l’dor vador, from generation to generation. Our task is to ensure that Israel – and, in its own way, the Diaspora – lives up to the ideals it espoused at Israel’s founding on May 14, 1948. Our ongoing task is to work for a world Jewry, an Am Yisrael, that is tolerant, flexible and infused with those prophetic values embedded in the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Dare we strive for less?

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.