U8 Behar Dvar

Hey folks, so this isn't exactly about my time there, and I promised
long ago more details about my trip there, but they didn't ever come
exactly. I think they will in the next month or two.

In the meantime, here's "Dvar Torah" (Commentary on the Torah) that I
read to a synagogue in Olympia on Friday night. Feel free to ask
questions! For the non-Jews among you, change the word "Jew" to
"human" and it should still make sense for you.

Love,
Jacob

Shabbat Behar- May 11, 2007, Ya'akov Rosenblum

Shabbat Shalom Chevre-

From Tu B'Shvat until Pesach, I was in Israel/Palestine. I bring good
news from the Middle East- some people there still like Jews. I even
found a few Israelis who like Jews, amazingly enough.
The important message that I have to bring you is that you no longer
need to choose: between your humanism, your compassion, your values
you've been brought up with, and being Jewish.
One of this week's parshiyot is Behar, and it expounds upon the
notion of yovel, or Jubilee, as well as shemitta, or "Sabbatical
Year." The core message is a radical approach to poverty and inequity,
a way of re-balancing human societies- every seven years, all debts
are erased, and every 50 years, people are brought back to the land of
their ancestors, and all land is re-distributed.
Zionism could be interpreted this way: our people were finally
returned to our ancestral lands. We missed a few dozen Jubilees in the
middle there, but now we're back on track. We are renewing the
practice.
What a blessing! What a mitzvah!
For many of us, this joy has worn off. There is a great defeat that
lingers over Israel, and it's because the Jews have been tricked. We
were tricked into aligning ourselves with the most powerful in our
midst, who wanted the Jews out of Europe. Ashkenazi Jews came in
droves, first before, and later in huge numbers, immediately
surrounding the Holocaust. And these Ashkenazim could notice that
there was land; they could notice how important it was for their
identity, but what they could not notice is that they had come to an
Arab land. While being absolutely certain of their right to this place
that our many-thousand-year heritage avows so distinctly, we could not
notice that there was another people living there for whom the land
was just as important, sacred, and promised, and whose entire lives
were intertwined with the land.

We see clearly that we had ancestors there 3000 years ago, we do not
see so clearly that Palestinians had ancestors there 50 years ago.
There are also Jews who have always been in that land, there are also
Sephardic, Mizrachi, and other Jews that did not have a stake in
attempting a European-style takeover, informed by white racism. But
the society that set itself up in Israel has brought in our Mizrachim
and Sephardim, and demands that we prove ourselves to be distinct from
Arabs, even though many of us are Arabs, Arabic is our first language.
While we enforce this, we blind ourselves to the fact that Israel is
in the Middle East.
We, as Pacific Northwest American Jews, can benefit from noticing
that we claim this land for our own, once solely inhabited by
indigenous people, and now ruled by white Protestants. What does it
mean to recognize natives and their full right to this place?
I get to support my Israeli friends at being Middle Eastern- speaking
Hebrew and Arabic, appreciating Arab culture, befriending Arabs. And
for myself, I can learn how to honor this land, and everyone whose
ancestors have walked this part of the Earth, including the Nisqually,
Squaxin, Skokomish & Chehalis peoples. The second chapter of Genesis
teaches us that the Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the
Earth.
I want to invite you to go to Israel/Palestine- as a Jew- to struggle
with and struggle for what you believe in. To make the Holy Land a
place that is welcoming to everyone with an Ancestral History there.

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