Religious communities are never the same once they reach America. In my view, they often become even more remarkable.

As a third-generation American Jew, it is at times even challenging for me to think of Judaism apart from the American experience. In spite of hardships early on for our community, the search for common threads between the disparate Jewish groups that came in droves to America two (and more) generations ago forced us to reexamine and hone our religious beliefs. What actually bound us together?

Answering that question compelled leaders of the American Jewish movements to articulate key Jewish values for the contemporary world — notably equality, education and the support of Jewish communities worldwide. Yet most compelling for many American Jews was, and remains, the active engagement of social justice issues.

We emerged from disempowered (and worse) circumstances in Europe as a community that lived out its faith through action in America. From the labor movement to the feminist movement to the civil rights movement to the environmental movement, American Jews found themselves disproportionately represented and often in leadership roles. Jewish belief (whether theological, ethical, or both) guided action, and action inspired belief.

As has become quite evident in the past several years, another set of religious groups, bolstered by recent waves of immigrants to America, is also looking to social justice as a possible unifying trope. Launched by Anju Bhargava, Hindu-American visionary and founder of Hindu American Seva Charities, this effort seeks to increase long-term collaboration between Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Sikh communities through religiously inspired volunteerism, charity and social services.

Together, these groups — several of which are comprised primarily of immigrants from South and East Asia — represent what may be described as Dharmic religious communities and a new coalition in the American religious landscape. They are seeking a unique American identity and niche for their adherents. Like other religious communities that have flourished during and after waves of immigration, they appear poised to make essential contributions to American society.

Michel Foucault, in his ‘Discourse on Language’ states:

I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers?

Foucault identifies a number of excluded areas of discourse found in contemporary society, such as sexual speech, or speech not residing within the truth values of currently accepted paradigms of science. This week we will see how the textual commentators identify and characterize a more fundamental type of problematic speech, the pathology it evokes, and steps that can be taken towards prevention and healing.

I. Marked and Marketing:

Our textual portion begins:

‘This is the Torah of the Metzora, the tzara’t patient on the day of his purification; he shall be brought to the Kohen’

The Midrash initiates its investigation of this verse with an oft quoted word play, where the unusual word ‘metzora’  (commonly translated as leper, though it is clear that is not the affliction described here) is viewed as an acronym for ‘motzi shem ra‘, gossip or slander. The anecdote used in the Talmud regarding the motzi shem ra, the malignant gossip, is that of an itinerant peddler, a ‘rochel‘, who like the snake oil peddlers of the nineteenth century, wandered among the towns around Zippori, proclaiming ‘who would like to buy the life elixir’?. The Midrash tells us that R. Yannai joined in with the gathering crowd, and tried to purchase some of this elixer from him. The peddler pushed him away, explaining that this product is not intended for people like R. Yannai, but R. Yannai persisted, and the peddler pulled out the book of Tehillim opened to verse 34:13 which reads: ‘who desires life should prevent himself from speaking evil’.

In other words, this peddler was an early example of a public health marketing campaign. R. Yannai is then quoted as responding:

Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a regular Op-Ed columnist and blogger for The New York Times, is one of America’s leading progressive voices on a host of political and fiscal issues. However, as a liberal American Jew, one subject Krugman intentionally refrains from treating is that of Israel, and not because he isn’t invested in the country’s success or highly critical of its current political directions.

No, Krugman typically refrains from critiquing Israel because – as he wrote yesterday in a rare moment on the subject – to do so “is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.”

And yet, Krugman was moved to do just that for a brief moment yesterday – offer up a few brutally honest words on Israel.

What was his motivation for doing so? Krugman felt compelled to come to the defense of Peter Beinart, whose book – The Crisis of Zionism - has elicited unhinged personal attacks masquerading as critical reviews from all quarters, including those published in the pages of the Times and The Washington Post.

Iconic photo of concentration camp survivors in port at Haifa

Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims (a history through 2001) is perhaps the most comprehensive and fair-minded book yet written on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I don’t agree with the author’s post-2001, Intifada-inspired assertion that the Palestinians resist making peace because of a religious prejudice against the concept of a Jewish state, but this book (written before he reached this conclusion) is very thorough and balanced in depicting the history. On the other hand, its encyclopedic scope may be tedious for many readers.

What follows is an abridged version of a review I wrote (published in the Nov. 2001 issue of Jewish Currents magazine) of a livelier book by Meron Benvenisti. This author, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, moved to an opposite conclusion to Morris, but he is likewise very factual and makes no apology for having been born as a Jew in pre-State Palestine. His book is emotionally wrenching but more fluid and shorter than Morris’. My understanding is that Benvenisti has become even more exasperated and caustic in his criticisms of Israel in the ensuing years. My own views fall in between what Morris and Benvenisti believe today.

“Original Sins Revisited”

SACRED LANDSCAPE: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 by Meron Benvenisti. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2000, 366 pages, indexed.

Meron Benvenisti writes both analytically and personally. As a boy during the time of the British Mandate, he would accompany his father, a cartographer for the Jewish Agency, on his travels to map the countryside; his father was especially engaged in work to Hebraicize as many place names as possible. His son drew from these trips an initial appreciation for the Arab landscape of pre-state Palestine which has matured over the decades of conflict into this poignant reflection….

In all, 9,000 Arabic place names were renamed after the 1948 war, to reflect biblical/ Jewish themes – usually without exact historical justification for that particular location – or to convert Arab or Muslim sites to bogus Crusader castles. Benvenisti quotes Ben-Gurion in his charge to the Negev Naming Commission: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also do we not recognize their spiritual proprietorship….”

The name “Israel” means “He who struggles with G_d”. Genesis tells how that name was given to Jacob after he triumphed over an angel with whom he had wrestled all night. And indeed there is a tradition in Judaism, unlike any other religion with which I’m familiar, of arguing with G_d. A typical example is Abraham, the first Jew. He argues over the number of righteous people there needs to be in Sodom for G_d to forgive them, and talks G_d down from 50 to 10, which is good bartering with anyone, let alone the Creator of the Universe. But when you struggle, you don’t always win. And it seems clearer that the State of Israel, in their struggle with G_d, has lost.

The story of that struggle has been told as a joke, going back to the founding of the state. Uri Avnery says that G_d asked Israel when it was born in 1947 what it wanted to be, and Israel answered that it wanted to be Jewish, democratic, and stretch from sea to sea (Mediterranean to Jordan). G_d thought about this, and said that Israel could have any two of those, but not all three. There was a time, maybe up until recently, when Israel could have settled for democratic and Jewish, and taken the ’67 borders, and allowed Palestine to be a separate country. But that time has passed. Now the Jewish settlers own so much land in Palestine and use so much of the water in Palestine that it is no longer possible to create any real Palestinian state. “Real” means a contiguous state with enough power to satisfy the Palestinian people. Nor is it possible to pull the settlers out of Palestine, as the power in the Israeli parliament depends on right-wing support. But leaving the settlers there without Israeli protection is also impossible, politically. So Israel will stretch from sea to sea, and now must choose between democratic or Jewish.

I came across something unusual yesterday on one of the Christian Right websites I visit regularly. On the American Family Association (AFA) homepage, there was a link to an article that sounded intriguing: “25 Signs That Middle Class Families Have Been Targeted for Extinction.” At first the article sounded progressive, then populist. As it turns out, however, it was a Christian survivalist article.

The Mufti reviews Bosnian Muslim SS troops in 1943.

In a previous post, I’ve written something on my parents’ narrow escape from the Holocaust. My grandparents, two aunts, an uncle and a number of cousins did not make it, while others survived by getting to Palestine in the 1920s or ’30s. Currently, about half of my relatives are Israeli. It’s with them in mind that I’ve been a staunch supporter of the Zionist peace camp for many years. It broke my heart when the peace process of the 1990s foundered so dismally in the violence that began with the Second Intifada in the fall of 2000, and again following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

On this Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’m loosely adapting material from a letter to the editor I submitted the other day, about an article that has appeared in the spring issue of Tikkun, “Setting The Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust” by Ussama Makdisi. He reviews a book by Gilbert Achcar, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.” Both writers are professional historians of Arab background.

The reviewer acknowledges that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, had a “sordid” relationship with the Nazis, but does not elaborate. The Mufti helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into the SS, made incendiary shortwave radio broadcasts in Arabic, from Berlin, advocating hatred and genocide against all Jews, and played a prominent on-the-scene role with the pro-Nazi 1941 coup attempt in Iraq.

I would agree with the reviewer that it’s too simple to lay all the blame on the Mufti for the periodic post-1917 Arab attacks on Palestinian Jews (1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-’39, 1947-’48), but it would be refreshing and useful for historians to honestly analyze his impact without getting bogged down in ideological finger-pointing. Indeed, some Israeli and pro-Zionist writers do engage in finger-pointing from their side—perhaps most shockingly in the writings and public statements of Benny Morris in the last ten years.

Courtesy of Anne Frank Museum

“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” – Anne Frank

Dear Anne,

What would you make of it all?

What would you think of what has become of the world? What would you feel about how we still behave? Would you be surprised at what has happened to the Jewish people since your death and how the Jewish story is unfolding in the 21st century? Would you be shocked at how we have misused the memory of the Holocaust? Would you be dismayed at the mess we have made of your legacy?

What words would you be writing in your diary today, Anne Frank? What would you hope for and dream of?

An image of the English-language Holocaust memorial in Birkenau camp, taken in July 2006. / Wikimedia Commons

The Holocaust raises issues of moral complexity still being debated over sixty-five years after the end of World War II. Indeed, the discussion acquires greater nuance as more information is revealed about how some people were able to survive while others perished.

Perhaps one of the most important figures that the historical record hardly recognizes and who embodied this moral complexity is Katya Singer. She can easily be seen as a “collaborator” in terms of being the Jewish “bookkeeper” for the SS in Birkenau as well as having an SS Nazi lover and special privileges. Yet Singer has been credited by many survivors with saving the lives of countless women in the camp whom she rescued from the “outside details”; finding “inside jobs” for them; and, most importantly, substituting the numbers of the living and dead, so that the SS were deceived about the numbers of women sent to the gas chambers.

copyright 2012 Eiren Caffall

There were lilacs blooming in my dooryard.

But they are browning now, and they are almost gone; they were very early lilacs.

It is strange to see them at the end of their lives now, since, usually, they are my markers of my birthday – late April, the time of spring coming back, the time of the thaw, the time when everything feels like home again, like live grass and new birds.

I’ve chosen houses based on whether there were lilacs there. I’ve stayed in this house, as I wrangle with the bank over possible foreclosure, sometimes only with the hope of seeing another bloom of those trees from the windows of my own office.

The lilacs in my backyard when I was little were taller than the ancient trees in my Chicago garden. They were so tall that they stood like a curvy wall of trunks topped with heart-shaped leaves. I could lie on the bare ground under them and pretend things, like forts and like towers and dragons, since that was what I would be pretending anyway, flowers or no.

In the Massachusetts of my childhood, I could have told you exactly the week they would bloom. In Chicago, I used to be content to know that they would bloom on my birthday if I was lucky, Mother’s Day if the year was cold.

This year they bloomed in March.

The winter and spring we had out here was far too warm far too early and, really, if you were paying any attention at all, terrifying.

Foucault prefaces his book, The Order of Things, with a passage from Borges that leads him to the very same question which motivates this week’s essay on the classification of permissible and forbidden foods:

…This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that …animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that’is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that…

In this week’s perasha we encounter a taxonomy of “our own”, the classification of the animals permitted to us for kosher consumption, and those forbidden to us. A set of lists, with a unique set of inclusionary and exclusionary criterion. It would perhaps be desirable to fully enunciate an “archaeology” of how Jewish thought looked at the concept of taxonomy; my preliminary analysis here I hope will be instructive and leads to some surprising unexpected ideas about overcoming differences between peoples in a great striving for spiritual ascent.

In his recent New York Times op-ed, Peter Beinart makes a linguistic distinction between “nondemocratic Israel” and “democratic Israel” – a distinction meant to jolt American Jews from their slumbers regarding the reality of life for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

The linguistic distinction is, in my view, brilliantly conceived.

It is also too kind.

See, Israel’s democracy is not merely cracking under the weight of its own internal prejudices and perceived external threats, as Lara Friedman clearly outlined recently at Open Zion. It is also becoming, all too often, a satirical stage upon which the country’s political players continuously – and unintentionally – mock the idea of democracy while attempting to defend the skewed version that currently exists in Israel.

Witness the latest episode, which was set off by “flytilla” activists who, on Sunday, attempted to legally fly into Tel Aviv on commercial jets and declare their intention to visit Bethlehem. The activists (called provocateurs seeking the de-legitimization of Israel) and their protest attempt (visiting Palestine) put Israeli officials everywhere on edge. So much so that the idea of democracy was supplanted by a different one: stop these protesters from entering Israel, even if we look absurd in doing so.

How absurd?

On Saturday, April 21, Sacred Snapshots, a day-long Sampler for the Spirit, will invite participants to experience the divine, celebrate spiritual practices from a range of religions and traditions at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California (9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) Whether exploring religion in pop culture, engaging 12-step spirituality, or experiencing Hindu ritual, attendees will create a multi-religious, multicultural and international community for one day. Rumi wrote that “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” and at Sacred Snapshots, you will have the chance to try at least a dozen.

The flash controversy sparked by comments made by Democratic strategist Hillary Rosen saying that presumptive Republican nominees for President Mitt Romney’s reliance on his wife’s reports regarding women and the economy were meaningless because Ann Romney had never worked “a day in her life” has taken us back to an old discussion that in my opinion misses the point.

I must confess that it took me a long time to warm to feminism, especially to the writings of Betty Friedan and the ideas of the “Feminine Mystique” that argued for women leaving the ennui of a suburban housewife’s life to employ her mind and talents in the paid workforce. I was the first generation of women in my family who had a choice about whether or not to work outside of the home. My mother was a school teacher; my grandmother was a cook in white homes in the south; and my great-grandmother was a share cropper. Her foremothers were slaves.

I also did not warm immediately to this idea because my question was then as it is now: what about the rights of the women who will do the housework and raise the children while women are working outside the home?

I have been a married stay at home mom. I have been a married work outside the home mom. I have been a single work outside the home mom. And, in every instance, my family and I needed help. We depended upon community. Hillary Rosen told the truth when she pointed out that Ann Romney may not be the best source of information on the economic difficulties that most women in this society face. I have no doubt that Ann Romney has household help. I do not picture her dusting the inside of the car elevator in the Romney’s house. My questions: Is the household staff paid a decent wage? Do they receive benefits such as social security and health care? How much vacation time do they receive?

Belated but sincere Easter wishes to Christian friends out there. And a hearty Chag Sameach to Jewish friends who are observing Passover.

To make amends for my tardiness, I am sharing a link to this piece arguing for a reappraisal of the New Testament as “Jewish” literature. I’m not convinced by all its arguments, but it’s very interesting and thought-provoking and seems especially apropos as both communities observe intertwined holiday seasons.

What didn’t happen at Camp David will happen at Blue Heron. But Palestinian and Israeli peace won’t happen before 2016: There are too many anarchists, terrorists, militarists, “sectarianists,” political apologists and lots of other “ists” — yes, even including journalists and columnists — that have too much vested in the Israel-Palestine blame recycling industries to allow peace to break out any sooner.

One day in Lent went like this: another scattered stupid day of laundry, a crazy amount of mediocre cooking, bad feelings about myself and my negligible achievements, and attempts to pull myself out of self-absorbed self-criticism. Scurry, scurry, worry, worry, and meta-worrying about worrying. Tiring.

I got simple things done – a haircut, but only after wasting inordinate amounts of time surfing the web for “flattering haircuts for older women,” printing some images, doubting, looking for signs, irked at having to make all these decisions myself without clear divine commands. (Maybe the command I didn’t hear was, “Is this really important? Please live with more gratitude and now-ness.”)

That night, trying to decide whether to add doing a textbook to my list of tasks, I went to a Taize service at a local Church, a ritual I got into last year with my friend, Marilyn. I love to watch the candles, flickering as if they have a soul. Sitting in the dark, the computer well out of reach, I try to spare thought for others, think about Jesus in Gethsemane. Up above the altar, a big, round stained-glass window shows that scene, idealized. Why, I wonder, is Jesus’s face raised to the sky in prayer? Why that posture? Wouldn’t his head be down on the stone in agony and pleading? Around him are brilliant reds like chili peppers, and stunning blues. Closer to the congregation, two white lambs stand guard, one proudly holding a denominational banner, apparently with its leg. I wonder (but not in a harsh way) why martyrs need clean robes and how lambs can super-proud without dirt on their wool. Is this representation of myth an acknowledgment that daily life has so many dirty clothes and animals acting like animals? What would it be like if the lambs in church looked real, silly and fearful with maggots in their tails? What if Jesus looked like an everyday person in a country under occupation? Maybe we would find it hard to hope; maybe we’d resent being reminded of the world too much around us.

I believe in the value of ritual. Though not Catholic, I like to observe Lent in an interfaith way: a little bit of Ramadan for solidarity with the poor, a little bit of Judeo-Christianity for depth in simplicity, a little bit of Native American enlightenment through solitary retreat, a Jungian belief in the balance of feast and fast. In an unorthodox way, I decided to try out the experience of relinquishing several needless things during this period between Mardi Gras and Easter: candy was the first thing. For years, I never ate candy and somehow I’d started eating it regularly. The second thing was crabby negativity, a lifelong habit. You can guess which one was easier to give up.