1. This place is where the Jewish story began. 

2. There are so many essays I want to write, but every sentence needs a page of footnotes.

3. Every time the kaleidoscope of my heart turns, the pieces of this place make a new pattern: breathtaking and intricate, complicated and real. 

4. My place in the chain of generations: twenty-five years ago I visited the Western Wall with my mother (may her memory be a blessing), and now I have done so with my son. 

5. In Tzfat, many doors are painted blue to offer mystical protection. Also walls, ceilings, headstones. Blue evokes tchelet, the heavens and the sea, the vision of sapphire floor beneath God's throne.

6. There are so many broken shards here, and so many hidden sparks to uplift. 

7. I do not believe that God has a physical address. God's presence goes with us everywhere, in our wholeness and in our exile. 

8. We've been directing our hearts and our prayers toward or through this place for thousands of years. That leaves a spiritual imprint both on the place and on us.

9. Those two truths might seem contradictory, but they're not. 

10. I had forgotten how powerful it can be to glimpse parts of our sacred story in the archeological record. To walk where our spiritual ancestors walked. To feel we are a part of their story.

11. To me this place is a miracle, a refracting lens for emotion and for spirit, a heartbreak. 

12. Jerusalem is the only city where I've ever lived on my own, rather than with my parents (now gone) or my spouse (now no longer my spouse) or my child.

13. The Romans slaughtered us for not bowing to Rome. The Crusaders slaughtered us for not converting. Hitler slaughtered us not because of our beliefs, but because he saw us as subhuman.

14. I love this place independent of that history, but the history is also always present. 

15. The stories in Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures) land differently when one can see the topography of spring and desert, valley and hill.

16. Even the names used for places, neighborhoods, and structures here convey identity and politics. Settlement or neighborhood? Security fence or separation wall? 

17. To really describe this place of promise, maybe I would need God's voice: conveying all possible meanings and nuances at once.

18.  At the Great Mosque in Ramle one might sit on the floor, press palms to the lush carpet, and ask God for peace and wholeness for this place and its peoples. Of course, one might do that anywhere.

19. Everyone is on top of each other here. Different communities might be only a stone's throw apart. I've known that for years, but when I'm away I forget just how true it is.

20. In her poem "Jerusalem," the poet Naomi Shihab Nye travels from "I'm not interested in who suffered the most" to "it's late but everything comes next."

21. In the Pool of the Arches, an 8th century underground cistern, shafts of light pour down from skylights onto still waters plied by small rowboats.

22. The moniker the White City has nothing to do with the color of the buildings, though I still think it could. 

23. Foods to which many nations lay claim, a non-exhaustive list: falafel, hummus, that chopped salad of cucumbers and tomatoes. 

24. It's hard to stop wondering which different choices could have led the peoples of this place to a just and lasting peace. 

25. The name Tel Aviv simultaneously evokes both past (a tel is a manmade hill, created through thousands of years of human habitation) and future (aviv means spring). 

26. I thrill at the sight of bougainvillea and oleander, fig trees and date palms, pomegranate trees and grape vines, even the purple thistles that bring a spot of color to the desert scrub.

27. How good are your flavors of ice cream, O Jacob; your mint-lemonade with arak, O Israel!

28. Doris Haifawi, a Christian Arab Palestinian Israeli woman who claims all of those adjectives and who welcomes visitors into her home, wears the kind of fancy slip-on sandals my mother used to love.

29. During the First Rebellion against Rome, Yifat was reduced to rubble. Nearby Tzippori surrendered, which is how Judah ha-Nasi survived to write down the Mishna that became the heart of Talmud.

30. I never liked the story of the rebels at Masada who chose suicide over defeat, but now I realize they were at the end of a failed rebellion: they knew what had become of their fellow Jews. 

31. The black birds with orange streaks on their wings are a kind of grackle, and they like pretzels.

32. Every day that I am here in this place, I thank God that I am here. Every day that I am here in this place, I remember that there are people who yearn to be here and cannot be.

33. I love the fact that after centuries of being "only" a tongue of sacred text study, our holy language is again spoken in streets and marketplaces. 

34. So much water is diverted from the Jordan to sustain the peoples of this place that the river is now small, like the Rio Grande. At Qasr al-Yahud the water is cold even on a 110-degree day.

35. King Hezekiah's underground water tunnel, chiseled into bedrock in the late 8th century BCE, is a good place in which to pray Ps. 118:5: מִֽן־הַ֭מֵּצַר קָרָ֣אתִי יָּ֑הּ  / "from the narrow place I called to You!" 

36. The many small cats at Kibbutz Degania Bet near the Kinneret are extremely friendly, but I wouldn't advise petting the street cats in the Old City of Jerusalem.

37. Riding an electric scooter along the bike path between Tel Aviv and Yafo at night is both terrifying and exhilarating.

38. There are parts of the Judaean desert that seem so barren and windswept, they evoke the way I imagine I might feel on the surface of Mars.

39. Things that call to me in the market, a non-exhaustive list: olives, apricots, fuzzy green almonds, whole fish on ice, burlap bags of spices and tea, round cakes of halvah sparkling with pistachios.

40. I love to hear the muezzin's call echoing from every minaret, the tolling of church bells, the happy songs of the Breslover Hasidim, Hebrew songs and prayer accompanied by acoustic guitar.

41. The ibexes at Ein Gedi are almost the same color as the land. Some of them climb trees.

42. Every single time I enter Jerusalem after being away, I weep.

43. Rosemary grows into bushy shrubs here. I want to crawl into one and make a home there.

44. 187 days of Arabic on Duolingo are not enough. 

45. On this trip, the only person who hassles me about wearing a kippah is an older lady with a Russian accent, loading purchases from a homegoods store into the trunk of her car.

46. I wish every breakfast of my life could include burekas, hummus with cucumbers, labneh and zaatar, and watermelon with feta. Some of these are easier to replicate at home than others.

47. I love seeing mezuzot on (almost) every door.

48. The first thing that breaks me at Yad Vashem is the Dan Pagis poem Written in pencil in the sealed freight car. The facts are too terrible: my heart shutters. But poetry slips in through the cracks.

49. The moment I take my pick to the soft earth in Tel Maresha, I find potsherds, fragments of charcoal, and bits of bone. Remnants of ordinary life from the time of the Maccabees, 2200 years ago. 

50. I fly home with the dust of the land under my fingernails.

If you've been reading this blog for long, you know that I struggle with the cold dark days at the turn of the secular year. In high summer I sometimes have to remind myself not to dread the winter that is always inevitably coming. And at this season I seek comfort in all kinds of ways, from warm-tinted lightbulbs to blankets to braises, but I still have to work hard to avoid the malaise of SAD. 

The best mood-lifter by far that I've found this winter is... being terrible at Arabic. To be clear, I've never learned Arabic, though ever since the summer I spent in Jerusalem I've aspired to someday be the kind of rabbi who speaks some Arabic. (Someday. Later. You know, when I have time.) And then I read R. David's Why This Rabbi Is Learning Arabic (And Every Rabbi Should), and I thought: ok, I'll try.

It's engrossing. It feels like it's working a different part of my brain -- learning new characters, trying to train my ear to distinguish new-to-me sounds. Maybe best of all is that I am an absolute beginner. I know nothing, so every little bit of learning is progress. Remembering the initial, medial, or final forms of any letter feels like victory. And maybe that's part of what lifts my spirits.

I'm using Duolingo. And before anyone objects: yes, I know all the reasons why that isn't ideal. I should take a real class. I should find Arabic speakers with whom to practice. I can't do those right now, for all kinds of reasons. What I can do is keep a tab open on my computer, and instead of doomscrolling, work on parsing a new-to-me alphabet. (It's also great instead of doomscrolling on my phone.)

I can practice sounding out syllables while my kid's brushing his teeth. Remind myself of letter-shapes over morning coffee. Short digital bursts are not pedagogical best practice -- and yet I am learning, bit by bit. I do know that there are a dozen different forms of Arabic and what I'm haltingly learning is Modern Standard Arabic, which may or may not be helpful. But that's not a reason not to learn.

So far I can mostly parse sentences like "Sam is a good translator," or "Judy has cold fish," or "Tamer has a new house." None of this would be especially useful if I were in an Arabic-speaking place right now. (Well, maybe the words for chicken and fish?) In a funny way, that relieves the pressure. I'm really learning lishma -- for its own sake, for the pleasure of learning, not for the sake of any task.

Spiritually I think it's good for me to be a beginner at something. It gives me renewed empathy for my students who struggle to parse Hebrew texts that have become comfortable and familiar to me... and it's a good reminder to practice beginner's mind in other spheres of my life, too. It's good for me to allow myself to be terrible at something -- to practice something that I am not remotely good at yet.

Those things would be true if I were learning any language with unfamiliar orthography. But the fact that it's Arabic also matters. I want to learn Arabic in part because of Israeli/Palestinian traumas, histories, and realities. I want to learn Arabic because trying to learn someone else's language is a way of extending myself to others. I hope it's a way of showing that I see (and seek) common ground.

Also, Arabic really does have things in common with Hebrew. I get a little jolt of joy every time I encounter another cognate. And doesn't that feel like a metaphor for Judaism and Islam -- different and sharing some key underpinnings? Of course, it's also a false linguistic / cultural binary -- Arabic has a long history in Judaism too. (Just ask Saadia Gaon, Rabbeinu Bachya, or Rambam.)

How much will this help me next time I travel to a place where Arabic is spoken? Who knows. (Last night I slowly sounded out the unfamiliar word on a container of زحورات -- it turns out to be the name of this floral herbal tisane.) Still, with every lesson the language becomes ever-so-slightly less opaque. The learning is definitely good for me. And every day I can pick up a tiny bit more than I did before.

Worth reading: Why Israel’s Jews Do Not Know Arabic, by Yuval Evri

I try to make challah every Friday. While I knead the dough, I sing Shalom Aleichem to welcome the angels of Shabbat who will soon be here, and I pray the deepest prayers of my heart.

This morning as I knead, I can barely sing for weeping.

"The current reality, in the streets of a land our tradition deems holy, necessitates a spiritual crisis. A spiritual crisis requires more than prayer. It requires heartbreak, which demands reflection, which then demands action."

So write the many rabbinic students, from many different seminaries, who co-authored this letter.

Someday they will be my colleagues. Today they are my teachers.

If my mother were alive, she'd be asking me why I haven't written anything this week about Israel and Gaza and the West Bank. (Well, in fairness: she'd be asking why I haven't written about Israel. She didn't care about Gaza or the West Bank.) We had this conversation often, when she was alive and was well enough to get cranky with me about what I did or didn't write. 

I'm struggling to find words this week. Would my words actually make things better for anyone? Would they bring light, or only more heat? Would they open anyone's heart, or just deepen entrenchment? What purpose would my words serve? Instead I've been seeking out the voices of Israelis and Palestinians. Their words matter right now in a way that mine does not.

I read words from Leah Solomon about her heartbreak and desperation. I read words from Ismail (a young man writing under a pseudonym to protect himself) about feeling trapped between a quick death and a slow one. I read words from Lama M. Abarqoub about bereaved parents. I read words from Sarah Tuttle-Singer about blockades and parenthood and children. 

My heart breaks for all who have worked there toward justice and peace and coexistence.  The actions (and inactions) of governments and extremists are pushing justice and peace and coexistence further and further out of the realm of possibility. And I know the same emboldening of rightwing supremacists that scares me in the States is happening there too. 

So I pray this prayer by Rabbi Jordan Braunig, and this prayer of mothers for life and peace by R. Tamar Elad-Appelbaum and Sheikha Ibtisam Maḥameed (transl. by R. Amichai Lau-Lavie), and The smoke has not cleared by Hila Ratzabi. I pray poems by Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, Rachel Tzvia Back and Carolina Ebeid. I pray, and their words become my own.

We've all heard the term "Judeo-Christian." (And many of us have objected to it strenuously on the grounds that it erases important distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, and that when our traditions are conflated, often Judaism is appropriated to bolster Christian values that aren't our own.) But "Judeo-Islamic" isn't in the same kind of common parlance.

According to Bernard Lewis (in his book Jews of Islam), the term "Judeo-Islamic" was never adopted either by Jews or by Muslims in Islamic lands, because neither side saw their relationship in that light. But the Jews who lived in Muslim lands manifested a distinct strand of Jewish tradition, and Jews who come from Muslim or Arabic places complicate our mental binaries between Arab and Jew.

That's part of what I took from Dr. Yuval Evri's presentation to this year's LEAP fellows (of whom I am one) at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn. Each year, leading scholars of Judaic studies gather at the Katz Center to engage in research on Jewish civilization past and present... and each year, Clal invites a diverse group of rabbis to join those scholars and to (ideally) translate what we learn from them into "accessible, meaningful, and usable wisdom." 

This year, the fellowship focuses on the study of Jewish life in Muslim contexts. Our first speaker at our first session was Dr. Yuval Evri, who began by noting that Jews and Muslims have coexisted -- sometimes under Muslim majority rule, sometimes as parallel minorities  -- for centuries. He invited us to think beyond easy and simplistic narratives, both the pretty story of interfaith utopia and the ugly story of inevitable persecution, as we engage with the ideas and realities of Jews in Arab lands.

(You can glimpse his work here: Katz Center Fellow Yuval Evri on Arab Jewish Thought.)

In Ashkenazic / European-centered Jewish historiography, he pointed out, Sephardi / Mizrahi / Arab Jews are mostly ignored. When they are mentioned, it's as passive actors or bystanders. There's a problematic Eurocentrism in that lens. The underlying assumption of that approach is that Jewish modernization began in Europe, and from there spread to other parts of the Jewish world. But that's not fair or correct. It's more accurate to say that there are multiple modernities, not just the one.

Dr. Evri repeatedly used the term "Arab-Jewish."  I love the way that phrase elides, or even erases, a binarism that many of us in the European / Ashkenazic diaspora take for granted. The Ashkenazic (some would say "Ashkenormative") perspective presumes a tension between Arab and Jew, but Dr. Evri's work is a reminder that that's a false binary. And it's been a false binary for a long time. One can't study Rambam (Maimonides) properly, he noted, without knowing Arabic!

When we broke into small groups to discuss texts, my small group looked at Nissim Malul's "Our Status in the Country, or the Question of Learning Arabic," which offered a fascinating window into how one intellectual regarded the need to learn and teach Arabic to Jewish children in Ottoman Palestine in 1913, and how he regarded Arabic as a way to connect with his "brothers" in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. What a different paradigm for Jewish-Arab interaction that would have been.

There was a slide in Dr. Evri's presentation (that he didn't actually get to read when we were in session -- time was too short) that I want to excerpt for y'all, because it's such a beautiful encapsulation of the tensions his session was exploring. (This is one of the upsides of participating remotely: I had his slide deck, which meant I was able to see even the slides he didn't get to!) This is from his "Conversation with American Jew Sami Shalom Chetrit," and here's the part that really reached me:

Excuse me for prying, but I just have to ask you, are you Jewish or Arab?
I'm an Arab Jew.
You're funny.
No, I'm quite serious.
Arab Jew? I've never heard of that.
It's simple: Just the way you say you're an American Jew. Here, try to say "European Jews."
European Jews.
Now, say "Arab Jews."
You can't compare, European Jews is something else.
How come?
Because "Jew" just doesn't go with "Arab," it just doesn't go. It doesn't even sound right.
Depends on your ear.

The first speaker argues that it doesn't make sense to say "Arab Jew" because Arabs want to kill us; the second speaker retorts that the phrase "European Jew" is equally complicated because of European history of trying to kill us! I love how this piece skewers the fallacy that Arabs or Europeans maintain a single attitude toward Jews -- and the fallacy that "Jew" is any more (or less) incompatible with "Arab" than with "European." (Also the dig at American Jews not knowing that Arab Jews exist.)

Dr. Evri made the point that for Arab Jews, both historically and today, the divisions we're accustomed to presuming -- Zionist vs. anti-Zionist, Arab vs. Jew, East vs. West -- don't necessarily apply. In one sense this is kind of Jewish diversity 101 (of course Arab Jews exist, and of course these binaries are limited!) At the same time, his talk gave me an opportunity to ponder: given the existence of Arab Jews (historical and current) who shatter that binary, why are we still working with that binary at all?

This week was the first gathering of this year's LEAP Fellows at the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania; I offer this with gratitude to the Katz Foundation for making me a Katz Family Fellow. This is the first in a pair of posts processing some of our learning. Thoughts / comments welcome.

DAY 23: EVENING PRAYER


Afternoon's flat hot white
gives way to the electric green
of minarets against evening's blur.

Old city divides: here
crosses, there metal crescents.
Judaism's in the paving stones.

I press against the wall
to let the Land Rover pass,
the bike, the men with sidecurls.

I wish these dusty Coke bottles
were inscribed in two languages.
Harmony's a long way off.

Taste and see:
our story crackles
like pastry drenched with honey.

Torah is a fresh fig
ready to be parted and savored.
There's enough to share.

Long after every border blows away
like chalk dust on the wind
her waters will endure.

Today is the 23rd day of the Omer, making three weeks and two days of the Omer. This is the 23rd day of our 49-day journey between Pesach and Shavuot, liberation and revelation.

Today's poem was sparked by one of Luisa A. Igloria's prompts from last year - the one from April 22, which suggested stanzas, moving through space, synonyms for light, the words "metal," "electric," and "blur," the present tense, references to two sweets, and a reference to a commercial from my childhood. (Can you find the reference to the commercial?)

In the kabbalistic paradigm, today is the day of gevurah she'b'netzach, the day of boundaries or borders or strength within the week of endurance. As I worked with Luisa's prompt, I found myself thinking about Jerusalem, and borders, and what endures.

I had the opportunity to do something really neat last night -- to participate in a livestreamed Torah discussion with two colleagues, organized as part of 9 Adar: the Jewish Day of Constructive Conflict. What's 9 Adar? Glad you asked:

The 9 Adar project seeks to strengthen the Jewish culture of constructive conflict and healthy disagreements. In our ancient texts, it is called machloket l’shem shemayim (disagreements for the sake of Heaven). It means arguing the issues while respecting and maintaining good relationships with the other side, making sure that your personal motivation is to come to the best solution and not just to win, admitting when you are wrong, and acknowledging that both sides might be right. Approximately 2,000 years ago on the 9th of Adar, two major ideological schools of thought, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, allowed their disagreements to degrade into terrible conflict. Today, we are using the day to promote the original culture of healthy and constructive conflict.

There have been a variety of 9 Adar events in various places over recent days and weeks. (The ninth day of the lunar month of Adar was actually a few days ago; our event happened a few days after the date itself, but was nevertheless part of the same "Jewish Day of Constructive Conflict" initiative.)

The conversation was between me,  my fellow Rabbi Without Borders Rabbi Alana Suskin of Americans for Peace Now, and Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski (profiled as The Chareidi Rabbi from Virginia, though he's no longer there; he's now the assistant rabbi at Congregation Beth Sinai in Kauneonga Lake, NY and Crescent Hill Synagogue in Rock Hill, NY), moderated by Lex Rofes and Caroline Morganti of Open Hillel. The question we were given was:

The figure of Korach has fascinated readers of the Torah for millennia. To what extent do you sympathize with his mindset, and with his challenge to authority? To what extent, alternatively, do you feel that his behavior was ill-advised, or even malicious? Most importantly, what lessons can we learn about this story as we explore our relationships to conflict and authority today?

(Korach, you may recall, was the fellow in Torah who rebelled against Moses' authority; he argued that the whole congregation was holy, so why did Moses hold himself above everyone? Moses said okay, fine, let's put this to God and we'll see who God prefers; and the earth swallowed up Korach and his followers.)

We began by going around the virtual room and each of us offering a few thoughts about Korach. Here's more or less what I intended to say in my opening remarks about Korach and his story:

I find that when I'm teaching Korach to my b'nei mitzvah students, they universally take his side. "What's so bad about Korach? He just didn't want all of the power to be in Moses' hands. And who elected Moses leader, anyway?" -- that kind of thing.  I know that I have at times felt great empathy with Korach -- and yet I've noticed that over the last 15 years my empathy for Moses has risen and my empathy for Korach has decreased, and maybe that's a function of me becoming a rabbi, or maybe it's a function of me just getting older, I don't know!

For me, the Korach story is a useful illustration of how not to handle conflict in my congregation. If someone becomes angry with me and how I'm doing things, and I respond with my own defensiveness, then I'm setting the stage for some kind of disaster -- the earth might not literally open up and swallow anyone, but there could be hurt feelings, damaged reputations, etc. We have to find a better way of settling our disputes.

For me the critical question is: was Korach actually acting out of a sense that everyone in the community is holy? Or was he jockeying for more power of his own? If it's really about his own ego and self-aggrandizement (e.g. he wanted some of Moshe's power), then it makes more sense that the earth swallowed him up -- because his makhloket (argument) wasn't really l'shem shamayim (for the sake of heaven).

For me that's what this all boils down to: how to keep our disagreements (including those around Israel/Palestine) for the sake of heaven, instead of for the sake of me being right and you being wrong.

"If the argument is based in love and mutual respect for one another, then it's an argument for the sake of heaven," said Rabbi Kolakowski, quoting the Satmar rebbe. "The way to tell if someone's a zealot and is just arguing for the sake of arguing is, how does that person lead their life in general? Does he argue about everything, or is it only when it's something important and for the sake of heaven that he gets excited and speaks up?"

Rabbi Suskin began by noting that she feels strongly ambivalent about Korach. It's hard for us as moderns not to feel some sympathy for the position of "we're all holy here" -- and yet our commentaries on Korach are pretty strongly negative. It's difficult to do with Torah what we want to do with other kinds of stories, and tell the story from the point of view of the "bad guy" and thereby redeem him.

She pointed out that the rabbis suggested that the reason that Korach's argument was not for the sake of heaven was that when he protested that "all of the people are holy," what he was really saying was not that we all have the capacity to be holy, but that in and of ourselves, without doing anything, regardless of what we do, we're holy. She argued that it's not really Jewish to say "I'm holy no matter what I do; no one can judge me." We're part of the community; our behavior impacts those around us.

From there we shifted into talking about what it means for disagreement to be holy -- Rabbi Brad Hirschfield's You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right -- the Talmudic stories of Reish Lakish and of Kamza and Bar Kamza -- the obligation to rebuke, and also the obligation to recognize where people are and to speak to them in a way that they will hear -- finding the partial truth in opinions with which we disagree -- and more! Here's the video of our conversation, which ran for about 65 minutes:

And if you can't see the embedded video, you can go to it on YouTube - 9 Adar Interdenominational Text Study. If this sounds like fun to you, I hope you'll go and watch.

Earlier this fall I was honored by the invitation to offer some words of Torah as part of the Peace Parsha series at Americans for Peace Now.

You can read my commentary on parashat Toldot at APN: If this is so, then why am I? I'm also archiving it below.

"The children struggled in her womb, and she said, 'If this is so, then why am I?'" -- Genesis 25:22

We read in this week's Torah portion that even in the womb, Rebecca's children Jacob and Esau quarreled. And their perennial struggle brought her to an existential outcry: if this is so, then why am I? If this is the only possibility for my sons, she seems to be saying, then my motherhood -- even my whole existence -- feels called into question. If fighting is all there is, then what's the point?

I suspect that many of us who care deeply about Israel and Palestine have those moments of heartfelt crying-out. If this is so, then why am I? If struggle and violence are inevitable, "then why am I" giving my heart and soul to working toward peace?

Today's news out of Jerusalem rends my heart.

The mere fact of being alive being means that each of us will experience suffering: sickness, pain, grief. These come with being human. Being human means we experience love and joy and connection, and it means we also experience sorrow and loss. Sometimes I struggle mightily against that truth, but deep down I recognize that it's part of the way the world works. Human lives contain enough pain just by virtue of being human lives. Why do we add to that pain with hatred and killing?

I woke this morning to news of killings in a Jerusalem synagogue. My social internet this morning is full of images of bloodsoaked prayerbooks, tallitot, and tefillin -- unspeakably horrifying for those of us who pray with these same garments, these beloved words. The images evoke the Jewish community's worst fears and most deeply-entrenched memories of trauma. We can't help imagining our own morning prayer shattered, our own loved ones attacked in these ways.

My social internet is also full of people responding to this tragedy in the ways that we always do,¹ which heightens my grief with a sense that our conversations are futile. We're not getting at what really matters: when are human beings going to stop killing each other? What kind of spiritual and emotional evolutionary leap would it take, and how many more parents and children and spouses and siblings are going to have their lives shattered by trauma before we get there?

Slaughtering people at prayer is one of the most despicable acts I can think of. That's true whether the slaughter is committed by a Jew against Palestinians, or a Palestinian against Jews. And now I read that Netanyahu has vowed to "respond with a heavy hand," and that Hamas praises the attack (though Abbas has condemned it), and my heart cries out for God's sake, stop! Where can the spiral of violence and retribution take us but more violence and retribution? There has to be another way.

We need a larger framework of conflict transformation. We need to find a way to lift ourselves up, out of the positions we already hold and the things we've already tried. We need to seek to see the situation from a God's-eye view in order to create a path toward a different future. The Sfat Emet teaches that from where God sits (as it were) there are no binaries, no us/them, just goodness and oneness and love. As human beings we all have to find a way to see each other through God's eyes.

The worse things get, the harder it becomes to imagine anything other than continuing hatred and bloodshed. We have to imagine something other than continuing hatred and bloodshed. Please, God. Help us write a different ending to this story. And bring Your comfort and peace to those who mourn.

Mourner's Kaddish

I pray to You God,
that the power residing in Your Great Name
be increased and made sacred
in this world which God created freely
in order to preside in it,
and grow its freeing power
and bring about the messianic era.
May this happen during our lifetime
and during the lifetime of all of us
living now, the house of Israel.
May this happen soon, without delay
and by saying AMEN we express our agreement and hope, AMEN.

This is a time of unusually polarized and polarizing discourse in the Jewish community. The situation in Israel and in Gaza is devastating. And so is the way I've seen people reacting to different beliefs and opinions regarding that devastation: who's at fault, which atrocities are "worse," whose suffering merits our attention. As though compassion were a zero-sum game. As though anyone "deserves" fear, destruction, and loss. As though feeling empathy for the Other weren't at the very heart of Torah.

Just last week I received an email from someone who sought to put me in cherem, excommunication, because this person perceives that my writings about how I hope peace and justice will come to Israel and Palestine are a threat to Jewish unity. One of my dear colleagues has received death threats directed at them and their children. Another colleague was the victim of a spoof press release, filled with hateful rhetoric, which purported to be from him and featured his full name and contact information.

Everyone I know who writes about the Middle East expects to receive hate mail. Often that hate mail is laced with profanity. Often it draws analogies to Nazis, insisting that one who holds the "wrong opinion" about Israel and Palestine is no better than a kapo, one who collaborates with the destruction of our people. This is hate mail written by Jews, to Jews. When we are feeling strong we shrug it off, try to laugh, say ruefully that it's the price one pays for having an opinion. But in truth, receiving this vitriol hurts.

What is the matter with people? This is a real question. What is wrong with us, that anyone imagines that these are appropriate ways to treat others? Harassment is never called-for. Neither is name-calling. And surely it should go without saying that no one should ever make death threats, or spread libelous allegations which could be damaging to someone's livelihood. This is not the way that human beings should treat each other. Ever. No matter how substantively we disagree, about anything.

The sages of the Talmud, I suspect, might agree:

Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because of three things which prevailed there: idolatry, immorality, bloodshed.

But why was the Second Temple destroyed, seeing that in its time they were occupying themselves with Torah, mitzvot, and the practice of charity? Because therein prevailed baseless hatred. This teaches us that baseless hatred is considered of equal gravity with the three sins of idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed together.

(Yoma 9b)

Baseless hatred, say our sages, is of equal gravity with the three worst sins in the Jewish lexicon. Because our community was unable to overcome its internal divisions; because of unkindness and inability to bend -- say our sages -- the second Temple fell. Tonight at sundown we will gather in fasting and prayer and lamentation, remembering that destruction, mourning every grief and brokenness we know. Have we learned anything about kindness and compassion in the last two thousand years?

Lately I've been talking with rabbinic colleagues about how best to minister to our congregants who are struggling with the news out of Israel/Palestine. We're hearing from people who are unable to fall asleep because they can't stop thinking about the images of destruction and grief, or who wake up and immediately start agonizing about the conflict or worrying about loved ones.

For some, the realities of what's happening there provoke a crisis of faith. For others, those realities provoke profound anxiety. How can we best care for people who are struggling in these ways? The question feels especially relevant to me because not only am I tasked with extending pastoral care to people who are struggling, but because I myself am also struggling to maintain my emotional and spiritual equilibrium in the face of the violence, destruction, and fear.

Maybe the first thing we can do is honor the reality of the struggle. A colleague just pointed me to something I found really interesting -- research showing that media exposure to trauma can create trauma in those who are watching, even from afar.

Tens of thousands of individuals directly witnessed 9/11, but millions more viewed the attacks and their aftermath via the media. In our three-year study following 9/11, my colleagues and I found that people who watched more than one hour of daily 9/11-related TV in the week following the attacks experienced increases in post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms (e.g., flashbacks, feeling on edge and hyper vigilant, and avoidance of trauma reminders) and physical ailments over the next three years.

The relevance of indirect media exposure became apparent again after last April’s Boston marathon. In the days following the marathon bombings, my University of California, Irvine colleagues and I decided to replicate our 9/11 study and examine the impact of media exposure to the Boston Marathon bombings. We sought to look at all types of media: how much TV people watched, their exposure to disaster-related radio, print, and online news, and their use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo in the week following the bombings. We were especially interested in responses to social media coverage. Unlike traditional media that warn us about the gruesome nature of an image before showing it to us, social media typically display such images without warning.

Here's the conclusion to which I really want to draw your attention:

People who consumed lots of bombing-related media in the week after the bombings were six times more likely to report high acute stress than those who were at the Boston Marathon.

Let me be clear -- I am not suggesting that those of us who are following stories out of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza from afar are experiencing more trauma than those who are there. I recognize that from afar we can only barely begin to grasp the terror and the trauma. My child is safely watching cartoons; other peoples' children have been terrorized and killed. There is no comparison. What I am suggesting is that the media we consume has an impact in all four worlds: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and even physical.

I don't usually fast on the 17th of Tamuz.

For that matter, I didn't even take on the practice of fasting for Tisha b'Av until a few years ago. (See This year's wrestle with Tisha b'Av, 2011.) I didn't grow up observing the minor fasts, and I've never taken them on as a practice.

Instead I've tended toward finding other ways of understanding 17th Tammuz. Instead of focusing on the breach of Jerusalem's walls 2,600 years ago, I ponder breaches in the emotional walls which keep us safe, or the internal and interpersonal walls which need to come down in order for genuine connections to form.

But this year there is so much trauma and tragedy in Israel and Palestine, so much grief and destruction and fear happening right now, that I am fasting today and I am dedicating my fast to peace, compassion and kindness in that beloved corner of our world where so many people are suffering.

This was not my idea. Across Israel and Palestine, groups of Jews and Muslims are consciously choosing to fast on this day in solidarity with one another as what was initially called a Hunger Strike Against Violence, and has become part of an initiative called בוחרים בחיים / اختيار الحياة / Choose Life. The idea came from Eliaz Cohen, an Israeli Jew who lives in Gush Etzion, and Ali Abu Awwad, a Palestinian Muslim who lives in Beit Ummar, north of Khalil (Hebron). Cohen is a poet and a self-identified second-generation "settler kid" who supports the idea of one homeland for two peoples. Abu Awwad is founder of Al Tariq (The Way), which teaches Palestinians principles of nonviolent resistance.

(For more, see the front-page story in yesterday's Times of Israel, Aided by calendar, Jews and Arabs Unite in Joint Fast: West Bank activists organize Choose Life, a shared initiative to combat political violence and promote coexistence.)

Not long ago I posted a prayer co-written with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb in remembrance of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Sha'ar, Eyal Yifrah, and Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir. (It's here: A prayer in remembrance.)

Rabbi Lila Veissid, who serves Kibbutz Ha-Ma'apil in central Israel,  has translated that prayer into Hebrew. With her gracious permission, her translation is reprinted here.

תפילת זיכרון

מאת הרבה רחל ברנבלט
והרבה לין גוטליב

יהי רצון שזכרם של בנינו
שנהרגו בשל שנאה חסרת פשר
יהיה לברכה.

יהי רצון שרוחם תעלה
ותתנחם בחיבוקה החם
והאימהי של אלוהים.

יהי רצון שילדינו היקרים יהיו בטוחים מכל צרה.
יהי רצון שכל הילדים יהיו ילדינו.
יהי רצון שנגן על כל ההורים מן השכול.

יהי רצון שלבבנו ולבבם של בני עמנו
יירפא במהרה בימינו
מפצעי העבר וההווה.

יהי רצון שכל הורה אבֵל ימצא ניחומים.
יהי רצון שנזכה לראות את היום
שבו לא יהיו עוד הורים אבֵלים

(You can read the prayer in English at the original post: A prayer in remembrance, July 3 2014.)

I have been watching the news (and reading blog posts and tweets and Facebook updates) out of Israel and the Palestinian territories with a sense of unbearable heartbreak. It brings me to the brink of something like a panic attack: my chest tightening, my throat choked with tears, the embodied feeling that the grief will wash me away altogether. And I am aware that those who live there are experiencing something far more powerful.

The only thing which brings any comfort is poetry and prayer. Bethlehem Blogger posted A prayer in times of violence, which though it is explicitly Christian speaks to me nonetheless. Wendell Berry's poem The peace of wild things speaks right to my heart. I daven the oseh shalom blessing -- "may the One Who makes peace in the high heavens make peace also for us" -- with particular fervor.

If there are prayers or poems which bring you comfort at times like these, please feel free to share them in the comments so that other readers (and I) can benefit from them.

I wrote a prayer in 2012 called Prayer for the Children of Abraham / Ibrahim, which begins:

For every aspiring ballerina huddled
scared in a basement bomb shelter

    For every toddler in his mother's arms
    behind rubble of concrete and rebar

For every child who's learned to distinguish
"our" bombs from "their" bombs by sound...

I hate that it is once again resonant. I yearn for the day when this prayer will look outdated and ridiculous -- when the children of our children, running across this prayer in some shred of their grandparents' generation, will say "I can't believe that war went on for so long." Please, God, may the day come speedily and soon.

On Tuesday, July 15, many Jews will observe Tzom Tamuz, "the fast of Tamuz" -- one of Judaism's minor fast days, commemorating the breach of Jerusalem's city walls which led (three weeks later) to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E.

I say "many Jews" because I know that the minor fasts are not universally observed, especially in liberal Jewish communities. The notion of commemorating the first chink in Jerusalem's armor almost two thousand years ago may seem strange to us.

But I think there's value in observing 17 Tamuz, and being conscious of the Three Weeks which link it with Tisha b'Av, even if you do not fast, and even if you aren't certain you actually want to mourn the fall of a Temple you can barely imagine.

There is a deep wisdom in the way the Jewish calendar unfolds. Our festivals and fast days are waypoints along the journey we travel each year. 17 Tamuz marks the beginning of the descent toward Tisha b'Av. At Tisha b'Av, we mark the beginning of the ascent toward the Days of Awe.

In Hasidic tradition there's the idea that often in order to rise, one first has to fall. Yeridah tzorech aliyah: one has to go down in order to be able to go up. Descent for the sake of ascent. This drama plays itself out in a variety of places in Torah -- for instance, in the Joseph story, in which "descent for the sake of ascent" is a recurring motif. The downs are necessary precursors to the ups.

For Lurianic kabbalists, the whole of creation was a shattering which it is our unique privilege to be able to rebuild. If there had never been a rupture, then there couldn't be a healing.

This drama plays itself out on the stage of every human life. We fall down, we get up again. And while our modern sensibilities may be offended by the notion that tragedy or trauma is necessary in order for growth or forward motion to appear, I believe that there are gifts to be found when circumstances have laid us low. As the 17th-century Japanese poet Mizuta Masahide wrote, "My barn having burned down, I found I could see the moon."

17 Tammuz, the Three Weeks which follow it, and Tisha b'Av which comes at the end of those weeks, are a time for us to delve together into descent. It's not only "my barn" which has burned down -- it's our barn, the place which was spiritual home for all of us together. It's not only my life which sometimes contains brokenness or sorrow -- it's all of our lives. We're in this together.

It can be tempting to want to paper over the places that hurt. To look on the bright side, to put on a happy face, to focus on the positive. I do these things all of the time. But 17 Tammuz and the weeks which follow are an opportunity to let ourselves experience moments of descent, together.

17 Tamuz is a day to consider: when and how do your "walls," the boundaries of your emotional and spiritual integrity, feel breached? What is it like to feel that something painful has come through your defenses? When and how do we come to feel that the integrity of our community has been shattered? What issues, subjects, or sore spots make us feel defenseless and alone?

The tradition says that 17 Tammuz is the anniversary of the day when Moshe came down the mountain, saw the people worshipping the golden calf, and in heartbroken fury shattered the first set of stone tablets containing God's words. What are the idols our communities have fallen into holding sacred? Can we allow ourselves to grieve the ways in which our communities are not yet what we most yearn for them to be?

The point of 17 Tammuz and the Three Weeks and Tisha b'Av isn't wallowing in anger and sorrow. It's allowing ourselves to recognize the things that hurt, the places where we are broken, so that together we can emerge from those places humbled and energized to begin the climb toward the spiritual heights of the High Holidays. Descent for the sake of ascent. If we're willing and able to go down together, we build bonds of community which will lift us to greater heights when it's time to climb up.

All of the things I've just written are, I think, true every year as we reach this moment in our seasonal-liturgical cycle. Here is something which is unique to this year:

This year the 17th of Tammuz falls during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when our Muslim cousins are fasting from dawn to nightfall every day. (This "minor fast" in our tradition is observed in the same way -- morning to night, not 25 hours like Yom Kippur.) And this year, 17 Tammuz arises amidst tremendous bloodshed and suffering in Israel and Palestine -- the murders of the three Israeli teens Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Sha'ar, and Eyal Yifrah; the murder of Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, apparently burned alive; Hamas firing rockets into Israel (see A view from Jerusalem - Israel at war); Israel bombarding Gaza in return (see You can never be emotionally ready).

Eliaz Cohen, a poet who lives in the settlement of Gush Etzion, has suggested that in the midst of so much sorrow and violence in Israel and Palestine, Jews and Muslims can choose to consciously fast on this day in solidarity with one another, as a "Hunger Strike Against Violence." You can learn more at Fasting Together, Jews and Muslims Choose Life (FB, mostly in Hebrew) 0r War Looming: Make Fasts of 17 Tammuz and Ramadan Hunger Strikes Against Violence (English). Some of us who are the talmidim (students) of Reb Zalman are taking on this joint fast in his memory, knowing that he wept for both the children of Abraham and the children of Ibrahim.

Whether or not you fast from food and drink on 17 Tammuz, I ask my Jewish and Israeli readers to please consider fasting from negative assumptions about our Muslim cousins and Palestinian neighbors; whether or not you are observing the Ramadan fast from food, I ask my Muslim and Palestinian readers to please consider fasting from negative assumptions about your Jewish cousins and Israeli neighbors in turn. May this minor fast day, and the following Three Weeks of opening ourselves to grief, bring us together in our low places so that together we may begin the work of building a better world.

by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat and Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb

May the memories of our boys
killed in senseless hatred
be for a blessing.

May their spirits be lifted up
and comforted in the close embrace
of God's motherly presence.

May our precious children be safe from harm.
May all the children be our children.
May we protect all parents from mourning.

May our hearts and the hearts of our people
be healed quickly in our day
from the wounds of the past and present.

May every grieving parent find comfort.
May we live to see the day
when no parent has to grieve.

We'll read this prayer at my congregation on Shabbat morning before mourner's kaddish. If it speaks to you, you are welcome to share it with your community, though please take care to keep authors' names attached. May the families of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Sha'ar, Eyal Yifrah, and Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir be comforted.

Edited to add: this post has also been shared at Kol ALEPH, the blog of ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

Edited to add: Rabbi Lila Veissid has graciously translated this prayer into Hebrew; you can read it here.

You've probably read by now about the three Israeli teens who were kidnapped while hitchhiking home from their yeshiva in the West Bank. (If not, here's a recent article from TIME: Israel holds breath over three teens kidnapped onWest Bank.)

CNN reports that Israel has detained 150 Palestinians in an effort to find the boys. The Guardian reports that Israel has sealed off most entrances to Hebron (see Israeli forces tighten grip on West Bank in search for three abducted teenagers.)

Netanyahu blames Hamas for the kidnapping; according to the Guardian, Hamas leadership has "furiously denied Netanyahu's allegations." (Meanwhile, in Ha'aretz, Abbas condemns kidnapping.)

The three missing teens are in my thoughts and in my prayers, as are their parents. As a mother, I can only begin to imagine the horror of knowing that one's child has been abducted and is in danger.

I recently retweeted, from the Women of the Wall Facebook page, part of the status update:

We continue to pray for safe and quick return of the kidnapped teens, along with all of Israel and the Jewish world. On our minds all day long as we go about our lives waiting for news.

I think back to my post from a few days ago about what it's like for me to be holding sick loved ones in prayer as I go about my ordinary life, and it seems to me that this is parallel. All of us who hold these teens in our prayers are experiencing this kind of bifurcated reality.

I pray that the boys are safe and will be returned to their families. And I pray for hope and change across that wounded land. My heart breaks for every child, and every parent, who suffers.

I've seen some concern lately in the Jewish community about the conversation which some of our Christian cousins -- specifically the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (PCUSA) -- are having about divestment and Israel. I think it's possible that some of the concern comes from lack of clarity about what the Presbyterians are actually discussing.

The Presbyterian church is not talking about divesting from Israel. (Indeed: one cannot divest from a country, only from a corporation.) They're considering withdrawing their church investments from three American-based multinational companies which make certain kinds of equipment used by the military.

Here's a link to the report which lays out their recommendations. And, from that report, here are their reasons for suggesting divestment from these three companies, in brief:

• Caterpillar sells heavy equipment (e.g. the armored IDF Caterpillar D9) used by the Israeli government in military and police actions to demolish Palestinian homes and agricultural lands. (See On the Tent of Nations, destruction of orchards, and the path to peace.) It also sells heavy equipment used in the West Bank for construction of, among other things, settlements, roads which are solely open to settlers, and the construction of the Separation Barrier.
• Hewlett-Packard sells hardware to the Israeli Navy, including Electronic Data Systems which provide biometric ID used to monitor Palestinians (and not used to monitor Israelis) at several checkpoints in the West Bank and in the separate Palestinian road system.
• Motorola sells an integrated communications system, known as "Mountain Rose," to the Israeli government which uses it for military communications. They also provide equipment for the IDF, including ruggedized smartphones, and have signed a contract to provide the next generation of this technology to the IDF.

The conversation about divestment comes from the church's Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (CMRTI), a denominational committee which works to ensure that their investments are aligned with their stated religious values. The Presbyterian Church has an official policy of only investing in businesses which are pursuing peaceful endeavors.

The PCUSA has made these sorts of decisions before. Early in the church's history they withdrew investments from companies which produce alcohol. In 1980, they began withdrawing investments from corporations involved in military production. As one Presbyterian writes, PCUSA's "social witness policy prohibits [us] from investing in industries that harm people. We do not, for example, invest in gambling, firearms, pornography, and alcohol." I can understand why the CMRTI thinks that if their church seeks to only invest in businesses which do the work of peace, these corporations are not a fitting place for their investments.

Some of the Jewish critique of the church's process seeks to make the case that focusing divestment and other economic attention on what happens in Israel is inappropriate if equal attention isn't also paid to other places. But to me it makes perfect sense that the church would pay attention to "the Holy Land." It's easy for us, as Jews, to forget that Christians have a two-thousand-year-old attachment to this place. Don't we all pay attention to places which are emotionally and spiritually meaningful to us?

It may also be noteworthy that the PCUSA's investing agencies continue to hold stock in companies which do business in Israel, among them Intel, Oracle, Coca‐Cola, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Microsoft, McDonald's and American Express. (And that they have chosen at various times to withdraw investments from companies which did business in South Africa, Burma, and Sudan -- companies doing business in Israel are not the only subjects of their attention.) They're considering withdrawing their investments specifically from these three companies which produce implements used in a militarized or militaristic manner -- not from Israeli businesses or from other businesses working in Israel.

I don't imagine that any of these corporations would be substantially impacted by the removal of the PCUSA's funds. The divestment from Caterpillar et al. would be merely symbolic. But religous institutions frequently work in the realm of the "merely symbolic," and I can understand how this gesture could be meaningful -- both to members of this church, and to my friends who are working toward a just and lasting peace.

When I hear the anxiety from sectors of the Jewish community which oppose this divestment, I hear fear that this divestment proposal is thinly-veiled antisemitism; that it delegitimizes Israel; and that its passage will lead to further anti-Israel feeling. I see the situation differently. To me, what "delegitimizes" Israel is the injustices of the occupation, and I don't think it's appropriate to try to shame the Presbyterians into continuing to invest in corporations which do work they deem unethical.

The prophet Isaiah -- author of a holy text shared by Jews and Christians, though we sometimes interpret it in different ways -- speaks of the day when we will beat our guns into plowshares. (Some artists are taking that call to heart even now, turning guns into religious art, or into musical instruments.) Choosing not to invest in companies which make implements of war -- whether they be guns, or military communications systems -- is one way of embracing that prophetic vision of peace.

Valley of fruit trees: before and after. [Source.]

Several years ago, during the summer when I was living in Jerusalem, I had the opportunity to spend an evening with a group called the All Nations Café. (I blogged about it at the time, and also spoke about it from the bimah of my shul on erev Rosh Hashanah that year.) It was an incredibly powerful experience for me -- talking with Israelis, Palestinians, and internationals who were  dedicated to peace and to forging connections across our differences. It's one thing for me as an American, living half a world away, to talk about my yearning for peace and coexistence. These folks were living that intention, and I admired them deeply.

I remember being particularly moved by hearing the story of the man on whose land we had gathered, a Palestinian man named Abed, who told us about his struggles to prove ownership of his family's land (despite holding papers dating from Ottoman times) and about the challenges which that entailed. I thought of the All Nations Café last week when I heard news about the destruction of the orchard at the Tent of Nations farm. (A side note: as I was writing this post the tentofnations.org website seemed to be down, but I think that webmasters are in the process of mirroring it at a new location: Tent of Nations.) My friend and colleague Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb wrote:

Daoud Nassar and his family at The Tent of Nations in the West Bank was invaded by the IDF and their environmental and educational farm destroyed. Entire fields of grapes, apples, apricots, almonds, figs were wiped out. Hundreds of fruitful trees were destroyed. Daoud and his family own the land, have papers dating from the Ottoman Empire...I feel this deeply. Daoud is my friend. Those of us who know Daoud have been deeply impacted by his compassion, nonviolence, resiliency, creativity, and commitment to community.

Daoud has posted about the destruction on the Tent of Nations Facebook page:

Today at 08.00, Israeli bulldozers came to the fertile valley of the farm where we planted fruit trees 10 years ago, and destroyed the terraces and all our trees there. More than 1500 apricot and apple trees as well as grape plants were smashed and destroyed.

(His post is here.) I'm embedding a ten-minute video about Tent of Nations, which includes a tour of the land and gives a good sense for what and where it is. I really recommend watching the video -- take ten minutes and watch, before you read the rest of this post. (If you can't see the embed, it's here at YouTube: Tent of Nations: we refuse to be enemies.)

One of the articles archived at Friends of Tent of Nations explains that "The Nassar farm is part of a parcel of land, including eight nearby Palestinian farming villages, that Israeli authorities hope to annex in order to expand the Gush Etzion settlements, whose population is around 50,000." I know that there is a housing shortage all over Israel; I feel certain that that plays into the Israeli government's desire to annex West Bank land in order to build. But I suspect that the current Israeli government is also acting out of the intention to continue establishing "facts on the ground."

That article explains that when the Israeli government first declared intention to confiscate the land, the Nasser family made the conscious choice "not to be enemies," and founded the Tent of Nations, an organization whose aims are "to build bridges between people of different backgrounds, and between people and land." Author Emma Halgren continues:

The Israeli authorities have forbidden any permanent infrastructure development on the site, as well as access to the electricity grid and public water, so the Nassars have refurbished seven underground caves, painting them, fitting them out with comfortable rugs and cushions and connecting them to electricity from a generator so that they could be used for meetings and other gatherings.

I remember a similar situation on Abed's land where the All Nations Café met -- because land ownership was contested by the Israeli authorities, no construction was permitted, so Abed and his family had refurbished a small cave and had also erected tents. I remember hearing about how the cultivation on Abed's land involved rain-collection and solar power, because the legal limbo of the land ownership dispute prohibited him from accessing the surrounding electrical or water systems.

In a 2010 post about Tent of Nations (Tent of Nations receives demolition orders), Rabbi Brant Rosen wrote:

Some background: Daoud’s farm has been in his family for four generations; his ancestor registered his land with the ruling Ottoman Empire and the Nassars still have the original deed. In 1991... the Israeli military initiated proceedings to expropriate the Nassar family farm, which happens to be located between two Jewish settlements in the Gush Etzion Block.

Despite Daoud’s irrefutable proof of his family’s ownership of the land, the legal battle over it has stretched on for well over two decades – and the Nassar family has spent over $140,000 in legal fees to date. Up until now, their case has been essentially stuck in Israeli legal bureaucratic limbo.

In the meantime, the Nassar family has used their land to establish “The Tent of Nations” an inspirational center that provides arts, drama, and education to the children of the villages and refugee camps of the region. Daoud and his family have also established a Women’s Educational Center offering classes in computer literacy, English, and leadership training. (Many rabbis and rabbinical students are familiar with Tent of Nations as a primary destination for Encounter – a well-known educational program that promotes coexistence by introducing Jewish Diaspora leaders to Palestinian life.)

I meant to go on an Encounter program during the summer I was living in Israel, but it was cancelled on account of violence. Many of my rabbinic friends and colleagues have visited Tent of Nations, and I hope to have the chance to do so someday as well.

Rabbi Rosen refers to Daoud Nassar's "irrefutable" proof of ownership; I assume he means the Ottomon-era deed to the land. Unfortunately for Daoud and his family, Israel maintains a policy of not recognizing Ottomon or British deeds in the West Bank (see Displacing: House Demolitions and Closure at ICAHD), so that deed isn't enough to protect the farm or the organization established thereupon. Because Israel doesn't recognize Ottoman or British deeds, the Nassar family has funded an extensive survey to further prove ownership of their land, but everything I've read suggests that the survey's findings are in a kind of legal limbo.

Recently I posted about a dispatch from Paul Salopek in Jerusalem. I quoted Paul: "In a 5,000-year-old city where changes in neighborhood zoning rules earn international headlines—such is the ferocity of ownership over each square inch of Jerusalem—we orbit painful questions of identity, of zealotry, of personal loss, of national survival." This is surely most intensely true in Jerusalem (because everything is more intense in Jerusalem!), but Jerusalem is also a microcosm of larger struggles for ownership and identity which persist across the land.

What precipitated this demolition of 1500 fruit trees and adjacent vineyards? A note from attorney Sami Khoury explains that the Israeli military authorities recently served papers to the Nassars indicating that their orchards were planted on state land and that the trees therefore constituted tresspassing. (There's something vaguely Kafkaesque, to me, about accusing fruit trees of being tresspassers...) Although the Nassars immediately filed an appeal with the military court arguing that the orchards were planted not on state land but on their own land -- and although legally no demolitions are supposed to take place while an appeal is pending -- the orchard was uprooted shortly thereafter. (There's an extensive timeline of events at the bottom of Rabbi Rosen's more recent post about Tent of Nations.)

I empathize with my Israeli friends who struggle for housing in a country where apartments are in short supply. And I'm sure that those who live in the settlements which surround the Tent of Nations land would be happy to have that land for their own building purposes. When I was in Israel I met several bloggers, one of whom was then living in Neve Daniel, one of the settlements adjacent to the Nassar farm; she mentioned the housing shortage, as did my friends in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem. But bulldozing fruit trees which have been so lovingly cultivated goes against the grain of my understanding of what Judaism is about.

The Torah teaches that we should not destroy fruit trees even in a time of war, and mainstream Jewish interpretation has understood this as an edict against any act of despoiling, in peacetime as well as war. Writes Rabbi Arthur Waskow (in an email to the OHALAH rabbinic email list, quoted with permission):

Torah could hardly be clearer. This early step in protecting both the Earth and human beings from "scorched earth" destruction helped create the tradition of menshlichkeit that is the best fruit of the Jewish people. Was it for cutting down that fruit and these verses of the Tree of Life that generations worked so hard to create a "Jewish" state?

For another perspective on how Torah prohibits the destruction of trees, see the essay Bal Tashhit: the Torah Prohibits Wasteful Destruction by Rabbi Norman Lamm, former president of the mainline Orthodox institution Yeshiva University -- hardly a lefty peacenik.

Destroying orchards is not ethical. Even if there is a housing shortage in the surrounding towns. In this era of consciousness about our footprint on the earth, there's no excuse for destroying productive agricultural land in order to build houses, and that may be especially true in the Middle East where rainfall and arable land are both limited. Because the Nassar farm is prohibited from accessing local water and power systems, they have developed (and are teaching others) sustainable agricultural practices, using solar power and rainwater, filtering "grey water" for reuse, and so on. This farm could be an exemplar to others of how to live lightly on the land.

Beyond that: destroying someone's farm and livelihood is not ethical; and kal v'chomer, when that farm is also home to a nonprofit organization which does so much good work, the destruction becomes even more shameful. One of Tent of Nations' projects is instruction in English and in computer skills for women in the neighboring village of Nahalin. These women are unable to leave their village because of travel restrictions (imposed by Israel), and would otherwise have few opportunities for education and personal development. (You can read more about that program in this April 2014 dispatch.) Tent of Nations also provides summer camp programs for local children from Bethlehem and nearby refugee camps, where the kids engage in projects like putting on Shakespeare plays and making mosaics out of broken tiles scavenged from rubble. These good works should not be met with this kind of destruction.

Beyond that: what impression can this possibly give to the wider world, except that Israel is destructive and power-hungry, trampling on the rights of the poor? That is not the Israel I know and love. But that is the Israel which is making itself manifest in the eyes of the world, and that grieves me.

I am among the many who believe that settlements are an obstacle to peace. (The recent Pew study showed that a plurality of American Jews hold this understanding.) I've been writing about this for years -- see West Bank settlements: obstacles on the road to peace, my liveblogging of a 2009 panel discussion featuring Akiva Eldar, chief political columnist and writer at Ha'aretz; Hagit Ofran, the director of Settlement Watch, a project of שלום עכשיו / Peace Now; and Scott Lasensky, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention.

It seems obvious to me that the more Israel builds up the settlements, the more those settlements carve the West Bank into a disconnected block of Swiss cheese. And the more the West Bank is carved-up in that manner, the less plausible it becomes to imagine a Palestinian state there. Many of those who support settlement expansion agree with me that building settlements negates the possibility of a two-state solution -- there are members of the Knesset who support settlement expansion for precisely this reason. If there will be no Palestinian state, then either Israel must choose a path of perennial occupation, or Israel must choose to grant citizenship to the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.

I don't think that perennial occupation is sustainable. I also don't think it is ethical, and I believe that it is damaging both to the lives of those who live under occupation and to the souls of those who perpetuate the occupation. Is it time to give up on the two-state solution and instead work toward a binational state in which all citizens have equal rights? I don't pretend to have the answer to that question. But it seems to me that as settlements expand, we approach a moment when the question will become moot. And I think it's especially saddening when the intention of expanding the settlements leads to the destruction of an orchard like the one belonging to Daoud Nassar and his family.

If you're interested in learning more about how you can help Tent of Nations rebuild, I'm told the best way to stay abreast of the situation is to "like" their Facebook page, so that you will receive their updates on how they plan to move forward.

Some weeks ago, I wrote a poem inspired by Paul Salopek's Out of Eden walk, his seven-year quest to cover -- on foot -- the original migratory journey of humankind. (You can find my poem on the Out of Eden blog -- Couplets and kilometers -- and it's now available in April Dailies, which you can read about here.) If you have any interest in travel, I can't commend Paul's work to you highly enough. You can read his chronicle of his journey at National Geographic, and on the companion website you can listen to audio clips, look at photographs, and encounter other multimedia glimpses of where he's been.

As it happens, these last several weeks he's been walking through some places to which I have a deep attachment. (Me and just a few other people, as it happens.) His most recent blog post is about a city I revisited only six weeks ago:

"This place is too complicated," says Yuval Ben-Ami, my walking partner in Jerusalem. He is a big man with gentle eyes. A writer. A radio host. A street singer—a bard. He has hiked Israel’s entire perimeter along its borders. He knows its village bus stations. Its cheap Ethiopian restaurants. Its most scenic battlefields. He has been up all night thinking. "The only way we can do this--"

And with a blue pen he draws a curlicue...

That's from Vortex: Walking Jerusalem, the most recent dispatch from Paul. Later in the essay he writes:

In a 5,000-year-old city where changes in neighborhood zoning rules earn international headlines—such is the ferocity of ownership over each square inch of Jerusalem—we orbit painful questions of identity, of zealotry, of personal loss, of national survival. We trudge over a hundred lonesome boundaries—invisible and monumental—that Israeli and Palestinian Jerusalemites do not cross...

I found his post incredibly resonant with my own sense of the city. It's poignant, surprising, and thoughtful.

Once you read it, click through to the walking Jerusalem map. You can see the dotted line of his walking journey through the city, and if you click on any one of the little icons, you'll be taken to a photograph taken in that spot. (As it happens, one of the first icons I clicked turned out to be the bookstore where I went for lunch with Bethlehem Blogger -- the place where I purchased Crossing Qalandiya, which I just reviewed recently.)

I'm looking forward to continuing to read Paul's dispatches -- especially as he walks through places which are entirely unknown to me. But there's something especially powerful about reading his words, and seeing his photos, from a place which I am fortunate enough to already know and love.