Parsha BEHAR, May 11, 2007

Shabbat Shalom Chevre-

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

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

RedSolid > Writings > Israel/Palestine Writings > 2007 > Update8- Behar Dvar