by Lawrence Bush on April 24, 2012
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, former head of the congregational arm of the Reconstructionist movement and a long-time activist with the Jewish Funds for Justice, has published a piece with Jewish Voice for Peace about why he recently came out in support of church participation in the movement to divest in corporations that profit from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Several years ago, Rabbi Liebling published a piece for Meretz USA explaining why divestment is a counterproductive strategy. It’s a very useful exercise to read arguments on both sides of the issue from the same thoughtful man, so here goes:
Why Divestment is Counterproductive by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling
Why I Signed a Letter in Support of Church Divestment by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling
by admin on March 29, 2012
Khad Gadya, the old Aramaic fable sung at the end of the Passover seder, is often associated with a sense of relief that the long evening is finally over. It also helps that it comes after four glasses of wine. It traces a cascade of events beginning with a baby goat being devoured by a cat. Each verse adds a link to the chain reaction: a dog comes and bites the cat, a stick beats the dog, fire burns the stick, water puts out the fire . . . and on it goes. Each successive verse gets longer until the fable ends in a final karmic stroke; God kills the Death Angel. It’s part morality-play, part Rube Goldberg device.
It’s also a great metaphor, making its appearance in a painful contemporary poem by Yehudah Amichai;
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultan’s Pool
in the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Khad Gadya machine…
Amichai’s metaphor — the terrible Khad Gadya machine — is pitch-perfect for the Arab-Israeli conflict, with violence generated and regenerated by self-righteous rage, desperation and vengeance. [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on March 26, 2012
Hamas conducted a suicide-bomber attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, during a Passover seder on this date in 2002, killing thirty civilians and injuring 140. Most of the victims were elderly, including some Holocaust survivors. The attack, the deadliest of the Second Intifadah, was intended to kill in its cradle a new peace initiative by the Saudi Arabian government, which based a normalization of Israeli-Arab relations upon Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. (The initiative was reiterated in 2007 but has been largely ignored by the Israeli government.) Israel responded to the terrorist attack with Operation Defensive Shield, a two-month operation in the West Bank that held Yasser Arafat under siege in his Ramallah compound, killed numerous Hamas operatives, and devastated the town of Jenin. The combined toll of the military operation, along with additional suicide bombings, was 130 Israelis killed (100 noncombatants) and 238 Palestinians killed (at least 83 noncombatants). The conflict ended Yasser Arafat’s relevance as a leader and thereby helped strengthen Hamas.
“It was so pretty, with crisp white tablecloths and flower arrangements, and then everything turned black.” —Maxim Elkrief
by Lawrence Bush on February 24, 2012
Baruch Goldstein, an Brooklyn-born Orthodox Jewish physician, murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 others by opening fire in a mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on this date, the Purim holiday, in 1994. Goldstein was attacked and killed by survivors of the massacre. His grave in Meir Kahane Memorial Park in Hebron became a site of veneration for extremist settlers, with a plaque praising “the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel.” Goldstein was a charter member of the Jewish Defense League and a dyed-in-the-wool racist; four years before the massacre, an Israeli intelligence agent who had infiltrated Kahane’s Kach movement had warned his superiors about Goldstein.
“You are not part of the community of Israel… You are not part of the national democratic camp which we all belong to in this house, and many of the people despise you. You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. . . .We say to this horrible man and those like him: you are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism.” —Yitzhak Rabin
