Masada Judaism
July 22, 2006
My cousin in Israel works as a social worker, doing cultural sensitivity training for El Al workers. In explaining to Israeli workers how to attune themselves to cultural differences that they might encounter around the world, she recounts the following story:
When she was doing her training of Dutch El Al workers, she noticed that many of them were greeting her with the word “halon” whenever they would meet her. “Halon, halon” would be the first warmly-voiced words out of their mouths. Baffled, she asked them what they were saying. They explained, embarrassed about their pronunciation, that they thought that was how one says “hello” in Hebrew. Working at the check in counters at airports, they found that a common first word out of the mouth of Israelis as they approached with their luggage and passports was “halon”, usually expressed with a kind of barking intonation. The Dutch El Al workers had made a linguistic inference and assumed that was how one greeted strangers in Israel. My cousin had to explain that, in fact, the Hebrew word “halon” means “window” – as in “window seat”.
I recently was exposed to a theological contemplation of the sociological phenomena of Israeli aggression. (And anyone who doubts whether it is a sociological phenomenon need only walk down an Israeli street with cars and pedestrians competing for priority).
I was sharing dinner with a Jewish Israeli colleague who works on co-existence within Israel of Jewish and Arab/Palestinian populations. In the course of our conversation, I had occasion to confess to him that when I was sixteen, my almost perversely Judeophilic father had asked a question that I have always thought was profoundly anti-Semitic. In one of the many dinner table conversations we had about the Holocaust, my father, an atheist Protestant, asked us children, somewhat rhetorically, “But you have to ask why? why on earth? did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter? Why didn’t they resist?” There are many terribly painful accounts of Jews who went to their deaths “passively” in the Holocaust, with no more outward sign of resistance than the sh’ma on their lips.
The sh’ma (Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad) is the most important prayer in Judaism and is used as a centerpiece of all morning and evening Jewish prayer services. The defiant utterance of those words ("Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord,") always struck me as unutterably moving at that moment. And I have always felt my father’s query to be anti-Semitic as I thought the question should always rather be: How could one slaughter a human being as he or she was exposed, a supplicant, in prayer?
My dinner companion grew very agitated when I recounted this to him and told me “No!” I should go back to my father and tell him, after all of these years, that that was not an anti-Semitic question. It is Zionism’s question. It is the question that only someone who loves Jews dearly could ask: “Why did you let it happen? We won't do the same. We won't let it happen again.”
I also recently learned the sickening Israeli Hebrew expression “savonette” or “sabon”, meaning “bar of soap” – used by Israelis, on the left and the right, for those who do not seem tough enough. Diaspora Jews, whose collective and individual weakness was revealed in the Holocaust, are not infrequently embraced in this hideous word used by “sabra” – Israeli-born – Jews. The expression is a “blasphemous” allusion to what the Nazis did with the fat of the Jews massacred at Treblinka and Auschwitz. “Blasphemous”, recounts Michel Warschawski, “was the word that stuck in my mind the first time I heard the expression. I remember my whole body tremble, as if my mother had been called a whore or someone had urinated in front of the tabernacle of the synagogue.”
I detect the disparagement “savonette” in the renowned (secular) Israeli novelist A.B.Yeshoshua’s infamous remarks to American Jews in June of this year, for which he remains unapologetic (even baffled that such a common Israeli sentiment ruffles feathers in the American Diaspora). "Judaism,” he said, “cannot exist outside Israel. Those who do not live in Israel and do not participate in the daily decisions that are made there and that are entirely Jewish, do not have a Jewish identity of any significance."
Michel Warchawski, insists on calling himself a Diaspora Jew though he has Israeli citizenship and has lived in Israel since his father, former Chief Rabbi of Alsace, sent him to study the Talmud under Rabbi Abraham Yitzak Kook at age 16 in 1966. Twenty-six years later, in 1990, the Israeli state sentenced Michel to a twenty-month prison sentence, with eight of those months to be served behind bars.
In 1984, Michel founded the Alternative Information Centre (AIC) in East Jerusalem – a clearinghouse for alternative news on what happens, and is happening, in Israel/Palestine. The Shin Beit burst into the AIC offices in 1987 and seized all manner of journals, brochures and articles and charged Michel with 31 counts of possessing materials intended to serve illegal organizations. By the end of his trial, only one count stood; the rest were dismissed as the court held that the possession of written materials could not be considered a crime. The successful charge was the following:
There was a brochure in the AIC offices, designed and laid out by the AIC staff for a student group at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, which was a collection of accounts by Palestinian activists who had been arrested and tortured, describing in detail the interrogation methods of the Shin Beit. The Shin Beit persisted in calling this a training manual coaching activists on how to stand firm during possible future interrogations. The brochure had an introduction that mentioned the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as "our" organization.
Although the court agreed that Michel Warschawski did not know what was written on the pamphlet, he was originally sentenced to 30 months of prison for "having closed his eyes" to the links that tied the brochure to the PFLP. Even the prosecutor agreed that the sentence was too severe (as not even a Palestinian had been sentenced to prison for more than 4 months for printing banned materials, even with his eyes wide open). The sentence was eventually reduced to 20 months, eight to be served in prison.
Of course, even the Israeli Supreme Court has by now confirmed that torture is not legal, rejecting in 1999 the arguments of the Israeli government that special circumstances faced by Israel made it necessary to resort to coercive means of interrogation.
It occurs to me that it is not the Diaspora Jews who need cower in front of the Israeli landlord who has gone crazy, to borrow Israeli President Ehud Olmert’s apt phrase; ashamed that they cannot be here to put their own children on the front lines of assault. Diaspora Jews, at a slight remove from the Arab/Israeli conflict, have at their disposal the slender saving grace that they do not suffer from the corruption of intimacy that corrodes the ability of their Israeli cousins to see what they are doing. And from this sacred vantage they can implore their cousins to refrain from striking out and hitting someone else in the very same spot in which they are hurting.
Professor Susan G. Drummond teaches family law and introductory Talmudic Law at Osgoode Hall Law School and continues to write from Jerusalem.