Maternal Wisdom and Solving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

I often think that word “solution” should be expunged from the language. I do mean that, among other things, in the sense of “solving the Israel-Palestine problem.” Speaking of “solutions” indicates that there is a definable, condensable problem, to which there is some kind of unique “solution” out there, which, if we could only get everyone to see it, could turn a hopelessly muddled situation into a good, well ordered reality. The American-style “can-do” mindset sets us to thinking that if there’s a problem, then of course we MUST and CAN solve it. But jumping too quickly to “solutions,” clever as we think they are, tends to pull our eyeball off the problems, which meanwhile languish and fester in all their knotty complexity.

Last week, I turned to the weekly Torah portion of Toledot for some illumination on this issue, with the help of the commentary of R. Samson Raphael Hirsch. Near the beginning of the reading, it is said of Rebekah:

The children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If so, why do I exist?” She went to inquire of G!d, and G!d answered her: “Two nations are in your womb, two separate peoples shall issue from your body; one people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.” When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first one emerged red, like a hairy mantle all over; so they named him Esau. Then his brother emerged, holding on the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob.

Even before they were born, these two children were locked in struggle. Rebekah was deeply and spiritually involved in their striving, and from before they were born until the end of the story, she struggled, as a mother, to cope.

A Talmudic proverb says that a child or a young person should be educated “according to their own way.” Hirsch asserts that the parents, Isaac and Rebekah, in their eagerness to pass on the spiritual heritage of Abraham, were wrong to try to educate these two very different children in the same classroom. Sitting in school was good for Jacob, but not for Esau. Like a child with an “attention deficit” issue, he rebelled and ran away to the fields.

Years pass, and the two boys confront each other over a stewpot. Whether this exchange was “for real” or, as Hirsch suggests, a boyish acting out of the rivalry between the brothers, each must have brought to it his own resentments: Esau, for his parents’ inattention to his specific needs; Jacob, for a deficit of father-love. As we know, “Isaac favored Esau, because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah favored Jacob.” Each, says Hirsch, also brought his own natural inclinations: Esau, roaming the fields, had no real desire for the property and responsibility that would come with the birthright, while Jacob longed for the heritage of his forebears. (As Hirsch points out, the upshot was exactly the reverse: Jacob, after the affair of the paternal blessing, ended up being forced to leave his parental home with nothing but his staff and the clothes on his back, leaving Esau to inherit the family estate.)

Sensing the enmity between the boys, Isaac tried to resolve it by imposing the “fair and square” solution of giving Esau his paternal blessing, as the rightful firstborn. But Rebekah understood that Esau, the loner, was unsuited to spiritual leadership. Dressing Jacob in Esau’s clothes, as Hirsch presents it, was a scheme to buy time; Rebekah knew that the deception would be discovered immediately – and such, in fact, was her intent. By foiling Isaac’s plan to hand over the leadership immediately – though he was still far from being on his deathbed – she hoped to allow her two sons more time to settle their differences and define their roles over against one another.

Here, too, though, she misstepped grievously. Esau’s understandable fury became murderous. Ever “the mother of Jacob and Esau,” as she is called at the end of the story, Rebekah was alive to the complex and conflicting emotions and inclinations of both her sons. Educated by her failures and continuing to grow and develop as a mother, she arrived at the painful understanding that their struggle could not be resolved quickly, and so they must be separated. She sent her favorite son away to a distant land, from which he was not to return in her lifetime. Living apart, however, the two men eventually arrived at a point in their life-paths where they were able to come together again without rage, if not in perfect brotherly love.

Today, the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, continue to struggle. What could not be resolved in the biblical narrative itself, and has not been resolved in the millennia since passed, evidently will not be resolved in our time, notwithstanding the almost painfully naïve ambitions of each new American president, or the duplicitous rhetoric of successive national leaders on every side. Don’t get me wrong: I think it is urgent to address the wrongs of the occupation, even as we protect ourselves from terror. But that is exactly the point. As we pursue the chimera of a “solution,” the occupation festers, the struggle continues, and rage, resentment and competition over resources claim yet more victims. Positing "fair" solutions is easy. Addressing the problems on the ground, while staying attuned to the spiritual and material yearnings of Palestinians and Israelis (including settlers), requires far greater wisdom, intense and unremitting work, and willingness to fail and try again.

Roger Cohen wrote this week in the International Herald Tribune that an Israeli-Palestinian solution is probably impossible under present conditions, given the hostility and fear that has built up on all sides. A truce, he declares, is not only the best one can hope for at the moment, but a worthy goal. I would add that if we can keep our eyeball, our minds and our efforts on the problems, we might even aspire to address and ameliorate them.

New Orleans and Thinking the Unthinkable

What does New Orleans have to do with Tisha be'Av?

Thanks to my dear friend, brilliant sociologist Brenda Brasher, I found myself in the "Big Easy" a couple of weeks ago, attending the conference she organized on "Jewish Women and Philanthropy." While I was there, Brenda helped me get my consciousness raised about the disaster that struck the city, and the efforts at recovery.

On a "Katrina tour" of the parts of the city hardest hit by the hurricane, I heard the bitterness in the voice of our soft-spoken guide, Gail Cherlew, whose home was flooded, destroying most of the possessions that make a life. "The flood was a man-made disaster," she told us more than once. Contrary to what one may have heard, it wasn't the earthen levees lining the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain that gave way. It was the drainage canals running through parts of the city, whose purpose is to drain off floodwaters and pump them into the lake. And those, Gail told us, were not built to the specifications set down for them by the federal government. Meant to go 50 feet into the ground, they went down a mere 14 feet. When the test came, they simply fell down.

Somewhere along the way, the money for building those canal walls was siphoned off, leaving the city at risk of catastrophe. The possibility of a catastrophic storm had in fact been considered -- yet was put aside as "unthinkable."

Maybe you can already see what I'm getting at. In the additional reading for the Torah portion of Deuteronomy, read last Shabbat as part of the lead-up to Tisha be'Av, we heard: "Your silver has turned to dross; your wine is cut with water. Your rulers are rogues and cronies of thieves, every one avid for presents and greedy for gifts; they do not judge the case of the orphan, and the widow's cause never reaches them" (Isaiah 1:22-23).

Which of these decadent ways created the aperture by which the catastrophe of conquest rushed in? We cannot know. It is said that the first destruction was a result of corruption; the second -- leading to a 2,000 year exile -- of divisiveness and mutual hostility. But these were the indirect causes; the direct cause was conquest and defeat by a greater power that became an enemy. Decadence blinded the nation to the reality of the risks facing it and to the holes in its defenses. The possibility of conquest was the elephant in the room; it was "unthinkable" -- and so it was not prevented.

People will disagree about what the "elephant in the room" is today, and of course that's one of the problems. There are plenty of elephants to worry about, from meteorites striking the earth to swine flu. I personally see a grave risk in the policy of continuing to settle the territories while hoping that the "Palestinian problem" will somehow go away; and I see a grave source of corruption in keeping masses of people in our territory without the civil rights emanating from democracy. And what about the possibility of alienating our great friend, the United States? "Unthinkable"! Others will disagree with me about the elephant's identity. But perhaps the real difficulty is that decadence in our society will keep us from recognizing the real risks and coping with them before -- well, I don't want to say. It's unthinkable!

An Israeli whom I happened to meet in the US before setting out for New Orleans said to me: "I can't understand why people would go back to live in such a place, knowing that a hurricane could come again!" I responded as you probably would: "And you're from the Middle East??" "That's different," she said. "it's home; that's where my family is." It's often the risk closest to home that we don't want to think about.

To go back to New Orleans, I met wonderful people there. They are committed to rebuilding their city, making it better than before, and sealing the holes in its defenses. And they are doing that by getting the city's diverse communities to work together. Now that I've been there, I feel a little bit like a citizen of New Orleans, and as an ambassador, I take back this message: Don't ignore the unthinkable. By letting empathy grow and rooting out corruption, we, too, can remove the blinders and see to our defenses.

Independence Day

Coincidentally or not, Israel's Independence Day fell this year in the week of the reading of "Aharei Mot" -- "After the death of the two sons of Aharon" -- which is concerned with the rituals of Yom Kippur. It seemed appropriate, on this day, to do some soul-searching, some thinking about the years of my life in this country, and how we go into the years that lie ahead.

I've lived in Israel for 33 of my 55 years -- which means that, by now, I've been here not only for much longer than half of my life, but also for longer than half the life of the State. My Hebrew is still accented, but I'm far from a greener, an "olah hadashah." The four children born to me in this country are grown-up Israelis.

It's no secret that my politics are left-of-center, even, as these things go nowadays, far left; or that I'm one of those maverick religious lefties. That puts me out of sync with the politics of Israel's majority. It means I'm doomed to feel the pain of both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more so since my spouse works for a human-rights organization and spends many of his days traipsing around the territories, experiencing the hardships faced by Palestinians at first hand. But I'm also a mother of soldiers in the IDF, and a citizen of Jerusalem, city of spiritual glory and terror.

Many people on the left are pretty critical of this country and pessimistic about its future. I'm critical, too. There's plenty of human folly to be seen here, and cruelty, and corruption. Yet if I ask myself, in that soul-searching mood, whether I have regrets about settling here -- no, honestly, I don't. Maybe it's because Judaism, Jewish culture, and Hebrew culture are so vital to me. Maybe it's because of the unparalleled energy I feel here. Maybe it's the idiosyncratic people, the let-it-all-hang-out ways of relating (for better and worse). Maybe it's the richness of our community and family life. Or the breathtaking landscape. What I know is that from the moment I arrived here, it felt right, and after 33 years, it still feels right. The bad things pain me; they don't make me feel like going anywhere else. I think you call that love.

Some folks on the left say they don't feel like celebrating anymore, because Israel is too wicked, too corrupted. And yet, to me, every day in Jerusalem is a fragile, shimmering gift. I insist on holding onto the contradictions, and still blessing God for what we have, and what we have done.

Actually, we read two sedras this week, "Aharei mot," and also "Kedoshim" -- Be Holy! A sedra that includes a great many ethical commandments, including the commandment not to oppress "the other." While celebrating what we have, it behooves us to bear in mind that holiness is not a state (or a State, or a Land), but a commandment. Not, "you are holy," but "be holy!" And not, "you are righteous," but "pursue righteousness!" That's why, for example, I found the recent pronouncements of Ehud Barak and others that "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" ridiculous. Such declarations sound like what they are -- babble. Morality is not a state of being, but a constant pursuit, and the moment we let go of that pursuit to rest on our "moral" laurels, we lose them. If Barak had said, "the IDF strives toward a level of morality worthy of our people" -- that, I think, I and others could respect (and by "people," I mean all the denizens of the Land of Israel/Palestine). And if the army's leaders could inculcate that striving into our soldiers and their officers, the news coming out of our conflict zone might improve considerably.

Having reached middle age, I am past hoping that the human race can be perfected. Israel is no exception, but since I can't buy out of humanity, I've stopped looking for that cool white space in which I can glory in pure righteousness and criticize others for being defective. That's not what we're asked to do; as humans divinely commanded, we're given the Sisyphean task of striving constantly to correct ourselves, which is, indeed, the spirit of Yom Kippur. So, no regrets, but if I could have a wish for our country's future, this would be it: That the energy we devote to self-criticism -- and Israelis are world leaders in that activity -- should be spent in striving to "turn from evil and do good, seek peace, and pursue it."

The Invisible People

The plagues commenced in Egypt with the ghastly plague of blood, and continued, perhaps oddly, with the comical-sounding plague of frogs. Commenting on the Hebrew word tzefardea, 'frog,' R. Samson Raphael Hirsch quotes a fanciful etymology, according to which the word is a compound of the Aramaic word tzefar, 'morning,' and the Hebrew word da, 'knowing.' The frog, he explains, is a meek creature active mainly at night; it knows the coming of morning and is quick to hide before most humans are up and about. What happened in the plague is not that there suddenly were frogs where none had been, but that the creatures, in defiance of their usual nature, stayed up and went where people could see them. Instead of staying under the sink, they jumped up onto the plates. Just so, continues Hirsch, were the slaves in that society -- always present, but rarely noticed. The portent of the plague was that the society's "invisible people" were about to become visible and trouble the nation's consciousness.

In the plague of locusts, too, an army of small, ordinarily barely noticeable creatures rises up to "cover the eye of the land." So, as the disasters piled up, did the Hebrew slaves become the most noticeable and troublesome group in society. To end the plague, God sweeps up the locusts and drops them in the area of the Sea of Reeds -- pointing to the spot where the slaves were to have their final, redemptive confrontation with Pharaoh's army.

In that confrontation, two elements of society that usually hover just below our consciousness, intermingled in society and taken for granted, are set out in the stark light of a desert morning, with the sun glinting off the sea: the most oppressed, and the perpetrators of oppression. For once, we can tell who is who; they stand on one side, and we on the other. And even then, with the final overthrow of the oppressors, God is said to have chided his angels: "My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you are singing songs?"

The lesson, perhaps, is that no creature is invisible to God, and we, to realize God's image in ourselves, need to open our eyes to the "invisible people" who ought to be troubling our consciousness. Case in point: When our planes and tanks wreak havoc upon a civilian population, we'll never be able to assess the extent to which the destruction was justified unless that population is visible to us -- unless we can see them as real people, and not just as "the enemy."

Unless we want to end up where some of our enemies want us -- in the sea -- we'd better not wait until they "cover the eye of the land."

Reclaiming our honor

This week we began to read the Book of Exodus in the Torah cycle, but the harrowing events of the week keep taking me back to the story of the rape of Dina in the Book of Genesis. Dina, as we know, had her honor sullied by Shechem, son of Hamor. Her brothers, led by Shimon and Levi, took their fearful vengeance by tricking the men of Shechem into circumcising themselves and then, as the men were recovering from the painful surgery, storming the town and slaughtering them. Jacob, upon hearing of the massacre, rails against his sons: "You have made me odious among the inhabitants of the land!" And they respond: "Should our sister be treated like a whore?"

There's an obvious answer to that rhetorical question, and it resembles the answer to the response I hear when questions are raised about the Gaza offensive: "Should we let them shoot rockets at our cities?" No, we could not overlook the rape of our sister; no, we cannot pass over the rocket attacks on our cities. But did that make it right, good or wise to massacre the men of Shechem? And does it make it right, good or wise to bomb Gaza to its foundations?

The raid on Shechem resulted in the destabilization and flight of Jacob's family, turning what was supposed to have been a homecoming into a renewed exile. And now comes an eerie link with this week's reading. Jacob's response, "you have made me odious among the inhabitants of the land," is echoed by the complaint of his descendants, slaves in Egypt, to Moses: "You have made us odious to Pharaoh and his courtiers!"

Coming from slaves, of course, this is an absurd complaint. Odious is exactly what they already were. They had no need to fear becoming odious; Jacob did. In fighting for their sister's honor, Dina's brothers lost their own. It was only to be regained on the long road out of Egypt.

Yes, there was and is a call to reclaim the honor of Sderot and Ashkelon, to repel the violence perpetrated against our cities and our citizens. But by fighting kill with overkill, we lose what we seek to regain.

States are charged with wielding violence to protect their citizens. Their responsibility is to wield minimum violence for maximum effectiveness. In Gaza, I fear, we've done the opposite: maximum violence with minimum effectiveness, leaving our cities still open to violence, our captive Gilad still in enemy hands.

The time has come to regain our lost honor and our hope. But, as the Israelites learned on the way out of Egypt, sometimes there are no shortcuts. If we want to keep moving out of exile rather than back in, we'll need to take not the short road of overkill, but the long road of wisdom.

He Lived

"He lived" -- these are the opening words of this week's Torah portion and the title by which it is known. "Jacob lived for seventeen years in the land of Egypt, and the days of Jacob, the years of his life, were a hundred and forty-seven years. And the days of Israel drew near to death, and he called for his son Joseph ..."

"He lived" -- the expression alerts us that Jacob/Israel was nearing the end of his life, that he was on the cusp, between life and death, soon to pass over. The events of the last week have reminded us constantly how delicate that cusp is, how easily a human being can be swept over from one side, irretrievably, to the other. Indeed, as he contemplates his end at the age of 147, Jacob/Israel recalls the death of Rachel, so unexpected, and she still so young, when they still wanted more children together. In compensation, his first act on his deathbed is to adopt Joseph's two sons, as if they had been born to him by Rachel.

And Jacob/Israel recalls his twenty years as a bereaved father. For all those years of guilt and grief, he knew that his beloved son Joseph had died by violence, and that he, as a father, had failed to protect him.

Joseph, we know, was miraculously "brought back to life" for his father. In the end it was all a big mistake, a big lie; Joseph had been alive all along. In days of grief, we fantasize that our loved one will still walk in the door, laughing, alive. But the fathers and mothers of the young men killed this week know that, for them, there will be no resurrection. As do the relatives -- mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers -- of the hundreds of human beings whose lives were ended by our attacks, and those who were killed by theirs. They are all irretrievably dead. When the slide show on the news site is replaced tomorrow by another, and the talk moves to "solutions," they will still, irretrievably, be dead.

Two of the soldiers in our household are home today for the weekend, and the debates are on, passionately. Israel cannot tolerate Hamas's rockets, insists the younger generation. We have to do what we have to do. We ourselves are willing to lay down our lives for this -- the protection of our people. Israel's army is the most moral in the world. They invited our attack; what country in the world would put up with eight years of cross-border rockets? It's hard to argue with them.

It's also hard to argue with dead bodies, the bodies of those who were killed because they had nowhere to go, in teeming Gaza, to dodge our bombs, even when our army took the "moral" step of warning them to get out of the way. I can tell you this: The propaganda machine is working hard and well on our side. The only way to overcome the threat Hamas poses to Israel is to break them by violence, for all the horrendous cost. And possibly the only way for the Labor party and Kadima to overcome the Likud in the forthcoming election is by proving that Israel can "do it right" this time -- can fight effectively, to win, to restore our national pride.

For some reason there seems to be no doubt that our bombs and our soldiers have the potential to achieve a clearcut victory over the many-headed hydra of terrorism, and that the human cost is inevitable. If we control the territory, we CAN beat back terror, say my sons. Look what we (meaning they and their fellow soldiers) are doing in the West Bank.

Perhaps they are right, and Israel is doing what it has to do. But did it have to come to this? Was there something we could have done, much farther back, to play things out differently? Are there Josephs among us, able to see fifteen years into the future (not to speak of 150 -- which is surely the time-frame contemplated by our foes) and plan for the different scenarios that might transpire?

We live -- at a cost in death and destruction, to our side and to theirs. Is this the inevitable price of history moving on? We live. Is there a way for us to live into the future, so that we live, and they live?

Joseph and the Business Cycle

It occurred to me that the Torah portions for last week and this week -- Miketz and Vayiggash -- are uniquely relevant to the financial crisis, which the press highlighted as the sea change of the year just ended.

Last week, Pharaoh had his famous dreams of the fat cows and the skinny ones, and the fat ears of corn and the skinny ones. Unlike many national leaders of the modern period, Pharaoh took notice of his disturbing dream, sensing its hint of trouble brewing for his prosperous kingdom. He searched for a person in his kingdom -- any person, even a jailbird! -- with the ability to interpret the disturbing sign, and so was Joseph brought before him. The amazing thing that happened there was not only that Joseph dared speak truth to power -- but that power was able to hear the truth.

And the truth was that no matter how secure the boom times might appear, they would inevitably be followed by bust (business cycle, anyone?). Joseph didn't need to be a prophet to arrive at that thought; he needed common sense and -- just as important -- the sense to heed it. Perhaps even more than that, he needed the sensitivity and intuition to hear the stirrings of Pharaoh's own mind and soul, the sense to agree with them, and the courage to speak them aloud in a society where it seemed that the boom time would last forever.

So what's the lesson for 2009? First, to all of us: Dare to speak to truth to power, and dare to trust common sense. Second: Power, keep your ears open to hear the truth. And third: Power, seek out those with the keen intellect, intuition and ability to sense the undercurrents to overt reality, and to suggest wise and prudent courses of action.

Sound obvious? So why are the bombs falling again in our part of the world? Is there no one with the ability to spy out a wise and prudent course of action in dealing with our enemies? Must it always come down to brute violence? (To be sure, sometimes it must; I'm not saying our army should be disbanded, but that there might be craftier and more prudent ways of outmaneuvering our enemies.)

Joseph -- a story for our time.