Elliott batTzedek’s talk for kol nidre 5786 @Tikkun Olam Chavurah

This is Yavneh, not Tzion

Over the past two years, as part of an on-again, off-again book project, I’ve been writing a long essay about everything I’ve learned over the past 20 plus years of inventing a non-zionist Jewish spiritual practice, and tonight I want to talk with you about what I learned through the writing (and rewriting) process about the Jewish future we are all building together, and the difficult, dangerous moment we are now living in.

To get to that “now”, I want to start a little ways back in Jewish history – to 70 c.e., when Jerusalem was besieged by Rome. The Jews trapped inside the city were torn into factions, and the violent religious zealots were constantly attacking and killing other Jews. Finally, in a desperate attempt to force everyone to take up arms against the Romans, the zealots burned all of the carefully gathered food supplies and broke the water cisterns, tipping the city into starvation.

Both Jewish life and Jewish civilization were going to be destroyed – there was no redemption coming. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, working with a nephew who was a reformed zealot and with a Roman general who had been an ally, arranged to be smuggled out of the city in a coffin, with a promise from the general that he and a small group of sages would be allowed to set up a school in the city of Yavneh. This was the birth of Rabbinic Judaism, and those who escaped and fled there reinvented what Jewish life and Jewish spiritual practice would mean. They built into that the knowledge that Jews could survive within the constant clash of empires but not if militant, religious fundamentalists controlled their fate.

This story clangs loudly in me now, as a US Jew. The Jewish religious zealots in Israel are carrying out acts of horrible violence for which all of us are being held accountable, and we seem to have no way to stop them. The empire is also at our gates as the US government openly embraces extreme anti-semitism and is already, as the right wing withdraws support for Israel, beginning to cry, “The Jews made us do it.” Most US Jewish leadership has been unable and/or unwilling to respond to either of these threats to our community and our future, doubling down on “Stand with Israel” and the imagined safety of being protected by being embedded in the Empire.

This isn’t surprising, as those institutions, having been in a panic for decades now about the mass desertion from synagogues and JCCs, unwilling to see how their lock-stepping to the Zionism drumbeat has marched them to a cliff they seem determined to fall off of, for the “next generation” they are screaming to recruit is following a different path forward, away from the violence they have been witnessing for years. The false messiah of Zionism – and I believe deeply that Zionism is a yet another of Judaism’s false messianic movements –  promised in its recruitment speeches that Jews could “be like other peoples,” only later showing that “like” for them meant a colonialist-settler nation state built on violent suppression of Palestinians and a vicious racial ranking even among Jews. Like all other messianic episodes when they fail, the once-true believers and those too rigid to change will go silent or go missing, as they’ve always left after crashes. This means that the Jewish future belongs to those of us here, in this room, right now.

19 years ago, Fringes: a feminist, non-zionist havurah was founded here in Germantown. If you think about where you were, and who you were, in 2006, you’ll have some sense of how radically unthinkable it was to even name Zionism, much less to name ourselves as removing Zionism from our spiritual life. We set out to make a new kind of prayer life based on a statement of values, which included a rejection of all nationalism. With no clear idea what would make a Jewish prayer service “non-Zionist” we decided to invent what that would be. That is, we headed for Yavneh, where other communities have been joining us ever since – lay leaders, rabbis, artists, musicians, scholars, writers, the lost and the furious and the seeking.

For all these years I’ve been wrestling with questions about which words and rituals from tradition to carry forward, and which ideas are now worn out and need to be set aside so new understandings can bloom. This is not a casual question – In a world where lines from Torah and liturgy are used as justification for genocide, how are we out here in Yavneh going to handle inherited liturgical tradition? We know from watching Israeli government officials speak that  Torah passages about flattening the enemy’s villages and throwing their little ones against the rocks now have real world consequences. What will we do with those? When we open the ark to remove our sacred text, will we continue to sing may your enemies be scattered, may they be afraid of your might? What will we want to suppress? What to bring forward? The early rabbis invented the entire concept of an oral torah with equal weight to the written torah – what tools and bridges will we create? How will we address the misogyny and racism that have restrained Jewish life for far too long?  We know that even the most holy words and concepts can lose their power, or can become toxic, so must be changed. This is a serious question for us. At Fringes we’ve always struggled with the word “Israel” in prayers. We know it means the ancestor, or the tribe, or the half-dreamed ancient homeland – but it also, now is inseparable from the nation state that claims to represent all of those. As the genocide in Gaza has gotten ever more horrific, we’ve removed the word “Israel” from the sh’ma, the central prayer, replacing it with “ami,” my people. In a way only Jews can understand, that speaks the measure of our horror and disgust.

The future we’re building over here in Yavneh is about much more than opposing Zionism. We’ve been building from the margins, from lives of Jews seen as marginal. We’ve been willing to ask, to explore, to try on new ways of creating prayer and culture. Fringes was created around the desire to build new liturgies that could speak our hearts, and the desire to reject the violence and nationalism of Zionism is also the desire to include our lives and our bodies in our prayers, to have new words that speak our hearts fully. The true project of our havurah, in the end, is not that we have opposed Zionism, but that we’ve been building the Judaism that will exist after Zionism crashes. All of us who care about the Judaism we pass on have to be working hard, right now, to create new options—vibrant, engaged-with-the-world-as-it-is options. And we have to be practicing them, trying out new patterns, new words, new rituals, new songs, in order to prepare for holding up our people who are lost and seeking when Zionism does come tumbling down. For it will. For, on some days in these awful times, I swear I can see the cracks that will bring it down spreading quickly.

The goal of creating non-/anti-Zionist Jewish practice is to build a Jewish future that we want –to gather in the teachers, the healers, the dreamers, the poets, and all who build community through food and art and acts of repair. This is a future I’m so proud to be one of many stitching together, a future I see in the faces here tonight, even as I face the immediate, immense task of working to find and to write the words to help shore up activist hearts staggering under grief and fear.  

As the U.S. has descended into fascism in what feels like overnight, as forests burn and glaciers melt and species die off, and I try to create liturgy to help Jewish communities live in this moment, I’m being pushed to reconsider the entire concept of Zion. The concept of Zion/Tzion was nearly magical in rabbinic thought, an entire set of ideas about wells, rivers, god’s foot rest, even earthquakes, all connected to a time and place of wholeness and peace. All of that richness was flattened and appropriated when the Zionist movement was founded, abandoning the dream of Tzion to build a Jewish homeland that would be a nation-state “like all others.” Out with the magic and the hope for a time of healing, in with the army and a nationalist anthem called “hope.” And now, in the ultimate perversion of the concept of Tzion, Zionism has become excuse for genocide.

So, for now, at least, the entire concept of Zion has become toxic. Can we redeem that idea sometime in the future? Perhaps, I hope. But let me be honest, as tonight is kol nidre – many of us here might not live to see that, either because we’re old, or because of the destruction of the environment and social structures. Here, and now, as the planet burns and melts and floods, and as people are being kidnapped off our streets and disappeared, as our institutions fail us over and over, and with no clear ideas about what to do to get to safety, we are living without a “zion” which means that being a “non-Zionist” has a new, unavoidable meaning. Facing what is happening, what is going to get worse before it can get better, and what this world will be for our descendants – which means constantly staring down despair – I’ve realized that being a non-Zionist liturgist now means building prayer services without a Zion. That is, without a sure belief that there will be any time ahead of healing, wholeness, and redemption. It means writing liturgy that sits in the fear and grief, and stays there. I do not say this lightly, nor in temporary hopelessness, nor in hopelessness at all, but only in the necessity of using words of power to confront and convey the truth.

            For we have entered a time of constant change, not surety, and we need a spiritual practice that isn’t afraid to see this, and name it, yet still hold our communities together. Judaism has survived for thousands of years because it is structured to hold community together through impossible times. Judaism has a brilliance for dealing with dying, death, and mourning, and our immediate future will also need that, rather than shallow platitudes about better times coming. The decades ahead will need us to develop new rituals, and this work will be at times devasting. How will one do taharah for bodies swallowed by rising seas? What will shiva be when entire ecosystems must be mourned? What will a ritual of atonement for having committed genocide sound like?

            I don’t have answers, any more than I knew what non-Zionist prayer would mean when Fringes was founded so long ago. We will learn, together, by adapting old words and creating new words and trying them on to see what serves us in these times.  As one member of the communities that have thrived through the process of giving up the false messiah of Zionism, I have the experience to help my community give up the false messiah of “the Democrats will save us” or “green technology will save us” so we can face the world that is. We are here, tonight, as a community unafraid to walk away from a system that has failed Jews, and caused irreparable harm to Palestinians.  So we have faith that we can, together, walk away from other myths, other outdated understandings, and build traditions and meanings to pass on to the next generation, and the next, even as they face I world I simply can’t imagine.

A fearless understanding of where we are, and what we face is not resignation, or fear, or failure. It is the hard-won, clear-eyed honesty that is our best gift to our struggle and our future.  Our resolve to move forward without a zion is the journey-bread that will we carry, and we will pass along to all the children not yet born.