An Open Letter to ARZA chair Rabbi Daniel Allen

Dear Rabbi Allen:

I am a Zionist and a Reform Jew. I received your letter about the ARZA petition against a United Nations (UN) process for a Palestinian state through my synagogue, and I was extremely offended. My Judaism demands that I speak out against injustice, and I will not refrain simply because ARZA is a Reform Jewish organization.

The petition which you requested Reform Jews sign is hypocritical, unjust, and contrary to Jewish values. In addition, the petition relies on false premises surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I also believe focusing on preventing a UN vote is focusing on the wrong part of conflict mediation.

The letter you sent as well as the petition set up direct negotiation and UN action as mutually exclusive. However, there is no reason why the processes cannot be utilized in conjunction with each other. A UN vote only precludes negotiation if we let it, but Jewish groups taking that

Bringing statehood issues for a vote at the UN is not only one of few ways new states have to assert their legitimacy internationally, it is also the very path that Israel took to statehood. Rather than criticizing governmental entities using well-established legal means to achieve statehood, we should applaud foreign entities who seek out legal avenues to pursue change. Since the petition reaffirms support for a two-state solution, the only other principled objections can be to the timing of the request or to the borders proposed.

Asking millions of people to wait to gain citizenship rights until people who have not managed to reach solutions by war or negotiation for over 50 years is unreasonable. We do not ask people denied rights in the United States to wait for those rights. Amazing rabbis like Joachim Prinz and Arnold Jacob Wolf were extremely involved in the civil rights movement. The notion that this concern for human rights ends because the government denying them rights is Israel's is ridiculous; if anything, this should prompt us to work harder to advocate for their rights.

In 1947, the partition plan was created on the principle of dividing the land based on population. Jewish areas would become the Jewish sate and Arab areas their own state. That state was never declared. The problem with returning to the borders drawn up in 1947 is that they are no longer demographically tenable. So, if this is the ground of the current objections, it is an understandable objection. However, then the appropriate action is to propose a plan with more reasonable borders, and to encourage ongoing negotiations to finalize borders and other issues.

I am a religious Zionist and a political Zionist. My religious Zionism has nothing to do with my political Zionism, and I find your use of the pulpit to promote denying rights to millions of people unconscionable. You are promoting political stability over human rights. It wouldn't go over well as a d'var torah, and I didn't appreciate it in my inbox.

If you want to help Israel and the Palestinian Authority achieve an end of conflict agreement as well as a two-state solution, act reasonably to promote that goal. Promote negotiations in all circumstances. But don't use my religious affiliation to ask me to abandon my religious principles.

Sincerely,

A Reform Zionist in America

Grandpa

My grandfather was one of the best human beings I've known. He was kind and generous and never insulted anyone. I think some of my more masculine behaviors were learned from him, which may be why I come of as old-fashioned sometimes. And I wish I could raise a gin and tonic to him tonight and talk to him about girls (women - he would correct me), because he always had the best stories, if not the best advice.

Just a plug

Plugging my friend JK's excellent blog Cat Flight of Fancy in honor of unexpectedly running into him at lunch yesterday.

Summer's always hard

Summer is always hard, and I'm not talking about the extreme heat index numbers. For me, summer is the time when I lost those most important to me. Summer is the time when I read about the camp I used to attend and mourn that it is so heteronormative as to verge on homophobic, and is certainly institutionally transphobic. Summer has also become a time where I feel rather lonely.

Last week, the anniversary of my love's death hit pretty much as hard as it ever does. And all I wanted was to be back at OSRUI, taking refuge in the Tzofim Beit Teva or Tiferet's Ski Chalet. (Those who call it the Beit Am are being brainwashed by an attitude of Hebrew language supremacy at camp that I find detrimental, but that is perhaps for another post). I remembered one night in 1996. It was the first year of Tiferet workshop and the Ski Chalet did not yet exist. Tiferet used Metros and showered at Chalutzim. On this particular night, we had programming in the Art Center, not yet widely called by its Hebrew equivalent. The skies turned black all of a sudden and it started pouring. The lightning was very close, and we could not return to our cabins. We were preteens (that was the word before tweens for all you youngin's) not all scared but not too comfortable either. However, the songleader Josh Rabinowitz and the unit head Danny Maseng had their guitars and played us music until we fell asleep on the dance studio floor. And I found myself listening to my recording of Danny playing B'shem Hashem on loop not because his music is so amazing as to eliminate the pain of loss, but rather because at least I wouldn't be scared. His voice and that Carlebach tune combine in a way that still puts me at ease fifteen years later. And I missed camp, even its heteronormative aspects.

The most ironic element of missing camp wasn't its heteronormativity. It was that when I received the letter from my love's parents telling me of her death, the last place I wanted to be was OSRUI, where I had no access to modern conviences like the internet and the telephone. When I was in Chalutzim I spent half my camp summer cursing that I went to camp in the first place. Now when I have to deal with what happened, camp is the first place I think about, and I remembered writing my love a lengthy letter from Tiferet in 1996 describing what an amazing storm had rumbled through camp and how Danny and Josh had distracted us with wonderful music ranging from the chasidishe to James Taylor.

My Machon year at camp, I had a terrible time. I couldn't be out to staff or to campers, and I found myself much more aware of the institutional aspects of camp's homophobia and transphobia. I am told by those who have been there more recently that the situation is getting better, but I don't really believe them. The evidence is in the programming offered to campers, but that doesn't really help if counselors are still discouraged from coming out or discussing their own personal experiences of queerness as an identity. Obviously discussing personal sexual experiences with campers is bad, regardless of the genders of those involved. I resolved then not to go back until camp started moving rapidly in better directions of inclusiveness. My year on staff was my worst year at camp ever, mostly because the place I called home more than home for 10 years became a place that deliberately marginalized people like me.

But somehow, despite all this current animosity, OSRUI is still home for me. It's still the place where I first thought about becoming a rabbi. It's still the place where Judaism started making sense as a practice in addition to whatever religion was. It's the place I learned the power of music and art, not just from Ohad and Danny, but from the devastation my counselors experienced when Jerry Garcia died. (You may think I'm joking, but I'm not.) OSRUI is the place I learned about supporting my friends, and it's the place I learned how to give back massages. OSRUI is the place I learned that it's ok for a Jew to be an atheist, and it's also the place I learned to relate to God. OSRUI is the place I learned conflict resolution, but also the place I learned about solidarity. 70 Chalutzimniks chanting around the Migdal because there was no Israeli dancing our first Shabbat that summer may have been my first act of civil disobedience. OSRUI is the place I felt most alienated growing up with one Jewish parent (although there were lots of campers like me in that regard), but it is also the place where I first divulged my queerness to another person, a counselor whom I knew to be gay even though he never came out to me. My friends and even some former counselors and faculty from OSRUI populate half the contacts in my cell-phone, and I know that the bonds I have with old camp friends will last for longer than I can manage to keep in contact with those friends, although facebook has been a great help. But it pains me that I call a place that marginalizes me by omission home.

Of course, it's easier to talk about camp than loss. But what can I say about losing my love that I haven't said about a million times before?

Indepence Day

I narrowly avoided an argument with my roommate yesterday. The ginkgo girl moved out in the middle of June and one of my other friends moved in with me. There are very few arguments I do not wish to have. There are very few arguments I do not wish to have, but there are three or four that I cannot have and be civil at the same time. One of those is about the founding moments of the United States of America. When my roommate suggested that celebrating Independence Day was irrelevant to modern American life, it took all my strength not to go ballistic. I wanted to throw it back in her face and say that her being able to say that without fear of repercussions is reason enough to appreciate our freedom and form of government. I wanted to say some choice words too, but I simply suggested that I didn't want to have the argument and moved on.

We take our freedom and the struggle for our independence for granted now, perhaps because we feel historically removed from the situation. None of us were there for the continental congress when the Declaration of Independence was signed. We are so far removed from these struggles that when a survey was conducted in the 1960s asking people to identify the source of the first line of the Declaration of Independence, most thought it was from the charter for the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society. The line reads: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a descent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Usually, this confusion is used to point to the failures of American e ducation, which it certainly points to. However, the sentiments of revolution so eloquently captured in Thomas Jefferson's words are relevant not only to the American revolution, but to many subsequent ones.

I don't think the USA is the best country in the world, or that we always live up to the ideals that we have as a nation. But I do know that we are always expanding those ideals: voting is no longer restricted to rich white men, and we abolished slavery. And after the civil war which split our nation in two, President Lincoln assured "malice toward none" who had been in the confederacy. We are in struggles to expand equality further in this country. So, today, I will try not to take the freedom I enjoy for granted, and renew my commitment to helping expand the rights of those who live around me.