Responding to the Israel-Hamas War
Clarice by Ester Schneider
Roundtable
A Conversation Between Israeli and North American Rabbis
With Lauren Berkun, Dotan Arieli, Rori Picker Neiss, Yael Splansky & Ron Zariz
Rabbi Lauren Berkun is vice president of rabbinic initiatives at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Rabbi Dotan Arieli directs gender equality programs at HaMidrasha at Oranim.
Rabbi Rori Picker Neiss is executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St Louis.
Rabbi Yael Splansky is senior rabbi of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto.
Rabbi Hadas Ron Zariz is the spiritual leader of Yifat B’Ruach, an Israeli community in the Jezreel Valley, and a founding member and co-director of HaMidrasha at Oranim.
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Recent events in Israel have thrown light on the ways rabbinic leaders now face unprecedented challenges in their educational and communal roles. A select group of rabbinic leaders—fellows of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Rabbinic Leadership Initiative (RLI)—gathered this summer in Jerusalem for a ten-day seminar on the theme “Zionism and Rabbinic Leadership at a Crossroads.” In addition to engaging in text study seminars with senior Hartman faculty, the group visited Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities in Sheikh Jarrah and in Lod and encountered a wide array of narratives about the recent violence.
During the program, I invited four members of the RLI cohort—two from Israel and two from North America—to discuss those narratives. The following conversation opened a uniquely personal window into the very different ways these rabbis grapple with both the troubling events of this past May and the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora.
—Lauren Berkun
LAUREN BERKUN: What were your primary experiences of the most recent Gaza conflict? Did you feel like your colleagues across the ocean were empathetic to your experience?
HADAS RON ZARIZ: I live in the north of Israel. We had tickets for a play and had to cancel an hour before because of Arab demonstrations in the area; we weren’t allowed to leave our kibbutz. My son, who currently serves in the army, called to say he was headed to Gaza, which terrified me. My sister in Tel Aviv was getting bombed. Because she doesn’t have a shelter, she had to take cover with her family in a pantry under a staircase. An hour later, I called my Arab students to see how they were; I had to check to see what was happening to them.
YAEL SPLANSKY: On a personal level, I felt serious anxiety. The app that tells us when the rockets are falling in real time makes one feel connected [to events in Israel]. Of course it’s not the same as sheltering in place, but the anxiety was real. Each night, going to sleep, thinking and praying about the people I know and the people I don’t know. Waking up, my first thought is to check to see what happened overnight. Many of my congregants also felt that way because they have family and colleagues in Israel.
At the communal level, I was asked by the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto to speak at a virtual solidarity rally. More than a thousand people gathered online for an event that was pulled together in less than twenty-four hours. I offered two messages. First: whomever you know in Israel, even someone you haven’t been in touch with for years, call them, reach out to them, and let them know that you are thinking of them. Second: aware that I was speaking across denominational and political lines, I said that we can have perfect clarity on our points of view [about the conflict], but when it comes to our prayers, we can be expansive. There is no reason why we shouldn’t—and every reason why we should—pray for the child in Gaza and for Israeli citizens who are not Jewish. There are no limits to our prayers. We get so entrenched in showing our support and loyalty for Israel that we think that’s the end of our duty. But we have another duty: to become expansive in our humanity and in our prayers.
DOTAN ARIELI: The day after the conflict started, we were supposed to meet Arab friends for two days of planning local programs between Jews and Arabs. That night at 11:30 p.m. we started texting one another: Are we meeting tomorrow? Will they bomb the place that we were planning to stay? We decided to cancel. I was scared for my Israeli friends but even more scared about a civil war. I was concerned for Israeli Arabs who are my friends and students. We decided to show up in places where Arabs and Jews live next to each other and stand there to say that we support each other.
I felt that my North American friends really do want to stand with us. But I was worried when I heard what’s going on in America, about how the deliberation on whether to evict six Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah was making people say that Israel shouldn’t exist.
“We get so entrenched in showing our support and loyalty for Israel that we think that’s the end of our duty.”
RORI PICKER NEISS: I feel like it’s hard to know where to begin the story. It was Mother’s Day weekend in America. I got a phone call that Sunday morning from one of our Muslim partners while I was at a weekend camp with my family. “You need to say something about Al Aqsa mosque,” she said. “We need to hear from the Jewish community about this.” We started to write something to the local Muslim community, but before we finished we got reports of rocket attacks from Hamas. At that point, what you said—or didn’t say—became a political decision. Our intention was to say, “On the holiest day of your calendar, we saw one of your holiest religious sites stormed! That is a painful experience!” Then we had to decide: do we mention rocket attacks too? Do we have to name who started it?
I found myself at an intersection: worried about my friends and family in Israel, while feeling even more scared about what was happening in America. To be clear: this is not because it was worse in America, but because I realized my worry wasn’t going to change anything in Israel, where there are far more qualified people dealing with the situation. My job is to focus on what is happening in America.
I felt that the organized Jewish community was not responding to the needs of the conversation, since in our statements in support of Israel there was no reference to Sheikh Jarrah, or to the violence in Lod. Some statements made it sound like we were all walking quietly down the street when Hamas started dropping rockets. I’m not saying that preceding events excuse the rockets in any way, but these statements flattened an incredibly complex situation. It showed that we weren’t equipped to engage with people who were seeing the story from a different angle. We were having different conversations than those who started their story not with “Hamas started shooting rockets” but rather with the protests in Sheikh Jarrah, the police raid at Al Aqsa, or the Jerusalem Day march.
Much of my time was spent talking with people to help them understand things from a Jewish perspective. One of the most difficult roles was navigating pushback from the Jewish community. Because I said the words, “Sheikh Jarrah,” I was seen as, somehow, not Zionist; if I didn’t condemn Hamas, I must support terror attacks. There was a feeling that to name a Palestinian child who died was somehow being unfaithful to Israel, rather than opening our hearts and acknowledging that this is a tragedy for everyone involved, and that we must hold a multitude of narratives.
Navigating the internal American Jewish community attitudes was the hardest part for me. There were different frontlines [in America and Israel]. They were not morally equivalent, but there was a lot of fear that we had in America. We didn’t know what this new American administration was going to do when faced with this conflict. It wasn’t clear what President Biden was going to say, or how things would play out given political shifts within America, nor what this would mean for an American Jewish community that felt forced to oversimplify and take sides. We were also scared of what that was going to mean for us locally.
LAUREN BERKUN: What do you want your counterparts in Israel and North America to understand about how the Jews in your communities were interpreting the conflict?
HADAS RON ZARIZ: I want you to understand that this is about our family and about our kids in the army. It is more than values or ideology. It’s our life. Our lives here are in many ways confusing. It was clear to me that my son is going to the army, but I will fight for peace and equality and human rights in every place I can, and I do it for him as well. I pray that he won’t be in Gaza and will never participate in war. But he serves in the army because that is part of serving his country, just as I did. This is the complexity of our lives. This is our struggle. I have to keep reminding myself to hold onto all kinds of narratives. I want North American Jews to share that with me.
DOTAN ARIELI: Like Hadas, I want North Americans Jews to know that Israel is not made up of one way of thinking. Sometimes it looks that way even to me, but it’s not. I’m surrounded by people that think that we are responsible for what happened with Israeli Arabs in Israel, that the situation is our responsibility, as well as theirs. The riots that were happening are also our responsibility. I know our voice is very quiet in the media in Israel. We may not be very loud, but there are a lot of people who think in a very complex way.
RORI PICKER NEISS: For a long time, we have adopted a narrative of North American Jews investing in Israel, of seeing our fate as tied to the fate of Israel. It’s important for me that Israelis know that what happens in Israel impacts us in North America. I don’t mean that to suggest that Israelis should change their actions but that they should understand that the ripple effects go in both directions. There is a tether that’s tying us together.
“Our lives in North America are no less valuable or authentically Jewish.”
I have a request of Israeli Jews: let us not be so quick to dismiss people. Even among those with very strong ideologies, we can engage them at the personal level, building real relationships with people. During this recent conflict, I was sitting with some people who would fall into the category of those who criminalize Israel. We were able to sit together, to be in pain together. It wasn’t about convincing each other but about expressing our pain to each other. To look at America and dismiss any group of people, it makes it much harder for us to do the work on the ground. When Israelis align with one or another American political party, it makes it very hard for those of us doing the work on the ground. Hadas said, “This is our lives.” Our lives in North America are no less valuable or authentically Jewish. We can be the best partners for you, but you must let us do it.
YAEL SPLANSKY: I don’t want to add another burden to Israelis, but like Rori I want you to keep us in mind, to consider how things play out in the diaspora, to consider those ripple effects. Tal Becker [a legal adviser to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and senior fellow of the Kogod Research Center at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem] once defined a Zionist as someone who gives Israel the benefit of the doubt. There should be a similar working definition for the diaspora, that Israelis would also give us the benefit of the doubt.
LAUREN BERKUN: This week we visited homes in Sheikh Jarrah and heard about the situation on the ground from multiple perspectives: from Arab families facing eviction, and from Jews working to change the neighborhood’s demographics by bringing more Jewish residents to Sheikh Jarrah. What was that experience like for you to listen to conflicting, even irreconcilable narratives?
HADAS RON ZARIZ: My obligation is to not to give up on my Zionist or Jewish points of view but to use those views to say something about the occupation and about the conflict. On the other hand, I remind myself not to run to the feeling of guilt because it doesn’t help me communicate about this conflict. I really appreciate what Donniel Hartman said to us: something is not right in the way that we live with so many years of unjust occupation.
RORI PICKER NEISS: I found Donniel Hartman’s observation that this is the first round of conflict that’s being linked to occupation to be astute. But that means that the American Jewish community is ill equipped: because we never had the first conversation about occupation, how do we have a conversation about how the conflict with Gaza is being linked to occupation? In America we saw a real effort by some institutions to link this to something other than occupation. I saw statements trying to link it to Iran, saying Israel is trying to stop a nuclear Iran. Or, based on where they started the narrative, some made it seem like Hamas just started shooting rockets out of sheer boredom.
We put out an informational email. As I looked at the first line, I said to myself: where you start this story is itself a political decision. Did this start when the police raided the Temple Mount or Al-Aqsa? With the protests in Sheikh Jarrah? Or years before? We’re not equipped to tell the story. The organized Jewish community is having a completely different conversation than the one Israel’s critics are having. They’re talking about occupation. Jewish leaders are saying, “Israel has the right to defend itself from Hamas.” We’re not addressing what they’re saying: “For 54 years, you’ve held control of these territories and you rule over a people and what are you going to do about it? It’s immoral.” We’re neither answering nor even hearing those questions and thus we’ve set ourselves up in some ways for failure.
YAEL SPLANSKY: I want to talk about the diaspora “front” of this conflict. Never in my life did I see something in the news that I knew was incorrect, and then actually go report it, except for during this conflict. CBC [Canada Broadcasting Corporation] was interviewing a very articulate young Palestinian woman, probably 20 years old, in Gaza City. She said that they don’t have bomb shelters in Gaza because Israel won’t allow them to build bomb shelters. The reporter just let it stand. So now thousands of Canadians believe that falsehood. I reported it to Honest Reporting, and they followed up.
Throughout the conflict, people were referring me to journalists: “Rabbi Splansky, can help you find us a spokesperson?” I’ve been telling journalists that I’ll provide them with an Israeli in Toronto who would be a good fit for TV or radio, but first I need to know what kind of story they are trying to produce: entertainment or truthful conversation?
“Where you start this story is itself a political decision. Did this start when the police raided the Temple Mount or Al-Aqsa? With the protests in Sheikh Jarrah? Or years before? ”
Another story. My synagogue, Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, maintains a good relationship with a local mosque. We had arranged for a six-part series of joint programming. Our first event addressed Jewish and Muslim humor–it was very funny. The second event was to be led by two professors, one teaching about the history of antisemitism and the other about the history of Islamophobia, in hopes of understanding each other’s narratives better. Days before the event, the president of the mosque wrote to us: “I’m sorry, I don’t think we can continue the series.” Why? Because of a flyer on our website about a UJA solidarity rally [related to the conflict]. I read the flyer again and again and couldn’t find anything offensive. Finally, the mosque leader explained that she objected to language in the flyer referring to Hamas as terrorists. I couldn’t believe it. The government of Canada lists Hamas as a terrorist organization. Suddenly, this tender relationship that we had invested in so much is frozen.
One more story concerns a horrific attack on a Muslim family in London, Ontario. A family of three generations was out for a walk one evening, and a white supremacist in a truck mowed them down. Only the youngest grandchild survived. Thousands of people showed up for a vigil full of heartfelt mourning and in solidarity against white supremacy. The vigil avoided politics, until the last speaker, a local Imam I haven’t met, said: “I just want to say, whatever is happening in Jerusalem and Gaza is related to whatever happened in London, Ontario. Period.” The crowd went crazy with cheers. I thought to myself, what just happened here? It felt like whiplash. We’re still reeling from it.
RORI PICKER NEISS: It’s such a powerful story. Now it’s socially acceptable to talk about occupation. What bothers me is that the Jewish community could have been leading, even driving, that conversation. Instead, we yielded that space, we silenced this conversation within our community, and in other spaces, for so long. We’ve lost the credibility to be the ones to lead in those spaces. Now we’re trying to catch up, and we’re behind. I think we’ve lost some of our own credibility because we haven’t been honest with ourselves about what’s been happening.
LAUREN BERKUN: What is our role in all this as rabbinic leaders in Israel and in North America? What ideas inform how you equip the Jewish communities you work with to grapple with the conflict?
HADAS RON ZARIZ: In Israel, too, we avoid talking about the occupation…To hear you makes me feel like we are sharing the same conflict. The way I was raised, the conflict was Israel’s business; the diaspora can support us or not. But being in this community of rabbis, I have started to feel this is a unique group that can see the complexity and feel the responsibility to each other. For you to make such an effort to come to Israel at a time like this gives me a feeling that this conflict is not only ours in Israel, it’s yours as well as ours.
DOTAN ARIELI: I want to strengthen North American Jewry. Not in the old way, by saying you have antisemitism so you should come here to Israel. I want you to be happy and safe where you are; keep living your wonderful life wherever you live. I understood it before, but the feeling is stronger now.
RORI PICKER NEISS: A few days ago, we studied together the story in the Talmud (Gittin 55a) about a house built with a stolen beam. It’s a beautiful image. Whether the theft was intentional or accidental, the text doesn’t say. Somehow, you’ve built your house around a beam that doesn’t belong to you. Both the beam, which is not yours, and the house you built, are true things. To rectify the situation, you’re not required to destroy what you built in order to return the beam. But at the same time, you must somehow make that owner of the stolen beam whole again. The fact that you’ve built this house around the beam, and the fact that it’s your beautiful home, the place you’ve raised your family, doesn’t erase your obligation to somebody else.
I’ve been feeling so deeply this sense that all of us have built things and we’ve all borrowed and taken from one another. Sometimes those have been given as gifts. But we’ve taken things that people didn’t want us to take. There seems to be a fear that if we acknowledge that, we couldn’t handle the responsibility, so it’s easier to deny it: “let’s just erase that history.”
But saying “this is immoral” doesn’t mean we have to go back to 1947, or that we have to take away a country. Instead, we must identify a process to talk about making somebody whole again. We are having that conversation in America, and certainly Canada is having that conversation. We’re scared of those conversations. I love that our tradition acknowledges: yes, you’re going to build a house around a stolen beam, and that doesn’t mean you have to destroy your home, but you can’t ignore that there’s somebody who’s missing a beam. We should ask ourselves what that looks like for us.
YAEL SPLANSKY: I have a congregant in her late twenties who grew up in a staunchly Zionist home. She asked if our synagogue would be putting out a statement about Sheikh Jarrah. “If you don’t,” she said, “all the work you did in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder will ring hollow.” She was connecting the dots in a way that I don’t agree with. But I take her, and the issues, too seriously to ignore her view. What we’ve learned from the protests in Jaffa and from the protests in Minneapolis is that we need to change the definition of what we mean by strong or powerful. Who is the gibor [mighty one]? The one who is willing to say, “We must do better.” We must make room not only in our prayers, but also with our wallets, our land, and with positions in government and that will make us whole again. In Canada, we use the word “reconciliation,” and in the U.S. the word “reparations.” I don’t know what the word is in Israel…
DOTAN ARIELI: We use the word hakarah, recognition.
LAUREN BERKUN: After sharing these words, what do you think Israeli Jews and North American Jews owe to one another, particularly when a conflict like the Gaza conflict breaks out?
HADAS RON ZARIZ: The Lebanon War started right after I left the army, and many of my friends were still in the army. As soon as the war started, protests broke out against the war and against the government. I participated in these protests and was very clear in my mind about opposing the war. I spoke with my soldier friends about how they felt about my protesting against this war. Two of my dear friends said, “We need you. We need your voice, the voice of protest. It’s helping us to do our job better.” I feel we Israelis owe you [North American Jews] our voices. We can fight in different ways.
RORI PICKER NEISS: I grew up in an Orthodox community in New York pervaded by this language of what we owed to Israel, our obligation to Israel. We were expected to support, fund, lobby for, and defend Israel. Jews who questioned this were told: “Israelis are on the playing field. You are the fans, and as spectators you don’t get to question or to tell Israelis how to play the game.” I found that very difficult. True, I’m not the one on the field playing the game, but you’re asking me to do all these things for you. If you want me to sit up in the nosebleed seats and be quiet, I can do that. But then you can’t call me and say, now we need you to go to Congress or send money.
Being in these conversations together, studying together, and being able to talk about this has shifted something for me. I don’t want to be obligated to you, and I don’t want you to be obligated to me. I want to be in relationship with you. That relationship includes obligation, but the relationship doesn’t come from obligation; the obligation emerges from relationship.
YAEL SPLANSKY: I want the state of Israel to live up to its declaration of independence, not because diaspora Jews are wagging their fingers about it, but because you Israelis are saying so. And I want Israel to serve as an inspiration. Maybe it isn’t fair to ask that of you. But Israel is the center of the Jewish world. We draw from you pride and insight and direction and spiritual uplift—and even physical strength.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
