Dvarim and our Debt to the Dead / דברים און אונדזער חובֿות צום מתים

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim (Tōrah commentaries) written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist, with guest posts from comrades. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the pshat (i.e. engages with the plain meaning of the text, especially when it's difficult) and uses Tōrah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

An appeal

My friend Kamal needs help to leave Gaza. He is trying to immigrate to Greece to search for his missing son, who in desperation took a small and dangerous lifeboat across the Mediterranean. Please donate what you can.

Content note

Genocide in Palestine

"Take the land."

This is the first parsha in the last book of Tōrah, and it's largely a reminder of what happened in Bmidbar told through Mōshe Rebeynu. We remember how the bickering of the Israelites frustrated him. He appointed new leaders as delegates for the new legal system. The spies returned from Knaan and whipped the people into a panic, and the Israelites refused to enter the land; they were punished with wandering until that generation died. Mōshe recounts too the travels through different lands not ours, not promised us. He speaks his peace, chastising the Israelites for their wrongs and lack of faith as he prepares to die. An exit interview.

That this parsha is a reiteration of previous stories highlights the importance of remembrance in Jewish tradition. "Remember" is a constant refrain and commandment, and here repetition of our story is framed as a teaching. We remember not only the events but words. Our ancestors are a vital, almost-living part of our ongoing narratives.

Immediately following Shabos this week, we enter Tisha b'Ov, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.

My griefs this year are in orbit with each other: the genocide in Palestine circled by my personal struggles as an antizionst Jew of conscience. I'm mourning the mass death, the resulting trauma and loss of culture: asymmetrically, Palestinian and Jewish. How can I be observant right now? Our tradition has gone to great lengths to pivot away from the gleeful militarism of this parsha and last, only to turn violently (and relatively recently) toward nationalism.

Zionism kills everything it touches

including Jewish pluralism. All our ethnic, linguistic, ideological and geographic histories were flattened in service of creating the nationstate: for just one example—and a dear one to me—see comrade Elia Ayoub's piece on how Zionists violently repressed Yiddish in Palestine. It is no comfort that those of us who have long been antizionist were right about fascism being the logical conclusion of ethnonationalism.

After Shabos we will read Eykho (Lamentations), full of detailed and very bleak imagery of the loss of the Temple. Each verse in Eykho has a direct parallel in Palestine today: the decimated city, the starvation, the children in captivity, and all the indignities of war.

I cannot help but feel that the foe has prevailed. The people of the world are with Palestine but those in power are against her and want to "finish the job" of expelling—or killing—everyone in Gaza and the West Bank that they might build luxury hotels on the beaches. The war has raged for nearly 2 years but is at least as old as Zionism's late 19th century colonial roots. It's hard not to imagine that the Nakba is all but complete.

But it is our duty not to resign Palestine yet to history for us to remember: her people are still there, starving and dying and begging and fighting to live. There is so much damage and trauma already done which we cannot undo. And, it can always get worse. We must keep fighting and supporting her fighters.

Take stock once again of your resources. What are your skills? Who do you know? What can you sacrifice? Do not burn yourself out on sending spoon emojis back and forth. Ensure your efforts are spent on something that matters. For me, that metric is: action that either materially supports those in Palestine, or materially interrupts those enabling the genocide.

The dead are owed a great debt. Is it our sacred duty to remember our texts, our mythologies, our histories, and our martyrs—and in their complexities. But greater is our sacred duty to fight like hell for the living.