Eykev and Jewish chosenness / עקב און דער אם־סגולה

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim (Tōrah commentaries) written by an orthodox atheist transsexual anarchist, with guest posts from comrades. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance, and it's crucial that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. We 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

Mentions of genocide in Palestine, Zionism, antisemitism

The parsha this week is a continuation of Mōshe's soliloquy. He retells the story of the golden calf, the carving and smashing and re-carving of the tablets, the miracle of mana, and the failure of the Israelites to take the land after the spies returned. Mōshe implores us to have faith, to remember how awesome Hashem is, to destroy the peoples He delivers to us, and not to be ensnared by the lesser gods of other nations. Mōshe is rounding off the narrative, harkening back to Bereshis when Hashem promised to make Avrohom's children as numerous as the stars, and offering further promises from Hashem that will be fulfilled if we merit them.

This parsha is dense. It gives us the second paragraph of the Shema—the foundational Jewish prayer—with a reiteration of last week's commandments to lay tefilin and put up mezuzehs. Hashem (through Mōshe) claims to eschew bribes and execute justice for the widow and orphan, and once again commands kindness for the stranger. These things give us comfort and orient us toward righteousness. But the parsha also gives us an explicit articulation of chosenness and promises of genocides unfolding in our favor, in which we "show them no pity". There's plenty here to prop up Jewish ethnonationalism.

For better or worse, Tōrah contains both values we love and verses we struggle with. It is our work not to discard that which we don't like, but to reframe it and shift our understanding of what it means. Jewish chosenness, or Jewish particularism, is an ancient idea and liturgical battleground in liberal siddurim.

The orthodox view of Tōrah is that it is an immutable and timeless text. You don't get to rewrite the word of G-d. But, while the text is perfect, we are not: more than being permitted, we are required to reframe what we read and interpret it anew.

Chosenness

Tōrah is a complete text: it should be read with reference to itself, and the commentaries which come after. To pluck half-lines out of context is to disrespect the entire text and tradition, especially when done in service of violence.

The first half of this verse is used as a divine justification for Jewish superiority, but in context we see that the blessing being offered to set us "above" is fertility (and, in the following verses, health and military victory). It's a promise as yet unfulfilled: we are not blessed above others, evidenced by the continued problem of infertility among even a single Jew (or Jewish cow). We still get sick.

We could conclude that we do not yet merit chosenness.

Many leftists are uncomfortable with the concept of Jewish chosenness on a purely material basis. We can engage with the theology all we want, but in the meantime this idea is used as a justification for ethnonationalism—racism, xenophobia and violence. Antizionist Jewish organizing is dogged by the problems of particularity/universalism, tradition, isolation (within Jewish and antizionist communities), and guilt.

The genocide in Palestine continues. At least 184 journalists have been murdered. (This particularism doesn't mean that their lives were more valuable than martyrs who weren't journalists, but it helps us understand the scale of violence by zooming in, and gives us a glimpse into just how much is lost with each life. Journalists cover the atrocities and provide us with narrative; every martyr loses their voice, but journalists are silenced.) How can Jews preoccupy ourselves navel-gazing on Jewish issues in the face of such horror?

Antizionism and definitions in negative

Since October 7, antizionist Jews have been organizing to stop the genocide and support Palestinians. Some of us have organized as leftists; some as leftist Jews in particular; many of us moving between both contexts. There is utility in both.

For some antizionist Jews, their Judaism or Jewishness is defined by their antizionism: in relation to—specifically, in conflict with—Zionism and the crimes of medinas Yisrael. Ironically, this capitulates a lot of ground to Zionism by centering the state. When I lived in Scotland, there were two Jewish antizionist groups. Both went to pro-Palestine rallies, but only one hosted Shabos dinners.

Antizionism is an ideology, not a tradition. In the latest issue of Jewish Currents, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel observed that leftist organizing focuses on street movements rather than institution building, and the hesitation to agitate for collective liberation from a position of Jewish particularity rather than universalism:

Indeed, even among those who insist on the principled separation of Jewishness and Zionism, I’ve noticed a tendency to cede ever more territory, to declare more and more of Jewish life contaminated or at least suspicious, with suspicion reason enough for withdrawal. I’ve seen some friends and comrades become increasingly skittish about Jewish left politics, out of discomfort with the way that even adamantly anti-Zionist formations remain responsive to a seemingly compromised Jewish subjectivity.

The Jewish left has so far failed to articulate a Jewishness that is in solidarity with Palestine and isn't apologetic. This precludes us from being effective comrades who can leverage our particular position. It also denies us our heritage and the strength that our tradition can provide us, leaving us spiritually unfortified. To see Jewishness only as something to apologize for is to finalize the process of Jewish assimilation into whiteness.

This identity crisis is not just a distraction. If our Jewishness is going to be effective as a spiritual or rhetorical tool, it needs to be less self-doubting and offer something more inspiring than not-Zionism.

I was always a vocal antizionist, but my ritual observance is as divorced from the question of Zionism as it is from the question of "gender ideology". Of course I cannot help but daven as an antizionist, transsexual, bisexual, atheist, American, autistic, and all the other adjectives which comprise my identity—but primarily I daven as a Jew.

On building power

Some instagram activists quip that the last thing antizionist Jews should be trying to do right now is building power: the ongoing genocide shows what happens when Jews are in control. (I'm not going to link to examples and fuel the outrage economy.) It's a strange and racist notion to discourage people that you agree with—people with whom you share political goals, and political enemies—that they should not try to build power or coalition because of what their coreligionists are doing. Are Jews inherently and uniquely predisposed to abusing power?

The consensus on my social media is that Jews can be in coalition as leftists, but in trying to build power as Jews we are incapable of being in genuine solidarity with Palestine, or in fact any other oppressed group.

The left fetishizes disenfranchisement: "We outsiders remain pure, but powerless," Angel writes. In building the pink peacock—a queer, Yiddish, anarchist free food café and infoshop in Glasgow—I found this to be true. As we opened we braced for Nazis and TERFs, but the overwhelming majority of hostility came from leftists. We were by no means perfect (our hours were sporadic and our brand of social media was maybe annoying) but we were by no means the grifters or enemies of "the community" that some made us out to be. We were a small group of mostly-trans anarchists trying to feed people for free, and I'm proud to say we did that successfully. The left is more suspicious of those trying to seize power and wield it for good than those who already have and abuse it. Punching left and punching down is easier than building coalition with people you think are annoying.

Zionists have no moral qualms about building and seizing power. If we're to effectively combat them, we must build power too.