R'ey and Gods you haven't known / רעה און געטער וואָס איר האָט נישט געקענט

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

I know I make these appeals every week, but the situation remains dire as I'm sure you know. My friend Kamal needs help in Gaza. His nephew was shot in the head and is in critical condition, with treatment pending a payment of $2,000. This is his pre-existing GoFundMe, which will pay for medical bills and other basic needs. Donating is literally live-saving and life-changing. Please share and donate what you can.

Content note

Genocide in Palestine, Holocaust mention

As the year draws in, I must admit I'm losing steam. The transition from summer to fall is one I relish but I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with my time. There's a gulf between the knowledge, the firmly held belief that diversity of tactics is how we will win; and the feeling that I'm not doing enough and must do everything. We're not diversified anyway: we're individualized and isolated. If we don't agree fully and without caveat with our comrades, we're encouraged to leave and do it our way, alone. I won't help you if I disagree with an aspect of your tactic even if our goals are shared. It atomizes us and erodes what fragile ties to "the movement" and "community" we have. We are cursed.

The parsha this week is absolutely teeming with content for leftist analysis. Mōshe Rebeynu continues his speech: follow Hashem's laws. Don't do idol worship, do kill the idol worshipers, don't do human sacrifice, do provide offerings to Hashem in the prescribed way (we're reminded that disabilities are defects). Don't listen to false prophets, even if their predictions come true. Keep kashrus. Grieve without self-harm. Celebrate Peysakh, Shavuos, and Sukōs. Don't blot out Hashem's name. It's a week which, like last week, is difficult to read for leftist Jews. Mōshe gives us a utopic vision of tsedoke and debt forgiveness through shmita; and, he instructs us on genocide and how to "ethically" keep slaves.

There is not a coherent modern morality or ideology reflected in Tōrah. Instead, we have blessings and curses.

The parsha's tension between good and bad, blessings and curses, is established in its first verses. We are implored once again to follow Hashem, and to abstain from "other gods whom you haven't known/experienced". This phrase is repeated 4 times this week. It serves as a reminder for the Israelites that they should be loyal to Hashem because they have directly witnessed His power and benevolence. But I'm struck by the fact that we haven't experienced Hashem for many generations. We haven't seen miracles since those outlined in this ancient text. Or perhaps I should only speak for myself: I haven't known or experienced Hashem.

I understand that it is not the intent of whoever authored Tōrah that I read this and wonder why I, a modern Jew, should bother following this god or any other whom I have not known or experienced, but who demands terrible (and inconvenient) things of us. I've met Jews who have faith that their parents, and their parents, and so on have passed down this oral tradition after the miracles in Torah were literally witnessed by their great-great-great- - - - - - - -grandparents. Some Jews have a relationship with the divine which instills them with a faith all their own. I'm not such a Jew. My interest comes from the compelling discourse of the tradition, the strong values of justice and rest, and the beauty of the rituals. This week, I'm not sure if that's enough for me.

Kashrus

A big chunk of the parsha is devoted to kashrus. We're given a list of kosher and treyf animals and reminded not to drink blood or boil a kid in its mother's milk. I drafted a mini essay about it—the "intentionality", the class element, the deliberate isolation which comes from restricting our diets in an extreme way—but I can't bring myself to finish that right now. Studying kashrus laws feels absolutely perverse in the midst of the weaponized starvation in Gaza by a Jewish army.

The parsha presents a favorable view of slavery.

The excesses of owning and exploiting people are mitigated by shmita: release your slaves every 7 years, and don't send them away empty-handed. This, we are to infer, is justice.

The Torah though it doesn’t abolish it, limits slavery. Even if my absolutist sensibilities desire an outright ban, there is a pragmatic part of me that understands the value of regulating, rather than abolishing, the institution. Slavery was a fact of the biblical era and Israelite legislation made it a more humane condition. ... Instead of utopian dreams, the Torah offers laws to temper existing inequality and injustice.

Rabbi Dorothy A. Richmon, My Jewish Learning

Amidst all the impossible miracles, is slavery-reform the best that Tōrah can offer us? There is no liberation here.

"Genocide"

The parsha unambiguously calls for us to murder entire tribes and steal their land, again and several times. (Is dispossession and land theft not abhorrent to Hashem? Is divinely-demanded genocide not human sacrifice?) The Sages have answered that this commandment is time-and-location specific, and we are forbidden from misapplying it to our modern context. Yet even if genocide is not something we are to do now, Hashem still demanded that we wipe out entire peoples in our holiest and most perfect text.

There's no self-defense in genocide. Every myth about medinas Israel as "the only democracy in the Middle East" and the IDF as "the world's most moral army" has been revealed to be a farce since October 7, even for the people who were too ignorant and invested in Zionism to see it before. The rhetoric shift wherein all of Palestine is contained in the metonymy "Hamas" condemns the entire people to an "unfortunate but unavoidable" death for the sake of Jewish "security".

We were 5,000 people who were taken from Auschwitz to Warsaw to clean up the ghetto. One day, one of the Jews said to me: “Rabbi, do you still say today, ‘Ata bachartanu’ (You chose us)? I answered him: ‘Today I understand that you chose us more than ever before. If we were not chosen, we would be like them, Nazis. And we were chosen not to be like them. It is better to be burned than to burn. For what is ‘good’? Is ‘good’ to devour? Do we envy animals?

—The Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe, quoted by S. Shabtai, 25 September 1959

The Holocaust is special and is not special. The scale was unprecedented, but we are not the only people who've been murdered en masse for our ethno-religion—it's happening again. This genocide reveals what we are all capable of. Identity isn't static and we can all move from victim to oppressor, if we do not embody both already. Zionists believe that calling what's happening now in Palestine a "genocide" not only indicts the state of Israel but also somehow cheapens what happened to the Jews of Europe. We must remain exceptional in our perpetual victimhood and consequent inability to do harm. Always burned, never burning.

There is still more hand-wringing about the word "genocide" than the mass death, which is undeniable no matter what you call it. We don't want to call it a genocide because that means Jews are committing a genocide—the destruction of an ethnic group, with intent—and we are all complicit in failing to stop it.

The leftist obsession with language is the same distraction (perhaps too is my obsession with pointing out the pointless obsession). "War". "Genocide". Does the name matter? Who cares if your Zionist parents have their facts wrong or use words we don't like? It is not activism to give the thing the correct name without intervention. Why is that the site of struggle? Haven't we learned that the fascists and warmongers do not care if we point out their hypocrisies? By the IDF's own account, 83% of the dead in Gaza are civilians. The hasbara machine has wasted so much of our efforts on language while they kill.

People are starving, settlers are shooting people in the West Bank, and there are plans to continue forcibly displacing Palestinians from Gaza. These facts seems more urgent to me that the particular categorization of the "conflict". As a writer I value semantics, but I hope we save that battle for after the literal war is over and focus our immediate energies on stopping it.

Can we take any comfort in the righteousness of the text when it sits beside frameworks for systemic violence?

The contradiction that I feel in the text is best represented by the following verses on the poor:

What kind of divine promise is this? Our liturgy constantly reaffirms that all our sustenance comes from Hashem's broad hand, not our own efforts. It follows too that our lack is also Hashem's doing. (Everything is Hashem's doing). Here Mōshe promises that Hashem will provide for everyone, then immediately tells us He won't.

Ibn Ezra says that the contradiction indicates that Mōshe knows that there will not be a generation in which we sufficiently heed the commandments, meriting the blessing removing neediness. We're given a utopic vision, a slice of possibility, which we will never attain. The gulf between the blessing and the reality is insurmountable.

We are not blessed. We are cursed.

As the genocide-war wages on, I'm very much considering abandoning Judaism to Zionism. The more Tōrah I study the more I see the genocidal glee, and the sages don't do much to temper it. The consequences, obviously, aren't just theological.

What is all this commentary in defense of? At what point are we (Jewish antizionists) going to admit that Zionism is a product of Jewish values? Add on the codified misogyny and homophobia which persists not only in text but exegesis, and I wonder what the fuck we're doing.

Anyone who doesn't want to abandon our tradition to its worst adherents—the modern majority of Zionist Jews—has their work cut out for them. Do we have a debt to our ancestors and children to continue trying to find meaning in these texts, to ever-improving halakha that it reflect our humanity? Do we have a duty to Hashem? And what of Hashem's duty to us? Why tell us to oppress and kill? Why can't our divine texts imagine better blessings, which is to say: why can't we?

Can/should we try to change a bad system from within? Until recently, I held onto the belief that Zionists were abusing our texts. Now I think they're using them as intended. And by choosing to stay, we're participating. Every Jew is complicit in the genocide of Palestine.

I'm searching for parallels of participation/withdrawal from other rotten systems. Our governments and broader societies are fucked up, and we still participate because we don't want to abandon the vulnerable people within and besides, opting out is nearly impossible. But Judaism is religion which I can't bring myself to really do right now. Worship requires kavanah (intent) and all I can access is anger.

This is all, once again, the identity-obsessed question: what does it mean to be a Jew? I can't opt out of my personal history. But I could stop observing and participating in what has become a death cult.

Instead I cling to the things I find valuable in it. I love the focus on justice, flawed as it may be. I love the cultures of food and hospitality. I love the fetishization of learning and the centuries-long arguments. I hate kashrus but I love Shabos. This week, like every week, I will light the candles and close my eyes and say the brukha and like every week, my shoulders will finally relax a little.

Religion is a tool for narrative and culture, guiding us and grounding us. If we find this one is unfit to reflect the values we hold dear, I pray that we will find—or create—better ones.