Shlakh and Minority dissent / שלח און מינאָריטעטע ניינזאָגונג

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim (Tōrah commentary) written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist. 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 source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make us more comfortable) and uses Tōrah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

An appeal for Gaza

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, the Holocaust

Promised land

Twelve spies are sent to scout the land of Yisroel, also called Knaan. They are gone for 40 days and return with sensational reports: the land is full of giants. "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." The people despair and beg to be back in Mitsrayim, believing that they cannot win in battle. Two of the spies—Hōsheya/Yhōshua (Hosea/Joshua) and Kholeyv (Caleb)—argue in defense of Hashem's promise that they will win and inherit the land. The community prepares to pelt the steadfast spies with stones when Hashem appears in the Mishkon to scold them, threatening the whole community with death and pestilence. Moishe Rebeynu appeals to Hashem's ego and argues for mercy. Hashem relents and tempers the punishment: the people will wander for another 40 years that their "carcasses shall drop in this wilderness". Only their children will see the promised land. A small group of regretful Israelites decides to go forth and fight for the land, following Hashem's initial will but ignoring the revised instruction to wander/die; they perish in battle because Hashem is not with them.

We also get details about the sacrifices in the future Temple; the law of taking khale (challah); the mitsve of tsitsit; and the punishment of the wood gatherer, who was stoned for gathering sticks on Shabos.

One of the main narratives in Tōrah is Jewish wandering. We are punished with golus in a literal and spiritual sense. Tōrah is also about displacing other people in Knaan because we used to live there, and (more importantly) Hashem says the land is ours. It's not a good model for peace. But within it, we also have models for dissent.

The death cult of Zionism

Rashi said of the giants seen by the spies: "it seemed as if the sun was draped around their necks". The enemy is huge and we are small. We've been traumatized by generations of slavery and are triggered by fear. We dehumanize them, we hate ourselves, and we cannot believe that we will ever be safe again. We're once more in bmidbar (the wilderness). I'm not sure we ever left.

Even though they have new instructions to wander the desert until they die, a few soldiers decide to try to fight their way into the Holy Land anyway.

The word וַיַּעְפִּלוּ ("defiantly") is of uncertain translation. Rashi says it connotes darkness. The Netziv elaborates:

The intention is that there were many of those who went up who believed and knew they would not succeed and would fall in war, but nevertheless they considered it worthwhile to be killed in the Land of Yisrael and be buried there and not in the desert. However, Hashem annulled their plan.

The soldiers are not foolish but are determined in their self-destruction. They would rather die and be buried in the promised land than live in golus (exile). This reading harks to the death cult of Zionism: Israelis send their children to the meat grinder of war, and they kill not only combatants but children and civilians. Better to die on our feet than to... live in peace, also on our feet. There is no regard for life on either side of the borders. And it does not appear that Hashem is with them.

The insolent soldiers in the desert are killed. It's an irony that, by disbelieving Hashem's promise, they created a self-fulfilling prophecy of death on the battlefield. Another irony is that the Netziv was a proto-Zionist who believed strongly in the modern Jewish settlement of Palestine.

Wandering and inheriting the land:
on indigineity, refugees, and colonizers

After the Holocaust, Jews were living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps across Europe, without immigration documentation. It would be callous to call them "colonizers", no matter where they voyaged. Are their children colonizers? After how many generations does a people "belong" somewhere?

To what extent are we responsible for displacement: only if we steal the house? If we redline? If we buy it for a fair market rate, but alongside a nationalist project to shift demographics? What if we have no where else to go? We must hold the contradictions between being a refugee and a settler; being displaced and displacing others.

People have used so much breath and paper explaining why Jews are not indigineous to Palestine, so I won't. I also believe that even if we were there first, it doesn't matter.

I'm not willing to use convenient but flat narratives, because I think they undermine truth and therefore justice. What the Jews are doing—and I use that word deliberately because I believe we are almost all implicated—what the Jews are doing in Palestine and Lebanon and Iran is unforgivable. And, I don't think that talking about the history of Israel/Palestine is a "distraction" from the current violence. It is the job of writers and historians to make sense of this and to honor its complexity. Simple narratives only serve those in power, even if we think it helps us in the short term.

I'm an anarchist and therefore believe states and borders are always bad. The Earth is our collective inheritance. If Jews want to live in Israel/Palestine, that is their right not as Jews but as people on this planet. Everyone is (or should be) entitled to freedom of movement. I'm disturbed by calls from the left of Jews to "go home"—t0 where, Poland?—instead of what I suppose would be too complex a chant, like "stay if you like but not at the expense of others". Palestinians have the right not only to return but to a brand new relationship with the land. We all do. Arguing indigeneity for anyone there is the wrong track. How do we prove that? How long back do we go? And why does my ancestor's connection to the land entitle me to live there more than others? We shouldn't carve up the Earth based on a birth lottery.

There is a tension between hating people (Jews), and hating systems (white supremacy), and hating the people that uphold the systems (the Knesset and IDF and ADL et al), and hating people that represent or benefit from the systems (Jews). We have limited energy and I want us to be effective in our targets—and, I don't want us to waste too much time choosing the "perfect" target. It's better to do something than nothing. But we can do better than smashing an Israeli-owned business in Brooklyn as if that's justice.

Name changes

Before the spies set out, Moishe changes Hōsheya's name to Yhōshua. Of course there's a trans read on this: a new name is a new identity, and in this case a new destiny. Yhōshua is favored by Moishe and represents strength among fear.

The land is called Knaan, erets-Yisroel, Israel, and Palestine, depending on who you ask. Zionists are obsessed with reminding us that "Palestine" is a Roman name, arguing that Palestinian is a "new" and therefore invalid identity, or that the Palestinian claim to land can only extend back to the 5th century BCE while Jewish connection to the land is older. To this I say: who cares.

Name changes are powerful, but they do not change the thing itself. Language reflects not an immutable reality of the object but the meaning we ascribe to it.

In this era of fractured Yiddishkeyt, some of us are reconsidering the name "Israel", stolen from the Jewish people to name the ethnonationalist project. I'm committed to holding on to it. I'm not prepared to cede any ground to Zionists.

Minority dissent

The ten spies who caused calamity were killed by plague; on the contrary, the two righteous spies Yhōshua and Khōleyv were permitted to survive not only the plague but the 40 years of wandering, that they would enter the promised land as a reward for their faith in Hashem.

The cries and begging to return to Mitsrayim is attributed to "the people". Are we to assume that literally everyone except those explicitly named—Moishe, Ahron, Yhōshua, and Khōleyv—were demanding to go back? Or was the entire community punished based on the loudest voices? Even if every single Israelite was not wrong or vocally supported going back, being quiet in critical moments is not good enough. We must speak up.

We must be like the two spies, standing up against our peers who outnumber us, and who are wrong—not due to our faith or in anticipation of reward, but because of our dedication to justice. At the risk of sounding like a centrist (khas v'sholem), today this means vocally and materially opposing Zionism and vocally and materially opposing antisemitism from the left. We should be clear that the reason the Nakba and the genocide are bad isn't because Jews are on land where they don't belong—an especially rich claim coming from not-indigenous people in America, or from colonial countries in Europe—it's the violence.

Against apartheid

Bmidbar 15:15 (Misha Holleb)

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Since long before October 7, the state of Israel has flagrantly contravened Tōrah, international law, and basic human decency by using apartheid—an unequal legal system in service of the systemic racial domination of one group over another—to uphold Jewish supremacy.

Are we a generation doomed to wander golus for the collective sins of our people? To put it another way: is it possible (or desirable) to distinguish antizionist Jews from Zionist ones? We are in the minority. They are pelting us with stones. Can we make them see reason and do tshuva? What if it's too little, too late?

Tōrah contains both violence, and rebuke for violence. Tōrah's many facets are the reason for its enduring relevance in Jewish life. It is our burden and privilege to wrestle with its contradictions.