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.

This parsha is an important piece of my parnosa (income), and the full dvar is paywalled for four weeks to help me sustain my work as a writer. But it's important to me that anyone can access Yiddishkeyt—if you can't afford to subscribe, email me and I'll send you the link for free.

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.