Growing Up Jewish in America
The Passover Seder has been one of my favorite celebrations of the year, but I’m so troubled by what’s happening in the Middle East, that I don’t know how—or even if—I can celebrate a holiday about escaping oppression this year, or ever again.
I was raised in a Jewish family, and I have passed on certain beliefs, superstitions, and rituals to my children: the dead live on in the memory of the living; it’s unlucky to name a child after someone who is living, lest the Angel of Death take the wrong person; and family dinner is sacred.
One of the first things I understood about being Jewish was that my family lived outside mainstream culture. When I was in first grade in 1961, I didn’t know which was worse: to say the school prayer we recited after the Pledge and invoke the wrath of my family’s god, or to refrain from praying, and offend the school authorities. I was relieved, later that school year, when the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools. Only much later in life did I learn that what we’d recited in school was Psalm Twenty-three, which is now one of the two bits of Biblical text that I’ve committed to memory. The other is, “Jesus wept.”
I was probably in my teens when I learned about the Holocaust, and understood the significance of the tattooed number I’d seen on the arms of my grandparents’ neighbors in Brooklyn and their friends in Miami.
When I was sixteen, my parents took me to Israel. My most enduring memory of that trip is looking out past the Shrine of the Book where the Dead Sea Scrolls are housed, toward a dusty, parched, plain, a plain I sensed had been blood-soaked time and again, and would continue to be so, again and again.
At sixteen, I didn’t understand the geo-politics of the creation of Israel, just as I didn’t yet understand that the Pilgrims and the Europeans who followed displaced the natives of North America, nor that my European grandparents, who came to America at the beginning of the Twentieth century, weren’t Pilgrims, nor were they seeking religious freedom as much as they sought survival.
Europeans are by no means the only ones in the history of the world who usurped others’ land. The tradition goes back at least to when Homo Sapiens pushed Neanderthals off their turf. What’s sad, is that despite the reputed evolution of humankind, this pattern persists.
It wasn’t until I was an adult, living in Vermont, that I understood that as a Jew, I was expected to support Israel. At the same time, I became aware of Israel bending toward theocracy, and that it oppressed its Palestinian neighbors. As one who has celebrated Passover for almost seventy years, I realized I couldn’t support either a religious-based government, nor one that denies Palestinians autonomy in a separate state. I was dismayed with Israel’s West Bank settlements and restrictions on Palestinians living in Gaza.
And then came October 7, 2023.
Of course, I was horrified when Hamas attacked Israelis and took hostages. As a non-practicing Jewish woman and acculturated American, I felt both conflicted and unsafe. In those days immediately after the attack, I wanted more than anything for Israel to turn the other cheek, to engage in a diplomatic process at least, and in a reparative process at best. And I will admit, that while these sound like lofty, ideal-driven dreams, they really arose from fear for myself, my family, for an Israeli friend who lost friends and colleagues that day, and for Jews around the world.
Israel’s biblical destruction of Gaza has made the world less safe not just for Israelis, but for all Jews. For me. And being American, which I grew up thinking was the best thing in the whole world, will not save me. The United States’ participation in the genocide in Gaza is as misguided as retaliating the September 11 attacks by invading Iraq. Wars of vengeance have made the world less safe for everyone.
As recently as the beginning of this century, I celebrated Passover with joy, able to rejoice in the story of the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt, enduring forty years in the desert, receiving the Ten Commandments, and coming to the Promised Land. I feasted with family and friends, each year weaving new stories, poems, and songs into this foundational story of a persecuted people. How, then, can I celebrate when those formerly oppressed are now the oppressors?
A Civic Prayer
I gave up on the idea of an all-powerful god years ago. When I lift my eyes to the mountains, they’re the Green Mountains of Vermont. What I believe in is civil society, where we worship democracy at Town Meeting and participate in the holy rite of voting.
This year, Newfane’s Town Meeting addressed an article regarding the war between Israel and Hamas. The meeting adopted an amendment to the somewhat technical article. It’s the last three sentences of this amendment that I can fully support. Indeed, they read like a prayer.
“We, the voters of Newfane, call for both sides in this conflict to acknowledge the pain and trauma they have inflicted on the other. We, the voters of Newfane, call on both sides, for the sake of all our children, to accept the right for both sides to exist, with freedom from repression, with freedom from the threat of annihilation from the other, and with self-determination, in peace.”
Amen.