The Key to Peace in the Middle East
By: Paula Levin
“Only one nation is capable of destroying the Jewish People – and that is the Jewish People.”
Mark Twain once said that “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme”. And the song that was playing before October 7 was eerily familiar – the chords of discord. Before the destruction of the Second Beit Hamikdash, with Jerusalem besieged, factions within the city were fighting… each other! The city had enough food in storage to withstand years more, but those storehouses were burned to the ground – leading to the horrific scenes of starvation we read about in Eicha every year on Tisha Be’av. Now for the parallel. Just ten days before Hamas launched its depraved attack – Jews in Tel Aviv were physically fighting each other – at a Yom Kippur prayer service – over the issue of segregated seating in a public square. The protests over judicial reform that had shut down highways, placed barbed wire over light rail tracks, and filled families with rancour for each other had reached the point that fighter pilot reservists vowed they would not defend the country if the reforms were passed.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that over the last three and half thousand years, every world superpower has tried to destroy us – the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Christian and Muslim crusaders, the Nazis, and the Soviet Union. They are all gone, and yet we remain. The times that we faced the existential threat of exile, however, were each precipitated by our own actions. The first exile was to Egypt. The pasuk says that the brothers hated Yosef, they could not speak with him in peace[1], and, coming close to killing him, sold him as a slave. The second exile happened after just three Jewish kings had reigned (Saul, David, Solomon) and civil strife split the Jewish People into two kingdoms, Judah and the ten tribes of Israel. The latter were conquered by the Assyrians in 721 BCE and disappeared from the annals of our history. As a direct result of the split, the two remaining tribes of Judah and Benjamin were vulnerable to the Babylonian onslaught, which resulted in the destruction of the first temple 586 BCE. Rabbi Sacks even makes the point that our name – Jews – comes only as a result of this split – previously we were known as the children of Israel.[2] And in what surely cannot be a third coincidence – more internal strife resulted in the aforementioned Roman destruction of the Second Temple. Says Rabbi Sacks, only one nation is capable of destroying the Jewish People – and that is the Jewish People.
In a fascinating feature of classical Jewish thinking, the Prophets of old and the Sages of the Talmud always placed the responsibility for our fate squarely on our own behaviour. As Jews, we are never victims of other people’s evil designs, we carry both the accountability as well as the key to our own redemption. This incredibly resilient worldview guides us never to despair or feel unfairly victimised, we need never waste our energy on Days of Rage or fantasies of revenge. What we do need to do – as Michael Jackson put it – is look at the man in the mirror and ask him to change his ways. We always have hope because we always have agency.
Divisiveness has been at the root of our suffering at all of our watershed moments. How, then, do we navigate our differences, our passionately held beliefs? How does Israel flourish as a democracy with a plurality of cultures and views, allowing space to protest and to stand for or against certain political positions – but without the baseless hatred that always leads to catastrophe for our people?
October 7 changed us all. Most visibly in Israel, it changed Israeli society into a brotherhood. Unprecedented levels of unity have characterised Israeli society in its aftermath. Protest organisations pivoted overnight to drive volunteerism and fundraising for displaced families and soldiers – or their fellow countrymen, regardless of political beliefs. Charedim were barbequing for soldiers, while secular Jews kashered their restaurants to make them food. Intuitively, those most traumatised by Hamas issued impassioned pleas to stop the internal hatred. They knew our response needed to be unity. Many people have seen the heart-wrenching video clips. A soldier who has lost a leg, begging for it not to have been in vain, begging for unity. Two or three weeks after October 7, a video of Shelly Shem-Tov, the mother of Omer, went viral. “We are all brothers! Brothers! Unite. My Omer was not kidnapped stam. But because for an entire year, we have been warring with one another. Enough! Enough!” Natalia Casseroti, mother of 21-year-old Keshet (the Hebrew word for rainbow) who was murdered at the Nova Festival, wrote the following: “The enemies who see us divided with mutual hatred between us know that they easily overpower us. If we are not together, truly together, in acceptance of our differences, we will not overcome what we have been through, and the death of 1 400 people, including my son, will be in vain! In their death they commanded us life. You don’t have to love each other. Definitely not. But yes, we must accept. There are great differences between us, like many colours, but we all have a place in the rainbow.” Faced with an actual, merciless, savage enemy, Israelis were confronted with true evil – and those on the opposite side of the political spectrum – whom they had previously seen as an existential threat to the country – who they had labelled as evil – suddenly paled in significance. On the scale of one to ten – where evil is ten, people with different political aspirations and religious beliefs suddenly moved to the centre.
The phenomenon of demonising someone who has hurt us, or whom we see as a threat – has a psychological explanation. Clinical psychologist Joanne Zagnoev explains it at length in her upcoming book Soul Therapy (Mosaica). It’s called “splitting”, and it describes our tendency to simplify complex things into black and white categories. It starts as a legitimate defence mechanism in infancy, when our cognitive abilities are still developing. Sadly, many of us never grow out of it. Joanne explains that when triggered by pain, shame, or fear, we lose sight of ‘the whole picture’ – the fact that most humans are neither all-good nor all-evil, but a mixture of both – mostly good! We may do bad, hurtful, ignorant, or destructive things, but this is not the totality of who we are. Splitting is when all good or bad in this mixture is erased and we are left with a two-dimensional picture of the person, or group. Splitting is common in politics, and the phenomenon is purposefully used by populists in search of power or votes. The easiest way to manipulate people and pit them against others is to use incendiary language. Sticks and stones are far less sinister than the labels that shut down conversation and drive people away from each other. If you pay attention, you will see this in full force in every society today as labels like racist, nazi, and genocide are thrown around to shut down dialogue. In Israel, those words may be chareidi, fanatic, chiloni, leftist, rightwinger. Beneath the labels, though, are people. And for the Jewish People, those people are our brothers. Our own family! The Talmud in Nedarim states that the Jewish people are one body. The left and right are two hands beating each other! Could anything be more ridiculous? As Tzvi Freeman puts it, “There are no two sides, just two hands of a single body that are not coordinated too well.”
We need a way to hold onto each other’s goodness even when our fears are triggered, even when we feel threatened by their politics. Freeman writes that our religion should actually be spelled Jewdaism, because without Jews, there is no Judaism. If the Torah is the foundation of the world, our peoplehood is the ground in which this foundation is built. Without our unity, without our love for each other, there is no foundation. We have to put our relationships with each other first. “If we are not a people, what are we doing in that land?” he asks.
But, as Rabbi Sacks puts it, unity does not mean uniformity. G-d is the ultimate unity, but is there anything simple about the Infinite Oneness? Hashem chose to create a world of astonishing and infinite diversity, with unity and interconnectedness at its core. Our job is to reveal the underlying unity, while also allowing space for diversity. Each person reflects a unique aspect of “tzelem Elokim”, the image of G-d, in which we were all created. If Israel can get this right, wouldn’t this be the greatest light unto the nations? If a society made up of countless different colours, cultures, histories, and stories can find the grace to tolerate one another – would that not be the ultimate model for every society?
The Torah offers a roadmap for how this is done. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that the Oral Torah is a record of heated debate among scholars. Why not just record the conclusions reached? “We need to stay in the argument until it leads us to love each other,” he says. If we stay at the same table – we can share the collaborative search for truth. Rabbi Gartner explains that the talmud teaches that just as we all have a different face, so we each have a different opinion. “Why does it say, just like we have a different face? It can simply say we each have different opinions. My rebbe taught that the example is the whole point. Just as we aren’t annoyed that someone’s face looks totally different to our own, but accept this face completely, so too we should not take personal offence by the fact that someone thinks differently to us!”
Truth is a process of collective discovery through curiosity and exploration and testing. And it demands that we keep talking to each other – instead of about each other. This may be why there are so many laws governing speech in Judaism. We have to be careful not to diminish, demonise, and defame each other through our words. And when we talk to each other, we connect with our shared humanity and are confronted by our common destiny. “Though we may be divided on matters of faith, we share the same fate,” says Rabbi Sacks.
Something amazing happens when we talk to each other – instead of at or about each other. Menachem (Manny) Shasha is a Brooklyn-born Israeli who defines himself as Charedi. Together with his wife and five children, he lives in a secular neighbourhood in Herzliya. Manny loves hosting people, and when he saw a lone soldier at his minyan in the old age home where he davens, he invited him for a meal. The soldier asked if he could bring some flatmates, also recently released from the army, and four young men from around the world arrived for a meal. The next week, Manny asked his new friend to spread the word that they were welcome to join his family for Friday night Oneg Shabbat – an informal gathering with food and song and connection. That’s how Manny ended up hosting between 20 and 30 young people every Friday night. These are “irreligious people’” with diverse views about Israel, all choosing an Oneg Shabbat in Herzliya over Tel Aviv’s nightlife. “I think it’s because they know I don’t have an agenda. I’m not trying to convince them of anything or prove anything. My wife and I simply open our home and heart to them because at the end of the day we are all family.”
It’s this attitude that led Manny into the unusual position of collaborating with a left-wing organisation and forging meaningful connections with people with polar opposite political beliefs. “I was walking in the neighbourhood and I noticed a reform shul’s community hall that had been turned into a “Chamal” – a war room – which is a place where people bring donations for displaced families and soldiers. One day I walked inside to see what they were doing and if I could help. Of course they were shocked to see a religious looking man coming into the hall, but I was really moved by the chesed that is at the heart of what they were doing and who they are, so I asked how I could contribute.” Manny was so inspired by the important work these people were doing that he brought potential donors to see and began to assist the women in charge of the operation. Before long, because he is Manny – he had invited them to his home. “I often host a rabbi to give an open dialogue about the Torah perspective on life, I invited these ladies to come and check it out – no pressure. They joked with me afterwards: ‘You probably thought we wouldn’t come!’ And it’s true. I didn’t. But I feel so hopeful about this connection because I think this is what is sometimes missing from Israeli society. It’s easy to get obsessed with the 1% that we disagree on, or on how someone is dressed, because there’s no face-to-face interaction, we miss the other 99% of the values we actually share! Building bridges must start with a smile, saying good morning, and being a mensch. It means looking at the good. There’s a lot of criticism of the chareidim for not serving in the army, and while there are many who do, the overall idea is not something that is welcome within their communities. It must be understood that from the perspective of the Eternal Jewish Nation, they are the ones who are plugged into the electricity which is the “Yahadut” (Judaism) of what it means to be a “Yehudi” (Jew) – they provide the unbroken chain of Torah since Har Sinai. Whenever a person wants to return to our roots, to our history and thousands of years of Torah knowledge, the chareidim are there to reconnect them. In addition, there are so many Charedi organisations that contribute to society in so many ways, for example Zaka who are volunteers that went into the South after the massacre, knowing they would be traumatised for life with the atrocities they witnessed and yet they still chose to go. On the other hand, we also have to look at the good in people we call secular. Their passion for standing up for what they believe is right. The gemara teaches that during the reign of King David, the nation was on a very high level spiritually to the extent that even a five-year-old girl was greater than any of the tzaddikim in our generation. And yet, many soldiers were killed in the many battles that were fought. In contrast, during the reign of Achav and his evil wife Izevel, when the nation were idol worshipers, not a single soldier was killed in battle. And the gemara explains that the people’s unity is what protected them. They did not speak negatively about each other. So it’s clear that unity is our secret weapon and is what G-d wants from us.
“Right now, we no longer need to support the families who were displaced, but we are still collecting and sorting out things for our soldiers. And I think it’s important to notice that no one asks what a soldier’s opinions are on politics or religion before they will give him a neck warmer, thermal socks, or hygiene products. It’s enough that he or she is our brother or sister and defending all of us, for us to care and want to do everything to support them. I believe that when this war is over, those soldiers who were there for each other in the hardest moments, standing shoulder to shoulder in the face of death, united on a level we can’t imagine, they will help create a new society of love, loyalty, and tolerance. They will help us remember that we are all brothers. Brothers fight. But those arguments should always be seen for what they are – a small noise in a sea of love.”
The protests against the government have resumed. Wearing their t-shirts representing a far left party, Manny’s new friends told him they were going back to Kaplan street on Shabbat. “I think things will be different this time,” he concludes. “We now know that we have common ground and that we can work together. And I’m hopeful that we can build on the positive…”
