As an Israeli, I am proud to be an American Jew
Op-ed: The victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre were murdered because they were Jewish and liberal; In Israel it is not a great honor to be an American Jew, but within the range of complex Israeli identities, I am proud to be Jewish-American, a member of a community from which we, as Israelis, stand to learn so much.
As a born-and-bred Israeli, I often play down the Jewish-American identity within me. Not that I’m fooling anyone, but afternoons on the Israeli playground taught me that it’s better to claim the fact that I’m a second-generation Jerusalemite. Or, if we’re playing our ethnicity cards, to pull my Dutch heritage card... but being an American Jew—that’s not something an Israeli would brag about.
American Jewry just isn’t something that Israelis like to think about seriously, not to mention liberal American Jewry.
Until, that is, they are being murdered for being Jewish, and being murdered for being liberal.
And so—even though the pain and mourning are still fresh— this is a moment for Israelis to reckon with the Liberal American Jewish Community, eleven of whose members died this past Shabbat in sanctification of God’s name, martyrs.
Martyrdom; sanctifying God’s name, these are not phrases we use lightly. They belong to the Jews of medieval Europe under the Crusader sword, to the persecution of Jews in Islamic lands. It is quoted in prayers for the millions slaughtered in the Holocaust, mingled with our tears for the deaths of those killed in attacks in our beloved Israel.
But not in North America. In the United States Jews don’t die as martyrs, sanctifying God’s name. Not that it has never occurred, but you know, generally: it doesn’t happen. In Har Nof—yes, in Los Angeles—no. And yet, here we are.
This coming Shabbat Jews all over the world will gather again in synagogues, and when the moment comes to return the Torah to the ark, that sweet, tender moment of parting, we will sing: “It is a Tree of Life to those who uphold it.”
Then, one by one, before our eyes we will see the worshippers from Tree of Life-Or LeSimhah of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who met death at the hour of prayer; who, having chosen to go to synagogue, and to this particular synagogue, with its particular set of values, were forced to give their lives in sacred martyrdom.
Sadly, in the three thousand year story of Jewish history, a community’s murder, its martyrdom, raises it up in our view to the status of a holy community. As the Shabbat prayer book goes: “Av HaRachamim, Father of compassion, who dwells on high: may He remember in His compassion the pious, the upright, and the blameless—holy communities who sacrificed their lives for the sanctification of God’s name."
Maybe that’s why so few Israelis see American Jewry as a holy community in that sense. Not like the communities of Maintz, of Polin, of Sanaa. Not like the communities of Andalus or Mashad. To see a Jewish community as a holy community in this sense is to accept its values as authentic Jewish values, its Judaism as one worthy of the name, a Judaism that the Holy Blessed One, imagined in choosing us, little us, from among all the nations of the world as God’s own people. A Judaism, a Jewry, in which a person is proud to be a part of.
So maybe this is the right moment to say, as we face the giant breach in our hearts— torn by the acts of an alt-rightist, drowned in the flood of lies that calls itself white supremacy, may its name be blotted out!—that the community of Tree of Life, Or LeSimhah Congregation of Pittsuburgh is a holy community, and its values are holy, and that we are glad to be called by its name and are proud of its work.
That they, as it says in the weekly Torah reading, they never got to read last week at Tree of Life, are the children of Abraham, who taught “his children and his posterity to keep the way of God by doing what is just and right.” And in their merit, we are proud to be Jews.
Thus, even if it saddens us that this horrific act was what brought their actions up into our hearts, it is still better to say this late than never: I am proud to be an American Jew.
Seeing people who labored for decades (97 years!), who saved and troubled and worked and gave; and who with their own hands and with no public support, in a random suburb of a post-industrial city, built a Jewish congregational home, where they could continue the tradition of their mothers and fathers and pass it along ‘mi’Dor l’Dor’, from generation to generation (as they say, in their American accents)— then I am proud to be an American Jew.
When we are aware of the fact that this murder took place ten minutes after the beginning of the service, that is, when the only people there are the core worshippers, the minyan-makers, the organizers and the volunteers, and alongside them the fragile ones whom others in the community have taken care to bring early, to support them; and when we think about all the congregations where people get up early to start services on time, and how many centuries we’ve been doing that, and how many congregations like that have sprung up in the last century in the United States—then I am proud to be an American Jew.
When we watch the video of the community memorial gathering, so interfaith, so Pittsburgher, so Jewish, and so very American, in which the community’s Jews chose to remember their dead alongside Americans of every race and religion and custom; and we understand that this is the Promised Land they dreamed of for themselves and for their children, an American dream that is so very Jewish—then I am proud to be an American Jew.
And when we understand that the straw that broke the back of that despicable anti-Semite was the fact that families in this congregation volunteered to protect immigrants and refugees to the United States, working with that magnificent organization HIAS; that they sought this way to express their obligation under the Torah’s most-repeated commandment, the commandment to love the stranger; when we understand that they said, “Because we were migrants in the land of Egypt and in the land of America, we are obligated to help migrants and displaced people, strangers and refugees around us, even though they aren’t from our own people, even though they speak Spanish while we have traces of Yiddish in our accents, even though the President of the United States thinks they are a threat—thinks they and we are a threat…” and when we understand that this is why that murderer marked them out for death—then I am proud to be an American Jew.
This is a time to inscribe these values on our hearts, and if it was not so clearly inscribed on our hearts before then let us write it now in the blood of those murdered as martyrs, sanctifying God’s name: those murdered were Liberal American Jews—A holy community, sustaining traditions three centuries old of loving humanity and repairing our world, alongside love of their own people and of ancient Jewish tradition. A community with a magnificent history, and with a future that will yet astonish us all. A community from which we, as Israelis, stand to learn so, so much.
So in this time of complex Israeli-Jewish identities, of framing ourselves as descendants of Moroccans and Kurdistanis, from the Soviet Union and from Holland, in which each of us contributes our own sweet and bitter elements to the crazy mixture that is Israeli Judaism, I’m proud to count myself among those descended from Americans, from that great liberal community. I hope to continue to uphold that Tree of Life that my ancestors planted in the soil of the United States, and here, in my home in Jerusalem, to continue walking in its ways; because its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.
Rabbi Mishael Zion is Director of the Mandel Program for Leadership in Jewish Culture, and leads the Klausner Minyan in Jerusalem.
