"In Every Generation..." How Passover locks shut the Jewish imagination

For our Passover meal this year (Monday 14 April) I have a fifth question and answer to add to the traditional quartet of the Ma Nishtanah.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Because on this night we make a meal, literally and metaphorically, of our unique story. Via mouthfuls of bitter herbs, salt water, nuts and raisins mixed with wine, and unleavened bread, we promote the damaging mindset that tells us that we are the world's eternal victims.

I expect an immediate challenge to my liturgical liberties.

"Enough already with your iconoclastic itch! How can you say such things? Surely, Passover is the quintessential expression of our physical and spiritual liberation. Hasn't the escape of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery become the biblical paradigm of freedom from oppression that has brought hope to countless peoples across the centuries?"

I know, I know.

But my fifth question and answer is true none the less.

This is the night when we are most at risk from locking shut the Jewish capacity for empathy and blinding ourselves to the suffering of others - most notably, the Palestinians.

There will be some around the Seder table who will resent me wanting to recount the woes of another people ("the Palestinians for heaven's sake!") rather than those of my own kith and kin.

"Please can we celebrate the Exodus and our founding mythology of Jewish nationhood without dragging all that stuff into a nice family gathering! Let us enjoy the remembrance of our liberation by a God who intervenes in history with 'a strong hand and an outstretched arm'. Or are you going to insist on playing the part of the 'wicked son', the one in the Haggadah that cannot see the point of the celebration? Now have some more Motza and shut up!"

So, I will have to take a deep breath and try to explain how we have reached this immensely regrettable state of affairs. I may need a fifth cup of wine to get me through.

There are two powerful themes at work within the Seder night service. Two themes that have dominated Jewish self-understanding since at least the Middle Ages when the Seder night service, as we know it today, was first woven together.

The first theme can be characterised by this beautiful sentence that comes early on in our Passover meal:

"Let all who are hungry, come and eat; let all who are needy come and celebrate Passover."

This is the Jewish voice of welcome, of empathy. It marks the Exodus as the ancient anchor of Jewish ethics and reminds us of our timeless belief in a God that bends His universe towards justice and compassion.

The second theme arrives, with a chill air around it, towards the end of our evening of story telling, after the last terrible plague, the death of the Egypt firstborn, has persuaded Pharaoh to (temporarily) end his tyranny.

"In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands."

This is the collective cry of a people that has been oppressed and discriminated against throughout its history. A people left physically and psychologically scarred. A people that feels justice for them has been long delayed. This is our story told as one long pogrom.

It is a passage that reinforces the sense of the Jews under perennial siege all the way from biblical mythology to modern history. From the tribe of Amalek trying to thwart the slaves' escape from Egypt, to Haman's planned genocide of the Jews of Persia in the story of Esther, to Adolf Hitler's near success in making the European continent 'Judenrein'

In every generation there is always another Pharaoh who is out to get the Jews.

It's not difficult to understand how this idea repeated each year, at what is still the most widely observed Jewish festival, has profound emotional consequences for the Jewish imagination. And the resonance of the message does not end with the singing of the final verse of 'Hud Gadyah'.

We leave the Seder table convinced, once again, that we are the eternal victims, outsiders, never accepted, forever threatened. It is the worldview that helped to propel 19th century political Zionism into the 20th century Jewish mainstream. Zionism, brilliantly and dangerously, wrapped together a religious longing for spiritual and physical redemption with a nationalist colonial project dressed up as a rightful 'Return'. It was a compelling and heady mix. The world will never accept us, so the theory goes, so we must have our own state in our own land where we can live in safety and normalcy. And never mind who might be living there now, for our needs our greater than theirs, our story more important, and our ancient Promise more profound than any set of civil rights.

In our post-Holocaust, Israel-centred Jewish consciousness, the 'Every generation...' passage has continued to grow in significance, eating away at our moral sensibility. So much so, that we have difficulty understanding modern Jewish history and politics without constant reference to this paradigm of oppression and threat, or, as it is now more often described, 'Security'.

Benjamin Netanyahu happily taps into all of this with his new demand that the Palestinians accept Israel as a 'Jewish State' with all the implications that has for Israeli Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens, the rights of Palestinian refugees and the chances of the State of the Jews ever being truly 'Jewish and Democratic'. John Kerry and the Obama administration have failed to challenge the same "In every generation..." mindset and so find themselves acting as Israel's legal team rather than as honest brokers of peace.

And meanwhile...whatever happened to: 'Let all who are hungry, come and eat...'?

In Hebrew, the word for ancient Egypt is 'Mitzrayim'. The same word can also be translated as 'the narrow place'. Today, we Jews are living our lives in a narrow nationalist echo chamber where the chanting of our past suffering bounces off the walls blocking out every other sound to our ears.

It is true, we celebrated many Seder nights in the ghettos and shtetls of European oppression. But we are now in a radically different place and we are yet to adjust to our new circumstances. We have failed to notice that in this generation it is we who have the power, we who have status in every country where we live, we who have a nation state with a great army and Super Power backing. And it is we who have constructed our own apparatus of prejudice and injustice in the very land we call 'Holy'. Today, we have become the Pharaoh we once despised.

At this point I'm hoping that my Seder night companions will turn to me and ask, with at least a hint of humility: "So what is to be done, Rav Micah?"

I have a remedy. But it will not be easy.

A new Exodus is needed to set the Jewish mind free and open our imagination to those that suffer at our hands. The theme embodied by "In every generation..." must be understood anew. It must be claimed for the same Jewish spirit that invites the hungry and oppressed to share at our table. We must see that in every generation, even among ourselves, the narrow vision of 'Pharaoh' can rise up. Our task is is to bring it down in the name of the same God that rescued our ancestors with 'a strong hand and an outstretched arm' and delivered us to uphold a moral universe.

This year - we remain trapped in the narrow place. Next year - may we find our new Exodus to liberation.

Hag Sameach!

P.S. If you found this blog post provocative, stimulating or just plain annoying, then you may like to read 'Occupy the Hagaddah' from 2012  and the poem "On the Impossibility of Passover" from 2013.

Why I'm on the side of Bibi's "shameful" "anti-Semites"

Well, it's good to know where you stand.

As someone who supports the tactic of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel) I now know, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu's speech this week to America's pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, that I am a "shameful" "anti-Semite", "peddling a farcical, twisted picture of Israel" to the "naive and ignorant". In truth, BDS, according to Bibi, stands for "Bigotry, Dishonesty and Shame". In short, BDS is "morally wrong".

Well, if campaigning peaceably for human rights to be recognised throughout Israel/Palestine is what the Prime Minister of Israel thinks of as morally wrong, then he is certainly living in a different moral universe than the one that I hope most of us inhabit.

It was a great speech by the way - even if I don't agree with a word of it. Bibi has some top writers on his team who know how to push all the right buttons. If you want to understand the neo-Zionist mind-set that continues to present Israel as the eternal, embattled victim, vulnerable to destruction on multiple fronts, then read this. It's the perfect summation of everything that's wrong with politics in Israel today and why a just and lasting settlement with the Palestinians is so unlikely to happen despite all of the air miles that John Kerry has been clocking up since last summer.

Netanyahu is a good public speaker, especially with a warm American audience. His favourite technique is the magician's trick of misdirection. Don't look there, look over here. Don't see this, see that. It's Iran you should be worried about, stupid. And after Iran it's all those pesky anti-Jewish boycotters determined to "delegitimise" the unfairly maligned Jewish State. At which point it is time for Bibi's script writers to call up the really big gun in his oratorical arsenal: The Holocaust.

For Netanyahu, nothing concerning Israel can be understood without reference back to this cataclysmic event in Jewish history. From Bibi's mouth comes a terrible abuse of history and memory that aims to close down debate and frighten critics off with accusations of being the next generation of Hitler's willing executioners. It's just nonsense.

I'm yet to read a speech of Netanyahu's that does not conscript six million murdered Jews into the service of defending Israel's actions. In this worldview, Israel is forever the victim and another Holocaust is permanently in the making. And that paradigm of emotional blackmail, aimed primarily at Europe and America, allows the never-to-be-satisfied demands of Israeli military security to trump all other concerns and the rights of any other people who may also have (a rather convincing) claim to the land from which they were, and continue to be, forcibly evicted.

So is BDS anti-Semitic? Well, if it was truly aimed at all Jews indiscriminately, then yes, it would obviously be shameful, racist and idiotic. But it's not, as Bibi knows all too well.

BDS is a tactic, not an end in itself, and it is clearly aimed, not at Jews, but at the policies and actions of the State of Israel towards the Palestinian people. This is not the same of the Nazis boycotting Jewish shops in Germany. This is not the international version of Kristallnacht.

So will BDS mean the end of the Jewish State as we know it?

Well I certainly hope so. As long as by that you mean the end of an expansionist ethnocentric nation that by definition has to discriminate against its one million non-Jewish citizens and that sees Israeli Palestinian children as nothing more than demographic ticking time bombs.

If BDS leads to equal rights for all the people of Israel/Palestine in a land (two countries, one country or a bi-national state) that can call itself a homeland to more than one people, then count me in. This would not be the end of the world for the Jewish people in Israel or the Jewish diaspora. This is what progress would look like. And even better, it would be a closer alignment to Jewish ethics than what we have now.

So, is BDS unfair? Is it picking on Israel when other countries are surely far more deserving of our righteous anger?

As Netanyahu pointed out, Israel has a free press, is progressive on gay rights and has seen women hold the highest offices. Yes, there are other far more brutal regimes where no citizens enjoy the rule of law. But what Netanyahu fails to mention is that Israel is also responsible for a 47-year occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and an on-going siege of the Gaza Strip. So that's coming up to four million Palestinians who have their lives effectively controlled by Israel (without a vote in Israeli elections) who may consider the constant claim that Israel is the "only democracy in the Middle East" to be a touch misleading. In the 60% of the West Bank known as 'Area C', where most of the Settlement blocks have been built, there is no doubt that a form of apartheid rule is in operation from highways to courtrooms to planning regulations to water distribution.

After 20 years of the post-Oslo 'peace process' with ever-hardening right-wing coalitions governing Israel's actions, the views of half a million Jewish settlers dominating political discourse, and the United States failing to ever be a truly honest broker, it seems reasonable to think that the time is right to change the dynamic. Which is where BDS comes in.

Clearly it is starting to work. Otherwise Netanyahu and the whole Israeli hasbara (propaganda) machinery would not have cranked up to oppose it. Netanyahu mentioned BDS 18 times in his speech. So it's clearly rattling him, along with the entrenched formal Jewish leadership around the world.

In an interview given just ahead of Netanyahu's visit to the United States, President Obama was very clear about where he thinks responsibility lies for blocking an early resolution to this very asymmetrical conflict. It's not in Ramallah with the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, but in Jerusalem, the city that now boasts an extended name: "Jerusalem - the eternal, undivided capital of Israel and the Jewish people" [cheers and applause from the AIPAC audience]. So that's one possible compromise already taken firmly off the table.

Here's what Obama said in his interview:

"[W]hat I do believe is that if you see no peace deal and continued aggressive settlement construction — and we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time — if Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited."

What Obama is getting at is that if the Kerry talks hit the rocks, the call for Israel to be economically and culturally isolated will grow and not even its greatest ally, the USA, will be able to stop it.

It all reminds me of the quote from Mahatma Gandhi when describing his non-violent opposition to the British Empire in India: 

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Dear Bibi (The letter Cameron should have written to Netanyahu)

Prime Minister David Cameron chairs crisis meeting on UK flooding

Dear Bibi

I'm really sorry I can't make my planned trip to Israel this month. I'm up to my ears in flood water and effluent, with sandbags around my feet and high winds whipping around my head. You know what it's like in a political crisis, you have to look like you are taking charge and in control (even when you're not). So I'm staying home and chairing lots of crisis strategy meetings.

It's a real shame I can't be there in Jerusalem to make my address to the Knesset. I was planning to make a few points, and I don't mean like Stephen Harper did in January. Even you must have been a bit embarrassed by that amount of Canadian fawning from a Prime Minister. No, that's not my style. I was planning to land a few home truths rather than let you guys think I'm happy with business as usual.

Now, you know that I'm fond of saying that I'm a passionate friend of Israel. And I mean it. Although you and I may have a different idea of what that friendship should look like.

As a friend, I need to tell you this straight. Every indication I see tells me that the State of Israel will soon be considered a pariah nation by most countries and most people around the world. After all that Jewish communities have suffered throughout the centuries, what a tragic situation to have reached.

I know that Scarlett Johansson must have become for many in Israel their favourite Hollywood 'A' lister. But ditching Oxfam in favour of SodaStream and becoming the world's best known advocate for trade with the Settlements may not prove to be a great career move in the long run. She certainly did the pro-boycotters a huge favour. Scarlett 'setting the bubbles free' floated the whole issue of the 46 year occupation of Palestinian land to the top of the news cycle.

I know you're thinking up new ways to stifle the whole boycott movement in the States, but the real 'fizz' building behind the campaign is happening away from the front pages and in Europe not America. I guess you must have been a little rattled by the news that the Netherlands’ largest pension fund management company, PGGM, has withdrawn all its investments from Israel’s five largest banks because they have branches in the West Bank or are involved in financing construction in the Settlements. It's pretty clear that the whole occupation touches every aspect of Israeli life.

But I'll tell you the thing that really stood out for me in the last few weeks.

Perhaps the biggest signal that Israel is heading straight for global isolation was an editorial written in the Financial Times on Saturday 1 February 2014. Now this isn't the Guardian or Haaretz, this is a grown-up sensible newspaper for grown-up sensible business people. The FT's readership are not a bunch of radical lefties you can safely ignore. Off the back of the Scarlett/Oxfam bust up and the claim that her new corporate friends were providing Palestinians with jobs and "building bridges to peace", the FT had this to say to its economically rational readership:

"The occupation imprisons thousands of the Palestinians’ young men, gives their land and water to settlers, demolishes their houses and partitions the remaining territory with scores of checkpoints and segregated roads. There are almost no basic foundations for an economy. The way to create Palestinian jobs is to end the occupation and let Palestinians build those foundations – not to build “bridges to peace” on other people’s land without their permission."

Well, I know you will disagree Bibi, but I think that pretty much nails it. That editorial puts the whole thing firmly on the mainstream business (and political) agenda from where I'm looking.

So, what about the John Kerry 'framework' for peace talks? I see that you are meeting Barack in Washington at the start of March. I know the two of you are hardly best of mates and you're probably hoping Barack has run out of time to force your hand before we hit the next run of US elections. But I really think you have to listen to him this time. So far, from what I'm hearing from you and your coalition partners, I don't fancy the chances of Kerry's framework taking flight. I know how frustrating coalition partners can be, but some of yours are truly frightful.

And if you ignore Kerry and Obama, what then?

A Palestinian Spring? A third Palestinian uprising? The resignation of the Palestinian Authority? The collapse of your coalition. All these things look possible, even likely.

I have to say Bibi, if Israel continues to reject the most minimal of Palestinian demands then it will find the UK and the EU rejecting Israel. The moment is coming when Her Majesty's Government are going to call time on the endless prevarication, the endless raising of the bar for what makes the Palestinians acceptable partners for talks, the tired refrain of your 'security needs' from a country with the most powerful military in the Middle East (and I should know, we've sold you plenty of UK hardware). And it will not be discrimination or unfair victimisation. It will be, as the FT editorial pointed out, simply attempting to enforce the law.

My friend, this is not about "destroying Israel" as you like to scaremonger. South Africa was not "destroyed" by the anti-Apartheid campaign, neither were the southern states of America wiped out by the actions of Martin Luther King. Rather, they were turned into places of genuine democracy and given a new lease of life. And when we reached a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, we never insisted that the Catholics recognise the province as 'Protestant' with Protestant rights protected above all others. Equal rights for all was enough and is what usually defines a democracy.

I know that some of your coalition colleagues, and other members of the Knesset, will see my message to you as a form of incitement against the Jewish People and may even decide to accuse me of anti-Semitism as a way of closing down such talk of boycotts and sanctions. Well you can tell them I think such name calling is out of order and if it is used against me I will be quick to make my own outrage very clear in return.

The casual accusation of anti-Semitism to anybody who asks for even the most minimal concessions to the Palestinian people is already doing a massive disservice to Israeli and Diaspora Jews. The word is fast becoming meaningless.

An EU wide boycott of the Settlements could just be the thing that enables real, meaningful talking to begin. After all, I've never seen a country relinquish power without some kind of external pressure. I like to think that you, Bibi, could perhaps be Israel's F.W. De Klerk. I'm quite sure you have some Palestinian Mandelas locked-up somewhere too.

So, a lot to think about and it's a shame we can't meet in person this week.

One last thought before I go off to chair another COBRA meeting on the floods.

Maybe I should have done something earlier when people were pointing out the dangers of climate change and the need to take action on flood defences. Perhaps I should have fixed the drainage before it become a catastrophe for people's homes and livelihoods. Maybe the political dangers were starring me in the face and I just chose to ignore it, hoping it would go away, hoping I could hold back the rising tide forever. I think there could be a lesson in here for you too.

With kind regards, your passionate friend,

Dave

Israeli elections, Tu B'Shvat and the history of 'righteous trees'

The deck chairs are being shuffled about in the Knesset with no real prospect of change on the Palestinian front whether a fragile centre/right or fragile right/ultra-right coalition emerges. As usual, the seats won by Israeli Arab parties (12 in total) are not even in the reckoning for any complexion of governing bloc.

So in the circumstances, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about trees.

Why trees? Well today (Saturday January 26th) it's the festival of Tu B'Shvat which is the Jewish New Year for Trees. And trees have their own particular story to tell when it comes to Judaism and Israel/Palestine.

Trees have been on my mind for a while now, ever since I rediscovered the Israeli tree certificates I received for my Bar Mitzvah in 1979. I had one from my synagogue and 13 from my parents' B'nai Brit lodge. This was the traditional gift at the time, along with a copy of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew bible). I'll come back to my own personal piece of Israeli woodland later, but first a swift history of trees in Judaism and Zionism.

Let’s start at the very beginning. Genesis, the Garden of Eden, and the ‘Tree of Knowledge’. This is our very first call to lead a righteous life. Adam and Eve having eaten of the fruit, are given the ability to know good from evil, the knowledge to discern right from wrong. From now on we are expected to carry the burden of making ethical choices for how we live, our relations with others and with the planet itself.

Next up we have the story of the Noah and the Great Flood. Remember how the dove returns with leaves from an olive tree indicating that the waters are subsiding along with God's wrath at humankind's behaviour. We are given a second shot at righteousness and the olive tree makes its global debut as a symbol of restored peace and harmony.

By the way (and one day you may just find this useful to know) there are thirty varieties of tree mentioned in the Hebrew bible. Alphabetically, they go from Algum in Second Chronicles to Vine trees in Deuteronomy via Mulberries in Samuel and Myrtles in Isaiah.

While we are tree hunting in Deuteronomy, here's an interesting commandment (20:19) concerning behaviour to our enemies during wartime:

“When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees of the field people, that you should besiege them?”

In modern terminology this is a prohibition against scorched earth tactics that destroy the enemy's capacity to care for itself and rebuild life after defeat. I'll come back to this later.

And if it is us that are defeated and we find ourselves living in exile, then the advice from Isaiah is to plant ourselves firmly in the host community to become "trees of righteousness" (61:3).

And now to Tu B'Shvat itself. It's a minor Jewish festival which originated in biblical times with the need to establish a 'tax year' for the income from fruit harvests so that a tithe (one tenth) could be made to the Temple in Jerusalem and for the poor. Since tithing must be in proportion to individual income that makes it a progressive tax going to a righteous cause!

Even after the Temple was destroyed, in 70 CE, the tradition of tithing continued in the Jewish diaspora with money being given to those studying Torah, and to the least well off.

The festival became associated we tree planting and the reciting of ‘nature’ psalms, in particular Psalm 104:

“The trees of the Lord are well watered,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds make their nests;
the stork has its home in the junipers.”

The festival began to take on a new layer of symbolism and significance around the 16th century when the Jewish mystics of Safed, in northern Galilee, draw on Kabbalistic traditions and took the tree as an image to represent the dynamic aspects of God's creative power.

Leaping ahead to the 20th century, in the late 1960s Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (one of the truly great Jewish theologians of the last century) reached back to that verse in Deuteronomy, harnessing Judaism's prophetic tradition in his campaigning against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Jewish Campaign for Trees for Vietnam, with Heschel as its chairman, challenged the actions of the U.S. government in deliberately destroying the forests of Vietnam to deny tree cover to Vietnamese guerrillas.

The Jewish Renewal movement, predominantly in north America, has taken up the festival as a ready-made Jewish commitment to environmental sustainability. With typical Renewal creativity and drawing on mystic and Hasidic thinking, they have re-imagined the festival as an opportunity to emphasise Judaism's 'green' credentials and general concern for the well-being of the planet.

And so to Zionism's contribution to trees and righteousness.

The Jewish National Fund (where may Bar Mitzvah trees came from) was created in 1901 to purchase land for Jewish settlement in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. Here's how the JNF website sums up its own history:

“Over the past 109 years, JNF has evolved into a global environmental leader by planting 250 million trees, building over 210 reservoirs and dams, developing over 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1,000 parks, providing the infrastructure for over 1,000 communities, bringing life to the Negev Desert and educating students around the world about Israel and the environment.”

In short, making the desert bloom.

Of course there is another way of looking at this and an alternative Palestinian narrative that challenges all the desert blooming activity in a land that was certainly not without a people and nor without an established agricultural economy.

To quote from the Stop the JNF website, the actual consequence of all this land buying and tree planting has led directly to:

"...the creation of an exclusive and discriminatory Jewish state [and] also the destruction of Palestinian land ownership, community, livelihood, and the land itself."

The land was often bought by the JNF at inflated prices from absentee Arab landlords for the benefit of the early Jewish immigrants to establish their own agricultural communities. But the left wing Zionist pioneers of the 1920s and 30s did not see the local Arab population as part of their socialist Jewish dream.

When I began to read the works of the Israeli Jewish revisionist historians who have challenged the myths of Jewish state building, I became to feel less comfortable with my own little patch of Israeli greenery. It also made me reflect on how the State of Israel and Jewish identity have become so interwoven by diaspora Jewry to the point where they have become indistinguishable.

There's nothing on my tree certificates to tell me exactly where they were planted so I have no idea if they added to the woodland and forests that have covered over many of the Palestinian villages that were abandoned, fled from or demolished during the civil war/Independence war of 1947-1948. The very existence of the villages and their history has also been grassed over by the tourism guides and the park websites.

Yes, Israel has certainly planted a great deal of trees but a great many have been destroyed too, usually in the name of 'security' including the construction of the Separation Wall.

Some of the more militant Jewish West Bank settlers (ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist) also take opportunities to destroy their neighbours' livelihood in ways that seem totally at odds with Jewish ethics. Last year the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported 7,500 olive trees were destroyed by settlers between January and October 2012.

I don't know what they teach in Torah school these days on the West Bank but they're clearly skipping that verse from Deuteronomy.

During the election campaign in Israel there was little talk of trees, planted or uprooted, righteous or unrighteous. Netanyahu's handling of the economy and his failure to address the concerns of the social protests of the last two summers, had more to do with his party's drop in support than his belligerence over the Israel/Palestine question.

At Tu B'Shvat we think about God's creation and the annual nature cycle as we begin to emerge from the gloom of winter and look forward to new life emerging from the cold ground.

I don't hold much hope that the new Knesset will have the vision required or the bravery and imagination that will be needed to take Israel forward on the question of Palestine. For Jews like me though, this remains the project that will determine the well-being of the Jewish People and the future of Judaism for this century and beyond.

At Tu B’Shvat we may marvel at the miracle of God’s creation, as we see the sap begin to rise once again, but it is God and not the soil that we should worship. 

As the politicians cut their deals in the back rooms of Jerusalem to decide who gets control of which government department, I offer the following observation from Abraham Joshua Heschel, which made after his first visit to the State of Israel in 1969.

“Judaism is not a religion of space and does not worship the soil. So too the State of Israel is not the climax of Jewish history, but a test of the integrity of the Jewish people and the competence of Judaism.”