Rise Up and Remember
Partial kudos to the Forward editorial board in linking the remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to current political issues that must be addressed.
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April 19, 1943, marked the eve where hundreds of young Jewish fighters took up arms in the first **publicly recognized** major act of armed civilian resistance against the Nazis, who invaded and occupied Poland in 1939. **Editorial note as resistance to the Nazi regime was always happening. It is a continually perpetuated myth that we were not fighting back in other realms and other ways.
I say partial because the link is focused predominantly on Darfur. If we’re going to link it, lets link it–link it to the struggles people face everyday not only in Darfur, but also locally in our own cities and towns. Link it in the Bundist tradition of doykayt (“hereness”)-the idea that Jews, in coalition with others, should focus their struggle for universal justice and equality in the place where we live. Link it to political prisoners, to mass incarceration, to the elimination of section 8 housing–link it to rape and sexual abuse–link it to the “war on drugs” and “terrorism”–rise up–yes rise up in resistance. Yes, but truly link it.
If we link it, then link it–link it to the Congo, Iraq, the Philipines–to Hawaii, Puerto Rico–to the embargo on Cuba–link it to the Israeli occupation and Palestine. yes, I said it. link it to Palestine.
Let us truly remember and honor our ancestors spirits and link it.
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“I have concluded that one way to pay tribute to those we loved who struggled, resisted and died is to hold on to their vision and their fierce outrage at the destruction of the ordinary life of their people. It is this outrage we need to keep alive in our daily life and apply to all situations, whether they involve Jews or non-Jews. It is this outrage we must use to fuel our actions and vision whenever we see any signs of the disruptions of common life: the hysteria of a mother grieving for the teenager who has been shot, a family stunned in front of a vandalized or demolished home; a family separated, displaced; arbitrary and unjust laws that demand the closing or opening of shops and schools; humiliation of a people whose culture is alien and deemed inferior; a people left homeless without citizenship; a people living under military rule. Because of our experience, we recognize these evils as obstacles to peace. At those moments of recognition, we remember the past, feel the outrage that inspired Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and allow it to guide us in present struggles.” –Irena Klepfisz From Love and Justice in times of War Haggadah
Are you seriously comparing what is gooing on in Darfur and the Congo to the “situation in Palestine?” This is why I love Jewschool sometimes – it’s like shooting fish in a barrel! Thanks for the link to the modern day Red Haggadah though – I’lll ignore the fact that seder was last week only because I haven’t laughed so hard at something so patently ignorant in a good long time! Tirbach!
Interesting that out of the entire other list of things that Palestine is what you chose to bring up ck. When did I use the word compare? I didn’t. Rather, what I said was the importance of linking our history of struggling against oppression to MORE than just Darfur. And if we must continue on this, LOTS of folks do seders the last two nights as well. So wait, who’s laughing?
Cole, y’all can do your Seder whenever you like. Traditionally however, Seder was performed only on the first (and then second) night of Passover as per Leviticus 23:5. I’m just stating that the traditional way that it’s been done, barring extreme circumstances, is on the first night (and then the second as well if you are in the diasporah). In fact, it’s actually strictly forbidden to do it on any other night. But what the hey – everything’s up for grabs – folks can and will do whatever they want.
As for this link-fest, over at Jewlicious we’ve specifically linked the seder to the Slave trade, we’ve been supportive of Darfur-based initiatives, we are horrified by the situation in the Congo, etc. etc. etc. But the Israeli occupation???
Sheesh. Contrary to some opinions, the situation in “Palestine” does not merit a lot of the attention it receives. If one is concerned about the state of human rights abuses around the world, “Palestine” is a mere blip, by any reasonable measure, compared to Darfur, Congo, Tibet, Nepal and many other places. And on top of that, the fact that the duly elected representatives of the Palestinian people appplaud the actions of suicide bombers, presents a special quandary for those of us of the Jewish persuasion who are concerned about Human rights in general.
So you want me to deface my haggadah and add in special prayers for those who want to kill me? There’s a word for people like that here – “Friar” (Israeli slang for sucker). Or Christian. I’m neither.
I’ll tell you what though, my daily prayer routine does include a prayer for the Palestinians. I pray they wake the fuck up and stop pulling one stupid move after another that serve only to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and miserym that they’ve been in thus far. I pray they elect leaders that are neither kleptocrats bent on stealing everything that isn’t nailed down or extremists bent on killing every Jew who wants to live in a Jewish state.
Amen!
ck–
Amen, amen, amen.
The more I learn about the world outside the Jewish epicenter (New York and Israel), the more I realize that the Israel/Palestinian situation is the tiniest little problem. Problem is, this problem spills over into a religious catalcysm affecting our oil supply.
Another Hebrew-ism: oof!
-judah
ck – yasher koach!
Let the moral equivalency game end. It only distracts us from the real work, and makes a mockery of our activism.
well ck, i must tell you there would be many of us that would disagree with you. in fact, if there are folks in new york who haven’t had enough seders yet, check this out:
After exodus: Jews Against the Occupation/NYC
invites you to our post-passover sort-of seder!
During the 8 days of Passover we tell a story of liberation as though we had lived through it ourselves. We ask difficult questions and refuse to settle for easy answers.
Now we must ask:
What stories aren’t we telling?
Are we settling for easy answers?
How do we commit ourselves to the work of creating a just world?
What happens after Exodus?
Join us to honor Jewish tradition by working for justice and peace in Israel/Palestine.
Come together to bring what Passover teaches us to the table as we grapple with the realities of occupation and violence in Israel/Palestine, so that we may truly live the lessons of Passover.
thursday, april 20, 2006 – 7 pm
clemente soto velez community center
107 suffolk st (rivington/delancey)
F/J/M/Z to delancey/essex
POTLUCK! Please bring a dish to share, in the ashkenazi passover tradition (without wheat, oats, corn, rice, legumes, soy, etc), and/or a bottle of wine (if you buy kosher wine, please avoid settlement-grown wine)
oh and i almost forgot to mention, as i did in my post, which was that one of the reasons i linked it to the haggadah was b/c the warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 was on the first night of pesach.
Not enough seders? Gotta go with CK this time. If a group, political or otherwise (and methinks it’s usually political), hasn’t had enough seders, my instinct is to blame the Yetzer Hara and the spirit of Davka as the partial inspiration.
“Join us to honor Jewish tradition…
…at least insofar as we can pick and choose Jewish tradition that sort of fits into our own predefined, secular ideals of justice…
“…by working for justice and peace in Israel/Palestine…”
…because a holiday that partly celebrates God giving the Jews a specific tract of clearly defined land is a great excuse for giving the land to someone else…
“…Come together to bring what Passover teaches us to the table as we grapple with the realities of occupation and violence in Israel/Palestine, so that we may truly live the lessons of Passover…”
…which include a divine mandate to violent occupy a land and force out its inhabitants.
Oops!
I mean hey, I’m secular and non-rightist and support the creation of a Palestinian state, but man, I’m so tired of this half-baked “Judaism demands that we give the Palestinians a state and be card-carrying ideological leftists [it doesn’t], so one night a year we’ll have a kitniyot-free seder and have matzah ball soup and pretend to be like, all religious and into Jewish tradition and stuff, and then next Friday night we can go out for pepperoni pizza with our non-Jewish girlfriends!”
Maybe Jewish tradition demands social justice, but it also demands keeping Shabbat and keeping kashrut and administering the death penalty under certain cases and performing daily animal sacrifices and creating a monarchy. As a secular Jew, I don’t give a flying fuck what you do or believe, really, but spare me the sanctimonious bullshit about “honoring Jewish tradition” when the only tradition you honor is one that happens to fit into your non-Jewish social ideology.
Michael–who exactly is the “you” you’re addressing–you don’t know any of the people involved and make gross assumptions about whoever the “you” is in your commentary–and for someone who doesn’t care about what people “believe” you certainly do have a lot to say about what is or is not Jewish tradition and what is and is not Jewish.
Funny, I thought the whole point of initiatives like Jewschool was to actually end narratives from Jews to other Jews telling us what is and is not Jewish. In fact one of the main missions: “It pries Judaism from the lifeless fingers of the Jewish establishment and serves it up to the public with the insistance, “This belongs to you.†So Michael, you may have ideas of what is and is not Jewish for you, but guess what they’re yours–not anyone elses.
Dude, you’re totally right. I think Judaism is really a doctrine from a benevolent alien king who wants us all to live on a planet orbiting the star Sirius, and the alien king won’t send a spaceship until we free Tibet, and I’m not going to let no damn establishment tell me otherwise, because my ideas are as valid as anybody else’s despite my disregard for history or logic or my trendy obsession with du jour political issues. Because we shouldn’t let other Jews tell us how to be Jews, except of course the Jews who tell us to protest the security barrier or hug our transgendered brethren on the bimah as they bless the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Because that’s as genuine a Jewish tradition as circumcision!
Actually Michael, yes, yes it is. Whether you like it or not–it is 110 percent genuine.
Cole,
You wrote,
“Michael–who exactly is the “you†you’re addressing–you don’t know any of the people involved and make gross assumptions about whoever the “you†is in your commentary–and for someone who doesn’t care about what people “believe†you certainly do have a lot to say about what is or is not Jewish tradition and what is and is not Jewish.”
To be fair, Cole, theological belief is not a necessity for Historiographical accuracy. Michael has a point.
As for your point,
“If we link it, then link it–link it to the Congo, Iraq, the Philipines–to Hawaii, Puerto Rico–to the embargo on Cuba–link it to the Israeli occupation and Palestine. yes, I said it. link it to Palestine.”
I like that, as it fits into my own world view perfectly. That Anti-Zionism and is the twin sister of Zionism, and both are sleeping with Holocaustism. I reject all three world views. They are all false gods.
David, what do you mean by this? “To be fair, Cole, theological belief is not a necessity for Historiographical accuracy.” It’s unclear to me and how it connects to what Michael was saying.
Cole wrote: Actually Michael, yes, yes it is. Whether you like it or not–it is 110 percent genuine.
Yup. I agree. It is 110% genuine for the individual involved, regardless of how deluded or out and out wrong said individual might be. But you know, Judaism isn’t really about individual interpretation absent serious book learnin and communally recognized leadership. It’s about community and while the establishment may have failed us somewhat in the past, there’s no point throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I’m no great fan of the Federations for instance but you have to admit they’ve done a pretty good job in a number of areas – I’ll tell you, I am not looking forward to a day where I have to rely on participants in your touchy-feely fake seder to care for the elderly, build hospitals for the sick, develop ejumucation for the chillens and provide the overall community with valuable and much needed services. The answer is not to break up the community, cold lifeless fingers aside, into narrowly focused special interest groups, but rather to reinvigorate our communal institutions so that they are more effective and perhaps even more representative. Little anarchist collectives might be cool when you’re a freshman in college, but someone’s got to pay the bills. In unity, there is strength.
So yeah, I hope the seder was fun and fulfilling for you. My job is to make sure that initiatives like those receive the ridicule and approbation they so richly deserve. I would never seek to stop them, god forbid, but people ought to realize that Jews putting the interests of their enemies above their own is neither smart nor particularly Jewish.
Having said all that, I need to chime in one last time. Although I mostly disagree with them on Halachic issues, both Sharon Kleinman and Ayelet Cohen, Rabbis at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York, are very consistent in their approach to Jewish tradition and how that interacts with the outside world. When they talk about honoring Jewish Tradition, they are far less likely to indulge in, as Michael so eloquently put it, “sanctimonious bullshit.” They don’t just talk the talk, they also walk the walk.
I actually agree with a lot of your points in your last thread ck, and I do very much so believe in it being about community. I also believe that just b/c you don’t like what some people are saying in what may be communities that are different from yours doesn’t make it any less Jewish or bound in the tradition. Yall are being hypocritical. You don’t know anything about me or the people that apparently you think are worth ridiculing and whether we walk the walk. So you can keep assuming, that’s fine, but in the end it does you no good.
Cole,
Well, Michael is a bright boy, and he can surely speak for himself. But my point was that Judaism is confined to some degree, like every civilization, by the documents it basis its moral code on. Now, Judaism is certainly different than Jews, and I recognize that, particularly since I don’t live within the parameters of Judaism, though on some level, and in some ways, I do attempt to, even if not very well.
But that doesn’t change the parameters, and though they aren’t always clear or as definitive as the Fundamentalists would like to pretend they are, they also aren’t as fluid as perhaps many of us would like to prefer they are.
Adding extra seders and the like, or deleting and adding text of the narrative of the Haggadah according to the politics of today — you can’t expect everyone to accept that as within the parameters of Judaism, since ,any of us wouldn’t do the same even if we have questions and problems with many aspects of Judaism, both large and specific. Believe me, you aren’t the only one who has issues, even if you have more issues. Michael’s mention of circumcision was possibly specially tailored for me, not you. It drives him bats when I rant on the subject, (which hardly dissuades me, since he’s funny). But there are long-standing documents, there are Mitzvot, and we grapple with them. The thing is, to completely deny the narratives of the past as non-essential to Judaism (as opposed to our own morality, which most of us accept as an alternative, including, I think, Michael, even if it makes him a little edgy) or reinterpret them in ways that don’t fit the text or the tradition are problematic, since they simply don’t fit the documents. And that’s why I brought up historiography. If the interpretations don’t fit the texts, then they aren’t based on these documents or traditions.
To suggest otherwise is simply fantasy, and it won’t be taken seriously except by those who don’t care about the documents enough to seek legitimacy. And then the implicit question is inevitably, “Why are you bothering to pretend you are interpreting these documents?”
It’s a shtarke kasha (strong question).
Tis true David. There are long-standing texts, and a number of people, including myself, do grapple with them.
The question though is who is it that I, or anyone else, should be trying to seek legitimacy from?
Should my goal be to seek legitimacy from the very people who could care less if I even know how to read the texts to be able to grapple with them? I’ll answer for me–hell no. My goal is not to “seek legitimacy” from people who try to take away tradition from people–it’s as much mine as it is theirs. My goal is not to seek legitimacy when a few who have power have been able to write out masses of people who don’t. Lets be real–a lot of the people who get to make these parameters you’re talking about don’t want people, I mean the masses of Jewish people, to know how to grapple with the texts. that’s not their goal. In the end, if that’s the framework that is used, it is unfortunately and undoubtedly elitist.
You aren’t hearing me. It’s not about people. It’s about the texts themselves. It’s about legitimacy according to the documents, not whoever these “very people” are. If your world view doesn’t fit into these documents, that’s fine, get rid of the framework you don’t like in your personal life. You will hardly be the first person to do so.
But don’t claim your framework is based on these holidays and traditions which are confined by these documents. And they are confined by these texts.
David you act like the texts stand alone of people, like they weren’t written and interpreted by people–that’s just not true.
Well Kelsey makes a great distinction – there is Judaism and there are Jews. Krawitz, you are undoubtedly a Jew. But I don’t have to be a famous Rabbi with yichus up the wazoo to know that turning the other cheek is decidedly not what Judaism’s about – “Do not stand idly by your brother’s blood” [Leviticus 19:16] – There’s a text for you. Now, what standing do you have to dispute the well established laws of rodeph that are based on this piece of text? Amongst the few who have power and interpreted this text are none other than Rashi and Rambam. I think they would take umbrage to the inclusion of “anti-occupation” crap in the Seder. To say the least.
it is quite true there is a distinction–and from the way yall make it sound, you have very little respect for thousands of Jewish people who don’t engage with Judaism however you think they should. Which is interesting seeing as how projects like these supposedly are all about challenging that,
And if we are going to make distinctions, there is a difference between “turning the other cheek” and recognizing that Rabbis are not infalluable and that there is an inherent power dynamic in who can and cannot be Rabbis and how that has impacted how text has been interpreted throughout the generations. And I challenge you to show me how folks, including myself, who grapple with Jewishness regardless of whether or not they read the text (which I do) are turning their cheek? So I guess because thousands of Jews who do things like volunteer, social service and social change work turn their cheek because they don’t know the text?
So are you telling me that everything you post ck (and a few others on this thread) that relates to a holiday or somehow talks about a historical moment or a tradition is bound by halacha? And if so, do you post along with it what sect of halacha you are bound by? Come on yall. All of a sudden this is about halacha? So interesting how yall end up breaking it down. And if we’re going to break down texts, there are also numerous texts that talk about how we should thank god for not being lots of other things, in fact I think probably a number of you are davening it this morning–how you thank god for not being born a woman. Give me a break–you can pick and choose what texts you want to quote to me about not standing by but how many of you who are in New York are actually doing anything in your communities? And please, please don’t act like the texts just came down and floated themselves onto a page. They didn’t–they were written by men. and I do mean men.
My seder was as halachic and as traditional as they come, and I did indeed link (part of) it to Palestine. In the paragraph directly after the third cup. With full understanding of the words and with absolute concentration. Tirdof b’Af…
“So I guess because thousands of Jews who do things like volunteer, social service and social change work turn their cheek because they don’t know the text?”
These are three different things. Please explain how volunteering and social service are usually contrary to classic Jewish text, whether they are known or not.
“and from the way yall make it sound, you have very little respect for thousands of Jewish people who don’t engage with Judaism however you think they should.”
I don’t think most of us are demanding that people engage in Judaism, or disrespecting other emphasis.
“Which is interesting seeing as how projects like these supposedly are all about challenging that”
You’vebeen her 5 minutes and are lecturing way too much what this project should mean to me. Could you not do that?
“you can pick and choose what texts you want to quote to me about not standing by but how many of you who are in New York are actually doing anything in your communities?”
No one. Just you and your friends. Of course.
“And please, please don’t act like the texts just came down and floated themselves onto a page. They didn’t–they were written by men. and I do mean men. ”
Yes, most ancient documents were written by men. And we still don’t just discard them as irrelevent to the culture they speak of. Not even in Jewish culture.
Wow, this conversation is such a boring flame-fest! I can’t believe people are actually taking the time to contribute to it. Cole posted something that represents the interests and sentiments of a huge segment of the progressive Jewish community, and sentiments that are nothing new or groundbreaking (see my article: http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/specials/article.2006-04-04.2854706072), and people are really spending their time trying to discredit these sentiments by shredding the idea of Seders past the second night? WTF? I read this blog all the time, wishing someone like Cole was contributing and someone with more interesting feedback was commenting. I’m really glad Mobius created the forum, but I wish the conversation could get past halacha and on to something I couldn’t get in the traditional Jewish community (if I wanted it).
There was so much I wanted to say after reading Cole’s post – like my appreciation for the beautiful Klepfisz quote, and my comments about how I think we would be wrong to downplay the value and urgency of the mainstream Jewish community’s work on Darfur – especially considering the incredible silence of my movements – radical movements – on the genocide in Darfur. Much of it tinged with sickening antisemitism: the people who stand up at Left conferences, rolling their eyes at the mention of Darfur and saying how the movement against genocide in Darfur is just a PR ploy by Zionists. Or the Indymedia posts that declare that the Darfur genocide is the direct work of Zionist schemers.
But my interest in conversation was iced after reading the complete disrespect with which people – apparently people with a lot of time on their hands – replied. What is the point, here?? With all due respect to the prominently displayed Rav Soloveitchik below (who implores us to attack views only), I’m not interested in attacking or being attacked, period. Why?
Because time is short. Both Jews and non-Jews are presently living in great danger. There are people out there who are working to make fundamental, life-saving change in the world. And then there are people who are sitting on blogs, BELITTLING anyone they disagree with and using their ability to quote from Jewish texts and make imperious corrections to halacha to do so.
Our time on this earth is precious and every step we take has a consequence. Think carefully about what part you are playing.
April, thank you — for sure a good meditation for me indeed during the counting of the omer