The following was delivered by R' David as part of a panel discussion at Evergreen State College on 2/21/24 entitled "What is Our Responsibility? Four Jewish Perspectives"
I am delighted to be here at Evergreen State College, the alma mater of my sweet heart and the home of a great deal of organizing and education I have been a fan of for nearly two decades. As a guest here on the land of the Squaxin Island Tribe, I am also grateful to the indigenous people of this land. And I want to thank Professor Koppleman for organizing us together and everyone who worked and labored to make this discussion possible.
I speak today and most days because I am responsible to my ancestors and also to my descendants. I speak today out of my responsibility for my own micro Jewish community that is Kadima – a 45+ year-old community founded to be a progressive voice in the Jewish community and a Jewish voice in the progressive community. And I also speak tonight out of responsibility for my Jewish siblings everywhere. I am here responsible to the many people whom myself and others with my identities as a white, able bodied, cis-straight European heritage male rabbi have a particular history and present of harming. I am here responsible both for and to myself as a mender of relationships and a world repair worker, starting first and foremost where I have relationships, proximity, and any influence. And today and for the last two decades I speak out of my responsibility to those over whom the State of Israel wields military power and violence, namely, the Palestinian people.
The idea of responsibility, as we will each discuss today, is critical in Jewish tradition and in my understanding of my life as a Jew and as a human. In a society such as ours, we are barely encouraged to be responsible for ourselves. Maybe for our kids. Perhaps for our pets. But even this is tenuous where avoiding responsibility is the goal of many of our leaders and avoiding responsibility ensures that the ruling class continues to profit from exploiting the earth’s resources at the expense of anyone who gets in the way. Responsibility is not something we are really taught to take, in my experience of growing up wealthy and assimilated in the 1980s and 90s. In fact, I feel like I have been taught in the United States that taking responsibility is for goody goodies and suckers. And this is part of how we continue to live in a society where we have not taken responsibility for the vulnerable, for the power-stripped, for the marginalized, and for the exploited. Where people literally and figuratively get away with murder.
Responsibility, as our discussion here is framed, may just be a way out of this mess.
Jewish tradition offers us something different than the United States culture I grew up assimilated into – a third generation of my family born in this place. Many Jews find dissonance in the tension we feel in our bones and in, as my grandmother would say, in our kishkes. The tension is that we are remarkably encouraged in Jewish thought, wisdom, text, and culture, to take responsibility not for no one, but indeed for everyone! For interdependence is a core teaching of our ancient tradition.
An unforgotten thread, no matter how assimilated we might have grown up, perhaps, is this idea that we are responsible for one another. Indeed this is ironically encouraged through the antisemitism that means anything any Jew does reflects poorly on the rest of us. Many marginalized communities might know what I am talking about – you hear about a crime committed and you might think “I hope they weren’t Jewish, Muslim, Black…etc.”
In the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Shevuot 39a, we see an idiom that roots this idea back at least 1500 years: Kol Yisrael aravim ze ba'ze. That all of the Jewish people are responsible one for the other.
Indeed, this line from the Talmud has become a famous quote to describe how we Jews are in it together, need to look out for one another, and should have one another’s back.
In the context of the whole page in the Talmud, this line describes the ways in which our transgressions make the whole world liable. It brings to mind the quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in discussing the perils of the war in Vietnam: “morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
The Talmud’s conversation about who is liable for particular transgressions brings us into the realm of realizing that on some level, the whole world is responsible for any wrongdoing in the world.
And this juxtaposition of guilty and responsible from Rabbi Heschel is key in how we approach the current genocide in Gaza. Non Jews I talk to – from state senators to Christian clergy to other parents and informed folks who are trying to speak out against what is happening – they lament that there is very little room to talk about what is happening without being called antisemitic.
Antisemitism is real and hurtful and limits the life and livelihood of Jews, myself and my family included. It must be fought and taught about and worked toward being a thing of the past. And, we must not confuse or conflate antisemitism with the work to end the racist, violent, and fatal policies of a state, in this case, a state that itself claims to be Jewish.
In fact, the Talmud and Rabbi Heschel might lead us to think that those non Jews too are responsible for their Jewish siblings all over the world, and also for their Palestinian siblings as well. And for this, they too must speak out in defense of these people. And it is possible to speak out BOTH out of responsibility to Jewish people AND Palestinian people. For no military occupation and certainly no civilian disregarding military campaign can possibly be for anyone. We must stand firmly against it for the sake of everyone in the world. We are responsible.
Further, I think about my role as a great grandson and as a father. I am responsible to my ancestors. My zeydees and my bubbles – grandpas and grandmas – who themselves fled pogroms. State sanctioned violence aimed at them for the sake of scapegoating and protecting the ruling class. I am responsible to ensure that the crossing of oceans and starting lives anew was not for naught. They fled because of a violent state sponsored campaign against them. Before that, state laws created an apartheid situation that meant they did not have freedom of movement, education, and occupation.
These ancestors had a variety of responses to these realities: on one hand, make sure nothing like this ever happens to us again. And on the other hand, make sure nothing like this ever happens to anyone ever again. They passed on this responsibility to me. It lives inside me.
And while these sound like two different messages, I have been able to reconcile them in the teachings of collective liberation: I can only ensure that nothing like that ever happens again to us BY helping ensure that nothing like that ever happens again to anyone. In a world where there is subjugated and subjugator, one might understandably try to simply side with the subjugator at all costs to ensure that they are never again subjugated. But if instead we work to create a world where there is no subjugator at all, we ensure that no one – not us, and not anyone – is again subjugated. By siding not with the subjugator to protect me and my family, but to side with all who are subjugated to team up and overturn the false standard that this binary is natural or necessary. Not to become the subjugator, but to destroy subjugation entirely.
This is our responsibility. To build societies without subjugation. To do it here tonight in how we interact with one another. To do it on the streets when we protest the oppression and violence and harm occurring in our own neighborhoods as well as how that which is happening across the globe affects our neighborhood. We must build those societies in how we hold accountable those who harm and how we treat ourselves in our complicity and our shame when we ourselves are the subjugator.
And this is where I am responsible to my children and theirs. To my students and theirs. When I own the responsibility I have to working not just to critique subjugation but to build its opposite, I am working on behalf of generations from whom I am temporarily borrowing the present.
When my children and students hear that I am working toward accountability out of my responsibility to them, it is not so they will have to look back and say “look at the things my people did,” but “look at the things my people took responsibility and accountability for.” In this future, built right now in the present, we can find ourselves being responsible for how our descendants take responsibility for everything within their reach and their relationship, as though they are responsible for the whole world itself.
Right now, as I take responsibility for the genocide going on in Gaza, I am not singling out Jews or the State of Israel. I am not simply calling out settler colonialism perpetrated by a people with indigenous claims on the land they are settling. I am not conflating Zionism with Judaism or Jewishness, and I am not simply siding in a binary way with an oppressed people over an oppressor people.
We must see ourselves as responsible. We must do all we can to end the violence.
I am taking a look in the mirror. I am seeing that I can do something about this. Not the deciding thing, but something. I can work today and now toward creating the society that lives up to my ancestor’s most prized teachings and my children’s most cherished needs. A life driven by purpose and the sanctity of life.
I am delighted to be here at Evergreen State College, the alma mater of my sweet heart and the home of a great deal of organizing and education I have been a fan of for nearly two decades. As a guest here on the land of the Squaxin Island Tribe, I am also grateful to the indigenous people of this land. And I want to thank Professor Koppleman for organizing us together and everyone who worked and labored to make this discussion possible.
I speak today and most days because I am responsible to my ancestors and also to my descendants. I speak today out of my responsibility for my own micro Jewish community that is Kadima – a 45+ year-old community founded to be a progressive voice in the Jewish community and a Jewish voice in the progressive community. And I also speak tonight out of responsibility for my Jewish siblings everywhere. I am here responsible to the many people whom myself and others with my identities as a white, able bodied, cis-straight European heritage male rabbi have a particular history and present of harming. I am here responsible both for and to myself as a mender of relationships and a world repair worker, starting first and foremost where I have relationships, proximity, and any influence. And today and for the last two decades I speak out of my responsibility to those over whom the State of Israel wields military power and violence, namely, the Palestinian people.
The idea of responsibility, as we will each discuss today, is critical in Jewish tradition and in my understanding of my life as a Jew and as a human. In a society such as ours, we are barely encouraged to be responsible for ourselves. Maybe for our kids. Perhaps for our pets. But even this is tenuous where avoiding responsibility is the goal of many of our leaders and avoiding responsibility ensures that the ruling class continues to profit from exploiting the earth’s resources at the expense of anyone who gets in the way. Responsibility is not something we are really taught to take, in my experience of growing up wealthy and assimilated in the 1980s and 90s. In fact, I feel like I have been taught in the United States that taking responsibility is for goody goodies and suckers. And this is part of how we continue to live in a society where we have not taken responsibility for the vulnerable, for the power-stripped, for the marginalized, and for the exploited. Where people literally and figuratively get away with murder.
Responsibility, as our discussion here is framed, may just be a way out of this mess.
Jewish tradition offers us something different than the United States culture I grew up assimilated into – a third generation of my family born in this place. Many Jews find dissonance in the tension we feel in our bones and in, as my grandmother would say, in our kishkes. The tension is that we are remarkably encouraged in Jewish thought, wisdom, text, and culture, to take responsibility not for no one, but indeed for everyone! For interdependence is a core teaching of our ancient tradition.
An unforgotten thread, no matter how assimilated we might have grown up, perhaps, is this idea that we are responsible for one another. Indeed this is ironically encouraged through the antisemitism that means anything any Jew does reflects poorly on the rest of us. Many marginalized communities might know what I am talking about – you hear about a crime committed and you might think “I hope they weren’t Jewish, Muslim, Black…etc.”
In the Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Shevuot 39a, we see an idiom that roots this idea back at least 1500 years: Kol Yisrael aravim ze ba'ze. That all of the Jewish people are responsible one for the other.
Indeed, this line from the Talmud has become a famous quote to describe how we Jews are in it together, need to look out for one another, and should have one another’s back.
In the context of the whole page in the Talmud, this line describes the ways in which our transgressions make the whole world liable. It brings to mind the quote from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in discussing the perils of the war in Vietnam: “morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
The Talmud’s conversation about who is liable for particular transgressions brings us into the realm of realizing that on some level, the whole world is responsible for any wrongdoing in the world.
And this juxtaposition of guilty and responsible from Rabbi Heschel is key in how we approach the current genocide in Gaza. Non Jews I talk to – from state senators to Christian clergy to other parents and informed folks who are trying to speak out against what is happening – they lament that there is very little room to talk about what is happening without being called antisemitic.
Antisemitism is real and hurtful and limits the life and livelihood of Jews, myself and my family included. It must be fought and taught about and worked toward being a thing of the past. And, we must not confuse or conflate antisemitism with the work to end the racist, violent, and fatal policies of a state, in this case, a state that itself claims to be Jewish.
In fact, the Talmud and Rabbi Heschel might lead us to think that those non Jews too are responsible for their Jewish siblings all over the world, and also for their Palestinian siblings as well. And for this, they too must speak out in defense of these people. And it is possible to speak out BOTH out of responsibility to Jewish people AND Palestinian people. For no military occupation and certainly no civilian disregarding military campaign can possibly be for anyone. We must stand firmly against it for the sake of everyone in the world. We are responsible.
Further, I think about my role as a great grandson and as a father. I am responsible to my ancestors. My zeydees and my bubbles – grandpas and grandmas – who themselves fled pogroms. State sanctioned violence aimed at them for the sake of scapegoating and protecting the ruling class. I am responsible to ensure that the crossing of oceans and starting lives anew was not for naught. They fled because of a violent state sponsored campaign against them. Before that, state laws created an apartheid situation that meant they did not have freedom of movement, education, and occupation.
These ancestors had a variety of responses to these realities: on one hand, make sure nothing like this ever happens to us again. And on the other hand, make sure nothing like this ever happens to anyone ever again. They passed on this responsibility to me. It lives inside me.
And while these sound like two different messages, I have been able to reconcile them in the teachings of collective liberation: I can only ensure that nothing like that ever happens again to us BY helping ensure that nothing like that ever happens again to anyone. In a world where there is subjugated and subjugator, one might understandably try to simply side with the subjugator at all costs to ensure that they are never again subjugated. But if instead we work to create a world where there is no subjugator at all, we ensure that no one – not us, and not anyone – is again subjugated. By siding not with the subjugator to protect me and my family, but to side with all who are subjugated to team up and overturn the false standard that this binary is natural or necessary. Not to become the subjugator, but to destroy subjugation entirely.
This is our responsibility. To build societies without subjugation. To do it here tonight in how we interact with one another. To do it on the streets when we protest the oppression and violence and harm occurring in our own neighborhoods as well as how that which is happening across the globe affects our neighborhood. We must build those societies in how we hold accountable those who harm and how we treat ourselves in our complicity and our shame when we ourselves are the subjugator.
And this is where I am responsible to my children and theirs. To my students and theirs. When I own the responsibility I have to working not just to critique subjugation but to build its opposite, I am working on behalf of generations from whom I am temporarily borrowing the present.
When my children and students hear that I am working toward accountability out of my responsibility to them, it is not so they will have to look back and say “look at the things my people did,” but “look at the things my people took responsibility and accountability for.” In this future, built right now in the present, we can find ourselves being responsible for how our descendants take responsibility for everything within their reach and their relationship, as though they are responsible for the whole world itself.
Right now, as I take responsibility for the genocide going on in Gaza, I am not singling out Jews or the State of Israel. I am not simply calling out settler colonialism perpetrated by a people with indigenous claims on the land they are settling. I am not conflating Zionism with Judaism or Jewishness, and I am not simply siding in a binary way with an oppressed people over an oppressor people.
We must see ourselves as responsible. We must do all we can to end the violence.
I am taking a look in the mirror. I am seeing that I can do something about this. Not the deciding thing, but something. I can work today and now toward creating the society that lives up to my ancestor’s most prized teachings and my children’s most cherished needs. A life driven by purpose and the sanctity of life.
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