After Gaza, Standing Again at Sinai

The title of my essay plays on the famous book by Judith Plaskow, which requires Jews to return to Sinai (the site of God’s Covenant with the Israelites when the Torah was given) and reread the tradition through a feminist hermeneutical prism. After the Gaza genocide, Jews ought to stand again at Sinai and ascertain how to reenter a covenant with God, one another, and now with Palestinians, a reentry that will depend on righting wrongs. This reentry after Gaza entails centering Palestinian ethical claims upon Jews. It is a reparative covenant with God and Palestinians; such a covenant cannot be made without the presence of both. Returning to Sinai after Gaza amounts to a restorative justice praxis. In other words, this return, or teshuva in Hebrew (which also means atonement), would signify a decolonial move (not a metaphor!), an acknowledgment of harms dating back over a century, and accountability for past injustice. It requires imagining future horizons that do not replicate injustice and unjust structures undergirded by selective and harmful hermeneutics.

In her resignation letter from the Biden administration (the first such public letter by a Jewish appointee), which was released on Nakba Day in May 2024, Lily Greenberg Call referred to Biden as “making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong.” “Jewish safety cannot—and will not—come at the expense of Palestinian freedom,” she continued. “Making Jews the face of the American war machine makes us less safe.” In her reference to the question of “Jewish safety,” Greenberg Call disrupts the discursive manipulation of antisemitism, conflating Israel with Jews and rendering Palestinian life subsequently ungrievable. In her reference to “making Jews the face of the American war machine,” Greenberg Call names the persistence of imperial political, cultural, and economic forces in the dynamics that unfold on the ground in Palestine/Israel. Greenberg Call, in other words, illuminates the convergence of weaponized violence and (neo)imperial politics. To identify how weaponized antisemitism serves imperial designs is not to take away the agency of Jews in their colonization of Palestine and the racialized structures of dispossession and elimination they put in place.

Passover during a Time of Despair

The giving of the Torah at Sinai occurred after the Israelite exodus from slavery under the pharaoh and before entry into the land of Canaan (where other communities had lived). Since the Jewish holiday of Passover, which celebrates God’s intervention on behalf of the Israelites to liberate them from the pharaoh, occurred amid the sixth month of the Israeli genocidal assault in Gaza, many Jews in Palestine solidarity circles felt despair. They did not know how they could celebrate Jewish liberation at a time when the utter un-freedom and destruction of Palestinians occurred in their name. Palestinian un-freedom has long been justified as necessary for the protection of a political entity that claims to embody Jewish liberation and redemption. In light of this despair, a small group of American rabbis and Jewish Israeli activists orchestrated an action that drew on the Jewish imperative to feed the hungry during the Passover seder. Carrying bags of rice and flour and other food items, the delegation of rabbis and Jewish Israeli activists walked toward the gates of Gaza. They sang passages from the seder conveying the imperative of feeding the hungry. The military police quickly stopped them and seven were arrested. Rabbi Brant Rosen, one of the American rabbis detained, wrote about the absurdly tragic reason for his arrest in a piece for The Nation: “The Americans were told, bluntly, that they were being held for ‘attempting to bring food into Gaza.’” The famine generated by Israel amounts to a war crime. The rabbis’ symbolic action, drawing upon the Jewish script of the Passover Seder, represents the reclaiming of Jewish meanings from the jaws of cruelty and violent ideology. This motif has permeated Jewish protest and, during the Gaza genocide Passover, has reconnected Jews to Sinai and the Exodus story. As public intellectual Naomi Klein argued, it reflects a breaking free from the shackles of idolatry. At a Seder in the Streets of New York City in April 2024, after saying the traditional blessing over the bitter herbs, Klein meditated on Zionism as the Golden Calf Jews have been worshipping. She called on Jews to undergo an exodus from this idolatrous captivity. In this meditation, Klein conveys the general sentiment of the movement of Jews critical of Zionism: “We cannot be free until Palestinians are free.” Young Jewish American activists have chanted this saying in marches and at university encampments across the US and Europe. However, as those Passover actions happened with urgency, in mourning, and through an effort to shutter the Golden Calf of Zionism to re-access the Jewish tradition—historically, through direct accountability to Palestinians—other Jews actively attacked humanitarian trucks and destroyed food en route to Gaza. These are the Jews who long ago left Sinai.

Landlords’ Theology

Those who deliberately and repeatedly attacked humanitarian convoys embody a landlords’ theology (see also Rouhana). “Landlords’ theology” refers to how the Jewish tradition is deployed as a land title to authorize Jewish domination and supremacy along with a prolonged process of “Judaizing” historic Palestine. The latter is achieved by uprooting Palestinians through settler colonial processes. They believe themselves to be in the “Promised Land,” an illusionary redemptive space predicated on eternal violence and domination. To read the bible as a land title reveals, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the colonization of Judaism by the Christian imagination. The enactment of this imagination and Jews’ “return” to Zion (undergirded by a presumption that Jews were not really from Europe) has carried with it the seeds of two genocides, the Shoah and Gaza (as the culmination of the Nakba that pre-dated 1948).

Activists in a new movement called The Faithful Left, which came into being following the consolidation of a fascist-settler coalition during the election cycle of 2022, reject the theology of landlords, arguing that only God is sovereign. In doing so, they reclaim the Jewish tradition from its violent desecration. They seek to re-access the gentler Judaism of the diasporas and, with it, a virtue ethics that defines norms for interpersonal and intercommunal relationships. Anti-occupation Jewish Israeli religious activist Mikhael Manekin, for example, wrote in Haaretz amid the Gaza genocide about his rejection of the ascendance of a Judaism that sacralizes starvation, domination, and war. He expressed disdain for Rabbi Dov Lior, who sanctioned the looting of aid to Gaza, framing it as a sacred act that could trump keeping the Shabbat. Manekin writes: “For Lior, blocking aid to a starving population, even against the wishes of the Israeli military and an extreme right-wing government, is a more crucial religious commandment than keeping the Sabbath.” Another, Rabbi Eliyahu, the Chief Rabbi of Tzfat, even wrote a prayer for the looters and those who prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the victims in Gaza. This rabbinic sanctioning, for Manekin, is deeply troubling. He further writes: “The very idea of violating the Sabbath to create more hunger and as a means of punishment or coercion is alien to Jewish rabbinic tradition and would undoubtedly have baffled our sages. However, in Israel, it is an increasingly mainstream ethical position. To be a good Jew is to put the collective punishment of Palestinians ahead of basic observance.” Manekin calls to reclaim Jewish ethical traditions in the face of this desecration of the tradition. Manekin’s and The Faithful Left’s intervention embodies what I have called “critical caretaking,” which refers to a peacebuilding methodology that centers a historicist demystifying of religiopolitical scripts. However, rather than remaining in the privileged location of critique, “caretaking” conveys hermeneutical work, in this case, on the ground and from within the sources of the Jewish tradition itself in order to rewrite religiopolitical scripts.

To read the bible as a land title reveals, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the colonization of Judaism by the Christian imagination. 

In a second annual conference of The Faithful Left held in February 2024, religious Zionists who served during the genocidal assault on Gaza met behind closed doors to discuss the contradictions they experienced between their actions and their understanding of Jewish ethics. They rejected how the Jewish tradition had become drafted into a discourse that posits “the more violent you are and believe in the war, the more Jewishly authentic you are, and the more you speak of peace, the more you are assimilated into the West” (my translation). This directly opposes the centering of the Amalek discourse and the downgrading of many other resources within the Jewish tradition as “weak” and “diasporic.” The Faithful Left sees itself as challenging from within the sources and institutions of religious Zionism, i.e., the supremacist and violent interpretations of Jewish power. In doing so, they stay “at home” in the discourse of religious Zionism, even as they challenge some of its tenets. In prioritizing this feeling of being “at home,” however, they are unable to provide the necessary, more foundational, critique of religious Zionism.

What this examination of the discourse within the Faithful Left reveals is that theology after Gaza that seeks to make Jewish power nicer and more consistent with presumed Jewish values as operationalized within a “Jewish home” is not the same as standing again at Sinai and retelling the story from the perspective of its victims. The latter is as a hermeneutical praxis of repair. The returning religious Zionist soldiers who felt inconsistently Jewish as they donned their uniforms and became instruments in a genocidal war involving Jewish narratives of revenge never shattered the Golden Calf, the “sacralization of Jewish safety/security,” as Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian illuminates in her work.

Theology after Gaza that seeks to make Jewish power nicer and more consistent with presumed Jewish values as operationalized within a ‘Jewish home’ is not the same as standing again at Sinai and retelling the story from the perspective of its victims

Hence, Jewish ethics after the Gaza genocide has to dismantle this Golden Calf and its illusions of agency, redemption, and freedom. Both manifestations, the gentler of the “faithful left” and the grotesque of the looting landlords, do not interrogate Zionism as a political theology whose focus on homemaking and homecoming (redemption) has meant the uprooting and erasure of Palestinians. Literally, turning Palestinian homes into rubble. Therefore, even if mostly not conceptualizing their agency as theological or religious, anti-Zionist Jewish activists who center the Nakba as an ongoing structure that has now escalated into a genocide, in effect, do theology when they don’t do theology. They do theology when they unlearn Zionist mythology about the Nakba and subsequently concretely imagine Palestinian return (such as Zochrot), or when they engage in anti-colonial binational translation, seeking to reclaim Arabic or Persian as Jewish languages and cultures. They enact a restorative political theology of unlearning supremacy and reclaiming how to be Jewish in the space outside a settler colonial and supremacist frame. A restorative political theology, therefore, is “theological” when it unlearns supremacist Euro-Zionism and what Solo Baron called Zionist “lachrymose history.” This process requires a counter-archival retraining of the political imagination which identifies, together with Ella Shohat, for example, the intersecting geographies of Arab-Jewish and Palestinian dislocation, as well as Indigenous Peoples’ genocides associated with modernity/coloniality. Unlearning Zionism, in other words, means excavating Judaism from the debris of Gaza and Zionist historiographical epistemic destruction.

Back to Sinai

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a Jewish American who has been in the Jewish/Palestine solidarity space since 1966, like Naomi Klein, spoke recently (responding to a talk I delivered at UC Davis in May 2024) about how, upon descending from the mountain, Moses—who was enraged by the idolatrous behavior of the Israelites whose impatience for their liberation and entry into the “Promised Land” led them to worship the Golden Calf—shattered the tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. Speaking while the genocide against Gaza is still ongoing, Rabbi Lynn said that the shards of the tablets represent the current reality of the Jewish tradition. Is it possible to put it back together?

Rabbi Lynn’s image of reconstituting the tradition from the shattered Tablets is striking because of its similarity with the kabbalistic notion of Shevirat Hakelim or the “Breaking of the Vessels.” Shevirat Hakelim or tzimtzum (contraction) refers to how, to make room or space for creation, God or Ein Sof (the infinite, “without an end”) contracted to create an empty space into which God sent light, which initiated the creation process. Seven of the ten sefirot, or vessels, were shattered by the power of the light. Their shards entangled with divine sparks descended into the abyss. This act of creation entangled with the breaking of the vessels denotes the utter disharmony of creation, making room for the human agency of repair or tikun olam.

Speaking while the genocide against Gaza is still ongoing, Rabbi Lynn said that the shards of the tablets represent the current reality of the Jewish tradition. Is it possible to put it back together?

In the kabbalistic discourse, the brokenness of Jews interconnects with the brokenness of the world. However, over the centuries, tensions emerged between more particularistic and more universal interpretations of tikun olam. For Rabbi Lynn, the repair of Judaism means its decolonization (or an exodus from slavery in the false idol of Zionism), and this process will go hand-in-hand with decolonizing Palestine. Jews need to grapple historically through a restorative un-theology (rather than mythologically) with the blood-soaked debris in Gaza as utter profanity. The most urgent political question for Jews in Palestine/Israel therefore is also a theological one, even if they see themselves as atheist or not religious: How can I be Jewish in this space but not a settler colonialist supremacist? It requires us to stand again at Sinai.