KT MEMBER Rabbi Alissa Wise
Shabbat Shuva 5785
Oct 5, 2024
My Bubie, Lena Wise z’l spent all her days in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was one of eight children and as one of the oldest girls was saddled with care taking her siblings when her mom got ill and died at an early age. Her life was as a caretaker. For my Dad and his two brothers, for her siblings and siblings-in-law, her nieces and nephews, and then for us grandchildren. When our family dog Emily got older she began cooking chicken for the dog as she thought the dry food to tough for her old mouth. Nearly every Shabbat and every single Jewish holiday she would make sit down meals for 30-50 people with dozens of dishes. Whenever we brought a friend for dinner she would watch what they ate and make sure she made it again the next time the came. She would start each dish not at the head of the table, but with the person for whom she had made it. And she welcomed whoever came to the table as me and my cousins got older, across faiths and race and sexuality she welcomed everyone the same. I took it for granted, honestly. Only now I know how special that was. I watched how part of this care taking was also for Judaism ensuring that my generation knew the customs and practices, the ways of living Jewish, but also that we enjoyed ourselves as part of it.
My family were kosher food distributors and so we had special relationships with the other kosher-keeping Jews in Cincinnati. There was an informal bartering system for goods and services at play. My parents were on the board at my Jewish Day School, the local Jewish Federation and active in our synagogue. Until I insisted on playing community soccer, and then to go to public school for high school, my world was almost entirely made up of Jews. I was very much in Ohio, and, as I reflect on it, at same time in a totally other place – where the calendar began with the month of Tishrei, not January. Where it wasn't Saturday, it was Shabbat. Where we had two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for milk, and two more sets to use during Passover.
I live a thriving Jewish life in Ohio. Not perfect of course, I had some upsetting and formative intimate brushes with anti-Jewish hatred, but I came out intact and vibrant. I felt very “other”, but I also felt at home.
As Kabbalistic scholar Jesse Noily has said of the experience of living in diaspora – To be in diaspora necessitates a negotiation between experiences of alienation and place.” That was entirely my experience.
I still choose to live my life how my Bubbie taught me – while I am not, as it is called in yiddish - balabuste – a talented cook and homemaker, (I married one instead!) I feel in her lineage of building Jewish community. To this day I have never knowingly eaten pork or shellfish and I do not mix meat and milk. I don't spend money or use my phone or drive a car on shabbat. I am still a religious Jew, and in part that's because i know it would make my Bubie happy.
Sadly, most of my family thinks I have left the fold, they share the views of most establishment Jewish organizations about me you would likely hear that I am a self-hating Jew, not really Jewish, or worse because I reject Zionism.
As you may or may not be aware, Zionism’s roots are in dispensationalist theology which gained steam in the 19th century and forwarded the idea at root of Christian Zionism that Jews must repopulate historic Palestine in order to bring about the second coming of the messiah. At that point Jews must convert to Christianity en masse or burn – nothing more anti-semitic than that!
Many of the key leaders in the British Parliament that brought about the State of Israel were adherents to this belief – most famously Arthur Balfour.
Arthur Balfour is the man behind the Balfour declaration– the statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This document was not something, of course, that Balfour came up with on his own, out of nowhere. Some historians maintain that there was efforts over not just decades, but some claim centuries (dating back to the 16th century) of promoting the idea that Jewish settlement in Palestine must be nurtured and advocated for as a matter of foreign policy.
There were rabbis in that time that saw with clear eyes exactly what Balfourism meant for the Jewish people and the world. Writing a decade after the Balfour declaration was signed Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares - an Orthodox rabbi and served as a delegate to the Fourth World Zionist Congress in 1900, after which he renounced nationalism/Zionism. He wrote with sarcasm and righteous fury:
“Furthermore, during these ten years of Balfourist redemption the situation of the Jews has worsened in the world. All the new League established or aspiring sovereign states find it useful to persecute the Jews as they pursue their nationalist aims, and for the grace of a similar state to which we can escape we are grateful to Balfour and his cronies! But apart from this physical catastrophe of our people to which the trumpeters of the Balfour declaration have contributed by drowning the anguished cries of persecuted Jews with shouts of rejoicing at their nationalist “redemption” they have contributed to a moral catastrophe as well – both for Jews and the world.”
If only more had taken to heart his warnings.
Judaism – its texts and symbols have been recruited to the project of Zionism but by my reading of Jewish history, Judaism is not just the same as Zionism as many would have us believe, but is in fact antithetical to it.
As French-Algerian critic Houria Bouteldja said of Jews: “[the West] managed to make you trade your religion, your history, and your memories for a colonial ideology … it is as if sorcerers had put a spell on you.”
Well – I am here to de-activate that spell.
--
Judaism as we know and practice it is a tradition that evolved out of Israelite religion after the destruction of the second temple. Though there was never a formal edict of exile for Israelites, and many continued to live in historic Palestine, it was in diaspora, in Babylonia (and beyond) that Judaism was born.
In diaspora, exilic trauma was imagined and expressed in Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
But what emerged from Babylon is Judaism - a robust and beautiful religious and cultural tradition. I am inspired by the resiliency of our ancestors to transform their grief and longing into a spiritual framework still thriving thousands of years later that speaks powerfully to the paradoxes of existence.
–
Embracing, and regrounding in diaspora is a political imperative for us today. It provides a substantive – and I would argue – original philosophical, cultural and emotional foundation for Jewish life pre-colonialism. Given the centrality Zionism plays in Jewish communal life today, it is essential – strategically speaking –that there is something on the other side to re-scaffold jewish life through embrace of diaspora.
With the founding of the state of Israel, diaspora would need to be fully negated – shelilat hagalut. This included Babylon.
In the early 1950s as part of an operation known as “Operation Ezra and Nehemia”, invoking the prophets associated with the Biblical return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple– Israel coordinated the mass exodus of 120000 some Jews from Iraq. This was for many Iraqi Jews a painfully complex experience, an ongoing multi-generational trauma which engendered an ambivalent sense of belonging for dislocated Middle Eastern Jews.
Ella Shohat, a professor at NYU and a leading scholar of Arab-Jews whos family immigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1950 captures the pain and disorientation of this modern exile by flipping on its head the ancient psalm when she said:
‘By the waters of Zion, we sat and wept, when we remembered Babylon.’
-
I want to note here that I understand diaspora to be a way of being in relationship to land and place that is liberatory. Robin DG Kelley wrote of Pre-colonial indigenous nations in ways that resonate with how Jews can be in right-relationship to land and place. He wrote
“they were nations without states, governed by a culture that emphasized hospitality, care, grace, mercy, deep listening, ‘deep reciprocity, sharing, sovereignty, and a commitment to wellness, intimacy, joy, and love.” I work for decolonization to empower such a way of being.
I also want to acknowledge that these are fraught and delicate waters to wade in – hard to talk about a redeemed Jewish relationship to land as a settler colonial project in the name of Jewish people is enacting a genocide.
-
A beloved teacher of mine when I was studying in rabbinical school who was deeply informed by Jewish ethical tradition – mussar – always instructed us when we were engaging with a text in class that we must read it and read the text until it reads ethically. That was likely the single greatest gift I got during my rabbinical studies. It epitomizes what I came to understand as the quintessentially Jewish way of engaging with text and tradition over time. My read of Judaism is that it is best understood as a religious civilization which has been in perpetual evolution over time as successive generations of Jews engage with stories and practices passed down to us and filter them through the experiences and understandings of our time.
It is urgent we do so.
Over the last year we have seen grassroots mobilization in solidarity with Palestinians at an unprecedented scale. Massive street protests, building occupations, student encampments, boycotts, work disruptions, and more by millions of us in the US and around the world. Polls show most Democrats want to see the US enact an arms embargo on Israel as currently the US is delivering weapons to Israel every 4 days. We are at our most powerful and united in our support for Palestine and it is has proven to be insufficient to stop the Israel-US genocide. All the conventional wisdom we used to live by of how power works has been upended in this past year.
So what do we do now?
Shabbat shuvah is the perfect time to ask this question.
We have to be willing to let go of all we think we know and understand. As people of faith, that must include going back to our sacred texts and read them anew.
We must re-read texts and teachings that are used to justify settler colonialism, and harvest from our texts teaching that emphasize interdependence and solidarity. Or introduce them ourselves.
Reading and re-reading our sacred texts right now is essential political work – to link arms with whom we are aligned. Those that insist on reading our texts as real estate contracts that justify colonialism and seek to recast Israeli apartheid and oppression of Palestinians as a religious conflict in promises of messianic redemption must be stopped at the root.
The way that I am choosing to engage with Jewish tradition is to mine it for imperatives to solidarity and mutual aid, to nourishing where we live not dominating it, to live interdependently with our neighbors. To choose collective liberation, in which we fight for all people and none of us are left behind.
For Jews, I think we have a powerful concept that was gifted to us be secular Jews – the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund which began at the same time as Zionism. Where Jewish Zionism’s founders looked around at the rabid antisemitism in Christian Europe and decided ethno-nationalism was the answer, the Bund suggested that instead Jews could link arms with the working class and nourish – not dominate – where they are. They coined a term in yiddish called “doikayt” which can be translated as here-ness. The idea that wherever you are, you join together in coalition across faith, class. And identity to win justice and freedom and dignity for all people.
There is more thinking to be done in conversation with indigenous leaders, Jews from Muslim countries who had a very different experience of place than those of us from Christian Europe, and others. But I think there is a possibility that we can pull on this thread of Doykeit as a way to understand in Jewish terms a model of decolonial diasporism and liberatory solidarity.
--
When my Bubie died I was gifted a box of jewelry she received over the years for her service in a Jewish Zionist women's organization whose motto was “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel”. The organization was founded before Israel to engage in what its founder called “practical zionism” organizing resources for the early Zionist settlers in particular medical and nursing support. It was a breakout women’s organization after tussling with men over allocations. They incentivized women to be part of the organization when you were given an award, made a significant donation, marked many years of service, or participated in a leadership position or special project where you were gifted a pin or pendant. each pin bears a different phrase from Torah, describe their adherents as a “Mother of Israel”. I know she wore them with pride.
My Bubie taught me so much and in many ways made me who I am today. And, I have taken a sharp turn from my family of origin in coming to realize that the values they instilled in me, when applied to what I see Israel doing in the world, I am called to refuse Israel acting in my name. As committed as she was to supporting Israel seeing it as in the best interest of our people, I am committed to challenging Israel, I likewise see it in the best interest of my people to do so.
At first it felt odd for me to have been the one to receive her this collection – but now I understand it as fitting – it is a physical reminder of accountability. From generation to generation the women in my family have risen, as best as they could figure out, to steward our people. My work today is fueled by understanding the complicity of my family in the Zionist project. Part of the reason I am so committed to joining arms with Palestinians as they fight for their freedom is because of the ways that my family played a role in their dispossession. I am not seeking to shirk my responsibilities but quite the opposite.
The pins are a reminder to me of my responsibilities to my community that does not mean simple deference or adherence to how it was done before, but to be part of healing and redemption. My responsibility now is to decolonize.
A closing blessing
May we learn from the mistakes of our ancestors: those that got confused. That misunderstood. That thought it was us or them. Me or you. The ones who stole, and claimed, and took, and shamed. The ones who turned their backs. Shut their doors. Closed their eyes and their hearts. May you take the mistakes of our ancestors and spin them into blessings---they are your mistakes too, after all, part of your legacy. L’dor v’dor. From generation to generation.
Oct 5, 2024
My Bubie, Lena Wise z’l spent all her days in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was one of eight children and as one of the oldest girls was saddled with care taking her siblings when her mom got ill and died at an early age. Her life was as a caretaker. For my Dad and his two brothers, for her siblings and siblings-in-law, her nieces and nephews, and then for us grandchildren. When our family dog Emily got older she began cooking chicken for the dog as she thought the dry food to tough for her old mouth. Nearly every Shabbat and every single Jewish holiday she would make sit down meals for 30-50 people with dozens of dishes. Whenever we brought a friend for dinner she would watch what they ate and make sure she made it again the next time the came. She would start each dish not at the head of the table, but with the person for whom she had made it. And she welcomed whoever came to the table as me and my cousins got older, across faiths and race and sexuality she welcomed everyone the same. I took it for granted, honestly. Only now I know how special that was. I watched how part of this care taking was also for Judaism ensuring that my generation knew the customs and practices, the ways of living Jewish, but also that we enjoyed ourselves as part of it.
My family were kosher food distributors and so we had special relationships with the other kosher-keeping Jews in Cincinnati. There was an informal bartering system for goods and services at play. My parents were on the board at my Jewish Day School, the local Jewish Federation and active in our synagogue. Until I insisted on playing community soccer, and then to go to public school for high school, my world was almost entirely made up of Jews. I was very much in Ohio, and, as I reflect on it, at same time in a totally other place – where the calendar began with the month of Tishrei, not January. Where it wasn't Saturday, it was Shabbat. Where we had two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for milk, and two more sets to use during Passover.
I live a thriving Jewish life in Ohio. Not perfect of course, I had some upsetting and formative intimate brushes with anti-Jewish hatred, but I came out intact and vibrant. I felt very “other”, but I also felt at home.
As Kabbalistic scholar Jesse Noily has said of the experience of living in diaspora – To be in diaspora necessitates a negotiation between experiences of alienation and place.” That was entirely my experience.
I still choose to live my life how my Bubbie taught me – while I am not, as it is called in yiddish - balabuste – a talented cook and homemaker, (I married one instead!) I feel in her lineage of building Jewish community. To this day I have never knowingly eaten pork or shellfish and I do not mix meat and milk. I don't spend money or use my phone or drive a car on shabbat. I am still a religious Jew, and in part that's because i know it would make my Bubie happy.
Sadly, most of my family thinks I have left the fold, they share the views of most establishment Jewish organizations about me you would likely hear that I am a self-hating Jew, not really Jewish, or worse because I reject Zionism.
As you may or may not be aware, Zionism’s roots are in dispensationalist theology which gained steam in the 19th century and forwarded the idea at root of Christian Zionism that Jews must repopulate historic Palestine in order to bring about the second coming of the messiah. At that point Jews must convert to Christianity en masse or burn – nothing more anti-semitic than that!
Many of the key leaders in the British Parliament that brought about the State of Israel were adherents to this belief – most famously Arthur Balfour.
Arthur Balfour is the man behind the Balfour declaration– the statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This document was not something, of course, that Balfour came up with on his own, out of nowhere. Some historians maintain that there was efforts over not just decades, but some claim centuries (dating back to the 16th century) of promoting the idea that Jewish settlement in Palestine must be nurtured and advocated for as a matter of foreign policy.
There were rabbis in that time that saw with clear eyes exactly what Balfourism meant for the Jewish people and the world. Writing a decade after the Balfour declaration was signed Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares - an Orthodox rabbi and served as a delegate to the Fourth World Zionist Congress in 1900, after which he renounced nationalism/Zionism. He wrote with sarcasm and righteous fury:
“Furthermore, during these ten years of Balfourist redemption the situation of the Jews has worsened in the world. All the new League established or aspiring sovereign states find it useful to persecute the Jews as they pursue their nationalist aims, and for the grace of a similar state to which we can escape we are grateful to Balfour and his cronies! But apart from this physical catastrophe of our people to which the trumpeters of the Balfour declaration have contributed by drowning the anguished cries of persecuted Jews with shouts of rejoicing at their nationalist “redemption” they have contributed to a moral catastrophe as well – both for Jews and the world.”
If only more had taken to heart his warnings.
Judaism – its texts and symbols have been recruited to the project of Zionism but by my reading of Jewish history, Judaism is not just the same as Zionism as many would have us believe, but is in fact antithetical to it.
As French-Algerian critic Houria Bouteldja said of Jews: “[the West] managed to make you trade your religion, your history, and your memories for a colonial ideology … it is as if sorcerers had put a spell on you.”
Well – I am here to de-activate that spell.
--
Judaism as we know and practice it is a tradition that evolved out of Israelite religion after the destruction of the second temple. Though there was never a formal edict of exile for Israelites, and many continued to live in historic Palestine, it was in diaspora, in Babylonia (and beyond) that Judaism was born.
In diaspora, exilic trauma was imagined and expressed in Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
But what emerged from Babylon is Judaism - a robust and beautiful religious and cultural tradition. I am inspired by the resiliency of our ancestors to transform their grief and longing into a spiritual framework still thriving thousands of years later that speaks powerfully to the paradoxes of existence.
–
Embracing, and regrounding in diaspora is a political imperative for us today. It provides a substantive – and I would argue – original philosophical, cultural and emotional foundation for Jewish life pre-colonialism. Given the centrality Zionism plays in Jewish communal life today, it is essential – strategically speaking –that there is something on the other side to re-scaffold jewish life through embrace of diaspora.
With the founding of the state of Israel, diaspora would need to be fully negated – shelilat hagalut. This included Babylon.
In the early 1950s as part of an operation known as “Operation Ezra and Nehemia”, invoking the prophets associated with the Biblical return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple– Israel coordinated the mass exodus of 120000 some Jews from Iraq. This was for many Iraqi Jews a painfully complex experience, an ongoing multi-generational trauma which engendered an ambivalent sense of belonging for dislocated Middle Eastern Jews.
Ella Shohat, a professor at NYU and a leading scholar of Arab-Jews whos family immigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1950 captures the pain and disorientation of this modern exile by flipping on its head the ancient psalm when she said:
‘By the waters of Zion, we sat and wept, when we remembered Babylon.’
-
I want to note here that I understand diaspora to be a way of being in relationship to land and place that is liberatory. Robin DG Kelley wrote of Pre-colonial indigenous nations in ways that resonate with how Jews can be in right-relationship to land and place. He wrote
“they were nations without states, governed by a culture that emphasized hospitality, care, grace, mercy, deep listening, ‘deep reciprocity, sharing, sovereignty, and a commitment to wellness, intimacy, joy, and love.” I work for decolonization to empower such a way of being.
I also want to acknowledge that these are fraught and delicate waters to wade in – hard to talk about a redeemed Jewish relationship to land as a settler colonial project in the name of Jewish people is enacting a genocide.
-
A beloved teacher of mine when I was studying in rabbinical school who was deeply informed by Jewish ethical tradition – mussar – always instructed us when we were engaging with a text in class that we must read it and read the text until it reads ethically. That was likely the single greatest gift I got during my rabbinical studies. It epitomizes what I came to understand as the quintessentially Jewish way of engaging with text and tradition over time. My read of Judaism is that it is best understood as a religious civilization which has been in perpetual evolution over time as successive generations of Jews engage with stories and practices passed down to us and filter them through the experiences and understandings of our time.
It is urgent we do so.
Over the last year we have seen grassroots mobilization in solidarity with Palestinians at an unprecedented scale. Massive street protests, building occupations, student encampments, boycotts, work disruptions, and more by millions of us in the US and around the world. Polls show most Democrats want to see the US enact an arms embargo on Israel as currently the US is delivering weapons to Israel every 4 days. We are at our most powerful and united in our support for Palestine and it is has proven to be insufficient to stop the Israel-US genocide. All the conventional wisdom we used to live by of how power works has been upended in this past year.
So what do we do now?
Shabbat shuvah is the perfect time to ask this question.
We have to be willing to let go of all we think we know and understand. As people of faith, that must include going back to our sacred texts and read them anew.
We must re-read texts and teachings that are used to justify settler colonialism, and harvest from our texts teaching that emphasize interdependence and solidarity. Or introduce them ourselves.
Reading and re-reading our sacred texts right now is essential political work – to link arms with whom we are aligned. Those that insist on reading our texts as real estate contracts that justify colonialism and seek to recast Israeli apartheid and oppression of Palestinians as a religious conflict in promises of messianic redemption must be stopped at the root.
The way that I am choosing to engage with Jewish tradition is to mine it for imperatives to solidarity and mutual aid, to nourishing where we live not dominating it, to live interdependently with our neighbors. To choose collective liberation, in which we fight for all people and none of us are left behind.
For Jews, I think we have a powerful concept that was gifted to us be secular Jews – the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund which began at the same time as Zionism. Where Jewish Zionism’s founders looked around at the rabid antisemitism in Christian Europe and decided ethno-nationalism was the answer, the Bund suggested that instead Jews could link arms with the working class and nourish – not dominate – where they are. They coined a term in yiddish called “doikayt” which can be translated as here-ness. The idea that wherever you are, you join together in coalition across faith, class. And identity to win justice and freedom and dignity for all people.
There is more thinking to be done in conversation with indigenous leaders, Jews from Muslim countries who had a very different experience of place than those of us from Christian Europe, and others. But I think there is a possibility that we can pull on this thread of Doykeit as a way to understand in Jewish terms a model of decolonial diasporism and liberatory solidarity.
--
When my Bubie died I was gifted a box of jewelry she received over the years for her service in a Jewish Zionist women's organization whose motto was “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel”. The organization was founded before Israel to engage in what its founder called “practical zionism” organizing resources for the early Zionist settlers in particular medical and nursing support. It was a breakout women’s organization after tussling with men over allocations. They incentivized women to be part of the organization when you were given an award, made a significant donation, marked many years of service, or participated in a leadership position or special project where you were gifted a pin or pendant. each pin bears a different phrase from Torah, describe their adherents as a “Mother of Israel”. I know she wore them with pride.
My Bubie taught me so much and in many ways made me who I am today. And, I have taken a sharp turn from my family of origin in coming to realize that the values they instilled in me, when applied to what I see Israel doing in the world, I am called to refuse Israel acting in my name. As committed as she was to supporting Israel seeing it as in the best interest of our people, I am committed to challenging Israel, I likewise see it in the best interest of my people to do so.
At first it felt odd for me to have been the one to receive her this collection – but now I understand it as fitting – it is a physical reminder of accountability. From generation to generation the women in my family have risen, as best as they could figure out, to steward our people. My work today is fueled by understanding the complicity of my family in the Zionist project. Part of the reason I am so committed to joining arms with Palestinians as they fight for their freedom is because of the ways that my family played a role in their dispossession. I am not seeking to shirk my responsibilities but quite the opposite.
The pins are a reminder to me of my responsibilities to my community that does not mean simple deference or adherence to how it was done before, but to be part of healing and redemption. My responsibility now is to decolonize.
A closing blessing
May we learn from the mistakes of our ancestors: those that got confused. That misunderstood. That thought it was us or them. Me or you. The ones who stole, and claimed, and took, and shamed. The ones who turned their backs. Shut their doors. Closed their eyes and their hearts. May you take the mistakes of our ancestors and spin them into blessings---they are your mistakes too, after all, part of your legacy. L’dor v’dor. From generation to generation.