Originally written for Passover, 2024
For forty years, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam wandered the vast, rolling dunes of the Sinai desert. Behind them thronged a long line of Hebrews, their people, haggard and rushed, with doughy, pale circles of unleavened bread shining like full moons atop their sun-baked backs.
The Hebrews had just endured centuries of enslavement, and were tired. The culmination of their suffering had been written in God’s ten plagues; a show of divine might, of righteous justice, wrought through the knotted, wooden staff held in the trembling hand of Moses. I know that Moses’ hands shook, for before he was a messenger of God, he was a confused, displaced stranger, with a knot in his tongue and no way with words. In the Quran, Moses is said to have beseeched God: “My Lord! Open up for me my heart/ And ease for me my task. / And untie the knot of my tongue. / That they may understand my speech.”
It was not until God told Moses that he should seek out his brother, Aaron, that he was given a voice, and the knot was untangled. This voice of brotherhood, of family and fellowship, carried through the land of Egypt, strong enough to bear the true weight of God. After God brought the plagues, and at last Pharaoh acquiesced, it was Moses’ time to lead the Hebrews past the Red Sea and into the sands of Sinai. The voice of family, shared amongst those three siblings, was wielded in that moment by Miriam. Holding a tambourine, Miriam led the women in a song for the Lord, exalting him. This is a quote from a song about this event, by Debbie Friedman, an American-Jewish feminist songwriter. Friedman sang, “And Miriam was a weaver of unique variety./The tapestry she wove was one which sang our history./With every thread and every strand/she crafted her delight./A woman touched with spirit, she dances toward the light.” Miriam is vitally important to be included alongside Moses and Aaron, for the men did put the strife of the Jewish people into words, but Miriam sang and danced to them, and brought joy and celebration to the years of devastation felt by our ancestors. Like many Jewish women we know she was loud and bright and burning with love for God, and even more apparently, love for her people, her tribe.
But then, for forty years, the Hebrews wandered in the desert. Moses had promised his people deliverance, salvation, and a new home. After so much control, they would know freedom, thus eclipsing the danger of Egypt’s enslavement behind the power of a prophesied, promised land. Gone were the years of oppression and devastation, and before them unraveled an endless spool of possibility. But then, for forty years, the Hebrews wandered in the desert. They could not find Canaan, that place God promised Moses, and Moses promised the Hebrews. They were lost, confused, betrayed, and afraid. They were scorned by the promise of a loving Father who would, again, as he had in Egypt, turn his face from their suffering. And why, they must have wondered?
Here we are, during Passover of 2024, or Pesach of 5784. Like Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the biblical Hebrews: we are lost, confused, betrayed, and afraid. Think of what we have endured: in the very least analogous to 430 years of enslavement in Egypt: Crusades, scapegoating, ghettoization, codification, persecution, and genocide. Pogroms in Europe are at least 928 years old, if we mark their beginning with the People’s Crusade in 1096, which led to the advent of widespread murder of Jewish peoples in Europe. More than double the time than the Hebrews were in Egypt, the Jewish people of the West have been shackled by violent, white supremacist anti-Semitism. Especially after its culmination of the Holocaust, or Shoah, we might like our promised land, our safety and salvation. But instead we wander in the desert.
Moses was lost in the desert for four decades as a test. He was placed in opposition against the evils of the world, of the base wrongness that existed beyond God’s light, before he might find Canaan–and he did not. He was not ready. He died before reaching the promised land. And before we, the Jews of the year 5785, can be ready, we must understand truly what our promised land will be.
The concept of the nation-state did not exist in the Torah, much less to Moses and the nation of Israel. What, then, is the actual nation of Israel? What is a nation at all, beyond the fog of modern geopolitical borders? A group of people, united by shared culture, customs, and identity. There is connection to land there, but in its conceptual nature, the nation supersedes physicality. The nation might find a physical location to center itself out of, but it existed before it was settled in a particular place. Before the nation can have a place, it has people–and the Jewish people have always wandered, untethered to earth but rather bound to God, to knowledge, to questions, and to each other. Therein lies the diaspora, defined as “people settled far from their ancestral homelands; and: “the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland” by Miriam-Webster’s Dictionary. The diaspora, then, is the true nation of Israel, for it is our heart, that moving mass of Jewish people, unconnected to modern and anachronistic geopolitics.
In almost all of our Hebrew prayers, the nation of Israel is mentioned. I have grappled a lot with hearing those prayers and that word as images of dismembered bodies fill the hollow basin of my aching chest. I see flashes of faces warped by chemical burns, or the tiny earring of a martyred child pinned to the lapel of her grandfather’s coat, or people drowning as they swim for airdropped American aid-packages in the churning waters circumscribing the northern Gaza Strip. This is Israel, I have thought. How can I pray to this? But since then I have come to this conclusion I just shared with you: that the true nation of Israel, our promised land, like the one entrusted to Moses and the Hebrews, cannot be a nation-state, for the God of our Torah did not ever say that a nation-state should exist. He said that the Jewish people should be safe, should have a home, and should live in the lands of our ancestors. I believe that is impossible unless the nation-state of Israel is abolished, for there can be no safety in a land of lasting conflict and violence.
The Mishna, citing Isaiah, states “[weapons] cannot be seen as anything other than reprehensible and in the future they will be eliminated, as it is written: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not raise sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore.”
How then can the Israel of the Torah, of our prayers, possibly be what we see today? If our prophesied future is one without weapons, how is it true that the true promised land must receive billions of dollars in armament, from guns to bombs to tanks to lethal gasses, in order to exist?
As the Hebrews, spirits worn down by timeless torment, continued their trek through the desert, they were tired. They were hungry, thirsty, and hurting, and could not understand why, after so much suffering, they must suffer more. They asked Moses, “Why did you take us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle by thirst?” (Numbers 20, verse 4). Moses and Aaron, distraught by their pain, and also distraught by the request to return to the land of their oppressors, “fell upon their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of Israel.” To them a return to Egypt was unfathomable, even if wandering in the desert was not the salvation they were hoping for. They would not go back to that place that would cage God within the laws of a land that was not their own, that would imprison them to do the labor their overlords were unwilling to do themselves.
The European-Jewish presence in the nation state of Israel, as it exists today, are those of us that turned back to Egypt. Like the Hebrews might have returned to the familiar oppression of Egyptian imperialism, White Jews would return to the familiar model of European colonialism. European colonialism that devastated us for more than 900 years. Yet we have been taught that the way to recover from oppression is to become the oppressor, and that to free ourselves from the cycle of anti-Semetic persecution we must persecute others. Never again, we think, yet we think, too, that the cycle of suffering can do nothing but repeat. That, then, genocide is justified in that it has been placed away from us, saving us at last, and we have freed ourself from the groundhog day of repetitive Shoah. The ouroboros’ snake has spit out its tail, to be eaten by another animal instead. This is acceptable for a myriad of reasons, drilled into the minds of nearly all Western Jews, but adherence to European colonialism serves a wicked purpose. Like the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt to build pyramids–monuments to wealth and power–modern Jews would be enslaved to lay the path for the West to devastate that area of the world, to build our empires of oil and capitalism. I pray to God that we will not let ourselves be enslaved to do this labor that the gentile, white supremicist elite is too cowardly to do themselves. Let us instead wander in the desert of diaspora, knowing that when the time is right, when we can lay down our arms and animosity, the true home for the nation of Israel will be found. Until then, we have each other, and that is more than enough for me. Dayenu.
