May Pundak and Dr Rula Hardal on Receiving the Innagural Vivian Silver Impact Award
It is, again, a difficult year for writing Rosh Hashanah sermons. I don't expect much sympathy. It's easier to write a sermon than spend even a minute as a captive in some godforsaken tunnel under Gaza. It's easier too, to write a sermon than to spend even a minute in some Gazan not-very-safe refuge. But I've been thinking about what is ‘just.’ I’ve been thinking about Israel and Gaza and Palestine and I want to share that journey with you.
Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof – pursue justice, only justice Lmaan
Techyeh VYarishta Et HaAretz – pursue justice that you may live, and
possess the land. Justice and land.
I’ve been reading John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Imagine,
suggested Rawls, that you brought together the brightest people you can find
and task them with working out principles of justice for the society they would
enter. But they have to figure this stuff out behind what Rawls called a ‘veil
of ignorance’ where no-one knows, as he puts it,
“[their,] class position or
social status, their fortune in the distribution of natural assets and
abilities, intelligence, strength, and the like.”
It’s only once they have figured out what is and what is not
just, that the specific nature of how they will exist in society will be revealed.
It’s a remarkable thought-experiment.
I think the Torah expresses a similar idea when, just before
the verse, Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof, there’s an instruction given to judges
- Lo Takir Panim. That’s often translated as ‘do not show partiality’
but literally the phrase means, ‘don’t recognise faces.’ I’m going to understand that to mean, don’t
lean into recognising the things you already know about yourself, and the
people around you.[1] Try
to disregard what you already know.
Let me take a case from today’s Torah reading. What if you had
to debate the justice of this morning’s Torah reading from behind a veil of ignorance?
What if you didn’t know which character in this tale you would find yourself
cast as: Sara or Hagar, or Isaac or Ishmael. In the passage we read, something
seems to have happened between Sarah’s son Isaac and Hagar’s son, Ishmael. It’s
not clear. The Torah says Yishmael Metzachek – was playing. But
Sara is appalled and insists Hagar and Ishmael are kicked out of their
homestead. Abraham acquiesces and there’s a moment where Hagar, having been
sent into the desert and run out of water, places her child under a shrub expecting
him to die of thirst.
What if you don’t know if your people – in this story – are the
descendants of Isaac, or the descendants of Ishmael? What does it mean to pursue
justice now?
And so to Israel and Palestine. What would you say about
justice if you didn’t know whether you would emerge from behind Rawls’ veil of
ignorance and find yourself living on a Kibbutz on the Gazan border, like Itay
Shabi who spoke of his experience on Oct 7th from this very Bimah earlier
in the year?
Or what if you were to be a Palestinian? Someone like Awdah
Hathaleen who Rabbi Natasha and I met on our trip to the South Hebron Hills in
March. Hathaleen was a peace activist living in the West Bank. While protesting
against settler encroachment on his land, in his village, he was shot dead by a
Jewish settler on the UK Government’s sanction list.
How would you determine what is and what is not the just use
of force in Gaza, in Israel, in the West Bank if you didn’t know how you would
emerge from behind a veil of ignorance?
Rawls’ thought experiment is captivating, but hard. It’s not
easy to think myself away from my knowledge of myself. But as I tried, and I
got stuck, I started to feel something else; that attempting to think about
justice from behind a veil of ignorance is somehow both less important than I
had thought, and simultaneously absolutely vital.
Here's the less important part. I’ve been lobbied about my
sermons this year – I’ve had emails asking me to condemn ‘this’ as being
unjust, or not condemn ‘that’. I’ve been invited to use or avoid one kind of
language or another to justify or refute one element or another of this awful situation.
And, it’s not that I’ve lost my moral compass, it’s just that I’ve become less
interested in the value of making that kind of a call about what is and what is
not just. It’s felt, increasingly, that these kinds of public calls are unlikely
to actually move anything – anyone’s mind, anyone’s freedom. They seem to be
opportunities to show how much I agree with one group of people or disagree
with another, so one group or another can know if I’m an acceptable Rabbi or
should be cancelled.
But trying to think from behind a veil of ignorance, trying
not to recognise the faces – in that language from Deuteronomy, trying to
decentre my own experiences and narrative has drawn me into thinking more about
the experience and narratives of others. Again, it’s not abandoning a moral
compass, it’s becoming increasingly interested in trying to recognise what
other people – the so-called other side – are saying rather than focus solely on
my own sense of my own views.
I looked at one of the saddest pieces of sociological
research I have ever encountered. Robert Brym and Bader Araj[2]
surveyed the 138 suicide bombers responsible for 657 deaths in the Second
Intifada in the early 2000s and tried to work out why they acted the way they
did. Their research suggests these bombers didn’t act irrationally and didn’t
act strategically, but rather as part of what the researchers called a “cycle
of retaliation.” They wrote;
“Much of the impetus for
Palestinian suicide bombings can be explained by the desire to retaliate
against Israeli killings of Palestinians; and much of the impetus for Israeli
killings of Palestinians can be explained by the desire to retaliate for suicide
bombings.”
I did warn it was
sad, so awfully, tragically sad. And it’s not that I read the article and equated
the killing of an Israeli by a Palestinian with the killing of a Palestinian by
an Israeli. I didn’t. But I found I was caring less about who started it and
who was or wasn’t justified and started caring more about how to stop these
awful cycles of retaliation.
The retaliation has been going on for so long that the idea that there is implacable hatred between two sides bent on destroying the other has become not only an acceptable claim, but the only claim that passes scrutiny, BOTH in circles that advocate a love of Israel and hatred of Palestinians AND in circles that advocate a love of Palestine and hatred of Israelis.
And whether the pollsters or the politicians or academics or
social media influencers who make these claims are inflating or ignoring one
piece of data or another – and they might not be – the really sad thing is that
this view seems only to lead to ever more violence.
Thankfully there are other voices.
I was at a meeting of the Palestinian and Israeli leadership
of the organisation, A Land for All. It started with this sentence, “There are nine
million Jews and five million Palestinians living in this land and we start
from the understanding that none of us is going anywhere.” The leaders of the
organisation have sat down and tried to work out a plan to share one land
between two people. There are plans for the borders and refugees and security
and all the rest of it. It’s a path out of here and it’s built, for both Jews
and Palestinians, on a commitment to decenter our own claims as the only claim,
it’s built on an attempt to step behind a veil of ignorance. It’s an approach
that gets mocked for being naïve. It can seem shocking in a world that seems so
intent on setting “them” as wholly against “us”. But May Pundak and Dr Rula
Hardal don’t come across as naïve and don’t consider themselves to be naïve –
they know exactly how miserable the current situation is and how much worse it’s
getting. They say it’s their desperation that drives their involvement in this
work.
I’ve been deeply moved by listening to Magen Inon this year.
Both of Inon’s parents were murdered on 7th October. He’s responded
by calling for peace-building, by standing together with Palestinians who similarly
have suffered and stand alongside him. I’ve seen him alongside a Palestinian
whose brother had died in an Israeli jail. I’ve seen him alongside Palestinian
artists and musicians, fighting for a view of this awful conflict that doesn’t
further set Jew against Palestinian and Palestinian against Jew.
We should be embracing this kind of bravery, reposting this
kind of content on our social media and in our whatsapp groups, turning up to
these sorts of rallies. We need to platform precisely the people who offer a
way away from believing the only way to justice is to from our own point of
view.
The alternative, I think, is to fold into a place where my
view of what is right occupies my entire vision. That entails becoming ever
more convinced that views different to my own have to be rejected. And I think
that is how we bind ourselves tighter and tighter into places of isolation and cycles
of misery.
There’s a passage in the book of Kings when the prophets of
Baal are trying to get their god to set fire to a sacrificial bull, and their
prayers aren’t working. Elijah taunts them, encouraging them to cry BKol
Gadol – with a louder voice - and they cry louder and even “cut themselves
with swords until the blood runs out.”[3]
And it doesn’t, of course, work. They would have done better to step outside a
pattern that had long since established itself as failing.
This isn’t just about Israel and Gaza, of course.
The best thing I’ve heard about the hope this year is from an
interview with Nick Cave, the singer, who lost both his sons, one at the age of
15, one at the age of 31.
Much of my early life [wrote
Cave] I spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a
position both seductive and indulgent. It took a personal devastation to teach
me the preciousness of life, the essential goodness of people, and to
understand that the world was crying out for help. It took a devastation to
find hope. Unlike cynicism [he continued], hopefulness is hard-earned and makes
demands on us and so often can feel like the most indefensible and foolish
place on earth. [But] hopefulness is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to
cynicism. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth
defending and that the world is worth believing in.
It's not remarkable to experience savage pain and want to
close down. It might even be entirely just to experience savage pain and close
down. But it’s not going to transform. It’s not going to mend. And it’s not necessarily
naïve to seek the other thing, it might be easy to accuse those who hope of naiveite.
It might feel foolish but, as Cave suggests, hope is a transformational emotion
and it might be born of both understanding and desperation.
The seductive attraction of the patterns we know won’t get
us to a future that differs from our present. The only way to change is to step
outside our own recognition of our own certainties and instead amplify or focus
on the views of those who are working how we can live together on this fragile planet.
In a time so divisive and polarising, we need to stop
claiming how just we are and instead make space for voices other than our own. We
need to be on the side of hope. Whether that’s about Gaza, Israel or any of the challenges of our time, or even the way we treat our colleagues, friends
and family. We have to be on the side of hope if we want anything to improve.
So that’s my task, for myself, and my challenge to us all –
to hope more, to continue trying to step behind a veil of ignorance, to
continue to decenter my recognition of only the faces I agree with, and in so
doing find a better way, a better year, a year of peace and possibility.
May it come for us all.
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