The Stories of Judaism Lost to War
For Passover, a reflection on flattened histories and human complexity
When I was growing up, some of my closest atheist friends were Jewish.
Later on, I would eventually meet Jewish folk who believed in a more literal god, and some of my childhood friends would become Orthodox extremists themselves, suddenly concerned as young adults with purity and protecting their priestly lineage after very much fooling around in all things un-kosher throughout their teens.
But for a good stint in my youth, I was surrounded by Christians and Muslims who fervently believed in a real, active god, and Jewish classmates whose families who loved a good story, the power of ritual, and the resilience of tradition. Fellow atheist-atheists being in short supply, you can guess which group I jived with the most.
The problem with being an atheist-atheist, though, is that at the end of the day religion still informs so much of our world, and there’s not much that one can do to turn the tide of such an overwhelming commitment to a few ancient stories.
Sure, you can embrace empirical knowledge, and marvel at the natural cosmology it yields, but without figuring out how to reckon well with human cultures built upon deep histories of religious belief, you’re not exactly offering a compelling alternative to a lot of toxic baggage that comes with the stories that billions of humans hold dear.
And honestly, there are times when I can’t stand any of the Abrahamic faiths. Sometimes, when I’m furious at the damage these stories have done, and how small and tribal they all seem, it’s difficult to remember the good that many individuals have also done with the stories into which they were born. In moments of helpless fury with the weight of religious violence in the world today, I feel deeply ashamed to belong to a species that can’t seem to surmount the worst in its ancient tales.
And then the humanist in me kicks in.
The humanist in me asks: “But what if we can’t? What if it’s a key part of ‘being human’ to want to embody the stories that give our lives structure, momentum, and meaning? What then? If this is how most humans exist in the cosmos, isn’t it just another form of tribal hatred to deny the value of those lives and experiences, too?”
What emerges from such questions is a strong drive to improve human agency and dignity: if we can’t shake the Etch-a-Sketch of human storytelling clean, we can at least strive to reduce the negative impacts of our current tribalism through greater mutual understanding, and by coaxing the better parts of our disparate stories to play nicer with one another in the full, fragile world that we share.
But this project requires a more comprehensive understanding of the world in which we live in the first place. It’s not enough to understand the science of our physical selves, and our immediate environments, and the whole of the cosmos writ large. We also need to understand the histories of our peoples: our texts, and their stories.
Historiography in particular is important. It’s not enough to say “this is the story that we tell about ourselves in this part of the world, or in this community”.
Why do we tell our stories one way today, and not another?
What are we overlooking when we do?
And who, or what, is served by our erasures?
The stories of Judaism lost to war
These last few months of Israel’s war in Gaza have been deeply painful on many levels: not only because of the staggering loss of human life and dignity, but also because war makes us terrible historians and excellent propagandists. In times of conflict, we enthusiastically take up the work of flattening ourselves and others into simplistic groupings that make it easier to firm up lines in the sand. We lose the ability to see bids for cultural nuance as anything more than fence-sitting or elaborate psyops.
A few Wednesdays ago, I talked about some of that missing nuance by looking at a mid-20th-century history around the rise of Revisionist Zionism: a form of Zionism that exists on a spectrum of religious and political belief, but which very much does not want to be seen as belonging to a spectrum at all. It is important to the mission of this more militant form of national affirmation that no other views be considered as legitimate representations of Jewish experience and desire—even when the Jewish community has always been a rich fount of debate and wide-ranging dissent.
To quickly recap the chronology from that post: in the 1870s, brutal Russian pogroms drove Jewish persons to resettle en masse—in the US, and in the Middle East. In the 1890s, overt antisemitism in France further demoralized Jewish Europeans, and fortified Theodor Herzl in his formative views around Zionism and a need for Jews to have a state just like the rest of Europe, if they were ever to be safe from persecution.
But Zionist movements at that juncture were still often blended with socialist and communist projects across Europe, and the international Zionist community in the 1920s was not a fan of the militant Jabotinsky, who was willing to work even with Ukrainian groups that had slaughtered Jewish people in the past, if it would allow him to defend against a Soviet project he saw as the greater threat to Jewish nationalism.
Labor-oriented Zionisms, along with forms of Zionism that drew on more modern forms of Judaism that we’ll address below, firmly disagreed with this form of Zionism for decades to come—and yet, they had other political tensions, too. Was the Zionist dream of homecoming something they were meant to wrest from the world by force? Or work with the international community to attain? Or were they supposed to wait for the Messiah first? Maybe homecoming could be achieved by living in a spirit of community and peaceful love wherever they were, to usher in a Messianic age?
Even after the formation of Israel in 1948, Jewish persons in Israel and diaspora were widely divided on these ethno-religious questions—and Revisionist Zionism was still seen as extreme among them: not just by liberal and socialist persons, but also by many Orthodox Jews firmly opposed to a movement so fixated on secular markers of Jewishness, at cost to what they felt were deeper spiritual elements of the faith.
Decades would pass with gradually amassing conservative members of Israeli parliament, called the Knesset, until what had once been a fringe movement became the Likud Party in 1977, rising to power and shifting the political balance with its initial promise never to abandon Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and to strive for a future in which “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” When a far-right Zionist murdered the sitting PM, a Labor Zionist, in 1995, the balance continued to skew increasingly toward more hard-line militant politics. That doesn’t mean the form exists alone today, though: in diaspora, in Israel, and in Israel’s Knesset (parliament), a wide range of perspectives on how best to fulfill Jewish nationalism remains, and opposition to the Likud Party’s Netanyahu is fierce.
However, all this nuance isn’t something that most Gentiles care to learn about. We’re perfectly comfortable vaguely hand-waving over all Jewish persons as if they’re still little more than stock stereotypes from self-congratulatory World War II propaganda. It’s also not something many Revisionist Zionists give a hoot about disclosing to us.
And why would they? From their perspective, the Gentile world has never been any good at protecting Jewish people (understatement of the century), so if Gentiles want to “help” now, we can damned well do so, the rationale goes, by shutting up and supporting their form of self-determination through whatever military campaign they deem necessary to secure the land and safety of their people forever.
We have failed to keep people safe, in other words, so we have no right to be alarmed by how some Jewish persons choose to keep their people safe today.
But that was another post.
Today, in the middle of Passover, we find ourselves in the middle of another flattening of Jewish experience to war-driven caricatures. Yes, I’m talking about the complex news cycle whipped up around a student protest in New York—amid the passage of a US aid package for Israel, and ongoing civilian casualties and suffering in Rafah, and all the sabre-rattling around Iran and through active skirmishes in a complex north- and northeastern territory where Hezbollah operates and clashes with the IDF.
It has been a mess of propaganda amid material violence, in other words.
And in the middle of it, yet again, the fullness of human experience is lost.
Because the fact is:
There are Jewish students among those calling for Columbia to divest from its partner program with Tel Aviv, along with other recently added initiatives tying the university closer to Israel. A Jewish student group is still pursuing legal action for its November suspension for antiwar efforts. Jewish citizens also took to the streets of New York protesting US aid for Israel’s military campaign, and were mass-arrested for their Passover Seder demonstration outside one of Chuck Schumer’s residences.
There were also Jewish persons on campus firmly against the divestment protest, including a controversial professor under review for harassment of protesters and Palestinian colleagues. He was blocked entry to campus after making it public that he wanted to lead a counter-protest within the original encampment area. Billionaire backers have hit pause on university funding. A rabbi sent a WhatsApp message to hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students encouraging them to avoid campus. Jewish citizens from New York rallied around campus to protest clear acts of antisemitism, some of which is arising from the presence of non-university actors at related events.
I should also note that at least one Jewish student at the school, Benjamin Ben-Menachem, has come out firmly against the media spin, in a Substack posted yesterday with a great deal more information about much of the above:
What this all amounts to, then, is something I have been trying to emphasize since well before this war began: we contain multitudes, which are always lost in war.
What I keep forgetting, though—and what keeps getting me down—is that it’s an uphill battle even to keep us interested in pursuing nuance around such themes.
Because most of us don’t want nuance. Many of us are even worried that nuance is sabotage—the result of foreign actors trying to weaken our resolve! When conflict arises, most of us simply want to be affirmed by clearly defined notions of Right and Wrong… no matter what deeper human truths we end up losing along the way.
Different schools of Jewish thought
This Passover, for instance, I find myself thinking about the many schools of Jewish religious thought, which I’m going to talk about in four loose groupings.
Passover marks a Biblical story that even Israeli archaeologists will handily tell you is not in accordance with historical record. There are no signs of a great “exodus” at the time when it was supposed to have occurred, despite the era being one with many bureaucratic records, and despite our ability to find older archaeological evidence of other people in key regions. The history of the arrival of Israelites in Canaan seems to have had a much more mundane origin of tribal differentiation around 1200 BCE.
Like many other mythic parts of the whole Biblical tradition, though, this story serves other purposes, and was especially important for Jewish groups after their Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. At that time, Biblical stories around the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th century BCE, and this grand story of an earlier Exodus (which most scholars consider to have been written during that later period of Babylonian exile), would come to fortify many Jewish groups anew.
The first century of our common era was a complex time for Jewish groups in general, in a rapidly transforming culture where other faith traditions were starting to formalize their own religious stories, too. We’ve lost a lot of those 1st-century efforts, especially from the blended Gnostic traditions that 2nd-century Christian leaders would often expressly destroy. Nevertheless, a few Jewish groups made a concerted effort to preserve their own oral traditions in writing, and crafted a body of rabbinical literature that would carry their people through the coming ordeal of being cast out.
For the next 1700 years or so, Jewish persons would find themselves excluded from Gentile statecraft in many formulations of European and Middle Eastern culture. They would become heavily reliant on traditions of Rabbinic Judaism for self-governance across all their scattered groups in diaspora, and thus cultivate a very different relationship to notions of nationality than many of their neighbours.
But in the 1800s, fortune was starting to favour Jewish people in Europe, and movements for their civic inclusion within secular states sparked interest in spiritual reformation. Judaism didn’t need to be quite so rigid anymore, many argued—and with the rising amount of new empirical knowledge that was transforming Christian beliefs as well, wasn’t it high time that Judaism modernized, too?
Enter Reform Judaism: eager to blend ancient faith traditions with a fresh curiosity about the broader world, and boasting a living Bible to match. Why should Jewish persons still be beholden to old rites like animal sacrifice, when the world had clearly progressed to other exciting ways through which one might honour one’s god?
Reform Judaism wasn’t progressive enough for some people’s liking, though, so around the 1910s you also got a form of Liberal Judaism that was impatient to tear down gender divides, too. The two forms have been operating in a kind of paired dialogue with one another ever since—with some thinking they’re pretty much the same already, and others still holding on to the differences crafted over time.
In the meantime, though, Orthodox Judaism firmly asserted itself as a reaction to Reform Judaism—digging its feet in on old traditions, albeit with different internal versions of what traditions mattered most. Orthodox Judaism also found its partner in dialogue in Conservative Judaism—which doesn’t go anywhere near as hard as Orthodox on ritual and lifestyle, but does share in a deep consternation with Reform/Liberal forms of the faith. Orthodox and Conservative forms are also divided on questions of militant nationalism and engagement with worldly pursuits.
At the end of the Passover Seder, Jewish persons say “Next year in Jerusalem”—an expression that showed up amid the Crusade-driven ache for return: first in a 12th-century poem for Yom Kippur, then in Passover texts from the 14th century on. Originally recorded by a single person aching for a literal return himself, it now has far-ranging meanings depending on one’s Jewish tradition, especially in a world where many Jewish persons no longer live far from Jerusalem to start.
For some, the Zionist call for a literal and permanent return to the region could not be clearer: it is the mission of those of faith to return to Jerusalem, resettle its proximate areas, and defend the land from further threats until the coming of the Messiah.
For others, it is a reminder of the importance of pilgrimage, at the bare minimum, and to always keep the holy sites in Jerusalem close to one’s heart.
For others still, the expression is a call of mourning and solidarity with Jewish persons across time and space: a remembrance of past suffering, honoured today.
And lastly, for many the character of “Jerusalem” in this line is much more figurative. Its recitation is an appeal for Jewish persons around the world to live the coming year in such a way as would bring about a Messianic age of peace and love.
In the heat of today’s brutal war, there are a great many bids for our allegiance and attention—and not just among Gentiles. Many within the vast and dynamic Jewish community have very rigid notions of which Jewish beliefs “count”, and who deserves to be heard in the current conflict. Some Jews will therefore accuse others of being self-hating if they belong to a less militant spiritual and political tradition. Others will accuse more militant groups of having sacrificed true faith for secular ambition.
And of course, the “Gentile” world has its allegiances, too—with many Christian groups having their own designs on certain Jewish schools of political and spiritual thought, as they fit into Christian eschatology and reform practices, respectively.
Is there any hope of resolution here?
Of one view triumphing over all the rest?
Of course not.
The goal is simply to remember that all of these tensions are playing out concurrently—and to try not to let any given view flatten all the rest.
One last thought on Exodus
The Torah’s version of Exodus differs markedly from the one known to many Christians. It contains multiple hardenings of Pharaoh’s heart against a Moses he respects, and multiple assertions that YHWH is doing all these terrible things to demonstrate divine power (in other words, for the story in it all).
But one part of this Passover story breaks my heart more than the rest, every time I return to this ancient text. Again, I know it’s just a myth structure, which tells us more about ancient cultural priorities than actual regional events. Still, one section sings out as a perfect depiction of the everyday human cost of our mythic traditions.
Before the murder of every firstborn in Egypt, YHWH instructs Moses to tell his people to ask their Egyptian neighbours for gold, silver, and clothes: things they’ll apparently need for their journey. And they help, readily and without question.
As Shemot (Exodus) 11:1-3 explains,
The Lord said to Moses, "I will bring one more plague upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go from here. When he lets you out, he will completely drive you out of here.
Please, speak into the ears of the people, and let them borrow, each man from his friend and each woman from her friend, silver vessels and golden vessels."
So the Lord gave the people favor in the Egyptians' eyes; also the man Moses was highly esteemed in the land of Egypt in the eyes of Pharaoh's servants and in the eyes of the people.
And as 12:35-36 continues,
And the children of Israel did according to Moses' order, and they borrowed from the Egyptians silver objects, golden objects, and garments.
The Lord gave the people favor in the eyes of the Egyptians, and they lent them, and they emptied out Egypt.
Now, again, these people of Moses were planning to leave the city right after YHWH had murdered every firstborn not under a protected doorway.
But there’s no sign in this ancient myth of Moses and his people ever reciprocating their neighbours’ kindness by warning them. The people in this story know that the friendly Egyptians who’ve just given them gold, silver, and clothes are going to wake up with dead children—and yet apparently, to create an ethnic space and unifying story of one’s own, this was just the price to be paid back then.
And also in every other century to come after it.
All around the world, that is, everyday humans who more often than not just want to be good neighbours find themselves propelled into awful social roles by The Powers That Be: their “pharaohs”, their community leaders, and maybe even their gods.
So you can see why my heart is sick with hate sometimes for all these terrible Abrahamic stories, which so routinely show disdain for actual human life.
But at the same time, to value “actual human life” requires accepting its diverse nature. So if we can’t wipe our bloody slate clean, we can at least try to highlight how diverse it’s always been, and try to help one another move toward a deeper and more empathetic understanding of our human condition through the exercise.
War is the great flattener.
It is a killer of truth, and the ruin of rich histories.
Who will we be, and what will we champion, when it comes next for our own?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Race, religion, and ethnic identities are all fictional constructs. We can be aware of the enduring social impact, both positive and negative, of these utter fictions, while refusing the tide rather than giving in to it. Reparations, yes - religious ethnostates, no.
With the exigencies of human social collapse and the Climatastrophe overhanging every waking moment, who has to time to constantly give value to wish-based nonsense? Atheistic atheism - now that's a club worth belonging to and paying dues.
Two groups were adamantly antizionist before the founding of Israel.--the ultra orthodox and socialists, like the bund.
However, Reform Judaism initially opposed zionism. And there were some antizionists in Reform and Conservative Judaism even after Israel was founded.
Jewish antizionism still exists, both in religious and political forms.