On faith
May 24, 2024
Part 1: Devastation
We are living through a historically devastating moment. Months and months of genocide, loss, and brutality in Palestine.
We know that it is not enough to make general this devastation. Because it is deeply personal and unique.
The fracture is along familiar lines of nakba, of imperialism. The fracture is current and urgent for Palestinians.
For many of us Jewish anti-zionists these past months have been exhausting. Even with every comfort of distance, of choices of when to put our bodies on the line, we too are deeply fractured.
We know that these fractures are not random. They are pointed and they happen repeatedly against the same people that state violence repeatedly targets.
The fractures run deep and wide. There is no denying the void they have created. A void of life and of hope that we each carry in our own way.
Part 2: Hard to have faith
As we sit here at a community Shabbat, it feels necessary to say that it is hard to have faith right now. To be a person with any kind of faith. And this too, feels freshly painful and all too familiar. A loss of faith in leadership, in institutions, in community, in family, in religion and in God.
Zionism has warped the very meaning of safety, home, and Jewish life into something bent on the end of Palestine. Every single Jewish organization has been caught up in this warp. Zionism is imbedded in our Jewish community to the point where even progressive Jewish organizations and synagogues are engaged in a willful inability to see the plain facts of genocide.
Let us not forget that it is core to the failure of this moment that zionism has been intentionally weaved into our Judaism.
Part 3: Faith persists
You all know plenty about what’s going wrong. The fracture and the failures are blatant.
The reason we are here is that we believe in something truer.
We believe that faith persists.
We believe that faith persists.
Faith persists because of anti-zionism. It persists because of a refusal to be corrupted by a death cult.
Faith persists because we honor the immense toll of loss but we don’t just stop there.
We believe that faith - as much as people have tried to corrupt it - means a return to what is core about being human.
Integrity in the face of harm. A return to stillness. Humility before one another.
Faith persists because of the fundamentally liberatory throughline of religious life. Exodus means exodus for all. Freedom means freedom for all. Returning home means we all get to return home.
Faith means believing we are loved, we are whole, and that healing - as impossible as it might seem - is possible and that we are definitionally bound up with one another along the way.
Part 4: What we are doing here
The work that we are doing here is not simply a response to the Jewish establishment. It is not simply a response to this genocide - although it inevitably is.
The work that we are doing here is also a deep mystical return to Jewish faith.
Faith means believing in something truly inspired and truly aligned.
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One of the only places I have experienced this kind of alignment is in the pro-palestine movement. Although nothing is perfect, this movement has demonstrated for me what it is like to be part of something deep and important, accessible and collaborative, vibrant and embodied, and liberatory and radical.
When I think about my spiritual life, I don’t want to settle for anything less.
I want to be part of something that is
Deep
Open
Present
And liberatory
I hope tonight will be the beginning.
I am full of faith.
