Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/guest/page/18/)
Content from our print issue is usually only available to subscribers, but this week we’re offering free access (for a limited time only!) to one article from our current issue on Jubilee and Debt Abolition.
This was one encampment. There were one or two such sites on every street. The three of us in the car were shocked and depressed. We should be shocked and depressed. We were trying to drain an ocean with a spoon.
For centuries we were safe from the bloodletting that we fantasized about, because we were powerless on the whole, and our blood was being let. The fantasy of turning the tables was a fantasy of comfort. Now, however, our oppression has—in most parts of the world—ended. The State of Israel is powerful, armed, mighty, yet we continue to read and celebrate the fantasies of revenge.
So should we stop remembering – and like, our classical Liberal forebears, cease to commemorate Purim and Tishah B’Av? Alternatively – and this is what I would recommend – should we commit ourselves to a fuller and more dimensioned understanding of Jewish history that acknowledges the achievements and astounding creativity of Jewish life alongside the suffering?
At least one explanation is obvious. Few industries are more lucrative than firearms. According to the Nations Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry is worth $32 billion per year. Moreover profits on handgun sales are surging according to Bloomberg Business Week—43% for the first quarter of 2014.
From saving water, to helping animals, to decreasing our carbon footprint, the single most effective change we can make is to eat a more plant-based diet. Just as Esther took action to save the Jews, so we can take action to save animals and our planet from extermination.
It is 2015 and I could list so many names. I would pray, but I am not a believer, as people call us now, but I do believe in action, in what has always been called struggle, in what I insist on calling faith in the human capacity and responsibility to know and feel another human story. I witness my son, now a man of 40, marching from Washington Square Park up Fifth Avenue, across 34th Street, downtown on Sixth, long renamed Avenue of the Americas, to One Police Plaza. He marches and shouts with colleagues and friends: I can’t breathe! Black lives matter!
But it’s just a movie, right? Your favorite shoot-em-up makes no claims to being a documentary. We all know one American can’t gun down 50 bad guys and walk away unscathed, in the same way he can’t bed 50 partners without getting an STD. It’s just entertainment. So what?
That summer my Palestinian-Jordanian Arabic teacher and closest confidant asked me, seriously, as many cynics told me she would, if the Holocaust actually happened. That summer I summoned up all the grammar and honesty I could find to say “Yes. And to admit that it happened does not excuse what has been done to the Palestinians. It’s not Jewish history, or Zionist history; it’s human history. Just like the Nakba is human history.”
This is why this little festival, that’s over almost before it begins, is one we don’t really take seriously, maybe can’t take seriously. Jewish communities often make it into a child-focused festival, concentrating on the fun and the fancy costumes. It’s made into a Jewish Mardi Gras, and adults have a bit too much to drink maybe, but not so much that we, like Rabbah in the Talmud, discover the depths of our own aggression.