Another Hateful Screed
© Rabbi Menachem Creditor
A few weeks ago, I shared on Facebook a screed sent to me in reaction to a statement of my Love for Israel. Sharing it, instead of responding to it, was the way I chose to process it, exposing it to the air and reaching out to others for their 'takes.' The comments many shared were helpful, and I am very grateful. The same person just sent the following 'response' (see below) to my "what I am praying for right now blog post ( http://rabbicreditor.blogspot.com/2014/07/what-do-i-pray-for-now.html )."
I am sharing this latest attack because it hurts so much, and because I am weary of this kind of relentless fury at Israel, an arrogance that cannot acknowledge Israel's attempts to protect Palestinian lives, its humanitarian work with Syrian refugees, the ongoing missile assaults (985, as of this morning) on Israel's entire civilian population, the tragic reality the Palestinians are forced by Hamas to endure, and more.
The phrase "self-hating" doesn't exactly fit. But "hateful" does. Here's what I just received, and please only comment I dignified ways. We won't conquer hatred by internalizing it. Olam Chessed Yibaneh - We must build this world from love.
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The philosophy you are advocating in Israel/Palestine is not Judaism at all. It's the opposite of Judaism. It's amoral familism. They say they are Jews, we say we are Jews, so we are for them.
In the Judaism I grew up with, which wasn't subordinated to Israeli policy, human lives were of ultimate value. Not just Jewish ones.
What happened to, "He who takes one life is as if he destroyed the whole universe." Yet you insist we pray for the IDF.
Rockets "raining down" on Israel, while hundreds are snuffed out in Gaza in yet another orgy of killing.
Iron Dome, funded by the US, protects Israelis so they can freely drop bombs on sleeping Arab children.
Do you really believe that the fact that inter-marriage has risen from 10 to 70 percent among non-Orthodox young Jews since Israel became an occupier is a coincidence? That the hypocrisy of the kind of religious sanction you give to endless subjugation, occupation and blockade doesn't have a terrible effect on the Jewish identification of young American Jews?
Pray for the safe return and "triumph" of the Occupying army, whose whole reason for being now is the subjugation of the Arabs of Palestine in perpetuity? Why not a prayer for the Palestinians? No one has sacrificed more for the Zionist dream.
It's not 1967. It's not 1948. It's not 1944. We can't trade off the Holocaust forever, ever playing the victim.
But you don't need to respond. Your whole way of one-sided, self-centered, self-satisfied musing endlessly justifying the unjustifiable, operating only in a context in which you cannot be held accountable.
