We cannot celebrate this Passover without acknowledging the biggest distortion in Jewish life today—the often blind worship of the State of Israel in an era when Israel has become for the Palestinian people the current embodiment of Pharaoh-like oppression.

Israel, which describes itself as “the state of the Jewish people” has failed to embody the highest values of the Jewish tradition in the way it treats our brothers and sisters, the Palestinian people.

We are not Jews who reject Israel or think that it is the worst human rights violator on the planet. We do not accept any account that one-sidedly blames the Jewish people or the Palestinian people for the development of this conflict, nor any account that leaves out the role of centuries of Christian oppression of Jews that eventually led Jews to believe that we desperately needed a state of our own, or the role of European colonialism or American imperialism in the way that many Middle Eastern Muslims came to feel outrage toward the West in general and toward Israel in particular, insofar as it is perceived as an extension of Western power. Nor are we unaware of the hardliners in the Islamic world who have spread anti-Semitic messages against Jews and who do not accept the very existence of the State of Israel and spread horrendous calumnies against all Jews. Even as we recognize that at this moment it is Israel that has the vastly greater power and hence the greater responsibility to make dramatic concessions, it is also important to see the ways in which both sides have legitimate claims, and both sides have been unnecessarily hurtful, provocative, violent and lacking compassion and empathy for the other side. Yet we still push Israel, after 50 years of Occupation, to either grant full equal rights to the Palestinian people living in the West Bank or support them to build their own politically and economically viable Palestinian state. Doing so in a spirit of generosity and repentance would be a fulfillment of the Torah’s command to “love the other/stranger.”

One thing is clear: Israel’s current Occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza is unsustainable and causes great harm to the Jewish people and deep distortions within Judaism.  Our obligation to our own people and coming generations of Jews, as well as to the Palestinian people, mandates our supporting voices like Tikkun that speak out loudly for an end to the Occupation.


haggadah Section: -- Exodus Story
Source: Rabbi Michael Lerner