To be human means to put an equality sign between oneself and others

 

To be human means to put an equality sign between yourself and others. That’s what my father-in-law, professor emeritus of mathematics Abe Shenitzer, said one day in our kitchen. We wrote it on a sheet of paper that he held up and we took a picture of him holding it in front of himself. As the IDF continues to destroy Palestinian lives and the Israeli cabinet plans to reoccupy and settle Gaza, all I can think of is this: what would it mean to put an equality sign between Israelis and Palestinians? What does it take to be human in this conflict? I don’t for a moment mistake my place here. I am a relative outsider to the conflict. I enjoy dual citizenship in Germany and the United States, where I reside and teach. My friendship in, connections with, and scholarship on the communities and history of the Holy Land don’t give me more than a tangential voice. It is my Israeli and Palestinian friends who are suffering and worrying about the future. And because I have Israeli and Palestinian friends, and because I consider myself Jewish, I feel more responsible and implicated in this conflict than in others. I worry about the people of South Sudan, but it does not concern me directly. To be sure, this is an unsatisfying position, lacking in moral clarity. Should not all lives matter? But this would be an abstraction. Not every conflict in the world concerns me so directly. At the same time, as I am reminded by people close to me, the laser focused attention on the Middle East alone may be driven by emotional, political, and historical reasons that have nothing to do with the nature of the conflict itself. Rather, what is at play is the singular importance of the Middle East to our collective imagination, our traditions, our religions, and our hopes for the future. It is also a sign of the moment in human history, a history infused with apocalyptic urgency, where every battle – but especially battles over rights, presence, and dominance in the Holy Land – seems to be conducted as a kind of last battle, a Gog and Magog, even though the finality has nothing to do with the expectation that, in the end, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. At the end of the Anthropocene, there will be only wasteland and destruction. All wars being conducted now and that will take place in the near future are battles for control over the scarce resources left after humans have degraded the planet beyond its capacity to sustain the wasteful ways of the west. We must decide whether under these circumstances we still believe that what it means to be human is to put an equality sign between yourself and others or whether the death of others (literal or in terms of access to the fundamentals of a human life in peace and dignity) is a calculated risk we are willing to take, not to save ourselves but our kind and kin. In other words, what we see unfolding here and elsewhere is a return to tribal warfare that affords true humanity only to your own kind. 

Putting an equality sign between yourself and others is work. We are not equal to one another. Men and women, black and white, trans and cis, Jew and Christian, Hindu and Muslim are not the same. What then does it mean to put an equality sign between yourself and others? The equality sign validates both sides of an equation. As the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig emphasized in his Star of Redemption, grammatologically speaking, “=” means “and.” Like all equivalence, the equation of “=” and “and” is reversible. If A=B, then B=A. Thus for example in the famous Greek formula hen kai pan, “one and all,” which means one is all, and all is one. Yet the order of the phrasing matters, too. To say, A=B is directional. The reversibility reduces the equation and its members to abstractions. The moment you consider the equation as a kind of judgment, things change. A=B, subsumes A to B, making B the assumed rule under which A falls, expressing a movement of thought from the universal to the particular, or – in B=A – from the particular to the universal. Hen kai pan subsumes the particular to the universal. To put an equality sign between yourself and others means to start from yourself and realizing that you are no different from others. 

Modern political theory starts from the natural right of each existent to strive for self-preservation, to strive to persist in its being as best it can. Since this supposedly leads to a state of perpetual warfare we agree to relinquish some of our rights to some form of government that, in exchange, uses its power accumulated by way of every citizen having relinquished some of their natural rights to protect the lives of the citizens from being subject to one another’s greed and violence. This simple model of the social contract seems to have every single individual look toward the state as the sole actor in the mitigation of conflict between individuals and groups. In fact, it does not even consider the possibility of groups acting as aggregates of particular interests. The theory can only function in form of a radical democracy (Spinoza) or an absolute monarchy (Hobbes). For Spinoza, the weakness of this model is mitigated by the religion of the prophets and the apostles who preach love of God and love of neighbor, that is by the need to put an equality sign between oneself and others. This doesn’t sound like much, but if Abe is right – and his views are backed up by the kind of experience that most of us have been spared – it might make all the difference. To see the other as not the same but equal to myself then I set myself a task, namely, the task of looking at the other as real, as worthy of more than bare life (though that’s already a start), as equally endowed with natural rights and as justified as I am to seek to enjoy a life of safety and happiness. Now, this sounds a lot like the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, where it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words are a confession of faith. They put an equality sign between all men and they ground this equality in the belief in creation. Why “creation?” Does it mean that we are dealing with a religious creed? I can assure you that Abe was not a believer. This is not what he had in mind. He loved poetry and music but he was also a hard-nosed scientist. What he was speaking of was not the traditional view that human rights are grounded in divine creation or in natural equality as its equivalent. He was aware of the fact that modern evolutionary science vitiates against the idea of equality. Nor did he ignore that people first and foremost act out of self-interest. It would be quite silly to assume that words can turn us into altruists. This Holocaust survivor from Sosnoviec in Poland cried tears of sublime relief when he arrived in Tel Aviv for the first time and saw a Jewish soldier with a gun. What he saw as well, however, was that Israel could not win an endless war aimed to suppress the will to live in dignity of the Palestinians. Putting an equality sign between himself and others did not mean to love your enemy. But, much like Yitzhak Rabin he understood that it would be stupid and shortsighted not to respect your enemy. He worried about the future of the Jewish state. What matters most to me right now is that, for Abe and others, the future was something that could, should, and must be forged by us. That there was a future, and if we screwed it up, it was our own responsibility.

In view of the atrocities committed by the Israelis in Gaza, to be human means to imagine the future, a future where Israelis and Palestinians can both persist and live in peace and dignity. Israelis cannot and must not decide on behalf of the Palestinians but they ought to act in a way that envisages a future where both communities can live and thrive. To put an inequality sign between yourself and others is foolish and shortsighted. It might work. But it will destroy one’s own humanity. 

Stop the Genocide!

After eighteen month of war, with over 50,000 Palestinians dead, most of them women, children, and the elderly and countless wounded and maimed, infrastructure and housing stock widely destroyed, and the remaining population of the Gaza Strip traumatized and starving, we are facing a climate where even stating basic facts seems no longer possible without fear of persecution. 

Instead of an extension of the ceasefire and negotiations for release of the remaining hostages, we are seeing a renewal and escalation of violence pursued by an Israeli government that ignores its own people and shunts aside the urgent calls by thousands of reservists to end the war and bring back the hostages. 

Meanwhile, the US government aids and abets the Israeli right wing regime by labeling legitimate protests domestic terrorism and a threat to the security of this country. Abusing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism, the government is going after students, depriving them of due process and first amendment rights, revoking their visas, and unlawfully abducts and detains them. Criticism of Israel and vocal calls for an end to war on Palestinian civilians and the recognition of Palestinian rights are turned into un-American activities, with the clear aim to silence our students while gratuitously dismantling our institutions of higher education. 

At such a time, those of us secure in their rights as citizens and committed to the Torah's commandment to love the stranger must raise our voices on behalf of those silenced by fear and repression of speech. We must restore moral clarity and say it loudly and clearly: not in our name!

We cannot sit down and celebrate the Passover this week, remembering our own liberation from slavery, without looking toward a different, better future for all, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and others, in the Holy Land. 

All people, individually and collectively, have rights, rights proclaimed and protected by international law. We all have the right to life, liberty, shelter, protection from violence, and everything else we all need to live in dignity and safety. 

Depriving the population of Gaza or the West Bank of these rights and threatening them with whole-sale expulsion or deportation has a name. It is called genocide.

If you're not sure what that term refers to, here, from the UN Convention on Genocide website, is its internationally recognized definition:

Definition

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Source: https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

Israel-Palestine: If You Want, the Future is Open

In 1914, the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen published an essay titled "Das Gottesreich." In English we might say, the Kinship of God. The essay appeared in a collection first released on November 9, 1913, at the meeting of the Federation of German Jews (Verband der Deutschen Juden). Other authors included Leo Baeck (1873-1956), a profound religious thinker and representative of German Jewry under the Nazis who survived internment in Theresienstadt, who wrote on "the creation of fellow man;" Simon Bernfeld (1860-1940), who perceptively wrote on modern Hebrew literature; the lawyer Bernhard Breslauer (1851-1928), a co-founder of the federation; the historian and folklorist Juda Bergmann (1874-1956); Max Eschelbacher (1880-1964), a jurist and rabbi; Moritz Güdemann (1835-1918), an older fellow-Breslau seminarian of Cohen's who served as chief rabbi of Vienna; Philipp Bloch (1841-1923), another Breslau seminary graduate, who wrote brilliant essays on medieval Jewish philosophy; and the extraordinary preacher Nehemias Nobel (1871-1922), famed for the brilliant intellectuals he attracted to his Frankfurt sermons, including Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. The collection of essays was titled "Social Ethics in Judaism" and covered the topics of "the creation of fellow man" (Baeck), i.e., the biblical command to love your neighbor found in the Book of Leviticus and underscored by Jesus in the New Testament, a trope in Christian polemics against Judaism and hence a site of Jewish apologetics; "state and society" (Bernfeld) that anticipates Cohen's concluding reflections, arguing that ancient Judaism has no concept of the state except a state of radical freedom and equality of all of its members, a state where right confers might rather than the other way around; on "law and jurisprudence" (Breslauer) that places Jews and Judaism on the side of economic justice; "philanthropy" (Bergmann) as imitatio dei; traditional and modern views on the status of women in Judaism and in a changing society (Eschelbacher); education and Mendelssohnian educational reform in the spirit of an enlightened Judaism (Güdemann); popular and adult education (Bloch), an important subject at the time, along with the question of labor and social justice; the "Sabbath" (Nobel) as a symbol of human freedom and dignity; and finally Cohen's essay that attempts to bind the disparate themes together under the idea of divine rule. 

The book appeared ten years after the death of Theodor Herzl. Though Cohen is now often remembered as an anti-Zionist challenged by Martin Buber in their public exchange of 1915, the contributors were not then engaged in an open campaign against Zionism. The movement was no longer perceived as an immediate threat to the precarious status of European Jews, and the defense against anti-Semitism was once again directed at the genteel and liberal Protestant contempt for the Jews that gave rise to the Federation and similar institutions in the first place. Though Cohen could speak, earlier in the century, of a war of annihilation waged against the Jews, what he meant was spiritual degradation, the loss of identity, mass apostasy among the young trying to deal with a pervasive culture of contempt and  relentless pressure on Jews to convert in order to advance. The aim of the Federation was to instill renewed pride among the Jews and renew the spirit of Judaism through what they called the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a liberal project that acknowledged historical change while celebrating Jewish contributions to social progress and to the shaping of the very concepts we now take for granted: freedom from the relentless pressures of work, social justice, love of neighbor and the messianic orientation of history toward greater justice, greater equity, and the rule of law.

The liberal Jewish elite of that age represented a besieged community. But they could not know that, only two decades later, they would be marked for expropriation, stripped of civil rights, and eventually exposed to mob violence, deportation, and, finally, extinction. Blamed for everything, they were guilty of nothing. 

Or is there a relation between the attempt of German Jews to idealize the contributions of Judaism to modern concepts of equal rights and social justice and the destruction of European Jewry at the hand of regimes that not only marked the Jews for death but opposed the ideas they had so vigorously defended, that is, the ideas that had buoyed the American and French revolutions, the idea of liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of all men, regardless of race or creed? Can you blame the hatred of the defenseless on the defenseless, on their defense of the defenseless? Zionism arose as a different kind of defense, one that recognized the need for self-defense and appealed to the right of the Jews for self-determination. It became, in that sense like other nations, departing from the religious view of those who appealed to the better angels of humanity. There was also another kind of Zionism, rooted in what Buber called  "Hebrew humanism" and realized in a new kind of "concentrative" rather than expansive colonialism, one aiming at cooperation and coexistence rather than nationalism, exploitation, and exclusion. Are such views too good to be true? Could it have been otherwise? 

Modern politics has been riven between hope and fear, between belief in a just society, committed to universal human rights, and rank tribalism, driven by exclusive self-preservation, reducing politics to zero-sum, us-or-them, games. As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the mood here in Massachusetts is subdued and the foundations of the American experiment are shaking. Not that everything else in American history provides cause for celebration. The revolution had its birth defects, foremost among them its complete obliviousness to the evils of the slave trade. Abolition in the wake of an apparently unforgotten and unforgiven civil war was followed by the Jim-Crow-system with its euphemism of "separate but equal" enshrined into law by Plessy v. Ferguson, which casts its long shadow even today. American imperialism and the violent overthrow of foreign regimes during the Cold War remain among the causes of global instability, and the promise of the equal pursuit of happiness for all often seems mere propaganda assured to lull the disadvantaged into dreams of better days. Yet, now more than ever, we understand that words matter; ideals matter.

As the first phase of the cease fire in Gaza expires, the Netanyahu government has suspended all humanitarian aid, funded by many nations and agencies, from reaching the besieged population. Aside of the palpable cruelty of these measures during a period of religious fasting, withholding food as a means of exerting political pressure is a crime against humanity. If our German Jewish authors were right, it is also a blatant betrayal of the Jewish values incessantly invoked by the ruling right-wing coalition.  

At present, really since the late 1990's when an infamous memo circulated among Israeli and American neo-Conservatives that called for a "clean break" with the socialist past of the Jewish state and ushered in the end of the Oslo Process, the Jewish state is showing us the ugly face of Jewish tribalism, of us v. them, of exclusion, expulsion, stripping of rights, brutalization, internment, dehumanization, endless military occupation and random destruction. We have heard Israeli politicians openly calling for ethnic cleansing and a new Nakba. If not vigorously opposed by the international community, modern Israel is not immune to committing genocide. Like other regimes aiming to establish facts on the ground, Israel dresses up its brutalization of the Palestinians, piecemeal expropriation, harassment, deprivation of essential resources, including access to water, and other legal and extra-legal measures as security measures and acts of self-defense. New shipments of 2000-pound bombs and automatic rifles are on their way. We have seen how this kind of weaponry was used by the Netanyahu regime in the past. It is true that Hamas and their hateful rhetoric, their brutal repression of dissent, their bloodthirsty acts on and before October 7, 2023, have not helped. The voices of internal dissent are few and feeble. Yet, unless we unite in the interest of a different future and unless we recognize the Palestinians as political agents in their own right, more death, more brutalization, and more dehumanization is assured.

There are today, as there have been in the past, courageous people who are out on the streets, demonstrating for a different way, for an end to hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians, for a return of the captives (a Jewish duty), and a peaceful solution to the conflict. To be devoted to an ideal does not mean to be unrealistic. Idealism and realism are false opposites. Political agreements are possible. Compromise does not fall from heaven but is made. It can happen if we want. 

For Cohen, the kingship of God is grounded in the realization that all human states come and go. No state lasts, no state is the last. Statehood is not an end in itself. That's what God's kingship symbolizes: that it is always coming, always there for us to pursue. What does that mean? It means reaching for justice, equality, and the rule of law. No state that is based in self-preservation at the expense of others can prevail. The only rule that is eternal is the rule of the Messiah, the one who is coming, under whose rule humanity will be one. The more we are disturbed by the present, the more we ought to return to this ancient and ever-coming future. The future is open, if we want.