Leaving Jerusalem: Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

A Memoir

By

David Asia 

After an estrangement of twenty years, I am back with my people. I have come to be one of them again, to participate in the celebration of the holy days, to share the memories and hopes of the nation, to take part in the spiritual and intellectual warfare going on within the House of Israel, on the one hand, and between our people and the surrounding civilized nations, on the other; for though the Jews have lived among the nations for almost two thousand years, they cannot, after all, become a mere part of the organic whole.

 Moses Hess, From Rome And Jerusalem: The Last National Question, 1862

I am not Davy Crockett, as much as I would like to be. I was not born on a mountain top in Tennessee. I was born in Seattle. We were not a family of cowboys, professional baseball players, or mountain people, although I pretended to be each for awhile. We were Reform Jews, members of Temple De Hirsch, the great reform synagogue on Capitol Hill. My two siblings and I each went the full twelve years to “Sunday School” at De Hirsch, surviving two Bar Mitzvot, one Bat Mitzvah, and a marriage. 

The Judaism at De Hirsch was ecstasy free. We did not biddy biddy bom, or even associate with those who did. But we were the people who gladly underwrote productions of “Fiddler On The Roof”. To us, ecstatic Judaism was safe as theater, as perhaps it had been to the more acculturated, old world Jews from whence we came. 

Like so many others, my ancestors immigrated to America to escape the poverty and brutal uncertainty of history - quite literally, to become other than they had been. Ours was another iteration of the secular, ecumenical Judaism of a new world. Our rabbi, Raphael Levine, spent 15 seasons on television with Father Treacy talking about how much alike we all were, Catholics and Jews, how it was okay for us to have a Catholic president (Kennedy) and how Jews should no longer be shoved into box cars. Given the inhumanity and butchery of the preceding 30 years, when, under the watchful eye of Father Treacy’s pope, Jews had been shoved into box cars, these were necessary things for these two to talk about. But, at the time, they were not necessarily my things. The wheel, so I thought, had turned.

To be sure, I owe a great deal to those early influences at De Hirsch. Through them, I learned the answers to what I have come to know are the three most absolutely important questions we must have answered for us and, later, to answer for ourselves: 

Who am I? 

Where do I come from? 

Why am I here? 

Through those influences, I learned that I was different than the non Jews around whom I grew up, especially those at the private school I attended. And I knew that they knew it too. Associations with them were uncomfortable, friendships impossible (it didn’t help when, as a middle schooler, I put flame decals on the thick, black, temple pieces of my Buddy Holly glasses). So I spent a lot of time alone, alternatively envying and despising them, wishing that I could talk about girls like they did, as if I’d actually touched one. 

But that wouldn’t happen until I became a Zionist.

I Become a Zionist

            My Zionism begins when I’m about 14 and I become part of a Seattle cell of the Canadian Zionist Youth Group, Young Judaea. We would meet almost every weekend at one of our houses for a kumzits, or gathering, where we would talk, sing Israeli and English folksongs, learn an Israeli folk dance or two, and eat cookies. We were a chavura, a community of unsure, unprepared young people who sought the safety of one another’s company in what to us felt like a menacing and unfriendly world.

            That summer, I went to Camp Hatikvah, a Young Judaean camp in the Okanogan Valley of British Columbia. Through my growing association with these Jewish young people, and unencumbered by the baggage of my past, I began to create with them a more substantial identity, an inclusive one, constructing an understanding of ourselves as an accepting community, and incorporating the shared belief in the State of Israel as an uninhabited wilderness waiting only for the Jewish hand to reanimate an oasis of milk and honey. 

            From Hatikvah, I graduated to Camp Biluim, the leadership camp for Canadian Young Judaeans. The camp got its name from the BILU, several seminal waves of tenacious Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms, or staged massacres of Eastern Europe, who managed to get to Ottoman, and later, British Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I attended the camp for three summers, first as a camper, then as a junior counselor, and, finally, on staff. We lived in Canadian Army bell tents, three to a tent, and were supervised primarily by larger than life Israeli shlichim, or emissaries, reservists with the Israeli Defense Forces, with names like Zev and Zvi (Wolf and Deer), whose job was not only to teach us, the privileged children of secular leaning, urban Jews, but to harden us, prepare us for an aliyah, or immigration to Israel, most likely, given our youth and unpunctuated idealism, as kibbutzniks. We studied the history of Zionism, the history of the state, Hebrew, and Israeli folk songs and folk dances. The songs were about working the land, greening the Aravah or southern desert, comrades lost in battle, evenings of roses, and love between the shepherd and the shepherdess. When the narrative included the population of Palestinians indigenous to the land, which it rarely did, they were cast as a nameless, faceless people somehow deserving of their own exile and victimization.

            At night, we took turns on shmira, or watch. I don’t know what we were watching for, whether it was other campers stealing into the kitchen for peanut butter on white bread, or armed, Arab raiders disguised as scotch broom crawling out of the Ontario woods in order to steal peanut butter on white bread. Whatever it was, I spent those and most other nights in youthful and miraculous foreplay with my Nova Scotia girlfriend. It was about time.

The Draft

            In February of 1965, in response to a Viet Cong attack on the American base at Pleiku, Lynden Johnson ordered expansion of the bombing of North Vietnam. In March, the first US ground troops landed at Da Nang, under the command of General William Westmorland. By the end of 1965, there were 184,000 American troops on the ground in Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1966, the number of draftees grew from 100,000 to 400,000. I turned 18 on August 7, 1965. A few friends and I went to register for the draft that summer. One of the questions asked on the form was if you had a religious objection to participation in the military but were willing to serve the national health, safety, and welfare through alternative, civilian service. If you answered yes to this, which I did, you were applying for 1-0 status as a conscientious objector. When we were leaving, I mentioned this to my friends and they were shocked. They told me I’d never get a job. My mother said she wished we had talked about it first.

Parallel Universes

            In May of 1967, after escalations in paramilitary activity and rhetoric, Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt dismissed the United Nations Emergency Force (the first of its kind, incidentally), composed mainly of Canadian soldiers, in the Sinai Peninsula. He then moved 130,000 Egyptian troops into the Sinai, closed the Straights of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and had Egyptian officers put in command of Jordan’s army. In early June, the Israelis launched preemptive strikes against Egyptian forces, and responded militarily to the entry of Jordan and Syria into the war. The war lasted approximately six days, with Israel occupying what is today called the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. The Sinai peninsula was returned to Egypt as part of a bold, permanent peace initiative between Israel and Egypt, brokered by Jimmy Carter, Anwar El Sadat, and Menachem Begin, in March of 1979.

In 1780, Rabbi Israel, the maggid of Koznitz, prayed that God should redeem Israel. “And if you do not want to do that”, he said, “then redeem the goyim.”*

 In mid June of 1967, I began my third year of relatively unfocused undergraduate work at the University of Washington. By the second week of the month, with the ink barely dry on the tenuous cease fire agreements between Israel and her neighbors on the one hand, and no end in sight for the increasing deployments of American boys to Vietnam on the other, I was sitting on the grassy mound outside the student union building smoking marijuana and listening to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Strawberry Fields forever.

Hearing Voices

            One characteristic of many Reform Jews is our ambiguity. Having shed most of the constraints of our old world ancestors and disposed of most of the remaining absolutes, we wobble in a world of gray, making our lives up as we go along. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but, when we do pause and reflect, we tend to hear more than one voice in our mind’s ear. For example: Jews, wherever they are, should not lull themselves into thinking that they can ever be safe as Jews anywhere in the Diaspora. The United States is just another experiment in a tolerant, open society bound to end in some catastrophe, another victory for the null hypothesis, reflecting nothing systematic or glorious in history or the west. We are Joseph, thriving for a time in the house of the Pharoah. For Jews, any golden age tends to end badly.

And then there is the Disqualification by Point of Origin. My peers and I were, and still are, children of privilege, products of what was apparently another Camelot, a brief, shining moment limited to comparatively few children who, because of the perseverance of their ancestors and the luck of color and class, managed to hustle their way up and out, saving their children from becoming just so much muddy blood flooding down the Mekong Delta. If you could buy your way out of the Union Army for 300 bucks in 1865, you could do it with modest SATs and a year’s tuition at a state university in 1966.

            Oh well.

            Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol, before his death, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”*

            I don't know who Rabbi Zusya had become by 1970, but I had been drafted and was doing my 2 years of alternative service as a counselor at a drop in center. But that's a story for another time, as they say.

University

My most immediate concerns in 1967 included our collective opposition to the Vietnam War, the draft, the persecution of the Black Panther Party in Seattle, and what we took to be the harassment of street people on University Avenue by the Seattle Police Department.

  I also began to take notice of, talk to, and argue with and about an increasingly articulate group of Arab and Palestinian students on campus. These students, perhaps for the first time, began crafting and refining their version of the Middle Eastern narrative, and it included a lot of very sticky language, both tantalizing and confusing, to young Jews involved in the so called New Left. The fedayeen and fatah (Palestinian radicals) were socialists, freedom fighters, and the Palestinian people as a whole were in a struggle for their liberation, like the Viet Cong, attempting to finally cast off the yoke of the oppressor, now in the form of an imperialist, expansionist, Zionist state. It was, as is often the case, history by analogy, and it was, as it so often is, mostly wrong.

These were not comfortable conversations, with each of us feeling obligated, the them and the us, to engage one another with scrap books of poorly crafted "Cliff Notes" to several thousand years of history, each acting as if strong beliefs alone could make it so, resolve all the messiness and brutality by sheer force of argument. I remember hearing endlessly about Deir Yassin, a comparatively peaceful, Arab village over looking Jerusalem which, according to the terms of the UN partition plan, was to become a part of Israeli Jerusalem.  In April of 1948, with Arab forces blockading Jerusalem, two Jewish paramilitary organizations, the Irgun  (led by Mehachem Begin) and Lehi  (aka the Stern Gang) attacked the village, claiming that it harbored Arab militants. Their goal, according to one narrative, was not only to cleanse that village, but also to terrify other Arab villagers in the area so that they might flee. The result, by some accounts, was the deaths of nearly 200 villagers - men, women, and children - perhaps only 11 of whom were actually armed militia. Or were those villagers hostages to a much larger group of armed militants attempting to block, at all costs, the creation of an independent Israel? Deir Yassin was the poster child for our competing narratives, and research about it today sheds no clearer light than the conflicting versions we hurled at one another over forty years ago. 

If one seeks reconciliation either in front of or behind an illusive peace, I suspect that there needs to be some agreement on the broad outlines of a single narrative, one that provides some possibilities for the redemption of both them and us. Did the Israelis massacre innocents? At the time, it was inconceivable to me that our Jews could massacre the innocent instead of being among those innocents massacred. While I had clearly absorbed the ethos of Jew as national victim, I had little psychic space in which to place the Jew as national perpetrator. The existence of a strong, unapologetic Jewish State had changed everything but the shtetl mentality of much of Diaspora Jewry, myself included. Why would I believe, somewhere in my viscera, someplace then unreachable by language, that it is better for the world to have dead Jews rather than living ones? 

The increasing heat generated by Arab students on North American campuses did not go unnoticed by the American and Canadian Zionist establishments. They began to fear that the Jews of the New Left, indeed the entire movement, was being hijacked. After all, this tale of resistance, liberation, and redemption, this epic tale as old as history itself, belonged to us Jews. We had been freedom fighters for over two thousand years, a people, to this day, hanging on to the edge of a hostile, as yet unredeemed planet. In 1968, these organizations sponsored a group of Jewish activists from both countries for a month at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I went.

But by then it was too late for me. Although still a child in so many ways, I had begun to take my pacifism more seriously. I had also started to admit the possibility of the competing narrative, and, from the safety of my admittedly privileged perch, had begun to believe that Palestine/Israel had been and still was a shared land, that jumping from tactical advantage to tactical advantage, like youthful seductions, was no replacement for the sustained initiative required of a successful marriage. 

Really, though, one of the most profound realizations to come from that summer was that, regardless of what my Zionist mentors and other voices in my head had been whispering, I did not feel that coming to Israel was coming home. It was 1968 in Jerusalem. Everyone was armed, and heavy armor was parked on the street while young operators joked and flirted in the cafes. I was ill at ease among these Israelis, who appeared to live such unambiguous lives, lives very different than my own. And this morphed into an all too familiar feeling to me, this feeling of insufficiency. It had left a bitter taste in my mouth growing up, and I did not wish to drink from that cup again. 

Not Even Hindsight Is 20-20

   Moses Hess returned to Judaism after failed marriages to a prostitute, socialism, communism, and atheism. On his journey, he influenced some of the great socialist thinkers of his time, including both Engels and Marx, and had a profound effect on early Zionism. He believed that history was coming to an end, that it would end with nations honoring nations, and a nearly universal return to an orthodox, humanistic, and finally triumphant Judaism. Jews needed to go home to Palestine and get ready (which Hess himself did not do). Today, in the glare of our post modern world, such millenarianism offers no real illumination.    

There are those who believe that Jews like myself who do not live in Israel have no right to second guess the decisions of those who do. Theirs is indeed one of the voices in my head: regardless of how far we get from the Shoah, the Holocaust, the right of Jews to define themselves in their own land is not diminished, nor will it ever be. In this imperfect world, nations still struggle with nations, and Israel has, will always have, special permissions. 

Alas, I have no faith that blind.  And I cannot say if the Israel of which they speak is the same one I speak of. And how can we speak at all unless we can agree on something as fundamental as that?

Was the State of Israel ever what I thought it was? Was it ever what I was told it was? An heroic refuge, a small enclave for a battered people which would be just enough, thank you. Aside from a few kibbutzniks, did anyone capable of making big history in those first twenty five years really believe in an Israel within the borders of the UN Partition, or had it always been implicit, if not explicit, that Israel would, by whatever mix of intention and accident, eventually find its way to unilateral sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and key parts of the western bank of the Jordan? If the Six Day War had not occurred in 1967, would someone’s Israel have needed to invent it? Can the settlements, outposts, and the separation barrier of today be best understood as a kind of toxic residue of Deir Yassin? 

Did the Zionists at the founding, people like David Ben Gurion and Abba Eban, envision in their hearts a state defined by an unarguably oppressive, dehumanizing, forty year occupation of Palestinian villages, the increasing vilification of Arabs qua Arabs, and the dramatic increase in the authority of a Fundamentalist Rabbinic Judaism? Would they now approve of a state increasingly defined by ayatollahs, even if they are our ayatollahs?

I suspect that the best answer one can give to such questions is, well, it depends. But those now in positions to actually address questions of war and peace seem like children trying to illuminate their way through the tinder of history with matches, blind to the incendiary risks.

A man who was afflicted with a terrible disease complained to Rabbi Israel (of Rizhyn) that his suffering interfered with his learning and praying. The rabbi put his hand on his shoulder and said, “How do you know, friend, what is more pleasing to God, your studying or your suffering?”*

Well, ultimately, we don’t know. That, after all, is the essence of faith. But if that is so, then how do we come to know good and evil?

_______________

* Rabbinic vignettes from Buber, Martin, Tales of the Hasidim, Schocken Books, New York, Edition 1991

They Came For The Guineas

I wrote this essay after a terrible shooting occurred at Marysville High School in November, 2014. It is not about those events, however, although they did get me thinking about my own storytelling. 

It is not really about any event specifically. Remember that when you start talking to yourself after reading it...

"The Universe Is Made Of Stories, Not Of Atoms" 

From “The Speed of Darkness” by Muriel Rukeyser, 1968

We love to tell stories. 

When we can’t tell them aloud, we tell them to ourselves, quietly, in our heads, stories welded together by repetition until the map we have created in our heads begins to breathe on its own.

When things don’t fit, we make them fit: smoothing their edges, diminishing a rogue detail here or there, embellishing another, until it slides seamlessly into place alongside the others. And we don’t stop in the middle. We tell each story through, time after time, to the same, satisfying end.

Some call this making sense of the world. Others consider it delusional. Some end their lives in order to finally come to the end of the narrative, while others flush their meds, risking sanction, in order to keep telling it. Some stories are of little consequence, others incinerate continents.

We are especially fond of telling stories about traumatic events, like a school shooting. Our need to make sense of an inherently senseless event like this is compulsive: the shooter (and when did fourteen year olds become shooters in our stories?) was bullied, abused at home, was mentally ill, on drugs, was mentally ill and on drugs, jilted by a girlfriend, culturally conflicted, et cetera, et cetera.

There are as many probable explanations of such terrible events as there are maps of the world. And each of them has the heft of sense. 

But none of them explains anything. They are, instead, small, but continuing attempts to place periods at the end of the dissonant sentences which intrude on our otherwise congratulatory myth making.

When the evening is done, however, before we wander back into our gated, mental territories, we need to take a cleansing breath and acknowledge some rough and tumble truths:

·      None of us, in life, will ever stop telling ourselves stories,

·      None of us can ever pay nearly enough attention to one another, and,

·      The availability of guns makes the rage or despair roiling up in each of our stories much more lethal.

Don’t get me wrong. We have been far too oblivious to real time and virtual bullying in our institutional lives. We are far too tolerant of child abuse and completely blind to the family histories and sociologies which perpetuate it generation after generation. Our failure as a society to provide free mental health and substance abuse treatment on demand is wasteful, dangerous, and could be considered criminal if it weren’t so blatantly stupid. Each of us has the capacity to be self centered and cruel at some point(s) in our lives. And there is still a thick, mean streak in American discourse that feeds on blaming the victims for their own powerlessness and oppression.

Truth be told, we are not a civilization that strives to pay very close attention to these things, even after a headline grabs us by the neck and throttles the air out of our lungs. Well, maybe for a day or two…

Nor are we a people who strive to pay very close attention to one another. We think we do, of course (such beliefs are fundamental to any culture’s collective narrative). But our lives are too noisy, too full of surface clutter, and all in all, managed too comprehensively by forces over which we have chosen to surrender control.

And guns? Well, it may be that the bumper sticker is right: guns don’t kill people. But they certainly make every person’s anguish easily more lethal, not only to themselves, but also to the three or four of us hanging around the cafeteria, or the mall, or the video store, at 12:17pm on that particular day. 

In this reality, there is little we can do about any of this, especially (and most distressingly) about guns - they have become one of the few remaining totemic objects in an increasingly secular and blurry world. For many of us, regardless of place, the more blurry the world, the more sacred the guns.

Wait a minute, you say. I thought we were supposed to resist trying to make sense of the senseless, and here you are trying to do that very thing…

Fair enough. 

But, regardless of how unhappy it makes you, or me, for that matter, the earth is not flat. And neither I, nor the weight of all of the carefully fabricated denial in the universe, however artful, can make it so. 

Some things, fortunately or not, just are.

Beyond The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)

(First Published in the Methow Valley News)

        First, some background on the Bakken Crude Oil Formation in North Dakota:

         “The Bakken Shale ranks as one of the largest oil developments in the U.S. in the past 40 years. The play has single-handedly driven North Dakota's oil production to levels four times higher than previous peaks in the 1980s. As of June 2015, ND is second to Texas in terms of oil production and boasts the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.1%.

The Bakken Shale Play is located in Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota, as well as parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the Williston Basin. Oil was initially discovered in the Bakken play in 1951, but was not commercial on a large scale until the past ten years. The advent of modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing helps make Bakken oil production economic (sic). The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated the Bakken Shale Formation could yield 4.3 billion barrels of oil and estimates from Continental Resources stretch as high as 40 billion barrels” (taken from “Bakken Shale: News, Marketplace, Jobs”, copyright 2009-2017, KED Interests, LLC).

Transforming our economy from one dependent on fossil fuels to one increasingly, and more desirably, dependent upon renewable resources doesn't happen by magic. We can’t just wish it to be so. It happens because of the development decisions we actively support with our social and economic policies and incentives. As a society, we decide to support some things instead of other things, and so the future is made.

         We’re hearing more and more about the Bakken Oil Field as we watch the growth and evolution of the protests on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. But, as important as this protest continues to be (and it will continue to be incredibly important), it is still only a part of the story.

         In reality, the Bakken Oil Field in North Dakota presents a perfect storm of challenges and opportunities for the United States. Because of the nature of the oil itself, the risks of transporting it by pipeline under the Missouri River (regardless of where), and the depressed nature of oil prices, the wisest course for the nation as a whole might be (gulp) to just to leave it in the ground.

         Aside from the questionable ethics and treaty aspects of rerouting the pipeline from north of Bismarck to a route south of Bismarck on the edge of the Standing Rock Reservation, and aside from burying a 30 inch pipe full of flowing crude oil 92 feet under the Missouri River period, there are these:

            Bakken Crude, involved in several rail fires and explosions, is too volatile to be transported by rail or truck. This leaves a pipeline, regardless of risk, as the only option* (Bakken Crude is considered “sweet crude” and, to our oil economy, is akin to pure heroin to a heroin addict. Interestingly, both can kill you – one all too quickly and the other over generations).

1.                According to a University of Michigan study, the Bakken Oil Field specifically is a …”key culprit in global ethane gas increase.” Ethane gas hydrocarbons increase concentrations of ozone in the atmosphere which directly affect global climate.

2.                North Dakota has put most if not all of its economic development chips on the continued fracking and transport of Bakken Crude.

     So this is where the rubber meets the road, isn’t it? How do we reverse a series of decisions which the science overwhelmingly agrees will most likely make things measurably worse for the planet both in the near and far term? And as desirable and even necessary for our futures as it might be, is it even possible for us to leave it in the ground?

         Mind you, I’m not concerned about the shareholders of Energy Transfer and other corporations who have thrown their lot in with the completion of this or that pipeline. They should have been better advised when the writing was first seen on the wall some ten years ago. They are now free to break ground and initiate a class action lawsuit against their corporate officers for malfeasance and misrepresentation of the investment environment. What is good for Energy Transport Corporation may not be at all good for the nation.

         So, if you’ve stuck with me this far, here’s the question: how would we actually suspend the fracking and transport of new Bakken oil without demolishing the economy of North Dakota?

         You do like it says in the movies: you make them an offer they can’t refuse.

         Specifically, let’s work with the people and government of North Dakota, including the Standing Rock Sioux, the Spirit Lake Nation, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Nation, and the Trenton Indian Service Area in order to reclaim the Bakkan landscape, and, simultaneously, to develop and finance a renewable energy infrastructure which includes the manufacturing and deployment of solar and wind technologies as well as other alternative energy sources appropriate to the North Dakota environment. Incidentally, Bismarck, just north of Standing Rock, gets an average of 200 days of sunshine per year. And the annual average wind speed for Bismarck, and North Dakota in general, is 9.5 miles per hour (1.20 miles per hour more than the national average). And money for the private landowners, payment for their willingness to keep the oil in the ground.     

         I understand that an effort like this creates many problems to solve, political and economic. But they might be the kinds or problems that help us create a better future for ourselves. Perhaps It could be the first major infrastructure endeavor of the new administration, providing additional stimulus to American manufacturing and to a new energy future. A high risk pipeline project is set aside, and North Dakota becomes independent of the boom and bust of the oil economy, growing to become the hub of US renewable energy. Seems like a pretty good investment to me…

         What’s more, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the good people of North Dakota who have already adopted a new motto to go with this new economic future: Serit ut alteri saeclo prosit (One sows for the benefit of another age) (North Dakota Century Code 54-02).

         Now I can hear the guffaws grumbles as you read this. If my friends and neighbors had any doubts about my sanity before, they know for sure now.

         But, you know, given what we are learning about climate chaos and its current and projected impacts, this just might be one of the sanest, most rational proposals you’ve ever read about big oil.