Chesed and Gevurah

Have you ever had this experience? I ran across an article featuring a man who is devoted to the memory of the Holocaust and travels all over the country in order to photograph survivors and bear witness to their experience. While I am struggling to transcend useless ways of thinking and knee-jerk assessments and reactions, my first assumption was still that this person must be humanistic. Upon viewing his website I was very disappointed to learn that he is a far right wing nationalist, at least to my way of thinking. What I do not understand is how extreme conservatives fail to see they are in direct contradiction to the teachings of the religions/spiritual paths they claim adherence to.

This individual refused, of course, to discuss the matter with me. Seeking dialogue is in fact the reason for this blog and why it is named Open Letter. While a blog is a record of one person's thoughts, in reality I wish that I could dialogue with someone to work these issues out. Again, I must note I recognize that this desire to confront what I view as total hypocrisy and injustice, stems partly from childhood trauma in which I was unable to hold my persecutors to account or receive acknowledgement of my suffering. My desire, even compulsion, to confront those whom I call "people of the lie", that is to say, those who project all blame and condemnation outward while refusing to take responsibility for their own transgressions, in other words-- Pharisees, at this time still hasn't been resolved.

I remember years ago being member of an online progressive community (Daily Kos) in which I learned, for the first time, that there was such a thing as left-wing Zionists...I had written a blog describing a dream I had about Israel and Bibi Netanyahu, in which I recounted how I first came to understand the difference between Israel and the Eastern European shtetl of literature, and the difference between my admittedly idealized view of Judaism and Jewish people and the human reality of the modern state of Israel and her sabras. I could add, I was confronting the difference between Israel's idealistic beginnings and its current nationalist/militant reality. I described how I once encountered an Israeli while working at Butera's Delicatessen in Houston as a cashier. I have always been fascinated with Israel in every aspect and used to long to make pilgrimage there. This man was physically powerful and wore reflective eyewear which hid his eyes, which are the windows of the soul...He was wearing a Star of David and his face was a granite mask. It wasn't so much that he was physically big and strong, as the fact he was completely opaque, and even surly. To me he seemed brutal. I would not have been surprised to learn he was an assassin, policeman, soldier, or anyone whose duties regularly entail beating people up. I was just using this encounter as a basis for talking about my ambiguous feelings toward the political state of Israel, how I felt disillusioned upon finding out about the state's use of torture, human rights abuses, etc. My blog was a sincere record of honest disillusionment, nothing more. I even faulted myself for being naive and for having unrealistic expectations. Yet I was vehemently attacked for writing this blog. Individuals accused me of anti-semitism; of perpetuating a cultural stereotype of Jews as victims, as puny, as unable to defend themselves physically and as unsucessful; they asserted that an image of (what to me was not) success was threatening to me and that I could only tolerate Jews as downtrodden.

To the contrary, the image I used to cherish of the Jewish people was always based on their humanism and cultural and spiritual values. I grew up in a home in which the Jews as a race of human beings were held up as the embodiment of many ideals. My father, who is Hungarian, did not want his children to grow up as ignorant, spoiled Americans, not knowing or understanding the extremes of man's inhumanity to man. I read Holocaust history and first-hand survivor accounts obsessively over the years, on and off; collected and then left behind scores of books on the subject more than once, Jewish literature also, Tales of the Hasidim, Kabbalah. My brother who used to live in Marfa, Texas, had ordered a complete Zohar which was several volumes. He lent someone the first volume and never got it back. He wanted me to take the incomplete set off his hands at some point and I kept it with me through several moves. That Zohar traveled across the state more than once. I finally ended up in Burnet County north of Austin. When I decided to re-home the Zohar, we packed up it carefully in a box with clean towels to pad it. We brought the box to the Chabad House in Austin and laid it tenderly on the porch like an abandoned baby, with note attached. The Lubavitcher who called us later couldn't believe we had shown such love and reverence for the mystical tomes. Thus in the case of my Bibi article, I suffered the irony of being a #1 Biggest Fan of Jews who was being acccused of hating and deriding them. Not so, it has never been so. That was probably my first encounter with the woke mob, or at least, the Left Wing Zionist mob.

Which brings me back to the need to confront religious hypocrisy. Such a confusion of impulses: whereas I do admire and am attracted to traditional religion in some aspects, legalism is, in my belief, spiritually dead and even destructive. As a youth seeking religious identity, my investigation of Judaism as a possible personal belief system ended upon learning that I would have to keep kosher. I could not conceive of having more than one set of cookware and dishes for different types of food. But I nonetheless claim Judaism as my own in a spiritual sense. I am a wild olive grafted onto the cultivated branch.

Nobody is obligated to respect my ideals. In fact, I have myself rejected idealism and embraced mysticism more as a path forward. But how do the orthodox of any tradition justify the hatred, judgement and condemnation they use to persecute other human beings? Predictably, religious Jews would rather make common cause with religious Muslims than with secular Jews. There is no greater contempt than that of the pious for secular people or non-observant believers who pursue a more mystical or spiritual path. But come on, the last thing you'd think a Holocaust devotee would be is anti-immigrant. Regarding the religious gentleman who photographs Holocaust survivors whom I tried to confront, I wanted to quote the Torah scriptures which command tolerance and mercy for the "alien among you". There are several. I found a pdf someone had compiled listing them and I would like to quote a few of them here.

from The Complete Jewish Bible by David H. Stern, 1998

SH'MOT(Exodus) 22:21 "You must neither wrong nor oppress a foreigner living amoung you, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

23:9 "You are not to oppress a foreigner, for you know how a foreigner feels, since you were foreginers in the land of Egypt.

VAYIKRA(Leviticus) 19:33-34 "If a foreigner stays with you in your land, do not do him wrong. Rather, treat the foreigner staying with you like the native-born among you-- you are to love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

B'MIDBAR(Numbers) 15:15-16 "For this community there will be the same law for you as for the foreigner living with you; this is a permanent regulation through all your generations; the foreigner is to be treated the same way before Adonai as yourselves. The same Torah and standard of judgment will apply to both you and the foreigner living with you."

D'VARIM(Deuteronomy) 10:19 "Therefore you are to love the foreigner, since you were foreigners in the land of Egypt."

23:7 "But you are not to detest an Edomi, because he is your brother; and you are not to detest an Egyptian, because you lived as a foreigner in his land.

24:14 "You are not to exploit a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether one of your brothers or a foreigner living in your land in your town."

This is a pointless and thankless task. Those who are in denial of their own wrongdoing cannot be confronted. Religious extremism is a sickness much like alcoholism or any addiction in which the afflicted person bullies and offends others, yet believes themself to be the victim. All bullies feel sorry for themselves. Here are some books: