‘Has Israel let you down?” asked a JTA headline on September 1. “Its minister of Diaspora Affairs wants you to talk about it over the High Holidays.”
In the article, Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai did indeed write “that we in Israel are slowly but surely taking responsibility for our side of the relationship in a way that you have never seen, that we realize we have disappointed you and are doing teshuva, repentance, with a sincere desire to make things right in the future.”
I confess, both that line and the headline seemed incomplete. Diaspora Jews need to have a conversation about how some of them have disappointed Israelis too. This framing felt very one-sided. True, teshuva, repentance, reconciliation in a relationship, requires mutual self-criticism, humility, and apology.
The current debate over the tragic murder of Barel Hadaria Shmueli is feeling similarly one-sided. A Hamas gunman shot this young soldier in the head at point-blank range during a demonstration on the Gaza border on August 21. His poor family watched Shmueli endure multiple operations until he died a week later.
Since then, his parents – and right-wing activists – have been attacking Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the IDF leadership, often in the harshest of terms. At Shmueli’s funeral, when soldiers fired off rounds in the air to honor their fallen comrade, one woman suggested shooting Bennett instead. There is an honorable Israeli tradition never to criticize grieving parents. But the more the parents politicize their son’s death and ratchet up emotions around this tragedy, the more reasonable people need to say “enough.”
All the right-wing extremists calling for Bennett to resign over this incident should acknowledge ex-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to contain the situation in Gaza for 12 years(!), and admit that the same tragedy could have taken place months earlier.
Moreover, we need to hear the parents repudiate all the extremists who have started exploiting this family’s pain and anger, not just to make political points but to cross rhetorical redlines no democracy can tolerate. Most importantly of all, let’s not forget the truly guilty parties: the Palestinian leadership, their enablers of terror, and the murderer himself, whose crime Hamas proudly posted on a despicable snuff video.
Although the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora is certainly not the same as the heart-rending controversy over a fallen soldier, in both cases we risk distorting the true meaning of repentance. We also once again succumb to the Twitter-driven, hyper-partisan nature of today’s finger-pointing-fest, which forgets that – as my younger brother Dr. Tevi Troy once learned in one of those tedious workplace seminars – when you point your forefinger at someone else, you point your middle finger at yourself.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks – who last Rosh Hashanah was still alive and teaching us – explained the true power of teshuva in a powerful article published in 2017 in the Wall Street Journal. Describing the beauty of the High Holy Day drama, he wrote that as Yom Kippur ends, we are exhausted yet exhilarated: “We have admitted the worst about ourselves and survived.”
What Sacks called the “Jewish drama” is “less about character and fate than about will and choice. To the monotheistic mind, the real battles are not ‘out there’ against external forces of darkness, but ‘in here,’ between the bad and better angels of our nature.”
To overcome our weaknesses, our failings, “God wrote forgiveness into the script.” But to get the second chance, to bask in God’s forgiveness, we have “to acknowledge our wrongs, apologize, make amends and resolve to behave better.”
With that drama at its core, Judaism became “God’s call to human responsibility, to create a world that is a worthy home for His presence.” But the essential first step, in taking responsibility and ultimately building a life of meaning, requires humility, self-criticism, and mutuality in relationships, “knowing that God forgives every failure we acknowledge as a failure.”
As a theologian, Sacks wrote that knowing that God still believes “in us even when we lose faith in ourselves, can be a life-changing experience. That is when we discover that, even in a secular age, God is still there, open to us whenever we are willing to open ourselves to Him.”
As a political historian and Zionist activist, I know that democratic communities like ours – as a people, as a country – can only survive and continue to grow when we are willing to look critically at ourselves, not just disdainfully at our fellow citizens.
Nachman Shai is to be commended for challenging Israelis to ask where have we erred and sinned with our brothers and sisters abroad, but those brothers and sisters abroad have to start judging themselves a bit too, and not just judging us.
Similarly, the Shmueli family is to be commended for challenging Israelis – and the military leadership – to ask where did we err and how can we protect our soldiers even better. But they also need to call out their allies for previous mistakes Likudniks made when in power, for indulging in a rhetoric that is never acceptable in a democratic community, and for using this tragedy to try pulling us apart politically rather than pulling us together existentially.
Dictatorships, like all abusive relationships, are one-sided. Democracies, like all healthy love relationships, are self-reflective and self-critical duets. May we spend this new year dancing and singing together, individually and collectively, rather than shouting at one another self-righteously.
The author is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University, and the author of nine books on American History and three books on Zionism. Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People, co-authored with Natan Sharansky, was just published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.