The following is a transcript of Episode 165 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer and we’re recording on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023.
I had this overarching feeling standing on the mall in Washington last week at the rally for Israel, under the cloudless sun, amidst throngs of people streaming into this cordoned-off open space, with my line of sight bracketed by the Washington Monument on one end and the Capitol Building on the other. I had this feeling that I hadn’t felt in nearly 40 days, a feeling I can best describe as serenity.
I’m not sure I can fully explain how I got to that feeling. For the 40 days since October 7th, I’ve been traveling through a lifetime of emotions across a spectrum that usually takes a much longer period of time to experience. At times, unbearable sadness, the constant anxiety about my family and friends in harm’s way, that sometimes feels like a quiet heartbeat, and other times like a thumping drumbeat.
I felt grief at what has been lost. Anticipatory grief, as though I could adequately prepare for some tragedy still yet to come. I felt something of a panic about whether Israel could survive not just October 7th, but the war, the survival not just material, but spiritual. And then for a week or two, building up to the rally, a mounting sense of righteous anger.
The anger scared me a little bit. I really strive not to be an angry person. I have a general dispositional bias against emotional volatility. But it wasn’t just the emotion that I was scared of. It was also the consequences for my work and for my opinions of that anger.
Anger and fear in crisis, they can drive an ungenerous agenda in Jewish life. They can make us close ranks instead of encouraging us to draw others near. They can make us draw dividing lines that insist on moral clarity and that reject any forms of ambivalence.
With a life’s work in pluralism, in building towards an expansive agenda of inclusive Jewish peoplehood, and after decades of building interfaith group alliances, the anger thing felt threatening to me. And maybe another emotion, part of what had been building up for me, the strange and alienating sense of feeling powerless from afar.
Donniel Hartman spoke about this a little on our sister podcast, For Heaven’s Sake. Israelis are struggling with what they can do to help support the war effort, and they have families and friends on the front. But what are diaspora Jews supposed to do 7-10,000 miles away? A sense of helplessness is not great psychologically.
Stephanie and I put the kids to bed every night and clean up dinner and we sit side by side reading up on the day from Israel, responding to WhatsApp messages from Israeli friends and families, and then we try to get a little bit of fitful sleep, made impossible by that anxiety we had brought upon ourselves, scrolling on our phones and completely unaided by the fact that besides that fact, there tends to be not much else we can do.
And we’re two people who actually work professionally in and for the Jewish people, both of us in Jewish education, trying to help to create proximity and intimacy and connection for our students and our stakeholders to the big stories of Jewish life, and through that, to the Jewish people itself. As stressful as this work has been for a month and a half, I think we both feel fortunate that we at least get to worry about Israel when we’re at work.
So the rally was announced and there was something for us to do. It wasn’t the most elaborate thing. The something for us to do was to show up. That’s it. And it’s a great thing. I’ve said before, and will insist again, that showing up is underrated, and it’s clear that we’re not the only ones who felt this way.
Julie: How could I not be here today? I have friends, family, colleagues in Israel. I just had to be here, to be with the Jewish people here in D. C.
Aviv: I want to be here to let everybody know that we’re here and we’re proud and we’re strong. And we have a whole lot of love for each other and that’s not going away.
Adina: There was no choice about coming today This is where we have to be. This is where we have to come together. And this is where we also have to show the world that we belong.
Yehuda: Our executive producer Maital Friedman brought a microphone to the rally so that we could share with you the experiences of our friends and colleagues and some other fellow rally-goers, who were next to us. Others sent us voice memos after the fact.
Rebecca: It was the first time in over a month that I felt like I would be able to use my feet to do something.
Yehuda: That’s Rebecca Starr you just heard. She’s the director of regional programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She also oversees our programs and partnerships of the Midwest region. She traveled with over 900 other Jews from the Detroit metro area to D.C. for the rally. We’ll hear more about that later on.
Rebecca: There was a physicality about it that I, I needed, and I really wanted to be there in person with my body and to be counted and to show up.
Yehuda: It’s the formative act of Jewish peoplehood. To be with the people, to constitute the people, and it’s also the essential act of Jewish leadership. There’s so much Torah on this. Maimonides writes that to be considered part of the Jewish people, you can’t just do the feasts and fasts alone, you have to do them together with community. Piety, in other words, is intertwined with participation.
This idea is also intuitive. Showing up creates proximity, which is essential to ethics and empathy. When we see each other showing up, when we stand a little bit uncomfortably close to one another, we become simply part of something bigger than ourselves.
Julia: I could not believe how many whatsapp groups were formed, how many people just trying to organize, trying to come together, trying to find each other and figure out ways to find each other at this massive event, it became so obvious to me that this was something that I needed to be a part of because of my sense of Jewish peoplehood.
Yehuda: So yeah, it took a while for me and the rest of our Hartman cohort of staff and boards members to get to the rally, and we schlepped a whole bunch of swag, first from New York, and then carrying boxes across the streets of D.C. And it was a little frantic and frenetic, figuring out where to be, and how to meet up with our group, since we were coming from different parts of the country.
Elana: I took a red eye with my colleague Masua and with a bunch of Jews from the Bay Area.
Lauren: I live in Miami, Florida, and I came in today with my youngest daughter.
Yehuda: We found ourselves just one small cluster among a sea of American Jews.
Julie: I flew in from Birmingham, Alabama.
Speaker: You came from Brooklyn, how did you get here?
Rally member: By bus.
Adam: We have 3-400 students, if not more, coming [00:05:00] today, um, to show support.
Morgan: I took a flight at 5 in the morning with the rest of my friends from my university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Aviv: Our Jewish organization, Chabad, had found donors to sponsor 60 students to fly out here for the day.
Yehuda: 290,000 people, at least according to one count, with a lot of diversity baked in. It’s hard to imagine any other environment in which you’d find this kind of gathering of Jews.
Elana: So you have one group of like, Lubavitch messianists, that have their own stand. You’ve got a group of Trumpers who have their Trump paraphernalia. You’ve got people with pride flags. You’ve got people who are coming as veterans. You’ve got people who are coming as kind of hipster bohemian.
Yehuda: There was no cell phone reception, but there in the sun, finally, I had a feeling of serenity. Actually, maybe not having the cell phone helped. There was nothing to do but hug people and stand there and listen. I’ll confess that it also helped that the area where we were first standing was kind of an audio dead zone, so we couldn’t hear anything. We eventually moved, but I loved those first quiet moments. I felt calmer than I have in weeks.
As for the rally itself, as you might imagine, I don’t love rallies. I go back often to a wonderful speech by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who pleads the case, writing in 1994, in a commencement address, for the cause of pluralism as the enduring message of the twentieth century, a century that had been torn apart by totalitarianism rooted in moral certainty.
Berlin, in contrast, wanted us to hold multiple commitments in tension. He wanted us to compromise, to make trade-offs in our moral commitments so that we could live together. He writes, “So we must weigh and measure, bargain and compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march.”
That’s how I feel at rallies. I want nuances messages that don’t fit neatly onto signs. That said, some of the messages at the rally were simple, and easy to endorse.
“Release the hostages,” for instance. “Oppose antisemitism.” And we did manage to get a pretty nuanced message, at least onto one of our Hartman signs. It said, “I show up because our destinies are intertwined.” It was a suggested phrase. You could read that sign a lot of different ways, and by every reading, it wad compelling.
I know that other groups showed up who dissented from some aspect of how the organizers construed the idea of pro-Israel. There were left-wing Jewish groups who formed something that they called a “peace-bloc,” a group of people who cheered when Van Jones hinted at support for some version of a ceasefire, and booed lustily when Reverend John Hagee spoke. They booed in person, they booed on social media, before or after.
The truth is, I was just really glad that they were there, boos and all. They were maybe more uncomfortable than me at the rally, but they decided, and I think that they were right, that it was better to be there, but be uncomfortable, rather than letting their discomfort keep them home. After all, staying home for the rally was gonna send as powerful a message as showing up for it.
And most of the speeches were, you know, rally speeches.
Rally speaker: There were three generations of world Jewries who fought for our freedom. Many of your grandfathers fought for our freedom. Many of your parents fought for our freedom. Many of you fought for our freedom.
Yehuda: The Hartman group, which ultimately relocated to be closer to the speaker system, cheered loudly for our friend and colleague Mijal Bitton, who offered a rousing charge of the crowd going.
Mijal: I stand here as a Jewish woman, burying four thousand years of history, from Abraham to my four-year-old daughter.
Yehuda: I was really proud to have a Hartman scholar on the main stage, and especially that it was Mijal, who I’ve known since she was an undergraduate. And to see her emerging to clearly into the limelight of being one of the American Jewish community’s most important thought-leaders, a status she’s earned through her scholarship, through her teaching, and through her principled moral leadership.
I found Senator Schumer’s speech endearing, and I found Speaker of the House Mike Johnson inoffensive, in spite of generally disagreeing with his politics. And then after those speeches I started wandering around, with a Hartman hat and sign. I was gratified to be greeted by a lot of you podcast listeners, and by a great number of our alumni, Hille directors and rabbis, Hartman teen fellows, Hevruta alumni.
I ran into friends and colleagues, I took some selfies. I tried to find my two teenage boys who had come with their high school on an envoy of twenty buses, a lot of those kids walking around with matching white sweatshirts so they were easy to spot. But without cell service, it was impossible to find them.
But I loved the wandering, and just seeing the faces. It was gratifying to see how peaceful so much of it was. A peaceful rally supporting Israel in the midst of a war. I guess I had worried more than I had expected that there would be more red-meat militarism at the rally, and I’d worried about counter-protests and maybe even about some anti-semitic unpleasantness that might show up.
But I barely saw any of that. It seemed like a lot of people, like me, were just relieved to be there, awash in the masses in a sea of serene blue and white. I learned only later that despite the incredible amount of organizational effort, the privilege of attending the rally wasn’t afforded to all those who intended to go.
More than half of Rebecca Starr’s 900-person contingent from Detroit made it all the way to the Dulles Airport in D.C. in chartered flights, only to learn upon arrival that some of their charter bus drivers, who meant to be there to pick them up, were staging a sick-out in protest of the rally, and that, therefore, a whole bunch of their group would never be able to get there.
Rebecca: Everyone tried to move heaven and earth. We had tireless professional and lay leadership working as hard as they possibly could to try and make the situation better.
Yehuda: Rebecca herself was able to make it to the rally, but only for the tail end. Her son Caleb was one of a full plane’s worth of people who never left the tarmac.
Caleb: To say I tried to go to the rally is a really hard thing to say, because obviously the Jewish community understands that I wanted to be there and we should have been there, but there definitely was a sense of uselessness throughout the groups that weren’t able to go to the rally. And though it is true that my narrative and my experience will be drastically different than anyone else’s, especially those who are able to go to the rally, I hope that this collective experience will show that no matter what you put in front of us, we will be able to persevere and show our support in whatever way we can.
Rebecca: It was very hard to enjoy, I would say, or to feel the atmosphere of the rally. It was winding down. It was quiet. I looked up at a certain point. We were there literally for about 10 minutes. And this is the time when Matisyahu was performing One Day. And this is a song all about our hope for the future, our hope that there will be peace, our hope that there will not be hatred.
And I just had to stop and think to myself, yeah, I’m with you. I do hope for that. I pray for that. But really at this moment, I’m sort of angry. I’m really frustrated because it doesn’t feel like we are there and it feels very, very hard right now.
I do know in the end that Detroit was counted. We made it clear that we stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves and for our family in Israel. That is something that no bus driver could take away from us.
Yehuda: Near the end of my time at the rally, after wandering the crowds for half an hour, I finally found Stephanie. I spent a few minutes with her. There was a group of parents and teachers and students from the Jewish day school that she leads in New York.
And that little time together really brought the whole thing home for me. The parents looked tired but not different tired. Parents kind of generally look tired, and there’s a war on, and they had just come off of a bus ride with their kids, and anticipating the bus ride home.
The kids, by this point in the rally, were doing what kids do. Not really listening anymore, even to the searingly painful testimony by parents of abducted hostages. And I kind of think it was okay that they weren’t listening anymore. They were sitting on the grass, huddled around a cell phone and playing video games.
The truth is, when I think about it, I know that I was at the 1987 rally for Soviet Jewry. I have faint memories from the mall on that day, and I was living in the D.C. area at the time, so it was a slam dunk for our school to take all of us, even my fifth-grade class.
But I can’t tell you what happened that day, just the fuzzy, lingering legacy of having been there with and for the Jewish people. And I’m pretty sure that those Beit Rabban students will have the same experience. Will they be able, decades from now, when Israel is finally living at peace with all of its citizens and neighbors, to remember what was actually said at that rally? There’s no chance.
Actually, most of us adults won’t even remember what was said next week. But will it linger in the consciousness of those kids that they were there? Yeah. Definitely. Partly because they’ll remember that their teachers and their parents and role models pushed them to come and told them that it was important and came with them, and partly because they got to miss school for an epic, one-day field trip, and partly because later Jewry will recount the episode of the 2023 rally for Israel the way that American Jews narrate nostalgically the story of the 1987 Soviet Jewry rally as a marker for who we were then as a people and why it mattered to come together.
And most of all, maybe, they will feel a tingling of that strange sense of belonging that comes with being part of the Jewish people.
Shira: As a child of the 80s, with very vivid memories of traveling in the backseat of a station wagon, through the weekend traffic, to stand in the streets of Manhattan, and to call, with all the other people who were standing there for the freedom of Soviet Jewry. That experience of advocating on behalf of my people across the globe, whom I had never met, it shaped me.
Yehuda: That sense of being part of and fighting for something bigger than yourself is irreplaceable. But the significance of showing up can make the inability to be physically present all the more painful.
Shira felt that way even in the week leading up to the rally.
Shira: My name is Shira Berkowitz, I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Yehuda: Shira is the president and CEO of Sacred Spaces, she’s a personal friend of mine, an extraordinary Jewish leader, a person whom we’ve partnered with at Hartman in our work on gender inequality and creating a safe Jewish community. I also sit personally on her board of directors.
Shira’s children are all under the age of 12, which makes them too young to be registered for seats on the bus that her community chartered to Washington, so she decided to stay home and watch the rally over livestream.
Shira: I found myself thinking about how not being there and not standing together at Israel’s time of need, it would leave a sort of footprint on my soul. And I began to wonder if I could offset what I came to think of as my absence footprint in much the way one would a carbon footprint.
A friend connected me with someone who wasn’t attending the rally because the transportation costs were too high and so I was able to partner with that person and help get them there, and it felt like their headcount maybe could be instead of my headcount.
Yehuda: Showing up, then, doesn’t just mean being present in the physical space of gathering. It also could mean supporting the presence of others with favors, with dollars, or simply with attention.
Shira: I had this realization as I watched the online views jump from 50,000 to 60,000 all the way up to 80,000 on the livestream I was watching, that, today, I actually could be counted, even from afar, at least virtually, in a way that we never could for Soviet Jewry. And that there were hundreds of thousands of people like me, who for whatever reason couldn’t be there in person, were still joining remotely.
Yehuda: Social media and the digital age get a bad rap, mostly it’s deserved, but then you get moments like this, when we can create community, and when people can feel a sense of belonging to community from far away, transcending the logistical limitations that prevent our participation.
Jewish peoplehood is always a version of imagined community, and this rally enacted that. Those were there, and those that wished to be there. It’s like that line from Deuteronomy when Moses describes the covenant as including those who are there with us today, and those who couldn’t be here.
For what it’s worth, I’ll add, the rally also meant a lot to those very folks in the Jewish people who we were standing with, our friends in Israel, the beneficiaries of our solidarity. Many Israelis have felt deeply lonely these past few weeks, but they noticed, big time, that we were there.
Rachel: My name is Rachel Korazim. I teach at Hartman. I live in Jaffa, which is the southern part of Tel Aviv.
Channa: My name is Channa Pinchasi, I am from Yerushalayim, I am a research fellow at the Kogod Center in the Hartman Institute.
Rachel: As soon as I knew about the rally, I decided that I wanted to take in as much of it as I could.
Channa: I was reminded of my experience of the months of the protests here before the war, and how encouraging it was to be part of the crowd.
Rachel: I found the streaming programs, and listened to as much of it as I could. I made a point on my social media and other means to let people know about the rally, to let people know about how people feel about us in America.
Yehuda: Something interesting is happening to us right now between Israeli and North American Jews. We’ve been pulling apart from one another for decades, for both banal reasons, like geography and language, and for substantive, ideological and political reasons as well.
But since October 7th, I’ve felt that the ties between us are healing. We’re trying to show up for them, and they, in turn, are worried about us. Little gestures really matter to people. Channa felt that there was something bigger going on, too, that the American Jewish community was modeling something that Israelis might be able to learn from.
Channa: We felt envy of the ability of Conservatives, Reform, Orthodox, different Jews from different denominations, to stand together at the same stage. I thought to myself, when will we get to the moment that it will be possible to, I’m hoping that it won’t demand too heavy a price in order for us to understand that we need each other, and we’re dependent on each other.
Yehuda: We are impossible, the Jewish people. We’re a nonsensical idea, this idea that we constitute a people across every imaginable difference: race, ethnicity, language, culture, heritage, geography, belief system. And it’s impossible, nonsensical, that we’ve sustained that idea of our nationhood for such a long time.
We’re also impossible in real life. Differences with one another heavily outweighing, or at least challenging, the imagined bonds that are supposed to hold us together against those real and important differences.
Speaker: We have each other’s backs, and we rely on each other and love each other so much more than we previously thought.
Elana: We care about and we really disagree with each other about things. To see that we all want to be here together, that is an important statement about Jewish peoplehood.
*Acheinu playing*
Shira: I think these moments of discomfort, they too were important, because they’re symptoms of achdut, of unity. We are a diverse people in so many different ways, and yet, we all stood together to call for the return of the hostages. We stood together against anti-Semitism in solidarity with our people in protection of our land.
And I think, probably, for everyone there, we stood with hopes and prayers for a better tomorrow, for a day of peace for all people, for all civilians, for all children. And I found myself thinking about the quote from Isaiah, “lo yisagoy algoy cherev, v’lo yilmidu od melchama,” a day when nations will lay down their swords, and we will know no more war.
Yehuda: Thank god, then, for the serene moments of imagined belonging. The truth is I don’t know whether the solidarity moment of North American Jewry in relationship to Israel will last. I think it’s more powerful than you might think, if you were only getting updates from social media, which incentivizes social divisions and is amplifying dissent in the Jewish communitu right now, much more than, I think, actually exists in real life.
North American Jewry is in a moment, not just because of October 7th, but because of its aftershocks in the spike of global anti-Semitism, and in the absurdity of aspects of the global response to October 7th.
I don’t know if this moment will last, but thank God for the moments.
Thanks for listening to our show this week and thanks to all of the people who offered their voices for this episode. Identity/Crisis is produced by M. Louis Gordon, and our executive producer Maital Friedman, with assistance from Sam Balough and Sarina Shohet.
This episode was edited by our assistant producer, Tessa Zitter. It was mixed by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC. And our music is provided by Socalled.
Transcripts of our show are available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. To find them and to learn more about the Shalom Hartman Institute, visit us online at shalomhartman.org.
For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes or you can visit us at shalomhartman.org/israelatwar. We’re always looking for ideas of what to cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or comments on this episode, you can write to us at identitycrisis@shalomhartmanorg. You can rate and review our show on iTunes to help more people find it. You can subscribe to Identity Crisis everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week, stay safe, and thanks for listening.
