Beyond Tribalism
by Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah
Did you watch a series
on the television a few months ago, which recorded the experiences
of a white western anthropologist engaging in what that profession
calls, ‘participant observation’, among various
tribal peoples in various places around the world? Unfortunately,
I only caught a snippet of one programme – but what I
saw has stayed with me. The anthropologist had lived with one
tribe for a while, and now he was staying with a neighbouring
tribe. Their way of life was almost identical – but the
two tribes saw each other as radically different, and were constantly
at war. I caught the bit, when members of the one tribe were
explaining that the other tribe were ‘thieves’,
who were forever stealing their horses.
I’m sure that the reality of antagonism between different
tribes comes as no surprise to us. Sophisticated citizens that
we are of a modern democracy – albeit, technically, ‘subjects’
of Her Majesty the Queen – I have an uncomfortable feeling
that many of us tend to watch programmes like ‘Tribe’
through the same kind of lens we otherwise reserve for David
Attenborough’s forays into the undergrowth. We have a
vague feeling that we are observing creatures like ourselves
– but from a great distance, both, geographical and temporal,
amazingly bridged for us by the wonders of modern technology.
We are fascinated by the way that they live. And if we weren’t
quite as sophisticated as we are, we would probably echo the
attitude of the nineteenth century anthropologist, Sir James
Frazer, of The Golden Bough (first published in 1890) fame,
and call them ‘primitive’.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we were to view ourselves
through that lens? Around the same time that the series ‘Tribe’
was being screened, it was the World Cup. Living with a lover
of the ‘beautiful game’, it was impossible to avoid
football fever, and so I watched the closing stages of a few
matches. Mostly the cameras followed the action around the pitch,
but at different moments, viewers caught glimpses of the crowd.
And what did we see? Not just the colours of the nations concerned
displayed on football ‘strips’ and flags and banners,
but on faces and hair. I wonder what old Frazer would have made
of those stadium crowd scenes…
A few weeks ago, in early August, as war between Hizbollah
and Israel raged in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon, I
stood here and talked about ‘the perils of taking sides’.
I’m not going to rehearse what I said on that occasion
– but I do want to explore some aspects of the impulse
in a slightly different way, and broaden out the terrain, as
well as return to the soil of that all-too-familiar, particular
conflict between Israel and Palestine.
But before I take us to the Middle East, I would like us to
pause for a moment, and reflect on who we are and what we are
doing here. Today, on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the
Jewish year, Jews across the world have congregated together
in great numbers in synagogues – and in halls, and even
tents, where synagogue sanctuaries are not large enough to accommodate
them all. It feels like a gathering of a great tribe. Is that
what we are? Is the People Israel a tribe, once tied to a particular
piece of the earth, now scattered across the globe?
Recently, the United Synagogue has set up a young section that
it has called ‘Tribe’. Checking the Tribe web-site,
I found the initiative described in this way: ‘Tribe is
for the future of our community: our young people. It’s
about touching young Jews with a vibrant, living Judaism. We
work with an entire generation. Any young Jew from the moment
they are born until the day they become a parent can join.’
Well, I guess, as a non-parent, young Jew-at heart fifty-one
year old, I’m still eligible then. But joking apart, I
am a little concerned at the thought of young Jews being encouraged
to sign-up to the ‘Tribe’. I’ve no doubt that
the name, with its promise of ‘belonging’, is very
appealing, but I think that pressing the ‘tribal’
button is very problematic.
On the surface, of course, there is a lot of evidence that
Jews are a tribe: Like any tribe past and present, we share
a particular set of ancestral roots and rituals, and a common
language, and see ourselves as having a distinct identity that
is different and separate from other peoples. But the Jewish
People is not a tribe. Although we share one sacred tongue,
and basically follow the same calendar, and some key common
practices, we don’t share the same interpretation of Judaism,
we express ourselves in many different languages and cultural
forms, depending on where we live now, and where have lived
before, and, actually, we don’t even all share the same
roots in the past – since throughout the millennia, the
Jewish people has always encompassed both Jews by birth and
Jews by choice. What binds us together is not blood, nor our
particular ways, but our recognition of the fundamental unity
of all Creation – expressed, for religious Jews, by the
unity of the Creator. Paradoxically, what first made us distinct
as a people was the awareness that all peoples are essentially
the same – united by our common humanity. As we read in
the Mishnah, the first rabbinic code of law, edited eighteen
hundred years ago: ‘It was for the sake of peace among
us that Creation began with a single human being: So that none
might say to the other: My ancestor was greater than your ancestor’
(Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).
This is all well and good, I hear some of you say to yourselves,
but everybody knows that most Jews do see themselves as part
of a tribe. If that is true, then, one might argue that it is
precisely because some Jews see themselves as part of a tribe
that other Jews, don’t want to have anything to do with
Jews and Judaism. But, of course, it’s not as simple as
this. None of it is. And now I’m going to complicate matters
further by turning to the Middle East. When we read the Torah,
we learn that the People Israel was originally composed of tribes:
The twelve sons of Jacob, later known as Israel, became the
progenitors of the twelve tribes. At Sinai, these biological
descendants of their common ancestor were augmented by the erev
rav, the ‘mixed multitude’ (Exodus 12:38), who fled
Egypt along with b’ney Yisrael, the ‘children of
Israel’. Nevertheless, the narrative tells us that the
tribal organisation was maintained throughout the journey in
the wilderness, and as they approached the land they were about
to occupy, each of the tribes, with the exception of Levi, the
tribe that was assigned responsibility for the sacrificial system
of worship, was allotted a particular territory – with
the descendants of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh,
each becoming tribes in their own right.
If we read the narrative of the occupation of the land by our
tribal ancestors, around 1250 years BCE, as it is related in
the Bible, from the Book of Joshua onwards, we become aware
of how the story of our people became inextricably linked with
a particular area of territory, that grew and shrank, at different
times, according to their changing political fortunes vis a
vis, both the other peoples who inhabited the land, and the
successive imperial powers that conquered it from the 8th century
BCE onwards. From this perspective, it is clear that our peoplehood
is, in fact, defined by the land – and this was, indeed,
the point of view expressed by classical political Zionism in
the late nineteenth century. But, as I said on Rosh Ha-Shanah
morning, the Zionist movement was a response to the persistence
of anti-Semitism in the modern world – of the failure
of the process of Emancipation in Western Europe to deliver
full equality for the Jewish people. Inspired by the nationalist
struggles of various European peoples during the nineteenth
century, Political Zionism was, by definition, a child of the
Diaspora: The hope was that by returning to the land of our
ancestors, Jews would solve the problem of being a victimised
minority in other people’s lands, and become a sovereign
nation, in charge of our own destiny.
Of course, our people does have a deep historical relationship
to the land on the Eastern border of the Mediterranean. But
our existence as a people has also been defined, by almost two
thousand years of Diaspora experience since the Romans destroyed
Jerusalem and the Temple in 70CE. And not only that, even prior
to that great dispersion, from the days of Abraham and Sarah
onwards we have been a people on the move, continually; for
ever travelling up to the land, and going out of the land, and
settling, not only in that particular piece of the earth, but
in the ancient centres of Babylon and Alexandria, centuries
before the Romans marched in.
While the usual name for our people, Jew, Y’hudi, connects
us with Y’hudah, Judah, the nation that survived following
the Assyrian conquest of the Northern kingdom of Israel in 722BCE,
as I have pointed out on other occasions, the ancient name of
our people, the Hebrews, Ivrim, meaning ‘those who cross
over’, reminds us that while our people is connected to
a particular land, we have always been a journeying people,
forever crossing over borders. Interestingly, the name Ivrim
– Ivri in the singular – is always used in a particular
way in the Bible, where it is either the name used of us by
other peoples, or used to distinguish us from other peoples.
So, we find the first reference to this name in connection with
Abraham, in Genesis chapter 14, verse 13, where the narrative
there tells us that during a battle between the ‘four
kings’ and the ‘five kings’ in Canaan at that
time, one of the kings escaped, and told Avram Ha-Ivri, ‘Avram,
the Hebrew’, that his nephew Lot had been captured.
Avram Ha-Ivri: Abraham the first Hebrew. Abraham: The first
ancestor of the Ivrim, because, as we read in Genesis chapter
12, verse 1, he was the first one to leave his land, his kindred,
his father’s house, and set out on a journey. But the
name Ivri conveys even more than this propensity to cross borders.
In the Haftarah set aside for reading on Yom Kippur afternoon,
we hear about another famous Ivri, Jonah. As you may recall,
according to the Book named after him, Jonah was a very reluctant
prophet. Rather than obey God’s word and travel to Nineveh,
the epicentre of evil at his time, and denounce the city, he
gets on a ship at Jaffa, to flee to Tarshish. When there is
a sudden terrible storm that threatens to destroy the ship,
the sailors cry to their gods, and do everything they can to
lighten the vessel. When that fails, they go in search of their
foreign passenger, Jonah, who is fast asleep in the bowels of
the ship, in the hope that his God will save them, and then
decide to draw lots to find out who is responsible for the raging
seas. When the lot falls to Jonah, they begin to question him
closely. In response to their questions, Jonah says, Ivri Anochi;
v’et Adonai Elohey hashamayim ani yarei, asher asah et-hayam,
v’et hayabashah – ‘I am a Hebrew; and I fear
the Eternal One the God of heaven, who made the sea and the
dry land’ (1:9). Significantly, Jonah defines himself,
not only as an Ivri, but also in relation to God. But in talking
of God, Jonah does not speak of his deity; the God of his particular
land. Rather, he tells the sailors that the One he ‘fears’
is the Maker of ‘the sea and the dry land’ –
the Creator of everything, in other words.
And, of course, it is the Creator of everything, who, at the
end of the story, much to Jonah’s chagrin, accepts the
repentance of the Ninevites and forgives them. The Eternal One
is not a tribal God, concerned only with Israel, any more than
Israel is a tribal people. Indeed, the name Israel is just as
pertinent as the name, Ivrim: Yisrael: the people who struggle
with God – not the people who own God. God does not belong
to us alone.
So, if the Jewish people is not a tribe what are we to make
of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between
Israel and Palestine? In 2002, the Israeli writer, Amos Oz,
travelled to Germany, where he delivered two speeches. Published
with the titles, ‘Between Right and Right’ and ‘How
to cure a fanatic’, the two overlap in places –
as, when, in ‘How to cure a fanatic’, he declares
(Princeton Univ. Press, 2006, pp.61-62):
Essentially the battle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian
Arabs is not a religious war, although the fanatics on both
sides are trying very hard to turn it into one. It is essentially
no more than a territorial conflict over the painful question,
“Whose land?” It is a painful conflict between right
and right, between two very powerful convincing claims over
the same small country. Not a religious war, not a war of cultures,
not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply a real
estate dispute over whose house this is. And I believe that
this can be resolved.
I think that Amos Oz is right – essentially. After all,
neither Israelis nor Palestinians are homogenous. Not only the
Jewish people, but the Palestinian people, too, encompasses
a variety of traditions and cultural expressions. Indeed, Palestinians
don’t even share the same religion. While the majority
are Muslims, a significant minority are Christians. But even
though the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs
may ‘not’ be ‘a religious war, not a war of
cultures, not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply
a real estate dispute over whose house this is’, I don’t
think that this makes it easier to resolve. Both sides in the
conflict, in their different ways, are not only caught in a
deadlock of conflicting ‘right’ claims, they are
not only stymied by their own terror-filled projections about
each other, they are also held captive by their own myths about
themselves.
The Palestinians were not a free, self-governing people before
the Israelis came along. Before the State of Israel was established
in May 1948, the Palestinians lived under the British Mandate
in Palestine, and, before that, until the end of the First World
War, they were subject to Ottoman rule. Meanwhile, before the
State of Israel was established, those Jews who had immigrated
to Palestine, lived in the Yishuv, the ‘settlement’
that was Jewish life in that land – and the only thing
that differentiated them from the Jews ‘settled’
in all the other lands around the world, was their determination
to create a ‘Jewish state’ in Palestine. The Palestinians
have been victims of colonialism for centuries. Jews have been
victims of anti-Semitism for centuries. Possessing and governing
their own lands cannot be a ‘cure all’ for all the
various terrible pains that each people has endured. Justice
demands that a sovereign State of Palestine must be established
and justice demands that a sovereign State of Israel must continue
to exist, but neither people can be defined, simply, by their
ownership of a piece of ‘real estate’ – to
use Amos Oz’s expression – or perhaps that of his
American translator.
Each people is connected, not only to that particular land,
but also to a wider family, a Diaspora family that lives in
many lands. Although, for the Palestinians, the experience of
living as refugees is much more recent – and was a direct
consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel –
nevertheless the events that have turned the two peoples into
enemies, have also made them much more like one another: The
wandering Jews have set up home again in the Middle East; the
Palestinians have settled in other countries around the world.
How ironic! The great contest between Israeli Jews and Palestinian
Arabs is not a contest between warring tribes with their distinct
and clearly defined identities. On the contrary, both peoples
now bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, not simply because,
like the other peoples in the region, they are the descendants
of the two sons of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, but because their
relationship to the one piece of land they are fighting over
is equally vexed, and complicated by their particular experiences
of living in other people’s lands.
So, what’s the solution? The Jewish people may not be
a tribe, but because of our experience at the hands of others,
we desperately need a country we can call our own. The Palestinian
people may not be a tribe, but because of their experience at
the hands of others, they desperately need a country they can
call their own. But unless and until both peoples recognise
not only the right of the other to the land, not only their
common inheritance in Abraham, but their kinship with one another
as colonised, persecuted peoples, who have suffered the pains
of exile and become rather complex and multi-faceted as a result,
the two-state solution will remain an impossible dream.
It is not enough to build walls and fix borders, as if the
objective is simply to keep warring tribes apart: The State
of Israel will not be secure, and a viable State of Palestine
will not be established, until both peoples fully acknowledge
one another. On this day of Yom Kippur, the day when Jews all
over the world, not only make confession of our wrongs, but
also resolve to put right what is wrong, it is right that the
Israeli government make a new effort to reach a just and peaceful
settlement of the conflict by offering to enter into negotiations
with the Palestinian leadership. It’s not just that, as
Winston Churchill famously quipped, ‘Jaw, jaw is better
than war, war’; talking is the only way that the two peoples
can begin to learn to connect with one another, and acknowledge
each other’s pains, hopes and fears.
Most of us know this, of course, but what can we do? Well,
quite a lot, actually. We can denounce the divisive beat of
the tribal drum; we can refuse to give into cynicism and despair;
we can add our voices to the voices of the peacemakers, among
both the Israelis and the Palestinians; we can support their
efforts for justice and peace; we can call on the British government
to play its part; we can resolve to play our part. We can begin
to hope that it is possible for each and every one of us, and
for everyone, everywhere, to begin again. May this sacred day
inspire us all to make a new beginning. And let us say: Amen.
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom
Verei’ut
Yom Kippur Shacharit – 10th Tishri 5767 – 2nd October
2006
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