A Jewish Sourcebook For Resistance, Part 1

Matthew Gindin
16 min readJan 10, 2024

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Nourishment drawn from premodern sources

Poster for the Jewish Socialist Union, or Bund (“Here where we live, this is our country!”)

Her ways are ways of pleasantness, And all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her, And happy are all who retain her.

Mishlei 3:17–18

According to the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), the Jews were a people chosen by God to fulfill a mission. That mission was to create a different kind of society, one based on tzedek u’ mishpat (restorative kindness and vindicating justice) which was, as far as their imagination could reach, egalitarian, ethical, and lived in covenant with the God of Life. For the purpose of this mission they were given a land- Israel- and warned that if they lived by the covenant it would be theirs and they would flourish there, but if they didn’t, the land would “vomit them out” (Vayikra 18:28). The ancient Jews struggled to fulfill that mission, and ultimately, by the analysis of those who wrote the Tanakh, they failed. They believed that this resulted in the loss of the land, and an exile which lasted over 1600 years.

Here is the Orthodox Jewish intellectual and professor at Hebrew University Yeshayahu Leibovitz– who we will meet again at length in our fifth class– on the concept that the land of Israel “belongs” to the Jews:

https://youtu.be/9JSZL-PP-zk?si=yAxhNuY2z4it2MBf

What Leibowitz is responding to in the video is a comment of Rashi, the revered medieval commentator on the Tanakh and Talmud. On the first verse of Genesis Rashi comments that lest anyone claim that the ancient Jews stole the land of Israel, in fact the maker of Heaven and Earth, to whom it really belongs, gave it to Abraham (and later again to the tribes of Israel). Leibowitz points out that his interlocutor is adding the words “given to Jews by right” which are not in the original Rashi, and then adds that the Torah explicitly says that the land of Israel belongs to God by right (as does everywhere else) and God gives it to whom God wills. He then quotes from the prophet Ezekiel, who said that the land was given to Jews as an inheritance not absolutely but conditionally upon their doing what they were intended by God to do there (as the Vayikra verse I quoted above also says). The same point is made in the famous verse of the prophet Amos (9:7):

“Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites [Ethiopians]?” declares the LORD. “Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, and similarly the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir? Surely the eyes of YHVH Elohim are on the sinful kingdom [of Israel], and I will destroy it from the face of the earth.”

The new leaders of the Jewish people, the Rabbis, crafted a post-exilic religion for a nomadic community, one which focused on the individual, the home, and the community. This religion was exacting and detailed in both its ritual and ethical demands, and cultivated an exquisite ritual, textual, psychological and moral sensitivity. The Rabbis taught that if Jews fulfilled the Torah in their persons and community it would bring not only a return to Israel but the coming of the Messiah– the global saviour, and the redemption of the world. This belief was elaborated into a mystical, quasi-shamanic cosmology whose priests were the Jews, whose actions would mystically repair the cosmos itself. They would be rewarded with a God-led return to Israel and the messianic redemption of the world, as well as the healing of the cosmos.

In the late 19th century, in the face of severe persecution in Russia and Poland and a rising tide of nationalism throughout Europe, a group of mostly secular Jews believed it was time to abandon this self-understanding of being an international tribe of holy people and replace it with being a people like any other. Some applied this idea to Jewish social activism, but some believed it should go together with Jews having their own homeland, and possibly their own nation-state. This was Zionism. It was resisted by most Orthodox Jews, by the massively popular Jewish socialist movement in Europe, and by the early Reform movement, who rejected the idea of Jewish nationalism in favour of a purely religious conception of Judaism. Zionism slowly grew in influence and power, however. The Zionist mainstream would ultimately go for the statist option, and in the eyes of many Jewishness would be redefined as an ethnicity or culture who had their own modern nation-state, Israel, and who relied not on God, but on their own military, their political skill, and their might to survive and thrive.

In this class I want to wind back the clock and look and engage in a project of reclamation focused on the voices of our ancestors who spoke out of Jewish tradition in a way which was skeptical of, or downright opposed to, statism, violence, war, and xenophobia, and who embraced principles of universal human dignity, careful ethical sensitivity, and love of both Jew and non-Jew.

My intention is not to romanticize the past or claim that premodern Judaism spoke with one voice about these matters- voices of authoritarianism, violence and xenophobia existed alongside the voices we will excavate here, but my purpose is to lead on us a journey to find nourishment in what I think are the highest expression of the insights and historical experience of our traditions.

Tanakh

In today’s class I want to start with a tour of eight events or themes in the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible, acronym for Torah (Teaching), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings)]:

Image, Murder, Monoculture, Brothers, Empire, Monarchy, War, and Protest.

Before we begin I want to share an insight from the great academic Bible scholar Richard Elliot Friedman, from his book The Bible Now. Friedman points out that we tend to misread the Hebrew Bible in ways that render it at best useless and at worst toxic. We do this because we don’t understand it in its context. The Hebrew Bible is a revolutionary text, and inside of it lies an arrow of thought pointing at a moral upheaval in its ancient context. The arrow points towards egalitarianism, justice, the dignity of human life, compassion, anti-militarism, and anti-fascism, but the people who wrote the text could only imagine the trajectory of the arrow as far as their imaginations allowed.

In many ways human thought- partially inspired by the Bible itself, has moved past the Hebrew Bible (though in some ways it still hasn’t caught up). When we read the text without seeing the arrow it is useless, and when we imagine that the limitations of the text are in fact its end-goal, then we do the opposite of what the text intends: instead of looking to where the arrow is pointing, we look backwards, enshrining the limitations of the authors — like patriarchy, for instance — as being sacred.

With that in mind, let’s begin.

Image

וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃

And God created humankind in the divine image,

creating it in the image of God —

creating them male and female.

The Italian Jewish Torah commentator Umberto Cassuto (1883–1951) pointed out that the word tzelem, often translated into English as “image” occurs very seldom in the Tanakh, and when it does it refers to an idol- a small clay statue used in non-Jewish temples. Cassuto pointed out that when the Tanakh says that Elohim– God– created human beings b’tzelem Elohim, it is making a slyly revolutionary point that is lost on us thousands of years later. What do you think it means to say that human beings are idols, little temple statues that represent God?

Another aspect of tzelem is that in the ancient Near East Kings were believed to be representatives- images and emissaries- of God, and so tzelem may also carry this connotation. Yet the Tanakh says that God created “human beings,” i.e. all human beings, as “the images of God.” The text, when saying humans are created “b’tzelem Elohim” confers a status on all human beings- without exception- normally reserved for the semi-divine tyrants of the world. It also makes a point of pausing and saying that “male and female” were created so. The inclusion of “female,” which strikes us today as ho-hum, or even problematic because of the gender binary, was in its context was actually a radical and rare affirmation of the dignity of women alongside men.

We should also note that these Earthlings (adam) are made from the Earth (adamah) and the Rabbis here comment, “They were made from the earth of all lands, so that no one could say, “My land is better than yours” and “they were made as the one ancestor of all human beings so no one could say, ‘My race or lineage or family is better than yours.’” As with many other examples to come, we will wish we could say, “from your mouths to the Zionists ears,” or as we would say in Yiddish:

פון דיין מויל ביז די ציוניסטישע אויערן

The image of the image is a protest against the imagination of the world the ancient Jews lived in, where only the male ruling elite were in the divine image, where lineage meant absolute hierarchy, and most people were created to be servants. This universal dignity was understood, in the Torah, as prohibiting….

Murder

The first murder in the Torah is that of Hevel by Kayin. When the envious Kayin (who name is connected to the idea of acquisition, “koneh”), guilty of murdering Hevel (whose name means “ephemeral, like vapour”) is confronted by God, who asks him where his brother is, he famously says, “What, am I my brother’s keeper?”

“Your brother’s blood calls to me from out of the earth,” God replies, which in Hebrew literally is written as “bloods.” The later Rabbis learn from the plural that it is not only Hevel’s blood which is on Kayin’s hands, but all of Hevel’s potential descendants. “Whoever kills one human being,” they comment, “it is as if they killed the whole world.”

God does not kill Kayin in revenge, interestingly, but rather marks him out not to be killed, seemingly trying to signal something: the cycle of violence ends here. Humans continue to become violent, however, and multiply vengeance for every death. Lamech, Kayin’s descendant, vows to kill 77 people for every one who harms him. This crescendo of violence is what leads to the Flood.

Every ancient people has a flood story- there are versions not only from Mesopotamia, but also from China, India, Africa, and Canadian Indigenous Nations like the Haida Gwaii. Each version explains why there was a flood differently. The Jewish explanation was that it was a result of humans’ violent exploitation of each other. This violent exploitation leads to God regretting our creation and hitting the reset button.

After the flood God seems to accept human’s commitment to violence, trying to mitigate it in other ways by allowing the eating of meat and establishing the rule that murderers will themselves be murdered: here the ancient Hebrews seem to be trying to harmonize their intuition that a just God would be opposed to violence with the fact of animals eating each other and murderers being punished. The Rabbis would later understand the descendants of Noach (i.e. all human beings) to be obligated by a universal human covenant which included the requirement for courts of law to ameliorate human violence and the prohibition of cruelty towards animals.

What stands out here is the revulsion towards murder, even of one person, which though some Jewish texts would abandon, the Rabbis would later take up and emphasize. To quote the much maligned Roger Waters, years before he became a pro-Palestinian activist, “You don’t have to be a Jew to disapprove of murder.” He got the fundamental Jewish ethic back then because it was a part of the traditional Jewish cultural soul that he saw.

Monoculture

Right before the flood there is a brief story as famous as it is misunderstood. In this story a group of people band together to make a tower to “make their name great,” i.e. for their own glory. God breaks the tower and scatters the people by confusing their language, giving them each diverse tongues so that they don’t understand each other and fragment. The story is about God being opposed to self-absorbed monocultures and solving the problem with diversity.

Rav Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), the great 20th century Kabbalist, reflected this insight on another level, when he wrote that eliminating cultural diversity, i.e. causing an culture to cease to exist even if one did not murder the actual people, was tantamount to a violation of the Biblical command, “You shall not murder.”

If we are correct that the Babel story is against monocultures, how does this reflect on the assumptions of Zionists about the land of Israel today?

Brothers

According to the Tanakh, God moved into human history in at least one way by choosing a nomadic Mesopotamian shepherd named Avram, later Avraham, for a special mission, and promising him a land in which he could teach his children “the ways of tzedek u’mishpat (restorative kindness and vindicating justice).” The mission was passed down to Avraham’s son Yitzhak, and not his son Ishmael, although Ishmael was promised a special relationship with God and divine protection and blessing as well. Yitzhak had two children, Ya’akov and Esav, and Ya’akov was chosen to lead the families mission. Rivkah and Yitzhak, fearful Esav would be chosen though he was not a good candidate, rigged the process and as a result a split between Yitzhak and Esav occurred. Though they later reconciled, Ya’akov, fearful of Esav’s hostility at being disempowered, chose not to join forces with him and, after promising to meet up and travel alongside him, instead went in another direction. As a result Esav married a Hittite woman from whom came Amalek, a tribe who later would fall on the Israelites in the desert and try to destroy them, and who, in the Rabbinic imagination, are the ultimate anti-semites. Amalek’s most famous descendant is Haman, who attempts to commit genocide against the Jewish people in the Purim story.

The Torah often speaks implicitly through story and causality. What can we learn from this story of brothers?

I think the lesson is that the exclusion of Esav led to Amalek and Haman. A warning.

The heroes of the Tanakh are remarkably complex and never 100% good, not even Moses.

The most shocking of the wrongdoings of Ya’akov/Israel’s children is the response of the brothers Shimon and Levy to the rape of their sister Dina by the son of the leader of Shechem. Shimon and Levy use a subterfuge which allows them to murder every last one of the men of Shechem in revenge, a brutally disproportionate attack. As Ya’akov lies dying he calls his children for blessing but excludes Shimon and Levy. Criticizing their wanton violence, he instead curses them.

In 1953, when an Israeli special forces unit led by Ariel Sharon avenged the murder of an Israeli woman and her child in a border town by Palestinian raiders by killing 70 Arab residents of the village of Qibiya, the Israeli intellectual and religious Jew Yeshyahu Leibovits wrote a controversial essay where he said the attack on “Qubiya-Shechem” was similarly accursed. Today we should say “Gaza-Shechem.”

The most famous crime of the sons of Ya’akov, however, is surely the attempted murder and sale into slavery of their brother Yosef. Yosef survives and rises to prominence in Egypt, and in the end is able to save the lives of his family. He is also able to save the lives of many Egyptians, but at the cost of making them slave labour for the state of Egypt: they trade away all of their land for food and become property of the state. Yosef, when he died, was mummified in Egypt instead of being buried with his ancestors in Canaan as he would have liked. A recent Bible scholar has pointed out that this seems to be the text’s damning commentary on Yosef being overly willing to adopt the ways of the Egyptian empire when he saved the Egyptian populace by enslaving them to the Pharoahs.

Many later Jewish texts would warn about the dangers of getting to close to Empire, such as Pirke Avot, which warns “Shemaiah used to say: love work, hate the Rabbinate, and do not attempt to draw near to the government (1:11)” and again in 2:3: “Be careful in your dealings with the government for they do not befriend a person except for their own needs; they seem like friends when it is to their own interest, but they do not stand by a person in the hour of their distress.” The Talmud is also harshly critical of the Roman Empire, which it viewed as hypocritical (in its claim to benefit the subjugated), unjust and a hoarder of wealth amidst the poor, among other things. Speaking of government……

Monarchy

Israel re-settled in Canaan, now charged with a mission to build a different kind of society than the surrounding Empires, and carrying the command to “love the stranger.” The mitzvah to “love” or “not to oppress” the stranger is the most repeated mitzvah in the Torah, spoken thirty six times. The data of the Hebrew Bible would suggest that it is, in fact, the biggest thing on God’s mind.

The Tanakh claims that Israel functioned as a loose tribal confederation under the authority of the Torah and God. Their leadership came in the form of charismatic shoftim (judges) inspired by the Spirit of God (ruach elohim) and later by nevi’im (prophets similarly inspired). After generations of repeated struggles with the Philistines and others, the people approached the Navi Shmuel and asked for a King so they “would be like other nations,” i.e., with a large, trained standing army under the centralized authority of one human being. Sh’muel was horrified by this request, but brought it to God, who told him to warn the people about the bad results of having a King, but to give them one if they want it. Later the laws of monarchy in the Tanakh would break with the customs of the time by insisting that the King could be any Israelite and was under the law, not above it. The main purpose of Kings was to levy taxes, amass weapons, and lead the people in waging wars. YHVH, though, was not so interested in those things…..

  • War

In the ancient Near East, kings and upper class men maintained control through a professional army which stockpiled weapons, horses, and chariots. They were paid through taxation. Torah law, fascinatingly, does not provide taxes for the army and also limits the Kings ability to stockpile horses and weapons. The Torah repeatedly tells stories of ancient Israelis fighting off much bigger armies when they are in harmony with God’s will, and failing when they are not. Israel’s army is a citizen army with crude weapons led by a modestly wealthy King with few resources- by design. Even alliances with other nations are frowned on again and again and seen as idolatry and betrayal of YHVH. It’s worth thinking carefully about the following speech the Torah says should be given to soldiers going out to battle:

And when you draw near to the battle, the priest shall come forward and speak to the people and shall say to them, “Hear, O Israel, today you are drawing near for battle against your enemies: let not your heart faint. Do not fear or panic or be in dread of them, for the LORD your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory.” Then the officers shall speak to the people, saying, “Is there any man who has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man dedicate it. And is there any man who has planted a vineyard and has not enjoyed its fruit? Let him go back to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man enjoy its fruit. And is there any man who has betrothed a wife and has not married her? Let him go back to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man take her.” And the officers shall speak further to the people, and say, “Is there any man who is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go back to his house, lest he make the heart of his fellows melt like his own.” (Deut. 20: 1–14, 19–20)

As we mentioned, the Torah depicts God as allowing Israel to have a human king under certain conditions, and Deuteronomy 17 spells out those conditions — one of which is stripping the king of all military might: the king is not allowed to build a professional army (“ he must not acquire many horses for himself”). The King is also not allowed to make military alliances with other nations (Deut. 17: 16–17).

This explains why in several instances Israel was commanded to hamstring their enemies’ horses and burn their chariots. As theologian Preston Sprinkle writes, “Horses and chariots were the ancient version of tanks. They were superior weapons. The army with the most horses and chariots was bound to win the war. So when Joshua (and others) hamstrings horses and burns chariots, he destroys their potential usefulness to Israel in further battles. It’s like killing an enemy with a knife and not taking his gun.”

“The king is not saved by his great army,” says Psalms. “A warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue (Ps. 33: 16–17).” The belief of ancient Israel was not pacifist, but it was a religious anti-militarism. Whatever we might think of that today, it is literally the polar opposite of the militarist ideology of the modern state of Israel.

Lastly, here is Sprinkle again: “If America, for instance, used the Bible to shape its warfare policy, that policy would look like this. Enlistment would be by volunteer only (which it is), and the military would not be funded by taxation. America would not stockpile superior weapons — no tanks, drones, F-22s, and of course no nuclear weapons — and it would make sure its victories were determined by God’s miraculous intervention, not by military might. Rather than outnumbering the enemy, America would deliberately fight outmanned and under-gunned. Perhaps soldiers would use muskets, or maybe just swords. There would be no training, no boot camp, no preparation other than fasting, praying, and singing worship songs… as it stands, many Christians will be content to cut and paste selected verses that align with America’s worldview to give the military some religious backing. Some call this bad hermeneutics; others call it syncretism. The Israelite prophets called it idolatry.”

Substitute modern Israel for America above and you have an interesting thought experiment.

We know that even previous to Zionism, and even within the Hebrew Bible itself, Jews did not embody these values much of the time. Yet they echo throughout Jewish thought, leaving their imprint. In the next essay I will explore the ethical landscape of pre-modern Judaism, and then view the reaction of pre-Zionist Orthodox Rabbis to Zionism, followed by a look at 20th century Jewish intellectuals who critiqued the new Israeli state as it was coming to birth.

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Matthew Gindin
Matthew Gindin

Written by Matthew Gindin

Editor, freelance writer, journalist, ghostwriter. www.matthewgindin.com

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