Quests & Questions — A Blessing for the Month of Nisan

With this new moon of Nisan, we mark the beginning of spring. For the full moon, we’ll celebrate Passover, our people’s fresh-life festival of freedom.

Dear friend,

When every side claims the banner of “freedom,” how can the word hold real, useful meaning?

Last week, because of my parents, Ira and Barbara, and their lifetimes of hard work, good fortune, and generosity — three of the same reasons RUACH exists — this radical queer institutionalist got to fly to Nashville for the annual Jewish Funders Network international conference. (People loved RUACH, by the way, but that’s for another note!) Over 700 funders and foundation professionals from the United States, Israel, and beyond gathered at the JW Marriott to ask: What do the Jewish people need today? Within this question was another question, sometimes spoken, always sensed, in panel after panel: With antisemitism rising in an uncertain world, what will it take to feel free?

Many plans were discussed. Many of them offered hope. The conversation that made the deepest impression for me was about shared society for Jewish and Arab Israelis. As part of the gathering, in the style of a popular Israeli gameshow, funders were invited to submit anonymous heartfelt questions, with particular encouragement to be “blunt,” from which the panelists selected the handful of questions that interested them the most. One question was: “Is it possible to acknowledge the Nakba [the 1948 mass displacement of Palestinians in creating the state of Israel] AND fight antisemitism?”

The air in the room was charged with anticipation for the response. The panelists included an Orthodox Israeli woman from a kibbutz next to Gaza and a Palestinian citizen of Israel. After they gave their answers (different versions of a resounding “yes”), the room broke into applause. And, I kid you not: lightning flashed, thunder boomed, and the skies opened with rain.

After the poetic coincidence, when the sky was blue again, I found myself connecting outside with the Palestinian man, Rasool, an attorney with attentive eyes and an easy smile. We talked about Palestinian dignity, a two-state solution, shared indigeneity in the Holy Land, his respect for the Jewish people, the dangers of Hamas’s kind of fundamentalism, and the possibility of Palestinians being our greatest allies in fighting antisemitism, if we Jews, in return, can see our right to self-determination reflected in their eyes. Talking to Rasool, this kind of vision came easily. It was like talking to a cousin. When we touched on shared Hebrew-Arabic etymologies, it hit me with fresh force that as descendants of Abraham, cousins is exactly who we are.

With this new moon of Nisan, we mark the beginning of spring. For the full moon, we’ll celebrate Passover, our people’s fresh-life festival of freedom. This year, I can’t stop thinking about the “mixed multitude” the Torah says left Egypt: specifically, about the non-Jews who walked with the Israelites across the parted sea.

When I asked another non-Jewish ally, RUACH’s Director of Operations, Dream, recently, about what freedom means now, they smiled, groaned, and said “Oh my God…” (I can imagine Rasool responding similarly.) Then they offered two possibilities:

• Acknowledging that we are living under a rising tide of authoritarianism: frankly naming the reality we hold in our nervous systems as much as our minds.

• Framing this moment in the context of a global paradigm shift — the gruesome birth pains of a new world order, rooted in local community.

  
  

Today, 18 months after the horrific attacks of October 7, bombs are still dropping on Gaza — the families of the hostages are still begging for diplomatic solutions as the only viable way to bring their loved ones home alive — Hamas is still in power — millions of innocent Palestinians are still crying out for a state of their own, as promised to them by the international community — even as illegal Israeli settlements expand in the West Bank — even as a fundamentalist-driven Israeli regime (patriotically opposed by millions of Israeli citizens) pushes annexation and rejects the concept of a Palestinian state, placing their nation more and more deeply under Jewish military control. These are tragic but intellectually neutral statements: there are many prominent, traditional American Jewish leaders who would (privately, at least) acknowledge this pattern of facts.

To be clear, there is no excuse for supporters of Palestine to veer into antisemitism. A solution that denies Jewish indigeneity is as ignorant and dangerous as one that denies Palestine’s right to exist.

And: with this new moon, as our festival of freedom approaches, the question of shared responsibility and shared freedom is as urgent a question as ever for Jews to wrestle with. At least, that’s what yours truly sensed in Nashville.

Perhaps with antisemitism and authoritarianism rising, the best, most effective — and most heart-centered — strategy for Jewish communities and institutions to adopt includes acknowledging the cries of our Palestinian family and their allies — along with combating misinformation about Jewish history and publicly celebrating the values of Torah. The pain of Palestinians is real. So is ours, of course. But to focus exclusively on our own pain, to ignore the reverberations of Palestinian displacement, is to foment the conditions for resentment and disempowerment to bubble into a more toxic brew.

Perhaps, with antisemitism and authoritarianism rising, the questions before us at our family tables may sadly still need to include some versions of “Why can’t some people stand us?” — and perhaps, beneath a full moon's glow, the Passover seder's curious spirit can encompass an inverse set of questions, too, like: “How have Palestinians always been like us?” “Why do some people, without converting, choose to live within our organizational structures?” Rasool and Dream come from different worlds, an ocean apart, yet both, for their own reasons, choose each day to walk with the children of Israel.

May the light of this new moon shine on their footsteps, patterned with ours in the sand. May we all be blessed to walk arm in arm toward a shared future, knowing no other kind of future exists. May the moon of Nisan bless them — bless us — bless our linked roots and horizon — with the eternal, inextinguishable light of freedom.

Hodesh tov, may this be a good month,

Yaakov

RUACH Executive Director

Let's connect! yaakovgs@ruachhealth.org