Seeing Hagar, and seeing Gaza, this Passover

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I watched a good chunk of last week’s hearings with the president of Columbia, and the heads of the Board of Trustees, and one of the people leading their antisemitism commission in front of Congress. And there was one moment in particular that stuck out to me. A congressman named Congressman Banks got a hold of some kind of pamphlet that had been put out I think by students of the School the Social Work, which referenced the term, Ashkenormativity.

Ashkenormativity, I guess, is the idea that you kind of make Ashkenazi Judaism normative, and you kind of, you know, don’t pay attention to the fact that many Jews are not Ashkenazi and not from European heritage. Whatever. So, this Congressman was very upset that the term Askanormativity had showed up in some document that was given out to Columbia students and went around and asked the people on the panel what they thought. And one of the heads of the Board of Trustees said the phrase Ashkenormativity was ‘shockingly offensive.’

Now, I don’t really see what’s shockingly offensive about a term which tries to suggest that people tend to kind of assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews. But what bothered me—and deeply, deeply depressed me—was this discourse of the use of a phrase, Askanormativity, in some pamphlet at Columbia University as being shockingly offensive when in this entire hearing—at least the long stretches that I watched—there was not a single reference to Palestinians being killed in Gaza that I heard. Not a single reference. You could watch that and literally not know that a single child in Gaza had died. Shockingly offensive? The term Askanormativity in a pamphlet is shockingly offensive? What about the fact that 26,000 children in Gaza, 2% of the children in Gaza, have either been killed or injured; that 1,000 children in Gaza have had one or both of their legs amputated; that all of the universities have been partially or entirely destroyed; that 30 of the 36 hospitals have been destroyed?

What pervaded that conversation about antisemitism was the assumption that Palestinian lives don’t matter at all, that Palestinian lives are worthless. And that’s what to me defiled the conversation. Of course, I care passionately about antisemitism. I care about antisemitism on campus. My kids will soon be Jewish students on campus. I recognize that antisemitism is rising on campus. I do not want a single Jewish student to have an experience in which they’re made to feel unwelcome, even if they have views that would be ones that I profoundly disagree with.

And yet, to me, when you have a conversation about antisemitism that treats Palestinian lives as worthless, Palestinian lives on those campuses—because there’s also no discussion that I heard whatsoever from the people of Columbia who were testifying about what’s happening to Palestinian students on campus. This is in a situation where we’ve had Palestinians killed and shot and doxxed since October 7^th. That their lives are worthless and the lives of people in Gaza are worthless. And so, I feel like listening to one member after another basically talk about how they decry antisemitism, and they hate antisemitism, and what a huge problem is, and then even finding these kinds of absurd examples of what they claim is antisemitism, to me, I felt listening to it like I was revolted.

Again, not because I don’t care deeply about antisemitism, but because I hate a discourse of antisemitism, which makes it seem like our lives matter and Palestinian lives don’t matter. That’s not the fight against antisemitism that I want to be part of.  And it’s also not a fight against antisemitism that I think will be effective because it’s essentially a discourse led by Republicans who want to enlist Jews in a project of white Christian supremacism in the United States. Which treats Palestinian lives and the other lives of other kinds of people of color as worthless and invites American Jews to see our safety as part of that effort.

And I don’t trust them for one second as having our welfare at heart. I think that they’re using American Jews as part of their project of trying to establish, or re-establish, certain kinds of hierarchies in the United States about which lives matter and which lives don’t. And they’re inviting us to be on the dominant side, on the powerful side, a Judeo-Christian nation, i.e., not a Muslim nation, right? And I think we should reject it partly out of solidarity with the people who those Republican members of Congress don’t care about, and also because I don’t think that an ethno-nationalist project is ultimately safe for us. After all, those Republican members of Congress who talked about how upset they are about the antisemitism of Columbia, they are the same people who are gonna enthusiastically vote for Donald Trump, who hangs out with white nationalists all the time.

And we’re heading into Pesach and to Passover, and listening to this discourse in which Jews matter, and in which Jewish suffering matters, and in which bigotry against Jews matters, but bigotry against Palestinians and Palestinian suffering—even the overwhelming Palestinian suffering that we’ve seen—doesn’t matter, that it’s not important, it’s not even worth mentioning, made me think about how we could possibly have our seder in this moment. I think we have to fight against a discourse that exists in the United States and a discourse that exists in very many aspects of American Jewish establishment discourse, which treats Jewish victimhood as important, Jewish suffering is important, and Palestinian suffering as irrelevant or even something that Palestinians deserve. And the Passover Seder can, of course, be read in ways that play into that discourse, that it’s just a story about our victimhood, our bondage, and our liberation at G-d’s hands.

And yet, I think there are other ways to read the seder as well, to read the Passover story, which are more important than ever this year. And one of the things that I think we might think about doing is thinking during the seder about the story of Hagar. One of the points that Shai Held makes in his wonderful new book, Judaism is About Love—and I have to say Shai, who is someone I have known for a long time, is not someone who shares my view on Israel-Palestine at all. I don’t want to suggest that he does. But the book has many, many wonderful elements in it. And one of the points that he makes in the book is about the parallelism between the way that the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt is described, the language that’s used to describe the very word for oppression, ‘vate’anneha,’ and that it’s the same word used to describe the oppression of Hagar, the slave woman in the house of our patriarch and matriarch, Abraham and Sarah.

Hagar. The word means, ‘the stranger.’ The same word that is used for the Israelites in Egypt. Hagar, described in Genesis Rabbah by Shimon Ben Yochai as Pharaoh’s daughter; Hagar, cast out by Abraham and Sarah, who wanders in the desert without water just as the Israelites wander in the desert after they flee Egypt without water. And, and it seems to me, this parallelism cannot be entirely accidental. It is there to teach us something: that all these similarities between our bondage in Egypt by Pharaoh and our traditions imagining that our matriarch and patriarch themselves had an Egyptian slave, Pharaoh’s daughter, in their house and oppressed her—the same word for oppression that is used for our oppression; that we wander in the desert without water, that she wanders in the desert without water. And that G-d hears our cries in Egypt, and then again also in the wilderness, in the desert, and in bamidbar. And G-d hears her cries when she calls out. And the angel names her son Ishmael. G-d hears him. And Hagar herself gives G-d a name, and she names G-d, the G-d of Seeing.
So, perhaps one thing we might remember this Pesach, this Passover, as we hold our seders, is that we believe in a G-d who hears all people, a G-d who sees all people, who sees the cries and the pain of all people, and we do not believe that it is only Jewish pain that it’s only Jewish suffering, that it’s only Jewish oppression, that matters. There is a voice in our tradition, a very, very powerful voice, which says that G-d hears, that G-d sees the oppression of all people. And for goodness’ sake, in this moment, nowhere more than the suffering of the people in Gaza. And so, those members of Congress, those right-wing Republican members of Congress, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering in Gaza. And those leaders at Columbia who are just prostrating themselves to say whatever these members of Congress wanted, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering of people in Gaza. But G-d, our G-d, sees, and hears, and that seems to me something for us to say this Pesach.