cynical about congregations and felt that congregational judaism was dry and bereft and and in the end i graduated and found that in fact there are many very exciting congregations and  congregations can be there are congregations doing really remarkable work and i've never worked as a rabbi doing anything else in the end growing up i'm from the west coast originally i'm from southern california i grew up in santa monica and i would say my own identification as a jew was almost from the beginning as a zionist and with with the state of israel at the center my family identified as sinus we visit i visited israel with my family when i was ten or eleven for the first time we have many family members in israel and i have many friends there when i started to rediscover my own judaism in my own way and on my own didn't particularly liberal zionism was really at the center of it it was a large part of my own excitement about about jewish life i identified zionism story it speaks very profoundly and has two to generations of jews now even secular jews i think it has religious power for secular jews i would say it certainly did for me it's a redemptive story right it's a story of a people  horribly persecuted people who have just experienced the holocaust and the this new liberation the state of israel born out of the ashes of the holocaust and it was i think the re nature of that story spoke very deeply to me i will pause and say that i use that term religious very consciously i do think that zionism has been for for decades now maybe even the better part of the century of the the civil religion of american jews i think that even for secular jews it is a it has a religious power and there are lots of examples of that in the in the early days of the reform movement for instance was anti zionist i'm sure many of you know this that the reform movement for religious reasons opposed political nations statism and in palestine  but eventually came around to accepting zionism as well and today all of the major denominations are quite zionistic and if you look at the for instance one example is if you look at the prayer book of all of the major denominations reform reconstructionis the state and the opening line is very famous in refers to israel as a latino the israel is the first flowering of our redemption and this is a religious prayer that is and all of the major american jewish denominations prayer books and so i think that speaks very powerfully to how deeply embedded zionism is in the psyche of american judaism if you go to most synagogues in the united states and you go into the sanctuaries of the synagogues  look at the eastern wall i would say still probably the majority of them you will see the iran kodesh the the arc where the safer tore the torah scroll their most sacred book is is housed on either side of the ark you'll find an american flag and an israeli flag and it's so common that i don't think we stop to think about what that really means i mean these symbols are right next to our most sacred text we pray toward it we bow and it's this direction and it is  it has a sacred power israel the israel story and zionism is very much i think deeply embedded in the civil religious identity of american jews i think that's starting to unravel a bit i'll talk a little bit about that later as well but it certainly was for me and as i got older i den a fight in particular with what i would call liberal zionism i was very very connected to the ideas of labor zionism in particular i lived in israel for two years and most of that time i was on a two different kibbutz seam and i thought very seriously about moving to israel joining a group of folks who would move to a specific kibbutz i did not do that i decided to come back to the states and become a rabbi instead that's another story you don't need to know about i was twenty twenty one years old at the time so but it was it was still even the in making that decision i knew that israel would be a very important part of my life i knew i would visit often which i did and when i say liberal zionism that means not only you know the values of kibbutz but also i identified very strongly with the peace movement with peace now with the efforts to to strengthen the peace process and to move toward a two state solution i'm still old enough to remember that once upon a time talking about a two state solution talking to arafat's and the p l o was considered you know beyond the pale in the jewish community now it is as at the center of the jewish establishment approach as the two state solution but and spoke out a great deal about the importance of supporting us low actually our older son was born in one thousand nine hundred three and the day he was born was the day that the handshake on the white house lawn took place and we decided to change his middle name th name that we were going to name him in hebrew to shiloh so it was it was for those of you that remember it was you know it was a time of great promise and optimism and i think that that promise was relatively short lived but for the majority of my robin and i was a strong advocate for the peace process in the two state solution and if we the occupation was a horrible thing what was going on  are the palestinians was a terrible thing but if we could only have the two state solution everything would be fine and at the same time i think i know now that i had these nagging doubts about all of this and i did my best i did a very good job of keeping these doubts at bay but they were i can look back and realize that they were fairly constant i had i entertain now and then these these thoughts about well what is this business of of jewish political nationalism and creating an ethnically jewish state in in this part of the world that is has traditionally been so multi ethnic and multi religious and what does this mean what is a jewish state mean a state that is so radically dependent on maintaining a demographic jewish ethnic majority of jews in order for it to be a viable jewish state and many liberal jews liberal zionists will will talk about this very openly will will talk about the importance of a two state solution not necessarily from a moral point of view that the palestinians deserve a state of their own but really from a demographic point of view you hear this our great deal that with the with the palestinian birthrate that we need a two state solution because palestinians pose a demographic quite a core demographic threat to the integrity of the jewish state if we allow this to continue without creating some kind of new political parameters and every now and then i'd sort of stop and think the palestinians are a demographic threat to the integrity of a jewish state i mean as an american i would never dare say such a thing about any ethnic group a s an american i cherish my civic american national identity and believe that all peoples share that identity but what does it mean to advocate for a kind of a nationalism that is predicated on having a racial majority within a certain within certain borders and you know i would entertain those thoughts and then to sort of retreat back you know i'm usually the way i would deal with those questions as well it's very complicated you know those words are  i think come very easily to our lives that we we deal with a very painful issues by by retreating into the the complexities of the situation but i also there were other issues as well they were connected to that the circumstances around the birth of the state of israel especially around the night early ninety's which was when the israelis knew historians works were first translated into english works like by by people like  have heard of some of these names and these were israelis story ends who had looked at recently declassified military documents and were able to i think conclusively from historical point of view point out i think what many had already suspected for a long time was that the mythic story of israel's founding that had to do with you know a land a land without a people for a people without a land in the people who did live there  in israel these are the jewish and the jewish you should have at the time wanted to stay and they were caught in the crossfire the arab governments told them to flee we learned that all of these stories were mephitic and that the truth is that they they were in many cases forcibly removed from their villages and from cities and almost all of these villages were destroyed and they were not allowed to return to the ones that weren't destroyed and this huge refugee population was was created largely because it had to happen i mean it's connected to that demographic issue right that nor to create a demographically jewish state the presence of non jews is a problem and so those reading those works had a very powerful effect on me as well but i would also retreat back to be a complicated thing you know i mean i many of us would say things like well look at the birth of the united states you know this is our nations are created it's a messy business nationalism is a messy business and that's just you know that's what's always been so i think for the the first ten fifteen years of my robin and i really dealt with israel through avoidance by and large i didn't i would talk a great deal about the importance of a two state solution and supporting the peace process even though in my gut i started to feel like there was something hollow there every time there would be a new go around by whether it was george bush bush the first or bill clinton or you know later with george bush the second all these various iterations of the peace process we would always hear that well now we have a window of opportunity we can't pass up as window of opportunity and i would be out there championing this window of opportunity by the way there is a new window of opportunity you may have heard with the rebooting of the arab league peace plan and we're hearing the same rhetoric and if that was me several years ago i would be out there talking about the importance of not passing up this window which was closing very quickly the window apparently is still closing i'll talk about that in a second as well in the meantime i did  twice to the west bank i had the opportunity to go and see for myself the occupation well into the oslo period where the west bank was divided up into three sections and i saw what was going on in the area area see the largest area in which has the largest number of jewish settlements and i saw the wall i saw the checkpoints i visited refugee camps and went to her own where i saw separate jewish and arab  sidewalks and my resistance was starting to crumble that and but it really and continuing into two thousand and six when israel started to bomb lebannon in response to the rocket fire coming in from hezbollah in south lebanon the gaza blockade was i found to be very very troubling and i actually signed a public letter condemning it which was the farther side ever gone publicly but it really wasn't until operation cast lead that i my my defenses finally just sort of broke on this issue and i i remember very vividly it was december twenty eighth two thousand and eight and i was reading the first news reports of israel's massive massive military assault into gaza and the initial ones were in gaza city by and large in the north part of the gaza strip and there were about two hundred and fifty people killed in that  first military operation and i was reading about bodies lying in the streets and police cadets at a graduation ceremony who were just wiped out and including children and i just and all of this going on in a tiny strip of land a hundred forty mile square mile patch of land with one point five million people in it who had nowhere to run which was blockaded i just finally i read this and i was just writing for about two years up until then which was largely a just a nice venue for me to write about things i like to write about a lot of them had to do with is your own palestine but others i talk about all kinds of social justice issues and back in those days i wrote about all kinds of silly stuff it was two thousand and six was well before grown ups discovered facebook so i sort of you know i would put silly little youtube videos on there if you go back and look at the early days it's very different than it is now in titled outrage in gaza no more apologies december twenty eighth two thousand and eight the news today out of israel and gaza makes me just sick to my stomach i know i can already hear the responses every nation has a responsibility to ensure the safety of its citizens if the kasam stopped israel wouldn't be forced to take military action hamas also bears responsibility for this tragic situation i could answer each and every one one of these claims in turn but i'm ready to stop this perverse game of rhetorical ping pong i don't buy the rationalizations anymore i'm so tired of the apologetics how on earth will squeezing the life out of gaza not to mention bombing the living hell out of it ensure the safety of israeli citizens we good liberal jews are ready to protest oppression and human rights abuses anywhere in the world but are all too willing to give israel a pass it's a fascinating double standard and one i understand all too well i understand it because i've been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it so no more rationalizations what israel has been doing to the people of gaza is an outrage it has brought nothing it has but neither safety nor security to the people of israel and it is right nothing but misery and tragedy upon the people  gaza there i've said it now what to do and that last question sort of misunderstood at the time i think many people thought i was asking for practical advice like you know so they would write things like oh you should write this letter you should march in this rally or you should write to this congressman there and really for me it was much it was a much deeper question than that it was an existential question really i was i was it was a time of great anguish for me and i was not really sure where i was anymore you know i i wasn't sure if i could be in the jewish community and write these things i wasn't sure if i could be a rabbi and write these things or continue to have a job even and yet i wasn't sure what was you know i still i think held on to this sort of zero sum mentality where it's either i stand with israelis or stand with palestinians and so the question is what do i do now and it was a just this moment of great vulnerability where i just wrote it and sent it and i didn't regret sending it because i think i would have regretted much more not sending it but what happened was i got a flurry of responses many many more than i'd ever gotten before and probably sense of up to two hundred comments they just kept coming and coming the day after day and many were from congregants and many were from people i will never meet and have no idea who they were but they ranged from people saying unprintable things to meant some of those i didn't actually publish but i there are many people who are excoriated me as a for saying these things and for not standing with israel and its time of need and deny understand that israel had to do this that any nation cannot stand by when its people are under attack and on the other end i had many many people including many jews saying i thank you for saying this i've never heard a rabbi say these things before and i want to thank you for saying them and and then i had a lot of people in the middle saying you know well you know this is interesting you know what do you mean by this what are the what are the implications of where you're going with this and they just kept coming and coming and eventually people started talking with one another as well as my own responses and i realized that it was something very fascinating was going on that people were were actually eager to talk about it and maybe in the relative anonymity of the internet people felt able to do it although many i knew the identities of many of the congregants who who had shared so i was emboldened by this and i think by saying these things out that helped me encourage me i think in ways that i probably wouldn't have otherwise to to write more i wrote i wrote constantly during cast lead and this this conversation carried on and what happened was in addition to carrying on these conversations is for me all those voices that i kept locked in those lock boxes you know that i i shushed over the years just came i just let them out because this wasn't really just about hamas and rocket fire this was something that stretched back much much farther back to the orange origins of zionism really and so all of the doubts that i entertained i started to entertain very publicly and i got involved has a congregation in ithaca new york and was the founder of rabbis for human rights north america one of my dearest friends he and i put a statement together that we wanted to get as many rabbis as possible to sign that was condemning operation cast lead as an outrage and demanding a cease to hostilities and diplomatic engagement and just solution to the to the conflict etc and we worked very hard to convince friends of ours colleagues of ours to sign on and little by little after we got them to sign on but before we published it we got calls back saying you can't i'm sorry but you can't use our names and they one by one they all dropped off and that in the on my blog later much later just about my disappointment that more than disappointment my my sorrow that so i know that there are many rabbis out there who feel the way we do about about this issue but just can't speak their minds because of the professional implications of speaking their minds and it was it was a very we were a lot of anguish over what to do with the statement that how pathetic is that that we can't even get a minion of rabbis ten rabbis to sign a statement that was simply calling for simple human rights at any rate this sort of opened open the door for me to to become up to to go down a new road and brian and i started an initiative called jewish fast for gaza where we ended up getting well over a thousand people to sign onto a statement where we were calling for a monthly fast in solidarity with the people of gaza calling for an end to the blockade an end to military operations and the blockade beginning of real engagement there was in the spring i with other am not celebrating your hot summer and what i wrote in the post was that israel independence day has become american civil religion the jewish communal holiday with which the community comes together  most major major jewish communities metropolitan jewish communities the major jewish communal event happens around israel it was in los angeles where i was growing up in all the major cities in new york city they had their annual solitary israel parade and i i said what does this mean that on a day for palestinians and they refer to as the naacp on the day of their collective dispossession they see jews around the country and around the world celebrating and i felt this was not a day i can celebrate as as a jew this is a day i didn't say i wouldn't recognize the day or observe the day but i felt that the day was more accurately or appropriately commemorated through study through reflection through soul searching and reaching out and so in various cities around the country that year we had rabbis who invited palestinians to meet together with jews to tell just their stories of what occurred  to them and their family in many cases their families their parents or grandparents on that day which is may fourteenth one thousand forty eight and i wrote about that on my blog and this was sort of the nature of my activism going forward and what i found over time was that i began to understand what the answer to that question of what do i do now i realize that we're right belonged as a jew was standing with palestinians and i refuse the zero sum approach of you stand with us you stand against us that as a jew who believes that his spiritual tradition demands that i stand with  oppressed that the most important thing i could do as a jew would be to stand with palestinians and i believe as i was i put it in the post that my my jewish liberation was was intrinsically bound up with palestinian liberation and i found that you can do that and i've found that you can do that and remain in the jewish community it did cause a fair amount of dust to be raised in my congregation as you might imagine and because of i think what we had had and have is very visionary leadership the the president of the congregation at the time in the board when they would get these calls from irate members saying what the hell is this rap rabbi doing you know this you know we have family in israel we have we have friends there were under attack and he standing with the enemy they didn't respond and hysterical way to these these calls but rather they said ok well we have a situation here  have a rabbi who is following his conscience which is what clergy are supposed to do we accept that there are people in the congregation that may agree with what he's doing there are people who many people who clearly don't agree with what he's doing but how do we find a way to move forward together and it's been very difficult it's been a lot of work and it never ends i'm sure that i know that there are always members of my congregation and i have lost some members but not that many i've gained members because of my activism most certainly i know there are still members who are deeply pained by what i do i never pretend to speak for my congregation when i speak about this issue in public and it's an ongoing process of really trying to find a way forward that i can be there for them as their rabbi in a pastoral sense but at the same time as a rabbi i need to follow my prophetic role as speaking my conscience and you know what is often called speaking truth to power as i understand it and i know that's upsetting and i think places of worship should should not be completely complacent i think one of the things that my criticisms of congregation the why i swore i'd never be a congregational rabbi because as i once said to a friend of mine or medical school i just don't want to help lots of comfortable middle class jews feel more comfortable and i don't think that's what our places of worship should be i think we should look out at the world and be uncomfortable about what is going on the same time congregations can and should be places of comfort and solace and i think that balance is very important and i'm finding that i'm able to be a pastor to my congregants as individuals even as i'm challenging them challenging them often  very deep ways on this and other issues in my activism i'm more than ready to step outside the jewish community and find allies anywhere we can to ultimately to to shift to shift power to make change