Doubling Down on Who We Are

I knew Brad Lander when we were teenagers.

Not well. We weren’t close friends. But we moved in the same circles, NFTY conventions, the Reform Jewish youth movement that shaped so many of us who grew up in the Midwest. He was from St. Louis. I was from Omaha. Graduated our high schools the same year. We sang the same songs. Ani v’ata n’shaneh et ha-olam. “You and I will change the world!” We were pointed by the same tradition toward lives of meaning and repair.

This week, Lander, a Jewish politician who served as New York City Comptroller and has long been a prominent figure in progressive Democratic politics, won the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District, running on a platform of explicit opposition to Israel, endorsed by a movement whose relationship to Jewish life I can only describe as hostile.

Upon hearing the news, I found myself feeling something I didn’t expect. Not anger. Grief.

I don’t think I’m alone in that. Many of you have your own version of this person — a college friend, a cousin, someone from your own youth group — shaped by the same Jewish formation, ending up somewhere you don’t recognize.

And then there is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who also won a primary in New York this week. She is not someone I know. She is not someone wrestling with the tradition from a different angle. The day after Hamas massacred 1,200 people in Israel, she was in Times Square at a rally where participants chanted “Resistance is justified,” made throat-slitting gestures and called out the number of Israelis confirmed dead. She has defended being there. In 2020 she reposted a tweet that said simply: “Israel doesn’t exist.” When asked at a debate whether she condemned the Hamas attack, she refused to answer.

I will not pretend that what swept New York this week is a policy disagreement about the Middle East. It is not.

For comfort, I turned to our Torah portion.

This Shabbat we read Chukat-Balak, a double parasha. Chukat is full of loss — Miriam dies, Aaron dies, Moses strikes a rock in grief and pays a steep price. A community in the wilderness, mourning, uncertain. We know something about that wilderness right now.

And then Balak.

Balak, king of Moab, watches the Israelites and grows afraid — not because they’ve threatened him, but because they are powerful and he doesn’t know what to do with that. So he hires the prophet Balaam to curse Israel, to make Jewish existence itself the problem.

Balaam opens his mouth. Blessings come out. He tries again, from a different hilltop. More blessings. A third time. He cannot utter a curse.

What comes out instead is a blessing:

Mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael.

How goodly are your tents, O Jacob — your dwelling places, O Israel! (Numbers 24:5)

An enemy hired to destroy us looks at the Israelite camp and sees homes. Community. People living with and for one another. Those words, first spoken by a man paid to erase us, to deny our identity, are the words tradition has us say every morning when we walk through the doors of our synagogues. The words meant to curse become our morning prayer.

The lesson of Balak is not that enemies can’t hurt us. The parasha ends with a plague. The danger is real.

What the story says is more precise: the attempt to define the Jewish people by our enemies’ worst fears about us is doomed to fail. Not because we are perfect but because there is something in this people, covenanted to justice, to memory, to one another, that is impossible to extinguish.

And while I have confidence that we will endure, not just survive but find the way to thrive, I am deeply troubled by the path my classmate Brad Lander took. The Judaism we learned in youth group and in our synagogues taught us two things simultaneously: that we should care deeply about the suffering of others, and that we have a particular responsibility to our own people. Those values are not in tension. They belong together.

I remember the banners outside our synagogues in those days, mine in Omaha, his in St. Louis: “Let My People Go. Free Soviet Jewry.” We were taught that concern for the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinian people and unwavering commitment to Am Yisrael were not opposites.

But somewhere along the way, for too many who grew up proud and passionate Jews, Am Yisrael disappeared from the equation. That is the loss I’m grieving. Not a political disagreement but a severed inheritance.

Jewish communities across this country exist because Jews decided, generation after generation, to build something together. Tents, in the language of our Torah. Homes. Houses of worship. Schools for our children and for grown-ups as well. Places to bring our grief and our questions and our children and find that we are not alone.

That project is not contingent on who wins a primary in New York. It is not contingent on whether those who once sang with us still do. It has outlasted empires, inquisitions and movements far more powerful than this one.

The work, the ancient, urgent, irreplaceable work of Jewish community, is the answer. Not as retreat. Not as consolation. But as the most powerful response available to us.

So walk through the doors of a synagogue this Shabbat. Go with a friend or bring someone who hasn’t been in a while. Say the words of blessing with pride, with commitment, with conviction:

Mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov.

How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!

Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles.