June 11, 2021

It’s another hot summer morning in my Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill–an upscale, multicultural neighborhood and the epicenter of the city’s Jewish community. What has become old is new again. Each time there is a clash in Israel and Gaza, antisemitism becomes a news target.

Every Israeli knows that a rocket can fall any minute and they’ll have to run to the nearest shelter. Israelis deal with these threats collectively, not individually. They walk hand in hand with the fear.

I left Israel because of terrorist attacks but when my family ran to the bomb shelters this past month, I felt torn. Spring was in full bloom, but I felt neither here nor there. I knew what it was like to run to bomb shelters from thirty days of living as “refugees” on the beach during the second Israel-Lebanese war. I felt emotionally displaced. No U.S. crisis hotline could possibly understand what I was going through.

Because I have straddled two different homes for the past 15 years, trying to redefine home in a post-Tree of Life era has become especially challenging. Toward the end of the recent attacks in Israel, I noticed a sign posted by my next-door neighbor. It said, “The U.S. should stop aid to Israel now.”

I was taken aback, shocked. I had never before seen anything like this on our quiet street.

I had no choice but to speak up, and so I mustered all the courage I had and responded by saying, “You realize that the situation is complicated and there are two sides to every story.”

I wanted to tell my neighbor that as an Israeli expat and American Jew, I understand the insider mentality. I wanted to tell her of the rocket that landed in the backyard of our Arab-Christian relatives in the north of Israel and how important it was for me to say, “Stay strong. We are with you” in an act of solidarity. But I kept that part to myself.

“We don’t need to support an inhumane country. Look at what they’re doing to Gaza,” our neighbor shouted back to me.

Trying to stay composed, I said, “I just want you to know that I believe in peace and I am a proud American Israeli. Please do yourself a favor and research the facts.”

The next morning, the sign was gone. The house had gone dark and the neighbor was nowhere to be found. I don’t know if our confrontation prompted her to remove it. Quiet seems to reign again on our moss-filled streets. But something in me has profoundly shifted.

In my new memoir Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home, I write, “In the States, we don’t have the daily pressures of an ongoing war, and due to America’s vastness, we are far-flung; our distance separates us, both in space and in values. It’s easier to deal with feelings of stress, and perhaps even denial, privately. In Israel, people reflect the reality of their hardships. They are direct and to the point, and less prone to chitchat and pleasantries.”

And yet, in my own way, these geographical and cultural distinctions I know very well are working against me. On one hand, I’m an American. But on the other hand, I can’t let my fellow Americans beat up and villainize my heart’s home. And because I’m deeply aware of the fact that they are culturally removed from what’s happening in Israel, I feel an even greater need to speak up. It’s a different kind of war I’m fighting.  

On one hand, I’m an American. But on the other hand, I can’t let my fellow Americans beat up and villainize my heart’s home.

For a Jew in the United States, the outside world no longer feels safe, and like a parent protecting a child from a barrage of rockets, I have to protect and defend my country too. I know what it feels like to have your heart’s home under attack. I know what it’s like to run for dear life because you fear you might get blown-up. But does my U.S. neighbor?

The life of an expat is by nature conflicting. Israeli expats like me are not seen and there’s no room in American culture to discuss alienation and isolation. My sister-in-law in Israel summarized my expat condition well: You are an ambassador.

I am learning that the only “home” is the one inside of me. As an American Israeli, I’m realizing that the only way to resolve this inner conflict is to speak up against antisemitism in a country I thought I could reclaim as home.

Dorit Sasson is an SEO consultant and strategist and the author of the newly-released Sand and Steel: A Memoir of Longing and Finding Home and the award-winning memoir Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces.

Although published 35 years ago, “The Siege-the Saga of Israel and Zionism,” by the Irish journalist and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, is a remarkably perceptive description of Israel and the modern Jewish experience. For example, he notes, “The Jewish State, in the conduct of its own internal affairs, is intensely and jealously democratic: so democratic as to be almost unworkable.” Could there be a better description of the recent Israeli political imbroglio involving four general elections in two years?

But, O’Brien isn’t always right. He notes that with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, “the Jews of the post-Holocaust world need never again go defenceless to their deaths.” But then, quoting the writer Manès Sperber, he adds that the events of 1948 were “meant to let the whole world know that the long hunting season was over for once and for all.”

Sadly, the recent war (May 10–21, 2021) that broke out between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is an indication that the long hunting season may not be over. This war, yet another in a series, resulted from a decision by Israel in 2005 to unilaterally vacate the Strip by dismantling 21 settlements. (It is often forgotten that four settlements in the West Bank were evacuated as well.)

Why has this war been so disturbing? After all, looking at the results objectively indicates that Israel won. In spite of over 4000 deadly rockets fired by Hamas and its allies, the damage to Israeli infrastructure and the number of Israelis killed and injured were minimized because of the Iron Dome system. Moreover, Israeli counterattacks were remarkably successful at destroying Hamas infrastructure while minimizing civilian casualties. This is difficult to do because Gaza is densely populated and because Hamas operatives deliberately place their rocket sites in civilian buildings and schools in order to maximize civilian casualties. Even the head of UNRWA, Matthias Schmale, got into trouble for commenting on the precision of Israeli airstrikes. Hamas knows the public relations value of high casualty figures. Yet, if you compare the number of casualties in this latest round to those of the 2014 war, it is clear that the numbers were much lower. Any civilian casualties are unacceptable. But this is the strategy that Hamas uses and Israel can only respond after being attacked, as any other nation would.

Why, then, this feeling of unease and distress among many Jews? Because this war makes it clear that the fighting is not really just about battling Israel and resisting the occupation. It is about killing Jews. This time the sympathy for Hamas by much of the world’s media, including that of the U.S. and Canada, indicates that it is acceptable to do so. It is okay to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians but it is not okay to respond because an Israeli response results in an imbalance in casualty numbers. The violent protests against Jews in many North American and European cities tell us that only the numbers count.

Why, then, this feeling of unease and distress among many Jews? Because this war makes it clear that the fighting is not really just about battling Israel and resisting the occupation. It is about killing Jews.

Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamic organization that is hardly different from organizations such as ISIS, Hezbollah and Boko Haram, opposes most every current western societal standard, including gender balance, LGBTQ rights, religious freedom, etc. It has no interest in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Hamas states its intentions openly for anyone to see, and when it comes to Israel its intentions are the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state. The lesson for Israelis of all political persuasions is that a withdrawal from the West Bank will likely result in another Hamas-ruled territory. In a recent Sky News interview, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar, admitted that the Hamas strategy was to target Israeli population centers. When asked if Israel should exist, he replied no.

The number of the rockets and Hamas’s state of preparedness indicates that the tensions and disputes over Jerusalem were merely a pretext for launching an attack. In fact, the occupation is a pretext too. Between 1948 and 1967 there was no occupation. There was no Palestinian state, either. Gaza was administered by Egypt and the West Bank was a part of Jordan. Yet there were numerous yearly cross-border attacks on Israeli civilians, resulting in countless Israeli casualties. Even before Israel existed, during the period of Mandatory Palestine, there were pogroms that resulted in the deaths of many Jews, including the killing of 69 Jews in Hebron in 1929, triggered by a rumor that the Jews were taking over the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Sound familiar?

In fact, even before the onset of modern Zionism, Jews in Palestine led a precarious existence. As an example, in 1834 the Jews of Palestine were caught between Egyptian and Ottoman rivalries and local Arabs took it out on the Jews of Hebron and Safed. The situation in Safed was particularly appalling. Safed’s Jews, who constituted half of the town’s population, experienced a month-long orgy of looting, raping and killing by the local Arab population. Five hundred Jews were killed.

The words of Bob Dylan’s song about Israel, “Neighborhood Bully,” are especially appropriate: “The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive. He’s criticized and condemned for being alive. He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin. He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.”

Jacob Sivak is a retired scientist affiliated with the University of Waterloo. His work has been published in The Jerusalem Report, The Times of Israel, Algemeiner, The Canadian Jewish News and the Forward.

After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, many Jews felt a profound sense of shock and sorrow. Michael Stanislawski, a professor of Jewish History at Columbia, put it this way: “A Jew  had killed the prime minister of Israel! How could this have happened? How could the religious and political divides within Israel have descended to this low?” Stanislawski tried to get a better understanding of the Rabin assassination by studying previous instances of violence within the Jewish community; but there were very few cases to consider. For the first 1,750 years of exile, there were no instances of ideological violence. However, that changed in 1848 with the murder of Rabbi Abraham Kohn.

Stanislawski researched this now forgotten event, and published “A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History.” It tells the story of Rabbi Abraham Kohn, who was appointed as a rabbi in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) in 1843. Although he had been ordained by the staunchly Orthodox Rabbi Samuel Landau of Prague, Kohn was a moderate reformer. He ultimately instituted reforms that would not raise any eyebrows today, such as a German language sermon and prayer for the government, abolishing the selling of aliyot, and having a professional cantor for the services. In 1846, a new progressive temple was dedicated, which would then serve as the seat of his rabbinate. Kohn’s sermon that day, which praised Emperor Ferdinand I of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, caught the attention of the authorities, and he was elevated to become the official Chief Rabbi of Lemberg.

Kohn’s new prominence stirred the anger of Orthodox extremists, who saw him as a religious threat. Pamphlets were circulated slandering Kohn as someone who eats non-kosher food and violates Shabbat. Aside from religious conflicts, several of Kohn’s opponents had ulterior motives for opposing him. Rabbi Kohn was lobbying for an end to taxes on kosher meat and candles that the government had levied on the Jewish community. Although these taxes were discriminatory, many powerful Jewish leaders profited from these taxes; they were tax farmers who paid the government a flat fee for the right to levy these taxes on others. Kohn was a financial threat to them as well.

During Pesach in 1848, a mob descended upon the Jewish communal offices demanding that Rabbi Kohn be relieved of his post; there was so much mayhem that the leader of the mob was arrested. At that point, Rabbi Kohn’s wife Magdalena begged him to consider moving away from Lemberg. Kohn’s response was: “I am after all among Jews; what will they do to me in the end?” His naivete is understandable; at that time, Jewish ideological violence was unthinkable.

But the threats to Kohn continued to escalate. At the beginning of September, placards were placed in synagogues declaring Kohn to be a poshea Yisrael, a willful sinner, who needed to be removed from his position. Kohn responded to this intensifying campaign with a call to end violence. His final sermon was preached on the topic of “thou shalt not kill.”

On September 6 1848 Kohn was murdered. A thirty-year-old goldsmith by the name of Abraham Ber Pilpel visited the Kohns’ apartment, sneaked into the kitchen under the guise of lighting his cigar, and poured arsenic into the soup. When the soup was served to the family, Magdalena noticed something was wrong, but the rabbi dismissed the strange taste as too much pepper in the soup, and proceeded to finish his bowl. The entire family became ill right away. Magdalena, suspecting that they might have been poisoned, immediately called for a doctor. However, it was too late, and Kohn and his baby daughter Teresa died.

A subsequent investigation fingered Pilpel as the murderer, but indicated he had colluded with two prominent Orthodox leaders, Jakob Herz Bernstein and Hirsch Orenstein, who were arrested as well. Bernstein and Orenstein had been leaders in the campaign against Kohn, and were also wealthy tax farmers. Sadly the investigation went nowhere, and no one was convicted of the crime. (Even more heartbreaking is that Hirsch Orenstein would become the Chief Rabbi of Lemberg in 1878).

Stanislawski’s review of the files and newly found evidence leads him to the conclusion that Pilpel almost certainly committed the murder, and probably at the instigation of the others. For the first time in 1,800 years, a Jew had murdered another Jew for ideological reasons.  

For the first time in 1,800 years, a Jew had murdered another Jew for ideological reasons.

The rebellion of Korach in our Torah reading is a political battle, with Korach attempting to replace Moshe and Aharon as the leaders of the Jewish people. But the Talmud sees this story as relevant to everyday events, and the rebellion of Korach as simply an unhealthy dispute. The Talmud says that “anyone who perpetuates a dispute violates a prohibition, as it is stated: ‘And you should not be like Korah and his assembly.’” This, according to the 14^th-century Italian Rabbi Isaiah ben Elijah di Trani, requires us to be forbearing and understanding in personal disputes. Without a bit of forgiveness, every dispute will end up being as toxic as Korach’s.

Even more fascinating is a passage in the Mishnah which says:

“Every dispute that is for the sake of Heaven, will in the end endure; but one that is not for the sake of Heaven, will not endure. Which is the controversy that is for the sake of Heaven? Such was the controversy of Hillel and Shammai. And which is the controversy that is not for the sake of Heaven? Such was the controversy of Korah and all his congregation.”

This Mishnah is puzzling: what does it mean when it says that the dispute will endure or not endure? Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin notes that we certainly remember Korach’s dispute every year when we read this Parsha; it has endured in the memory of the Jewish people. And as far as Shammai and Hillel, no one continues to argue for Shammai’s views! So what is the Mishnah saying?

Rabbi Henkin explains that the word “endures” refers to whether the two sides will continue to talk to each other and debate the issues. When Moshe reaches out to Korach’s associates Datan and Aviram to come and speak with him, they emphatically respond, “We will not come!” When Shammai and Hillel debated, they continued to talk, and debate, and then debate again with each other; some of the debates took two and half years. All the while, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai married and socialized with each other. If you are debating for the sake of heaven, you can still love the person you disagree with. This is what the Mishnah means by saying “the dispute will endure”: both parties will still talk, instead of unfriending each other because of the disagreement.

If you are debating for the sake of heaven, you can still love the person you disagree with.

This is a profound insight, and in the growing academic discipline of Conflict Resolution, empathy for the other side is critical to creating a lasting end to conflict. And in marriage therapy, empathy is the anchor that can carry a couple through the most difficult marital conflicts. What gets lost in heated debates is our God-given ability to have compassion for each other.

The relative lack of political violence in the Jewish community during the years of exile is an anomaly. There had been many violent power struggles during the First and Second Temple periods. But it was in exile that violence became taboo because every Jew felt the sting and hurt of discrimination; that made it easy to empathize with other Jews, no matter how different they were, and ideological violence seemed impossible. But in 1848, this taboo was breached; and with the Rabin assassination, it was breached again.

But it was in exile that violence became taboo because every Jew felt the sting and hurt of discrimination; that made it easy to empathize with other Jews, no matter how different they were, and ideological violence seemed impossible.

It is painful to read the Parsha of Korach on a week when the dark clouds of violence are on the horizon once again, and several politicians in Israel now need ‘round-the-clock security due to death threats. Exile has taught us that unity is the only choice for the community; and the Talmud has taught that empathy is the only choice for the future. We must remember these lessons before it’s too late.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.