Dearest Zion,
How do you bear the suffering?
Heartbreak is what I feel when I connect to you now. Our sacred home of Jewish self-determination devolves daily into increasing domination and destruction, poisoning all who live on you.
I cannot shake the ache of witnessing your soil soaked in blood, ashes, and rubble. I live with outrage of what is done in your name, in our name, in the name of our love of you.
It surprises me how intense my heartbreak is. My earliest memories of you are vague stories of my great grandfather dreaming of you from Russia. Emigrating to the United States in the late 1800s, he worked tirelessly to both support his family and raise money for a Jewish state. In 1928, he manifested his dream and arrived in Palestine, where he lived out his years, an ocean away from his family. A devout Zionist, his bones remain with you on the Mount of Olives.
Unlike my great grandfather’s deep yearning, I was raised an assimilated Jew and proud Hebrew school drop out. As a social justice activist, I carried mostly critique for the State of Israel. Our people’s millennial longing to return to you, the land, did not yet resonate with me.
I was 23 when we met and began our slow courtship. On a year-long fellowship in Israel, each morning, I entered a world I had not known, studying traditional Jewish texts in a beit midrash. In the afternoon, I volunteered at Rabbis for Human Rights, applying that morning’s learnings to the reality unfolding each day. Over time, I learned Jewish history and our people’s connection to you, from Biblical times through to the present. I discovered how this yearning to return to you has woven through our prayers across millennia and continues in our prayers to this very day.
Having grown up in a Christian-dominant culture, being in the majority was thrilling. A calendar rooted in Jewish time—centering Shabbat and our holidays—with no nonstop Christmas carols playing in stores from early November. Layers of assimilation and shame scaled off.
Simultaneously, these central questions compelled me: How will we, as Jews, wield power? How can we govern with a sensitivity to the experience of the other — forged by millennia of our own powerlessness? How do we root our actions in the Jewish value of all human beings created in the image of God?
Every week, I traveled by bus the six miles from my apartment in Jerusalem through a checkpoint to the town of Beit Sahour in the West Bank to spend time with Palestinians sharing the land. I saw the shadow side of Jewish self-determination firsthand. I learned how my people’s return to you uprooted our Palestinian neighbors, cutting them off from tending you as their ancestors had for centuries.
As my love for and commitment to you grew, I wanted Jewish statehood to be a sacred experiment, to ensure that Jews with power would not mean Jewish domination and supremacy. I took on Israeli citizenship, a privilege granted only after proving that I was Jewish, and became part of this unfolding story. I worked closely with Israeli Jewish and Palestinian women to access their power to transform the reality on the ground.
Throughout these following three decades, I have lived with ongoing awareness of how Palestinians love and yearn for you, too. For me, the exile is a story recorded in history. For Palestinians, exile is raw and ongoing. Their ripped up roots remain painfully fresh.
I have never been one to hold an either/or, their land or ours, perspective. My love for you is steeped in a similar commitment to both/and (eilu v’eilu, as our Sages taught). A return of my people to you with justice and freedom for Palestinians in our shared sacred homeland.
I believe in the Jewish people’s need for self-determination and safety. Simultaneously, our concerns for safety do not and cannot erase Palestinians’ need and right for freedom and justice. They are two sides of the same coin: No Jewish safety without Palestinian liberation. No Palestinian liberation without Jewish safety.
Over these past decades since we first met, I have watched in horror and despair as the concept of both/and has been eroded, denied, violated, and all but destroyed. As much as I do not want to face it, decades spent abandoning an active peace process means that the reality of a Jewish and fully democratic state, with equal rights for all its inhabitants, does not exist. Not for the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian (Bedouins, Christians, Druze, Muslims) living with historic inequity and even less so for the Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
The increasing expansion of settlements throughout the West Bank and the horrific rise in settler violence alongside the indescribable devastation in Gaza erode the very soul of Jewish values.
Understandably, our story centers our Jewish pain. Yet, from the creation of the state, Palestinians have suffered from the expansion of territory and ensuing displacement and oppression.
Our shared future requires our recognizing Palestinian pain as well. Many of us — both Israeli and Diaspora Jews — have struggled to acknowledge the Nakba (the “catastrophe”), and no peace process has ever named it. Now, there is another Nakba, as Palestinians refer to the current devastation in Gaza and the West Bank.
The horrific trauma of October 7th will be forever etched into our collective Jewish memory. Simultaneously, the extremeness of our military response has laid bare how the Judaism I love has been hijacked.
As a people, we have a history of worshipping idols in moments of fear and crisis. I fear we are turning the State into our modern day golden calf, worshipping it and sowing seeds of our very destruction. We struggle to talk honestly about where we are missing the mark and instead defend and demonize those who challenge injustices when they arise.
Many are standing up against ways that you, the land, and our love, have been manipulated, distorted, even corroded. Countless citizens have poured into the streets to preserve Israeli democracy from continued authoritarian takeover and demand a prioritization of the sanctity of life over the privileging of destruction and annexation. Others stand guard with Palestinian shepherds against settler violence. Jews and Palestinians, in the land and across the world, work together to challenge the evil that has taken root. Religious Jews in both Israel and the diaspora are adding their voices, challenging this hijacking of Jewish values.
More is needed. We must fully face how unchecked Jewish settler violence alongside a government policy of expansion and destruction in Gaza eats at the soul of Judaism. We must turn toward—not away from—the pain and suffering that we not only have experienced but are causing.
To recover a Judaism steeped in holiness, we must recognize the fundamental humanity of the Palestinian people and their right to live in freedom and justice on this land we all hold holy. Relating to another as b’tzelem elokim (in the image of God) is central to our tradition — applying to all people, including Palestinians. Jewish lives are precious; so too are Palestinian lives. Privileging Jewish lives at the expense of Palestinians lives is a killing weed that chokes what is beautiful and sacred in Judaism.
It is time to return to a sacred relationship with God and the land, one no longer soaked in continued bloodshed, destruction, denial and demonization.
For the love of you, Zion, we must heed this urgent call.
With unending love,
Karen