On Myth Making - 09/08/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me today for this week’s community Kaddish. It has been 337 days since the start of the genocide in Palestine. The official death count is around 42,000 people, and we know that the death toll is likely higher and that numbers will never be able to capture all of the harm, which isn't nearly a strong enough word, that Zionism has wrought on Palestine. This week has shown that yet again, the Israeli’s capacity for brutality, and the rest of the world’s capacity for ignorance knows few bounds. I have been particularly horrified by the ways that the media has largely ignored the leveling of Jenin. Despite the fact that in  just a few days, the Israeli military destroyed the majority of the streets in the city. All for what - to perpetuate a myth of Zionism’s moral defensibility. 

All the while, we have entered a part of the Jewish year that demands that each of us embark on a journey of truth and reflection. We are 5 days into Elul, the final month in the Jewish calendar and during this month, we spend every day preparing for Rosh Hashana, the new year. Unlike the secular new year which is a time of frivolity, the Jewish new year is for serious self-reflection and accounting of all of the ways that we could have been better in the past year. This season culminates with Yom Kippur, 10 days after Rosh Hashanah, where we fast and repent for 26 hours to atone for our sins. 

There is a lot to say about what sin is and who defines it, but I want to spend a moment on this month, Elu, which is seen as the on-ramp to the High Holidays that comes a series of customs to try and make us turn toward ourselves, our communities and whatever conception of God people have. We are commanded to listen to the blasts of the shofar, or the rams horn, in order to wake us up with its loud muster. We are also supposed to read Psalm 27 every single day. For someone like me, my conception of the divine is not a man sitting on a high chair, but rather the divine is what happens in the space between people in a community. It is the way that we are good to each other, and create energy together as we share prayer and action. And even despite my non-traditional approach to God, I like to use this expanse of holidays to look at myself, how I have wronged others and how I have wronged myself. 

So this year, in an effort to find meaning in the season of repentance without a synagogue and without a standing Jewish ritual community, I decided to embark on the practice of reading Psalm 27 everyday. Now this is not something I have done before, but in a year where Jewish ritual and spiritual community has felt more complex, more cursory, more fraught and also more intentional and meaningful, I wanted to see what this daily practice would mean for me.  

The Psalm is largely one that does not resonate for me, it’s general theme is that god will protect us if we turn toward them in times of war, hardship etc. Given that I do not believe in an interventionist God, alot of the language is nothing more than words I read in a perfunctory sory of way, but, it is a Psalm that actually has some important resonance to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Here are some select lines:

“God will shelter my in their pavilion on an evil day,

Grant me the protection of their tent,

Raise me high upon a rock

Now is my head high over my enemies who are roundabout;

I sacrifice in their tent with shouts of joy,

Singing and chanting a hymn to God

Do not subject me to the will of my foes

For false witnesses and unjust accusers have appeared against me

Had I not the assurance that I would enjoy the goodness of God in the land of the living”

Of course, there is a Zionist interpretation that they use to complete the myth making that they are the victims in the genocide they themselves are perpetuating. Zionists are the ones who believe that God is on their side, keeping them safe, and that their holy fight is one that will end in protection and joy. We see the absolute worst version of this in the ways that the IOF conducts itself, in the ways that they invade Palestinian homes in celebration. As evidence, I am thinking of this one video of soldiers standing in a tight circle, arms around each other, singing about how they will destroy Palestine, or them raiding womens’ dressers, putting on undergarments or destroying children’s toys. This is what happens when divine myth, backed by religious fanaticism goes unchecked, unquestioned and reified for centuries to decades to centuries.

In my own philosophy and political orientation, I am struck by the lines: “Do not subject me to the will of my foes for false witnesses and unjust accused have appeared against me.” I am thinking of all of the ways that Israel has either erased and/or dehumanized Palestinians and the ways that Palestinians have had to fight just for their own definition of humanity:

In Palestine as a Metaphor, Mahmound Darwish says this: 

There is a difference between the myth already incarnated in the consciousness of Israelis and the myth that takes form in Palestinian consciousness. With the disappearance of our country, we suddenly found ourselves rejected before Genesis, and our poets had to write our own Genesis then from the mythological Genesis of the Other. For it must be known that Palestine had already been written. The Other wrote it in his manner, through the story of a beginning that no one thinks of denying. A story of Creation becomes one of the sources of knowledge for humanity - the Bible. The problem of Palestinian poetry is that it started walking without aid, without historians, without geographers, without anthropologists. It had to equip itself with  all things necessary to defend its right to existence.

This imposes on the Palestinian the need of passing through the myth in order to attain the familiar. I am a poet and I am, above all, the poet of human, familiar, details. But I never ceased arguing with the story of Creation. This dispute compelled me to write as myth the daily reality, as well as the Palestinian present. It’s a cycle that goes from the ordinary quotidian to the mythical, and this cannot be accomplished except by returning to its origins. Even when I directly refer to the myth, my obsession is to write what is simple, familiar, commonplace. I try to humanize the Palestinian text. Myth is not always the adversary of man, not always. It is only an aspect of cultural confrontation to write of the same place. We Palestinian poets write close to the Book of Genesis, and to an accomplished myth, definitive and consecrated. 

Darwish goes on, but his point here is this: Palestinians have had to create their own reality and identify as Zionism has born false witness, and used this to subject the people and the land to the worst of humanity. They have had to fight the very kinds of myth making that Psalm 27, among many other things, perpetuates. The ethos of Zionism, and the many players who have spent or continue to spend their time perpetuating it, erase Palestine and center Jewish people and Zionists as victims.  

In this month, where we as Jews are supposed to take stock of our lives and how they impact the people around them, I find myself at odds with the fact that the tools that we possess for self-betterment have and will also be used to perpetuate genocide, apartheid and occupation. The God that I envision would want us to be truthful in our analysis of theology and fact, especially in this holy time of the year. Truth is one of the things that we most owe our communities and ourselves. 

Given this, understanding the core liturgy, how it is interpreted and how those   interpretations are used  to justify actions happening in this earthly plane of existence is vitally important. For so long, mainstream Jewish spaces, which are overwhelmingly Zionist, have found ways to make every psalm, every line of torah to build the myth of chosen-ness and of deservingness and entitlement to land that is not theirs. Even on the holiest days, the ones that demand truth, the ones where we prostrate on the floor and deny ourselves food and water, synagogues will explicitly and/or implicitly platform the myths and dehumanization that undergirds the genocide of Palestinians. 

I don’t know what the antidote is to this. I naively hope that people can wake up and change, but I know it doesn't happen all at once, and that this kind of change cannot happen fast enough. But at the very least, I pray that those of us who see through the myth demand the truth and find ways of demanding that accountability in every community and every interaction we step foot in.