The following is a summary of personal impressions followed by a few critical comments of my own a week after the second conference of Smol Emuni held two Sundays ago at Congregation Bnei Jeshurun in Manhattan. , My own thoughts about Judaism as an elementary and protean form of power were only sharpened at the conference. About this more below, but in relation to the poison-politics of Isael and Palestine, I would see religion as a dyadic power –a profound source of moral and political culture, and a negative force and source of violence deeply structured into the life of a people.
Smol Emuni (Faithful Left) is the American sister branch of Ha’Smol Ha’Emuni in Israel. Smol Emuni is a Jewish religious left movement organizing opposition to the right and the religious right and in support of peace and justice in Israel and Palestine. Open to a diverse array of voices, Smol Emuni in the United Stats is dominated by voices on the progressive Zionist left. At least that was my impression at the conference, understanding that others might not have seen it that way. All of the plenary speakers, including Palestinian Americans, whose opposition to Zionism runs deep in their bones, avowed deep and open connection to the place and to all the people who live there, not disengagement.
The conference met two+ years after October 7 and the destruction of Gaza, a year into Trump’s second term of office, in the midst of an uptick of Jewish settler terrorism in the occupied West Bank, a day or so after the outbreak of war against Iran. In his words of welcome to the conference, Rabbi Roli Matalon of Congregation Bnei Jeshurun identified as chaos the overwhelming reality of our current moral and political moment. In her opening remarks, Rachel Landsberg (co-founder of Smol Emuni USA and its program director) defined the moment in terms of fear and uncertainty. In the face of radical chaos, fear, and uncertainty, Smol Emuni understands that the future of Israel and Palestine is bound up together with each other and with Judaism. Against the grain, the work of Smol Emuni was described by Landsberg in terms of human connection and critical reflection, and openness to new perspectives.
The central point made by professor of Jewish history David Myers who opened the morning plenary was to locate the critical work of Smol Emuni in relation to power and sovereign power. At the crux of the chaos today, not just in Israel but across the globe, power was described as a source of evil. Per Myers, the starting point for any discussion of Israel and Zionism today, the problem of state-sovereign power is basic to the work of the Jewish left. But what about religion? I cannot recall if Myers mentioned Judaism in this or any critical context. Also at the morning plenary, it was Greg Khalil (the president and co-founder of the Telos Group, a Washington-based peacemaking nonprofit that specializes in engaging with communities of faith) who described Zionism as a religion, i.e. bound up with ritual, community and identity, and perceived as being beyond critique.
I think it was journalist Amira Hass at the morning plenary who used the word “mutation” to describe Israel today. To my ear, her choice of the word echoes acid remarks made awhile back online by philosopher Asa Kasher to describe the radicalized and alien form of Judaism that today is consuming Israeli political life. As a historian, Myers wasasked when he thought this mutation of politics and Jewish religion first began to take shape. Various answers were suggested –1967, 1948, the Holocaust, or, per Dr. Eman Ansari at the afternoon plenary, at the very origin of the Zionist movement at the turn of the last century.
Unable to make it out of the country with the outbreak of the war with Iran, Mikhael Manekin, founder of Ha’Smol Ha’emuni in Israel, spoke on Zoom from Jerusalem. Manekin also addressed power, namely the enormity of history, and high-level scales of complexity and calculations which ordinary citizens are powerless to control. In the face of that, Manekin evoked the importance of grassroots work with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in terms of small scale “moments and movements.” Not without critical pushback from his fellow panelists, Manekin described the problem of Israel and Zionism and state violence and settler colonialism in the West Bank as a “theological problem.”
Breakout sessions after the morning plenary varied. There was panels on Immigration & ICE, the One Homeland-Two States confederation idea, a theology of strangers, Israel education curricula in Jewish schools, history and contemporary trends in Haredi communities relating to Zionism and nationalism, a screening of the film Children No More, and an experiential session based on teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
At the afternoon plenary, moderator Rivka Press Schwarts returned to the work to be done, as did Acting Chief Executive officer of the New Israel Fund Mickey Gitzin. Dr. Ansari described her own experience as a Palestinian woman growing up in Saudi Arabia and overcoming culturally imbedded assumptions and her own forging bonds of human connections with Jews in the face of the profound hurt and injustice that Zionism manifests at the heart of Palestinian life. Esther Sperber (Executive Director of Smol Emuni) concluded the conference with words about a Torah of justice, truth, and peace, about clarity, the imperative not to be silent, and the urgent need to amplify voices in Jewish tradition that seek repair and forgiveness, acknowledgment of harm done to others, and the need to start with uncertainty and honesty.
What I took from the conference about Judaism in Israel and the religious left:
About Judaism and religion, I would want to say that the spirit of the conference lacked a direct and critical sharpness. If anything, Rabbi of Bnei Jeshurun Roli Matalon’s brief words of welcome reflected the inverse of what needs to be said much more honesty on the Jewish left and on the Jewish religious left. For Matalon, malevolent political actors leading the State of Israel today are “using” Judaism to promote a rightwing political agenda. I would argue that this line of critique signals a basic confusion. It is easy for liberals and progressives to set themselves against Religious Zionism and state sponsored religious-settler terrorism. But American Jews have a hard time getting their mind around the deeper problem and painful reckoning. In Israel, the primary agent of chaos today is “Judaism,” not Zionism.
The desire at Smol Emuni to cultivate from the ground up a Judaism of morality and justice obscures the “root” of religion in power. Missing from the analysis at Smol Emuni and across the Jewish religious left is that Torah constitutes a complex source of power. As a protean force, Judaism lies at the heart of the abuse of power, an animating source of religious fascism in Israel. About protean power, the rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud understood things very well. Without fear of heaven, religion is toxic. The Bavli understands that Torah itself is a dyadic force, either a drug of life (sam ḥayyim) or a drug of death (sam mitah) that Moses put (sam) before the children of Israel (Yoma 72b).
I am old enough to remember when Israel was secular. On the whole, Israelis used to say they were Israeli first, and then Jewish. It seems to me that the mutation of Judaism currently transforming Israel and Israeli politics began during Oslo and in the wake of the Second Intifada. Two years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by religious Zionism, it was 1997 when Netanyahu whispered with calculated wickedness in the ears of an aged Kabbalist that the left forgot what it is to be Jewish. It was around this time that the poison of Jewish ethno-religion begin to mark hegemonic power in Israeli political life. Once upon a time, the storied Jewish parties in Israel were organized under ideological rubrics marked by names like Mapai, Mapam, Alignment, Herut, Likud, Mizrachi, the National Religious Party. In the wake of the Second Intifada, new parties with weird names began to mushroom on the political scene — Israel Our Home Party, The Jewish Home Party, Blue and White, and, finally at the very bottom of the fetid barrel, Jewish Power. These were the political parties that were buoyed by and that carried the transformation in the discourse towards more Judaism in public and political life. Religious Zionism is the spearhead of extremism in Israeli society, including in the army. Religious Zionism is the sector most invested in annexing the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Religious Zionism was behind the judicial putsch. Abandoning the hostages to their fate, Religious Zionism extended the war in Gaza at the expense of Palestinian life. Backed up by the state, Jewish terrorism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is dati. Today, it is religion that poisons secular Zionism and Israeli democracy, not vice-versa.
Echoing the realization from many years ago by religious gadfly Yeshayahu Leibowitz is to consider the distinction between religion and politics. On the one hand, Smol Emuni registers in the mirror of the rightwing Religious Zionism it opposes. This goes to show that infusing politics and the public sphere with religious meaning and purpose is dangerous at worst and naïve at best. Against the combination of religion and state is to see that the political is not the reshut of absolute value and that the power of religion is not itself political in any self-obvious direction. Instead, religion provides a critical vantage position from which to reflect on society and to contribute to its wellbeing from off to the side without, on the other hand, seeking to dominate it.
Smol Emuni is a home for the lonely person of faith, a home for the Jewish left. The great value of Smol Emuni, in cooperation with partners in Israel and Palestine, lies in changing points of view among American Jews about Zionism and Judaism and Israel on an alternative alignment of spiritual and human values.
You can confirm or disconfirm my impressions of the event at this livestream and read about the conference at Ha’aretz.
