By Rabbi Philip Graubart
LA JOLLA, California — Reflecting on October 7 for the New York Times, Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan commented, “We used to be Israelis. Now we are Jewish.”
Interesting dichotomy. By “Israelis,” she meant a sovereign people among other sovereign peoples, normal, not only in her national aspirations but in her politics, her economic incentives, her dreams, her relationships. Human, no more, no less.
But “Jewish,” that’s something different altogether, heavier, thicker. Steeped in narrative, memory, and myth. Israelis have a vibrant, pluralistic culture and a history that goes back at least seventy-five years. But Jews have memories and stories. And now we have more.
When I watched the unwatchable news on October 7, and then later doom scrolled through November and December and into 2024, inhaling episodes of rape and slaughter and captivity, but also excruciatingly moving scenes of incomplete family reunions, of young soldiers breaking down at funerals, and, of course, of women and children blown to bits in Gaza City and Khan Younis, a whispered prayer sometimes escaped my lips, “God, we don’t need any more stories.”
I was recalling my 30 years as a pulpit rabbi when Jewish stories were the fodder for my twice weekly sermons. Without them, I had no career. I’m referring to Bible tales, but also stories from the Talmud and the Midrash and the Maccabees, and Modern Israel, sacred accounts of martyrdom and heroism and the bottomless narratives from the Holocaust. I told these stories – twisted them into homilies – not because they were true (some, I imagine, were, some certainly were not), but because they evoked emotion, identity and memory. Sometimes they made people cry out loud or guffaw or storm out of the room, or just pay attention. They worked, when they did, because they were authentic memories. True or false, they’d made it into the brains and hearts of Jews.
In preaching those sermons, I was of course aware of the distinction between memory, which I exploited, and history, which I ignored. Micah Goodman, the Israeli philosopher, in his latest book The Last Words of Moses, writes “Memory is what happened to us. History is what happened to them.” In other words, memory is the series of connected, internally coherent mythic stories which creates and cements a thick tribal identity. History is just a bunch of events. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi devotes his entire classic work Zachor: Jewish History and Memory to this distinction. He notes that while the Hebrew Bible commands us to remember, “historiography, an actual recording of historical events, is by no means the principal medium through which the collective memory of the Jewish people has been addressed or aroused.” Until the 19th century, he writes, Jews “aroused” memory by telling stories. And though these stories might be remembered, “what is remembered is not always what is recorded.”
Both Goodman and Yerushalmi suggest a thorny paradox of Zionism. Theodore Herzl invented the enterprise to normalize the Jewish people, that is to yank Jews out of memory and story and into the ordinary world of history and politics. For Herzl, the fact that Jews had no country of their own rendered them mythic, fearsome creatures, “strangers” and even “zombies” in their host countries. His goal was to eliminate antisemitism – itself a mythic narrative, with its own set of memories and stories independent of actual historical events – by moving from memory to history.
But Zionism, with its goal of returning an ancient people to its ancient land, evokes nothing but stories and memories. You can’t remove the stories from the Jewish condition, while simultaneously planting the people in the land of their deepest dreams and most formative ancient narratives. Even today, mythical memories hover over even the most quotidian Israeli activities – draining swamps, planting trees, forming committees. Even the militantly secular Zionists yearned for the triumphs of Joshua, the daring of the Maccabees.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians developed their own myths, memories and stories. They began to characterize themselves as descendants of the ancient Canaanites, the first victims of Israelite aggression. Palestinian terror attacks often erupt along with shouts of “jihad” and “Allah Akbar,” invoking Islam and the Koran – Muslim’s ancient stories. Both the Hamas and the PLO’s original charters quote ancient antisemitic calumnies, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery that somehow migrated to the Middle East. Epic, sometimes religious national memories transformed a contemporary battle over land and resources into a mythic war, a battle of good and evil. Even the house keys that many Palestinian families who fled Israel in 1948 have held on to have become ritual objects, evoking memory more than history.
So, the encounter between Jews and Palestinian Arabs has become something more emotional and therefore much more explosive than two peoples vying for the same land. When Jews see Palestinians, and the encounter becomes hostile, they might very well see Amalek, the Israelite’s cruel biblical enemy, whom the Torah commands Israel to “wipe out.” Many Israeli politicians and army commanders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, have, in fact, mentioned Amalek in describing the current war. If not Amalek, then other Canaanite nations, or even Nazis. And when Palestinian see Jews, they often see the mythic Jew of their charters, the malignant demons intent on dominating the world.
No one, I think, could deny that this mythification of the conflict has escalated it almost beyond solving. In fact I would argue that antisemitism, with all its myths and memories and stories so harmful to Jews, has also greatly damaged Palestinians. By absorbing Christian, Western antisemitic myths like the Protocols into their national memory, many Palestinians now understand Jews as demonic adversaries, and act therefore with a suicidal ferocity. And Israel, already acutely sensitive to millennia of antisemitism, responds as if it’s fighting its own ancient biblical battles. And because Israel has the better military, the Palestinians lose the most. Ironically, they become victims of antisemitism. The tendency of many Westerners to characterize Jews as colonialists or, during Christmas, as the new incarnation of the ancient Romans, only reinforces this mythic thinking and therefore the deadly antagonism and mortal fears of both Palestinians and Jews.
That’s why I pleaded with God, “enough with the stories.” Everyone involved would be better off if we left the land of myth and stuck to history – the dispassionate understanding of historical events. Maybe then the rest of the world, not to mention the antagonists themselves, would start to see the conflict more like the wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or the Kurds and Turks, or even the Syrian civil war, “normal” battles over territory and resources, bloody enough for sure, but they don’t end up as fearful, destructive struggles on college campuses or trigger routine accusations of genocide. Maybe, separated from the land of myth, Jews and Palestinians could actually solve their hundred-year battle. Especially since both locals and outsiders have suggested reasonable divisions of land and resources for the length of the conflict. These real-world proposals always crack-up when exposed to the old stories. What if we all agreed to stick to history, and neglect memory?
But I’m writing this essay from sunny, safe La Jolla, California, not from the former Arab house, now a Jerusalem apartment, where I lived many years ago. My daily view now includes palm trees, surfers, pickle ball courts, seals and cyclists, not ancient stones, or biblical hills, or desert landscapes, sites of ancient cruelty or baffling miracles. I jog around my pristine middle-class neighborhood, not, as I used to, through the Monastery of the Cross, in sight of the Hill of Evil Council. How can anyone situated among the ancient stories of their people permanently leave the land of myth, especially when violence reenergizes the power of these sacred narratives every day? After all, as Yerushalmi points out, the preference for memory over history is “not limited to Jews alone.” The Kurds and Armenians and Azerbaijanis and Turks have their own stories which undoubtedly fuel their conflicts. This is a human trait. Memory and stories inspire most human collectives, for better, and certainly also for worse.
But maybe we can change the stories, or find healthier, more moral ones in our own traditions. I wouldn’t presume to sift through Palestinian myths, but Micah Goodman points to the urgent need for Jews to comb through Deuteronomy for narratives more humane than the vicious commandments to wipe out Amalek and destroy Canaanite cities. As a suggestion, he cites the many times Deuteronomy commands us to love the stranger, insisting we remember the pain of being an outsider and the tortuous burdens of slavery, and therefore love the stranger and free the slave. That’s the ancient story we should remember.
I would suggest one other. In Genesis, Jacob manipulates his twin brother Esau out of his inheritance and his birthright. Esau threatens violent revenge, so Jacob flees. Twenty years later they meet on the road to Shechem. According to the text, they “kiss and cry.” It’s a joyous, poignant reunion. But there’s a strand of ancient Jewish commentary that undermines the plain meaning of the story. In the Masoretic text there are a series of small dots above the word “kissed.” What do they mean? One rabbi suggests they indicate that Esau “didn’t kiss with his full heart.” Another proposes that the dots resemble teeth marks, that, instead of kissing his brother, Esau, vampire-like, bit Jacob on the neck. Another comments, “It’s a known law that Esau hates Jacob.” Based on these statements, a tradition emerges that identifies Esau with Amalek and then Rome and then all of Israel’s eternal enemies. Esau hates Jacob. But oddly Rashi, the tenth century scholar who becomes perhaps the most influential traditional Torah exegete prefers to retain the plain meaning. “At that moment” he writes, quoting a different Talmudic commentary, “Esau was filled with compassion and kissed with a full heart.”
If we’re going to live in the story and its ancient interpretations, why not choose Rashi’s, the one where, at least for a moment, you can authentically embrace your adversary who is also your brother. And then, as the text goes on to tell us, separate into our own sovereign lands, Jacob heading toward Succot, Esau to Seir.
That is a potential Jewish narrative. It’s decidedly not my place to propose a Palestinian story. Neither side has much influence over what ancient memories the other chooses to privilege. But this story, for my own people, substitutes brother for vampire and genuine compassion for cruelty. Maybe, in the long run, it can take us to a better place.
Meanwhile, a close friend, someone I grew up with, a woman with two children now fighting in Gaza has just posted a blog on Substack. One of her sons has already been injured, but he’s back in the rubble of Gaza. It’s a long post, and I can tell from the first sentence that it’s bad news, possibly tragic. Ah, I tell myself, settling down to read. Dear God. More stories.
*
Rabbi Philip Graubart is spiritual leader emeritus of Congregation Beth El of La Jolla.