Beyond Tribalism
Yom Kippur Shacharit – 10^th Tishri 5767 – 2^nd October 2006

Did you watch a series on the television a few months ago, which recorded the experiences of a white western anthropologist engaging in what that profession calls, ‘participant observation’, among various tribal peoples in various places around the world? Unfortunately, I only caught a snippet of one programme – but what I saw has stayed with me. The anthropologist had lived with one tribe for a while, and now he was staying with a neighbouring tribe. Their way of life was almost identical – but the two tribes saw each other as radically different, and were constantly at war. I caught the bit, when members of the one tribe were explaining that the other tribe were ‘thieves’, who were forever stealing their horses.

I’m sure that the reality of antagonism between different tribes comes as no surprise to us. Sophisticated citizens that we are of a modern democracy – albeit, technically, ‘subjects’ of Her Majesty the Queen – I have an uncomfortable feeling that many of us tend to watch programmes like ‘Tribe’ through the same kind of lens we otherwise reserve for David Attenborough’s forays into the undergrowth. We have a vague feeling that we are observing creatures like ourselves – but from a great distance, both, geographical and temporal, amazingly bridged for us by the wonders of modern technology. We are fascinated by the way that they live. And if we weren’t quite as sophisticated as we are, we would probably echo the attitude of the nineteenth century anthropologist, Sir James Frazer, of The Golden Bough (first published in 1890) fame, and call them ‘primitive’.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we were to view ourselves through that lens? Around the same time that the series ‘Tribe’ was being screened, it was the World Cup. Living with a lover of the ‘beautiful game’, it was impossible to avoid football fever, and so I watched the closing stages of a few matches. Mostly the cameras followed the action around the pitch, but at different moments, viewers caught glimpses of the crowd. And what did we see? Not just the colours of the nations concerned displayed on football ‘strips’ and flags and banners, but on faces and hair. I wonder what old Frazer would have made of those stadium crowd scenes…

A few weeks ago, in early August, as war between Hizbollah and Israel raged in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon, I stood here and talked about ‘the perils of taking sides’. I’m not going to rehearse what I said on that occasion – but I do want to explore some aspects of the impulse in a slightly different way, and broaden out the terrain, as well as return to the soil of that all-too-familiar, particular conflict between Israel and Palestine.

But before I take us to the Middle East, I would like us to pause for a moment, and reflect on who we are and what we are doing here. Today, on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the Jewish year, Jews across the world have congregated together in great numbers in synagogues – and in halls, and even tents, where synagogue sanctuaries are not large enough to accommodate them all. It feels like a gathering of a great tribe. Is that what we are? Is the People Israel a tribe, once tied to a particular piece of the earth, now scattered across the globe?

Recently, the United Synagogue has set up a young section that it has called ‘Tribe’. Checking the Tribe web-site, I found the initiative described in this way: ‘Tribe is for the future of our community: our young people. It’s about touching young Jews with a vibrant, living Judaism. We work with an entire generation. Any young Jew from the moment they are born until the day they become a parent can join.’ Well, I guess, as a non-parent, young Jew-at heart fifty-one year old, I’m still eligible then. But joking apart, I am a little concerned at the thought of young Jews being encouraged to sign-up to the ‘Tribe’. I’ve no doubt that the name, with its promise of ‘belonging’, is very appealing, but I think that pressing the ‘tribal’ button is very problematic.

On the surface, of course, there is a lot of evidence that Jews are a tribe: Like any tribe past and present, we share a particular set of ancestral roots and rituals, and a common language, and see ourselves as having a distinct identity that is different and separate from other peoples. But the Jewish People is not a tribe. Although we share one sacred tongue, and basically follow the same calendar, and some key common practices, we don’t share the same interpretation of Judaism, we express ourselves in many different languages and cultural forms, depending on where we live now, and where have lived before, and, actually, we don’t even all share the same roots in the past – since throughout the millennia, the Jewish people has always encompassed both Jews by birth and Jews by choice. What binds us together is not blood, nor our particular ways, but our recognition of the fundamental unity of all Creation – expressed, for religious Jews, by the unity of the Creator. Paradoxically, what first made us distinct as a people was the awareness that all peoples are essentially the same – united by our common humanity. As we read in the Mishnah, the first rabbinic code of law, edited eighteen hundred years ago: ‘It was for the sake of peace among us that Creation began with a single human being: So that none might say to the other: My ancestor was greater than your ancestor’ (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).

This is all well and good, I hear some of you say to yourselves, but everybody knows that most Jews do see themselves as part of a tribe. If that is true, then, one might argue that it is precisely because some Jews see themselves as part of a tribe that other Jews, don’t want to have anything to do with Jews and Judaism. But, of course, it’s not as simple as this. None of it is. And now I’m going to complicate matters further by turning to the Middle East. When we read the Torah, we learn that the People Israel was originally composed of tribes: The twelve sons of Jacob, later known as Israel, became the progenitors of the twelve tribes. At Sinai, these biological descendants of their common ancestor were augmented by the erev rav, the ‘mixed multitude’ (Exodus 12:38), who fled Egypt along with b’ney Yisrael, the ‘children of Israel’. Nevertheless, the narrative tells us that the tribal organisation was maintained throughout the journey in the wilderness, and as they approached the land they were about to occupy, each of the tribes, with the exception of Levi, the tribe that was assigned responsibility for the sacrificial system of worship, was allotted a particular territory – with the descendants of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, each becoming tribes in their own right.

If we read the narrative of the occupation of the land by our tribal ancestors, around 1250 years BCE, as it is related in the Bible, from the Book of Joshua onwards, we become aware of how the story of our people became inextricably linked with a particular area of territory, that grew and shrank, at different times, according to their changing political fortunes vis a vis, both the other peoples who inhabited the land, and the successive imperial powers that conquered it from the 8^th century BCE onwards. From this perspective, it is clear that our peoplehood is, in fact, defined by the land – and this was, indeed, the point of view expressed by classical political Zionism in the late nineteenth century. But, as I said on Rosh Ha-Shanah morning, the Zionist movement was a response to the persistence of anti-Semitism in the modern world – of the failure of the process of Emancipation in Western Europe to deliver full equality for the Jewish people. Inspired by the nationalist struggles of various European peoples during the nineteenth century, Political Zionism was, by definition, a child of the Diaspora: The hope was that by returning to the land of our ancestors, Jews would solve the problem of being a victimised minority in other people’s lands, and become a sovereign nation, in charge of our own destiny.

Of course, our people does have a deep historical relationship to the land on the Eastern border of the Mediterranean. But our existence as a people has also been defined, by almost two thousand years of Diaspora experience since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70CE. And not only that, even prior to that great dispersion, from the days of Abraham and Sarah onwards we have been a people on the move, continually; for ever travelling up to the land, and going out of the land, and settling, not only in that particular piece of the earth, but in the ancient centres of Babylon and Alexandria, centuries before the Romans marched in.

While the usual name for our people, Jew, Y’hudi, connects us with Y’hudah, Judah, the nation that survived following the Assyrian conquest of the Northern kingdom of Israel in 722BCE, as I have pointed out on other occasions, the ancient name of our people, the Hebrews, Ivrim, meaning ‘those who cross over’, reminds us that while our people is connected to a particular land, we have always been a journeying people, forever crossing over borders. Interestingly, the name Ivrim – Ivri in the singular – is always used in a particular way in the Bible, where it is either the name used of us by other peoples, or used to distinguish us from other peoples. So, we find the first reference to this name in connection with Abraham, in Genesis chapter 14, verse 13, where the narrative there tells us that during a battle between the ‘four kings’ and the ‘five kings’ in Canaan at that time, one of the kings escaped, and told Avram Ha-Ivri, ‘Avram, the Hebrew’, that his nephew Lot had been captured.

Avram Ha-Ivri: Abraham the first Hebrew. Abraham: The first ancestor of the Ivrim, because, as we read in Genesis chapter 12, verse 1, he was the first one to leave his land, his kindred, his father’s house, and set out on a journey. But the name Ivri conveys even more than this propensity to cross borders. In the Haftarah set aside for reading on Yom Kippur afternoon, we hear about another famous Ivri, Jonah. As you may recall, according to the Book named after him, Jonah was a very reluctant prophet. Rather than obey God’s word and travel to Nineveh, the epicentre of evil at his time, and denounce the city, he gets on a ship at Jaffa, to flee to Tarshish. When there is a sudden terrible storm that threatens to destroy the ship, the sailors cry to their gods, and do everything they can to lighten the vessel. When that fails, they go in search of their foreign passenger, Jonah, who is fast asleep in the bowels of the ship, in the hope that his God will save them, and then decide to draw lots to find out who is responsible for the raging seas. When the lot falls to Jonah, they begin to question him closely. In response to their questions, Jonah says, Ivri Anochi; v’et Adonai Elohey hashamayim ani yarei, asher asah et-hayam, v’et hayabashah – ‘I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Eternal One the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land’ (1:9). Significantly, Jonah defines himself, not only as an Ivri, but also in relation to God. But in talking of God, Jonah does not speak of his deity; the God of his particular land. Rather, he tells the sailors that the One he ‘fears’ is the Maker of ‘the sea and the dry land’ – the Creator of everything, in other words.

And, of course, it is the Creator of everything, who, at the end of the story, much to Jonah’s chagrin, accepts the repentance of the Ninevites and forgives them. The Eternal One is not a tribal God, concerned only with Israel, any more than Israel is a tribal people. Indeed, the name Israel is just as pertinent as the name, Ivrim: Yisrael: the people who struggle with God – not the people who own God. God does not belong to us alone.

So, if the Jewish people is not a tribe what are we to make of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, between Israel and Palestine? In 2002, the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, travelled to Germany, where he delivered two speeches. Published with the titles, ‘Between Right and Right’ and ‘How to cure a fanatic’, the two overlap in places – as, when, in ‘How to cure a fanatic’, he declares (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006, pp.61-62):

Essentially the battle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is not a religious war, although the fanatics on both sides are trying very hard to turn it into one. It is essentially no more than a territorial conflict over the painful question, "Whose land?" It is a painful conflict between right and right, between two very powerful convincing claims over the same small country. Not a religious war, not a war of cultures, not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply a real estate dispute over whose house this is. And I believe that this can be resolved.

 

I think that Amos Oz is right – essentially. After all, neither Israelis nor Palestinians are homogenous. Not only the Jewish people, but the Palestinian people, too, encompasses a variety of traditions and cultural expressions. Indeed, Palestinians don’t even share the same religion. While the majority are Muslims, a significant minority are Christians. But even though the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs may ‘not’ be ‘a religious war, not a war of cultures, not a disagreement between two traditions, but simply a real estate dispute over whose house this is’, I don’t think that this makes it easier to resolve. Both sides in the conflict, in their different ways, are not only caught in a deadlock of conflicting ‘right’ claims, they are not only stymied by their own terror-filled projections about each other, they are also held captive by their own myths about themselves.

The Palestinians were not a free, self-governing people before the Israelis came along. Before the State of Israel was established in May 1948, the Palestinians lived under the British Mandate in Palestine, and, before that, until the end of the First World War, they were subject to Ottoman rule. Meanwhile, before the State of Israel was established, those Jews who had immigrated to Palestine, lived in the Yishuv, the ‘settlement’ that was Jewish life in that land – and the only thing that differentiated them from the Jews ‘settled’ in all the other lands around the world, was their determination to create a ‘Jewish state’ in Palestine. The Palestinians have been victims of colonialism for centuries. Jews have been victims of anti-Semitism for centuries. Possessing and governing their own lands cannot be a ‘cure all’ for all the various terrible pains that each people has endured. Justice demands that a sovereign State of Palestine must be established and justice demands that a sovereign State of Israel must continue to exist, but neither people can be defined, simply, by their ownership of a piece of ‘real estate’ – to use Amos Oz’s expression – or perhaps that of his American translator.

Each people is connected, not only to that particular land, but also to a wider family, a Diaspora family that lives in many lands. Although, for the Palestinians, the experience of living as refugees is much more recent – and was a direct consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel – nevertheless the events that have turned the two peoples into enemies, have also made them much more like one another: The wandering Jews have set up home again in the Middle East; the Palestinians have settled in other countries around the world. How ironic! The great contest between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is not a contest between warring tribes with their distinct and clearly defined identities. On the contrary, both peoples now bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, not simply because, like the other peoples in the region, they are the descendants of the two sons of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, but because their relationship to the one piece of land they are fighting over is equally vexed, and complicated by their particular experiences of living in other people’s lands.

So, what’s the solution? The Jewish people may not be a tribe, but because of our experience at the hands of others, we desperately need a country we can call our own. The Palestinian people may not be a tribe, but because of their experience at the hands of others, they desperately need a country they can call their own. But unless and until both peoples recognise not only the right of the other to the land, not only their common inheritance in Abraham, but their kinship with one another as colonised, persecuted peoples, who have suffered the pains of exile and become rather complex and multi-faceted as a result, the two-state solution will remain an impossible dream.

It is not enough to build walls and fix borders, as if the objective is simply to keep warring tribes apart: The State of Israel will not be secure, and a viable State of Palestine will not be established, until both peoples fully acknowledge one another. On this day of Yom Kippur, the day when Jews all over the world, not only make confession of our wrongs, but also resolve to put right what is wrong, it is right that the Israeli government make a new effort to reach a just and peaceful settlement of the conflict by offering to enter into negotiations with the Palestinian leadership. It’s not just that, as Winston Churchill famously quipped, ‘Jaw, jaw is better than war, war’; talking is the only way that the two peoples can begin to learn to connect with one another, and acknowledge each other’s pains, hopes and fears.

Most of us know this, of course, but what can we do? Well, quite a lot, actually. We can denounce the divisive beat of the tribal drum; we can refuse to give into cynicism and despair; we can add our voices to the voices of the peacemakers, among both the Israelis and the Palestinians; we can support their efforts for justice and peace; we can call on the British government to play its part; we can resolve to play our part. We can begin to hope that it is possible for each and every one of us, and for everyone, everywhere, to begin again. May this sacred day inspire us all to make a new beginning. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut