Breaking the Doom Loop

There is a startling passage in the Akeidah, ‘the binding of Isaac’ that has provoked surprisingly little midrash, but it always unsettles me when I read it.

Here is the setting. Abraham and Isaac are walking up the mountain. I imagine the shrubs scraping their shins. Isaac is holding Abraham’s calloused left hand while hidden in the folds of his robe, Abraham clutches a sharp flint blade in his right hand. Abraham knows. He knows what the voice in his head is telling him what to do. Isaac doesn’t know. But I suspect that Isaac suspects. He looks up at his father and merely says, ‘avi?’, ‘my father?’ Abraham tenderly replies, ‘hineini b’ni’, ‘I’m here, my son’. Then the fateful question follows: ‘hinei ha’eish v’ha’eitzim, v’ayeih ha’seh ha’olah?’ –  ‘we have the wood and the fire, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’

Abraham’s answer is that God will provide. But that didn’t prevent the murderous intention in Abraham’s mind nor the trauma of Isaac being bound and hoisted upon the altar. Not only does Abraham almost kill Isaac, but he and Sarah banish Hagar and Ishmael to the desert, condemning them to likely death, in dry heat, with no water or shelter.

The question we ask ourselves is: how do you come back from that? That level of violation of trust, fear and hurt. How does a relationship heal from such brokenness? The answer is, well it depends. Sometimes the relationship is irreparably damaged, at least for the foreseeable future. And sometimes, the relationship can be restored. We learn at the end of Abraham’s story arc that our tradition lives with both possibilities.

The Torah tells us that, decades later, Isaac and Ishmael reconcile to bury their father together. That is the best-case scenario. But there are commentaries and midrashim that suggest otherwise: Isaac never speaks to Abraham again; Sarah dies on the spot from shock, or the worst-case scenario: Abraham actually runs the blade across Isaac’s neck.

In all these stories, there is a broken ending. In the crucible of relationship and power, it is hard to melt down the fissures and smoothen the cracks. Abraham and his sons lived with broken shards; and we do too.

We continue to live with the broken shards of the October 7th massacre and what it meant to Israelis, their families and their loved ones in our Diaspora.

We live with the broken shards of the destruction of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and what that means to Palestinians, their families and their loved ones in their Diaspora.

We live with the brokenness of the American Jewish community’s response in the wake of this horror, caught in a post-10/7 doom loop. We feel this in the repeated conflicts and negativity on social media, or the paralyzing headlines in the legacy media. We are pulled in by algorithms that thrive on our sense of doom and paranoia. In our country, we are suffering from a universal, bipartisan experience of the ‘outrage machine’ – I’m sure everyone in this room has experienced their own version of it.

Not only does this doom loop apply to our individual state-of-mind, but it applies to our Jewish legacy institutions too. Composed of both fallible individuals and larger-than-life political and moneyed interests, our institutions are fixated on the amygdala of Jewish life rather than on our collective prefrontal cortex: the impulse to lash out rather than the intentionality and patience to develop a proactive, positive vision for Jewish flourishing.

In our Jewish landscape, institutions, communities, families, friends, and peers have been broken apart these almost-three years by the deep moral implications of the war.

Our current condition keeps us tethered to trauma; it ensures that any emotional or moral progress  is pushed back by the latest flare-up. The specifics matter less than the patterns. A politician or activist criticizes Israel. A social media personality feeds the fire, and all the usual high-visibility Jewish institutions strike back. Blood pressures rise.

In a time where, for complicated and tragic reasons, our alliances are fragile and our democracy is under threat, this doom loop is a thief of dreams. Instead of pivoting to a positive Jewish future, loving Judaism on its own terms; and honoring the deep civic partnerships that have sustained the most successful Diaspora in our people’s history under that rarified gift of liberal democracy, we are pulled down by what Jewish Studies scholar Shaul Magid calls ‘Judeo-Pessimism.’

We need to address that brokenness head on before we can ever hope to heal it, for the sake of future generations, including our children who look to us.

First, we must name that everyone in our Jewish mishpochah has their own experience of that brokenness. Some of us fear non-Jews. Some of us fear our fellow Jews. Many, if not most of us, struggle with how to talk across the divide.

Ultimately, none of us can control what unfolds in the Middle East, but we can and must take responsibility for what unfolds here, in the United States. This is why we should talk about us. American Jewry, our big, lovable, messy, rambunctious at at times dysfunctional Jewish American mishpochah – family.

In the enduring lesson of the dysfunction of the Abrahamic family, we see our own dysfunctional family. The Torah deploys stories of families, not as shiny glosses of pious virtue, but as honest mirror-images of ourselves. The families of the Torah are raw, difficult, complicated, and often at a breaking point, just like our own real flesh-and-blood families. It is not for nothing that New York Times pundit and podcaster Ezra Klein wrote an article titled ‘Why American Jews No Longer Understand Each other.’

It is a hard truth to reckon with, but we in the American Jewish community are witnessing – and are sometimes complicit – in –  the horrors in Israel-Palestine. If you permit me, I would like to share a personal insight that I carry in my heart.

As a Dutchwoman, I grew up in a post-war and post-genocidal society. World War Two slashed the Dutch 20th century in half; there was only ‘before’ and ‘after’. I walked streets marred by mass death, even if they had been restored and beautified eighty years later. In many ways, Dutch society has healed. And in many ways it has not.

Every street in Amsterdam remembers. There are monuments everywhere. Not just the grand ones, like the Anne Frank Museum or the newish National Holocaust Museum, but the quieter ones too, the brass Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones’) encased in streets where Jewish citizens lived and were deported to their death.

I remember, as a child, to be careful around the elderly. To not ask too many questions of the past; for fear of either encountering trauma or worse, encountering Nazi complicity. I have witnessed the social and epigenetic effects of the War’s mass trauma in my own culture.

In the 1990’s, when I was a teen, I witnessed another genocide on European soil, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Rwanda genocide not long after. The ethic of ‘never again’ deeply impacted me. I knew viscerally that my own society could spiral into mass violence; I did not have the luxury of arrogance that it ‘could not happen here.’ Now I am on American land, and although it is hard to think about it, Americans know this about their own history too.

Witnessing Hamas’ war crimes unfold on Israeli soil, wounding the Gaza Envelope communities, filled so many of us with abject horror, keeping us tethered to the fate of the hostages for two long years. And it was with ever-growing and not-yet-abated horror that we see Israel’s devastation of the Gaza Strip and the impunity of violent settlers striking vulnerable West Bank Palestinian communities. Every conflict is unique and in some ontological way, incomparable; but all are united in the profound moral injury they bring to our souls. Never again means never again for anyone. 

We turn to the moral incongruence of American Jewish institutions defending the Israeli status quo. Not just once. Not just right after October 7th 2023 when Hamas’ horrors were still fresh, but almost three years later, still today.

Poll after poll show a discrepancy between what ordinary Jews, or ‘Jews in the pews,’ believe about the conflict and about the discourse driven by communal leaders, donors, and other powerful actors. The gap between many (though not exclusively) young Jews and their elders on Israel was already widening greatly before October 7th, but has been torn open more severely now.

While many Jews remain emotionally connected to Israel for compelling reasons, recent data from the Jewish Federations of North America, no less, indicate that only 37% of American Jews identified as Zionist. Only one-third of those aged 18-34 identified this way – the same proportion as identified as non-or anti-Zionist.

According to a Washington Post poll, already a year ago nearly 40% of American Jews believed Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, and fully 61% said Israel had committed war crimes.

So much of the Jewish institutional landscape is taken up with litmus and loyalty tests, with definitions on Zionism and anti-Zionism, with electoral priorities, with alignment with power and values that historically have not been our own. In my many pastoral conversations, I have held both the fears of American Jews who love Israel deeply and feel alone and isolated, as well as the fears of American Jews who criticize Israel fiercely and who likewise feel alone and isolated. Where I was hoping our leaders would display wisdom, temperance and compassion, they have only pulled our Jewish collective deeper into the doom loop.

In ten days from now, on Yom Kippur, we confess wrongdoing in the plural, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said: ‘‘few are guilty, all are responsible’. “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

If our response to 20,000 dead Palestinian children is to start any riposte with the word ‘but’, then this is a profound ‘al chet’, a shared moral failure we must confront.

When Abraham came down the mount with Isaac, they did not speak. Isaac’s beloved mother was dead; he was estranged from his inscrutable father. He had stared death in the face. Maybe Isaac wanted to be quiet for a while; or maybe he wanted to rage and protest or had a deep crisis of faith. But the Torah asks us to hold two complex truths: he was both never the same again, and he managed to find healing and reconciliation with Ishmael.

I suspect that for decades ( or centuries, perhaps), we will never be the same again. The Israeli historian Noah Yuval Harari likens the destruction of Gaza to the destruction of the Temples; an epoch-shattering event that brought immense suffering to those who underwent it … and also shifted Jewish civilization on its axis. Jews will create new liturgies and new rituals to commemorate the dead; Israeli and Palestinian alike. New martyrologies and theologies will emerge. And with that, a confrontation with the difficult fact – the awe-inducing responsibility – that in an age of Jewish power and sovereignty, Jews can be not only victims but also perpetrators.

As Dirshuni (a compilation of modern midrash written by Israeli women scholars) stated: ‘a man who would sacrifice his son to his God will end up with neither his son or his God.’

We are pointing the blade at the neck of our own children by compromising Judaism’s ethical mission and, in many instances, through closing our communal doors to those who dissent. We risk wounding all that is lofty, beautiful, and moral about our life-affirming and compassionate tradition.

Yes, despite all of this, our tradition IS lofty, life-affirming, and compassionate. It is through our reckoning, t’shuvah, that we can find healing, refu’ah.

It is through our t’shuvah that we break the doom loop. We build newer and better Jewish institutions out of the ashes of our current catastrophe – institutions, rituals, theologies that can speak to the moral needs of new generations of Jews.

And … a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite to breaking the doom loop … something I should tell myself: get off social media!

I continue to cling onto the endless horizons of hope; the wonder of the shimmering turrets of Yavneh–historically, the Jewish center of learning after the destruction of the Temple, the place where the Sages created a new Judaism – Rabinnic Judaism – that enabled the survival of the tradition in radically changed circumstances. Today, again in radically changed circumstances, a new Judaism is emerging. I see it everywhere. I see it in our congregation, where we have weathered deep and real disagreements with kindness and commitment to this shared space. I see it in Iowa City at large, where our interfaith relationships and connections to immigrants and people of all backgrounds – including local Palestinians –  are being made stronger. I see it in the dedication and wisdom of the generations who have stewarded Agudas Achim and in the creativity and daring of new generations rising through our ranks, promising a bright future.

I see it in an explosion of moral creativity: books, articles, podcasts, conferences, communities, alliances, that help explore the old questions of power and the new questions of growth. Despite the heaviness of rabbi’ing through this moment, I am not a Judeo-pessimist. We are more honest, more grounded, more real as Jews. We are being given a generational opportunity of raising up a banner of a humanitarian and compassionate Torah.

Each of us can join us in this magnificent project, in small ways and larger ways. The invitation of t’shuvah and the power of healing give us agency.

Abraham broke everything. He broke his relationship with both his sons, and arguably with his wife. But when he dies, his sons come back together to bury him, and there is a moment of healing, and the creation of something new, and we are the descendants of that moment. In our current broken collective family, it’s upon us to do the same. All we need to remember is why Abraham was called to his mission in the first place: to challenge cruel power, to do what is just and what is right, and to see transcendent unity in all. I hope you will join us.

Ken yehi ratzon, may this be God’s will.