We have to treat the local population with love and respect, justly and rightly. And what do our brothers in the land of Israel do? Just the opposite. Slaves they were in their country of exile and suddenly they find themselves in a boundless and anarchic freedom as is always the case with a slave who becomes a king and they behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty...
Ahad Ha'am (d.1927)
Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred...It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we babble and rave about being the "People of the Book" and the "light of the nations..."
Martin Buber (d. 1965)
A Jewish Home in Palestine built up on bayonets and oppression [is] not worth having, even though it succeeds, whereas the very attempt to build it up peacefully, cooperatively, with understanding, education, and good will, [is] worth a great deal even though the attempt should fail."
Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, (d.1948) first president of the Hebrew University
After the Holocaust no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.
Irving Greenberg
Since September 28, 2000, 783 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) have been killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 22 percent of the total Palestinians killed (figure at 22 July 2006); 2660 Palestinian children have been permanently disabled due to Israeli attacks.
Palestine Monitor (www.palestinemonitor.org)
There must not be one law for the Jews and another for the Arabs . . . . the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do for the Arabs.
Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, 1947
As the catastrophic, disproportionate Israeli assault on Lebanon began, one which saw it turned into a wasteland with 700,000 internal refugees and the civilian deaths tolling over one thousand, and Israeli deaths numbering thirty-seven, the words of a Jewish prophet was read aloud in Christian churches.
Amos of Tekoa (a town near Bethlehem) had made his way to the famous northern shrine of Bethel, 19 kilometers north of Jerusalem. The humble prophet, "a dresser of sycamore trees" was there to speak truth to state power legitimated by a co-opted priesthood. The year was circa 750 BCE. The king was Jeroboam ll. Amos' perennial message was simple: "Let justice roll like living water."(5:21). Do not become Pharaoh; stop being Goliath. Amos was told to leave.
Invited to preach on this text at the historic Anglican church of Holy Trinity on July 19, I reminded the congregation that once Toronto had its very own Amos in the Jewish community, Rabbi Reuben Slonim (1914-2000). The latter's stormy career among his people fully entitles him to be reckoned among the modern Jewish prophets. Further, his unflagging insistence on Judaism's universal values has, in my judgment, placed Slonim in the pantheon of the greatest Jewish witnesses of the past century. Despite his lonely exile from mainstream synagogue life, the Winnipeg-born rabbi persevered in reminding his people that the deepest ethical values of Judaism were being jeopardized and betrayed by Israel's blatant ghettoization and suffering of another Semitic people, the Palestinians.
McCaul Street Shul
Slonim arrived in Toronto from Winnipeg in 1937, a newly minted rabbi. Beginning at the McCaul Street Shul, the first Canadian to head a Canadian congregation, he spent fifty years reprising the theme of his first sermon: "I wanted a decent community organized for justice mercy and peace" he commented in his autobiography To Kill a Rabbi (ECW Press, 1987). His goal was "to be the first to lead a congregation out of the darkness of Orthodoxy into the light of Conservative Judaism." To this end Slonim spoke English, not Yiddish from the pulpit, and rejected the segregation of women in the synagogue. He believed the Bible was neither literal nor divine, but was a human document spanning centuries and that after the war Jews would have to develop compassion for Germans. "They wanted a soothing message not a challenging one," he remarked.
The post-war years at McCaul Street dramatically changed Jewish life. The knowledge of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel increased Jewish self-awareness and self-affirmation, bringing a new-found pride to the community. Slonim could not abide the cry of "Never to forgive, never to forget" which increasingly defined the Jewish community. "Never to forget yes...but never to forgive? No Jew should be capable of hewing to an eternal hardness of heart. The Jews survived because they were compassionate." The rabbi came to believe that "the Holocaust did more than annihilate six million Jews; it invaded Jewish thinking and tradition and wrought alienation from Judaism's true nature."
As the Jewish state became a reality in 1948, the Zionist Slonim, influenced by the moderate voices of Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Ahad Ha'am, insisted that Israel must develop the land for all its inhabitants. As a youngster Slonim had deeply imbibed the spiritual and cultural Zionism of his teacher Shimon Frankel ("Moreh" meaning guide or mentor.) The latter was a lover of Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha'am 1852-1927). The Russian born Hasid died brokenhearted in Tel Aviv as he watched the spiritual basis of Zionism unravel over the treatment of local Palestinians.
In letters home Ginsburg exploded the myth that the Holy Land was virtually empty. He rejected the growing insensitivity to Arabs. "I can't put up with the ideas that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of another people...what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve at the end of times power in Eretz Israel? And if this be the Messiah I do not wish to see his coming."
For Slonim the new state would rest upon the foundations of liberty, justice, and peace as envisioned by prophets like Amos and enlightened Zionists mentioned above. To his shock and near devastation, he was booed off the stage as a "Jew hater" and "Arab lover." He had perceived in his own community, "an astigmatism, a supreme egoism...this new state was their monument, their pride was in the externals, the army, consulates etc."
1967 and Jewish Empowerment
Following the merger of the McCaul and University Avenue shuls in the early 1950s, Slonim served a small conservative synagogue, Congregation Habonim. At the same time he caught the eye of John Bassett, the publisher of the Toronto Telegram who sent him to Israel to write on the new state of which he was much enamored. As the Six Day War broke out in 1967, Slonim, visiting his daughter in Israel, spent time with his daughter's friends in a bomb shelter. As the Israeli victories accumulated he shared his consistent opinion with them that Israel might win the war, but it would lose the peace if it did not show magnanimity towards the Arabs. He was accused of dreaming.
On his return to Toronto, Slonim shared these same sentiments with his congregation. It exploded in recriminations. He was branded once again as an "Arab lover and "an enemy of the Jews." He became depressed that this attitude seemed to pervade much of the entire community. He wrote: "The victory had plunged modern Jews into an orgy of chauvinism from which they have never recovered."
From Slonim's angle, the empowerment of Jews after the Six Day War, the rise of the "tough Jew" had severely compromised Jewish ethics. By opting for power too many Jews were unable to see that the price paid -- the displacement, then the cruel oppression and ghettoization of the Palestinian people-- had wreaked havoc with the deepest values of Torah. The universal lessons of the Holocaust had not been internalized to include the suffering of others.
Like the prophet Jeremiah torn apart with anguish at his people's infidelities in the 8th century BCE, Slonim became "sick at heart" over what he considered the betrayal of the Covenant. For him, Torah transcended tribe. He was chagrined that "ethnic loyalty had replaced ethical obligation." He regretted the use of the Holocaust to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. "It invaded Jewish thinking and tradition and wrought alienation from Judaism's true nature," he said.
With the growing post war affluence Slonim grew increasingly disenchanted with the loss of the inner spirit of Judaism. Religion seemingly had become an adjunct to the market, a placebo and a therapeutic substitution for the prophets' clarion call for justice. Israel without Torah was an empty shell. Jewish existence was not to preserve the state of Israel at any cost but to reduce suffering. For him Israel's power had bewitched many diaspora Jews and turned their eyes from the displacement and the continuous subjugation and humiliation of the Palestinian people. The prophets of old had called this idolatry.
In describing synagogues as "country clubs for the wealthy" Slonim was simply naming the change which secularization and consumerism had wrought in both Christian and Jewish communities. As Canadians grew wealthier the prophetic voice of both synagogue and church were muted. Torah and Gospel had been compromised. The spirit of commerce had invaded both the sanctuary and sacristy of both communities. Both had become hostage in a suburban captivity. Both had been suborned by affluence, comfort, and spiritual lethargy. Church and synagogue attendance along with sterile ritual observance had replaced the divine summons of solidarity with the oppressed.
For American Catholics it was the post-war silence over the depredations of the American empire from Vietnam to Guatemala and latterly, its complicity in the war on the Iraqi people. America had abundantly rewarded immigrant Catholics as well as Jews. The quid pro quo was silence and conformity.
Losing the Universal Spirit of Judaism
In 1983 looking back on his stormy life in Habonim, Slonim wrote in his memoir Grand to be an Orphan:
"Today we Jews are losing [the] humanism and universalism of Judaism, all for the sake of Jewish statehood. We love Israel, and so we should, but we are so blinded by that love that we are willing to pay a prohibitive price for it. We condone acts we would declare unconscionable anywhere else in the world: nuclear weapons are wrong but necessary for Israel; apartheid is wrong, but for the sake of Israel's survival we will tolerate it; human rights are critical, but not for the Palestinians; we have a right to a state but Palestinians do not. Our racism towards Arabs would be regarded as anti-Semitism if others spoke of us in the same light. In all things we need to remember that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are but instruments, not ends in themselves; that what is good for the world is good for the Jews, not what is good for the Jews is good for the world; that the ultimate goal of the Jew, if he be truly Jewish, is to serve humanity.
Leaving Habonim, Slonim founded the Association of the Living Jewish Spirit to continue to promote Judaism's ethical values, speak out against Israel's growing oppression of the Palestinians and champion the spiritual legacy of his Zionist heroes Buber, Ha'am and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding Prime Minister. The latter at the end of his life (1973) had become the most hated man in Israel for daring to say that he would return all of the Occupied Territories for peace.
Slonim assuredly had become the most despised Jew in Toronto by the mid-1980s. Hate calls and poison pen letters were his daily portion. Invitations, which logically should have come to a wise elder, were withdrawn. The pages of Jewish newspapers were closed to him. Bookstores would not carry his writings and he was regularly condemned from the pulpit. Reuben Slonim had become your classical pariah, a prophet exiled from his own community. As one senior Toronto rabbi said to me," He is our Job."
On a personal note, it was at this time I came to know Reuben, and my frequent calls blossomed into a warm friendship. What I loved about him was his equanimity and acceptance of his fate. Often we would frequent a kosher restaurant on north Bathurst Street in Toronto, and as he moved toward his 80th birthday, invariably he was greeted with friendly salutations. "Good morning, rabbi" was a frequent greeting. Reuben would chuckle at the ever so small thawing. "It must be my age," he once quipped to me. Still, twenty publishers turned down his felicitously written and important autobiography.
He Heard Deeply
Reuben Slonim paid a ferocious price for his principled defense of Judaism's universal values. Like his forebear Amos, he "felt fiercely" because in the words of the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, "He heard deeply." And what he had heard was the same voice that the biblical prophets heard --the voice of the victims. His many trips (thirty in all) to Israel had given him a privileged view of Palestinian suffering which hometown Jewish audiences never saw and refused to hear.
What would Reuben Slonim think of the recent shocking events in Lebanon and Gaza? I believe he would substantially agree with Israeli historian Tom Segev: "Many Israelis tended to look at the Qana incident primarily as a media disaster and not as something that imposed on them any ethical responsibility. Just like in Iraq, the lessons of Vietnam have been forgotten. It is hard to avoid the impression that the routine brutality of oppression in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is also reflected in the unbearable ease with which Israel has forced out of their homes hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and bombed civilians.
Haaretz August 3,2006
The good news is that moral voice is alive and well in Israel itself --in the pages of Haaretz, in B'Tselem which monitors the widely disproportionate human rights abuses, in the Rabbis for Human Rights, in the lives of thousands of brave Israeli and diaspora Jews who see the ongoing humiliation and devastation and can no longer bear it. Quite possibly the Covenant is being carried forth largely by secular Jews.
It is this flowering of the authentic Jewish spirit which Reuben Slonim would have loved. That such a rabbi existed in the heart of Canada's largest Jewish community is something to be grateful for. A modern Amos, he suffered the prophet's fate. Like Ezekiel, he had become "a watchman for the nation of Israel (3:17)." He passed on the warning and watched in horror as the shock of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe of 1948) inevitably turned to resistance. As the decades passed, words morphed into stones, stones to homemade bombs and bombs to Katyusha rockets raining deadly fire on Israel. As he wrote in 1987, "Few heard; fewer even listened."
The words of his beloved Moreh he took to his grave: "Outspokenness will bring you loneliness but don't be afraid of being lonely. Everybody is. There are no pills to cure that, no formulas to charm it away. If you retreat from it, you end in a darker hell, yourself. But if you face it, you will remember there are millions like you who want to speak out and for one reason or another, cannot and in the end you will be lonely no more."
Reuben Slonim's life was a mitzvah to the entire Canadian people. May his memory be blessed.
Ted Schmidt is the former editor of the Catholic New Times and editor of the blog Theology in the Vineyard.
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