Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. (Books).

Out of the Ashes: The Search for Jewish Identity in the Twenty-First Century

By Marc H. Ellis, London: Pluto Books, 2002, $22.50 (cloth).

O, Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant

By Marc H. Ellis, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, $20.00 (cloth).

MARC ELLIS, the Jewish theologian, is a unique figure: He is the only theorist who has formulated a theological rationale for Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus his writings are of crucial significance for those Jewish dissidents and other sympathizers of the Palestinian anti-colonialist struggle who find that modern secularism and Enlightenment thought do not provide a sufficiently profound and personally satisfying justification for their political praxis. (Ellis deflects postmodern criticism by balancing his foundational claims with an empiricism that refers rather allusively to personal spiritual experience as the touchstone for the veracity of the Biblical revelations-constructions which are integral to Judaism.) Ellis who has been influenced by the Latin American liberation theology movement might be described as a Jewish-Palestinian-liberation theologist: he believes that Jews cannot fulfill their spiritual destiny without coming to terms with the Palestinian Other. He does not claim h owever that Israelis must accede to the Palestinians' quest for justice in order to guarantee their own security, their liberation from the threat of extinction. To the contrary, Ellis is enough of a political radical and student of realpolitik to realize that while ending the Occupation would bring peace to Israel, there is nothing to stop Israel from attaining physical security by transferring (ethnically cleansing) the Palestinians from the occupied territories or by indirectly expelling them by destroying the infrastructure of their society.

Clearly a formative influence upon Ellis's thought has been the Jewish Holocaust theologians. Although Ellis ultimately rejects most of their conclusions, he agrees with their assessment of the Holocaust as an event of profound theological significance. But Ellis has been far more positively influenced by the writings of Christian theologians who grappled with the implications of the Holocaust and audaciously accepted Christianity's historical guilt for the genocide of the Jews. For liberal Christianity, this was a defining moment that led to a new relationship with Jews, and to an affirmation of Judaism. In the forefront of this movement was Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz who wrote, "We Christians can never go back behind Auschwitz; to go beyond Auschwitz, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only together with the victims of Auschwitz." For Christians this encounter, this dialogue, is the basis for a genuine atonement that makes possible the re-affirmation of Christ ian universalism.

But just as Christians cannot go back behind Auschwitz, so Jews cannot go back behind Israel and the crimes against humanity committed by the "Jewish" state. In his essay "Beyond the Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Solidarity with the Palestinian People" (1992) Ellis re-phrases Metz, "We Jews can never go back behind empowerment; to go beyond empowerment, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only with the victims of our empowerment, the Palestinian people." To do so would enable Jews to transcend the false self they have constructed--the eternally innocent victim--and thus foster a process of healing from the wounds of the Holocaust. There can be no authentic healing that is based on the dispossession of another people.

Ironically, liberal Christians today all too often help to bolster the reactionary tendencies of American Jews who are inclined to shirk their responsibility to face the plight of the Palestinians. Christians (Ellis does not include in his discussion conservative Christian Zionist fundamentalists) have made an unspoken agreement with Jews--what Ellis calls "the ecumenical deal." On the one hand, in return for Christians' confession of guilt, they are rewarded by Jewish forgiveness and a recovery of Christianity's sense of integrity. On the other hand, they must tacitly consent to observing the Jewish taboo and exempting Israel from critical examination. Thus, Jewish-Christian dialogue is based on "eternal repentance for Christian anti-Jewishness unencumbered by any substantive criticism of Israel" ("Beyond the Jewish-Christian Dialogue," 7).

This deal relieves Christianity of its guilt and bolsters Israel's public image, but unfortunately it creates a new moral dilemma--it muffles the cries and ignores the anguish of Israel's victims. Ellis quotes the Palestinian Christian Nain Ateek, "Israel was using power in a terrible way to oppress us, and these Jewish and Christian people were celebrating this kind of Jewish power as something redemptive and from God," Ellis suggests in his book Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time ('997) that ultimately the ecumenical deal is based on the fact "that Jews without power can be demonized and romanticized by Christians but it remains almost impossible for Christians to accept that Jews, having taken power, are doing exactly to the Palestinians what was done to them by Christians" (7-8). Ellis explored these themes in depth in his work in the 1980s and 1990s.

With the publication of his book O, Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant, and his books written since then Ellis focuses more intently on the implications of the Palestinian question for the understanding of Jewish spiritual identity It is this topic that I want to examine here. Ellis has affirmed in his books more forcefully than any other contemporary writer/witness that American Jews' uncritical support of Israel is destroying the spiritual core of Judaism itself, driving a dagger through the heart of our identity as Jews. Jews' relationship to Israel has displaced their relationship with God, and the vicarious identification of most American Jews with the state of Israel has eclipsed their recognition of their identity and vocation as the people of Israel who are bound by an ancient covenant to the God of all nations. This vocation entails the obligation to criticize, with the unflinching insistence of the Biblical prophets, the community of Israel when it acts in violation of God's will --of universal norms of justice.

Ellis writes, "[T]he covenant remains today in a struggle for life in the heart of every Jew, religious and non-religious alike. It is murdered or given life as the other, the Palestinian, is banished or embraced by the Jewish community" (0, Jerusalem, 91). And on a more despairing note, which is at the same time a prophetic call to action, Ellis writes a few years later, "What the Nazis had not succeeded in accomplishing--the undermining at a very fundamental level of what it means to be Jewish--we as Jews have embarked upon. I witnessed this [in 1988] in the hospitals and in the streets [of Israel/Palestine] where Palestinians, struggling to assert their own dignity, were being systematically beaten, expelled, and murdered by those who had suffered this indignity less than fifty years earlier" (Out of the Ashes, 156).

Ellis has turned the tables on those who accuse Jewish critics of Israel of anti-Semitism. It is the actions of Israeli Jews--and the rationalizations of their American Jewish defenders--that are a manifestation of Jewish self-hatred. They constitute a suicidal abnegation of Jewish identity precisely because of the fact that with all Jews' "flaws and limitations as a people" it is not possible "to consider Judaism without justice." In his book Out of the Ashes (2002), Ellis buttresses his point, in characteristic fashion, with an image and a rhetorical question "Is it possible to be Jewish with helicopter gunships hovering at our center?" (48).

Ellis's convictions were formed during the first Palestinian intifada in 1988 when he first visited the hospitals in Jerusalem--just months after Israel had announced the policy of beatings and "breaking bones" as a response to the mostly non-violent Palestinian uprising--and "saw the Palestinian children lying in beds from which they would not soon leave, some paralyzed for life, others brain-dead, existing on antiquated life-support equipment. . ." (156). Ellis asks, "Does post-Holocaust Jewish culture deny the humanity of Palestinians and at some level seek their disappearance or elimination?" (Revolutionary Forgiveness: Essays on Judaism, Christianity and the Future of Religious Life (2000), 168.) It is revealing (at least of the attitude of Israeli Jews) that the current chief of staff of the Israeli army appointed by Sharon, recently--without provoking any clamor for his resignation--defined the Palestinians as a "cancer," and suggested "amputation" as a possible solution (Haaretz, August 31, 2002). (T his kind of terminology was frequently used by Nazis to describe Jews and other "inferior races.")

The uncritical support of American Jews for Israel is the most prominent and significant manifestation of their betrayal of their heritage, but this betrayal has left its marks across the cultural landscape of American Jewry--whose suburban affluence symbolizes its accommodation to State power (of Israel and the United States) and to the materialism of American culture. American Jews' allegiance to Israel has undermined in diverse areas their readiness to give prophetic witness, a task that Jews assumed eagerly during the nineteenth century (in Europe), and during most of the twentieth century--after many Jews had emigrated to America. As Roberta Feuerlicht wrote in The Fate of the Jews (1983), "The heritage of the Jews is not power but ethics" (56). It is morality, she argued, that binds them, not statehood. She continues: "Dispersion and exile have so scattered the Jews that the single link that binds them is the legacy of Moses and the prophets--the ethical imperative. Now that single link is in danger of being smashed in Israel" (285). Israeli social critic Boas Evron wrote in Jewish State or Israeli Nation (1995), "The unconditional, unquestioning identification with Israel, the fabrication of excuses for Israeli action so that it corresponds with lofty moral principles (even when Israeli policy is represented by ominous figures such as Ariel Sharon) has set in motion a deethicization process of the Jewish people in the Diaspora" (253). He predicts that eventually this will cause "cynicism and nihilism among the best elements of the Jewish Diaspora and a feeling that the Jews have lost any claim to a loftier morality" (253). In the place of this morality is only the idolatry of Israel, the never-ending memorialization of the Holocaust, and the vapid consumerism characteristic of Western culture in general. Ellis comments, "If it is true that a person and a community worships what is central to its life, then the ark of the covenant in synagogues should be filled with designer clothes, automobiles and cell p hones instead of the Torah" (Out of the Ashes, 97).

Ellis is disturbed that the majority of American Jews are unwilling to acknowledge under any circumstances that Palestinians are being mistreated. Censure of Israeli is proscribed under the shibboleth of Jewish unity. As Ellis commented, "We know that as Jenin was being invaded and systematically destroyed the call from the Jewish establishment was for unity. As tanks surrounded Yassir Arafat's compound in Ramallah and the ordinary citizens of that city were under almost complete closure and curfew, the call from the Jewish establishment was for increased support for Israel. Would a large scale expulsion of Palestinians draw the same reaction, satisfaction that 'terrorist nests' were finally being emptied?" (177-8)

Many Jewish dissidents have been arguing for years that Israel should end the Occupation and negotiate a settlement based on a recognition both of the rights of Palestinians and the security needs of the Israel people--in short, an exchange of "land for peace." The land that would be ceded of course is the land that belongs to the Palestinians, as it was territory seized and occupied by Israel, in violation of international law, during the 1967 War. In other words, Jewish leftists and dissidents call upon Israel to negotiate a settlement based on the numerous resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council, as well as the UN General Assembly. Despite popular misconceptions in the United States, the Oslo Accords were not based on an acceptance of the Palestinians' right to autonomy or to form their own nation--as Ellis demonstrates. The fabled "generous offer" that Barak finally made to Arafat and the Palestinians was merely the facade of autonomy, a mirage of freedom, that now no longer exists.

Ellis concluded reluctantly in his most recent book that the dissidents' ideal of the end of the Occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state is a dream that will not be realized--at least not in our lifetime. It is time to recognize that fact. After all "the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in the next fifty years would be a major reversal of the history of the last fifty years" (Out of the Ashes, 168). He comments ruefully, "Is this the fate of Jewish dissent? To want so desperately and deeply to assert justice as the center of Jewish life and. . .yet be denied because Israel as a nation-state is no different than other nations, wanting power, expanding its borders and influence, and denigrating those who stand in its way?" (168).

Of course, pace Ellis, the fact of the matter is that we do not know what the future will bring, even within the next five years--the survival of humanity itself seems to hang today by a thin thread and is thus unpredictable. But those of us who have been graced with awareness are responsible as human beings to do what we can to reverse the political and social policies that endanger our existence, the existence of the earth, regardless of the outcome--as Ellis of course would agree. And those of us Jews who cannot sanction the polities undertaken by the "Jewish state" are responsible as Jews--no matter how bleak the future prospects appear--to act to advance the cause of justice in Jerusalem, in Palestine, in Israel.

But the question remains: Is there anything that individual Jews could do that might salvage the Jewish legacy from the threat of extinction? Here Ellis is unequivocal--despite his despair over the continuing oppression of the Palestinians and the failure of Jewish dissidents to date to influence the policies of Israel, or even to influence American Jews. The "only way to fulfill the covenant" in this era of Jewish empowerment (and the abuse of that power) is to "remember the victims of Jewish power" and "to embrace the Palestinian people as intimate to the covenant itself" (0, Jerusalem, 59). Or perhaps the covenant has "already" been expanded to include the Palestinian people "without Jewish acknowledgment."

Ellis's formulation is extraordinary. It is not only that Jews have a moral responsibility to the Palestinians as victims of Jewish power--it is that Palestinians hold the key to the recovery of Jews' lost spiritual identity (although that recovery may at the same time entail an unexpected transformation). As Ellis puts it, "the enemy is seen as a bridge to a recovery of the covenant and the direction of Jewish history" (0, Jerusalem, 53). Those dissident Jews who embrace the enemy, "who carry the memory of Jewish suffering and act in solidarity with the Palestinian people may ultimately decide the future of the covenant and the Jewish people" (71-2). These dissidents may be "the key" to a future beyond atrocity even if "their witness is buried in the affluence and power of contemporary Jewry, as the diaries and pleas of Holocaust writers were buried in the rubble of ghettos across Europe" (72). Ellis's poignantly chilling analogy is intended to make the point that although the prospects now may be bleak, wha t is critical in the long run is the opportunity the dissidents have to place their "understandings and vision...before the Jewish community and the world," ("On the Future of Judaism and Jewish Life," 7.)

It should be noted that many Jewish dissidents are not concerned about the future of the covenant. Jews who have embraced the Palestinians come from a variety of backgrounds and have defined themselves in myriad ways: Many are secular, some are atheists, some are Reform Jews, a small number are Hasidic Jews, some are Buddhists, some (perhaps) are even (Jewish) Christians. Some see Judaism or even Jewishness as incidental or irrelevant to their identity or as a mere social construction, and could care less about the Jewish heritage. These identifications are secondary as Ellis sees it. What is of paramount importance is the fact that "whether overtly religious or not" they are "fulfilling the demands of the covenant" (0, Jerusalem, 169). They are embodying the most ancient Jewish tradition, "the refusal of idolatry," of the idolatry of the state, of power, of military might. "By protesting against injustice at a personal sacrifice, by witnessing in history to the possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness, by seeking community against empire, this remnant embodies the ancient prophetic and covenantal tradition without which Judaism and Jewishness is impossible" (Out of the Ashes, 169).

Ellis believes that the bulk of these Jews are primarily secular in their orientation--and although he sympathizes with secularism as a revolt against the hypocrisy of Judaism and other religions, he is critical of its attempt to impose its own parameters upon the philosophical and religious quests. Thus many Jewish dissidents and exiles become captives of a "profound and unremitting secularity" that renders them unable to "name the source from which their activity emerges, "unable to articulate the depth or destination of their journey" (Revolutionary Forgiveness: Essays on Judaism, Christianity and the Future of Religious We (2000), 271) - which requires the use of the archetypal language of religion and myth. I personally agree with Ellis here, although I wonder if he overestimates the appeal of secularism among Jewish dissidents. Be that as it may, it is undeniable tat the most intellectually formidable Jewish scholarly critics of Zionism are secular--Noam Chomsky is of course the outstanding example.

It is for this reason that Ellis's own work is singular: He interprets the religious significance of the dissidents' actions, using numinous imagery and symbolism to connect it to its spiritual roots. A poignant example of this is the visual image that Ellis tells us repeatedly comes to his mind whenever he reflects upon his life as a Jew: He sees Jews of conscience walking slowly into exile. But as these Jews--many of whom are secular-- walk into the new diaspora, they are engaging in a profoundly religious and sacred act. In his mind's eye they are literally carrying the covenant with them into exile!

The exile of these Jews who have embraced the victims of Jewish power--the Palestinians--is not of course from Jerusalem, but from their families of origin, their original community, the mainstream Jewish community which refuses and denies their witness, and derides them as self hating Jews and traitors. The estrangement of the exile is augmented by a sense of sadness: "The realization that the community itself, the Jewish people as a people in history, will not embrace the covenant as a way towards ending suffering and beginning the process of healing evokes sadness. For does not the covenant speak of a people chosen among nations, with a destiny guided by God, particular and universal in significance, one of liberation and hope?" (O, Jerusalem, 166). The exile must carry this burden of sadness-- aware that his/her own community is betraying its heritage, is turning away from God and from His covenant "in its fullness and promise" (166).

I am reminded here of the literary critic Northrup Frye who in his classic Anatomy of Criticism described the hero of the tragic genre: "The tragic hero has normally had an extraordinary, often a nearly divine, destiny almost within his grasp, and the glory of that original vision never quite fades out of tragedy....While catastrophe is a normal end of tragedy, this is balanced by an equally significant original greatness, a paradise lost" (210).

Yet despite the exile's rejection by his community and his sense of tragic pathos there is reason for hope. Ellis seems to be implying-or at least this is howl choose to interpret him or perhaps, more precisely, extrapolate from his insights-that because Jewish-Palestinian solidarity is a theological act, a metaphysical stand, it spontaneously engenders and is embedded within archetypes of repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. These archetypes are assimilated into various independent artistic projects and (to a limited degree) the corporate commercial multi-media of the everyday world-despite the pro-Israeli bias of corporate America. The archetypes will evoke symbolic resonances within the collective psyche of the Jewish people, no matter how antipathetic Jews may feel, no matter how much they prefer the security of power and affluence to that of justice. This is inevitable because these archetypes fit within the gestalt of the Jewish spiritual/religious tradition (as Ellis's work itself demonstrates) -regardless of how isolated they may appear. This tradition may be forgotten, distorted or repressed within the current historical moment of Jewish (state) triumphalism, but the tradition cannot lose its influence upon the collective unconscious of modem Jewry and it clamors for recognition "in the deepest corners of Jewish faith and affirmation" (0, Jerusalem, xiii). How could this be otherwise with a people who trace their origin and mission to an encounter with God and a vision of justice?

I have expressed a basis for hope here in psychological terms because I believe that human beings are frequently prophets, messengers, bearers of the revelations of God the Creator--and these revelations consist not only of mere verbal signs (words) but equally or more importantly of verbal and non-verbal symbols and archetypes. Thus the subliminal dynamics of the psyche may help to explain our receptivity to that which we consciously resist. Psychology aside, what I am referring to ultimately is the power of God over humanity, over American Jewry.

Curiously although Ellis repeatedly writes of the covenant, he refers explicitly to God much less frequently--as if the very naming is too impertinent, or too intimate to be used without reserve within the realm of modem public discourse. And yet Ellis's confidence that in the long run the witness of Jews of conscience will make a difference is another way of saying that if dissident Jews, however meager our numbers and current influence, act as witnesses of God's message of justice and mercy--if we keep the covenant-God will triumph, the Jewish people will return to God. The age of Auschwitz--the idolatry of power, the cycle of atrocities, the religion of modern secularism which is perpetuated, not reversed, in the empowerment of Israel--will finally come to an end, and the glory (my term, not Ellis's) of God's promise will be made manifest. Ellis possesses an adamantine religious faith that exists in tension with his pathos in the face of the ongoing tragedy of history. It is this faith I believe that is t he source of the surge of crypto-messianic metaphysical utopianism that keeps resurfacing in Ellis's writings, offsetting the steady drift of his political pessimism, or perhaps more precisely his political realism.

Ellis has not abandoned God--nor is he involved in emotional revolt against God. Unlike the Holocaust theologians whose work had a formative (but mostly negative) influence upon him, Ellis does not hold God responsible for the Holocaust, for Auschwitz. Like Buber and others he sees these atrocities as the responsibility of human beings-but, contrary to the original perspective of Orthodox Judaism, not the fault of the victims. Thus like Abraham Heschel and Buber, Ellis does not envision a God who is omnipotent and impassible-Ellis's theology is as far from Orthodox (Rabbinic) Judaism as it is from Orthodox Protestantism. But it is consonant with a Jewish tradition that goes back to the Bible, is reaffirmed in the Kabbalah, and later by theologians like Buber, Heschel and Gershom Scholem. Man is a partner with God in the process of redeeming the world from evil. As opposed to a God who is omnipotent and remote Ellis presumes a God who is affected and influenced by human beings themselves. Thus in Unholy Allia nce Ellis--borrowing an expression from a mentor, Joan Casanas-makes the radical assertion that the human project is "the task of making God exist" (148-9). It remains within our power to create the conditions not only for speaking of God once again, but of affirming, or perhaps even creating or re-creating God.

The Jewish theologians and writers who wrote about the Holocaust-like Elie Wiesel--were involved in an angry dialogue with God who they excoriated for abandoning the Jews. With many of the next generation of Jews, that dialogue lapsed or disappeared altogether. Yet Ellis wonders if "active solidarity with Palestinians" is an "unspoken reassertion" of the dialogue with God, "a pre-theological action that represents an intuitive desire to create a framework in which speech about God may become possible again" (Out of the Ashes, 30). This is why I have stated that Ellis sees the embrace of the Palestinian cause as implicitly theological: it is a dialogue with God. It is in effect a resumption of an "unspoken" dialogue with God-a non-verbal dialogue. It is the human word in the form of acts, of deeds, of symbolic interactions. Is not such an audacious human initiative bound to call forth a gracious response from God? Ellis, as we will see, evidently thinks so.

In Out of the Ashes, Ellis suggests that Jewish dissidents' solidarity with Palestinians is a "counter-testimony to Auschwitz, a counter-testimony which the Jewish world did not expect and perhaps cannot accept" (30). In one of his more messianic formulations Ellis writes: "Perhaps this testimony could initiate a restoration of the image of God so desecrated in the Holocaust" (30). This is a bold statement albeit tentatively formulated. For after all Ellis is speaking of the restoration of the image of God in man/woman- this is the reference of the Biblical phrase. And it bears noting that this image, "desecrated" in the Holocaust, has not--according to Jewish religious traditions--been recovered in history (or rarely so) in its full sublime grandeur since the biblical Fall of Adam. (In Christianity it is recovered or re-manifested only by Jesus--whose salvific acts make it possible for others to emulate his example.) Thus as Ellis interprets it, Jewish solidarity with the Palestinians constitutes at once: an unexpected departure: the human beginning of a new conversation with God; and a creative and moral act on the part of man/woman that may lead to the restoration of the image of God in humanity.

At this point in Ellis's theological poetics it becomes difficult to distinguish which salvific events are the effects of human initiatives and which are the responses of God--God and humanity are working together and the boundaries of their actions become blurred or fused. What is important however is that something new and momentous has begun--Jews have entered into exile, embraced the enemy, bonded in community with strangers. This beginning, this initiative on the part of human beings, may be a result of God's prompting within our own psyches-this coming together of "enemies" could actually be inspired, or guided, as it were, by divine providence. Maybe not--Ellis hedges. Maybe this new embrace of the covenant will be negligible in its effects, maybe it will not rupture the history of atrocity, maybe it will result only in "an unintended martyrdom, lost to the movers of history"(O, Jerusalem, 134).

Despite Ellis's doubts the dominant motif--at least in his book O, Jerusalem--is one of the divine in-breaking into history. In O, Jerusalem, Ellis develops this theme with vivid imagery and in several of his most inspiring passages even suggests--as if swept up by the momentum of his poetic and narrative imagination--that indeed this initiative on the part of human beings, this coming together of "enemies" might be a response to the commanding voice of conscience which "could be calling Jews" to a "new Sinai," to "a new holy place to-re-encounter that most ancient voice, the one voice that called diverse tribes to become a people" (134, [my emphasis]).

This new Sinai will "appear. . no doubt in the least expected of places" (135). The first Sinai was the climax of a journey of diverse individuals and tribes who had the courage to "strike out into the wilderness and create life" without the safety of a common language, God or culture (Unholy Alliance, 176). Those Jews today who have understood the lessons of both Auschwitz and Deir Yassin (the name of the Palestinian Arab village where the infamous massacre of villagers by Israelis occurred in 1948) who ate determined to put an end to the history of atrocity, to the "pre-history" of humanity (to paraphrase Marx). are also striking out into the wilderness--the modern wilderness--and may well find themselves spontaneously converging on "a new holy place" to meet with seekers of justice and exiles from other religions in order to form a new people. This would be a "calling forth on the threshold of the twenty-first century "similar to "the calling forth experienced at Sinai over 3,000 years ago" (O, Jerusalem, 170).

Thus, Ellis affirms, as against both Holocaust theologians and secularists, the prospect of a God who intervenes in history--who has done so in the past, and will do so again in the future. He does not quote the ancient prophets here but one cannot help but think that in the light of what Ellis interprets as the historic failure of Christians (exemplified in Auschwitz) and of Jews (exemplified at Deir Yassin), that the encounter with God that he envisions at the "new Sinai"--should such a miracle occur--would involve not just the formation of a new people but also the forging of a new covenant as described and prophesized by Jeremiah, "I shall put my law in their midst and on their hearts I shall write it, I will be their God and they will be my people." (31:22-4) And it might also be the beginning of the age described by Isaiah when humankind will "establish justice" on earth (Isaiah 42:1-4) and God will create "a new heaven and a new earth." And men/women will study war no more and all will worship together , "And My House shall be a house of prayer for all people." (Isaiah, 56:7-8) If there ever was a time for such a miracle, it is now--now as all humankind thirsts to hear the word of God (Amos, 8:11), now as the whole earth hovers on the brink of a planetary holocaust.

Seth Farber is a psychologist, a social critic, and a member of Jews Against the Occupation. He is the author of several books (including Madness, Heresy and the Rumor of Angels: The Revolt Against the Mental Health System) and is currently writing a book on American Jewish critics of Israel.