[4-1-02]

Thanks to Frederic Bush, a Presbyterian in Orange, CA, for sharing this deeply thoughtful essay by a Jewish woman who laments the actions of Israel against the Palestinian people, and cries out a Passover hope for "Next Year a Free Jerusalem."

Next Year a Free Jerusalem

By Emma Rosenthal

Emma Rosenthal is a writer, artist, educator and human rights activist, living in the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California.

Why is this year different from all other years?

This year we cry out

Next year a free Jerusalem!

Next year a free Jerusalem!

For years, as Jews sat around the table for the Passover seder we would say: Next year in Jerusalem. This call to return to a land we left so many years ago speaks to our ineffable connection to location as well as to memory. Next year in Jerusalem, Next year in Jerusalem. We have wandered for two thousand years in the wilderness of Europe, where we have endured ridicule, genocide, slavery, persecution, expulsions, false accusations. For two thousand years we cried: Next year in Jerusalem. This cry predated a zionist movement, a movement that seized upon the wandering suffering and the hunger for home. It seized upon the symbols of a people, the name of a people, the memory of a people (zion, Israel, next year in Jerusalem.) The desire to return, as refugees (with all of the rights that should be granted refugees of persecution and genocide) was supplanted with the desire to return as conquerors (with all of the guilt and destruction of invading armies: death, domination, genocide.)

The refugee by all rights, should be free to enter the land for safety, shelter, for refuge, to contribute, to build, to embellish the society that takes her in. The conqueror should be repelled, resisted, refused access to power, to people, to land. There is a difference. There is a tragedy, the tragedy lies in the circuitry of the brain that would turn a victim into a perpetrator.

I gathered my friends and family around the passover table, a pantheon of human rights activists, not all Jewish, to celebrate the emancipation from slavery. If any holiday exemplifies the importance of myth and archetype for me, it is Passover. Each year the story grows in significance and insight. This year the holiday took on special meaning, as daily reports pour out of Israel of children shot by Israeli soldiers, government sponsored assassinations, Israeli soldiers painting numbers on the arms of Palestinian prisoners, painting stars of David on the walls of Palestinian homes, house demolitions, suicide bombings, and here in the U.S., the aftermath of September 11th.

For so much of Jewish history, we have been the victims, we have been the survivors, the revolutionaries, the righteous, and in the name of that history, with all the self-righteousness that comes with suffering and persecution, now, this Passover, guns, Israeli guns are pointed at children, Palestinian children. This is done in my name. I have been told, over and over again, so that I can have a place to go, should I suffer persecution. Somehow I am to believe that I benefit, that the Jewish people benefit from these guns and tanks and helicopters and bombs, that somehow the persecution we experienced for the last 2500 years at the hands of Europeans will be vindicated in the graves of the children of Palestine.

It was more than I could endure, the contradiction of the holiday of freedom, and the persecution and genocide against the Palestinians, in my name. It was my seder, this would be the theme.

We told the story; Moses the negotiator and healer, Miriam the prophet organizer and planner, Aaron, the voice. Pharaoh the hardened heart, the persecutor. We recited the plagues that befell the pharaoh and the people of Egypt when justice was refused us. We diminished our joy of freedom from slavery, as we symbolically took out a drop of wine from our glasses for each of the plagues as we recognized the suffering of the oppressor as a consequence of persecution. The death of the first born, though, how to reconcile the death of the first born? Not simply the act of an angry God, the true consequence of persecution. If you oppress a people, your own children will die. The victims of September 11th were the death of the first born, those killed by suicide bombing were the dead first born. True, there is innocent blood shed on all sides, but if not for the persecution, no one would be dead. If we want to save Jewish lives, we must stop the killing of the Palestinians. Our own iniquity will kill our children. Justice will either feed us all or kill us all. It requires its own retribution.

Then, out of Egypt; we told of the years of wandering, forty years in the wilderness because it was determined that the slave mentality, the internalization of the oppression, the memory of the oppression, the anger, the hurt, the bitterness should not be the hands, the back, the muscle, the brains that forged a new society. So, for 40 years we wandered until the last of the enslaved had died. Even Moses, did not live to see the promised land, only the children, the ones who knew freedom, albeit in the harshest of wildernesses, the ones who knew the hard work of self-determination, and interdependence, the ones who knew the cost but not the price of freedom, only the children of the enslaved could enter the promised land.

1948, destitute, sick, dying refugees, a problem for the West, where to send them? What to do with them? Poland didn't want us, England didn't want us, the United States didn't want us. A small band of Zionists solved Europe's problem and provided a new vehicle for the western imperial policy of divide and conquer. Send those fresh from slavery to forge a new land. Let the slaves conquer the territory. Let the slaves establish the promised land. No forty years of wandering, no waiting for the slavery mentality to die down, fresh from the ovens of Treblinka, the factories of Auschwitz, the gas chambers, the labs of Mengele, send these homeless tempests to the promised land, let them forge a new way of life.

We sat around the table stunned. Stunned by the merging of myth and history, stunned by the brutality of the war waged against the Palestinians by the victims of brutality, by the children of the victims of brutality. How could memory be so short? How could pain be so transferable? How could the spirit of a people be so quickly compromised? We said a prayer for the children of Palestine. We said a prayer for the children of Israel. We envisioned a land of justice, where the children of Abraham could live together, just and free; where one people would not oppress and expel another; where law would be equitable and magnanimous; where children could play without fear, on the streets of their grandparents, in the homes of their ancestors; where the refugee, any refugee could find refuge, could return. We could not say: Next year in Jerusalem. These words did not speak to these times. We sought a new vision of the coming year:

We sat around the table, telling the story, reaching back through memory, extracting meaning from myth, We looked to each other and envisioning the coming year, declared...



Next year a free Jerusalem!!!

Next year a free Jerusalem!!!



© 2002 Emma Rosenthal, all rights reserved.

Permission granted by the writer to forward in its entirety, this essay.

The author has also given gracious permission for posting of her essay on www.witherspoonsociety.org

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