I had the pleasure of listening to a conversation between Danny Gordis and J street honchos Jeremy Ben Ami and Ilan Goldberg. It was sweet because even though they are on different political wavelengths, the conversation was warm and respectful. We need more of that.

Check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQIUkKPvnk8&t=1s

A few comments. Gordis always emphasizes the tribal aspect of Judaism and says too many American Jews have lost this sense and now view Judaism as some kind of universal religion. There’s a real tension here for those of us who are politically progressive. What takes priority, our belief in universal values such as fairness and equity or our particular tribal affiliation? All of us like to say that we need to affirm both, and I believe that. And yet I think there is something to what Gordis says. If you ask me which is more important to you, being a Jew or being a progressive, that’s an easy question for me to answer—I’m a Jew.

Gordis argues elsewhere that you have to choose, and if you choose being a progressive, either in your thoughts or your actions, then you run the risk of losing that connection to our ancestral heritage. I am concerned that he may at least sometimes be correct. One generation starts out as belonging to the tribe of progressive Jews. The next generation, or at least too many of the next generation, wind up joining the tribe of progressives, Jewish or otherwise. There just aren’t that many of us, AND oh man, I’d hate to leave the Judaism to the Ben Gvir’s of the world or my racist orthodox relatives.

This ties into the question of indigeneity. I view indigeneity as belonging to a particular place in the context of a particular tribe. It’s not enough just to be really connected to a place, you need the tribal component as well. So the question with which to grapple in this context is what is your tribe?

Let’s turn to the question of who lives with the consequences of Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state. Gordis, who lives in Israel, rightly made the point that his grandkids are going to have to live with the consequences of if there is any kind of a Palestinian state. Ben Ami and Goldberg rightly countered that Israel’s actions have consequences on Jewish diaspora engagement with Israel, a point with which Gordis agreed, to his credit.

What was missed is that Gordis’s grandkids are also going to have to live with the consequences if there is no kind of political solution to the two peoples in one land. It is a simple fact that many more Jews have died in the state of Israel because of violence than have died in the diaspora over whatever time period you want to specify since the Holocaust. Even today with the rise of anti semitism or maybe anti semitic expression on both the left and the right, it is far more dangerous to be a Jew in Israel than to be a Jew anywhere in the diaspora.

There will be no peace in that land without a political solution. If there is no peace, many more Jews will die. Gordis, Ben Ami and Goldberg all agreed that Israelis don’t believe that peace is possible—with Gordis thinking he and the great majority of Israelis are right, and Goldberg and Ben Ami disagreeing.

What is certainly true is that if you don’t believe peace is possible, then you won’t achieve it. It is also simply true that Israeli actions are making peace less possible, not more. It’s also true that Israelis are the ones who have a say in what happens far more than we diasporic Jews do.

In the words of the psalmist, “pray for the peach of Jerusalem” (122:6) for all who are connected to this sacred land, Jews, Christians, Muslims.