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THE SUKKAH AND THE TOWERS
* * *
Arthur Waskow
WHEN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY CELEBRATES the harvest festival, we build sukkot.
What is a sukkah ? Just a fragile hut with a leafy roof, the most vulnerable of houses. Vulnerable in time, where it lasts for only a week each year. Vulnerable in space, where its roof must be not only leafy but leaky-letting in the starlight, and gusts of wind and rain.
In the evening prayers, we plead with God: "Ufros alenu sukkat shlomekha." "Spread over all of us Your sukkah of shalom."
Why a sukkah? Why does the prayer plead to God for a " sukkah of shalom" rather than God's "tent" or "house" or "palace" of peace? Surely a palace, a house, even a tent, would be more safe, more secure, than a sukkah ?
Precisely because the sukkah is so vulnerable.
For much of our lives we try to achieve peace and safety by building with steel and concrete and toughness:
Pyramids,
air raid shelters,
Pentagons,
World Trade Centers.
Hardening what might be targets and, like Pharaoh, hardening our hearts against what is foreign to us.
But the sukkah comes to remind us: we are in truth all vulnerable. If as the prophet Dylan sang, "A hard rain gonna fall," it will fall on all of us.
Americans have felt invulnerable. The oceans, our wealth, our military power have made up what seemed an invulnerable shield. We may have begun feeling uncomfortable in the nuclear age, but no harm came to us. Yet yesterday the ancient truth came home: we all live in a sukkah .
Not only the targets of attack but also the instruments of attack were among our proudest possessions: the sleek transcontinental airliners. They availed us nothing. Worse than nothing.
Even the greatest oceans do not shield us; even the mightiest buildings do not shield us; even the wealthiest balance sheets and the most powerful weapons do not shield us.
There are only wispy walls and leaky roofs between us. The planet is in fact one interwoven web of life. The command to love my neighbor as I do myself is not an admonition to be nice: it is a statement of truth like the law of gravity. For my neighbor and myself are interwoven. However much and in whatever way I love my neighbor, that will turn out to be the way I love myself. If I pour contempt upon my neighbor, hatred will recoil upon me.
What is the lesson, when we learn that we-all of us-live in a sukkah? How do we make such a vulnerable house into a place of shalom, of peace and security and harmony and wholeness?
The lesson is that only a world where we all recognize our vulnerability can become a world where all communities feel responsible to all other communities. And only such a world can prevent such acts of rage and mass murder.
If I treat my neighbor's pain and grief as foreign, I will end up suffering when my neighbor's pain and grief curdle into rage.
But if I realize that in simple fact the walls between us are full of holes, I can reach through them in compassion and connection.
The perpetrators of this act of infamy seem to espouse a tortured version of Islam. Responding to them requires two different, though related, forms of action:
1. Their violence must be halted. They must be found and brought to trial, without killing still more innocents and wrecking still more the fragile "sukkot" of lawfulness. There are in fact mechanisms of international law and politics that can bring them to justice.
2. At the same time, America must open its heart and mind to the pain and grief of those in the Arab and Muslim worlds who feel excluded, denied, unheard, disempowered, defeated.
We must reach beyond the terrorists-to calm the rage that gave them birth by addressing the pain from which they sprouted.
From festering pools of pain and rage sprout the plague of terrorism. Some people think we must choose between addressing the plague or addressing the pools that give it birth. But we can do both-if we focus our attention on these two distinct tasks.
Let us imagine that the United States were to support, instead of opposing, the creation of an International Criminal Court. Suppose that in a case like the 9/11 attacks, the United States had asked the UN Security Council to sit as a grand jury. Suppose the U.S. had submitted evidence that would have justified issuing a warrant for arrests of the Al Qaeda leadership, to stand trial for specific criminal acts before the International Criminal Court and for the arrest of anyone who forcibly tried to prevent those arrests.
If the warrant had been forcibly resisted, force might have been necessary to execute it. But it would have been much more in the mode of police using the minimum force necessary to get the job done than in the military mode of using maximum force to shatter the enemy.
The level of legitimacy of the U.S. action would have been far greater than the invasion of Afghanistan. The preponderant ethical judgment of those in the world who have preponderant political power would have been crystallized into transnational law. (All law is a dance between justice and power.) The next terrorist atrocity would have been made less likely.
The fabric of shared human responsibility, so badly ripped by the attacks of 9/11, would have been repaired and strengthened. The vision of an interwoven world would have grown stronger.
Going to war against whole nations-Afghanistan or perhaps Iraq or perhaps mobs in the streets of Pakistan or Egypt-may weave together temporary elite alliances, but it leaves out the suffering people who ultimately in despair can topple regimes. It will damage whole cities and countrysides. It makes war even against the future because it leaves behind weapons that for decades to come will maim and kill civilians-often children. It may kill those alleged to be guilty without ever building the legitimacy of showing that they were guilty. Only from that sense of legitimacy come threads of trust we can weave into fabrics of community.
The response of arming the walls that we build between us ends up by making war as well on those within the walls. The process begins by holding for detention without trial hundreds of people defined by race or religion; it continues by planning to try alleged terrorists in drumhead kangaroo courts; it proceeds by snarling at those who oppose such measures for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
War will not drain the pools of pain and rage on which feed the plague of terrorism; it is far more likely to add to them.
What would it mean instead to recognize that both the United States and Islam live in vulnerable sukkot?
For example: What do we need to do to recover our knowledge of the history of two centuries of Western colonization and neocolonial support for oppressive regimes in much of the Muslim world?
How do we welcome Muslim societies fully into the planetary community?
What does the United States need to do to encourage grass-roots support for those elements of Islam that seek to renew the tradition?
How do we encourage not top-down regimes that make alliances with our own global corporations to despoil the planet, but grassroots religious and cultural and political communities that seek to control their own resources in ways that nurture the earth?
How do we establish the goal and encourage the emergence of a peaceful relationship between Israel and a viable, peaceful Palestine?
How do we ensure that Iraq is not preparing weapons of mass destruction, while also ensuring that Iraqi families are not devastated by the means we use?
Of course, not every demand put forward by the poor and desperate and disempowered becomes legitimate, just because it is an expression of pain. But we must open the ears of our hearts to ask: Have we ourselves had a hand in creating the pain? Can we act to lighten it without increasing the overall amount of pain in the world?
The choice we face is deeper than politics, broader than charity. It is whether we see the world chiefly as property to be controlled, defined by walls and fences that must be built ever higher, ever thicker, ever tougher; or made up chiefly of an open weave of compassion and connection, open sukkah next to open sukkah .
The choice is one of Spirit.
Instead of entering upon a "war of civilizations," we must pursue a planetary community. We must spread over all of us the sukkah of shalom.
FLAWS IN "BLAME AMERICA"
ARGUMENTS
Sylvia Barack Fishman
ONE OF THE MORE DISTRESSING ASPECTS of the September 11 attacks is that certain groups of American intellectuals, and as a result many college students, are filled with an implacable anger at America, not her attackers. Among the propeace agitators are many who assert that America herself is responsible for, and guilty of causing, the violence of the terrorists.
Just hours after the World Trade Center had imploded and collapsed, while smoke and fires were still smoldering in New York and Washington, teach-ins on college campuses featured professors explaining to confused and frightened students that the real villains were America and the American government. Striking back would be the worst possible response, they suggested. Instead of continuing the cycle of violence, the United States should solve its problems with Islamic fundamentalists through diplomacy.
Among the prominent American writers who lambasted the United States was Barbara Ehrenreich, who was sorry that the attack on America-in her eyes justifiable-was implemented by persons with problematic social values. "What is so heartbreaking to me as a feminist," she wrote in the Village Voice , "is that the strongest response to corporate globalization and U.S. military domination is based on such a violent and misogynist ideology."
Vivian Gornick in the same issue agreed that America was in the wrong: "Force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not retribution."
One advocate for a no-violence response was prominent novelist Alice Walker (The Color Purple) , who insisted that Osama bin Laden could be gently persuaded to live up to his own best self, "if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done. Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed?" "I firmly believe," wrote Walker in the Voice , "the only punishment that works is love."
Some postmodernists and postcolonialists assert that the United States is a greedy imperialist state responsible for much suffering around the world. Recent articles in The Nation assert that the September 11 terrorist attacks "were a result of injustices caused by the West" and that "our own government, through much of the past fifty years, has been the world's leading rogue state, having been responsible for killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents."
This "blame America" mentality has persisted, and it colors reactions to America's military response. The day the United States launched its retaliatory strikes on bin Laden, thousands of protesters were marching in New York, singing antiwar songs and expressing opposition to military action.
It is not that I believe the government of the United States (or Israel for that matter) is free of guilt, but it is clear to me-I hold these truths to be self-evident-that the fundamentalist extremist attacks of September 11 constituted an unmitigated, premeditated, and unprovoked evil, and an act of war.
The Islamic fundamentalist suicide pilots of September 11 were well-educated, middle-class men who had not led particularly difficult lives. Most of them came from countries such as Saudi Arabia that are neither impoverished nor oppressed by the United States. Their hatred of America was fueled not by privation or misery but by radical extremist Islamic hatred of Christian, capitalist America.
Despotic rulers throughout the Middle East and elsewhere cynically and nervously maintain their own power by floating on the surface of an evil bargain: they allow fundamentalist Islamic extremists to flourish financially and organizationally in their countries as long as they spew their hatred onto America and Israel.
I feel a special responsibility as a Jew to speak out and assert that historical events are real, and that all sides in this conflict are not equal. Contemporary Jews have frequently found themselves at the wrong end of historical revisionism and postmodernist ideology. The most obvious examples of this pattern are found in the diverse claims of revisionists that the Holocaust never happened or that its events have been greatly exaggerated.
Even more insidious is the demand that only a pure and innocent government has the right to invoke historical events on its behalf. One Holocaust revisionist intellectual ploy, for example, is the argument that because the judgment and leadership of some Israeli leaders has at times been deeply flawed, the state of Israel has no right to remind the nations of the world that no country opened wide its doors to Jewish victims before Israel existed.
Some ideologues assert that the original capitalist "sins" of the United States have given the frustrated and desperate terrorists no choice but to strike out and get the world's attention. Many of them also believe that Hamas, Fatah, and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups have no choice but to get the world's attention through suicide bombings in Israel.
Although I have always been opposed to retaining the disputed West Bank territories for both ideological and practical reasons, I fail to understand the willful selective hearing loss of those who simply refuse to take at their word those Arab leaders who insist that taking back the territories is just a first step, a prologue to the "liberation" of all of "Palestine."
As someone who for years worked hard for Oz VeShalom, the religious Zionist peace movement in Israel, I have reluctantly come to accept the evidence that for many of our "partners in peace," the whole land of Israel is an unjustified colonial possession. This realization, like the destruction of the World Trade Centers and the mutilation of the Pentagon, is hard to swallow. But the very harshness of these facts serves as an important reminder that struggle is sometimes an unavoidable human condition. And in those situations in which a country has no choice but to struggle with entities that wish it ill, that country is duty-bound to do its best to win the conflict.
Continue...
Excerpted from BEST JEWISH WRITING 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Michael Lerner Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
