A Jewish Plea



We have nothing to lose except everything.
— Albert Camus

By SARA ROY

During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water – living because it is fed in part by heavenly rain — and momentarily suspended as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and it signifies renewal and possibility.

The day of Jess’s conversion was also the day that Israel began its pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel’s violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet,
the link deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my daughter’s acceptance into Judaism and Israel’s actions-between Judaism and Zionism — a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at least, has now been broken.

For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinian and Arab peoples this one feels qualitatively different — a turning point — not only with regard to the nature of Israel’s horrific response – its willingness to destroy and to do so utterly — but also with regard to the virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for Israel’s brutal actions, something that is not new but now
no longer tolerable to me.

— Read the rest at CounterPunch

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