Photo of Iain Lothian: Simon Barrow
I RECENTLY SUPPORTED a Palestinian doctor who was arrested and charged at a rally while peacefully protesting against the war on Gaza.
Outside the court I talked to his wife. She asked me what I did. I told her I was a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and then found myself deeply embarrassed and apologising that the church I was part of was silent on the Israel-Palestine situation, and, at the time, not even calling for a ceasefire.
She looked at me with both compassion and confusion in her eyes, and asked this simple but profound question: “Why can’t they listen with their hearts?” I realised that I had been asking this very question when in conversation with many colleagues, parishioners and friends.
First and foremost, a listening heart requires us to engage with the cries of the afflicted, to put ourselves in their shoes and feel their pain, and be in solidarity with victims of injustice and oppression. In short it requires us and the church to re-ignite our prophetic voice by not only listening to Jesus and a long line of Old Testament prophets but to also listen to modern day re-emerging Jewish prophetic voices speaking into the present crisis.
A helpful framework and road map to navigate this call to both listen with and speak from our hearts and re-ignite our prophetic voice can be found in Walter Brueggemann’s seminal book, The Prophetic Imagination, where he describes the conflict between royal consciousness and prophetic imagination.
Royal consciousness versus prophetic imagination
Brueggemann describes royal consciousness as the imperial consciousness of the king, or whatever domination system is in place. This is a system favouring those who hold power; it is characterised by a high degree of affluence, satiation and comfort for certain elite parts of society. Its politics is one of oppression and violence, and the establishment of a controlled, static religion which legitimises the status quo. It is typified in the Old Testament by Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, and is personified by a hardness of heart, numb to the cries of the suffering.
Pitted against royal consciousness comes prophetic imagination, typified by Moses, the later prophets and Jesus, which dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation, and evokes an alternative society based on freedom, justice and compassion. It aims to penetrate the hardness of heart and numbness so prevalent within royal consciousness, enabling a listening heart and a capacity to weep for and with the suffering. This imperial consciousness survives through its capacity to still the groans and pain of the suffering and go on with business as usual; it cannot tolerate compassion and those who stand in solidarity with the victims of their oppression and violence.
In this conflict between royal consciousness and prophetic imagination, the role of language cannot be overstated because speech and language shapes our consciousness and defines reality. So the prophetic voice reintroduces heart, passion and compassion into discussion, because it knows that when passion disappears there is no humanising energy. ‘Cool’, ‘dispassionate’ language has no place within the prophetic voice, which stands against those supposedly ‘reasonable’ voices who see and understand ‘both sides’. Instead, prophetic discourse challenges the double-speak of imperial talk. It understands that change will not come unless truth is named and addressed.
“The prophets do not offer reflections in general. Their words are onslaughts, scuttling illusions of false security, challenging evasions, calling faith into account, questioning prudence and impartiality.” [1]
Kairos Palestine Document: The loss of the prophetic voice in the church
In December 2009, the Kairos Palestine document, A moment of truth: a word of faith, hope, and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering [2] was published. This articulates Brueggemann’s classification of royal consciousness in a contemporary context, which it renames ‘state theology,’ standing over and against prophetic theology. However it brings in a crucial third component at this point: church or priestly theology, which is sandwiched between the two.
The document argues that ‘church theology’ in the context of Israel-Palestine has, for the most part, lost its prophetic voice – a voice that is in solidarity with the afflicted, which boldly challenges manifest injustice and advocates for a just solution to the conflict. Instead, ‘church theology’ has responded with embarrassed silence, rationalisations for oppressive, unjust actions, and the taking of the ‘middle ground’. In so doing it uses Christian language of ‘compassion’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘unity’, while simultaneously avoiding recognising the violence, horror, and injustice of what is happening on the ground. It therefore separates these concepts from any acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
Addressing the present slaughter in Gaza, Munther Isaac, a prominent Palestinian Christian pastor and academic dean of the Bethlehem Bible College, pinpoints this kind of distortion. He says that “for the most part, what we get from church leaders are carefully crafted, balanced statements designed to convey the impression of compassion but ensuring a minimum of controversy, for fear of any backlash from powerful lobbies and being perceived as anti-Semitic.” [3]
A superficial compassion of this kind fails to name, let alone challenge structural injustices, including Israel’s flagrant violation of International law and the causes of the deepening humanitarian crisis. Its language is domesticated, softening the harsh realities of daily life for Palestinians and distancing us from their suffering. For this reason, words like ‘occupied territory’, ‘apartheid’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ are censored.
The result is that, amidst atrocities, the church seeks to ‘stand in the middle’, posing as a mediator, offering what the Kairos Palestine Document calls counterfeit or superficial reconciliation, devoid of a critique of power imbalance and the abuse of power, and therefore devoid of justice. A summary of this approach might be: “We must be fair and listen to both sides of the story. If the two sides can only meet to talk and negotiate they will sort out their differences and misunderstandings, and the conflict will be resolved.’’ But in truth, as the prophet Jeremiah (6:14) cries out: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”
The Palestine Kairos document argues that nowhere in the Bible or in Christian tradition does it suggest that we reconcile good and evil. On the contrary, we should confront and oppose evil, injustice, oppression and sin, not come to terms with it. As Desmond Tutu famously reminds us: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality”
The document goes on to list the injustices and oppression of the Palestinian people as well as outlining the mission of the church to speak the Word of God courageously, honestly and lovingly. It challenges the church to regain its prophetic voice, to listen with its heart, to name truth, and to allow suffering to speak, as well as evoking a future based on freedom, justice and compassion for all people.
Understanding that there is no one Jewish voice, but different voices
The biggest obstacle to the church reclaiming its prophetic voice on Israel-Palestine at present seems to be the fear of being perceived as anti-Semitic. As a result it listens to one voice only, the predominant Israeli government voice of royal consciousness, of king and state, which equates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism. This dominant voice, claiming to speak for all Jews, domesticates language to such an extent that truth is suppressed and the cries of the suffering go unheard, so that business can carry on as normal. This one ‘Jewish voice’ is echoed throughout our politics and mainstream media. Yet a fundamental characteristic of Jewish culture, religion and tradition is the space for disagreement, for different voices to be heard, debated upon and argued over. But the voice of royal consciousness, of state theology, is intent on shutting down all alternative voices.
Noam Chomsky says that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.” [4]
The range of debate on Israel-Palestine has thereby been narrowed and censored to such an extent that there are few dissenting voices questioning the very presuppositions of what is happening in Gaza/Israel and Palestine. But what of other Jewish voices and of the subaltern perspective and conscience?
Will Alden: A return to Shabbat
Will Alden, a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist who was part of an encampment at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) has written an illuminating article entitled, ‘A new Jewishness being born before our eyes’, [5] which both critiques royal consciousness and evokes a more hopeful future. Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of History at UCLA, confirms this when he says the student protests at his university are “transporting us to another place, compelling us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enabling us to imagine a new society.”
Alden declares; “Right now the future of our people is being written on campuses and in our streets. Thousands of Jews are creating something better than what we have inherited.” This imagining of a better future is deeply embedded in Jewish faith, tradition and ritual, in particular a theology of Shabbat, which Alden affirms is “to have a taste of the world to come, a holier one of peace, justice and compassion.” He describes a Passover Seder of olives, strawberries, and watermelon, to symbolise solidarity with Palestinians, along with a Shabbat service where Muslims, Jews and Christians sat and prayed together. This is a solidarity which not only evokes a more hopeful world, where different faith groups can co-exist peacefully, but challenges the American/Jewish establishment’s narrative that the protests are inherently anti-Semitic.
Alden describes their goal as being “to end the US- backed war on Gaza, secure liberation and justice for Palestinians and to get disclosure and divestment from companies complicit in Israel’s war crimes.” Although Alden admits that on this basis alone the protests have not, so far, been successful, he believes that their counter voice challenges the status quo, shows that people care about the plight of Palestinians, and thereby offers them hope and solidarity.
Alden goes on to contrast the brutal nature of the clampdown on these camps, the behaviour of pro-Israeli counter-protest groups, and the community spirit and solidarity of the student encampment. One of the students, Isabelle, is quoted as saying that the co-operative spirit within the camp amazed her. But, simultaneously, she witnessed some of the most horrific things she had ever seen in the backlash. Videos show the violence of the police and pro-Israeli counter protests shouting insults and slurs, spitting at demonstrators, and using physical intimidation and violence. Alden says that, “as a queer, gender-nonconforming woman, I’ve experienced plenty of hate throughout my life. I’m pretty tough. But the hate and vitriol we absorbed on Sunday for identifying ourselves as Jews critical of Israel, as Jews who support Palestinian freedom, was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.’
Melissa Finell, a filmmaker and instructor at UCLA, supported this, “Not only did they curse at us and yell at us that we should be ashamed, that we weren’t real Jews, and blow loud airhorns in our ears and accuse us of supporting Hamas, but one of the hardest moments came when a fellow Jewish woman screamed in my ear, accusing me of wanting to murder her children.’’ These testimonies highlight the sheer courage of alternative Jewish voices; of those who are often isolated and labelled ‘self-hating Jews’ by the dominating voice in their own community. By returning to the traditions of their faith these young Jewish student voices are returning to their Jewish prophetic roots and listening with their hearts, because Shabbat is fundamentally about the ‘law’ written on the heart.
Naomi Klein: an exodus from the shackles of Zionism
Recently, in a speech at an outdoor Seder in New York, the Canadian-Jewish activist and author Naomi Klein vociferously argues for Jews to stop worshipping the “false idol of Zionism”, resonating with Moses raging against the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf. She goes into full preacher mode, with a speech resounding with biblical metaphors taken from the stories of Israelite emancipation from slavery in Egypt. This is a story embedded in Passover, repeatedly referring to the false idol of Zionism – an ideology which justifies land theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide, as well as taking the transcendent idea of the promised land, a metaphor for human liberation, and turning it into a land of violence, oppression and military occupation, whose very foundation required the mass expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes in the Nakba. Klein’s use of biblical imagery continues when she compares the present Israeli government, which sees Palestinian children not as human beings, but as demographic threats, with Pharaoh fearing the growing population of the ancient Israelites and ordering the death of their sons.
As an ideology rooted in racial superiority, Zionism, Klein declares, is actually anti-Semitic itself. It is a betrayal of every Jewish value, including the value of questioning, a practice included in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child, and has led too “many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them shredding the core commandments: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.”
Then in true prophetic mode she moves from critiquing the royal consciousness of Zionism to evoking an alternative Jewishness, which cannot be contained by an ethno-state, but is international in nature.
“Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, a ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even- especially- the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirit.” [6]
Klein then returns to the motif of liberation and exodus by proclaiming that we need, “a liberation from the Zionist project that commits genocide in our name and has no plan for peace…..We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.”
She ends her speech with a rallying cry: “The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long. So tonight we say: it ends here. What are we? We, in these streets are the Exodus. The Exodus from the idealistic shackles of Zionism.”
What is telling is that Naomi Klein, a secular Jew, situates her critique of Zionism within the religious context of Judaism by using prophetic biblical language, imagery and symbols. This passionately dismantles the royal consciousness of the domination system and evokes a new Jewishness founded on traditional Judaic values of freedom, justice and compassion. Like the prophets of old, Klein is critiquing Zionism and the actions of the modern state of Israel from inside her Jewishness. She is declaring powerfully that this is a betrayal of true Jewishness, and therefore anti-Semitic.
Not in my name: Voices from the Holocaust
Many contemporary Jewish prophetic voices come from Holocaust survivors and their families, condemning Israel’s actions, and proclaiming, ‘Not in my name.’ Stephen Kapos, [7] an 87-year-old Hungarian Holocaust survivor, criticises the way that the experience of the Holocaust has been used to justify the massacre and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, describing it as an insult to the memory of those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. He argues that the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism does nothing but increase anti-Semitism, and he debunks the narrative that recent protests in solidarity with Palestinians are anti-Semitic by saying that Jewish voices are warmly accepted. He wishes that there had been protests like these during the Jewish Holocaust, because he and others experienced a massive abandonment by the great majority of people in Europe at the time. They turned a blind eye, as many are to the horrors of Gaza today.
The aim of preserving the memory of the Holocaust is to ensure that history does not repeat itself and that genocide ‘never again’ happens. The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial is a powerful reminder of the horrors of the Nazis death camps. However the terrible irony is that in rightly enshrining the Jewish memory of these horrors, many are erasing the horrific history of another people as the hills that Yad Vashem are built on are littered with the remains of those Palestinian villages that stand witness to shattered lives and ethnic cleansing of a people. Jewish liberation theologian Mark Braverman says that “to find meaning in the memory of the Holocaust means working for justice for Palestine: there are too many parallels, too many ways in which Israel was doing to Palestinians with what the Nazis did to us.” [8]
These parallels are a powerful and shocking critique of what is happening in Gaza and the occupied territories right now. Like Germany, Israel places itself as a righteous, peace loving nation, fighting for the democratic world, forced to take arms against external threat. So they expand their territory into occupied lands, claiming self-defence in whatever they do. The Israeli government use dehumanising language to describe Palestinians as inferior in order to overcome moral inhibitions and legitimise their actions, with the defence minister Yoav Gallant openly referring to them as ‘animals’. Meanwhile, Netanyahu has publicly framed the conflict as, “a war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darknness.” The Israeli state has a powerful propaganda machine and a huge number of lobbyists, all aiming to silence or smear alternative voices. They cast doubts on verified independent sources, whether journalists on the ground, UN officials, human rights officials or, in the case of South Africa, whole governments. They also exaggerate and invent atrocities to justify their own actions.
Conclusion
The prophetic voice calls us to hear the cries of the suffering and be in solidarity with them, to challenge injustice and oppression in whatever form it takes and to show tenderness and compassion – a true heart of flesh rather than stone, echoing Ezekiel: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36. 26).
The heart of flesh requires the church to refuse to collude with a royal consciousness, a state theology that limits and closes down free speech, inoculates, numbs and distances us from unfathomable pain and suffering, and which creates a narrative where persecutors are perceived as victims. We need to speak from the heart: to name injustice and boldly to challenge a politics of violence and oppression wherever it exists. We have to continue to imagine and evoke a new world of freedom, justice and compassion. Finally, we need to be in solidarity with those brave Jewish prophetic voices which seek to break from a Zionist heart of stone and which embody that Jewish heart of flesh which refuses to accept a ‘Jewishness’ that is dependent on the oppression and suffering of others.
These alternative Jewish voices feel a sense of exile from the mainstream and disorientation as they are shunned, isolated and dismissed in a variety of ways. However many are claiming back their core Jewish identity through the prophetic tradition, with its commitment to freedom, compassion and justice. Mark Braverman, describes in detail his journey from enchantment with the miracle of a Jewish-majority state to one of solidarity with suffering Palestinians. He describes a moment when sitting on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, when he says,‘“I now felt their suffering and pain. And my eyes shed streams of water for them, my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and yes, for the brokenness of my own people.” [9] ’Braverman allowed “suffering to speak” to his heart, so that a heart-reshaping took place, a reshaping that many Jewish men and women have undergone as they go deep into their Jewish prophetic tradition. We as Christians also need to similarly let the same prophetic tradition speak to us and allow our hearts to be softened and reshaped at this present ‘Kairos’ moment.
References
[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (HarperCollins, 2001)
[2] Based on the original Kairos Document, a theological statement issued in 1985 by a group of mainly black South African theologians based predominantly in the townships of Soweto, South Africa, at a critical juncture in the apartheid era there.
[3] Munther Isaac, from his Christmas address, ‘Christ in the rubble’ (https://time.com/6550851/bethlehem-christmas-sermon-nativity-rubble/)
[4] Noam Chomsky,How the World Works(Hamish Hamilton, May 2012).
[5] Will Alden, ‘New Jewishness being born before our eyes’,[5]The Nation,10 May 2024
[6] Naomi Klein interviewed by Mehdi Hasan on ‘Unshocked’, May 2024.https://youtu.be/Hjt9M1CS9Qs?si=GNKgq1sjc-yAGbi_
[7] Stephen Kapos on Double Down News, April 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qokhPdgvgw0&t=44s
[8] Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land (Synergy Books, 2010), p. 39.
[9] Mark Braverman, Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land (Synergy Books, 2010), p. 32.
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© Iain Lothian is Rector of St James-the-Less Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh. This is a paper first given at a consultation at St George’s, Windsor. It was formally entitled, ‘Let us listen with our heart: A call for the church to engage with the re-emergence of Jewish prophetic voices in order to reignite its own prophetic voice’.