Islam my friend,
I am so embarrassed by the behavior of my co-religionists and co-patriots who are doing these awful acts of terrorism in your beloved city. I imagine that our shared forefather, Abraham, and his beloved wife Sarah are turning in their graves with disgust.
I wish I could explain to these thugs that the reason Abraham bought the machpela was because he understood the difference between divine realities and worldly realities. Clearly Abraham believed that God promised him the land of Israel. This is why he abandoned everything he knew, all his worldly comforts, to go to the place that God would show him, but he also knew that there were inhabitants in the land with deep ties to their homes and customs of their own. Nowhere in the Torah do we have an indication of the burial practices in Ur, but when Abraham comes to Hebron and meets with his Hittite neighbors, he opts to adopt their burial practices, he acknowledges his status as a resident-alien and he insists on buying the plot at the Machpela, in public, at full value, because he wants to show that he accepts the worldly truth—that he is living among people who are different from him and that he must respect their ways.
I wish there was some way we could convince these settlers to walk in Abraham's ways and create breathing room between people when conflict seems eminent. This is what Abraham proposed when his shepherds and his nephew Lot's were having difficulty sharing the fields where their flocks grazed. Abraham proposed separation, two states for two nations, and successfully avoided war. Why is this lesson lost on the settlers who rampaged through your city.
Islam, I am sorry that you and your family must experience this shameful, violent behavior and that in the streets of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem my fellow Jews are not agitated and ready to follow our command from Torah to “surely rebuke your friend. (Lev. 19:17)” The word friend here is amitecha, which comes from the word am which means nation. We are commanded to rebuke our co-nationals, yet we are so afraid of civil war that we act as if we are paralyzed while your co-nationals are being robbed and beaten by our teenage boys. This is simply unacceptable, as is the response of the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, who said that the government will not forcibly evacuate settlers from the "House of Contention," but will instead settle for preventing settler attacks on their Palestinian neighbors. (HaAretz, Nov.26, 2008) Both terrorist violence against your people and illegal acquisition of Palestinian property, as determined by the Israel Supreme Court, are very wrong and need to be repudiated by all Jews, everywhere.
It would be much easier for me to say that these settlers are not my responsibility, that we do not share common beliefs, that they disrespect the government that protects and defends them and thus should be cut off, but this won’t work. That same word, am, which I told you before is the Hebrew word for nation, is a word that was prescribed to the Hebrew grandchildren of our common ancestor Abraham by Pharoah. Unfortunately, we Jews live with the uncomfortable binary of having an identity which we both assume and cannot escape because it is ascribed to us, and we experienced great hardships as a result of that ascription. So we are stuck, as Jews, in bed with our “wicked sons,” a reference to our Passover Haggadah, and you will have to have faith that people like Yariv Oppenheim, the head of Peace Now, and Professor Zeev Sternhell, one of Peace Now’s founders and a victim of those same terrorists you are facing now, and many more are doing what is in our power to change this situation.
Please have faith in us and don’t ascribe to us the same identity you rightly ascribe to those wicked young people doing pogroms in your city. We all share Abraham as a forefather, but each of us, you and me, have people in the family who are making our forebears squirm in their graves. Now the task before us is to call on our inner strengths and talents and find ways to “rebuke our co-nationals” when they do wrong, in a way that helps reverse this terrible violence and brings us back to some form of normalcy. And of course, we cannot give up hope.
Peace be onto you,
David
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