I have become untethered from moral certainty. As an observant Jew, I adhere to certain moral truths. As a liberal humanist, I acknowledge cultural and moral relativism. But I am disoriented by the moral judgements made by members of my cultural groups. My identity is on shaky ground. Two experiences are illustrative of this liminality.
On Friday, May 18th, 2012 I stood in a crowd outside the former home of my grandparents, Sally (Shalom) and Elise Halpern, Z”L, in Konstanz, Germany. My grandparents died in the Holocaust, and the Stolpersteine project was laying stones in front of their former home in their memory. Most of the people in the crowd were strangers to me, except for my daughter, sister and brother-in-law, with whom I had traveled from the U.S., and my son and (future) daughter-in-law who had traveled from Israel to join us in Germany. Also, the day before, we had met Petra, a young German woman who researched our family for the Stolpersteine presentation and laying of stones in front of our grandparents’ home, and we were standing that day in the assembled crowd listening to Petra tell our family’s story before the stones were put into the sidewalk. Two women caught my attention at this event. The first was a woman who came out of the building and began yelling at the Stolpersteine volunteers and at the artist (Gunter Demnig). Petra explained that the woman was the current owner, and she did not want the stones placed before her doorway. The woman angerly gave a number of reasons, such as the liability if the bronze nameplates became slippery in wet weather. Everyone ignored her, as she had no legal claim, and she quieted when the official ceremony began. Afterwards, she relented and gave our family a tour of her home.
The second woman who attracted my attention was a member of the crowd who began to cry while listening to Petra speak. Through my own tears, I watched her and wondered who she was. What was the genesis of the tears streaming down her cheeks and dripping on the pavement? After concluding the ceremony, Petra introduced her to us. The woman explained that her mother, who was then elderly and too infirm to travel, had been a neighbor of our grandparents, father and aunt in the 1930s (our father and aunt got out of Germany as children in 1938 and 1939 respectively but are since deceased), and she remembered the family well. When she learned about the Stolperstein ceremony, she insisted that her daughter and son-in-law attend and report back to her if there were any surviving family members.
On Thursday, July 12th, 2018, I attended a Tag Meir event outside the District Court in Lod, Israel. Tag Meir is a social justice organization formed in response to the Tag Mechir, Price Tag, movement, which seeks to exact a price against anyone, Palestinians or Israeli soldiers, who take any actions seen as against the Jewish west bank settlements. The court was hearing an argument in the case of the two Hilltop Youth (radical children of the settlement movement) accused in the arson murders of the Dawabsha family in Duma, a west bank Palestinian village, in 2015. That day the judge was to decide if the younger defendant, who was 16 at the time of the murders three years prior, should be released from detention to house arrest because of his juvenile status. The Dawabsha grandfather, Hussein, was arriving at the courthouse where he has been in steady attendance to see justice done in the murders of his daughter, son-in-law and grandson. Members of the Hilltop Youth congregate outside the courthouse regularly to harass and disparage Hussein as well as his children’s memory.
Gadi Gvaryahu, an Israeli Orthodox Jew and the founder and driving force of Tag Meir, has established a supportive and close relationship with the Dawabsha grandfather, and that day he gathered a group to surround and give encouragement to Hussein as he made the perilous journey past his harrassers and into the court building. The four Hilltop youth who arrived to harass him clicked on cigarette lighters in his presence and laughed about the burning of his grandson. Before and after Hussein’s arrival the young harrassers shouted incitements at our group of 30-40 supporters. Gadi repeatedly implored us not to respond, and most of our group resisted the urge. We sang songs of peace as we waited a couple of hours for the day’s hearing to end so we could escort the grandfather from the building. Passers-by occasionally became aware of the confrontation and joined the youths in screaming invectives at our peaceful group. They shouted, “Are you Jews? You’re not Jews! You’re traitors. (בוגדים)
Shortly before the judicial decision was handed down in favor of the younger defendant and Hussein Dawabsha exited the building, a youngish man with a pronounced limp came down the street pushing a baby in a stroller. He approached from behind our group and stopped only a few feet away from where I was standing. He calmly surveyed our group. We were handing out Tag Meir signs and stickers (סור מרע ועשה טוב) (“turn from evil and do good”) as supporters joined us, and I momentarily considered offering him these items, but something in his serene demeanor gave me pause. After a couple minutes of dispassionate assessment of our group, he walked towards the hilltop youth. A police officer, part of a group that had set up barriers and stood between the two factions, ran toward the man, smiling and reaching out to shake his hand. The man spoke earnestly with the police officer, the youths, an older, rabbinic-seeming man who had joined them, and some passers-by who had remained with them.
That night, after I returned to my son and daughter-in-law’s home in the south of Israel, (I am visiting from the States), I went on my computer and figured out that the man with the stroller was MK Bezalel Smotrich. He is a member of Tkuma and on the slate for the Jewish Home (הבית היהודי) party. The policies he supports include the segregation of Arabs and Jews within Israel for both housing and hospitals, a shoot to kill policy for the IDF against Palestinian children throwing stones, and that the arson murders in Duma, and other Price Tag crimes, should not be considered terrorism.
These two uniquely different experiences, one in Germany and one in Israel, raised similar questions and emotions for me, questions and emotions around how we judge others, how we assess good and bad, right and wrong. These experiences raise questions for me about group identification and shared values, of where I belong, where my values come from. I am shaken by the complicated relationship between good and evil, between history and the present:
- A German woman in her doorway yelling, judging those who would mark her home as a Holocaust crime scene.
- A German woman crying for a Jewish family she did not know, bearing the guilt of her ancestors who turned a blind eye as neighbors were deported.
- A young German woman who, after leaving Germany for several years and refusing to acknowledge her own nationality, returns to her country and volunteers countless hours to researching the story of a Jewish family she does not know and making their story a stumbling stone for other Germans.
- A Jewish Israeli who leaves his career in science to dedicate himself to pursuing small acts of reconciliation between Arab Israelis, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.
- A Jewish prosecutor who runs from the courthouse to grasp a grieving Moslem grandfather’s hand and apologize to him, expressing his embarrassment over the court’s decision.
- A Jewish Israeli woman who sees a peaceful demonstration and curses the demonstrators, demanding they side with their ethnic group no matter what evils members of the group perpetrate.
- A young religious Jewish politician who, two generations after the genocide of his people, promotes policies of hate, of us and them, of group superiority.
- Jewish teenagers with long peyot, large kipot, and tefillin wrapped on their heads and arms who cannot recognize the humanity of the “other”.
- An MK from Meretz (a leftist Israeli political party) who stands with Tag Meir.
- A motley group that gathers outside a courthouse in solidarity with a grieving grandfather and earnestly chants, “כל אדם הוא אדם, ואין הבדל בין דם לדם.” “Every person is a person, and there is no difference between blood and blood.”
My moral compass is quivering; the poles, it seems, are shifting.