Judaism does equal Israel

Editorial

Already this year, British Columbians have been treated to Norman Finkelstein and Ben White. Now, Marc Ellis, a professor of Jewish studies at Baylor University, will present at Simon Fraser University Harbor Centre on the topic Does Judaism Equal Israel?

A few spoiler alerts: Ellis’ just-published book is titled Judaism Does Not Equal Israel; among the sponsors of the Nov. 21 event are Independent Jewish Voices, Jews for a Just Peace and the Canada-Palestine Support Network; Ellis’ fans include Finkelstein, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the late Edward Said and Noam Chomsky; Judaism Does Not Equal Israel (New Press) is part of a series that includes books on evangelicals and Catholicism; on Israel, New Press has also published Against the Wall: Israel’s Barrier to Peace and The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.

Most of us will likely choose to do something else Saturday night and there will be little or no response from Israel advocacy groups. Ellis likely will have a mainly non-Jewish audience, well-meaning people who want to do what’s right. They will hear Ellis’ arguments and go home with negative views of Israelis and Jews, wondering how Jews can claim Israel as their homeland.

What those of us who love Israel should be doing is some research. We should be attending such talks and asking pointed questions – then at least some attendees might return home questioning the veracity of anti-Zionists’ claims. And it is so easy to demonstrate the weakness of Ellis’ – and other anti-Zionists’ – logic. A few examples should suffice, beginning with how his worldview is shaped by Christianity.

Ellis earned his PhD from Marquette University, a Jesuit institution. He then worked at the Maryknoll School of Theology, which has Catholic roots. Now he’s at Baylor, a Baptist university. Several of Ellis’ books have been published by Fortress Press, “the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.” And, according to Ellis’ bio, “he became deeply interested in Christian liberation theology” early in his career. While there are Jews who talk about Jewish liberation theology, liberation theology is strongly rooted in the Christian tradition and Jesus (the death of whom is still blamed on Jews by some Christians). In it, Jewish history, such as the Exodus from Egypt, is co-opted. And, as Rabbi Eugene Korn noted in a Jewish Exponent article, “Of course, when Jews are erased from the Bible, they forfeit any right to their historic homeland.”

As for Jews’ place in modern-day Israel, Ellis compares Jews’ political power to fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion and the transformation of the Roman Empire to Christianity, i.e. religion as the means by which a state retains and enforces its power.

In a 2001 speech, and repeatedly elsewhere, Ellis states, “That we as Jews have formed a Constantinian Judaism, where the energies of our leaders in the religious, social and political arenas are bent toward the justification of privilege and power, is ironic for a variety of reasons, not least of which is our recent survival of Constantinian Christianity in the death camps of Nazi Europe.”

In the same speech, Ellis claims, “It was our inability to confront the expanding state of Israel and the use of the Holocaust as a sign of our victimhood, paradoxically of our arrival as an empowered and innocent and affluent community, that trivialized the event that defines the past century.”

For such reasons, he argues, “For Jews of conscience, then, Christianity and Judaism ... are blurring into an interchangeable force that seeks to quell the pangs of conscience and to censor the articulate prophetic speech, that is, the very heart of Jewish identity.” He concludes, “That is why Jews of conscience have been and will continue to leave the Jewish community.... My own sense is that these exiles carry the covenant with them, and this perhaps is the last exile in Jewish history, at least as we have known and inherited it.”

Ellis quotes Isaiah a lot – perhaps because many Christians believe he prophesized Jesus as the Messiah – but he doesn’t dwell on Isaiah’s prophecy that, while the people of Israel would be exiled, God would eventually bring the exiles back to their homeland. Ellis overlooks Jeremiah’s prophecy that Jews would survive Babylonian rule and return home and Ezekiel’s message that God would gather the exiles of Israel and restore them to their land. He doesn’t talk much about Moses, the greatest prophet of all time, who led the Jews out of Egypt and to the land of Israel. And the fact that the modern state of Israel doesn’t come close to the size of what is biblically ordained doesn’t come up much in Ellis’ writings.

At this point, the small group of Jews looking forward to Ellis’ talk are thinking that Ellis doesn’t really mean Judaism doesn’t equal Israel, but rather that Judaism doesn’t equal Israeli government policy. If this is the case, why the book title? Because one can’t be a modern-day prophet unless one gets thrown out of the “club”? The irony is that it probably wasn’t a big step for Ellis, with his strong identification with Christianity, to reject the “mainstream” Jewish community – the same community that, in opinion polls, has consistently favored by a majority a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. So against whom exactly is Ellis railing? Or perhaps, the better question is to which audience is he catering?

Most of the arguments seem to stem from the assumption that Diaspora Jews cannot acknowledge that Israeli governments sometimes make bad decisions, but how is it that Ellis’ “prophetic” Jews (of which he is one, of course) can see no good decisions? In his copious works, why is one hard-pressed to find any mention of Israelis being murdered by suicide bombers or terrorized by rockets and Iranian nuclear capability? How can Ellis exploit the Holocaust as he does, while accusing Zionists of the same sin? Does he truly believe that Jews, of all the peoples in the world, do not deserve self-determination? Why does he believe that his Christianity-based theology of Judaism is more legitimate than Judaism from within? How does he reconcile his prophetic tradition with the actual prophets of the Torah?

Ellis’ talk offers the opportunity for reasonable people to civilly confront those who bring messages of hatred and misrepresentation to this city. We must start “taking it to the streets,” so to speak – not to prevent someone else’s free speech, but to exercise our own. We must defend that which is dear to our heart and essential to our being: Judaism and Israel.

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