Migration, Passover and promises
My maternal grandfather, Moses Ifland, migrated with his wife, Katya, from Odesa eastward across Russia to Harbin, China, in the early 1900s — my mother was born in Harbin in 1912 — on the way to the unknown, unpromised land of Seattle a few years later. My paternal grandfather, Sam Kessler, also crossed Asia from Odesa and landed in Seattle about a decade before Moses and sent for his wife, Emma. My father was born in Seattle in 1908.
So I am descended on both sides from refugees fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe via epic migrations of thousands of miles in hopes of finding a better life in foreign places far beyond the horizon. I think these migrant ancestors would be happy to know that their grandson knows so few details of their ordeals and that I'm a natural-born multicultural secular Jewish Californian.
Neither of my grandfathers was religiously observant — Moses used to say, “If I want to talk to God I can go outside” — so I doubt they saw their journeys as biblical; they were too busy trying to survive and just keep going. But from the comfort of where I'm sitting a century later, especially as Passover approaches, I see their experience in an almost biblical light.
The Bible is a mixture of history, legend and myth written by human authors. Read as literature by secular scholars it is just as infinitely subject to interpretation as the Talmud is to the ultra-Orthodox. A sacred text to some is to others a work of imagination. One person's promised land may be another's catastrophe, colonial outpost or imaginary ideal. That's why people of diverse beliefs and predispositions, yet certain of their religious or ideological righteousness, seem to lose their minds at the mention of the word Israel.
You knew I'd get around to Israel in an essay with Passover in the headline. I'm one of those liberal Jews, like many Israelis before Oct. 7, who believes that Israel has a right to exist and also that Palestinians have a right to their own state. Neither side's leaders in the current Hamas-Israel war believes both of those things. And anyone who refuses to reduce the Israel/Palestine conundrum to a simple binary choice — “You're either with us or with the terrorists,” in George W. Bush's memorable post-9/11 pronouncement — especially any Jew who voices legitimate doubts about the wisdom or morality of Israel's retaliatory devastation of Gaza and mass murder of its civilians, can expect to be called an anti-Zionist, an antisemite or, worse yet, a “self-hating Jew.”
Those kinds of bad-faith accusations are the cheapest way to try to shut people up when the accuser has no rational argument to offer. But I know from Exodus that when Moses was leading the Hebrews across the desert for 40 years in their escape from slavery in Egypt, his impatient, ill-tempered, unruly tribe, when they weren't giving their leader a hard time, were kvetching among themselves. Why should our contemporaries be any different? The Zen koan (rhymes with Cohen) “Two Jews, four opinions” applies to both ancient Jews and their modern descendants.
Antisemitism is real — my grandparents knew that, and so do I — and so is the fact that Israel's right-wing regime is perpetrating crimes in Gaza that nonpartisan aid organizations and scholars of modern war haven't seen before at this scale, and this cruel overkill inflames even more antisemitism everywhere, just as it will create at least as many terrorists as it kills in Netanyahu's deluded crusade to eradicate Hamas.
I and others like me (we are many, but few speak up for fear of the backlash) are neither antisemitic, anti-Zionist, self-hating or otherwise disqualified from having an opinion about moral questions whose answers are not holy writ. To interrogate doctrinaire orthodoxies, religious or political, is part of my job description. I am fortified by my ancestors' courage in making their exodus from an unsustainable situation into the unknown.
No land, or anything else, is promised to anyone.