By Nicole Martin
Jewish peoplehood: if we are one nation, then certainly it is appropriate to distinguish between members of our nation and everybody else, and certainly it is appropriate to favor members of our nation over, well, everybody else. In the diaspora this tends to go over pretty easily because we're a (historically oppressed) minority, which is why Jewish pride is a lot more socially acceptable than white pride, and why it's not weird to run a secular Jewish youth movement in the same way that it might be weird to run a secular Protestant youth movement. I start to get uncomfortable when our Jewish charities serve only the Jewish poor, especially when the need seems to be greater elsewhere; and, well, I can't be the only person who felt a bit weird in high school for claiming volunteer hours for teaching Hebrew school, rather than, say, working at a soup kitchen.
In Israel things get more complicated. Part of being an (oppressive [?]) majority is that even a little bit of ethnic pride can start to seem like quite a lot, at least in the eyes of one progressive American, and if the commandment to love your neighbor very specifically does not apply to a huge ethnic minority, if people who would never suffer a negative word about (Jewish) immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia have plenty of nasty things to say about the Arabs, the Bedouin, the thousands of undocumented immigrants from Sudan and Eritrea--that can be bad. And it's bad, especially, because it seems very nearly justified by the Torah, by all those pretty verses in this parasha and others about how important it is to be nice to Jews.
This isn't the note I wanted to end on. I don't especially want to rehash every peula ever about how Judaism can possibly coexist with democracy, how our loyalty to the Jewish people relates with our moral obligations as human beings. And I don't give myself any credit for writing this critically about the Torah in a forum like this one--it takes a lot more creativity, in my opinion, to recognize the value in traditional texts like the Torah than to write them off as
racist and unsuited to our era. But I can't help it: an obligation to love and look out for other Jews, but not human beings in general, is one that I find deeply troubling. And I don't have much of a resolution: most of what I know of Jewish culture, from the Torah to Labor Zionism, ranges from mildly to incredibly ethnocentric and nationalistic, and in many, many instances it challenges my basic conviction--which I think many of you share--that all human life is of immeasurable value, and that placing one person or nation before another is something that can be done only with the greatest care.
If you know of a better one, let me know, because it's really bothering me, but the best resolution I can think of goes back to the very beginning of the whole story: a single God, acting, we trust, out of infinite love and compassion, creates a single ancestor for all of humanity--for all of humanity as equals, with no distinctions between more and lesser loved.