Originally broadcast July 23, 2010

KATE SEELYE (correspondent): In a church in the Iraqi village of Qaraqosh, a priest prepares for a communal baptism. With a splash of water, he welcomes these infants into the Christian faith.

It’s a challenging time for Iraq’s Christians. Since the 2003 American invasion, the Christian community has been threatened and persecuted. Everyone is a target, including Father Mazen Ishou Mitoka. His church in the city of Mosul has been bombed three times. He himself was kidnapped and held for nine days. But the real horror took place last February when his parents responded to a knock at their Mosul home.

FATHER MAZEN ISHOU MITOKA: My father opened the door and saw three armed people. They entered the house and my brother tried to resist them but he had no weapons. We don’t keep weapons at home.

SEELYE: The intruders asked for an identity card to confirm that the family was Christian. They then shot and killed the priest’s father and two brothers. Father Mazin says the killings make no sense to him.

MITOKA: Are they political or sectarian? Is this part of some plan to get rid of the Christians? There is always a question mark. Nobody claims the assassinations.

SEELYE: Iraq’s Christians are one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Most belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church. Others are Assyrian, affiliated with the Church of the East, or Syriac Orthodox. While they all speak Arabic, their native tongue is Aramaic, the language of Christ. At the time of Saddam’s overthrow, there were estimated to be up to one million Christians in Iraq. Today their numbers have diminished by more than a third as Christians have fled a wave of violence, unleashed by the US invasion.

Siham and Linda Basheer are widows. Their husbands, a father and son, were killed in 2008. The men were shot within two weeks of each other in Mosul by unidentified gunmen. The widows blame the violence on growing Muslim extremism and intolerance, which they say didn’t exist before the US invasion.

LINDA BASHEER: During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan we sent food and well wishes to the Muslims. Muslims visited Christians, Christians visited Muslims. We all got along. But after the collapse of Saddam, everything changed.

SEELYE: In the past, they say, Iraq’s Christians were an accepted and integral part of Iraqi society. Their contributions were significant, adds Basile Georges Casmoussa, the Syriac Archbishop of Mosul.

BASILE GEORGES CASMOUSSA: In the 1950s, the dozens of doctors in Mosul were all Christian. Christians opened the first schools, the first publishing house, the first theater, the first hospital.

SEELYE: Most importantly, he adds, Christians were secure and protected under Saddam Hussein’s government, but the arrival of American troops put the community in a difficult position, adds Casmoussa.

CASMOUSSA: The Christians suffered from the advent of the Americans because our Muslim brothers assumed that because they were Christians and we were Christians, we must be allies. So we had to defend ourselves against that.

SEELYE: Christians were not a part of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam, unlike most Kurds and Shia Muslims. But once he was overthrown, many Christians took jobs with the American army. As law and order dissolved in the new Iraq, extremists filled the void. They accused Christians of being traitors, attacking their churches and businesses, and demanded that they convert to Islam. Without a militia to protect them, Iraq’s Christian community started to flee.

Some came here, to this largely Christian village of Qaraqosh, where security is tight. Qaraqosh is located in the Nineveh Plains, just north of Mosul in the northern part of Iraq.

Because it’s so secure, Qaraqosh has largely been spared the violence plaguing big cities like Mosul and Baghdad. Since 2005, nearly ten thousand Christians have fled here. This hastily erected compound houses hundreds of refugees, like the Basheers, who say they are just scraping by.

BASHEER: The government has never given us anything but there are a few humanitarian organizations which sometimes give us food, clothes and money.

SEELYE: But the vast majority of Christians refugees have fled Iraq altogether and are living in neighboring countries like Jordan and Syria.

Christian leaders here are now debating how to keep the remaining members of their community from leaving. Some hope a new election law giving Christians a minimum of five seats in Iraq’s parliament will increase their influence. Other leaders have been talking about establishing a so-called “safe zone” for Christians in the Nineveh Plains. But Lois Marcos, a local council member in Qaraqosh, says it’s a bad idea.

LOIS MARCOS: An autonomous zone would be a risky solution for the Christians because many other groups oppose it and if the Christians bring this issue up again there will be more threats and killings and migrations.

SEELYE: Instead, Marcos says, he would welcome U.S and foreign aid to create jobs here, as well as to establish local police units, manned by Christians. He says better local security is critical, especially given a growing dispute in the Nineveh Plains between Arabs and Kurds, a separate ethnic group.

Marcos says the Kurds, who run a semi-autonomous region to the north, lay claim to parts of Nineveh, even though its under the jurisdiction of Iraq’s central government.

MARCOS: We live in an area that is disputed. We have our brothers the Kurds to the north, and to the south, our brothers the Arabs. In Nineveh, we are stuck in the middle, caught between a rock and a hard place.

SEELYE: Mayor Bassem Bello is from another Christian village in the Nineveh Plains. He says the American army has served as a buffer between feuding Arab and Kurdish forces, but now, he fears, Christians will suffer even more after US forces start to leave Iraq at the end of the summer.

BASSEM BELLO: There is an Arab-Kurd conflict that exists in Iraq, nobody admits it. We minorities will be the victims of this conflict and this area will be a war zone.

SEELYE: Lawyer Hani Andrews says given all the pressures his community faces, Christians see no future for themselves in Iraq.

HANI ANDREWS: Every Assyrian Christian single man or woman wants to leave the country, if they get this chance, yes in general. If now, for example, if the United States administration declares that we are ready to give visas, U.S. visas to go to the United States for Christians in Iraq, I think at least 80 percent of what we have left of our population will leave the country to the United States.

SEELYE: And what will that mean for the Christian community?

ANDREWS: We are persecuted. We are, we have been killed every day.

SEELYE: But what will that mean for the numbers of Christians in Iraq? Will there be any Christians left?

ANDERWS: No, of course. The population is rapidly decreasing. Most of them want to flee.

SEELYE: Hani adds that the disappearance of Iraq’s Christians would not be unprecedented. He points to neighboring Turkey, where a once flourishing Christian community is now virtually nonexistent. He says Christians in places like Egypt and Palestine are also leaving due to political pressures.

ANDREWS: If these superpowers will stay ignoring what happening in the Middle East, I think maybe in the next 50 or 70 years the Middle East will be empty from Christianity.

SEELYE: For Iraq’s Christian community, which traces its roots as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, it’s a bitter prospect. But the only real guarantee for its safety is a secure, stable, and democratic Iraq. With Baghdad’s politicians still fighting over forming a new government and American troops soon scheduled to leave, a stable Iraq seems to many Christians like a dream.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Kate Seelye in Iraq.

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KATE SEELYE (correspondent): In a church in the Iraqi village of Qaraqosh, a priest prepares for a communal baptism. With a splash of water, he welcomes these infants into the Christian faith.

It’s a challenging time for Iraq’s Christians. Since the 2003 American invasion, the Christian community has been threatened and persecuted. Everyone is a target, including Father Mazen Ishou Mitoka. His church in the city of Mosul has been bombed three times. He himself was kidnapped and held for nine days. But the real horror took place last February when his parents responded to a knock at their Mosul home.

FATHER MAZEN ISHOU MITOKA: My father opened the door and saw three armed people. They entered the house and my brother tried to resist them but he had no weapons. We don’t keep weapons at home.

SEELYE: The intruders asked for an identity card to confirm that the family was Christian. They then shot and killed the priest’s father and two brothers. Father Mazin says the killings make no sense to him.

MITOKA: Are they political or sectarian? Is this part of some plan to get rid of the Christians? There is always a question mark. Nobody claims the assassinations.

SEELYE: Iraq’s Christians are one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Most belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church. Others are Assyrian, affiliated with the Church of the East, or Syriac Orthodox. While they all speak Arabic, their native tongue is Aramaic, the language of Christ. At the time of Saddam’s overthrow, there were estimated to be up to one million Christians in Iraq. Today their numbers have diminished by more than a third as Christians have fled a wave of violence, unleashed by the US invasion.

Siham and Linda Basheer are widows. Their husbands, a father and son, were killed in 2008. The men were shot within two weeks of each other in Mosul by unidentified gunmen. The widows blame the violence on growing Muslim extremism and intolerance, which they say didn’t exist before the US invasion.

LINDA BASHEER: During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan we sent food and well wishes to the Muslims. Muslims visited Christians, Christians visited Muslims. We all got along. But after the collapse of Saddam, everything changed.

SEELYE: In the past, they say, Iraq’s Christians were an accepted and integral part of Iraqi society. Their contributions were significant, adds Basile Georges Casmoussa, the Syriac Archbishop of Mosul.

BASILE GEORGES CASMOUSSA: In the 1950s, the dozens of doctors in Mosul were all Christian. Christians opened the first schools, the first publishing house, the first theater, the first hospital.

SEELYE: Most importantly, he adds, Christians were secure and protected under Saddam Hussein’s government, but the arrival of American troops put the community in a difficult position, adds Casmoussa.

CASMOUSSA: The Christians suffered from the advent of the Americans because our Muslim brothers assumed that because they were Christians and we were Christians, we must be allies. So we had to defend ourselves against that.

SEELYE: Christians were not a part of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam, unlike most Kurds and Shia Muslims. But once he was overthrown, many Christians took jobs with the American army. As law and order dissolved in the new Iraq, extremists filled the void. They accused Christians of being traitors, attacking their churches and businesses, and demanded that they convert to Islam. Without a militia to protect them, Iraq’s Christian community started to flee.

Some came here, to this largely Christian village of Qaraqosh, where security is tight. Qaraqosh is located in the Nineveh Plains, just north of Mosul in the northern part of Iraq.

Because it’s so secure, Qaraqosh has largely been spared the violence plaguing big cities like Mosul and Baghdad. Since 2005, nearly ten thousand Christians have fled here. This hastily erected compound houses hundreds of refugees, like the Basheers, who say they are just scraping by.

BASHEER: The government has never given us anything but there are a few humanitarian organizations which sometimes give us food, clothes and money.

SEELYE: But the vast majority of Christians refugees have fled Iraq altogether and are living in neighboring countries like Jordan and Syria.

Christian leaders here are now debating how to keep the remaining members of their community from leaving. Some hope a new election law giving Christians a minimum of five seats in Iraq’s parliament will increase their influence. Other leaders have been talking about establishing a so-called “safe zone” for Christians in the Nineveh Plains. But Lois Marcos, a local council member in Qaraqosh, says it’s a bad idea.

LOIS MARCOS: An autonomous zone would be a risky solution for the Christians because many other groups oppose it and if the Christians bring this issue up again there will be more threats and killings and migrations.

SEELYE: Instead, Marcos says, he would welcome U.S and foreign aid to create jobs here, as well as to establish local police units, manned by Christians. He says better local security is critical, especially given a growing dispute in the Nineveh Plains between Arabs and Kurds, a separate ethnic group.

Marcos says the Kurds, who run a semi-autonomous region to the north, lay claim to parts of Nineveh, even though its under the jurisdiction of Iraq’s central government.

MARCOS: We live in an area that is disputed. We have our brothers the Kurds to the north, and to the south, our brothers the Arabs. In Nineveh, we are stuck in the middle, caught between a rock and a hard place.

SEELYE: Mayor Bassem Bello is from another Christian village in the Nineveh Plains. He says the American army has served as a buffer between feuding Arab and Kurdish forces, but now, he fears, Christians will suffer even more after US forces start to leave Iraq at the end of the summer.

BASSEM BELLO: There is an Arab-Kurd conflict that exists in Iraq, nobody admits it. We minorities will be the victims of this conflict and this area will be a war zone.

SEELYE: Lawyer Hani Andrews says given all the pressures his community faces, Christians see no future for themselves in Iraq.

HANI ANDREWS: Every Assyrian Christian single man or woman wants to leave the country, if they get this chance, yes in general. If now, for example, if the United States administration declares that we are ready to give visas, U.S. visas to go to the United States for Christians in Iraq, I think at least 80 percent of what we have left of our population will leave the country to the United States.

SEELYE: And what will that mean for the Christian community?

ANDREWS: We are persecuted. We are, we have been killed every day.

SEELYE: But what will that mean for the numbers of Christians in Iraq? Will there be any Christians left?

ANDERWS: No, of course. The population is rapidly decreasing. Most of them want to flee.

SEELYE: Hani adds that the disappearance of Iraq’s Christians would not be unprecedented. He points to neighboring Turkey, where a once flourishing Christian community is now virtually nonexistent. He says Christians in places like Egypt and Palestine are also leaving due to political pressures.

ANDREWS: If these superpowers will stay ignoring what happening in the Middle East, I think maybe in the next 50 or 70 years the Middle East will be empty from Christianity.

SEELYE: For Iraq’s Christian community, which traces its roots as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, it’s a bitter prospect. But the only real guarantee for its safety is a secure, stable, and democratic Iraq. With Baghdad’s politicians still fighting over forming a new government and American troops soon scheduled to leave, a stable Iraq seems to many Christians like a dream.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Kate Seelye in Iraq.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: The church is carved out of El Mokattam or the mountain, a giant bluff just outside Cairo. Egypt’s Coptic Church is one of Christianity’s earliest, brought here by Mark, writer of the oldest New Testament gospel. The liturgy closely resembles those seen in other Eastern Orthodox churches, though the Copts’ leader, or pope, has always been based in Egypt. This church was actually built in the 1990s, a tribute to its ancient heritage, modern engineering, and the affluence of some in Egypt’s Coptic minority. But that wealth is in small pockets of Egypt’s upper class and a Copt diaspora in rich countries. Most of Egypt’s Copts live in poverty, sometimes dire poverty. Surrounding this church is one of Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods called Medina Zabaleen, literally “Trash City.” For decades, the zabaleen, or trash collectors, have gone door to door and hauled home what the people of Cairo threw away. They aren’t paid for this. Their entire income comes from recycling. They’ve been uprooted repeatedly as the city has grown and, activist Laila Iskander says, only grudgingly tolerated.

LAILA ISKANDER: The government realized, well, if we evict these people from here and tell them to vanish, who’s going to service the city? So there was always this recognition that these people were important, but we don’t like them. Five evictions later, into the ’70s, they figured there’s going to be a sixth eviction, it’s too easy, and the city will grow and catch up with us. Let’s go into the belly of the mountain, this limestone rock here, and they did that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Copts make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s population, and many say Zabaleen City is a metaphor for their struggle in this predominantly Muslim country, a struggle to preserve traditions and livelihoods, both of which, they say are imperiled by Egypt’s growing religious conservatism and by government policies. In 2009, the Egyptian government, responding to the swine flu epidemic, ordered all pigs killed in the country. Some 300,000 of the animals were culled. Pigs are considered unclean in Islam, but the Christian Zabaleen were suddenly deprived of a source of both income and protein, and health experts agree the animals were never a flu threat.

ALAA AL ASWANY: I don’t think the decision was anti-Christian. I think the decision was just another example of the incompetence of the government.

DE SAM LAZARO: Author and democracy activist Alaa Al Aswany also blames poor governance for Egypt’s persistent poverty. He says the resulting frustration has often fueled sectarian tension, and beginning in the 1970s so has a steady rise in the Wahabi brand of religious conservatism, imported and financed from Saudi Arabia.

ASWANY: You have, for example, in Egypt more than 17 TV channels every day promoting the Wahabi ideas, and this way of understanding the religion is very exclusive in the sense that they are against anybody who is different. They are against Shia, people of Iran. They are against even Muslims who are for democracy, like myself, accusing me of being secular, against the religion. They are against Jews, of course. They are against Christians. They are against everybody who is not with them.

DE SAM LAZARO: Egyptians who grew up in the 50s and 60s see the growing influence of Wahabism. Most Egyptian women cover their hair today, and growing numbers don the niqab, covering all but their eyes. It’s evident even in cemeteries like this one, where you can see disagreement over allowing inscriptions on tombstones.

AHMED THARWAT (reading inscription): This is “the most merciful” whatever, and then somebody says we’re not supposed to do that, he wipes it, and you actually see the culture clashing in print, right before your eyes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ahmed Tharwat has lived in Minnesota for 25 years, where he hosts a TV show for the region’s Arab-American community. He recently visited the Nile Delta village where he lived in as a young man.

THARWAT: This is all Muslims, this all, as you can see, all Muslim in this section.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says one Christian family lived in the village. But there was no Christian cemetery nearby, so they’re buried alongside Muslim neighbors. This departure from custom prompted some debate, but it was resolved by community leaders.

THARWAT: I remember when the neighbor, my uncle said he didn’t hurt us when he was alive, why would he hurt us when he dies? And I think it really sums up the whole story.

DE SAM LAZARO: But some say that kind of acceptance has given way to much more awareness of a religious divide—and tension.

PROFESSOR REFAT LAKOUSHA (Alexandria University, speaking through translator): You will always find a religious interpretation of any conflict between Coptics and Muslims because we live in an era of tension between the religions that I’ve never seen registered at this level, and that’s why in any conflicts between Muslims and Coptics, in the subway or the market, it will always end up being taken in the religious context.

DE SAM LAZARO: The most violent recent example occurred in southern Egypt outside a Coptic church on the Orthodox Christmas Day. Six worshippers and a Muslim security were gunned down. The killings were apparently retaliation for the alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man. There were riots and clashes with police during the funerals.

ASWANY: This intolerance has been existing in the society because of the Wahabi people, but also it has been transmitted as an infection to the other side, so you have also some Coptic fanatics, and you have also Coptic channels who are trying to make the point that the religion of Islam is a whole bunch of nonsense.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the end, religious leaders from both communities tried to bring calm after the Christmas shootings. Copts and Muslims have lived side by side for centuries, with occasional spasms of sectarian violence. The key question is: are things different this time? Will the current tension escalate into an enduring religious conflict?  Author Aswany thinks it’s not in the Egyptian character.

ASWANY: It could be repeated, but I don’t think this is an opening of an era of killing in Egypt, because as I said, the Egyptian culture, which is very old and very civilized, will never tolerate it. So we have had before, you see—probably this is one positive aspect to be belonging to a country which has been existing for 60 centuries, 6000 years, because everything you are having now you will discover that it happened before many times.

REZK YOUSIF (speaking through translator): Our problem is not with the average Muslim. Our problem is with the extremist and the Wahabi thinking about Islam. That’s where most of the problem is. Average Muslim—no problem.

MANSOUR KHADDIS (speaking through translator): And we wish the government and society in general would recognize that we are a vibrant community, not just “the trash people.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Back in Medina Zabaleen, church elders say they can only hope the historic tolerance prevails in Egypt, a society that may not have fully embraced the Copts, but one that nonetheless recognized their citizenship as one of Egypt’s ancient, original people.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred De Sam Lazaro in Cairo, Egypt.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: This is not something you might expect at the historic 6th & I Synagogue in Washington, DC—a full-out reggae jam session. But Matisyahu, the Hasidic Jewish musician, is anything but expected.

Matthew Miller, better known by his Hebrew stage name Matisyahu, burst onto the music scene in 2004 as something of a novelty: an observant Orthodox Jew who sang reggae songs about his faith. But now, with a Grammy nomination and two gold albums, Matisyahu has earned critical acclaim as well. He says his music is a reflection of his spirituality.

MATISYAHU: My life is not separate from my music, you know? It’s not like a day job that I leave and go home. It’s who I am as a person and how I am trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person.

LAWTON: The 30-year-old Matisyahu’s spiritual journey has evolved dramatically. He was raised in New York in a largely secular Jewish family. He says his first real interaction with spirituality came through the music of Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley.

MATISYAHU: Hearing all the references to the Old Testament and to Judaism in the context of reggae music. Why is Bob Marley singing, taking all these quotes from the Psalms? I know that I’m Jewish. I know I have some kind of connection with that, Psalms and Old Testament, and it made me intrigued to start to get interested in my heritage.

Click above to listen to Matisyahu’s “7 Beggars”

LAWTON: He went on a study trip to Israel when he was in high school, which further piqued his interest in his Jewish heritage.

MATISYAHU: You grew up with one strain of Judaism, and then you see all around you so many different types of Jews relating to Judaism in different ways. But Judaism is at the core of it all.

LAWTON: But he was also interested in rock music and the drugs that can go with that scene. He says from the time he was 16 until he was 22, he pursued what he considered the transcendent, almost spiritual experience of being high.

MATISYAHU: I got to a certain point I think where I felt very stuck and very like unable to get to that place, you know, to get back to that experience, and I knew that it had to be done without any crutch or any substances and drugs or anything like that. I really felt that the way to do it was to really delve into my spiritual tradition.

LAWTON: He discovered Shlomo Carlebach, the so-called “Singing Rabbi,” who incorporated music with Orthodox Jewish beliefs, and he got involved with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.  Not only got involved, he says, but jumped into it full force.

MATISYAHU: And I got really excited about being Jewish, you know? I started wearing a yarmulke, and I loved like all of a sudden the fact that I had this identity.

LAWTON: Matisyahu moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the Chabad-Lubavitch movement is headquartered, and he entered a yeshiva, where he spent his weekdays in intensive study of the Torah. He says he was inspired by the beauty he found in the text.

MATISYAHU: All of my creativity was kind of like festering and bubbling, and then on Friday I would go and I would just basically take one of those lines, one of those ideas, and try to develop a song around it, with a vision.

LAWTON: Matisyahu began performing those songs and became a sensation—the reggae singer with the Orthodox black hat and coat. The religious themes in his lyrics were numerous and overt. His Top 40 hit, “King without a Crown,” incorporates Chabad’s belief that the coming of the Messiah—Moshiach—is near. The song’s chorus is explicit: “I want Moshiach now.”

While his music career was taking off, he says he felt increasingly restricted by some of the Chabad beliefs and lifestyle. Matisyahu eventually left Chabad, although he still identifies himself as Hasidic. He says he values much from his time with the movement.

Click above to listen to Matisyahu’s “Temple”

MATISYAHU: It was an interesting experience for me, because in some ways it was very—there was a lot of light. It was very purifying. I really was able to get past a lot of the things that I hadn’t been able to get past before.

LAWTON: But he says it was also a dark experience for him.

MATISYAHU: The line of where you draw when you are trying to kind of lose yourself as to where it’s healthy and where you start to become schizophrenic, or totally lose your mind almost, you know? And I was really walking that line.

LAWTON: He says a Jewish therapist, who became a mentor, friend, and co-writer, helped him start to rethink everything he had taken as ultimate truth.

MATISYAHU:  I began to reevaluate all the decisions I had made and to reemerge, to kind of bring myself back into the picture and make decisions for myself based on what seemed right and what was wrong.

LAWTON: He says his spirituality today is focused not on finding the right answers, but rather on figuring out the right questions. He compares his faith to a romantic relationship.

MATISYAHU: God love-hate relationship, you know? You’ve been through something with somebody, and you have difficulties and problems and you don’t understand each other and you try to work through it. That’s more what my relationship with Judaism developed into versus the first was total blind devotion, just falling in love with it.

LAWTON: Matisyahu no longer performs in the hat and coat of Chabad, but he still wears his yarmulke and the visible tzit tzit, the fringes from his prayer garments. While on tour he continues to keeps kosher and doesn’t perform on the Sabbath. His music is still an outgrowth of his spirituality, but his lyrics are less religiously overt. He put together his new CD, Light, after two years of studying the writings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, an influential 18th-century Hasidic sage. Matisyahu says all the lyrics on the CD are infused with ideas taken from Nachman’s stories. The CD’s theme of light is taken from Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah teaching that when God created the world, he withdrew the light from the center of his being.

MATISYAHU: And then he created this sort of void, or this empty space within, and then the worlds basically exist inside of that empty space, and the light is surrounding it all on the outside. The idea is not to totally get lost in that darkness, but to be rooted in it with the sense that there is, above all of it there is this sort of surrounding light.

LAWTON: Despite the mystical allusions, Matisyahu tries to make his music accessible to a mainstream audience. NBC is featuring his hit single, “One Day,” an anthem of hope and peace, in its ad campaign for the upcoming Winter Olympics.

Matisyahu says music remains a profoundly spiritual experience for him, and that’s what he tries to create for others.

MATISYAHU: I see like the potential to continue to grow so much, to try to create this experience that people can really tap into something authentic, whether it’s a deep place within themselves or whether it’s God or something bigger than themselves.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

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What do you think the appeal is of your music?

It’s good music.

The deeper messages—do you think that makes it rise above in some way?

I think that’s one aspect of it, yeah, yeah. I mean in music there’s content. Then there’s the actual music or the sound, you know, and I think that people listen to music for a variety of reasons. I think the people that listen to my music listen to it for the experience that they have, you know, whatever that is, when listening to the music, and part of that might be the music itself. A part of it might be the lyrics or the content. For me, it’s not really about—it’s hard to decipher between the two. It’s kind of one thing, you know, and I guess in today’s music that you hear a lot today or always, sometimes the lyrics are very shallow and very sort of just kind of filler, you know what I mean? I don’t feel that’s the case, really, with my lyrics, you know. I try to tell a story or I try to bring forth some type of idea or a feeling, you know, through the words and the music.

Do you have an idea or a message or something that you want to put out, or does it just sort of happen organically because it comes from some place deep inside of you that just all comes together?

Yeah, it’s sort of the lyrics that I write are sort of just a reflection of my work that I do, I guess, my spiritual work, you know, emotional, intellectual, or whatever, my inner work, whatever I have going on, what I’m working on, the project that I’m working on, and then that’s what I deal with in my music, because it’s really one thing for me. Like my life is not separate from my music, you know. It’s not like a day job that I leave and go home. It’s my—who I am as a person, and how I’m, you know, trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person, whatever it is, is all totally bound up with music, how I see the world and experience the world, how I put it out there and take it in. It is all kind of one thing.

I’ve asked several other artists from different traditions who are spiritual or religious to describe for me or talk a little bit about this connection between music and spirituality and a relationship with God. How does that work together for you as an artist and a person of faith and spirituality?

Well, I think that listening to music or creating music is a spiritual undertaking, so the process of creating music, you know, involves listening. It involves sensitivity, it involves humility, you know, and then also it’s something which is higher than words. It evokes emotion, and it has the ability to, I think, really transport people someplace. To take people out of—to put people into the moment, you know, I guess, to kind of  cut away distractions and have people experience themselves, you know,  or community, like at a concert, for example, you know, there is a certain energy that’s created, you know, and that doesn’t require even an artist who has a spiritual tendency. You know, at a rock show, there is a certain energy that is created.

Is it heightened if the spiritual dimension is there? It’s almost like a transcendence or something. Does that get heightened if the spiritual enters into the mix?

Yeah, I think it can. It depends. You can have an artist that is spiritually minded but is not a great musician and is unable to create that energy, you know. You have some artists, take an artist, for an example just because he’s the perfect artist for this, like Michael Jackson, you could argue as to whether or not it’s really spiritual music. I mean he had songs that were certainly meaningful and powerful, and he certainly had some type of spiritual impact on anyone that really listened to his music. But I don’t necessarily know if he was coming at it from that place. But when he would perform, just the way he would move through music or sing you could say that that was affecting people. I think that if you have musician; let’s say, here’s an example, like Bob Marley, who is like a great musician and powerful presence and also with a spiritual message, yeah, you have the ability to create something really amazing. And those iconic figures like John Lennon or Bob Dylan or—I don’t know if you would say they were spiritual, but they were certainly infusing their music with so much meaning, you know, so certainly in a sense, yeah.

Let’s talk a little about the CD. You’ll be doing a lot of the songs from the “Light” CD. What were some of the inspirations for you as you were putting that together?

The way the process started for me was I sort of have a friend who is sort of a teacher sort of. He hates to be called a teacher, but I don’t know what else to call him, but a man who we have a lot of conversations, and we study together, and we started out by really delving into a rabbi named Reb Nachman from Breslov Hasidic movement in the 1800s, and he had some very sort of controversial and sort of edgy ideas about God, about spirituality, so we really started by studying his works, and there were two works in particular that became the backdrop for the record. One was a dream that he had, which I don’t know if it has a name, I think it’s just called “The Dream.” He mentioned that it was sort of like all of his teachings, his life were sort of found in that dream, and then the other one was the story of “The Seven Beggars.” Along with some of his teachings he has a safe or a book called Lukutei Torah, and we took that, and there was also some teachings from the Alter Rebbe that we incorporated. Alter Rebbe was the Shnuer Zalman of Liadi, was the first Chabad Rebbe; also around the same time. They were contemporaries and actually had some pretty stark difference of opinion about God and how to serve God, so we began sort of comparing and contrasting and, I guess, that became in a big way the backdrop for the record—a lot of the ideas, you know.

Give me an example, maybe, of how that came to fruition in some of the songs.

Like how it worked exactly?

Like that was the backdrop, but then how did some of those teachings, those ideas about God that you were studying and that that you were thinking and learning about, how did that then get into one of the songs?

So the process was kind of really pretty interesting, actually. It was like basically about a year of us discussing these things and, you know, emails back and forth and questions, and then it became pared down into writings, basically, sort of longer writings, sort of like pages and pages on each idea, you know, and basically “The Seven Beggars,” for example. There’s each beggar really represents another idea in the service of God, and so let’s say we would take one of those beggars, like the blind beggar, and we would start with that idea and then we would sort of have this thing, and then we would pare that down. Ephraim [Rosenstein] would write it down from sort of a pages and pages on it to, like, a very intuitive language, almost like poetry, like very more instinctive, emotional, maybe 15 lines or something like that. And then when I went to write my record I had this packet of ideas with maybe about 20 ideas, each about like anywhere from 10 to 30 lines or so, and I kind of kept it with me wherever I was writing, and then there was this whole backstory of all, you know, all the work we had done leading up to that, and when I would go to write music, whoever I was writing music with we would work on a track, let’s say, and then basically when the track was not complete but on its way, I would sit and listen to it, and then I would kind of read through these ideas and feel like which one felt like the right idea for that music, and then I would start to write lyrics based on  those sort of paragraphs, and sometimes I would take actual words from there, sometimes I would change and develop, because a lot of songs are more wordy, you know,  and that’s kind of how the songs came into play. Also, what we did was, around that time, I started to sort of like I had done some things, like I did the John Lennon compilation for Darfur, and I was involved in a movie that was made about sex trafficking in Asia, and so I started to, like, get this more awareness about child atrocities around the world, child soldiers, sex slaves, and the whole story of “The Seven Beggars” is about two children that are lost in a forest. So, like, you have this idea to try to incorporate more modern-day issues into this fairy tale kind of story. And we wrote this fictional story, sort of like “Remake of the Seven Beggars,” as if it was, like, two child soldiers in Africa, and so there was at the same time also this story about these two children, child soldiers, sort of running through the desert, basically, and how they come into contact with like these different ideas, and so initially the record was going to be like a total like story, and then I kind of decided to pull away from that, but I still used like the backdrop of that story about those children throughout the whole entire record.

Those teachings are infused throughout the all the music, it sounds like.

Yeah.

Talk about the theme of light and how that plays into it for you.

Well, in a nutshell there’s Kabbalah. The Kabbalah talks, Jewish mysticism talks about the creation of the world, and the basic idea is that God when he wanted to create the world withdrew His light from the center of His being. His light is like all being. Everything is consumed within God. So in order for Him to create like the other, He had to sort of pull out His core being, pull like out His light from the center, and then He created this sort of void or this sort of empty space within, and then the world basically exists inside of that empty space. And the light is surrounding it like on the outside, and I find that to be really, really, really—I find it to resonate like very much with like my experience in the world, you know, that in any spirituality basically, Eastern religion or Judaism or any tradition, there’s a feeling of sort of having to get in touch with the empty, withdrawing of the self. In Judaism it is called bittul. It’s sort of roughly translated as humility, but the ability to almost like sacrifice or to eliminate some aspect of yourself in order to make this space, and then the idea is not to totally get lost in that darkness, but to be rooted in it with the sense there is above all of it there is this surrounding light.

One song I wanted to talk about specifically on the CD is the one getting a lot of play on NBC and the Olympics, “One Day.” How did that come about? What do you think about that song becoming an anthem for promoting the Olympics?

It’s really great in the sense that, I mean, there’s—it’s a very sort of simple song, not—it was written after all of sort of—the record came later, and it was just sort of  went into the studio and I didn’t put too much thought into it and just wrote, and there were co-writers also, it wasn’t just myself, but just a basic, sort of, you know,  hopeful song, you know,  just to in some ways naïve, but just tap into that sort of just raw place of hope, I guess, and that is sort of what the Olympics is about to an extent, too—people, countries coming together that have differences, kind of rising above that.

How do you see your music, even the spiritual underpinning of it, evolving?

Well, I would say that when I sort of, the first record that I made, ”Shake Off the Dust,” which became “Live at Stubbs,” because that was a live, pretty much live version of those songs, was made while I was in yeshiva, and I was, you know, not raised religious, and then I went to college, and in my last year of college I became religious and went to move to Brooklyn into like a full religious environment and pretty much spent the days studying Torah for about a year and half. I didn’t leave much, and I was just right there. So the first record I made was pretty much made on Fridays, was like the one day you could leave the yeshiva and you could go, and what people would do was to go into the city, into New York, and find Jews, basically working in businesses or on the street and talk to them about Judaism. Try to get them to do mitzvahs and stuff like that, put on tefillin, light Shabbos candles, that kind of thing. So what I started doing was going to a studio, to a friend of mine’s studio, and that’s when I started working on the record. I had been sort of removed from my creativity, because up until that point all I did really was write lyrics and listen to music. What is that, left brain? Right brain? So anyway when I went to yeshiva I tried really just to be focused and learn Torah and then, you know, when I would learn I would find lines in the Psalms, or in the Tanya, which was the main sort of book in Chabad, the main ideological book, that I found really beautiful or inspiring or—and all of my creativity was kind of festering and bubbling, and then on Friday I would go and I would just  basically take one of those lines, one of those ideas, and try to develop a song around it with a vision, you know. And that’s really how that first record was made. The first song that I made was even before that, before I went to yeshiva, that was the first version of “King Without a Crown,” which was my song that did really well on radio, and that song was prior to all of that, and that was at the time when I was becoming religious, and it was really just about very, sort of, you know, about my experiences up until that point, just basic self-help type, you know, although that’s not a great word to use, but just like my lessons that I have learned, and that song was written in maybe twenty minutes, you know. That’s a lot of words. So like when the track was going I just wrote all of my, you know, I write more like, you know, a rapper would write at that point, the flow was more like writing a rap, you know, writing a rhyme, and so it would just come out in that form, and it was all about basically devotion to God and belief, faith, you know. The new record was more developed, sort of the next stage in my spiritual progression, and therefore it was, you know, more time spent on the ideas. The first one was kind of more like “I love this” or, you know, like that first dating someone for the first time versus like a relationship that’s been developed, God love-hate relationship, you know, you’ve been through something with somebody, and you have difficulties and problems and you don’t understand each other and you try to work through it. That’s more of what my relationship with Judaism developed into versus the first, which was total blind devotion, just falling in love with it.

I want to ask you about that. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about how that spiritual journey has changed, and moving away from Chabad and now where you are with all of that.

Well, basically, you know, like I was raised not very religious, but I went to Hebrew school, with some Jewish identity, and really my first, like, interaction with spirituality I would say was through the music of Bob Marley and hearing all the references to the Old Testament and to Judaism in the context of reggae music and getting high and everything that came along with that. And so that was obviously for me, as a fourteen-year-old, very accessible and very interesting and inspiring to me versus, you know, the typical Hebrew school experience being bland and unrelated to my life as a kid. So that was the first thing. It was like wow, why is Bob Marley singing, taking all these quotes from the Psalms? I know that I’m Jewish, that I have some kind of connection with that, Psalms and Old Testament, and it made me intrigued to start to get interested in my heritage, really, for me, and then along with that I went on this trip to Colorado, and it was like a wilderness trip, and I think for the first time when I was out in the wilderness I felt that feeling of that void space that we were talking about before, that feeling of emptiness, and delving into that and trying to figure out what that was, you know. Then right after that trip I went to Israel, and so in Israel I guess I started to feel an exposure to Judaism beyond the scope of what I had been brought up with or used to seeing, in the sense that seeing, you know, so many different types of Jews, it was sort of like Malcolm X, you saw the Malcolm X movie when he went to wherever it was, Mecca, and he was used to seeing like only one type of Islam. Then he went there and he saw these different people, you know. It’s the same experience for Jews that go to Israel, when you grew up with one strain of Judaism and then you see all around you so many different types of Jews relating to Judaism in different ways, but Judaism is at the core of it all. It’s not like in America, where it’s sort of the afterthought or just some part of, you know, your identity. There it’s alive and very real, and that had an impact on me. So then I came back to America, went back to high school, and that winter I went to a Phish concert for the first time. I had LSD for the first time and totally had just an amazing experience with music and with, you know, experiencing a whole other dimension of life, a core dimension of experience, what things mean really, you know, in so much of a deeper way than I had ever experienced anything. So by that point I realized that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to live like—I don’t want to be normal anymore. I want to go for this experience, and then the next, I guess, time between 16 until the time I was about 22, when I became religious, so about six, seven years became for me all about how to reach those depths, you know, or heights, and whether it could be done through drugs or sobriety or religion or, you know, or being in the wilderness, Israel, whatever it was, I sort of tried to find music. That’s when the journey started for me, and I got to a certain point I think where I felt very stuck and very, like, unable to get to that place, you know, to get back to that experience, and I knew that it had to be done without any crutch, or any substances and drugs or anything like that. So I really felt that the way to do it was to, like, really delve into my spiritual tradition, the heritage, and even though I didn’t know that much about it, just from seeing pictures or, you know, little things that I had read, I realized that there was something to that, and that was a part of me, that whether I would agree with it or not agree with it, it’s something that’s alive in me, it’s like in my DNA, and it’s a part of me, so rather than, I guess, exploring other religions and things, I figured I would start with this, the way that I am and the state of being that I was in at that time, when I was 22 or whatever, or 21. I really jumped into it full-force. The first thing was through Shlomo Carlebach and his music and his shul on the Upper West Side, and I got really excited about being Jewish. I started wearing a yarmulke, and I loved all of a sudden the fact that I had this identity. When I was on the train or walking down the street it felt so amazing to take on feeling of when other people see you it’s a certain thing, not just what you believe, who you are, and also all my life I felt very much on the outside, you know, and being Jewish, it fit in with my experience, you know. Everything kind of fit together.

Shlomo Carlebach

So I really got into that, and then I met a rabbi, a Chabad rabbi who had come from similar experience as me, like Grateful Dead and very young, charismatic, and funny and had gone through all the drugs and stuff, and I saw him in the way he was living, and he had like already two kids. He was living in the Village like doing outreach to basically Jews, to young Jews and stuff, and he was an extremely just fun person, lighthearted person to be around, and I am not that way. I can be—everything to me is, like, you know, so heavy, like this decision to be religious or not be religious, so I really got close to this guy and moved into his, you know, went through some hard things with my parents and then moved in with him and his family and slept on the couch in his two-bedroom apartment for about four to five months, and we became very good friends, and we would do these ridiculous things, like on Shabbos walk three miles to the mikvah and, you know, wake up at three o’clock in the morning and try and say the whole book of Psalms and, then, before morning prayers, you know, I would walk to different shuls and, you know, from Brooklyn to Manhattan over the bridge, and I started right away, got indoctrinated in the Chabad thinking. Right off the bat I started going. One rabbi asked me to start putting tefillin on somebody, a Russian kid who had been injured in the hospital. So I started going, started going everyday to the hospital putting on tefillin on this kid, and I was just starting to put tefillin on myself, you know. I was explaining to him you have to put on tefillin, this is why you have to do it, you have to start keeping Shabbos, and so I started to take on this whole other persona, personality that wasn’t really me, and just trying to—then I moved to Crown Heights. I got really into it. It was an interesting experience for me, because in some ways it was very—there was a lot of light, it was very purifying. I really was able to get past a lot of the things that I hadn’t been able to get past before, and I, you know, cut out so much stuff, you know, that is, not necessarily healthy things, things like, you know, whatever it is, you know, TV and, you know, any type of partying. I got really focused and tried to really, you know, purify myself. And on the other hand it was a very, like, dark experience as well, because I really sort of got into, almost into this whole loss, really, the line of where you draw when you’re trying to kind of lose yourself as to where it’s healthy and where it’s you start to become schizophrenic, you know, or totally lose your mind almost. I was really walking that line very, very much, and then I found, basically, I started doing my music. I had some people who really believed in me early on and kind of got me started doing my music, basically, and then I found this really amazing therapist, and we started really talking, who is the guy who became the co-writer with me on this record and stuff. Later we became just good friends, and I started to reevaluate everything that I had taken as ultimate truth, you know, and to pull back and say okay, that it’s time to start now reevaluating everything, questioning everything and not accepting everything as blanket—really reevaluate all the decisions I had made and to kind of reemerge, bring myself back into the picture and make decisions for myself based on what seemed right and what was wrong, and I was lucky to have this friend and guide to really help me to do that, and that process has continued, that balancing process of when you are dealing with religion and when you are dealing with ultimate truth, the idea of ultimate truth, or an ultimate idea is like such a little bit shady, dangerous place to be, and on the other hand you see in, like, American society, you know, in Western society, the total rejection of that based on history with whatever it was, Communism, Nazism, whatever it was. Anytime there was an ultimate idea it usually ended up not working. So Western society has been very much, is very much about not having ideas. At the same time, you can see that doesn’t really work in a lot of ways also, or in my experience it didn’t. So it’s this balance, of kind of going back and forth and trying to figure out, continually and always will be, finding the right questions, not having the answers. It’s funny, because you find that people—religious, nonreligious—everyone has their answers, and people are so quick to give these answers, and it’s really, for me, my whole spiritual process or growth process is all about, sort of trying to eliminate the answers within myself and be okay with being in the question, in the question mark, in the nothing, in the void space, and trying to find the right questions.

Doing this balancing in your personal life, is there a sense that also happens professionally? Is there a struggle for you trying to work out your spirituality? Is there a tension? Do you hear from some folks saying, well, maybe you shouldn’t be quite so Jewish overtly in your music or on stage? Or maybe you’d have a broader appeal if you did this or that? Is there a tension or a struggle in how you work that out as an artist, yes, but also as an artist who’s public?

I haven’t really had too many experiences with too many people telling me how Jewish to be or what, career-wise. I mean my career took off based on the fact that in a lot of ways that, you know, there is this very outwardly looking Hasidic Jew doing something totally not typically Jewish, and my song that was on the radio, I mean, the choruses has the word “Moshiach” [Messiah] in it. So you couldn’t really—it would be hard to make the argument. What I had had to deal with a little bit is more from the other side as I’ve sort of grown and evolved in different ways and different things, a lot of people are quick to say, oh, he must be—he’s not wearing his hat anymore. Must be the record company doesn’t want him to wear his hat. That’s always, you know, again it’s amazing how people are so quick to think they have the answers and quick to judge. It’s made me a little cynical about people in general, yeah.

Do you wonder about the layers in your music and who it’s appealing to or who’s getting—I’m sure a lot of people who hear the music don’t make the connection with Rabbi Nachman and all of that. So how do you balance the appeal to the audience when you’re bringing in your specific spiritual ideas?

I ran into this issue a lot live in the sense that, you know, my experience of live music is about a spiritual experience, you know. My experiences that I had were spiritual experiences, and that’s always been what I try to create, you know. And the people that come to my shows are not necessarily looking for that, you know, all the time. A lot of my fans are, a lot of fans from all over the board, such a wide variety of people that come to my shows. And, you know, some people have more of a religious, whether it be Christian or just belief, and they are looking for that at the show. Some people are coming from more of a jam-type of fan experience. Those people are also looking to totally immerse into the music, but I get a lot of like frat kids and young kids and, you know, young religious kids. It’s just their night out. They’re cooped up in yeshiva, and now they are here to be totally wild and crazy. It’s a big challenge to try to take people into that place. I do it a lot differently than maybe how I started doing it. Like at first when I was more early on in my career, when I was coming right out of yeshiva, you know, I felt like I had this sort of specific, like, very small kind of things I’m supposed to say to people, like it’s my duty to say this type of stuff, whereas now it’s more about really trying to achieve that, not to say it, but to achieve that experience through the music and through my own experience that I’m having and how I’m relating it, and it’s grown, and its been five years, and there’s been a lot of growth, and I see, like, the potential to continue to grow so much, to try to become a master at creating and trying to create this experience that people can really tap into something authentic, whether it’s a deep place within themselves or whether it’s God or something bigger than themselves, and yeah, I just—yeah.

The song “Silence” starts with a prayer in the music, but there is also some very real theological wrestling going on there, too. I’m just wondering how that maybe in some way shows or demonstrates your relationship with God, or what that song means to you? It was one that really spoke to me.

Yeah, that song sums up kind of a lot of, I guess, where I am now, you know, with things. This idea like I’ve been kind of been talking about, about allowing yourself to go kind of inwards and to face yourself and to go into that, allow yourself to be, I don’t know, I guess just to get in touch with darker or deeper parts of yourself and not run from them, you know, or avoid them, and that’s a certain aspect to that song, like crushing the fantasy. That’s one of the lines in there, “crush the fantasy.” It actually pertains really quite well to Hanukkah and to light, because one of the lines there which is taken from actually an idea in Chabad or in Chassidus in general, in Torah in general, is the olive oil, like in the Temple. So they would take the olives and crush the olives, and then through that process they would make the olive oil which then go to light the menorah, which is the whole story of Hanukkah, and the light and all of that. So that process has to come through this crushing of the olives, you know, and that’s the same metaphor for crushing the fantasy, and then allowing for, you know, some light to come out of that, which is, I guess, is a really central theme in my music in general, in the record, in the story of Hanukkah, and in the spiritual process in general.

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As the US tries again to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, American Jews are speaking in unusually diverse voices about what Israel should do. Generally, older Orthodox Jews are strongly opposed to anything they think might weaken Israel’s security. But more and more younger, less religious American Jews are publicly critical of some of the policies of the Israeli government. Betty Rollin listened to the full range of opinions.

BETTY ROLLIN: This year’s New York Salute to Israel parade honored the 100th anniversary of Tel Aviv. Unsurprisingly, the spectators included many fervent supporters of Israel.

UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: I just went and I was in love with it. The people are amazing, the spirituality and everything about it, you can’t find it anywhere else.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I think it’s important for my kids to know their tradition, their history, and for them to grow up with that love of Israel that my parents instilled in me and I would pass it on to them.

Rabbi Avi Weiss

Rabbi AVI WEISS (Hebrew Institute of Riverdale): The history of the Jewish people is wed to the land of Israel. The Bible talks about a special mission that the Jewish people have, and whenever it talks about the covenant, which is our contract with God, it talks about children, people, and land, and from the very beginning that land as defined is the land of Israel. That’s where Abraham and Sarah walked.

ROLLIN: Rabbi Avi Weiss, an Orthodox rabbi in Riverdale, New York, has strong personal ties to Israel. Two of his children live there with their children. He travels there often, and Weiss’s spiritual connection to Israel runs deep.

Rabbi WEISS: As wonderful as I feel in America, in Israel I feel like I’m spiritually flying. I can’t explain it. It’s like asking someone why they’re in love.

ROLLIN: Many American Jews are very moved by the concept of Israel. What’s behind that?

Professor STEVEN COHEN (Hebrew Union College): In part, they are reacting to Israel as a response to the Holocaust. For years, Jews have suffered from persecution. That persecution never reaches the height that it did in the destruction of six million Jews in Europe, and American Jews are very aware of that narrative from ashes to the glorious, miraculous state of Israel and that really cements the American-Jewish relationship with Israel.

ROLLIN: Whereas American Jews overwhelmingly support the state of Israel, there is more and more criticism of its policies, even on the part of some rabbis. Rabbi Michael Paley is a scholar in residence at the UJA Federation in New York. Although a strong supporter of Israel, Rabbi Paley is troubled by its treatment of the Palestinians.

“American Jews are very aware of that narrative from ashes to the glorious, miraculous state of Israel, and that really cements the American-Jewish relationship with Israel.”

Rabbi MICHAEL PALEY: We’re now in control of other people, and sometimes we’ve been too aggressive. Sometimes we haven’t listened to their rights. Sometimes we’ve blotted out their voices. Sometimes they made us blot out their voices.

ROLLIN: Philip Weiss is a nonreligious American Jew who writes a blog that is very critical of Israel.

PHILIP WEISS: Israel is pursuing disastrous policies on its own that, as a Jew, I have to stand up and say this goes against all my training as an American. This goes against the civil rights struggle in which I took a part. This goes against the Vietnam War struggle in which I took a part, and so I’m going to stand up as a Jew, as a proud Jew, and denounce these policies and say you have to find a new path.

Israel came out of a movement that responded to horrific conditions for Jews in Europe. Those conditions don’t exist anymore, and that is why this summoning the Holocaust—which is what the Jewish leadership is reduced to again and again in order to maintain support for Israel in the American Jewish population—that has run its course.

ROLLIN: Abby Bellows is a young Jewish American who is sympathetic with the Jewish need for a homeland, but she also has reservations.

ABBY BELLOWS (Community Organizer): I feel complex in my feelings towards Israel. My grandmother escaped from Germany, and a lot of our family was killed there. So I get the need for a Jewish state from that kind of visceral level, and I recognize that anti-Semitism still exists in the world. But at the same time I feel that there’s something fundamentally tense for me about having a state that by definition gives preference to one group over others, because my Jewish values taught me about egalitarianism, and I feel like they are not being represented necessarily in the policies of Israel.

A lot of my friends are into progressive Israel activism. But I have a lot of other friends who just feel really alienated from the state. I’m a community organizer, and a lot of left-Jews really don’t connect or are embarrassed by Israel or feel really alienated.

ROLLIN: Professor Steven Cohen has studied the wide range of opinions American Jews have on Israel. He found that non-Orthodox Jews over 65 are far more committed to Israel than those under 35.

Prof. COHEN: In large part that’s because younger people are more likely to marry non-Jews, and it’s the result of that marriage that their attachment to Israel is lower than older people. Among non-Orthodox Jews, most young Jews marry non-Jews.

ROLLIN: And many non-Orthodox young Jews feel they can fully express their Judaism in America without reference to Israel. In contrast . . .

Prof. COHEN: . . . Orthodox Jews, as opposed to everybody else, have become more attached to Israel: more travel to Israel, more study in Israel, more settlement in Israel. They are more conservative, some say hawkish, about Israel’s conflict with its Arab neighbors, and their approach to Middle East politics will come to more and more influence the way American Jews relate to that part of the world.

Professor Steven Cohen

ROLLIN: The Orthodox, among others, are greatly concerned that the two-state solution, which Obama favors, would result in a loss of land — and security.

Rabbi WEISS: We withdrew from Lebanon, and what happened was suddenly the rockets came in. We withdrew from Gush Kativ, from Gaza, and the rockets came into Sderot, and I have great fears at this point if we are going to withdraw from the West Bank, from Samaria and Judea, then Tel Aviv is right there in the line. I desperately want to live in peace with Palestinians. Rabin used to say you have to make peace with your enemy—which you can only make peace with an enemy who wants to make peace with you. Having Gaza which is controlled by Hamas, by terrorists, or withdrawing from the West Bank, which could then be taken over by Hamas or Hezbollah, that’s not good for Israel and it’s not good for America.

ROLLIN: However American Jews feel about Israel, the important thing, according to both sides, is that they feel.

Prof. COHEN: Criticism of Israel indicates engagement with Israel. American Jews should be worried when their children stop criticizing Israel.

ROLLIN: The question is whether the growing criticism in America will affect US policy toward the state of Israel.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in New York.

Rabbi Avi Weiss

Rabbi Avi Weiss, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, New York:
America is my home. I’m grateful to the US forever and ever. Israel is my homeland and that’s where my family lives, literally and figuratively. When I think about existentially who I am I think of Israel. My roots, I’m grounded, my ancestry all there.

The biblical narrative, and even if one doesn’t buy into the biblical narrative, the history of the Jewish people is wed to the land of Israel. The Bible talks about a special mission that the Jewish people has, and whenever it talks about the covenant which is our contract with God, it talks about children, people, and land, and from the very beginning that land is defined as the land of Israel. That’s where Abraham and Sarah walked.

As wonderful as I feel in America, in Israel I feel like I’m spiritually flying. I can’t explain it. It’s like asking someone why they are in love.

When you love something there could be different opinions, and I think those different opinions aren’t a bad thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think a consensus is being reached, and we are at a point now where there is an interdependence within the Jewish community. Israel is not going to make it with the political right alone or the political left. It’s not going to make it with the religious alone or those who couldn’t care less about religion. It’s only going to make it with the both, and there has to be a sense of interdependence between the two.

The political right has to understand that it has no monopoly on loving the land of Israel. The left loves the land just as much, but it thinks you’ve got to give away land for the sake of peace. The left has to understand that it has no monopoly on wanting peace. The right wants peace just as much. If both sides would stop impugning each others motives then that unity, interdependence, will be able to allow us to move forward.

Blessed be the nation that has as its army the Israeli defense forces, not only a strong army but, I believe, one of the most moral armies on the face of this earth. I know the families of the soldiers who fought house to house in Jenin at a great price, because when we went into Jenin back a couple of years, Israel could have taken out Jenin from the air but wanted to minimize loss of civilian life. Look, I mourn the loss of innocent Palestinian life. I mourn that. It’s a Jewish concept. But one must talk about intentionality. The intention of the Israeli defense forces to limit civilian losses, it’s only to target military who, unfortunately, they hide themselves amongst the civilian population. The intention of the other side: to murder as many men, women and children as possible. Are there aberrations? Of course, but it’s not part of the mainstream. It’s not part of the very system which Israel is about. Unfortunately, on the other side terrorism is very much a part of their whole motif.

I feel for Palestinians. The fault lies with Palestinian leadership. It lies with Hamas. It lies with Hezbollah. This is not a Ghandi-Martin Luther King movement. If the rockets stop lobbing into Sderot, if they are going to stop the terrorism Israel is the first one to want peace. Unfortunately, the more Israel has given, the weaker Israel is perceived from the other side, and the more the other side wants.

All I can say that whenever we have withdrawn up to this point, it has precipitated the other side wanting more. We withdrew from Lebanon and what happened was suddenly the rockets came in. We withdrew from Gush Kativ, from Gaza, the rockets came into Sderot, and I have great fears if we are going to withdraw from the West Bank, from Samaria and Judea, then Tel Aviv is right there in the line. And I think America has to understand that Israel today is the frontline against the spread of terror. I think this is one of the most important debates. Some people think that Israel’s war on terrorism is kind of isolated to the Middle East. I say no. Israel’s war against terrorism is America’s war against terrorism. I believe with all my heart when an Israeli soldier falls fighting terror, he is not only fallen in the defense of Israel and the Jewish people, he has fallen in the defense of the West, of the free world.

Israel is alone and Israel needs as much support as possible, and so it’s critical that there ought to be support not only from Jews, but from non-Jews as well. But as much as American Jewry helps Israel and as much as America helps Israel, I think it’s reciprocal. I think Israel is America’s greatest friend in the Middle East. I think today Israel really stands strong, being the bulwark against the spread of terror as it was the bulwark against communism during the cold war era.

I see the grassroots as being front and center and being in absolute solidarity with the people of Israel. There are of course those who would criticize, but by and large the support is overwhelming, and what I would do is, I think, it’s important for American Jews to visit Israel. I think it’s important for them to live in Sderot. If you live amongst those wonderful people you will see how peace-loving they are. I take second place to no one when it comes to an understanding the spirituality and potential holiness of all people, including Palestinians. I desperately want to live in peace with Palestinians. Rabin used to say you have to make peace with your enemy. You can only make peace with an enemy who wants to make peace with you. Having Gaza which is controlled by Hamas, by terrorists, or withdrawing from the West Bank, which could then be taken over by Hamas or Hezbollah— that is not good for Israel, and it’s not good for America.

I walk the length and the breadth of Israel. I don’t only see Israel being involved in a political kind of equation. I see Israel as a place of spirituality. I see it as an extraordinary place where people reach out for the vulnerable. I see a medical system; I see a social service system. Yes, I see Jews and Arabs in many, many places doing everything they can to find a language to talk peacefully and embrace each other. I see it as an extraordinary light, as Isaiah would say, to the nations of the world.

I take second place to none of those critics when it comes to concern for the Palestinians. Where we part company is where you place blame. They are placing blame on the state of Israel, on the army. I place the blame squarely on the heads of Hamas, and I will say it clearly. I would say to the Palestinians, if they had a Martin Luther King, nonviolent disobedient movement, they would have had a state many years ago. But when you’ve got a movement where you go bomb buses and you go into restaurants lobbing rockets and you maintain that it can be justified—nothing justifies terror.

We have to find some kind of way of making peace with the Palestinians, which I believe the settlers desperately want, while allowing people who have lived in these places to continue doing so. I can only tell you this: If from the other side there would be a show of trust in real peace rather than terrorism, the history of Israel is that Israel made peace with every Arab country who wanted to make peace with Israel. I believe it’s very fair for there to be natural growth [of the settlements]. Imagine someone turning to an American family saying you can’t have more children, or if you have more children you can’t add a home. What I find very difficult is when America and an American administration starts bullying Israel and starts pushing Israel around. Israel is a sovereign state, and I believe Israel knows best what is in its best security interest. From my perspective Israel knows more about security-wise in the Middle East than America knows. It’s got the experts, it is on the ground, and in that sense it makes an extraordinary contribution to America as well.

I think the mission [of Israel] is to be in a place where one has sovereignty and autonomy and can develop a society that really cares for the oppressed and for the vulnerable. It does so in its own place, in its own land, and does its share to set an example for others. That’s the Israel that I know. That’s the Israel that I love. That mission, I think, is ultimately going to evolve with people of all political persuasions and all religious backgrounds.

In the rabbinic literature Israel is compared to a dove. A dove can’t fly with one wing. You need both wings, and they may have disparate ideas, but there’s got to be a blending together and a consensus and a coming together. I think that’s the most critical challenge Israel faces today.

Rabbi Michael Paley

Rabbi Michael Paley, scholar-in-residence and director of the Jewish Resource Center of the UJA-Federation of New York:

I stand with Israel, and I love Israel. I love the Jewish people, and I love Israel. It’s been one of the most important aspects of my whole life. I came of age at 1967, and it fired my identity. But Israel has to make a choice: a democratic state, a Jewish state…and my particular flavor is a Jewish democratic state with territorial compromise. This does not take away my love for Israel or my hope for its security.

Because I love Israel, because I stand with Israel, I believe and hope and pray in its destiny. I believe its destiny is probably better within or closer to the 1967 borders. I’m not critical of Israel; it’s a democratic state. I don’t want to take away the rights of the voters who live there, like my brother, or my nephew who is in the Army now, are people who live and vote in Israel.

The 20th century for Jews was a difficult century, and we had to, for morality reasons, take power, and power is more difficult. We haven’t been very good at it. We haven’t had to decide the fate, as a Jewish people, of other people who are not Jews. We haven’t been in control of even the Jewish faith. We are in control of other people and sometimes we’ve been too aggressive, sometimes we haven’t listened to their rights, sometimes we’ve blotted out their voices. Sometimes they made us blot out their voices. Sometimes our trauma of the last century comes out and bites us and we say, “oh, what, are you crazy, you are not going to have any compromise at all? You know what happened the last time.” Of course, I’m conflicted. I don’t like to see these things. But still I stand with Israel. That’s the unique contribution of the Jewish people right now, and it’s a place in which our destiny is going to be wrapped up. It comes from our deep history, and it will also be our future. I hope we can do it with vision and understanding, even prophetic wisdom.

Abby Bellows

Abby Bellows, Jewish activist and community organizer:
I grew up in the Havurah movement. It was founded in the early ’70s as a breakaway from the Conservative movement and the Reconstructionist movement. It was people who wanted a more vibrant, more social justice-oriented Judaism. There were rabbis who were part of the movement but weren’t presiding over it. I grew up in one of the original Havurot in DC, Fabrengen. I’m involved in a lot of independent minyanim in New York—independent prayer communities. My Judaism has always been kind of free-form.

I feel complex in my feelings towards Israel. My grandmother escaped from Germany. A lot of our family was killed there. I get the need for a Jewish state from that kind of visceral level, and I recognize that anti-Semitism still exists in the world, but at the same time I feel that there is something fundamentally tense for me about having a state that by definition gives preference to one group over another, because my Jewish values taught me about egalitarianism, and I feel like they are not being represented necessarily in the policies of Israel.

The lack of Palestinians being able to get permits for building homes easily or the challenges with civil rights for a lot of Arab Israelis, Bedouin Israelis. Those things really concern me. The way that the Orthodox community is privileged over other types of Jews in Israel is really concerning to me and in a lot of ways I feel doesn’t reflect the Jewish values that I have been taught.

A lot of my friends are into progressive Israel activism. They are post-Zionist or they are progressive Zionist. They find some way with organizations like the New Israel Fund, J Street—organizations that are trying to better Israel with a progressive bent. But I have a lot of other friends who just feel really alienated from the state. I’m a community organizer, and a lot of left-Jews really don’t connect or are embarrassed by Israel or feel really alienated.

For a lot of people in my generation, we are struggling to understand the connection to Israel, the relevancy of it. For a lot of us anti-Semitism isn’t a daily reality, although the attempted attacks in Riverdale brought it close to home for a lot of us in New York. We still question how our values are reflected in the world, given Israel. For a lot of us what comes up more often than not, people in my circle at least, is friends of our who are on the left saying disparaging things about Israel or saying things that are particularly critical. I think a lot of people my age aren’t equipped to respond in a way that’s not just total right-wing-they-can-do-no-wrong, and I think that the path to fighting anti-Semitism is not only about drawing inward and protecting the Jewish state. It’s about educating and building relationships with people who are different than us. It’s painful for me to see Israel activists who are only in the paradigm that my grandmother told me: “Jews need to care for the Jews.” That’s not the interpretation that I’ve taken from the Holocaust and from the history of persecution of our people. Yes, we need to have a fall-back position of protection. What’s really going to change our future is building relationships that are interfaith, intercultural, and reflect the best of Jewish tradition, which is about being questioning and critical and open-minded.

For me it’s about the treatment of Palestinians. It’s also about the treatment of Bedouins, the Arabs who have become Israeli citizens. It’s also about Jews who aren’t Orthodox in Israel. I have friends who have made aliyah and had to do an Orthodox conversion, when previously they were very strong, practicing Conservative Jews.

I think Israel has to be much more upfront about human rights as a first, bottom-line priority, and that is something we can be proud of because Jews believe in human rights.

The most recent time I went, last summer, I went for my cousin’s wedding, who made aliyah. It was a feeling of home culturally. I love the feeling of walking down a street that’s called Hillel and the feeling of integration, of having the words that I use to pray be the words I hear on the street. The last trip I was on was a narrow trip. My vision was within my family and my friends, and it was pretty easy to not see what was happening in the West Bank, at the checkpoints, at other sites of contestation in Israel.

My Judaism has always been fully expressed in this country. I have never been raised with a Judaism that is referential to Israel necessarily, and when I was the president of Hillel I remembered having a conversation with the other leaders about taking down a sign in the entry way of Hillel that said “Wherever we stand, we stand with Israel,” which was Hillel’s motto, because it turned off a lot of my friends who didn’t feel comfortable coming into the space. I always try as a Jewish leader to create a Judaism that doesn’t have to be about Israel for the sake of the continuity of our people, celebration of all the richness of our heritage. I think right now for young Jews, it’s really important to have a Judaism that can be a Jewish home where people can feel comfortable even if they don’t put out their credentials about their support of Israel.

Steven Cohen

Professor Steven Cohen, Hebrew Union College:

In 1948, the State of Israel is born and American Jewish involvement with Zionist and other organizations is at its peak; it will never be as high as it is then. It plummets in 1949 and kind of putters along. There is a blip in 1956 with the Sinai campaign and still Israel is not a major part of the American Jewish consciousness until 1967. In 1967, we have the Six Day War. American Jews are mobilized and because they are coming out and becoming full-fledged Americans and proud Jews and ethnic Jews Israel will play a major role in their consciousness from ’67 probably through the 1980s. And since the 1980s there has been a declining American Jewish interest in Israel, in large part because of changes in the identity of American Jews. They are becoming more personal, less collective, more religious, and less ethnic, and Israel is a very unusual symbol for a religio-ethnic group in America. American Jews regard it as their homeland, but hardly any have ever lived there. Israel is their quasi-national symbol. They love the country. It represents ethnicity, nationality, culture, pride, heart, soul to the vast majority of American Jews.

In part, [American Jews] are reacting to Israel as a response to the Holocaust. For years, Jews have suffered from persecution. That persecution never reached the height that it did in the destruction of 6 million Jews in Europe. A fragment of those Jews joined other Jews who had been in the land of Palestine, then Israel. Before that Israel is born as a result of a Zionist movement and the return of Jews to Israel and American Jews are very aware of that narrative from ashes to the glorious, miraculous state of Israel, and that really cements the American Jewish relationship with Israel starting with 1948.

Both Jews on the left and Jews on the right want to blame Israeli politics for the alienation of some American Jews from Israel. The right says the left is too critical of Israel, the left says Israel deserves to be criticized. If it had better policies, it would hold the attention of American Jews.

The real engine of declining American Jewish interest in Israel is changes in American Jewish identity, the way American Jews think of themselves as Jews, and in particular intermarriage. The more Jews marry non-Jews, the more they adopt a definition of being Jewish which is very much like American Protestant Christianity, and American Protestant Christianity is spiritual. It’s about faith, it’s about religion, and there isn’t an automatic place for a national homeland.

On measure after measure, older people outscore middle-aged people, middle-aged people outscored younger people. Older people are more attached to Israel than younger people. Why is that? In large part, younger people are more likely to marry non-Jews, and it’s the result of that marriage, that their attachment to Israel is lower than older people. Among non-Orthodox Jews, most young Jews marry non-Jews. Were we to only look at the in-married, we would find that in-married Jews today are as if not more attached to Israel than in-married Jews of yesterday.

The Orthodox is a growing segment of American Jews. Eight percent of Jews my age, I’m in my 50s, twenty-three percent of American Jewish children are being raised in Orthodox Jewish homes. They are the China of American Jewish life, the growing force. Orthodox Jews, as opposed to everybody else, have become more attached to Israel. More travel to Israel, more study in Israel, more settlement in Israel. It may be that one-fourth of American Jewish Orthodox people will move to Israel in their lifetime. That is an amazing number, and it reflects the deep commitment of Orthodox Jews to the land, state, and people of Israel.

Orthodox Jews will come to exercise even more influence over the ways of which American Jews relate to Israel politically, culturally, religiously and in other ways. They are more conservative, some say hawkish, about Israel’s conflict with its Arab neighbors, and their approach to Middle East politics will come to more and more influence the way American Jews relate to that part of the world.

Left of center American Jews—and let’s remember Jews are the most left of center group in America—left of center American Jews are adopting more dovish stances towards the conflict, pretty much in keeping with the current American administration’s approach to the conflict. They want a two-state solution to the conflict, Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. They want peaceful negotiations, and they want the withdrawal of settlements from the West Bank.

We have more left-of-center Jews than Orthodox Jews, but we have more Orthodox Jews who are deeply involved with Israel. Most Jews see themselves as progressive, liberal, left-of-center sorts of people. Israel is very unpopular in the American left, and in fact the world left. The same principles which make the non-Jewish left unhappy with Israel make the Jewish left uncomfortable with Israel. So they are attached to Israel as a family matter, but they are unhappy with this member of the family, and they somehow would like this member of the family to behave a little better.

American Jews who would like Israel not to be there are a very small number. They get a lot of attention from the press, they get a lot of attention from American Jews, but when we go to the surveys we find very few Jews are in opposition to the Jewish state of Israel. The vast majority like the fact there is a Jewish state in Israel. They care about Israel; they care about the Jews who are there.

Israeli officials recognize that America is Israel’s primary strategic ally, and in that equation American Jews play a vital role. If American Jews don’t support Israel, then America won’t support Israel, and Israel will stand alone in the world against all of its enemies. Most Israelis think that way.

One of the problems that highly engaged Jewish young people have is that right now they have a choice either to be advocates for Israel or to be apathetic, and by creating other ways and other spaces in which Jews can be pro-Israel these people can be engaged with Israel and still, like many Israelis, take issue with particular policies of the Israeli government.

I have long been what we call a Labor Zionist. I believe in partition, the 1947 resolution that divided the land of Israel into an Arab state and a Jewish state. I would like to see a return to partition, a Palestinian state and a secure democratic Jewish state of Israel, and I think the way to get there is through serious negotiations with our Palestinian counterparts and a strong American and European presence in those negotiations and guarantees for the state of Israel. Without security, I am not willing to countenance significant withdrawals. But I believe that withdrawals from the West Bank will enhance Israeli security in the long run.

From our surveys we know that American Jews are widely concerned about the Iranian threat to Israel and to world peace as well. They, like our leaders, are unclear about what is the appropriate response, what will work to prevent Iran from becoming a serious nuclear threat to world peace and to the very survival of Israel.

America is an exceptional country. It has made Jews different from Jews everywhere else in the world, including Canada, Argentina, the UK, France. American Jews have adopted a more religious, faith-oriented definition about what it means to be Jewish. Jews in those other countries are still more cultural, more national, more ethnic, and therefore, in certain senses, more patriotic about their connection to Israel.

I’m very concerned about changes in American Jewish identity. The lack of interest in Israel among Jewish young people is important in and of itself, and important for what it says about changing Jewish identity. I’m a Jew who happens to believe that Jews need to be fully Jewish, religiously and ethnically Jewish. I’m very concerned that the ethnic aspect of being Jewish is in decline.

If secular Jews are angry at Israel for the way their way of being Jewish is being treated, by definition they are Israel-engaged. My concern is with secular Jews who don’t even know that secular Jews in Israel from their point of view are getting a raw deal.

No one is more critical of Israel than Israelis. Criticism of Israel indicates engagement with Israel. American Jews should be worried when their children stop criticizing Israel.

Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss, writer and blogger:

I didn’t have much of a relationship with Israel until after the Iraq war. Close friends of my family moved there when I was young, but it didn’t really interest me, and it was only after the Iraq war when I really began to look at my country’s relationship with Israel. My best friend told me, “oh they just destroyed the air force in Egypt and Syria on June 5th, 1967, and I was somewhat indifferent to that, I confess. I was 12 years old; it just did not mean that much to me. My family were secularized, academic Jews and they were tempted—because they thought anti-Semitism was an important factor in American life, a belief I don’t share with them—they certainly thought about moving to Israel. But I think the importance of opportunity for their children in the US came before that.

Israel is pursuing disastrous policies on its own that, as a Jew, I have to stand up and say this goes against all my training as an American, this goes against the civil rights struggle in which I took a part, this goes against the Vietnam War struggle in which I took a part, so I’m going to stand up as a Jew, a proud Jew, and denounce these policies and say you have to find a new path—the Jim Crow policies in the West Bank, the 600-700 checkpoints, the destruction of all hope for Palestinians for one-and-a half million Palestinians under occupation, for the Palestinians who were blockaded in Gaza, this sort of contempt for Palestinian human rights for certainly the last 40 years. It’s not just Jewish in my view. I come to this as a very proudly identified Jew. I grew up, that was my whole identity of being Jewish, and I developed a more diverse, American Jewish identity. As I became an adult I intermarried, I broke Jewish law in that respect. I don’t keep a kosher household, so there are many ways in which I represent sort of a typical kind of integrating Jew. I’m not very religious. I’m certainly not an observant Jew and I’m—no other religion calls to me. I go to synagogue a couple of times a year. I define myself as a Jew because apart from the fact that my mother and father are Jews, that I was raised Jewish and I feel Jewish all the time, I would say the ways in which I’m Jewish are that I’m a very bookish person. Books and reading are very important to me. I think of myself as Jewish because I bring a kind of an intellectual sensitivity to issues that I think is very Jewish. This sort of universal tradition in Jewish life of “rachmanes,” concern for others, is something that is part of me.

There is a little bit of love. I think about that often, because I criticize Israel night and day. I spend a lot of time criticizing Israel, just as I think I would have been criticizing the American South when it was segregated in the 1960s, I would have been criticizing it night and day. I would have been a Freedom Rider. The things that I love about Israel, and I’ve only spent a week there, but the things that I love, and I study the place, I think that journalism is wonderful journalism. Right now, the best journalism in the world is coming out of Israel. You have very brave Jews who are exploring things in a very open way. I think that intellectual tradition that I associate with Jewish life is very alive in Israel. When I’ve walked in Jerusalem, when I walked in small towns on my one visit, it was very pretty and beautiful.

I have been frequently been accused of being disloyal, and I think it is—I don’t care about that. I think that I’m being very loyal. I respect the power of communities to define themselves, and so in the 1600s the Jewish community in Amsterdam defined itself in such a way that Spinoza was outside. He was excommunicated, he was considered disloyal, and I respect that religious communities can do that, and today the religious community and the Jewish leadership of the US is trying to exercise a monolithic orthodoxy. In some ways it is reminiscent of the Soviet Union in terms of its tolerance of heretical ideas. What are my heretical ideas? They are that one man-one vote, all men are created equal. These are values I was given by Abraham Lincoln, by the civil rights struggle, by my American experience. So I think they have Jewish roots, too. I actually feel very strongly that I am trying to help my people. I feel a real, as assimilated as I am in many ways, I feel a great loyalty to the Jewish people, and I think the leadership, especially when it exercises these loyalty oaths or any prohibition on open discussion on this is making a very bad call. And so I assert myself as a Jew, and I say Jews have to talk about these things.

What I think is intolerable is a state that is oppressing a minority to the degree the Jewish state is doing so now. So I think Israel is facing a choice right now, that the two-state solution which Obama is pushing is truly its last opportunity to save the Jewish state, and if it fails, if it fails to take the two-state solution, it’s going to be involved in governing a majority population of Arabs in a Jewish state.

A million Jews have left Israel. They are living in Europe, they are living in the US. They don’t want to live there, and these are largely secular Jews, and they are Jews like me, who seek opportunity in a diverse society that respects minority rights. So I think Israel, which has taken a very sharp turn to the right under Netanyahu and Avigdor “Loyalty Oath” Lieberman, Israel faces a choice what kind of society it wants to be. I think it should grab the two-state solution.

Israel should learn from its Jewish cousins in the US that minority rights are essential, and diversity is essential, and these things make Jews safe.

You will notice Netanyahu has not said one word against the settlements. There is now a move to close down outposts. He can’t say he’s going to close down settlements because his coalition falls apart, and those settlements include these people of a fanatical religious character.

Take down the checkpoints in the West Bank is the first thing they should do. I think they should start taking down the wall, I think they should lift the blockade on needles and cloth and everything else that can’t get into Gaza.

I am obviously a minority and a very distinct minority. I represent a fringe of American Jewish life and yet the concern of the American Jewish leadership in the US is the concern that my fringe is getting bigger by the moment, and it is getting bigger because of the Gaza slaughter which woke up a lot of American Jews, thinking what kind of society is this? By the election of Avigdor Lieberman, of Netanyahu. There are many demographic changes that are going on in American Jewish life that is giving me more and more company by the day.

The tradition that I cherish in Judaism is respect for man in God’s image, the words “bitzalem,” which the human rights organization in Israel has, that God created man in his own image. That means all men, and so that kind of respect for all human beings, regardless of their ethnicity, I see as Jewish and is it true that many Jews do not accept my definition? Absolutely, but do we also understand in America that identity is fluid? Yes. I think that I represent a strain in Judaism. If Judaism is going to survive as a sort of a meaningful, moral presence, which I want it to be, then it’s going to have to embrace my views, and it’s why I have so much company now.

Under 35, 60 percent of American Jews are doing what I’m doing. They are intermarrying. They are fully enjoying their minority freedoms in the US, and I think many of them do not see Israel as sort of necessary. Israel came out of a movement that responded to horrific conditions for Jews in Europe. This is something that I think everyone has to remember, that I have to bear in mind whenever I’m criticizing Israel. If it were 100 years ago, I think I would have been a Zionist. If I were living in Vienna or Berlin, which is what I would have been doing, trying to be a journalist in the early 20th century, I would have been a Zionist, because there was a glass ceiling for Jews and worse, there were programs that my ancestors fled in Russia. Those are all real conditions that Zionism came out of. It’s why it captured the Jewish people, and those conditions don’t exist anymore and that is why summoning the Holocaust, which is what the Jewish leadership is reduced to again and again in order to maintain support for Israel in the American Jewish population—that has run its course. And for Jews under 35, I think their attitudes are going to be much more detached about Israel, and that’s the big threat the special relationship faces.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Monday night (April 2) Jews begin observing Passover, the commemoration of their ancestors’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt when they got out so fast there was no time for bread to rise. Observant Jews prepare for Passover — Pesach — by getting rid of everything in the house that is chametz — leavened. They even sell such food, symbolically, until Passover ends. We visited the Orthodox Jewish family of Ari and Shoshana Lerner in Pikesville, Maryland.

Rabbi ARI LERNER: Cleaning for Passover is a big adventure in most Orthodox homes. It typically starts weeks before the actual holiday and everybody gets involved and pitches in.

Passover is really the touchstone event in Judaism, and this gives an opportunity for families, parents and children alike, to really engage in a sort of preparation for the holiday as a whole. So everything ranging from, you know, cleaning out cabinets, countertops, bedrooms, going through dresser drawers, looking through books that may commonly be used in the areas where there’s food present or at tables while the kids are, you know, eating dinner, etc., and closets, pantries — all that kind of stuff is really gone through extensively to make sure that, within the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, that there’s no leavened material in the house.

It’s imperative that all the surfaces and everything that you use are completely kosher for Passover, because there can be no presence of chametz left. So, for example, stainless steel sinks need to be completely cleaned out thoroughly, let sit for 24 hours, and then boiling water is poured over all the surfaces of the sink.

Artificial surfaces such as Formica or Corian have to be covered.

We have a whole set of pots and pans specifically for Passover. We have dishes and knives, forks, spoons, cups, everything. Whatever we have during the rest of the year, we have one special set of that we only use for those eight days of Passover. Once we get things clean enough and we have areas that are clear of chametz, then we bring up those boxes and stock the shelves that we’ve already cleaned for Passover.

With regard to chametz that we’re going to keep in the house over Pesach, we typically collect it in certain locations, certain cabinets. We try to isolate it into closed off areas, and we actually have to sell that to a non-Jewish person for the duration of Passover.

Congregational rabbis will do it en masse for their congregations. People will come with a list of the locations that they have chametz in their house that they plan on selling.

Rabbi SHMUEL SILBER (Suburban Orthodox Congregation): So, you agree to employ me as your agent.

Rabbi LERNER: I’d be honored.

Rabbi SILBER: Good. So that verbal agreement, as well as your signature on this power of attorney, are enough to go ahead and formalize our relationship — me as your agent to sell the chametz on your behalf.

Rabbi LERNER: All of our preparation before Passover gives us the sense that we are preparing ourselves for some type of exodus.

SHOSHANA LERNER: The Exodus story is one that we tell to our children every single year. We have an obligation to tell that story over to our children, and that gets us, you know, involved in the Passover cleaning, and it actually gives the children a lift.

Rabbi LERNER: Passover season is really an indication of our freedom. It’s a time where we reflect on God’s role in our world. It gives us a tremendous opportunity to connect with family and with friends and with our religion and with ourselves.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a story today about a woman who is both African American and an Orthodox Jew, a rare but real combination in this country. Her very name expresses her mixed identity — Yavilah McCoy — and she is devoting her talent and energy to using music — Gospel music — to try to overcome the prejudice she has experienced from other Jews. Menachem Daum reports.

YAVILAH MCCOY: I don’t think it’s a simple thing to try to navigate both Jewish and black identity simultaneously in the context of raising a family. It’s hard. It involves a lot of sacrifice. It involves a lot of joy.

MENACHEM DAUM: Yavilah McCoy is one of several thousand African-American Jews. To create a better future for her children, Yavilah wants it known that Jews come in a variety of shades and colors. For the past several years, Yavilah has led workshops that combine classical Jewish liturgy with her family’s rich Gospel tradition.

Ms. MCCOY (leading group of white Jews singing in Hebrew the Gospel version of “Modeh Ani Lifanecha”): And the kishkas are about this soul: “Thank God for this soul that’s in me, oh yeah.” He woke me up this morning and I’m glad, so glad, about it.

The spirit doesn’t have a color, and this whole thing I do now with song is just because I feel like music is a way in which people access spirit quite immediately.

Ms. MCCOY (singing): And I’m glad, so glad about it, you know, I ‘m glad down in my soul.

UNIDENTIFIED JEWISH WOMAN: I’m sure there are white Jews who may have taken Hebrew songs and put them to Gospel music, just because Gospel’s part of our vocabulary, our musical vocabulary. But if a white Jew would do it I’d say, like, you know, I would say that isn’t ours.

Ms. MCCOY: What you got to do is say, “I went to Limud in New York, and I met my sister of color, and when I met my sister of color she sang some songs to me that now are a part of our people, and I want to share them with you because this is what our people look like now.” Today “our people” is changing. Today “our people” is broad. Today “our people” come from those places I told you. Our people come from Sudan and Ethiopia, and our people come from America, and our people come from Brooklyn, and our people come from New Jersey, and our people come from Yemen and our people — and you get to claim every inch of your Jewish spiritual breath. You get to claim it.

Ms. MCCOY (joined by her grandmother Jeanette Tate and mother Adeena Fulcher, singing in Hebrew a Jewish Gospel song): Adon olam, asher malach.

DAUM: The road towards Judaism was begun by Yavilah’s grandparents. Her grandmother Jeanette studied the Old Testament and concluded that the biblical children of Israel were actually Jews of color. For this reason, Jeanette rejected Christianity and became a member of the group known as “Black Israelites.”

JEANETTE TATE (Grandmother of Yavilah McCoy): We were brought to this country and subjected. We were taken away from what we originally were, and we were taught how Christianity began and how it enslaved our people and how Christianity was imposed on us.

DAUM: As a Black Israelite, Yavilah’s grandmother was not recognized as a Jew by most Jewish denominations.

AHDENAH FULCHER (Mother of Yavilah McCoy, singing in Hebrew): Adon olam, asher malach.

DAUM: Yavilah’s mother, Adeena, wanted to be acknowledged as a Jew without any questions, so she converted to Orthodox Judaism. But when she started having a family she learned that acceptance was hard to get.

Ms. FULCHER: My children started in the yeshivas at a very early age; as soon as they basically were toddling they were in yeshiva. That was not, first of all — depending on where they were — that wasn’t always pleasant. My children paid a price.

Ms. MCCOY: I was in third grade, and they didn’t want to hold my hand. When they would say line up, you know, the kids were scared.

Ms. FULCHER: It traumatizes you. It does things to you, but it doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change the fact that we’re Jews. Like it, lump it, or indifferent, that’s who we are. We’re Jews.

Ms. MCCOY (leading group, singing in Hebrew): Ana Hashem ki ani avdecha.

Through music, you don’t have to work that hard. You don’t have to sit and have a conversation with me about what are the obstacles to welcoming difference. All you got to do is just open yourselves up to the music.

(Group dancing and clapping): Hallelujah! All right, Hallelujah!

GROUP OF YOUNG CHILDREN (lighting Hanukkah menorah and singing “Ma’oz Tzur”)

Ms. MCOY: More than anything, this is about the children. This is about the next generation having a chance to be Jews just because.

DAUM: For the sake of her children Yavilah has founded an organization called Ayecha. One of Ayecha’s main events is an annual concert designed to build a community of acceptance for Jews of color.

Ms. MCCOY (speaking to crowd): Whooo! Everybody, hello. Need some of your attention! Okay, you are at a Jewish soul celebration. Welcome. If you didn’t know it, you have arrived at a journey that we’re going to take this evening through the music of Jews from cultures that come from Jerusalem all the way to Africa.

Ms. FULCHER (speaking to crowd): My dad and my grandmother — they came up as Gospel singers in the early days. They came out of the churches, and they could sing. When I say they could sing, they could really sing. And, yeah, they could sing.

Ms. MCCOY (speaking to crowd): If everybody in here has the spirit say, “Amen.”

CROWD: Amen!

Ms. MCCOY (speaking to crowd): If everybody wants to see this again, say “Mazel Tov.”

CROWD: Mazel Tov!

Ms. MCCOY (speaking to crowd): If everybody in here wants to go, say “Oy Vey.”

CROWD: Oy Vey!

Ms. MCCOY (speaking to crowd): If everybody here loves the spiritual journey we’re on, say “Umm hmmmm.”

CROWD: “Umm hmmmm!”

JOSHUA NELSON AND THE KOSHER GOSPEL SINGERS (singing in Hebrew): Adon olam, asher malach.

Ms. MCCOY (dancing and singing, leading Jewish group): I want to sing, sing, sing. I want to shout, shout, shout.

At the end of the day, if all we get to be is white or black Jews, it creates a situation where people have to leave parts of their identity behind. So Ayecha is giving people around the country a taste of what they’re missing every single day. People get a taste of what’s to come. They get a taste of that Jewish community that doesn’t exist yet.

DAUM: Whether or not Yavilah’s song will create the better world she dreams of remains to be seen. But she is guided by the Talmud’s teaching: You’re not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to abandon it.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY this is Menachem Daum in New York.