Australia/Israel Review

“I stepped into an avalanche,
It covered up my soul”

In 1971, the celebrated Jewish poet and singer Leonard Cohen wrote these words during a period of deep depression, where “absolutely everything was beginning to fall apart.” 

Over this last year, living as a Jew and one who loves Israel, I too feel like I have stepped into an avalanche.

This is what it feels like for Jews across the world, including in Australia. Everything that we have taken for granted as proud Jewish citizens of Australia seems to be falling apart. Our leaders are castigated, our artists are excoriated, philanthropists are humiliated. A former foreign minister, Bob Carr, dredges up the most disgraceful slurs about us all and especially so-called Jewish lobby groups (shades of the “Elders of Zion” canard); Jewish school children are targeted; university students intimidated; friends walking innocently along the streets of our cities or visiting a hospital are confronted with the vitriolic “Free, free Palestine”. There are merchants who won’t serve Jewish customers, while Jewish businesses are being boycotted and our places of worship attacked.

Is this what freedom in our democratic country has come to – a slew of toxic primitive hatred and anti-Jewishness? Never before have I felt what my mother and father must have experienced in pre-war Lithuania when they ran to escape from hostile antisemitic groups. Suddenly Mum’s trauma of being attacked by a group of kids and having acid thrown at her when she was just seven-years-old no longer seems like a distant scene of horror.

I simply can’t remember carrying a weight like this. A time aching with acute anxiety. An age of rage, a time of turmoil. Hatred is promiscuous, our ability to communicate is collapsing.

In addition, what is most disturbing is that everybody feels free to express whatever comes into their mind. No filters. No reflection. No thoughtfulness. I try not to follow the social media invective because I don’t want to descend into the sewer.

I am in despair because polarisation is king and black-and-white are the only colours. Simplistic primitive thinking at its very worst has pervaded our public spaces – including in Israel and in our own Jewish community.

The only solution is to seek out and embrace nuance, even when it’s uncomfortable. In my interfaith work for AIJAC, I don’t avoid the difficult conversations with liberal Christians, Buddhists or Muslim clerics. I have the unsettling conversations with them, even if they express views and attend the protest marches I so strongly oppose. You grow stronger through living with uncertainty and confronting dissent. It underlies our Jewish tradition of debate, argument and disagreement. You meet it on virtually every page of the Talmud and it’s implicit in the tefillot (daily prayers).

Yes, so much of this is because of the war in Gaza and a wilful and inane inability to distinguish between the Jewish population of Australia and the government of Israel. As if the Jews of Caulfield or Bondi decide policy in Israel. I, too, agonise over some of the decisions and actions of the Israeli Government – especially the short-lived withholding of food aid earlier this year. I am driven to distraction by action and words of some of the right-wing extremist Israeli politicians riding like Mad Max across the landscape. My heart is shredded daily by the suffering of the population of Gaza. My faith in humanity is decimated daily by the barbaric audacity and brilliant propaganda strategy of Hamas.

But I know there is no other country for the Jewish people. I know that this is a lone democratic country in the Middle East where the harshest critics of the government are free to express their opinions. I am totally befuddled by the media from ABC to BBC, Al Jazeera to CNN when it comes to Israel. They are so unabashedly one-eyed – truly, as John Milton put it, “eyeless in Gaza”.

I am tempted to hide in a safe corner until conditions improve. I am tired of talking about hatred. I am exhausted by the unrelenting barrage of hostility against Jewish people.

But the words of Deuteronomy speak to me with an alarming and urgent clarity: “I place before you today a blessing and a curse. Choose the blessing, choose life.”

I will choose love above losing my voice – the love of recognition of the other; reconciliation with those who choose dialogue before death, healing and repair rather than revenge and destruction.

As a Jew, this Yom Kippur, I will again reassert that we are a L’Chaim people; remember us for life is the refrain of our many prayers.

Two recent wedding engagements in Israel remind me that love can be cultivated even in the midst of the most terrific grief and loss. 

Hadas Lowenstern’s husband Elisha was killed during his reserve duty shortly after October 7. They had six children together. Just a few weeks ago, she announced her engagement to Hod Reichert, a widower and a single parent. In a similar vein, Rabbi Leo Dee, whose wife and two daughters were killed in a terrorist attack in April 2023, also announced his engagement recently. 

Love and chesed (deep loving kindness) are about not invalidating the other. They are about sharing the burden of protecting your community and your country. And they are about eschewing extremism (on both the right and left) and pursuing the path of radical moderation. If we do not find that path of the Biblical darchei noam, the way of peace and pleasantness, of reaching out in care and consideration to the other, what kind of world are we creating?

This awesome High Holiday season I will pray more intensely and commit all the more passionately to pursue the path of life and love for my people, my community, the people of Israel and for all humanity. May we all step into an avalanche of love.