A few months ago, I answered a survey, somewhere, about my interest in the videos put out by Unpacked Media, a resource I’ve used countless times that takes really complicated Jewish issues and makes them more bite-sized and entertaining. I forgot about the survey almost immediately, so when I received an email saying that I was on the waitlist for the Unpacked Community Beta, I was momentarily stung (wait list? Why don’t you want me?), and bewildered (What’s a “community beta”?), and then quickly forgot about it. When I was taken off the waitlist, I was between online Hebrew classes and decided to give it a try. The discussion board is part “safe space” and part consumer feedback for the creators of the Unpacked educational videos, and at first, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. Was I just being patronized, or was someone actually listening to me? But the Unpacked Community Beta (as in, experimental, for now) has quickly become a meaningful outlet for me, and a genuinely safe space to engage with challenging ideas.
The best example of that, so far, came when they posted the first episode of a new podcast called Borderlines, hosted by Yirmiyahu Danzig, and asked for feedback. The likelihood that I was going to sit through an hour-long interview with a politician was pretty low, except, I felt an obligation to help the Unpacked Community, and I was actually willing to engage with more difficult material if I could have my own voice heard in response. There’s something so disempowering about being told to watch a video or read an article or listen to a lecture without ever having the chance to respond.
The first thing that struck me was that Samer Sinijlawi, a Palestinian politician from East Jerusalem, talked about having gone to the Gaza Envelope to grieve with the families impacted by the Hamas attack on October 7th. There are certainly other Palestinians who have expressed horror at what Hamas did that day, but most of those Palestinians are also Israeli citizens, part of the 20% of the population of Israel that isn’t Jewish. Here was a man who had refused to even apply for Israeli citizenship, despite living in East Jerusalem where that is an option, because of his fervent hope that a Palestinian state, and therefore Palestinian citizenship, would soon be possible, and he was still willing to offer compassion to victims on the other side of the conflict, which made it easier for me to listen to whatever else he was going to say.
One of his main points in the interview was that the Palestinians living in the conflict on a daily basis are more often willing to be pragmatic and realistic than the Palestinians and allies watching from a distance, who often hold more maximalist and, in his words, la la land views. It was an interesting thing to hear, given that among Jews it’s probably the opposite. Many, if not most, diaspora Jews are much more hopeful about a two-state solution than most Jews living in Israel, who are under almost constant threat from the conflict, but it is the Jews who live in Israel, and know what it’s like on the ground, who get to vote on the path forward, rather than those of us in the diaspora who watch the results on the news. More often than not, it has been the Palestinians in the diaspora, or others claiming to speak for them, who have made most of the decisions for the Palestinian side, while the Palestinians on the ground have had to live with the consequences. It’s especially noticeable when campaigns like BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction), who say they are targeting Jewish settlers, in the West Bank, instead manage to punish the Palestinians working at Israeli factories and the few Palestinian/Israeli partnerships that are trying to create a path forward. Instead of making Palestinian lives better, or pushing the Israeli government back to the negotiating table, their actions tend to lead to more fear in Israel, and hardening of borders and hearts in response. At times it’s hard to know if the people who say they are speaking for the best interests of the Palestinians are just nonrat of the realities on the ground, or if they intend to push Israeli leadership further and further to the right so that negotiation is impossible and violence inevitable. Sometimes people are Machiavellian, and sometimes people are just wrong.
Another thing Samer Sinijlawi talked about was how unhelpful the rigid narratives are, on both sides, and how much better it would be if people could really get to know the lived experience of the other and start to come up with creative solutions together. I could almost picture the season of the Real World Jerusalem, “where people stop being polite and start getting real” (if that’s not too dated a reference). But even in this Borderlines interview, with two seemingly very willing participants in the dialogue, the discussion kept coming back to the surface level, and the rigid narratives, without being able to progress much further. It felt like, even with people of good will on both sides, the ice has to be re-broken over and over again before even the smallest shards of light can get through.
I watched a few more episodes of the Borderlines podcast, before the high holidays started to steamroll over me, and what I liked about the ones I saw was that Yirmiyahu Danzig seemed to be trying to take a deeper look at all kinds of issues in Israeli society, not just focusing on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as if everything else is working perfectly. He spoke to an Ethiopian Israeli academic about the difficulties Ethiopian Jews faced, and continue to face, trying to fit into Israeli society, and he also spoke to an Israeli/American rabbi, who comes from a family of celebrated orthodox rabbis, about how to bridge the divide between American Jews and Israeli Jews, orthodoxy and liberalism.
Something is happening. Communities are being built, often online where safeguards can be put in place, based on a genuine willingness to hear and be heard. Hopefully, with practice, more and more people will feel brave enough to consider ideas that challenge the status quo and maybe, finally, come up with workable answers. But all of this is happening at the same time as Americans and Israelis are wading through nasty political campaigns (leading to elections in late October and early November), and terrorism and settler violence in the West Bank are prominent again in the news. I can’t say that I’m feeling hopeful or optimistic, but I can see ways forward, and I can see people who are willing to keep trying. That’s gotta count for something. Right?
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
