“They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”
Though we may say it tongue-in-cheek, the words above constitute perhaps the core Jewish story of our time. And while it’s cute and sometimes applicable to our holiday narratives, what does it simultaneously obscure?
At Passover, they tried to kill us, we survived, and they were killed by the Angel of Death and drowned in the Sea of Reeds. At Purim, they tried to kill us, we survived, and then we killed over 75,000 of them. On October 7th, they tried to kill us, they succeeded in massacring 1,200 of us, and then we bombed them for months on end, killing tens of thousands of them.
When we end our story at “We survived. Let’s eat.” we obscure our own culpability, the destruction and degradation that we in turn cause for them and ourselves. When we frame ourselves as eternal victims, we invisibilize our own responsibility as actors. When we understand ourselves as the unquestioned “good guys,” we lose our ability to see when we stray from what is right. When we speak of “them,” we forget that all of Creation is an “us.”
In his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, internationally renowned author, Peter Beinart, makes the case that in the wake of October 7th and the destruction of Gaza since, the Jewish people need a new story. Meaningfully, this is the same case we made in our Chapter 9 Project, launched last year, where writers from across the Jewish world helped us reimagine different endings to the Purim story that center nonviolence and peace.
In this timely, Pre-Purim webinar, The Shalom Center’s Rabbi Nate DeGroot will be in conversation with Peter, plus three of our Chapter 9 Project authors - Graie Hagans, Devon Spier, and Rabbi Tamara Cohen - to unpack the Jewish stories we’ve inherited, reckon with the harm they have caused and cause, and dream about new Jewish stories we might tell going forward, for a world that desperately calls us to understand that we are all in this together.
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The webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording. We invite that you make this and other such programs possible by contributing at whatever level you can below. Please contact events@theshalomcenter.org if finances are a barrier.