Rabbi Burt Jacobson, the Baal Shem Tov, & the War
These snatches of Prophetic Vision sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with each other, sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with The Shalom Center. For not even prophetic vision can adequately express the Infinite ways to seek deep healing and justice inherent in the Breath of life.
Rabbi Burt Jacobson, one of the glowing gems of Jewish renewal is on his death-bed.
This is not a secret.
Burt and his beloved wife, Rabbi Diane Elliott, have told the truth to the whole Renewal rabbinate.
Burt has spent years writing an exploration of the deepest teachings of the Baal Shem Tov. He was able to complete the book in just the last few weeks, in time to secure a publisher and the promise of a preface from Dr Susannah Heschel. Burt applied the Besht to his own life, including how to deal with intense pain from his cancer with a minimum of suffering. He also applied it to crucial public events like the present bloody crisis in Palestinian-Israeli life. He wrote an essay on the Besht and the conflict that is too long — 14 pages — to publish here. But he asked us to publish a few opening paragraphs from that essay and from Rabbi David J .Cooper’s Introduction to it, together with the link to the whole essay for those who are interested. We are doing that — see below. My beloved Phyllis and I have read it all, and we strongly recommend you do read it all.
— Arthur Waskow, ed.
To read the whole Intro by Rabbi David Cooper and the whole essay by Rabbi Burt, click here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14khcCTHdV8IlgyVPjuu1I-FYS_n4XJaLe4FzqlBdcrI/edit
Or if you want to start with a little taste of the delicious borscht, here it is:
From Rabbi David Cooper:
What appears to be Rabbi Burt’s politics emerges from a deep dvekut, his experience of his oneness with God. Under the responsibility imposed by this oneness, Rabbi Burt operates under the Torah’s directive to love the other same as oneself. And that “Other” is not really an ‘other’ at all. Burt quotes the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching that one should not interpret the directive as meaning to love the other the same as one would love oneself, but rather to love the other who is–from the perspective of the divine Mystery–indistinguishable from oneself. To do unto another what is hateful to oneself is therefore an act of ‘Self’harm to the larger Self. This is fundamental to his theologico/politico praxis.
…
I believe that this sense of the loving rebuke is key to Burt’s evolving relationship to Zionism. For many years he regarded himself as a Zionist but more akin to the Zionism of Buber, Ahad HaAm, and the Brit Shalom group in Mandatory Palestine that did not pin the national liberation of the Jewish people on a Jewish ethno-state as it emerged in 1948. Noam Pianko has observed that for several Jewish nationhood thinkers of the early 20th century, it was not that they left Zionism so much as Zionism had left them. [Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn, Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 5]
At a certain point, Burt could no longer call himself a Zionist if it meant the affirmation of a Jewish supremacist state whether in a two-state or one-state configuration. However, he could not call himself an anti-Zionist either because he understood the oppression and horror that brought about Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel.
Israel, Palestine, and the Ba’al Shem Tov
by Rabbi Burt Jacobson
I undertook my final trip to Israel in 1968, soon after the Six Day War. At that time I was strongly considering making aliyah—immigrating to Israel—but something fateful happened that ultimately changed the direction of my life. I had been spending time in Eilat with my Israeli buddy Ya’akov, and when I returned to Jerusalem an American friend, Michael, took me to meet Arie Lova Eliav (1921-2010), who had been a liberal member of Prime Minister Golda Meir’s cabinet.
It was soon after the Six Day War, and Lova Eliav was extremely agitated. Pacing his living room, he told us what conditions were like in what Israel was calling the “liberated” territories. He had just spent six months in the West Bank getting to know the defeated Palestinians, and he was frightened by the conditions under which they were living. “We have to end this occupation,” he told us, “or it might mean the end of the Jewish state. But Golda won’t listen to me!”
I was shaken by what he revealed to us, for what he was saying inferred that the Palestinian Arabs had a legitimate and completely different narrative than the one-sided narrative that I had grown up with, the story that most Jews believed regarding the history of the struggle between the two peoples. When I returned to the U.S., I began to study the sordid accounts of the ongoing conflict, which had been going on since the 1920s.
Continue to read the whole Intro by Rabbi David Cooper and the whole essay by Rabbi Burt, click here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14khcCTHdV8IlgyVPjuu1I-FYS_n4XJaLe4FzqlBdcrI/edit