The Thing It Is Important to Remember...

by Marc Ribot

I oppose the Israeli occupation. I think it should end, now, and that all U.S. economic, political, and military support for Israel should cease until it does. I've been active in support of Israeli Gush Shalom and Israeli/Palestinian Ta'ayush, both anti-occupation, and will hopefully continue to be.

But something bugs me about the translation of the seder into the great lefty/Jewish holiday.

Our family Passover when I was a kid was liberal. We translated the civil rights movement as 'the thing it was important to remember on Passover'. Across the street, more conservative Jews were sitting with their families constructing the emergence of the State of Israel or the emigration of soviet Jews as the "meaning of Passover." But there are common assumptions buried beneath these liberal/conservative, socialist/zionist differences: most importantly that- God having died at Auschwitz- we write our heaven in material: the physical borders of the Zionist state, the transformation of the material means of production.

Well, OK then, if those are the choices. But as a good socialist, its my job to question lousy choices. To be sure, the conceptual world of torah grounds some of the deep structures of my concept of justice. But torah isn't reducible to my concept of justice. My sense of justice doesn't wrap, for example, around the torture of Job, or the cruel psychological disaster of the binding of Isaac.

Torah is a divine non sequitur, meant to frustrate simple translation, It generates readings that have the ability to surprise.

And if it doesn't, why bother? If I already know what the burning bush is going to say, why risk approaching? If I go through the ritual motions, I'll use them as a window onto an experience of a profoundly different, non-materialist mode of being; a dream-time, mysterious, irrational, terrible.

I know what the stakes are: the material is real, it has weight, it produces results: Israel=IS REAL...whereas that god crap doesn't work. It didn't work at Auschwitz. To imagine otherwise, even in the negative sense of sense of a dead or absent god, is to invite THE REVOLTING THOUGHT: that god did work at Auschwitz.

THE REVOLTING THOUGHT offends my sense of justice so deeply it makes me want to howl like an animal.

So now I've found my margin of meaning, my "what its important to remember on Passover": this Passover, if I remember anything, I'll remember to howl.