Your God Does Not Forgive You and Neither Do We

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Twenty years ago, when I still lived in Australia, I was invited to a professional development workshop in Sydney presented by an Israeli therapist who was also a rabbi. The topic was ‘narrative therapy’, an approach I had already rejected. I was especially suspicious of a presenter from Israel teaching narrative therapy, and I had no interest in attending.

Narrative therapy deserves its rightful place in the ‘discarded, forgotten and good-riddance basket’. It is clinically useless, even harmful. But it was favoured by Israeli therapists for its post-modernist basis. For those unfamiliar with it, post-modernism is a philosophical movement that holds that we each have our own subjective perception of reality. According to narrative therapy, this subjective perception informs our ‘narrative’ — the story we tell ourselves and others about our experience. It is true that we each have a subjective experience of reality and our own perspective on it — I see this regularly in my relationship therapy work in particular. But some extreme post-modernists have gone further, arguing that the fact that we have our subjective perception of reality means that objective reality doesn’t exist at all.

A few years earlier, I attended a residential weekend at the University of New England in NSW as part of a Masters degree in counselling. One of the lectures was on post-modernism. The lecturer explained with a straight face that because we each have our own subjective perspective, objective reality doesn’t exist. I raised my hand and said: ‘Suppose I approach you right now at the lectern and slap you. When you complain about it, I say it’s just your narrative and the slap never actually happened. I insist that all we have are our respective narratives, and mine says I didn’t do anything to you.’ He looked at me stunned, and admitted that ‘perhaps post-modernists have taken things too far’.

The lecturer, as it happened, was an Aboriginal Australian. I have thought about this many times since. His people had suffered catastrophic genocide at the hands of white settler colonisers who wanted their land and its resources — and to take it, murdered millions and set about erasing everything else: Aboriginal culture, identity, existence itself. And yet here he was, arguing that objective reality doesn’t exist. It is a striking example of how colonialist ideology can sometimes succeed in poisoning the minds of even some of those who have suffered its most devastating consequences, leading them into collusion and self-doubt. But that is a subject for another essay.

Israeli therapists have embraced narrative therapy enthusiastically, and it’s easy to see why. Therapists tend toward liberal or left-leaning politics — it goes with the territory. But Israeli therapists face a particular problem. They cannot easily identify with the right, yet confronting what their society is and what it’s doing is equally intolerable. To do so would mean acknowledging their own complicity, and accepting that being a moral person and a loyal Israeli are mutually exclusive. Narrative therapy resolves this nicely. The idea that objective reality doesn’t exist and that all we have is our subjective experience and the stories we tell about it allows Israeli therapists to feel progressive and humane while maintaining the convenient and wilful blindness that has always characterised the Israeli Zionist left. That blindness is driven by tribal loyalty, and tribal loyalty is driven by basic, self-serving existential fear and the belief that Israel is the only thing standing between Jews and another holocaust. When existential fear trumps everything else, values and principles that should be universal, become selective. You apply your values where it costs you nothing, and look away where it does.

If objective reality doesn’t exist, then what Palestinians say is being done to them isn’t in fact real — it’s ‘only’ their perception, their ‘narrative’. One wonders what would happen if we applied the same logic to Jewish victimhood and suggested it was just a ‘narrative based on subjective experience’, and that nothing really happened because postmodernism suggests that there is no such thing as objective reality. Israeli sophistry and double standards are legendary.

The organiser knew I was an activist for Palestinian human rights and that I had renounced my Israeli citizenship. He was insistent — he thought I should hear this particular speaker, and gave me the ticket for free. At the time this puzzled me and against my better judgement, I went.

The rabbi opened by listing his credentials — the educational and therapeutic work he was doing in the Jerusalem area, the joint Israeli-Palestinian educational projects he was involved with, which among other things facilitated ‘dialogue’ between Israelis and Palestinians. This was his way of telling us he was a decent man who didn’t hate Palestinians and was using his profession for good. What he never did was take any ownership of why a problem existed in the first place — the kind of problem no amount of ‘dialogue’ was ever going to resolve, because dialogue assumes two equal parties with a disagreement, not a coloniser society and the people it is replacing and erasing. I was not going to sit there and tolerate it. I waited for the first break and walked out.

Eventually I understood why the organiser had wanted me there. He thought he was bringing in a ‘nice’ Israeli — someone who worked with Palestinians, who clearly meant well — and he wanted the encounter to soften my ‘one-sided’ position. Twenty years ago activists like me were under considerable pressure to be ‘fair to both sides’, to acknowledge the good Israelis, and to moderate what Israel supporters labelled as one-sidedness. I now completely ignore this whitewashing nonsense.

Just before that year’s Yom Kippur — the Jewish day of atonement — I received an unexpected email from the rabbi. He had noticed me walk out of his workshop. He didn’t know what he had done to ‘offend’ me, he said, but he was asking for my forgiveness.

It might seem strange to some, but I knew exactly why he asked me to forgive him. Yom Kippur is the holiest day in Judaism, and the law behind it is specific in a way most people outside the religion do not know. On Yom Kippur, God can forgive sins committed against God. But God does not forgive sins committed against another person. That kind of sin can only be forgiven by the person who was wronged, and only if they choose to grant it. When this religious man asked me for forgiveness before Yom Kippur, he was not being sentimental or considerate of my feelings. He was trying to close an account that his own God could not close for him. I knew exactly what it would mean to him if I withheld my forgiveness. For an observant Jew, that is a very serious matter.

I wrote back and told him that he had not committed an offence against me as an individual and did not need my forgiveness. The issue was moral, not personal. He had used narrative therapy as a way of avoiding ever naming what his own society had done and was still doing, actively promoting the idea that Palestinian dispossession is a matter of perspective rather than a matter of fact. I told him he had ignored and whitewashed a crime against humanity, and that I was not going to sit there and tolerate it — which is why I walked out. I also told him who he actually needed to ask forgiveness from. He never replied. He had been released from needing my forgiveness and had no further need to engage with me. ‘Liberal Zionists’ like him believe you can make settler colonialism more humane, more ‘civilised’, effectively buying time for Israel to complete its monstrous, annihilationist project.

The Jewish religious law that made this man ask my forgiveness is: ‘Transgressions between a person and God — Yom Kippur atones. Transgressions between a person and their fellow — Yom Kippur does not atone until the wronged person has been appeased’. (Aveirot she’bein adam la’makom — yom hakippurim mechaper. Aveirot she’bein adam le’chavero ein yom hakippurim mechaper ád she’yeratzé ét chavero).

The law is clear. God does not forgive transgressions between people. The account stays open and does not close when the day is over. In other words, if forgiveness is not granted by a person who was wronged to the person who has wronged them, the purpose of Yom Kippur has not been achieved.

But the word that really matters here is chavero — fellow, neighbour, the other person. Jewish religion is legalistic by nature, specific and nitpicky about the meaning of every word. So who is chavero? Does it include ethnically cleansed and tortured Palestinians, those kidnapped and incarcerated without charge, raped and tortured in Israel’s dungeons of horror, the bereaved families of murdered Palestinian babies and newborns left to decompose in incubators in Gaza’s bombed hospitals, Gaza’s survivors who are suffering from malnutrition, who were left with nothing, who are surviving, somehow, in the ruins of their homes, maimed and traumatised children, displaced and traumatised Lebanese, the bereaved families of dead Lebanese people murdered by Israel, the bereaved families of two hundred Iranian schoolgirls?

If the answer is yes, then no ritual on the holiest day of the Jewish year absolves a settler, a soldier, a politician, or the rabbi who blesses them, of what they have done to a Palestinian or anyone else. Only the person harmed can grant forgiveness, and they are not being asked.

If the answer is no — if chavero means only other Jews — then this has to be stated out loud, for the world to hear. It means Israeli Jews and the Jews who support them admitting that the people of Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Iran are not considered fellow human beings.

There is no third option. Either chavero and the law apply to everyone, or someone has to stand up and explain why it does not. A society that dehumanises anyone who is not one of its own should have been called out long ago.

Judaism has no hell, no purgatory, no afterlife where unfinished business gets sorted out later. What it has instead is the ‘Book of Life’ — the belief that on Yom Kippur a person’s fate for the coming year is sealed, and that to be inscribed in that book is to be granted another year of life. Death, in this tradition, is not simply nature taking its course. It is what happens when atonement fails.

Atonement is not just about a private conversation with God. The law is explicit. The rabbi who condones rape, the settler who harasses children on their way to school, who burns olive groves, the soldiers who randomly break into people’s homes, searching, violating, humiliating; the soldiers who rape Palestinians, the judges who dropped the charges against them, the soldiers who train dogs to rape male Palestinian detainees, who shot a family in their car killing their seven-month-old baby and an entire family on another day, and lied about it, the politicians who send fighter jets and drones to finish off the survivors of a genocide in an enclave of Nakba refugees they have controlled and besieged for decades, the religious minister who poses for photographs with Palestinian detainees — none of them get to settle their account through ritual alone, no matter how fanatically they observe the day. In a religion with no later place to settle it, an open and unresolved account is a big deal.

I am not Jewish in any meaningful way. I was born in Israel and was given the label Jewish by that country, and that is the extent of it. But this legal point matters to every Jew who observes Yom Kippur. In Israel itself it matters more now than ever before. Israel is no longer the largely secular country it was when I was growing up, with religious Jews a minority. It is rapidly becoming a theocracy. It is run by a supremacist religious nationalist movement that justifies colonisation, settlement, dispossession, rape, torture and indiscriminate slaughter explicitly in the name of Jewish law and Jewish destiny. The rabbis who sanction rape as a weapon of war, the ministers who invoke the Torah to authorise the destruction of Gaza, the settlers who believe their title to the land is God-given and therefore unchallengeable — these are not fringe figures operating at the margins of Israeli society. They are at its centre, in its cabinet, in its courts, and in its military.

Jewish religious law is not a distraction from the political argument but the centre of it. When a state acts in the name of a religion, the obligations of that religion apply. You cannot invoke God’s covenant as the justification for what you are doing and then claim God’s law is irrelevant when it requires you to take responsibility for your actions. The chavero question is being posed to exactly those people who have placed religious law at the heart of their politics, their violence, and their impunity.

A strategy for protest & resistance

I want to suggest something concrete to those who are directly harmed by Israel: Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, and anyone affected by Israel’s surveillance technology and arms trading. Before Yom Kippur each year, send a message to Jewish Israelis and those who support them that you do not forgive them. Say it plainly — through social media, by email, on camera. Tell them you know about their Yom Kippur law; that their account is not settled and cannot ever be settled, because the only person in a position to settle it was never asked.

I do not believe these perpetrators deserve forgiveness. Their crimes are so heinous and so intentional that they are beyond redemption. But this is about them knowing that you know that their God does not forgive, on your behalf, a sin committed against you, no matter how devoutly they fast or pray or perform the rituals of Yom Kippur. If they want to insist this does not matter to them, they will have to say why. And there is only one honest answer available to them — that they do not consider you chavero — a fellow human being. Let them expose, in their own words, exactly how little they think of non-Jews. Because if chavero is not a fellow human being but only a fellow Jew, then it means they can do anything to anyone who is not Jewish with impunity and they are not required to atone for it. When people wonder why most Israeli Jews support genocide and show such absence of conscience and empathy, the answer is simple: even non-religious Jews are raised on the same value system that the religion is built on. They are taught to believe that only Jews matter.

Let the rest of the world explain why it supports, funds and provides political cover for a society that thinks and behaves as if only Jews are human — Jewish supremacy, laid bare.

At the next Palestine advocacy vigil or rally, carry a sign that says: ‘Yom Kippur does not atone for this — your victims do not forgive you. We do not forgive you.’ It will be very hard for the UK, German, Australian, French or US governments to legislate against this.

Jewish faith condemns its own adherents, and no intellectual gymnastics can change this. And ‘Thou shalt not kill’ doesn’t even include the chavero qualification. It is universal and has no exceptions.

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