'If I am not for myself ...'

A meditation on a teaching from Rabbi Hillel in the wake of October 7th, 2023.

A picture of a light pole from my visit to Israel, March 11, 2024

Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, I was on a panel at the AWP Conference with Sarah Einstein and a group of other great Jewish authors, where we talked about antisemitism in the literary world. This essay feels like a powerful continuation of that conversation. Sarah gets at a core dilemma many progressive Zionists like me face: how to stand up for ourselves and other Jews without letting go of our responsibility to others. The Hillel quote she anchors the piece around captures that tension—between looking inward and facing outward—that has always been part of Jewish life. — Howard Lovy

---

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?

— Rabbi Hillel

If I am not for myself, they will sing my praises and call me one of the good Jews, one of the ones who understands that our survival must not inconvenience or harm any other people. I will be invited to speak about why I support the calls to end the existence of the state of Israel at luncheons and conferences, and literary journals will clamor for the pieces I write denouncing not only the nation, but the people who dwell there. Colleagues will slip into my office to whisper unkind things about the only other Jew in my department and his Israeli wife, and in this way let me know that I am one of them in spite of my own Jewishness, though he of course is not. My husband and I would not have to have a rule in our house that we don’t discuss the conflict, because when we do, we fight and we are a couple who very rarely fights. I would have no reason to force myself to begin each day watching footage from Gaza, which is a thing I have done for fifteen months now (Shabbat excepted) because I believe that if I support a response (if not necessarily the specifics of how that response has been carried out) to the attack on our people, I must absorb the moral wounds left by such a response.

Because I am for myself, not so much as myself, but as one of the people of Israel, a conversation I’m meant to hold with another writer is cancelled when I’m sent messages threatening not just me, but also the bookstore which plans to host the conversation. It’s a decision I make—both the bookstore and the other author say that if I ask it of them, they will continue with the planned event—because I don’t want to put the Jewish bookstore workers (and there is at least one) in danger, but also because I don’t want to give the non-Jewish bookstore workers (of which there are many more) another reason to think Jews have a casual disregard for the safety of others. We don’t. One of the central tenets of Judaism, pikuach nefesh, holds that human life is sacred above all else. If, in fact, we must break another mitzvot to save a life, then we are to break it.

Because I am for myself, friends of many years no longer return my calls, though a few took time to first tell me how reprehensible they find me for my Zionism in a final conversation.

Because I am for myself, people with whom I would never be friends, people whose support for Israel is predicated not on the safety of the Jews, but on our place in their apocalyptic prophecy, suddenly begin reaching out to invite me to speak at their luncheons and attend their conferences. I decline. I point to a recent newsletter sent out by the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women that reads, in part, “Hitler and all intelligent readers throughout history have…” and then the infographic on their website that says “we support Israel” as one of my reasons. The enemies of my enemies are not, in fact, my friends.

Because I am for myself, there is a hurt between my husband and me that we each believe will never fully heal.

Because I am for myself, I don’t deny the horror of what is going on in Gaza, I witness it and I own what part of it is mine to own, though I refuse the assertion that I, we, own the whole portion. I see homes levelled by Israeli bombs in order to get at the military tunnels beneath them, and I am sorry for those who lived in those homes, but not for those who hid in those tunnels. I see the images of dead and maimed children in Gaza, and my heart rends, but it also rends when I see the dead children of Kibbutz Be’eri. There is blood on my hands, but it is only one small portion of the river of blood that flows through the region.

Who will be for me? In the immediately aftermath of October 7^th, the answer seems to be no one will be for me, or rather, for the world’s Jews, except ourselves. In my small, conservative Appalachian city there is a rally at which people decry an action Israel hasn’t yet taken and hold up signs that read “We Honor our Martyrs.” They mean the people who raped and murdered Israelis and didn’t make it back to Gaza. From the news coverage, I see that one of those holding such a sign is a former student. I’m not sure what he means by “our;” he’s a white boy from a Christian family who has never been out of the country. They will rally again, this time joined by organizations I once belonged to like Code Pink, on the day after the Israeli offensive begins.

A young woman tells the local reporter that 83 of her relatives in Gaza have been killed, 58 of whom were younger than 18. The reporter does not ask her how she knows this, a little more than 24 hours after the response began, or what proof she has. Our university—against my advice, since I think we are lucky to have avoided the worst of the protests—hosts a series of speakers including Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas leader Sheikdh Hassan Yousef. He famously defected to Israel and worked for ten years as an agent for Shin Bet, and speaks frequently and forcefully against the brutality of Hamas from an insider’s perspective. I didn’t attend the talk. I avoid all of the talks. I understand nothing good can come from them. But the next day a person in the administration, a person with quite a bit of power over me, says “We shouldn’t have asked him. He was too hard on Hamas.”

I understand that I can’t say “How can it be possible to be too hard on Hamas? Have you seen the videos from the Nova Music Festival? Do you know why they call Sinwar The Butcher of Khan Younis? Do you understand that they horde the food aid, block civilians from entering the tunnels where they themselves shelter during the fighting, and encourage Palestinian children to martyr themselves? Have you forgotten that Fathi Hamad, another Hamas leader, called on Palestinians to kill all Jews around the world in 2019?” So I just nod and say, “I couldn’t be there. I had a teaching obligation,” and hurry to my car, where I listen to an audiobook because I can no longer bear to listen to NPR.

And yet, my friend Amy, who isn’t Jewish, sends me an email telling me that she is so very sorry by what she is hearing in our shared academic and writing community, and to let me know she won’t be silent. And she isn’t. She posts with great clarity and passion across her social media platforms trying to rebut the worst of the propaganda. She does this so frequently that, in the digital and corporeal places where Jewish writers gather, we say her name with the reverence our foremothers might have said the names of the matriarchs.

And yet, my friend Paul, who isn’t Jewish, guards me during a particularly difficult event at which protestors disrupt events to chant From the River to the Sea and Death to Zionists and, at one point, a young man in a keffiyeh recognizes that my last name is Jewish and throws a fake punch toward my head, then laughs. I ask Paul over and over again if I am overreacting. He reassures me that I’m not. He also doesn’t mind when I cancel dinner plans because I’m just too damned tired after the day’s events.

And yet, my friend Chelsea, who isn’t Jewish, writes to me that she has followed my writing about the situation and is grateful for some moral clarity. She says the only Jewish American voices she sees in the press are those who have joined the encampment movement or those who stand so far to the right they attend conferences with the likes of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. She says she can’t imagine how I feel in this moment, and I am grateful that she acknowledges this; too many people have been telling me how I ought to feel, and why what I do feel offends them. We agree to meet for drinks at a conference that I’m afraid I won’t be invited to attend.

And yet, when I send off proposals to the conference I’m dreading—one on antisemitism in literary community and another in which a Jewish poet and I will join two Muslim writers to discuss shared liberation and paths to coexistence—and they are, as expected refused, the National Jewish Book Council intervenes. The panels are added to the schedule, though after some days the phrase “sponsored by the National Jewish Book Council” is appended to their titles. Nobody can tell me whether or not this is so the hosting organization can claim not to be responsible for our presence there. Peaceful coexistence being, it seems, beyond the pale.

And yet, my husband’s mother pulls me aside and asks me to show her pictures of my recent trip Israel. She says she knows he did not want me to go, in part because he worried for my safety but also because he did not like the politics of it, but she is proud of me. She reminds me that her birth certificate has a swastika on it. She is not old enough to remember the war, but she does remember the occupation of Austria and the resentment that carries from it to today. She tells me that she, too, believes that Israel is the only safety Jews will know in this world, and that she also—like me—wishes that this weren’t the case.

If I am only for myself, then what is the use of me? I have, for decades, participated in loose groups of activists in the United States who work to support organizations such as Standing Together and forums such as The Third Narrative that bring Israelis and Palestinians living in the region together to work toward shared security, self-determination, and eventually peaceful and even supportive coexistence. Some of this is pragmatic. There are nine million Israelis, seven million of them Jewish, and five and a half million Palestinians living in the regions usually called Gaza and the West Bank. I say usually because on either extreme, even these words are contested. I think often of the quote from Nir Avishai Cohen, author of the book Love Israel, Support Palestine. “At the end, after all of the dead Israelis and Palestinians are buried, after we have finished washing away the rivers of blood, the people who share a home in this land will have to understand that there is no other choice but to follow the path of peace. That is where true victory lies.”

I wake up every morning aware of the horror of the war, and it is never not a horror to me. It’s my first thought of almost every day, not because I intend it to be, but because I can’t escape it. I do not want it to take war to keep my people safe, but we have no safety without Israel. Americans often imagine that because the Jews they know are safe, Jews are safe everywhere. But they cannot tell me where the Jews of Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, the Former USSR, Ukraine, and almost every Arab nation could have safely gone when they were expelled from their homes. They cannot tell me where the Israeli Jews could go now if the country was lost.

I wake up every morning and say the shema before I begin my day.

I wake up every morning to a carefully curated mix of media about the conflict, one that is inclusive of Israeli and Palestinian voices, though not the most extreme of either. I give these voices my full attention before I start the tasks of daily life. I understand that I have no power to effect change in the region, but I do have an ethical obligation to listen to the stakeholders and advocate for them in my own small ways within my small circle of influence. Sometimes this makes my Jewish friends angry, and sometimes if makes my Palestinian friends angry. But the anger of friends is an easy thing to bear; it’s the moral weight of war that’s too heavy for my weak spirit. I carry the weight of it at every moment.

What am I? I grew up in the kind of Reform Jewish community that wanted nothing so much as to be indistinguishable from other religious communities, and who held both minhag and mitzvot loosely. The greatest good was to only ever be seen as admirable by those around us, the greatest shame was to do something which might reflect poorly on other Jews. I have even, for a while, not been a Jew, when my love of peace—and I do love peace—lead me to the Mennonite church, but for the three years I was a congregant there, I never stopped seeing myself as its Jewish member. Religion is only one part of what it means to be a Jew; one can’t leave a birthright behind so easily.

I am the great-great-granddaughter of a woman who sent her children from Lithuania, across an ocean, so that they wouldn’t be conscripted in the Tzarist armies of occupying Russia, where they would have been put on the front lines because Jewish boys were the most expendable. Still, she was a frum woman who expected her children to find Jewish spouses, keep kosher homes, and have Jewish children of their own. Most did some of those things, only one did all of them.

I am the great-granddaughter of a man who put a pack on his back and travelled through rural West Virginia selling small goods to recent settlers, staying out on his own for almost a week at a time, at an age when I wasn’t allowed to stay out past ten o’clock. His brothers did the same. They saved their money and built lives for themselves, good ones. They sent their children to school and impressed on them the shining promise they believed America held for us: that we could be Jews who were also Americans, and not just Jews living in America until we were once again forced to leave.

I am the granddaughter of a man who would have been happier if I’d been raised Episcopalian, not because he was some caricature of a “self-hating Jew,” but because he never fully believed that vision would hold, and he wanted us to be safe more than he wanted us to be Jews.

I am the daughter of a man whose own family abandoned their Jewishness as soon as they arrived in this country so thoroughly that his father was a virulent antisemite, though that was only one of his many bigotries.

I am the daughter of a woman who chose to raise her children Jewish in the hopes that it would keep us from becoming bigots ourselves, and it worked. We each have, or had, many faults, but we are each staunch believers in the equality of all peoples.

I am a Jew who held her Jewishness lightly until middle age, when the very strange circumstance of marrying into an Austrian family with a Nazi past led me to go searching for my own family’s path through Europe during the diaspora. I am one who now holds it closer, and understands its significance more clearly, and will not hold it lightly again.

I am a person who has Palestinian friends—mostly from the activist world, it’s true—and I know they hold their identities as dear as I hold mine. I want for them what they want for themselves, which is not so different from what my great-great-grandmother wanted for her family: a safe place to live where they could prosper as free people.

I am someone who wants that for all people.

If not now, when?

---

Sarah Einstein teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is the author of Self-Portrait in Apologies (Mountain State Press, 2025), Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press), and the forthcoming essay collection From Around Here: Notes on a Jewish Appalachian Life. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, Ninth Letter, PANK, and other journals. Her work has been reprinted in Best of the Net and has received a Pushcart Prize and the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Five tiny delights

1. My husband's spontaneous calls of "I love you" from his office to mine when we are both working at home.

2. When my tiny, three legged chihuahua sings to me.

3. A student coming to my office to tell me how proud they are of something they have written.

4. Visiting my mother.

5. The gloaming for two weeks in November, when Tennessee is almost West Virginia and I am almost at home.

Five tiny Jewish delights

1. Finding something entirely bonkers while doing Daf Yomi. Do you know how to get a snake out of a woman's private parts? You would if you did Daf Yomi!

2. The smell of my childhood synagogue, which even today smells like maybe my beloved relatives of blessed memory are just around the corner.

3. Discovering happy pockets in Jewish history in my travels.

4. Jerusalem bagels!

5. The fellowship of other Jewish writers.