Jewish peoplehood

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive)  that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.

“It takes a village to raise a child,” says the African proverb—and educating for peoplehood takes a full life. In The Kuzari, R. Yehuda Halevi defines prayer as “the seed of time and its fruit.” Prayer is both the potential and the final product. Similarly, I would define “Peoplehood Consciousness” both as what we are doing when we are involved with Peoplehood and as the final product we are trying to create. The sort of life experience that creates Peoplehood contains four critical stages: 1) knowing, 2) acknowledging, 3) feeling part, and 4) building partnership, each of which may contain a variety of elements and layers. In this article, I will lay out the pedagogical thinking underlying each stage, using examples from my own experience in the field of Jewish Peoplehood.

In August 1920, the political fate of the Kurdish nation, along with its territory, Kurdistan, were on the line, after the Allies asserted their interest in national rights to self-determination following World War I. Under the Treaty of Sèvres, Kurds were acknowledged as an ethno-political entity in the Wilsonian perspective, yet the ideal of self-determination failed to crystallize as a full legal right to independent nationhood. Thus, Kurdish statehood was annulled. In contrast, the drawing of states’ boundaries in Europe took place mostly along national lines. The result has been an untenable diversity across regions affected by the War in the varieties of self-determination, arguing that some peoples’ nationhood was credited with less legitimacy than others. The departure of imperial powers and subsequently the League of Nations from self-determination for achieving territorial independence came as a result of imperialist world policies to reorder political influence. With the adoption of self-determination as one of the purposes of the UN in 1945, and with the crystallization of self-determination as a legal right in 1966 and the subsequent campaign of decolonization, it could be argued the Kurds’ status was not repositioned and in some way is invisible to the law of self-determination, as applied.

Our perspective on the Jewish people as ever-dying or ever-thriving determines the leadership models and capacities we strive to attain.  "According to leadership experts who teach about long-range systemic change in countries, universities and business, successful leadership depends upon the combination of knowledge, the trust of a community of people, the capacity to leverage power and the willingness to take risks."