I’ve published regular Torah commentary at Hitzonim.com for a year and a half. I’ve decided to close up shop and focus here as my primary newsletter on the topics of religion, politics, and culture. If you’re curious, I published the following blog post to Hitzonim as a goodbye. Thank you for joining me from Hitzonim. Welcome! If you’re finding me for the first time, this is how we ended up here!
Friends and readers, I'm growing up. In fact, I may be right on schedule. The Ethics of our Ancestors (Pirkei Avot) instructs:
At five years of age the study of Scripture; At ten the study of Mishnah; At thirteen subject to the commandments; At fifteen the study of Talmud; At eighteen the bridal canopy; At twenty for pursuit [of livelihood]; At thirty the peak of strength; At forty wisdom; At fifty able to give counsel; At sixty old age; At seventy fullness of years; At eighty the age of “strength”; At ninety a bent body; At one hundred, as good as dead and gone completely out of the world.
I am 42 years old, so I'm somewhere between wisdom and giving counsel. Would you agree? Something that I've learned in my wisdom, if you're comfortable with me claiming that for myself, is to trust the signals I hear in the rhythm of my body.
I began this blog project by focusing almost exclusively on restoring an authentic Jewish voice to the gospel accounts in the Christian New Testament. We explored Second Temple Period Judaism and its history. We searched for Talmudic insights that sounded familiar to the parables of the gospels. We discussed New Testament authorship and composition, taking Markan priority. We examined the perceived anti-Judaic rhetoric of the gospels and offered a few nuances to complicate the story. We discussed the major Jewish sectarian groups of the Second Temple: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots. We even introduced the idea that Jesus may have, himself, been a Pharisee from a rival house to the Pharisees with whom he was often characterized as being in debate. These latter points raised by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on her newsletter, Life is a Sacred Text.
What happened along the way, as I prepared these weekly commentaries, is that I connected deeply with my Jewish identity. By restoring more intentional Jewish voice to the gospels, I was strengthening the inner Jewish voice within myself. I found myself becoming less and less interested in what the gospels were saying, and I was eager to get to the Jewish writings that I suggested were sharing conceptual common ground with some of the ideas in the gospels. AJ Levine said somewhere, "Studying Jesus and the gospels are studying Jewish history." I certainly found this to be the case, and my interest in the development of Jewish thought took precedence over how that development went the way of Christianity.
Then something happened: October 7.
I found myself poorly equipped to process the events of October 7 in Israel as someone who had been critical of the political state for some time and lacking a close Jewish community around me. It's way too self-centered to make too much of this, but feeling as though I was finally settling into who I was, the global Jewish community came under assault, and the the Jewish community split along Zionist-fault lines.
My first advocacy for Palestinian human rights began in 2012 with the pro-two-state organization J Street. Back then we were feeling the pressure from within the community to quiet our critique of Israel. It was just as hard then as it became now to have inner-community discourse that was not immediately silenced.
I think the difference this time around was a vocal pro-Palestinian leftist movement led across many college Universities that framed Israel-Palestine as oppressor-oppressed, and in many leftist spaces, the same quieting of discourse occurred as had a decade ago, but rather than from within the community, those external to the community critiqued two-state politics as simply more genocide sympathizing for its defense of Israel as a state to exist next to a self-determined Palestinian state.
As maybe a slightly vindictive note to my fellow leftists: I've about had it with 18 year old white kids from Nebraska who bought a keffiyeh on the TikTok shop shouting me down as a genocide sympathizer. I don't have the data to reinforce the claim that using the same rhetoric for those who were voting for Kamala had a direct impact on the election results, but I certainly don't think a sustained campaign against supporting Democrats helped.
What I want others to understand is that between the evangelical right, the pro-Palestinian left, and the uncritical Zionists within our community, for mature, experienced, practical, and willing-to-compromise Jews like me, we began to feel not only politically homeless, but also without community. For Jews, community may be the most important thing we have, and while tens of thousands of murdered civilians, tragically, mostly women and children, are the true toll of the campaign of collective punishment against Palestinians, the divisions within our community is also a tragedy that we failed to create institutional spaces for more pluralistic discourse about Israel and its accountability to Palestinians for occupying its land.
Too "self hating" for Jewish communities, too "antisemitic" for the right, and too "genocidal" for the left. It's been a difficult year.
I tried to get my feet under me by picking this blog back up and publishing weekly parsha summaries from the weekly Torah readings. I really enjoyed this, and I got to know the Torah much better. I tested my knowledge of the Documentary Hypothesis, and I improved at speaking on the internet about source criticism.
I also learned that my usefulness is not in Torah commentary but rather in my voice in its full authenticity. It's time that I step away from Torah/Tanakh commentary--at least to step away from that as a primary goal, and leave that to our scholars and religious leaders. My voice is better equipped to confront the political moment as a person with a unique point of view: A leftist, disabled, Jewish pastor's kid, in the Midwest, living with brain cancer. As I've included on a couple of social media profiles, "Yes, it's a lot."
I'm closing up shop here. I've already launched a new newsletter, Adam Marc Writes. No doubt some biblical criticism will show up in my posts, but the primary aim of that project is to comment on politics, religion, and culture, from that unique, intersectional place I occupy. I won't be moving any subscribers from here to that new site. I've moved us all once, and I think this signals an opportunity to give you all the choice to follow me to this new place. I've already posted a couple of times there, so you can get a feel for the shift in content direction.
I've loved learning and studying with you here on Hitzonim. It's been a privilege and honor to find my voice with you all as my readers. No pressure to follow me to the new place, but I would, of course, love for many of you to subscribe and join me at this new project. But it's up to you if you'd like to do so.
Thanks for reading. You've helped me find my way through a pretty difficult stretch. Shalom, salaam, peace. xx. <3 -a.
Let the discourse at Adam Marc Writes begin!