Ready to Create a New Form of Judaism

Rabbi Elliot Kukla • Age 49 // Author and faculty at SVARA: a traditionally radical yeshiva, California

At home, we have just started introducing the concept of the Holocaust to our child, which we hadn’t before. I’m a second generation survivor, and in my Holocaust education I was really introduced to the Holocaust as a very singular experience.

The way we learned about it was to instill terror, not to inspire grief. It was only in time that I realized that it was my early Holocaust education that led me to Zionism, that as long as I held the Holocaust as a kind of singular experience, then the answer to that is Zionism. And in fact, the Holocaust takes place within a historical context of many genocides.

I grew up in Canada, where many millions of First Nations people were slaughtered and where Hitler went to research the Residential and Reserve (reservations) system, and modeled the concentration camps after these. What I didn’t realize while learning about the concentration camps my family died in was that there were still these schools, people dying in those schools and being buried underground, underneath my feet as I was speaking.

Much later I came to realize that the Holocaust was unique because of its whiteness and its Europeanness and because it was mine, and it was my family. I still needed to grieve for it. The horror of all of the genocides that happen throughout history doesn’t diminish each one’s individuality—in fact it can make that grief more rich to grieve with others. So I try to figure out how to introduce to my child the idea that there is this intense story in her history that she can grieve without being necessarily terrified by, and know that it’s not something that sets her apart from humanity, but something that makes her extremely human. If you scratch the surface of almost anyone around here, there is going to be a story like this.

My father died this year. He was born in Belgium in January 1942. He was a Hidden Child in Belgium and he died in the same year that the Jewish state—which was formed in many ways in response to the genocide he was born in—was accused of genocide. And that should be terrifying to every Jew. That the Jewish State that was founded in large part to respond to genocide is now held guilty of genocide on an international level. That is existentially terrifying to me.

What gives me hope is that there is a radical change of attitudes amongst younger Jews. The younger Jews are educated and tuned in and are just really ready to create a new form of Judaism, and that is thrilling to me. And a year ago, when I would tell non-Jews that I was an anti-Zionist rabbi, they would look at me like a pig flying. And now, taxi drivers and random people will be like, Oh, anti-Zionist rabbi, that makes sense.

It has reached a point of mainstream recognition, and I remember when that happened for me also as a trans rabbi, as the first trans rabbi—there was a moment when I went from “I’ve never even heard of that” to… ”of course.”

(as told to Rebecca Katz)