To my son, who turns 13 on Saturday:
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Last week, Chicago’s City Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. It was as close as these votes get, with Mayor Brandon Johnson breaking the tie. Groups such as the Jewish United Fund spoke out against it, in support of Israel, saying they speak for Chicago Jews.
Chicago Jews like us. You are sixth generation, born in the same Hyde Park hospital as your great-grandmother. This is the year of your bar mitzvah, which means this year, you take your place before the Torah and speak in our community with your own voice.
It is a hard time to become a Jewish adult, but becoming an adult means facing what you have to, even when it is hard. You need to know that these groups do not speak for us or decide what it means to be Jewish. You need to know that being Jewish means standing for the good of the world. It does not mean standing for Israel.
Last month was Tu Bishvat, the birthday of the trees. At synagogue, we tasted fruit. I celebrated Tu Bishvat when I was a child. Your grandparents did too. That tradition is your inheritance.
Last month in Gaza, Israeli soldiers killed 195 Palestinians in one day. Israeli bombs leveled neighborhoods and apartment towers. Even sidewalks. Even the trees.
The soldiers doing these things do them on behalf of a Jewish state. In my name and yours. That means what happens in Israel, though not your fault, is your problem. That is part of your inheritance too.
In the West Bank, Israeli settlers are building towns in places that do not belong to them. They have torn up 800,000 olive trees, from which Palestinian farmers made their living for centuries. Grandchildren picking fruit from the same trees their grandparents did, and their grandparents before them — gone.
I remember, when I was your age, collecting tzedakah in blue boxes, sending coins to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. This was a bar mitzvah project. We thought: a good deed.
But in Israel, even trees are warfare. That charity has planted Aleppo pines on disputed land for more than a century, growing forests that keep displaced Palestinians from places they once lived.
Destroy a tree to uproot a people. Plant a tree to claim their land.
I have never understood why the Torah tells us not to look at truth that hurts us. God commanded Lot to turn away from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the Garden of Eden, God forbade Adam and Eve the tree of knowledge.
That can’t be who we are. Some fruits are bitter. We can’t pretend we do not taste them.
It is a gruesome lesson, that the government of a people you are part of can be so brutal. But what Israel has done is wrong. What Israel does now is wrong. And it’s us, here in the diaspora, and not just soldiers there, who do this. It is our coins planting those trees. It is our support fueling Israel’s war. We cannot look away.
You have to know how hard it is for some Jews to break with Israel. Our people have been through so much, and the idea of a Jewish state, safe and free from hatred, has seemed almost too good to be true. Because it is. We cannot afford a haven for Jews in Israel if the cost is Palestinian land and life.
I do not support Hamas or its terrorist attack on Oct. 7. I know antisemitism is real and that you will feel it in your life. You have already. I have too. The only person I ever hit, I hit because he mocked me for being Jewish. But as much as I can still feel that anger, decades later, I know hitting him didn’t make the next Jew safer, or his ignorance any less. Just as I know bulldozing Gaza makes no Jew safer from those who hate us, whose power this war only grows.
I love my Jewishness. It is the most important thing about me. I love your Jewishness, too. Even as I write this, I can hear you upstairs practicing for your bar mitzvah: singing ancient words in ancient tune. Like I did, and our ancestors before me.
You did not make this world, but you receive it. That means you inherit work you did not ask for, to make right what others made wrong. We have to speak now, loudly, to make our leaders see, like the City Council resolution calls them to, that things are changing. That American Jews will not stand by Israel when Israel is wrong.
Even trees move, you know. Even the ones that have stood for generations. They open new leaves on new branches. They bend to find the light.
Seth Lavin is a Chicago Public Schools principal.