Wayne L. Fuller is a retired corporate trainer and former Lutheran pastor living in Concord.

Judaism is one of the great cultures of the world. The world has benefited greatly from its culture with its Talmudic laws to the emphasis that Jews place on education, art, music, literature, science, fashion and social movements. I personally have benefitted from this perspective as I grew up near a Jewish neighborhood. I credit my Jewish friends and their families for introducing me to a wider world than I would have known if I had only grown up around my relatives.

As a child, I laughed at the comedy that Jews introduced into America, listened to the great songs of Gershwin and Cole Porter to name just a couple, enjoyed films, books, and plays written by Jews. Yet, there is one thing I know. As great as any culture can be one should be careful to not identify that culture with a nation-state or a political party.

I know this because a large part of my background is German. My grandparents arrived in the U.S. in the late 1800s and established themselves in the Midwest. They too have a great spiritual heritage and culture, one that includes Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Kant, precision and craftsmanship, discipline and order just to mention a few but very little to do with 20th-century German statecraft. Yet, by the time I was born, my mother did everything she could to try and distance herself from her German identity. Why? Not because of the culture itself but because of what the nation Germany had done. With the revelations of what Germany had done during WWII, she stopped speaking any German and tried to hide her identity. Any traces of German culture were pretty much erased from my childhood even in the churches we attended. This was the result of people identifying her with a nation-state she didn’t even know and the shame she was made to feel rather than with the culture and tradition itself.

To me, this is a cautionary tale for Jews who have come to conflate their tradition with the nation Israel. Israel, like Germany, is a political nation-state. It is prone to all the foibles of any nation-state where the lust for power, greed, conquest and control governs the actions of its politicians. I believe that such an identification with a state is bound to break the hearts of those who over-identify with it too closely and confuse their spiritual tradition and culture with their allegiance to the state.

Be very clear, the present conflict is not about Judaism fighting Islam. It’s a nation-state seeking to control an insurgency, a perceived threat to its existence and identity by marginalizing and subjugating and controlling another identity.

I refuse to accept that my criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitism just as I refuse to accept others’ criticism of Germany as being about Germans in general. People who are upset with Israel are not necessarily antisemitic. Such accusations are nonsense. However, when people attack Jews in this country because of what Israel is doing that is indeed antisemitism.

Personally, I believe that Israel is presently engaged in a form of ethnic cleansing and perhaps even genocide and I’m angry that our president has just wrapped his arms around Netanyahu and given him and Israel ‘carte blanche’ to do whatever they want and supply the money and munitions to do it. Yet, I will continue to enjoy my Jewish friends and embrace their friendship, enjoy their culture, their traditions, and contributions.

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For me, the two will always remain separate. I hope the majority of Americans and Jews will come to realize that those two things must remain separate in their minds as well.