Sermons and Divrei Torah
Standing With Israel
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Rosh Hashanah 5763)
An Englishman, an American, and an Israeli are exploring the deepest darkest
part of the jungle when they are captured by a tribe of cannibals. Suspended
over a pot of boiling water, the chief asks each of them if they have a last request.
The Englishman says, “Please let me sing God Save the Queen one last time,”
and so he does. The American takes off his wedding ring and says, “Send this to
my wife” and the chief agrees. Then the chief turns to the Israeli. “Your
request? he asks. “Please chief,” the Israeli answers, “kick me very
hard in the rear.” Well, the chief is a bit surprised at this request, but, he
kicks the Israeli very hard in the rear, so hard in fact, that the Israeli flies off
the scaffold, and lands on the ground. He then takes out a gun, shoots the chief,
and frees the other two captives. The other captives are flabbergasted and shout at
him, “If you had a gun all this time, why didn’t you just shoot him in the
first place??” to which he calmly answers, “I didn’t want to be deemed
the “Israeli aggressor.”
Funny, and bittersweet, and true. How odd to no longer be the victim. How odd to see
ourselves reflected in the light of the world around us not as some tiny state barely
over fifty years in existence trying to cling to its small allotment of land, but as
some mighty military machine bent on destroying, occupying, expanding and oppressing.
Not as ordinary folk with the basic fundamental right to live in freedom and security,
to go to pizza parlours and Bat Mitzvah parties without fear, but as a powerful regime
with a hungry expansionist agenda. When I was a kid, we used to collect nickels and
dimes to build trees in the “barren desert.” Now we rally to protect our
very right to plant those trees and have picnics with our families in their shade.
There hasn’t been a lot to laugh about in Israel since last Rosh Hashana.
When a Jew suffers a loss, you know how we traditionally mark it: we sit shiva,
then observe thirty days, and then a year of mourning. At the end of the year, called
the yahrtzeit, we say memorial prayers, we reflect, we pause and note how the year
has passed and how different we are now than when we were fresh in our wounds. It is
strange, then—strange, heartening, and also disheartening— to watch as the
whole world joins in that unique Jewish custom, marking the “yahrtzeit” of
September 11th with memorial programmes, retrospectives, and even some heshbon hanefesh,
some collective soul searching.
Strange, because the secular world’s rituals are not ancient, tested by tribe
and collective consciousness, honed by time, recognized by all as authoritative. The
secular world’s mourning and memorial rituals are quick sound bites, glitzy
star-studded musical tributes, well-known names publishing thoughtful articles.
But heartening, that the secular world feels its own loss at all, and moves toward
ritual to heighten awareness of that loss. How much easier it would have been to
move “onward and upward”, to forget how intense was our pain last Rosh
Hashana, how acute our vulnerability, how harsh the rhetoric on all sides.
Heartening that we have moved quickly from disbelief and panic to planning and
rebuilding.
But ultimately, so disheartening, so disheartening this past year, 5762. So disheartening,
Durban and all the other displays of polite and not-so-polite anti-Semitism now proudly
disguised as pro-Palestinian sentiment. So disheartening, French synagogues bombed, Jewish
tourists afraid in Europe; the taboos that had reigned in such hatred since World War Two,
gone. On the seventh day of Passover a violent riot in Antwerp looked more like a pogrom,
with 700 pro-Palestinian marchers throwing Molotov cocktails into Jewish homes, looting
stores and firebombing the synagogue. The new anti-Semitism particularly likes to parade
Nazi symbolism, as if to rub our faces in our own history, with slogans like Sharon=Hitler,
and IDF: the new SS. These attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions, and the threat
of such attacks, fueled by media coverage far more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the
Israelis, reached a crescendo after the Passover incursion into Jenin. The European press
castigated Israel for the so-called “massacre” in Jenin. Israel was pronounced
guilty by the “world court” before being proven innocent. But later the truth
surfaced: there was no massacre in Jenin. Kofi Annan rebutted the Palestinian claims this
past August. There was probably less collateral damage in two weeks of fighting there than
in one day of the NATO bombardment of Belgrade. It took 18 months of violence and 500 Israeli
causalities, most of them civilian, before Israel even went into Jenin. Jenin is a hotbed of
suicide bomber training and recruitment; it is the Al Quaeda caves of Israel, if you will.
And respectable, civilized Europe’s reaction was a Norwegian boycott on Israeli goods,
a Danish boycott of Israeli oranges, and the Belgians not letting Israel win the Eurovision
song contest because even music had to be about Middle Eastern politics.
The line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies— which we have seen in the
past and which never frightened us; in which many of us freely engaged—and downright
Jew-bashing, is now too frequently crossed. Take this as an example: Every year on April 9,
in Berlin’s Wittenberg Square, Jews and non-Jews gather to read aloud the names of the
55,696 Jews sent to their deaths from that very square. This year, for the first time, young
Palestinians gathered there and tried to shout down the readers, demanding that they also call
out the names of Palestinian victims of Israeli raids, a kind of “moral equivalency”
if you will. Wolfgang Benz, a professor at Berlin’s Technical University, told the
Jerusalem Report, “In Germany...you can only get your anti-Semitic feelings off your
chest through...criticism of Israel.” If you look closely enough, you will see in this
“moral equivalency” a dehumanizing of “the Jew” we have seen before. To
assume that Jews don’t care about Palestinian lives, don’t want Palestinians to find
a just solution that includes the kind of democratic government they have never had, is a form
of anti-Semitism; it is a smear on the Jewish people as a whole. To paint the Israeli people as
aggressors, lying in wait for innocent civilians, as many of the European papers have, is a
caricature not unlike the wealthy hooked nose Jew lying in wait for his debtors. Yes, to
label every Palestinian as a terrorist is also terrible and unfair, and I chastise anyone
who does so. But yes, every Palestinian terrorist is a terrorist no matter how “neutral”
the CBC wishes to remain.
It is particularly difficult to untangle anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, an untangling
often demanded, and especially demanded from the left wing today; a left wing I used to
count myself in. But its no longer considered “liberal” to support Israel, in
fact, just the opposite. “I have nothing against Jews, I just don’t support
Israel...” I’ve heard people say. But the basic right of the Jewish people to
have a homeland is about Jews. I don’t care if you disagree with the policies of the
Sharon government. I have no complaint against those concerned with human rights for both
Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. But the anti-Israel left—Jews included— has
adopted some of the most disturbing and condescending rhetoric I’ve heard in a long
time. I don’t know how many of you were at the Ottawa rally for Israel last spring.
One of the speakers was a Christian reverend from Ottawa, and he said to the thousands of
Canadian Jews gathered there to pray for Israel’s safety and Canada’s help, “
You are the people of the Book” he wagged his finger at us. “You know you must do
better, you must rise above, I also care about the Palestinians, they are your brothers...”
as if we have forgotten the basic values our own religion stands for. What he couldn’t
bring himself to say was that Israelis, with their many Holocaust survivors, might interpret
incessant suicide bombings as a renewed effort to annihilate the Jews, not just as a “freedom
movement.” And we polite Canadians all applauded his condescension at the end, except for
the few brave teenagers—and bless them for their chutzpah—who hissed and jeered at
his patronizing lecture to us “bad boys and girls.”
I’m disheartened, and yes, I’m mad. I’m mad as hell. Murders on March 5,
March 9, March 20, March 21, March 27, March 29, March 30, March 31, April 10, April 12.
This past August, a bomb at Hebrew University, bastion of civilized discourse, symbol of
young Jew and Arab learning together, speaking together, debating together. There were
Arab students in that cafeteria too. How much is one people supposed to take? Why should
Israel have to “explain” to the world that suicide bombing, men and women
blowing themselves and others up in pizzerias and discos, is a bad thing? That
indelible image of a Palestinian mother shouting at the television camera that she
wants all 10 of her children to be martyrs? In most societies, mothers would be throwing
themselves at the enemy to protect their children. Think back to that first picture of the
intifada, two years ago, of a panic-stricken 12 year old boy crouched on the ground, being
shot at by Israeli soldiers. Look again: the father is crouching behind a barrel. Now tell
me, why didn’t the father place the boy between the barrel and himself? And an Israeli
inquest—later confirmed by a German television crew who were there —found that the
boy was actually killed by a Palestinian gunman to the left of the camera. The Jewish press
reported this inquiry’s findings. The secular press did not.
You’ve heard people say, the Palestinians are young, restless, jobless, hopeless,
in a state of despair, with no future to look forward to. Tell me, if you knew a person
in a state of deep despair, seemingly hopeless, would you counsel suicide? The Tibetans
under the Dalai Lama are in despair; the blacks in South Africa under Nelson Mandela were
in despair, the Chinese in Tiamen Square were in despair, but none of them strapped explosives
onto their bodies and took their lives. And when the occasional Chinese monk lights himself
afire in protest, does he sprinkle the gas on all the little children close by to be sure and
take them with him? I quote from my sermon last Rosh Hashana a line I said just days after
Sept. 11 and which still resonate a full year later: “I weep for those who teach that
the answer to political frustration and economic deprivation—which does exist, to be
sure—but that its antidote is suicide. I weep for those who instill hopelessness instead
of hope.”
President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that would have gone far to end
their “desperation”, and Yassir Arafat walked away. Where is the Palestinian Gandhi,
Nelson Mandela, Anatoly Shransky, Harriet Tubman? Who is the Palestinian hero of effective
resistance and political problem solving? And what is the motive of the current culture that
glamorizes suicide and pays the family of the deceased a nice sum of money? I wish I could
say that the motive is to end the occupation of the West Bank and have an independent Palestinian
state—a goal many Israelis and Diaspora Jews still could support—but a nonviolent
Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority and the large
Israeli left could have delivered a Palestinian state thirty years ago. The Oslo Peace Plan
could have delivered that goal too. Lets be painfully honest. The motive driving 18 year old
suicide bombers is no longer statehood, or independence, or despair. The motive is revenge.
When 18 year old female Palestinian students say, “I wish to die a martyr’s death
and take as many Israelis as I can with me” is that about statehood? Is the bombing of a
cafe filled with Filipino foreign workers in Tel Aviv about ending the occupation of the West
Bank? Or is it about making Israeli life unpredictable and impossible? When a leading
Palestinian peace activist said the goal of the latest intifada is to never let Israelis
feel safe, not in the movies, not at home, not in Haifa or Tel Aviv as much as in the
settlements, it is clear that suicide bombing is a strategic choice, because the
Palestinians want to win their state in blood and fire. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the
NY Times, “All they can agree on ...is what they want to destroy, not what they want
to build. Have you ever heard Arafat talk about what kind of educational system or economy
he wants to build, what sort of constitution he wants? No...Mr. Arafat is not interested in
the content of a Palestinian state, only its contours.”
These shahids, once seen as fanatics, are growing in legitimacy as the media carefully
and consciously labels them fighters or militants or rebels but never bombers or murderers.
Their strategy is to push Israel into responding in a way that would turn it into another
apartheid South Africa, to push Israel to continue to react violently, so that the Jewish
state becomes a pariah, a nation no one will trade with, no one will sit down with, no
one will respect; to strangle the country diplomatically, economically, and spiritually,
all the while with great dexterity and skill to maintain the image of the Palestinians as
victims. Even moderate Arab leaders, in favour of democracy and a just solution, must
not be seen as “kowtowing” to Israel. The David of my youth has become the
Goliath and the world cannot stand to see strong, powerful, unafraid Jews who do not
cower. Weak and persecuted Jews? No problem. But Jews in tanks are a threat to the
cause-less left, and in many countries, a relief for those tired of hearing Holocaust
stories and tired of feeling guilty. Just like whites in the 60’s did not want to
let go of their “step’n’fetchit” expectations on black behaviour,
the world is still not ready for the ghetto nebish yeshiva-boy of Eastern Europe with
an Uzi.
But we aren’t allowed to make the streets of Tel Aviv, and the cafeterias of the
university, and the buses of simple moms and schoolchildren safe? Why? Because we are
Jews and the world holds us up to some other-worldly, unreachable standard it doesn’t
hold itself up to? NATO can bomb to smithereens electric grids and train stations to rid
the world of Milosevic but Israel can’t protect its children in their kindergartens?
Bush can demolish caves and homes and hospitals in Afghanistan to “root out terrorism”
but the “terrorism” Israel has been experiencing still isn’t accepted as the
same “terrorism” that attacked the world last September. So, I agree with Hirsch
Goodman who writes, “If there is going to be a boycott, perhaps Jewish caterers
should stop serving Norwegian salmon and Danish herring and Belgian chocolates and French
champagne.” And well-meaning interfaith conferences and speakers who take jabs at us.
I was invited to an official United Church gathering just weeks after the United Church
came out with a damning anti-Israel statement. I declined, as did several other rabbis.
And I explained why I would not be attending this year, leaving the following message
to the organizers: “At this time of terrible insecurity for the State of Israel,
the Jewish community needs more friends than critics. I do not wish to socialize now with
those who cannot feel our pain and those who, in their misguided attempt to be “neutral”,
actually stand by idly while their brother bleeds.”
So what can we say, what can we do here, so far away, so over-stimulated by the constant
barrage of bad news? A few days without a bomb and you can almost hear a collective
sigh of relief up and down Bathurst Street. I’m not worried about us adults,
we’ve been through it before in ‘67 and ‘73 and we have grown up with
Israeli war after Israeli war. But I see a whole generation of Jewish kids, teenagers
and young people who have never been to Israel, who won’t go to Israel, who
have no connection at all to Israel except the sure knowledge they aren’t going
on that summer programme or the year abroad to Hebrew U or the Bar Mitzvah family trip.
What do they care? Why should they care? They didn’t dance in the streets, as
I did, when Israel won the six day war. They haven’t climbed Masada at sunrise,
camped in the desert, dug in an archeological dig, stood where Elijah stood on Mount
Carmel. No posters or songs or Israel malls can substitute for the first hand
experience of being there. I understand why people aren’t flocking to Israel
now, I’m not blind to reality and I don’t won’t lay a guilt trip
anyone who chooses not to go at this time. But I do loudly applaud anyone who does
go at this time, recognizing that a trip to Israel now is like bikkur cholim,
visiting the sick. Israel is hurting, it is in pain and wounded, and a visit to
Israel is a visit to the sick. And more importantly, how will we instill a passion
for Israel in a generation of kids who have to get it long distance? This generation
has grown up with Heschel’s beautiful teaching that Judaism sanctifies time
over space, that we do not worship places or land. But what is equally true, and
what I believe must be taught now in their schools, is that the whole book of
Leviticus is dedicated to a sacred shrine in a sacred land; that Exodus has
thirteen excruciatingly detailed chapters on the construction of the Tabernacle,
and that Judaism values space, too. As Francine Klagsburn wrote, “During a
period when Israel’s claim to its land is under siege and Muslim leaders
deny the very existence of its ancient Temple, we need to reassert the pivotal
position that the Temple and other sacred spaces have always held in Jewish
tradition.” We must teach Israel as more than a country of Jews far away
to which we have a claim and tie. Step number one: lets talk about Israel as
sacred space; a holy place.
Step number two: I’d like to promulgate something Yosef Abramowitz has
eloquently stated: “The newfound emphasis on protecting the dignity of
the Jewish State provides an opportunity not just for emergency fund raising,
but for communal transformation...21st century thinking should figure out
how to invest wisely in the infrastructure of Jewry to ensure that a decade
from now Israel will have deeper and wider support.” Imagine if even a
small percentage of the Israel emergency money being raised now, $100 million
in the US and slightly less here, was used for a variety of programs in North
America that would be Israel-centric. For example: send every Jewish teacher, “birthright”
style, on a trip to Israel, complete with curricula, resources and Israel-centred
training to bring back. Send every young Jewish couple, before they have kids,
on a two week Jewish identity building mission to Israel. Send every graduate
of a Jewish conversion program to Israel as a required part of their conversion
programme. Write new curricula based on Israel’s spiritual connection to
the Diaspora. Refresh the old tired stuff the kids in day schools get from JNF;
redo an Israel curriculum for the supplementary schools that is passionate and
personal. Enough of the Israeli dances and campfire songs of the chalutzim of
the 1940’s at every Zemiriyah in the city. Let the kids learn up-to-date
Israeli culture, Shalom Hanoch and Noa and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and
they will know how vibrant the Israel of the 21st century is. Then use the
rest for a wide-spread and completely professional top-notch television,
print, and Internet public relations campaign to boost the image of Israel
and tell its side of the story eloquently far and wide.
Step three: Easy stuff. Buy Israeli products whenever possible: fruit juices
and wines and chocolates are a very easy place to start. Write letters to the
editor and send e-mails when you think Israel is being unfairly treated in
the press, and cancel your subscription to newspapers and periodicals that
don’t present a balanced picture. Send e-mails to your MPP and to the
Prime Minister to let them know how you feel. They count those e-mails and
they do count. Learn as much as you can about the history of the conflict and
the politics of the region. Kolel will be hosting a number of Israel-related
events this fall, a one-night lecture on October 6th featuring an Israeli and
an Arab scholar, and a six week class starting on October on the history of
the region and the present conflict which is already more than half filled. I
have ready for you, if you wish to take it, a list of resources of governmental
addresses, books, and web sites to keep yourself informed, taken from a
special edition of the CJN and reprinted with their permission. Please take
it home and look it over and keep yourself informed: it will be out on the
back table after the service and tomorrow.
Step four: don’t lose hope. Sing that phrase from Hatikva over and
over again: Od lo avdah tikvatanu, hatikvah shnot alpaim, lihiyot am hofshi
b’artzenu..” “We haven’t yet lost our hope, the hope of two
thousand years, to be a free people in our own land...” Don’t lose
hope, but much more importantly, don’t lose sight of our basic right to
be a free people in our own land. No apologies to the world for that. No
embarrassment. We have the right to walk the streets and visit the restaurants
and go to Bat Mitzvah parties and not fear for our safety. Don’t apologize
or cower in the face of that basic right.
I’m reminded of a story going around Israel right now about a Jerusalemite,
who cannot find his cell phone. His panic mounts, of course, as he searches every
nook and cranny of his Jerusalem apartment: for to the Jerusalemite, the cell
phone is his daily connection to those he loves and worries about and who worry
about him. Finally his wife says, “You’ve looked everywhere, every
possible place, except your blue jacket, and I’m sure I saw it last in
your blue jacket. Go look in your blue jacket.” “I’m afraid
to look in the blue jacket” he says. “What if it’s not there?”
That elusive “peace process”: what if it’s lost, what if its not
in the blue jacket? We can’t give up hope that we will find it. In this
morning’s Torah portion we meet Hagar, mother of Ishmael. We know we are
half brothers, but sometimes, and I hate to say it, brothers end up
irreconcilable. It’s our tradition to do everything in our power to avoid
this—short of destroying ourselves. I’m praying for a New Year that
will see the half brothers look together in the blue jacket without tearing it
to shreds.
Shana Tova
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
