Sermons and Divrei Torah
Disengagement- From What?
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Rosh Hashanah 5766)
The day I sat down to write this sermon, I happened to be wearing an orange shirt. I looked down at myself and realized, I can't wear this shirt... because the last time my nephew in Israel innocently wore an orange T-shirt the local greengrocer said, "what? you too?" and practically wouldn't serve him. Orange is the adopted colour of the anti-disengagement faction in Israel, the settlers and the West Bank kids who jammed the intersections and poured oil and nails onto the road and listened to rabbis who counselled them to disobey the army's evacuation orders! In Israel what you wear, from your kipa to the colour of your T-shirt makes a political statement. I can't wear this shirt...
So I went and changed into a blue shirt, because blue was the colour of those who supported the disengagement. Blue ribbons were on Israeli cars, and blue, playing off of course the blue and white of the Israeli flag, symbolized patriotism, so support for the disengagement was, in effect, support for the army and for the country. There, I could wear my blue shirt proudly, because...wait a minute, do I think the army should just go in there unilaterally and kick all those settlers out, the right wing nationalists along with the secular folks who just moved there cause it was cheap and out of the crowded city and the government gave them financial incentive to do so; do I support the unstated but implied government strengthening and support of the West Bank as a result of the Gaza disengagement? Do I totally believe it's worth the uprooting of 9,000 Jewish idealists, their homes and synagogues and lucrative greenhouses because they don't agree with my ideals ...oops, I can't really wear this shirt, either.
So, what does the well-dressed rabbi wear to her Rosh Hashana sermon? Lest this sermon turn into a fashion show, let me tell you why I want to spend this morning talking about the disengagement. First, today's Torah portion practically forces me into headline relevance; it suggests that there is no separation for Jews between politics and religion when it comes to the Middle East. Today our foundational narrative, a story heard round the world in synagogues everywhere on the holiest of days, introduces the struggle between the children of Ishmael and the children of Isaac that has led to the struggle between the orange and the blue in this past month's newspapers. Two peoples- mine and the Arabs- both read the same story as justification for their historical enmity. Two peoples- mine and the Arabs- claim the same source for the same land. I can't help but think of today's Torah reading in the light of the headlines.
Interestingly, today's reading of the birth of Isaac and the expulsion of Ishmael, together with the subplot of Hagar and Sarah is, in fact, changed in many Reform congregations—you can see that in your Machzor— to the story of creation in Bereshit, the seven days of the first chapter of Genesis, a much more pareve apolitical story. (That's of course assuming you aren't an anti-Darwinian creationist - or should I say, a proponent of 'Intelligent Design" in the American courts again this week, which makes even the Genesis reading political...) So how do we as liberal Jews read Abraham's reticence to cast out Hagar, even though she caused problems for Sarah? How do we read the prophecy that G-d will make of Ishmael—father of the Arabs— a great nation, but one that is, according to Genesis 16, "a wild ass, whose hand is against everyone..." ?
And the second reason I'm focusing on the disengagement is beacuse Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip dominated my thinking, and much of the energy of the Jewish world, for the last few months of the year we have just completed. Despite dire warnings of possible civil war, and rabbinic threats of annihilation of the Jewish people, the evacuation of Gaza's 9,000 settlers and a few thousand radical supporters took less than a week and was virtually free of serious violence. If an army can behave in a menschlichkeit fashion, then surely the IDF did, through the use of cajoling, convincing, even kibbitzing with settlers to get them peacefully out of their homes. What other army has the task of relocating its own citizens to give up its own land to those they consider their enemy? This is not a one-dimensional picture.
So from this complex picture I'd like to share three important lessons for the New Year that I think we can draw from the disengagement. The first lesson is about letting go of long-held notions that can simply no longer stand. What do we do when our cherished ideals no longer work, or no longer make sense? I think of Archie Bunker and his insistence on his beliefs, no matter how awkward or antiquated they were. What do we do when we have to rethink the way we have looked at the world? How many of us would be willing to give up a deeply rooted belief for the sake of a "greater good"?
The settlers, for the most part, believed what they were doing was right: settling the land of Israel; sending their children faithfully to the army to protect it; building schools and synagogues. Emuna Elon, columnist for Yediot Achronot, wrote, "Well-known champions of democracy ignored the public trampling of democracy and gagging of opposition simply not to miss the one-time chance of turning to wasteland a flourishing region in which every blooming flower held, for them, upsetting ideological connotations...a 30 year old Zionist project has been destroyed." For the settlers this was a disengagement from a philosophy: from the notion of religious attachment to land; from the cherished ideal of "eretz yisrael hashlema"- the whole of G-d given eretz yisrael for the Jews. The disengagement was a call to stop defining the land of Israel as Jewish because of its borders, and start defining the land of Israel as Jewish by its behaviour. It was an opportunity for renewed vision of what it means to be a Jew in the Jewish homeland. As Gershom Gorenberg wrote in an article called "The Disengagement from Messianism" in the Jerusalem report: "In ordinary history, there's a better chance of measuring how Jewish the state is by how it helps its poor, how it treats its sick, rather than what land it holds. It's worth getting through withdrawal symptoms for that." But---I don't for a minute dismiss the pain and sense of betrayal and abandonment they felt when the very same government which told them to settle uprooted them. I've been made to ask myself: have I ever been asked to so drastically alter my own world-view? How would I do that and still feel whole?
The second lesson is about Jewish oneness. We love to claim "we are one people" and its good for fund-raising appeals and to project unity to the "outside world." But for one people we are awfully factionalized and compartmentalized. In Israel, this is even more glaring. But I would claim that oneness became clear only after the disengagement, maybe even because of the disengagement, actually, because in the weeks preceding the disengagement there was a barrage of name-calling so ugly on both sides that it gave me pause to consider how Jews talk about other Jews here in the Diaspora, as well—and in fact, how blithly we all use epithets against one another. The power of our verbal images is immense- just a few weeks ago I was called a fascist—a fascist!—because I uttered a concern about raising kids in two religions. Before the disengagement the left called the right vigilantes and the right called called the left Nazis. Unbelievable...But during the disengagement the rift between the mostly religious settlers and the mostly non-religious supporters of the disengagement had to shrink because everyone had to join hands to make sure the country simply didn't implode upon itself. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin wrote for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "The joint prayers of soldiers and settlers...offered glorious testimony to the oneness of our people, despite the apparent chasm that generally divides the evictors from the evictees." One of the most significant challenges for my own stereotyping was how the vast majority of religious settlers, except for the most stubborn and radical few, put the people of Israel–clal Yisrael—and the oneness of that people above their own sense of self-pride and self-identification; above their houses and their schools and the lives they had built. Would I do that for the "other"- for Jews with whom I vehemently diagree? Would I put aside my own pride and identification for a principle of oneness? This lesson of clal yisrael, the whole united Jewish people, above denominational and territorial and synagogal differences; above even the Jewish beliefs and practices about which we most disagree- can we learn this lesson here in Toronto?
And the third lesson is about what happens "the day after." No one really knows and the signs are not pretty right now. But rather than make armchair prophecies I would like to know if we can use the disengagement there to re-engage with Israel here. Just as Israelis have had to ask what it means to be a Jew in Israel, Jews here have to ask what it means to be a Jew outside of Israel. What does it means to be a Jew attached to, but not living in, the Jewish State? Where does our engagement lie? How do I engage a whole generation who have not felt any connection to Israel, who have not visited, or studied, or debated, and who do not feel the ancient tie, the primal calling to a place that seems so far away? How do I begin to explain the feeling of walking in the footsteps of your ancestors, how do I describe the smell of Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon, how do I share the thrill of Biblical quotations on the buses telling you to give up your seat to the elderly, to Jews who have felt "disengaged" from the whole enterprise of Israel? The years of the two intifadas have taken a huge toll on us emotionally, let alone the toll they have exacted on Israelis physically and financially. Talk to the kids on college campuses- its exhausting to defend Israel as much as we have to. You have to be very committed, and to read the newspapers and the analysis and to know what you're talking about to even talk about it. Is it just too many years, too much politics, too many wars and terrorist bombs, too many travel advisories, too many water-cooler uncomfortable questions at work, to hope for a re-engagement?
I pray not. I hope that the disengagement from Gaza will signal the beginning of a reengagement with Israel by Diaspora Jews. Perhaps involvement with Israel again can re-energize us, and renewed identification with Israel by many of us who felt an alienation from the increasing right-wing politics can give our Jewish identity a whole added dimension. I've taken my kids to Israel and let me tell you, I was amazed at how utterly recharged their Jewish identity was after—and these are kids with an already strong sense of Yiddishkeit. When I took 55 people on a family tour last December I watched how teenagers in need of what we parents would call "attitude adjustments" about being Jewish were totally engaged in debates and dialogues about some of Judaism's and Zionism's deepest questions. OK- I have to admit that I have a re-engagement plan that I'm now going to pitch to you. Kolel is taking at least two groups a year for the next two years to Israel. First, a women's mission this January that is almost filled already and has just 6 spaces left—I'd like it to be filled by the end of Yom Kippur. In March a unique active nature and hiking exploration, to see the Bible through the lens of the land, and the land through the lens of the Bible that's just open for registration now and I'd like to see filled by Chanukah; in 2007 a first timers tour, and at Pesach 2007 an "Exodus tour" for both families and adults that has us go from Egypt to Israel, walking the border to arrive in time for a Seder in the desert. We are gauging interest in another culinary tour with myself and Bonnie Stern, so e-mail me if that interests you, and give me other ideas for new speciality educational tours. Honestly, I find it easier with the disengagement to feel that old-fashioned pride in Israel, that belief that we have a place in the world which holds out a moral compass, and maybe you will too.
I want to close with part of an extraordinary article written by an Orthodox soldier named Haim Watzman, entitled "Let My People Leave." He writes, "As an Orthodox Jew, I believe God gave us the land of Israel. That's why I know we must pull out of the occupied territories. How can this be...? After all, Orthodox Jews believe that God made a gift of the Holy Land to the Jewish people...Orthodox Jews must oppose handing over any part of that land to foreigners... So on what basis can I argue that...most of my fellow believers are wrong?" He goes on to explain with this story: "When I was part of an army unit serving in Lebanon, I passed through Kiryat Shmonah... Tacked up on several lampposts around town were signs announcing the formation of a group of young religious couples and singles who planned to establish an Israeli settlement in southern Lebanon, in the biblical territories of the tribes of Asher and Naftali. The imperative to settle all parts of the ancient land of Israel applied no less to these territories than to those in the Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), the sign declared. By the next time I reached Kiryat Shmonah two weeks later, the signs were gone. The religious and secular leaders of the settlement movement quickly squelched this and a few other nascent plans to settle the biblical lands to the north of the current state of Israel. The time was not ripe, they said... This little-remembered attempt to take...theology to its logical conclusion in Lebanon is worth recalling now, because it shows that even the leaders of the settler movement realize that there are practical limits to the application of their... beliefs."
He concludes, "Israel's current process of disengagement from the Gaza Strip is not a failure of faith. It's a public policy decided on by Israel's government. The country's leaders have come to the conclusion that Israel has no vital interests in that territory and that the task of defending the settlements and the roads leading to them are straining a seriously overtaxed army facing a Palestinian rebellion that probably cannot be brought to a peaceful resolution any time soon...That's why I can believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, and at the same time argue that that general principle does not lead... to the conclusion that the current state of Israel must control and settle Jews in all parts of that land. " G-d gave the land of Israel...and us the brains to figure out how to live peacefully in it. Now there's a man who has learned to live in the middle of two truths.
Living in the middle of two truths is something I have struggled with for years when it comes to Israel. I understand the need for a homeland not only for my people but for those Palestinians who also need one— whether through the fault of the Jordanians in 48 or the other Arab nations in 67 or whatever Arab nationalist illusions kept the Palestinians as political pawns for so many decades. I support giving back as much land as necessary for peace but I feel true compassion and love for, and refuse to vilify or demonize, those who wept as they left their homes and their cherished notions of the right of the Jewish people to live anywhere they wish in the Jewish homeland.
Above all else, I want Israel be a light unto the nations again. Already the fruits of this disengagement are being felt, from discussions with Tunisia, Pakistan, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain. I want Israel to be the "good guy" and bring on normalcy so that the Palestinians have no choice but join forces with the rest of the Arab world and play nice with Israel and Washington. Haim's article, and this morning's Torah portion in light of it, have touched me deeply, because they remind me that I and so many more of us live inbetween truths: the truth of the children of Isaac, and the truth of the children of Ishmael. In the Torah, it took father Abraham's death and funeral to bring these two half-brothers back together again. Maybe in my lifetime it can be different.
So... for now I'll wear orange and blue, for the courage to live in the middle.
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...
