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| Rabbi Cantor Alison Wissot |
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| Cantorial Soloist Mark Britowich |
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FIFTY FOUR HOURS IN THE HOLIEST OF LANDS
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1 FIFTY FOUR HOURS IN THE HOLIEST OF LANDS Rosh Hashanah 5767 Rabbi Karen Bender The following is a true story. In 1894, a Jewish Austrian journalist named Theodore Herzl traveled to Paris to cover the case of a certain Jewish army captain that was on trial for treason.
When Herzl arrived at the scene of the falsely accused Alfred Dreyfus, he was struck less by the bogus accusation than by the crowd’s reaction. “Kill the Jews!” they shouted, “Death to the Jews!” We might say today, “Of course, it was France.” But France then was different.
It was the country of the enlightenment, where Napolean had invited us to be full citizens. It wasn’t Poland or Russia where you expected anti-semitism.
Herzl had an epiphany: that as long as Jews do not have a land of their own, they will always be at the mercy of their host country. 2000 years of exile and expulsions led Herzl to conclude that we needed to go home. So he wrote Der Judenstaadt, The Jewish State, and became the founder of Zionism, meaning, the establishment of a Jewish political entity in the ancient land of Israel.
The Torah portion we will read on Yom Kippur states, “I have set before you life and death…choose life.”1 And our holiday prayer book describes a God who “delights in life” and yearns to inscribe us in the book of life.
THE REESTABLISHMENT OF ISRAEL AS OUR JEWISH HOMELAND WAS AN AFFIRMATION OF LIFE. After the ashes of Auschwitz and millenia of brutality, pogroms, blood libel and crusades in the villages and ghettos of Europe, Israel affirmed life.
My friends, tonight I want to speak with you about Herzl’s story and my story and your own. So come with me to Israel, walking through my 54 hours there last month.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a subtle but important difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel. The schlemiel spills soup on the schlimazel. My grandmother had passed away and I hurried to Israel for her funeral. I arrived at Ben Gurion airport at 3:15pm for a 6:00pm service. Confident that I had plenty of time, I swiped my Bank of America card into an airport ATM machine and out popped 200 shekel. I rented a car and cell phone and headed Westward, toward the Mediterranean, curving North at Tel Aviv to enter the Haifa Road, only to hit bumper to bumper traffic.
This was not your typical Israeli sig alert. Rather, the kind of traffic you hit when, oh my goodness, what was I thinking. The ceasefire with Lebanon was the day before. I was sharing the Haifa Road with about 600,000 Israeli refugees trying to get home. I had in fact become a schlimazel. My family was waiting for me in a little village cemetery near Netanya to bury my own grandmother.
I nearly arrived on time. As we covered my Savta in the sweet earth of the holy land and eulogized her life as a German Jewish refugee-pioneer, I thought of how she helped to build the country, and the consequential mix of joy and disappointment that speckled her life of 96 years.
You see each generation of my family represents a choice of life or death. My great grandparents, Berthold and Clementine Bender, had come from Germany to Israel 2 in 1938 to meet my father after he was born. But they chose to go back to Germany and were taken by the Nazis. They were victims.
My grandparents came to Israel in 1933. My grandfather Karl was thrown out of his medical residency when Hitler came to power. He became a Zionist and fled to Israel to build it. My grandparents were pioneers.
My parents, who were born and raised in Israel, met serving in the army. He visited her while she was on guard duty, kissed her and she dropped her gun. My parents were soldiers.
In our own life we each have a choice. We can be victims, pioneers or soldiers.
What are you? As you respond to our world, of terrorists, violence in our streets, the genocide in Sudan, poverty, hunger, natural disasters, our threatened environment, when you confront the basket of memories that make up your own personal story, the joyful and painful things that have happened to you, who are you?
One of the great struggles of these High Holy Days, is to determine our identities as victims, pioneers, soldiers, passive or active actors on the stage of the world and our own lives. And it is to ask ourselves what is our obligation to the state of Israel, especially in light of the recent existential threats that she has faced and continues to face under the dangerous rhetoric of Ah-ma-di-ne-jad, Nasrallah and Hamas leaders.
I once saw a bumper sticker that asserted: Feminism is the radical idea that women are people. I say to you: Zionism, is the radical idea that Jews have the right to live somewhere, to exist.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Once asserted that “Zionism is nothing less than the dream…of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land…Anti-Zionism…is antisemitism.” Israel has the right to exist. It is appaling that some still question Israel’s legitimacy. Not only Israel-haters on the internet, as Rabbi Jerome Davidson notes, but also journalists, “European intellegencia, world leaders and American university” professors. During the first week of the Lebanon War, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post called Israel a “mistake” and Kurt Anderson of New York magazine described the “…great unfortunate fact” that Israel “was carved out of Arab land in 1947.” This is ridiculous, calling to mind the story of Sharon telling Arafat that Jews were upset with the Palestinians for attacking Moses and the Israelites after we escaped from the slavery of Egypt. Arafat says, “Don’t be silly, there was no such thing as Palestinians back then.” Sharon replies, “Ah, now we can start negotiations.” The 1948 UN recognition of Israel was an acknowledgement of a historic tie and came only after large pockets of Israel’s swamp wasteland was purchased from local Arabs and Turks by a desperate international Jewry. Moreover, Jews had been living there throughout the centuries.
Rabbi Harold Kushner reminds us2 of the story of Chaim Weizman lobbying Britain to support Zionism, when a “sceptical member of the House of Lords challenged him: ‘Why do you Jews insist on Palestine when there are so many undeveloped parts of the world where you could settle with less controversy?’ Weizman replied, ‘That’s like asking you: why did you drive ten miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living on your street?’” After the 1930’s and 40’s, when my grandmother and so many others adopted children in the middle of the night, smuggled illegally because no one would have us: not 3 America, not Europe, not Palestine under British rule, the world finally said, so sorry about what happened, Jews, you can live somewhere, there, go there. And Arabs of Palestine, you can have a state too, side by side. But anti-semitism created the Palestinian refugee. Because too many Arab leaders could not stand a Jewish presence in an Arab region. Their hatred for us was stronger, as Golda Meir suggested, then their love of their own brothers and sisters and cousins in Palestine.
In 1948 we said yes to two states but six Arab nations attacked our infant Jewish State. Miraculously, we prevailed. And yes, a refugee crisis emerged, yes a second people scattered because of a war fought and lost by their brothers.
The world on a whim supported us. And they divided that region into puzzle pieces. The Ibn Saud family was given a country, Saudi Arabia, because they couldn’t get along with the Hussein family. The Hussein family was given a crown to rule over Palestinians in the new country of Jordan. A land filled with native Palestinians was given a foreign dictator to rule over them and they never got their rights--not in Jordan and not in the West Bank, which Jordan ruled until 1967.
So I ask you: why is it that no one questions the legitimacy of the Saud family to rule over the land of Arabia nor the legitimacy of the Hussein family to rule over Jordan, but that somehow people do not stop calling into question the legitimacy of this battered Jewish People to have returned to their ancient homeland in Israel?
You may not like some current Israeli policies, like the specific placement of the security fence or the settlements in the West Bank, but don’t let anyone get away with claiming that the problem is Israel’s failure to give the Palestinians a state. In 1937, Britain’s Peel Commission offered the Arabs of Palestine a state, but they said no. In 1947 the UN Partition Plan offered a Palestinian state, but they said no. In 1967, after winning a defensive war, Israel urged an exchange of land for peace, but we heard the famous three no’s of Khartoum. And in 2000 Yassir Arafat stormed out of Camp David.
It is not that Israel won’t “give” the Palestinians a state, it’s that Israel can’t figure out how to get the Palestinians to take one, to build one!
Learn your history so that no one can lie to your children.
Jewish critics of Israel must consider that in the current climate, condemnation can be misunderstood as questioning Israel’s existential legitimacy.
But then you may go on to say, “Rabbi, weren’t we too aggressive in Lebanon.” As MJ Rosenberg asserts, the death of civilians in Lebanon was terrible, of course. Yet, Israel was right to hit Hezbollah hard. These truths co-exist because unlike the Islamic terrorists who choose death, we are a people that cherishes life. We and Israelis, for that matter, ache from the death of Lebanese civilians even as we support Israel’s struggle to survive.
Israel obviously made mistakes in this war, but her goals were to crush terrorists, pressure the Lebanese government against Hezbollah and to stop the reinforcement of arms. In short, to end the war and save lives. When the enemy abused civilians as shields, Israel dropped leaflets before the necessary attacks.
Hezbollah, in contrast, set out to kill. Their goal was killing and terrorizing.
Thus, they used imprecise rockets with added bullets to maximize loss of life. They shot missiles from civilian populations on purpose. And they started a war.
Many of us were awakened to Israel’s fragility by the Hezbollah war. We became frightened for her survival. Attacks from Gaza in the South coinciding with attacks in the 4 North were terrifying. But, oddly, when Israel fought to survive, many compassionate hearts suddenly turned cold.
Do we only love Israel when she is a victim? Would we be happier if Haifa looked like Beirut instead of the other way around. Would we be more contented if the 600,000 Israeli refugees from the North were still without homes. Would Hezbollah have used restraint if we had not pushed them back?
My first choice is peace, but I prefer that my brothers and sisters are soldiers, not victims. And I wouldn’t dare to micromanage how they protect themselves. And I wouldn’t dare claim to be a better conscience for Israel than Israelis. There is not another country in the world, including the US, that engages in such vigorous self-criticism as Israel. Just read their papers in English translation and you will see. Let’s trust the collective conscience of our brutalized Israeli siblings to do their best with the horrendous circumstances under which they live and die. Let’s make it our mission to make them feel unalone in their quest to just survive, stating that Israel should be able to defend herself from terror without being condemned by the rest of the world.
During my 54 hours in Israel last month I spent a day in Haifa, asking my 8 year old cousin, Or, what the war felt like. The scariest thing was when the siren blared while you were in your car, she said. You had to jump out and run from the car and lie down on your stomach, because if a missile hits your car it will explode. When we were home during the sirens it was different, she explained. There I would become very sad because my dog has a bad leg and we could never find him fast enough to bring him to the bomb shelter with us. I spent most of the time in the shelter yelling for my dog and crying a lot.
My friends, if your heart can’t beat compassion for our siblings in Israel then please let it beat gratitude. Gratitude for the blood they have shed there, all they have achieved there. Gratitude that they are fighting the war on terror, promoting democracy and freedom in a region of ruthless dictatorships and religious fanatics. Pat Robertson understands this, George Bush gets it, we of all people should appreciate it.
If your heart can’t beat compassion for Israelis, then let it beat gratitude to them for serving the front lines of the Jewish People. As American Jews, we choose the luxurious life of not sending our precious, sweet 18 year old boys off to fight in Lebanon or Gaza or wherever radical terrorists wreak their havoc. We choose the luxurious life of not sending our husbands to reserve duty where their professional aspirations are compromised and our family lives are thrown into a state of chaos. We watch Israelis on the news as they serve the front lines for us. And with that privilege comes a responsibility: to care and to participate in the struggle for Israel’s survival.
Whether it is because of compassion or gratitude, solidarity or principle, consider adding Zionist to the list of words you use to describe yourself. I invite you to join me in proudly wearing the title.
Can you imagine a world without Israel? Most of us are too young to remember an American Jewry that was subdued and afraid, shy to protest the Holocaust, shy to cry out when the St. Louis ship carrying European refugees was sent back by the US government only to endure the fate of the gas chamber. Most of us are too young to remember that with the establishment of the Jewish State, American Jews lifted their heads in pride like never before. Israel unquestionably props up the position and strength of Jews in America. We need Israel as Israel needs us.
5 So come with me to Israel. Come with me in your heart, come with membership to Zionist organizations or come with me actually next summer on an intergenerational Temple Judea family and b’nai mitzvah trip. Show your children that a piece of them can be found along the Mediterranean sea. Or go with Rabbi Goor this January, on a solidarity/learning tour for first timers and those who want to see Israel through new eyes.
Even with everything, we should remain optimistic. Drown out the voices that say there are no solutions. No one would have believed Sadat would choose peace, but he did.
The majority of Israeli and Palestinian citizens want peace. And now Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, who are as afraid of Hezbollah and Iran as we are, are posturing themselves to compromise with Israel, effectively reversing the famous 3 nos.
A possibility of full recognition of Israel by 22 Arab countries in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders. Windows are opening. There is hope.
I am going to ask you a series of questions, which all have the same answer. The answer is YISRAEL. Who are we? Yisrael. Where is our homeland? Yisrael. Who do you love? Yisrael. Say it again? Yisrael. Sing it aloud: Yisrael. Am: Yisrael. Eretz: Yisrael.
We, the People of Torah, cherish life. We, Am Yisrael, have a destiny. And that destiny does not look like war nor terror nor fear nor blood.
We are Am Yisrael, a People that dreams and prays, aches and cries for Shalom.
Sometimes we even have to fight for Shalom.
The prophet says to beat your swords into plowshares, your spears into pruning hooks. And study war no more. Our guns will be melted down into building materials for bridges. The faces of our enemies will be indistinguishable from the faces of our friends.
My student asks: why do we have so many enemies? A calendar of tyrants.
Antiochus at chanukah, Haman at Purim, Pharoah at Passover. I say, these stories are not to teach us that the world is out to get us. But rather that good overcomes evil. That in the end we always survive.
Long after Mahmud Ah-ma-di-ne-jad will live Am Yisrael! Long after Osami bin Laden will live Am Yisrael! Long after Hamas will live Am Yisrael! Long after Hezbollah will live Am Yisrael. We will teach peace to a troubled region. And we will envision hope for all. There will be a safe home for our people. And next to it will be a safe home for our Palestinian cousins. There will be two states side by side. Every Israeli knows it and we ought to know it too.
It will be because we never forget our destiny. It will be because it is the right thing to do. It will be because we won’t give up trying. It will be because we are not a vengeful people. It will be because while we never forget our history, we have never been prisoners of the past. It will be because we promised to be a light unto the nations, bringing fire to the night, light to the darkness, goodness that is so deep and right that it overwhelms evil, righteousness that is so true that it eclipses the most prevalent injustice.
So if your children are told, do not sing salaam, because surely the Arabs do not teach their children to sing shalom, you will answer, I will teach them my song, I will model the melody, I will not give up my hopes and dreams, my music will turn dissonance into harmony.
6 We will choose life, remember our history and with love embrace our destiny.
Oseh Shalom bimromav, hu ya-aseh shalom, aleinu v’al kol yisrael, v’imru Amen.
1 Deuteronomy 30:11-20 2 Alan Dershowitz’s What Israel Means to Me, p. 239.
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