Rabbi Tracee Rosen
Congregation Kol Ami – Salt Lake City, Utah
Yom Kippur 5767
© 2006, Rabbi Tracee Rosen. All rights reserved.
The Reform Mahzor, "Gates of Repentance", contains a prayer: "Lord, we pray to You for the whole House of Israel, scattered over the earth, yet bound together by a common history, and united by a common heritage of faith and hope. Be with our brothers and sisters whose lives are made hard because they are Jews. Give them strength to endure, and lead them soon from bondage to freedom, from darkness to light."
“Whose lives are made hard because they are Jews…” I remember back to the time when we thought this part referred to the Jews of the Soviet Union, the Jews trying to flee Iran, the Jews of Ethiopia and Northern Africa. It always seemed appropriate to be recalling, on the Days of Awe the Jews who did not live in their own Jewish state, or in the safety of the United States, Canada, or other blessed lands, and to pray for them. We are indeed, as the prayer states, united by a common heritage of faith and hope.
But we never thought that a day would come when the meaning of the words of that prayer would take on a new, unintended, and ugly twist. For we know as we are gathered this year on the Yamim Noraim, that when we think of our fellow Jews whose lives are made hard because they are Jews, we are thinking first and foremost not of the Jews of Moscow and Kiev, but rather of the Jews of Haifa, Sederot, Nahariya, Karmiel, Tzefat, and scores of other places in Israel
These are the brothers and sisters we dare not forget today, whose lives are made hard because they are Jews.
There is a midrash from the second century I want to share today. Commenting on the second of the Ten Commandments which tells us that God will "show kindness to the thousandth generation to those who love Me (“le-ohavai”) and who keep My commandments (“u-le-shomerei mitzvotai”)." Now you would think that those who love God are the same as those who keep God's commandments. So why the redundancy? Why mention them both? Here, then is the Midrash (in the Mekhilta) that supplies the answer:
"Rabbi Nathan said: `Those who love Me' refers to those Jews who live in the Land of Israel, and in consequence put their lives in jeopardy when they keep the commandments. “Ma lekha yotzei lehareg? Al she-malti et b’ni”. Ask a Jew in the Land of Israel why he may be killed tomorrow, and he will tell you, `for nothing more than circumcising my son'. “Ma lekha yotzei lisaref? Al she-karati ba-Torah”. Ask him why he may be burnt up tomorrow, and he will tell you, `for nothing more than reading a book of Torah'. “Ma lekha yotzei litzalev? Al she-akhalti et ha-Matzah”. Ask him why he may be crucified tomorrow, and he will tell you that it is for nothing more than eating Matzah."
Rabbi Nathan lived in the second century. It was a time of great persecution, under the Emperor Hadrian. The Romans would not tolerate even the possibility of another independent Jewish state, and so even the most simple, routine acts of being a Jew -- celebrating a life-cycle event, reading a Jewish book, eating Matzah on Pesah -- became pretexts for violence. Those who loved God, according to Rabbi Nathan, were Jews who were otherwise unremarkable, and who did unremarkable things, except for the fact that they chose to do those unremarkable things -- to live as Jews -- in the Jewish land. Rabbi Nathan was giving us his own version of the prayer from Gates of Repentance, that would be composed so many centuries later: "be with our brothers and sisters, whose lives are made hard because they are Jews. Give them a special measure of love and kindness."
We have had confirmed for us in this summer’s battles the most melancholy fact that this is not primarily a dispute over territory. It is, rather, about the fact that these brothers and sisters of ours are Jews. We don't want to face it, and yet we must face it, for we have learned too much in the year 5766 to deny the fact that the lives of our brothers and sisters in the Land of Israel are being made hard because they are Jews. While we were traveling the globe, enjoying the beautiful scenery of remote places all over the world this summer, over a million of our brothgers and sisters were either traveling south to escape the range of the rockets launched by Hezbollah, or were tolerating the stark scenery of the concrete walls of their bomb shelters. And why? Only for the crime they had committed of being Jewish. We know this from the complete violation of international boundaries when Israeli soldiers were abducted from undisputed Israeli land. We know this from the words of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who said in August that he preferred that all the Jews in the world would move to Israel, so that they wouldn’t have to chase them down across the whole planet.
As horrifying as those words are, perhaps there is an element of hope to be gained from such strong language. For the last twenty years or so, although the State of Israel has been militarily strong, is has suffered greatly major setbacks in the realm of public perception. In the aftermath of the 1973 war, Israel was somehow transformed from being the underdog to becoming the aggressor. Note how subtly and cynically this was accomplished:
In 1967, and again in 1973, Israel was this tiny nation, barely a speck on the larger regional map of the Middle East or of all the Muslim countries of the Near East and Northern Africa. It was a country of 5 million Jews surrounded by 60 million Muslim Arabs. Its day-to-day survival hinged on the beneficence of the United States, and sometimes, like in 1973, that aid was slow in coming. But beginning with the public relations coup that was the original intifada of the 1980s, the struggle somehow transformed from being Israel versus all these much larger countries surrounding it, to Israel versus the poor Palestinians who had been kept in destitute squalor in refugee camps by their supposedly concerned Arab brethren for 30+ years in order to be played like pawns by the self-serving leadership of those host countries as well as the cynical manipulations of their own “homegrown” leaders like Yassir Arafat, George Habash, and others.
Then it became the well-equipped, American armed colonialist power oppressing these occupied people who just want to go “home.” And most recently, the party line among all the extremists seeks to put responsibility for Israel and the Jews back into the laps of the Europeans. Israel only exists as a state, they claim, because the Europeans felt guilty about what Hitler had done in murdering so many of them (in a holocaust that the most strident among them claim never happened). Why should we of the Muslim world have to pay for Europe’s sins? Europe wants to atone – let the Jews have a homeland somewhere in Europe. These are the arguments being circulated not only in the halls of the United Nations, but on college campuses across the whole country.
This reasoning, of course, ignores the realities of the situation, such as the presence of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the region formerly known as Palestine before the outbreak of World War II. It ignores the fact that before World War I the area was part and parcel of the Ottoman Empire, that the land called Palestine was owned primarily by absentee Turkish landlords, and that hundreds of thousands of acres were purchased legally from those landlords by Jewish organizations such as the Jewish National Fund, and that many of the individuals subsequently displaced were tenant farmers and not legal deedholders to their own property. It also ignores the fact that almost universally, the Arab countries were allies of Germany during WWII, and were subsequently defeated in the war. Most recently we saw the cynicism of an enemy who launched missiles from civilian homes, who built a war machine with schools and mosques as covers, and then decried Israeli brutality as they used civilians as human shields.
But I am not here as a spokesperson for the Israeli department of hasbarah, public relations. I am concerned about this shift in public image, less from the impact it has on public perception at large, and more from the affect is has had on the relationship between American Jewry and the Jewish state.
I am also concerned because of a subtle transformation that has taken place in the relationship between American Jews and Israeli Jews. In the old days, Amercan Jews were like the rich uncles of the family. Their poor nieces and nephews were struggling, and so they could always count on good old Uncle Shmuel to send them a few bucks for the stuff they really needed. Americans relished this patriarchal and patronizing role. But at some point in the 1990s, Israel as a nation grew up. With an influx of scientific brain power from the former Soviet Union, it became one of the hottest research and development laboratories on this planet. Through most of the 1990s and into this decade it has been one of the foremost recipients of venture capital investments in the world, averaging over $1 billion annually in new funding sources. It has gone from being a quaint, slightly backward second-world country, where you had to wait six months for Bezek to install a private phone line, to one of the most industrialized, computerized countries in the world. With an annual economy exceeding $100 billion dollars, the few hundred million that the United Jewish Communities campaign sends there in any given year barely makes a dent in the economy. In fact, a few years ago, in a rather radical assertion of its economic independence, the Jewish Agency began allocating funds to develop Jewish educational programs to strengthen Jewish identity in the diaspora.
As a result of Israel’s increasing financial independence, coupled with a decisive loss in the propaganda wars, and exacerbated by the violence that re-erupted six years ago, we are raising a generation of youth who have weaker ties to Israel than at any point in the history of the state.
And this is a problem. While as Jews, we are historically people with long memories and a highly defined sense of who we are and where we came from, as Americans, we suffer from that American blessing and curse of a notoriously short attention span, and short-lived historical memories. We have the ability to transform and reinvent ourselves every decade or two because at our core we believe that if it didn’t happen in our lifetime, in our memory, then its not relevant to who or what we are.
The American and Israeli Jewish communities now exist in more of a symbiotic relationship. We need each other. We provide our Israeli brothers and sisters political and moral support that is every bit as important as the dollars we send there. We also provide a model of modern Jewish religiosity in a pluralistic non-coercive way that many secular Israelis envy.
And our Israeli family provides us with amazing links to our past and to the community of Jews worldwide. It has become the major center of Jewish study, Jewish thought, art, theater, music, culture, and more. More and more Israeli authors are being translated into English for widespread audiences, such as David Grossman and Etgar Keret. Israel is a major player in the European pop music scene, and of course, Israeli discoveries in the fields of high-tech, telecommunications, and bioengineering are legendary.
What can we do to stop this erosion? My friends at the Federation would say that we should continue to send money, especially as there is so much rebuilding that we must do to repair the losses from this summer. Not only of buildings and homes, but of the trees and forests, and wetlands of the Hula reserve which have been brutalized, and that is a good place to start.
But, my friends, we all know that long distance relationships cannot survive without face to face contact. We must vote with our feet and with our bodies. We must strengthen and reinvigorate our connection to the people and the land by going there ourselves, by insisting that our high school and college aged young people spend time there.
It can’t possibly be any easier – Project Birthright offers literally dozens of free trips to Israel for anyone ages 18-26 who hasn’t been on a peer trip before, and registration is filling up for the winter break sessions right now. High schoolers can opt to spend six weeks during the summer in a transformative experience. If your kid had a bar or bat mitzvah here at Kol Ami, the Federation has set aside money through the Shorasheinu fund, and you can add to it and they will provide matching funds to help them to have the experience of a lifetime. I know safety is a concern, but it is also the primary concern of the Israeli government. This past summer was the biggest tourist summer in Israel in over 6 years. Thousands of Jewish teens were there, and not one of them was hurt in the rocket attacks. Their itineraries were adjusted, and they had the most amazing time.
And you should also go: participate in Sar-El a volunteer program for the Israeli army, in Volunteers for Israel, spend a couple of weeks or months learning at the Conservative Yeshivah, volunteer on a kibbutz, spend a summer in Ulpan, make the connection your own. If you are ready to do this, then call the synagogue office after Yom Kippur, and let me know, and if we get at least 15 people, we will go together. This is not tourist travel, this is a pilgrimage to discover your roots, your ancestral home, and the crazy quirky optimistic people who inhabit that land today and who show their love for God and their love for the Jewish people by doing ordinary things in an extraordinary place.
(Thanks to Rabbi Gordon Tucker for the midrash and its explanation at the beginning of the sermon)