These
are my eighth High Holidays at Beth Israel. In my first five years
here, I have followed the practice of many of my colleagues of
reserving one sermon for Israel. After that fifth sermon, a member
of the congregation came up to me and said, “Rabbi, it’s obvious
that you care very deeply about Israel, but I am not sure why I
should. Could you perhaps have a class to teach me why?” I was
touched by this request. Indeed, I count it as one of the kindest
things anyone has asked of me as a rabbi.
And
of course I held the class; and, astonishingly enough, it was the
best attended adult education course I have offered here. For five
weeks we studied the Jewish people’s history and its connection to
the land, the history of the land itself, the forces that impelled
the Jewish people off of it 2000 years ago, and the forces that
compelled them to return in the last century and a half. But on the
sixth week, I could no longer hide behind history. I had to answer
the question posed to me; the question that had become the course's
title: Why Care About Israel.
There
is part of me that wants to respond to that question in the same way
that Victor Laszlo responds to Rick Blaine when asked whether his
fight against the Nazis is worth it: “You might as well question
why we breathe,” he says. At first, it seemed astonishing that
the question should be asked at all. But when I tried to answer it,
I discovered that the truly astonishing thing is how difficult it is
to do so. In order to show you the difficulty, let me expand the
question. Here it is in its long form:
I
am a parent and a professional in my work. I live in Wallingford
Connecticut, a small, middle-class city with a very small Jewish
population. I am a member of the synagogue there because, in a
largely Christian town, I want my children to have a sense of their
Jewish identity. But I am also a member because I feel this ancient
faith of mine has something to teach me about how I should live my
own life - and I am trying my best to live a good and meaningful
life.
Israel
is very far away. What I know about it is what I see on the news,
and what I see on the news is mostly bad. Arabs killing Jews, Jews
killing Arabs, and I can’t really tell one side from the other.
The problems that lead to incessant war seem intractable; who am I to
sort them through? I have no desire to visit the place and, counting
pennies as we all are these days, no easy means of doing so if I did.
Why should I care about Israel?
This
is one very hard question. Israel is indeed far away and we are
connected to it not by some tangible dependence but rather by vague
ideas of a common interest and common history. Painful as it might
be to contemplate, if Israel were to cease to exist, it is hard to
see how our own lives would change.
So
in the class, I tried answering the question by narrowing the
distance. Israelis, I told them, are just like us. They live in a
free, democratic society. They are hard working, innovative, and
want to get ahead. They want peace just like all free people want
peace – so they can get on with the business of living. To that
end, they have all the institutions of freedom – courts that
administer justice, a press that is vibrant with controversy and
dissent, and a government that reflects the ever-evolving will of its
people. Beyond that, we share a history that goes back nearly 4000
years. And we share values, particularly our belief in the sanctity
and dignity of human life.
My
goal with this answer was to make Israelis seem less like foreigners
with a strange language and intrusive customs, and more like the
members of our family that they, in fact, are. I failed. The class
greeted my argument largely with silence. It was not the silence of
profound insight. Rather, it was the silence that says “is that
all you got?”
And
in fact, I myself was underwhelmed with this answer. Something I
knew, was missing: something that could not be found in economic
statistics or political theories; something not of the head, but of
the heart. So perhaps the best way to answer the question “why
should you care about Israel?” is by telling you why I
do.
As
many of you know, I did not go to religious school as a child. We
belonged to no synagogue; I had no bar mitzvah. Unlike most Jews who
hem and haw about the matter by saying that they are not very
observant, my father was an avowed atheist. I idolized my father,
which of course made me an atheist too. But despite my evolving
hostility toward religion, somehow the State of Israel entered my
consciousness. It entered there when I was nine-years old and
Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic
games in Munich. It moved still further into my consciousness a year
later when Egypt and Syria nearly destroyed it on Yom Kippur, 1973.
I took a giddy kind of adolescent male pride in Israel’s daring
raid that rescued 102 hostages held by Palestinian terrorists in
Entebbe, Uganda in 1976. I felt deflated the following year when
Menachem Begin became Prime Minister and everyone said he would never
make peace. And then I felt chastened the next year when he did just
that – giving back the Sinai peninsula to earn a peace with Egypt.
Through all these events, my Jewish identity - bereft of any
religious component - blossomed and grew. These acts of heroism in
the face of evil, these risks for peace with a former enemy, were
being done by Jews. And I was a Jew.
To
that point my consciousness of Israel was associated mostly with a
feeling of pride: pride in its courage, pride in its daring, pride in
its audacity, both in war and in peace. But in 1981, a new and even
stronger emotion crept in. That year, in a secret and audacious
raid, Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor the French were
building for Saddam Hussein in Iraq. I was thrilled. To me it was,
like the Entebbe raid, another example of Israel’s genius and
daring. But the world didn’t see it that way. British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher called Israel’s raid “a grave breach
of international law.” And The New York Times, true to its
form of getting all-things-Israel precisely wrong, called it “an
act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.”
But
the meaning of all this criticism did not hit home until the
following year with the outbreak of the Lebanon War. Throughout the
1970's, the Palestinian Liberation Organization or PLO, turned
Lebanon – particularly Southern Lebanon – into an armed base for
attacking Israel with shells and rockets and tanks. Israel had
little choice but to strike at this burgeoning threat. As Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger said at the time, “no
sovereign state can tolerate indefinitely the buildup along its
borders of a military force dedicated to its destruction . . .”
Israel invaded Southern Lebanon in June of 1982. Initial success led
to an effort to drive the PLO from Lebanon all together. That is
when the war bogged down and opinion turned against the Jewish state.
From all corners Israel was being attacked as an aggressor. Even
Jews, even Israelis were joining in on the condemnation.
I
was incredulous. How could you condemn a country for defending its
citizens against an enemy bent on destroying it? What other country
would be condemned for acting the way Israel had? Indeed, what
country would not be condemned if it failed to act as Israel had? As
you can tell, it did not take long for my incredulity to turn to
indignation. I had no problem holding Israel to a higher standard.
But to say that Israel's standard should be self-sacrifice rather
than self-defense struck me as the height of naivety. At least I
thought it was naivety at the time.
Sadly,
the history I watched unfold in Lebanon in 1982 became the pattern of
behavior in the decades that have followed. The terrorists who
surround Israel commit some outrage – a suicide bombing, a
cross-border kidnapping, indiscriminate rocket fire – and the world
mouths its sympathy for the Jewish State. The world loves to be seen
as sympathetic when Jews are being killed. But let Israel defend
itself and the world's moral calculus changes. We saw this in the
Palestinian terror war of 2000-2004 where Israel was internationally
condemned for building a fence to keep suicide bombers out. We saw
it in the second Lebanon war of 2006 where international pressure
forced Israel to shut down its operations before achieving its
objectives. We saw it in the first Gaza war of 2012 where the United
Nations accused Israel of war crimes – a charge its commission's
Jewish chairman subsequently renounced. And we saw it this summer
where the world placed at Israel's feet the body of every dead
Palestinian in Gaza – despite the fact that Hamas rejected or broke
every cease-fire that Israel accepted. Through it all, my
indignation at the world's heedless naivety grew. Then, at some
point – I don't know when for sure – I realized that what Israel
was facing was not heedless naivety at all. For who could be so
naïve as to take the side of an organization whose avowed purpose
was to destroy the Jewish state and every Jew living in it; that
conducts summary executions on busy, city streets; that uses its own
citizens as shields for its weaponry. This wasn't heedless naivety.
This wasn't even hatred of the State of Israel. This was
antisemitism. This was hatred of Jews, pure and simple.
Just
look at what they are saying out there on the street of almost any
supposedly civilized nation. With all the
oppressive regimes that rule their people through terror –
including in Gaza; with all the wars and genocides that mark their
dead in the tens and hundreds of thousands, what is the one country
that evokes angry, sometimes violent protest in France, in Germany,
in Poland, in India, in Great Britain, in Sweden, in Norway, in
Chile, in Italy, in Argentina, in Australia, in Columbia, in Canada,
in Denmark, in Austria, in Tunisia and here in the United States?
And in not a few of those protests they are shouting "Death to
the Jews," and "Jews to the Gas." These are not
protests against Israel. They are protests against Jews. They are
protests against you.
As
you can tell, I am passionate on this subject. But then again, we
Jews are a passionate people. And nothing evokes that passion like
our sense of justice. Think of Abraham arguing with God over the
fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: הֲשֹׁפֵט
כָּל־הָאָרֶץ לֹא יַעֲשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט –
will not the
Judge of all the world do justice?
Think of Moses, desperately defending the Israelites after the sin of
the golden calf - שׁוּב
מֵחֲרוֹן אַפֶּךָ וְהִנָּחֵם עַל־הָרָעָה
לְעַמֶּךָ -
return from Your anger and relent from
the evil toward Your people. Think of
Jeremiah at the end of the book of Lamentations, accepting God's
punishment but accusing Him as well - קָצַפְתָּ
עָלֵינוּ עַד־מְאֹד – You
have raged against us enough! Even
the story of Jonah is one of a man whose passion for justice is so
great he seeks to block God's mercy.
So what is it that evokes your
passion? What is it that causes you – in your own way – to rage
against the world? What would cause you to rage even against God?
Surely there must be something inside you that evokes what can only
be called righteous indignation. And surely the scapegoating and
villianizing of Jews must be worthy of that passionate response,
because if it isn't, then something is missing from your Jewish soul
– something you have to find in order to become whole.
I
care about Israel because I am a Jew. And you must do the same.
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