Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
You don't need me to tell you what a bizarre year this past year has been, what a troubled and troubling year. Few of us have ever known a year like it. On September 11th, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the first enemy attack on the continental United States since the War of 1812, the equivalent of Pearl Harbor happening in New York City instead of in far-off Hawaii. Not long after that, the situation in Israel deteriorated virtually by the week, almost to the point of all-out war. You remember the headlines, the shock of waking up to another atrocity on the morning news: suicide bombers in a Jerusalem pizzeria, in a Tel Aviv teenage night spot. And perhaps the worst part of it was that we almost got used to it. Events almost lost their power to shock us. There was the danger that we would no longer be horrified, but would respond with "Oh my, another one."
And if that weren't enough, there was a renewal of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere on a scale not seen since the 1930's, not criticism of Israeli policies, not even dislike of Israel, but crude vicious Nazi-style anti-Semitism: destruction of a 500-year-old synagogue in Tunisia; desecration of cemeteries in France, Germany, Italy and Poland; contemptible, totally loony accusations of Jewish involvement in the World Trade Center bombing, believed by otherwise intelligent people; the hijacking of a United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, turning it into an orgy of hatred for Jews and Judaism; vicious anti-Semitic harangues tolerated by the liberal community at the University of California at Berkeley; not to mention the condescending, oh-so-politically correct anti-Israel bias of the BBC and National Public Radio. You read the comments of a Nobel Prize winner in Portugal comparing what is happening to the Palestinians to what was done to the Jews in Auschwitz. You read the comments of British academicians that Israel has forfeited its right to exist. And you have to conclude that these are not the statements of sane people. You see the comments of French intellectuals and it reinforces the suspicion that French intellectuals are to intellectuals as airline food is to food.
It has been a hard year for those of us who love Israel and love Judaism. In fact, it has been a hard year for all of us who love decency and hate violence.
And because of the kind of year it was, I find myself compelled to give the kind of sermon I don't like to give, because this past year has compelled me to come to conclusions I didn't want to come to. For all of my years as a rabbi, I have believed and I have taught that Jews were no different from other people, that Judaism was different from Christianity and Islam but Jews had the same feelings, the same strengths and weaknesses, the same fears and dreams that Christians and Moslems have. I took issue with the Chabad rabbis who argued that Jewish souls are qualitatively superior to gentile souls. I opposed and discouraged interfaith marriage, not because I believed that Jews were better than non-Jews (24 years as your rabbi disabused me of that notion) but because a family with two religions was likely to raise children with no religion to avoid arguments.
But this year has persuaded me that Jews are in fact different. I find myself compelled to face the fact that the Jew plays the role for the world that the canary used to play for the coal miners. You've read about how the miners would take canaries with them into the mines because the canaries were extremely sensitive to dangerous gases. They responded to danger before the humans did. So if the miners saw the canaries get sick and pass out, they knew that the air was bad and they would escape as fast as they could. That's what we Jews do for the world. We are the world's early warning system. Where there is evil, where there is hatred, it affects us first.
To be a Jew, whether we like it or not, is to be a magnet for hatred, for envy, for resentment no matter how unjustified, no matter how irrational. If there is hatred anywhere in the world, it will find us. If there is evil somewhere in the world, we will become its target. People overflowing with hatred for whatever reason, including self-hatred, make us the objects of their hatred. Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City hated Jews though he could never have explained why. Leo Felton who was convicted in a Boston courtroom two months ago for trying to start a racial war by blowing up local landmarks, hated Jews though it is not clear if he ever met any. White supremacists who hate blacks hate Jews too, and black extremists who hate white people hate Jews with special fervor, not because there is anything wrong with us but because there is something terribly wrong with them. Semi-literate peasants in countries as diverse as Russia and Malaysia blame Jews for ruining their economy, and unemployed college graduates from Egypt to Pakistan blame Jews for ruining their careers.
This is the role we play in the world, not by choice but imposed on us by others, to be the miner's canary, to smoke out the bigots, the haters, the people who will be a menace to their communities if someone doesn't stop them, and we identify them early on by their hatred of us. Hitler attacked Jews before he attacked western civilization, and that should have alerted the world to what kind of person he was, but the world misread the signal. Moslem fanatics practiced their terrorist skills on Israelis before turning those skills on the rest of the world, but the world never understood the warning. When I see what Pat Buchanan or James Traficant have to say about Jews, or Jean Marie LePen in France or Jorg Haider in Austria, I don't have to look any further into their political philosophies. I know everything I need to know to consider them disqualified from public office.
At the very beginning of the Jewish enterprise, God said to Abraham, Lech L'cha, Go forth from your country, from your father's house, to the land I will guide you to, and be a blessing to all the nations of the world. Va'avarcha m'varchecha um'kalelcha a'aor. I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you. Why would anyone curse Abraham when he is such a wonderful person who is going to be a blessing to the whole world? People who make their life's work studying the sickness of the human soul offer three theories, none of which is likely to make Israelis feel safer when they get on a bus but perhaps they will help us understand the origins of the problem.
One is captured in Maurice Samuel's remark that "no man loves his alarm clock." We don't like to be told that certain tempting, attractive things are wrong. We chafe at the restrictions of morality, and we resent the descendants of Abraham who remind us of what God expects of us. That is the only way I can understand Hitler's determination to murder all the Jews of Europe, even if it meant losing the war and seeing Germany destroyed in the process. Dedicated to the cause of death over life, committed to hatred rather than tolerance, he had to destroy the people who, in his mind, symbolized morality, tolerance and life.
A second theory is that many European intellectuals, embarrassed by what educated Europeans did in the Holocaust, are desperately eager to exaggerate Israeli misbehavior because it lets them say "You see, they're no better than we are. We can stop feeling guilty about what we did to them."
And finally, the experts would tell us that there are people who hate themselves, often with good reason. They are not comfortable hating themselves, so they find someone as different from themselves as possible, and whatever they don't like about themselves they project onto this other person. They imagine it's this other person, not they, who has those terrible thoughts and habits. Sometimes they define the "other" racially, African-American or Asian. Sometimes by gender or sexual orientation, hating women or gays. And sometimes by religion and ethnic background, hating Jews as a way of not having to hate themselves.
So much for analysis. What do we do about it? How shall we respond to this reluctant conclusion that, whether we like it or not, we are fated to be the world's early warning system, the perpetual targets of the messengers of hatred and evil in the world? 46 years ago, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the greatest Orthodox teacher and sage of his generation, speaking on the eighth anniversary of Israel's independence, told his audience that when the Jewish people left Egypt, God entered into not one but two covenants with them, one at the moment of the Exodus, the moment of leaving Egypt, the other at Mt. Sinai, at the giving of the Torah. Soloveitchik called them the Covenant of Fate and the Covenant of Destiny.
He defines the Covenant of Fate as "an existence of compulsion." For the Jewish people as a whole as for the individual person, fate is what happen to you, what the world imposes on you. No matter how much you try, you cannot avoid or escape fate, as Jonah finds out in the story we read on Yom Kippur afternoon, when he tries to avoid God's summons only to have it follow him wherever he runs.
It is this sense of shared, unavoidable fate that inspires us to reach out to our brothers and sisters in Israel, to adopt a family victimized by terrorism. It is this sense of shared fate, this sense that their struggle is our struggle and their pain is our pain, that leaves us feeling dazed and unable to think straight for an entire day when the morning news brings an account of yet another bombing in Israel. This readiness to make their struggle our struggle and their pain our pain because we are bound to them in a covenant of shared fate is a beautiful thing. It is an inspiring thing. But it's not enough, as the Exodus from Egypt was not enough for the Israelite slaves. We, like they, need the second covenant, the Covenant of Destiny.
Fate is the story of what happens to us, the circumstances of our birth, who our parents are, what talents we are born with. Fate is what the world imposes on us, everything we can't do anything about. We can't escape our fate as Jews by assimilating and trying to be like everybody else, and we can't escape it by excelling and being such paragons of virtue that people will have no reason to hate us. The bigots of the world will hate us not because of who we are but because of who they are. That seems to be our fate.
But destiny is different from fate. Destiny is what we choose as a free people to do with our lives. Destiny is how we choose to define ourselves as Jews, and not let the antisemites define our Jewishness for us as something negative, something dangerous. Fate is slavery in Egypt; Destiny is Mt. Sinai, destiny is Torah, destiny is a distinctive Jewish way of life, not to win the admiration of good people and not to avoid the resentment of bad people, but because that is the way of life we choose.
If it is our fate to be the world's early warning system, if that is going to happen whether we want it to or not, what is our destiny? What is the part of being Jewish that we do have control over? Let me suggest that our destiny as Jews is to experience how satisfying it is to live a spiritually serious life. In the world of bigotry and anti-Semitism, being Jewish is a problem. But in our world, being human is the problem and being Jewish is the answer to the question of how to live a fully human life.
The world asks us "How will you earn enough money to define yourself as a success?" Judaism asks us "How can you use your money to define yourself as a mensch?" The world says "There is a reward for those of you who finish ahead of everybody else." Judaism says "There is a reward for those of you who know how to connect with other people. There is a kind of holiness you will know only when people come together, as we are doing tonight."
To oppose anti-Semitism is to deal with the Covenant of Fate. To help make a minyan so that your neighbor can say Kaddish is to live the Covenant of Destiny. It is Judaism as an answer, not as a problem. To write a letter to the Globe supporting Israel is the Covenant of Fate. To read a Jewish book to your children or grandchildren is the Covenant of Destiny.
If the Covenant of Fate represents God saying to Abraham "Bring the world this message that they need to hear, and some people will love you and some people will hate you for it," if the Covenant of Fate represents God saying to our ancestors as they left Egypt "whether you like it or not, you will never be an ordinary people, because you are the descendants of Abraham, because My Name is permanently and indelibly linked to yours and everyone who hates and resents Me will hate and resent you." the Covenant of Destiny represents God saying to us in every generation "Because My Name is permanently and indelibly attached to you, you will have access to a uniquely intimate relationship with Me if you choose to," and our ancestors responding to God "Yes, that is what we will do with our freedom. We choose to walk in the light of the Lord all of our days."
My friends, we pray for a better year this year than last year was. Are there grounds for optimism? Are there reasons to hope? Listen closely to what God said to Abraham: I will bless those who bless you and him who curses you will I curse. The 14th Century French sage Levi ben Gerson noted two important messages in that verse: first, that those who appreciate us will be many, and those who hate us will be few. The first is in the plural, the second is singular. The terrorists win headlines and the bigots and haters make a lot of noise, but there are really very few of them. They are obnoxious, they are dangerous, they can do a lot of damage, but they are few. Unlike Nazi Germany, the police, the government and the weight of public opinion are heavily on our side, not theirs. And secondly, God tells Abraham that where there are people who hate him, God will handle them.
If I were to ask you what word do we recite more than any other during these High Holy Day prayers, I suspect the answer would be Amen. Do you know what Amen means? It comes from the same Hebrew root as the words Emunah, belief, and Neeman, faithful, and it means basically "I believe that, I can count on that." To say Amen tonight is to say " I believe the world is so constructed, and the human soul is so constructed, that ultimately good will prevail over evil, truth over lies, love over hatred, because that is the kind of world God made."
God does so much for us; what can we do for God in return? It's not a matter of believing that God exists; God is not up for re-election this year. But we can believe in God's world. We can believe in God's reliability. We can say Amen to all the High Holy Day prayers that speak of life and peace and prosperity, saying it not by rote, not unthinkingly, but saying it as if we meant it, -- that we are willing to do what the Israelis do every day of the year, to bet our lives and the lives of our children on the proposition that this world may yet become God's world.
Is that realistic? In my lifetime, I have seen the defeat of Hitler, the fall of communism, the creation of Israel, the repeal of racial segregation, the empowerment of women, the extension of the lifespan, the eradication of so many diseases. We have grounds for hope.
Somebody asked me a trick question about the Torah the other day and I got it wrong. He asked "what command is repeated more than any other in the Torah?" I told him I thought it was the commandment to help the poor. He said "No, the one that occurs most often is 'Fear not - don't be afraid.'" God said it to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses, to the Israelites at the Red Sea and to the Israelites as they prepared for battle. And God says it to us tonight, on the threshold of a New Year. To be a Jew is to be aware of the dangers and choose not to be afraid.
When the war in Afghanistan began, a reporter asked an American general if he would ever be able to forgive Osama bin Laden for what he had done to us. The general answered "Forgiving bin Laden is God's job. Our job is to arrange the meeting." In the same way, we might say, Bringing about the downfall of bigots and terrorists is God's job. Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, not because it will make our lives easier, but because it will make our lives more meaningful, because it will bless the world as Abraham blessed the world, showing people what it looks like to live by God's word, and God knows this world could use that blessing. Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, because we can't escape the fate of being a Jew-generations before us have tried and failed-but we can claim the destiny of being a Jew; because when we do that, we discover how satisfying a truly human life can be.
My friends, in one of the key passages of our High Holy Day prayers, we look forward to a year in which TZADDIKIM YIR'U V'YISMACHU VIY'SHARIM YAALOZU, a year in which good people will have reason to rejoice and honest people will have cause to be glad, and the virtuous will sing for joy when the mouth of the wicked will be shut and evil will disappear like smoke.
May God grant that, when we gather as a congregation next year in our newly renovated synagogue, our thoughts and our sermons will be cleansed of all references to terror and hatred, V'TIMLOCH ATTA ADONAI L'VADECHA AL KOL MAASECHA, For God alone will rule over all creation. AMEN