Back to Rabbi Daniel Liben
On Yom Kippur morning 28 years ago, a remarkably similar scene played out in synagogues across America. Most of you are old enough to have been there- you remember: We shared our fear and anxiety as the State of Israel was under mortal attack, struck by cowardly enemies on the holiest day of the year. We prayed to God for Israel's rescue, and for the protection of her soldiers and citizens. We felt the threat to Israel's survival like a knife being held to our own throats. We pledged, on the spot, incredible sums of money to buy Israel Bonds.
It was a day on which Rabbis folded up their neatly typed sermons, now irrelevant to the crisis at hand, and instead, spoke from the heart. I heard Rabbi Al Lewis, a former President of the Rabbinical Assembly, and a gifted preacher, once tell a gathering of Rabbinical students how he had handled that morning. Putting aside his sermon, Rabbi Lewis taught his congregation these few simple words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, and sang them with his congregation: "Kol Haolam Kulo Gesher Tsar M'od; V'haIkar Lo Lefached Klal: The World is a narrow bridge; and the essential thing, is not to be afraid." That was the whole sermon: don't be afraid.
We rallied with speed to Israel's aid in the days that followed, just as we had in 1967, and just as we had in 1948 before that. The words, "We Are One," were not simply a UJA slogan; they were the creed that expressed the deepest existential truth of our hearts. And we were not afraid to say so.
Today is Yom Kippur, twenty eight years later, and this year, I am filled with fear. Not fear of bullets or of suicide bombers, but fear that those words, "We Are One," ring empty of the resonance and the passion which once filled them. Once, we marched and demonstrated in times of crisis, in order to tell the world that Israel is our hope and the beginning of our redemption, and that we are unwavering in our support of her. Once, we organized almost daily activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry, grass roots action that succeeded in opening the gates of the Soviet Union, and transforming the Jewish world.
But in the full year since the "Rosh Hashannah War" began last September, how loud have our voices been on Israel's behalf? Twenty one teenagers, mostly immigrants from Russia, massacred at a Jerusalem disco. Seventeen innocents killed by a suicide bomber at a family pizza restaurant in Jerusalem. Five more deaths last week in Nahariya. A total of 170 civilians murdered over the past year. To whom have we written letters? Before what international bodies have we cried out in protest?
My friends, something has happened to us, to American Jews, in the years since the Yom Kippur war. I fear that we have lost some of our resolve as Am Yisrael, and that we have drifted into an ambivalence, a distance that can not measured in miles, from Eretz Yisrael, the land and its people.
My colleague, Rabbi Jack Riemer, points to a story from the Talmud which he says is a reflection of ourselves. It is in Masechet Gittin, in the legends that describe what it was like when the second Temple was destroyed. The Talmud says that the Romans attacked the city of Tur Malka and for three days, they massacred Jews in one part of the city. That part of the city was soaked with blood, but there was a high hill that separated the two parts of the city, and therefore, the people who lived on the other side of the city could not hear the sounds of war. So, on one side of the city, Jews were being slaughtered, and on the other side, Jews were having parties.
I think Rabbi Riemer is correct: that is what it has come to for many American Jews. Our fellow Jews in Israel are being attacked every day, and we behave as if there is some kind of psychological mountain separating us from them, as if we lived in Tur Malka.
Let me share with you three anecdotes that illustrate my point. Two are related to the college campus, and one happened right here, in Temple Israel.
This summer, Jewish student leaders began to prepare for what was expected to be a major public relations assault on Israel led by Arab students on campuses across the country. Hillel brought 400 student leaders to a retreat, in order to focus on leadership training, and to arm them with facts about Israel and the Middle East conflict. "These Muslims kids know so much about what's going on, they know their arguments," said a 19 year old student from Ohio State, "We just know that we're Jewish and we enjoy being Jewish."
But not every kid got it. "I'm here to relax and to learn things...I'm not here to become an activist," said one young man. "They're preaching how they want us to act; I don't want to be told how to act." Another student admitted that she had known little about Israel that morning, but was unsure about what she had learned. "I want to be informed," she said, but I wanted to be informed on both sides." These young Jews are among our campus leaders, and yet see how difficult it is to rouse them out of their apathy and their ambivalence.
The second anecdote comes from a friend of mine, who does Hillel work at a large university campus. A Jewish student wanted to register a new club under the Hillel umbrella: "Jews for Palestinian Statehood." My friend had to ask herself, is there room for this in Hillel? We are a diverse, pluralistic community. But is everything kosher, or are there some limits, some boundaries beyond which, in self-respect, we as a community don't go?
My third anecdote is about the banner that we have on our front lawn. I'm sure you've read it; it says, "We support the State of Israel in Her Quest for Peace." A very nice Jewish woman called me last week to suggest that certainly now, after the terrorist attack on the United States, it would be unseemly, somehow unpatriotic, to keep that banner up. She was sure that it was just an oversight, and that someone would remove it.
Frankly, I was shocked. Israel is one of America's staunchest and most reliable allies. Now, more than ever, we share a common enemy in Islamic terrorism. Now, more than ever, every American should openly support Israel in her quest for peace.
I am more sympathetic to the parent of a nursery school student who also wanted to remove the sign. She feared for our children's safety, seeing the banner as asking for trouble, a magnet to attract crazies or anti-semites to our building. But to both, I offer the same response: If, as Americans, we fear showing public support for Israel during tough times, then everything we believe about pluralism, about freedom of expression, and about our sense of belonging here, is false. And if, as Jews, we are afraid to show public support for Israel, than what do we stand for at all? We might as well live in Tur Malka.
When Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Efrat was asked, what message should American Jews hear from Israel at the High Holidays this year, he wrote;
"Tell them that we Israelis feel very lonely, that we feel let down by the American Jewish community, because we are in the midst of a difficult war of survival and we don't hear from you. Tell your congregation that two student of mine, one of whom was a boy named Kobi, who came from America, and who was only 14 years old, two of my students were murdered a few months ago in a cave near Tekoa. These caves are part of Tekoa, and Tekoa is not on the other side of the green line. It is not part of any Palestinian state. They were murdered, while they were exploring the area in order to find a place in which to have a picnic. People would think that they could travel, hike and picnic there safely. But these two teenagers were not only murdered, they were so brutally battered. Their head, faces and bodies were so cruelly smashed, that we had to use dental records in order to determine which one was which, that is how unrecognizable their bodies were." And Rabbi Riskin said," I had to come to America this summer in order to raise money for Efrat, not for the Torah Ohr Schools per se, I came in order to raise money with which to buy Bullet Proof busses, so that our children can go to school in safety. I came in order to raise money with which to buy bullet proof vests, children's size, so that our kids can wear them when they go to school each day. "
It has been very difficult to be a Jew this year. First, because it has been a year of bloodshed and war in Israel. It is a war of terror fought at bus stops and pizza parlors. A war of splattered blood and frayed nerves that has settled into a prolonged disruption of daily life with no end in sight. We are weary and disheartened.
It has been difficult to be a Jew because, in the propaganda war, in which Palestinian soldiers calculatedly position themselves behind rock throwing youths, for the benefit of camera crews, we have been losing. In truly Orwellian doublespeak, the press, for example, refers to Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem as "settlements. " They refer to our holiest site in the center of the Old City by its Arabic name, and only parenthetically add, "also known by Jews as the Temple Mount." The very veracity of Jewish history is challenged on multiple fronts, by Arab archaeologists who deny that there ever was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, by reference books that fail to list the State of Israel among the family of nations, and even by long distance billing companies, who list your call to Jerusalem as located in the country of "Palestine!"
And it has been difficult to be a Jew this year because we have felt isolated. Israel is vilified around the globe, by countries who are afraid of offending Arab oil, or by those who fear Islamic reprisals, or more simply, by those who hate Jews. In case we thought that anti-semitism was passe, Durban taught us otherwise. This summer's international conference on racism there was intended to unite the nations of the world against bigotry. Instead, it became a forum of rabid anti-semitism and Israel bashing, so unabashed, that even the slogan," Kill the Jews," was heard. "What is painful," writes Eli Wiesel," is not the fact that the Palestinians and the Arabs voiced their hatred, but that so few delegates had the courage to combat them. It is as if in a strange and frightening moment of collective catharsis, everyone removed their masks and revealed their true faces. By means of the disgraceful conference in Durban, history has given us, the Jews, a sign. And we had better learn how to decipher it."
But American Jews of my generation are not used to anti-semitism, and don't fully comprehend it. We, who have been raised in the most privileged society that Jews have ever known, we, who have literally grown up with the Jewish state, and have no personal memory of Jews as a homeless and persecuted minority, we don't know how to respond. We are struck dumb.
Many of the "Al Hets" that we say today have to do with words, with sins related to speech:
Al het shechatanu l'fanecha b'lashon hara; we have sinned against you through slander. B'vitui sfataim- by speaking recklessly. B'Dibur peh- offensive talk. B'richilut, through gossip...and the list goes on. That is because the Rabbis know that words can poison and kill, even if they are untrue.
My friends, if we have been unduly and shamefully quiet in a time of Israel's great need, perhaps it because we have allowed our spirits to have become poisoned, our courage and resolve infected, by the barrage of hateful words against Israel. Like the victim who blames himself, we internalize the hate and the lies, and die a little bit more ourselves.
The NY Times scolds Israel for its policy of targeted "assassinations" of those who would train and deploy suicide bombers, and we cringe as if God himself had reprimanded us. Shame on us. Shame on us for not reading the Wall Street Journal, or the New Republic, or other organs which consistently get the story straight.
In its September 10 edition, the tenth mind you, printed days before the attack on America, The New Republic posed this eerily prophetic rhetorical question: "Imagine, for a second, that the United States knew that one of Osama Bin Laden's men was on his way to Manhattan with a bomb: No sane American would argue against intercepting, and even "assassinating" him to prevent the atrocity that would transpire. The American authorities, indeed, have a sacred duty to stop such an individual by whatever means they can. But there are many people who seem to prefer that the Israeli government stand idle as its society is lethally attacked."
On September 11, when that hypothetical became a horrific reality, the Palestinian press effused, in Arabic, of course, "The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of their noble predecessors... the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the US Marines a tough lesson...they are the salt of the earth, the engines of history...they are the most honorable among us..."
Maybe the media gets it now. And maybe it is time that we stop apologizing when Israel defends herself.
Words are used daily to attack the very foundation of Israel's existence. The Palestinians have reverted to referring to the state as "the Zionist entity," and the word Zionism is bandied about as if it were an epithet. Our friends tell us Zionism is old fashioned, our enemies equate it with racism. But let me remind you of what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said about Zionism:
"You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, that you are merely 'anti Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountaintops. Let it echo through the valley of god's green earth: When people criticize Zionism they mean Jews...Zionism is nothing less than the dream and the ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own homeland...And what is Anti-Zionism? It is the denial to the Jew of the fundamental right that we justly claim for the peoples of Africa, and freely accord to all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism."
But you and I should not need the words of Reverend King to remind us that Israel is our hope and our salvation, that Israel is the great miracle of the 20th century. Israel is the country that took in Ethiopian Jewry and gave them a home, when no African country would suffer their existence. Israel is the home to which over 40,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated, during this past year, in spite of the troubles that faced them there.
Israel is the country where Masorti leaders, such as Rabbi Michael Graetz in Omer, or Rabbi Reuven Hammer in Jerusalem, both of whom have spoken to you from this pulpit, teach their communities that it is the duty of the State not only to protect its citizens, but to safeguard their individual rights, whether they be Jew, Muslim, or Christian. Because Israel is a Jewish state.
Let me tell you something about Rabbi Graetz's congregation in Omer. They are concerned, even now, with keeping the doors of communication open between themselves and their Muslim neighbors. They have invited Muslim clerics, who do not share the extremists' views, to speak with them. And, after years of trying, Magen Avraham opened up an afternoon Talmud Torah- what we would call a Hebrew School. Only the kids don't learn Hebrew language, they study in Hebrew. For three and a half hours a day, five days a week, these kids study Jewish texts and values, using art, music and drama, and they apply their lessons to their lives. This is the first afternoon school in Israel, and it is run at a Masorti congregation.
Well, at the beginning of each term, Rabbi Graetz offers the parents a deal, just as we would here. They can save 350 Shekels if they join the synagogue at the same time. one or two families may take him up on the offer, but most parents- remember, these are primarily secular Israelis, are too shy of religious institutions to actually join a synagogue.
Well, on the second day of school, a stream of parents were entering and exiting the office of the executive director. When Rabbi Graetz asked what all the commotion was about, he was told, "They joined the synagogue. Not just one or two this year- all of them. Every family had joined." The message of Masorti Judaism, our message, is beginning to take root in Israel. Israelis are more open than ever before to the idea that Judaism can address the very real and complex issues of their lives. The birth of the State Israel was one miracle. The flowering of a dynamic, thoughtful, and passionate modern Jewish life on its soil is yet another.
Friends, it has been a tough year to be Jewish. But let us not respond by retreating into a distant silence, and forgetting our responsibilities. Israel needs us to stand tall in our support of her, openly and unafraid. The simple truth is that we did not start this war, Arafat did, after the Israeli government offered a territorial settlement so far reaching, that it surpassed anything Arafat might have expected. Even Martin Indyk, the former American Ambassador to Israel, grudgingly acknowledged this summer that Oslo failed because Arafat, "never really gave up violence."
Write to the President and thank him for having pulled the American delegation from the Durban conference. Thank him for continuing to stand firm behind Israel, our ally, during these trying times.
And while we are at it, let us put pressure on everyone who claims to oppose suicide bombing as a political tactic to make their voices heard in the Middle East as well. I have heard many Muslim clerics in the last two weeks decry the events of September 11 as an affront to their religion, which is a faith of peace, and which does not advocate terror. I truly want to believe them. Yet, they had all been strangely silent over the past year, as suicide bombers murdered Jewish children in the name of Allah. If there is a moderate Islam, then it is high time that we enlist its political aid in sending a message to the Palestinians.
What else can we do? Read more magazines, newspapers, and visit the web sites that give us the information that we need to defend Israel. Write a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe protesting last week's scurrilous op ed attack on Israel, and on the Jewish people. In a time when Americans should be pulling together, Derrick Jackson's divisive and scandalous article blamed America and Israel for the tragedy of September 11! Such views can not be dismissed with a tut tut and shake of the head. They have to be constantly, publicly countered.
Talk about Israel, with your children, your neighbors, your co-workers. Buy Israeli products. And make it a point, right after Yontif, to call, or E-Mail all of your friends and relatives in Israel, just to let them know that we care.
Buy Israel Bonds this year, because they are a link between your family and the Jewish State, and because her economy has been battered by a year of terrorism and uncertainty. And give generously to the Masorti Movement, because they are building the religious and social infrastructure that will make us all marvel at what the Jewish State can achieve, for themselves, for us, and for the world.
And go for a visit! Last week, Mayor Guilianni was asked what people can do to give support to New Yorkers. He replied, "come visit...spend money." As Jews, shouldn't we respond similarly to Israel? Every one of us who can at all afford the time and the money, this is the year we should visit Israel. Go on the CJP mission in November, or on another mission later on this year. A trip will give moral support to Israelis. And more, you will make a statement to yourself about your commitment as a Jew, and about your willingness to live without fear.
Last summer, the Reform Movement, which annually sends large groups of teenagers to Israel, cancelled all of its summer trips. I was so proud of our Conservative Movement for having the presence and the confidence not to cancel. We sent hundreds of our teens to Israel, on our USY Pilgrimage and our Ramah Seminars programs. I have spoke to some of them. They felt safe, because they were with people who loved them. They felt safe because they were in Israel. Yes, there were potential dangers, but the fact that they came at such a critical time made their contact with Israelis all the more meaningful for them. They knew what it was to be part of Am Echad, Blev Echad: One People, one heart.
And that, after all, is what its all about. Words cannot harm us. Even the fear of terrorism must not deter us. "...V'haIkar Lo L'fached klal." The essential thing, as we stand in judgement at the end of this fateful year, as Americans and as Jews, is to remain unafraid.
L'Shannah Tovah Tikateivu v'Tichateimu: May we be written and inscribed for a year of heath and of peace, and may we have the courage to fulfill our obligations as Am Yisrael.