Some thoughts as we approach an important anniversary

With Gilad Shalit now reaching 4 years in captivity, I thought I'd share my "The Rabbi Speaks" for next weekend here:

In my wallet, surrounded by pictures of my son, credit cards, receipts and other assorted flotsam and jetsam, is what looks to be a baseball card. It’s blue, laminated, and has a young man in a uniform on the front, smiling, frozen forever in his youth. He’s not in a baseball uniform, however, nor any other sports paraphenalia. He wears the uniform of an Israeli paratrooper. His name is--was--Michael Levin, and he died on August 1st, 2006, leading his men against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Michael was an American, just 22 years old, from the Philadelphia region. While he was not a member of my congregation, I knew his family, their rabbi. Most of my congregants knew them, their kids had Michael as a summer camp counselor. Michael chose to make Aliyah, to immigrate to Israel, joined the army, earned the rank of sergeant, and was visiting his family while on leave when the war in Lebanon broke out. His friends told him to stay in the states, but he refused. His was an old-fashioned kind of Zionism, a love of land and people that could not be deterred nor minimized, and he was going to fulfill his duty to his people and homeland, though it would take his life. It was Israel where he belonged, alongside his men, and it is for Israel that he died, and in Israel where he is buried.

I think of Michael at this time of year, for this past Friday, June 25th, was the 4th anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s captivity. Shalit, of course, is the young soldier (he turns 24 this August) who was captured by Hamas in Gaza, after Israel’s disengagement and pullout from the Gaza strip. that event set off a chain reaction of kidnappings on the Lebanon border, causing Israel to move against Hezbollah and Hamas, therefore ending Michael’s life, along with the lives of many young people.

Full disclosure: I’m a peacenik, unabashedly so. I believe that there should be a Palestinian State, that Israel has a moral imperative to make peace with the Palestinian people. I believed in the Oslo process, what Yasser Arafat called “the peace of the brave”. I had hoped beyond hope for the Gaza disengagement to work. I want to see a smaller, more peaceful Israel, one that doesn’t have to send its children into harm’s way generation after generation. I cringe at the tone-deaf responses from an Israeli government paralyzed by its right-wing political parties and a military that is unmatched tactically and understands the immediate existential threat, but cannot see beyond the horizon to an Israel five, ten, twenty years from now and what is needed to fight and win then.

And yet, I am painfully aware of the double standard that Israel is held to, by both Jews and non-Jews. We expect and demand a Jewish state be somehow more ethical, more righteous, more perfect than any other in the world. I am aware of the latent anti-semitism that masks itself as a love of human rights or the downtrodden, that flinches at the idea of Jewish power. I am aware of a world that drinks in a sermon on ethical behavior from Turkey, a country that has perpetrated ethnic cleansing on the Armenians, and engaged in the surpression of the Kurdish people. I am aware of the pain all Israelis feel at Shalit’s captivity, for in Israel, which still maintains a national draft, he could be anyone’s son, anyone’s brother, anyone’s friend or partner.

A few weeks ago, after the Gulf of Mexico became a code-word for ecological disaster, before the World Cup and Kyrgestan exploded in violence, before McCrystal lost his job fighting the forever war in Afghanistan, Gaza came into our headlines again, with the deaths of so-called peace activists sailing a fleet of aid ships to a blockaded Gaza. We were all horrified by the scenes of violence, at the idea of young soldiers and sailors, poorly briefed and ill-equipped, rappelling into a lion’s den of violence, forced to respond with brutal violence themselves, resulting in indelible images of bloodshed and Israeli oppression. The incident with the blockade runners calls Israel’s leadership into question and heightens the need for a speedy peace. It reminds us that a military solution, by itself, will not solve Israel’s future security needs. But it also reminds me of Shalit and his parents, wondering if they will ever see their son again. It reminds me of Levin and his parents, how they will never see their son again. And it reminds me of this prayer offered by one of Israel’s greatest poets, Yehuda Amichai:

Not that of a cease-fire,
let alone the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather as in the heart after a surge of great emotion:
to speak only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill: that’s why I’m an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say mama.

A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into plowshares,
without words, without the heavy thud of the rubber stamp;
I want it gentle over us, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds--who speaks of healing?
(and the orphan’s cry is passed from one generation to the next
as in a relay race; that baton never falls).

I want it to come like wildflowers
suddenly, because the field needs it: wildpeace.