An Arab shepherd is
searching for his goat on Mount Zion and on the opposite mountain I am
searching for my little boy. An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father both in their
temporary failure. Our voices meet above the Sultan's Pool in the valley
between us. Neither of us wants the child or the goat to get caught in the
wheels of the terrible Had Gadya* machine.
Afterward we found
them among the bushes and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.
I don’t like flying. I am, honestly, afraid of flight. The
idea of getting into an aluminum tube held aloft by physics alone sends my
heart racing. It’s been like this for a long time. The only thing that calms me
down is reciting t’fillat haderech, the
travelers’ prayer, and reciting psalms that begin ‘shir Hama’alot’—a song of
ascents. And when I am absolutely convinced I am going to become a statistic, I
plead that I have too much more work to do.
This is an irrational fear, one rooted in nothing more than
my own anxiousness. Today, I have other fears that, once upon a time, I would
have thought irrational, even inconceivable.
Today I fear for Jews around the world and at home being
attacked exclusively because they are Jews. I fear individuals and groups
attacking Jews or those believed to be Jews, with the express purpose of doing
them harm because they are Jews. I am afraid that our People is under assault
in a way we haven’t been in 70 years.
Today I fear for the survival of the Jewish state, a fear my
generation has never known. I fear for its survival against an insidious evil
that is sweeping across the Middle East. I fear inaction or worse, wrong action
from a West that has lost the ability to differentiate right from wrong, up
from down.
Today I fear that well-meaning people of faith and without
faith, who see suffering and want to accept easy morality tales, who
subconsciously continue to use Jews and the Jewish State as the blank canvas to
cast all they find repugnant in their own countries, are giving succor to
anti-Semitism. In doing so, organizations like the Presbyterian Church USA that
have so often been our natural partners in social justice are needlessly
unspooling decades of good will and good work that may never be repaired,
certainly not in this generation.
I fear that Israel, in its grief and anxiety for the future,
may be losing its moral core. I fear that in mourning children, Israel and
Israelis are lashing out with rage. That in defending itself righteously,
voices of intolerance and hate in Israel are gaining strength, and in
supporting settlement building by fringe elements, Israel is losing the ability
to speak truth to power.
Today I fear that children in this country are not safe.
Jewish children, black children, white children, are not safe. We have allowed
our fears to isolate us and violence to tear communities apart. A person is
shot blocks from the synagogue and no one says anything; even the residents of
the apartment complex are too concerned to get to work to worry about the blood
stains on the street. We look at each other with suspicion, and assume the
worst; of our teachers, police officers, of people different from us, of people
we’ve known for years.
I fear the voices that say it’s too late to save our world:
we are too violent, our political system too broken, our climate too polluted,
our world too competitive.
I am even afraid for me and my colleagues, rabbis who want
to speak out about Israel from a nuanced and thoughtful perspective, but are
convinced they will be shouted down, or ignored, or even have their job
threatened because they are perceived as having the wrong stance on the Jewish
State.
And it’s not only my fears. I speak with teens who are
afraid about what has been happening in Israel, who don’t understand why their
friends don’t see what Hamas is doing. Teens who are combating anti-Semitism in
places like Ridgefield, New Jersey and Pine Bush, New York, places with large
Jewish populations where nevertheless, kids are assaulted and verbally abused
and swastikas are painted on walls and school administrators respond too often
with a shrug.
Friends, there is a generation growing up with fear, who are
increasingly convinced of the bleakness of the future in a way we haven’t seen
in some time. They are afraid, and that fear is partly our doing. We have
become paralyzed ourselves. We don’t know how to act, we aren’t sure of the
right steps to take. We don’t want to do the wrong thing for fear we will fail.
And we are told again and again that there is no hope—there are no partners for
peace, that Europe, to quote Sylvan Schwartzman, is “a bloody trap.” That
people are the way they are, that injustice is a natural part of the world,
that the only thing people respond to is strength, and by strength we mean
force. We sacrifice our hope and moral compass to defeat that which is hopeless
and morally bankrupt. We fight fire with fire.
Tomorrow morning, you and I will read a story about a goat
and a child; we will read a story about sacrifice in the hills of Jerusalem. We
will read a story we call the Akedah—the binding, but perhaps should be called
the Nisa—the Test, when Abraham takes his son Isaac (though some say Ishmael),
his only, his beloved, his first born, to offer on the mountains of Moriah, the
mountain later called Zion. It is a test I fear we are still taking in
Jerusalem, one still involving children, sacrifice, and our temporary failures.
It would be so easy for us to give up. To give up on the
well-meaning critics of Israel: the Presbyterians and the college students and
the Europeans. It would be easy to give up on the Palestinians themselves,
their hearts clearly filled with hate and rage and fear. It would be easy to
give up on Israel, even; to divorce our love for the Jewish people from the
Jewish homeland. Perhaps it’s even better to tune out the entire Middle East,
to change the channel whenever news about Syria or Iraq comes on.
It would be easy for us to give up hope that things may ever
change, to harden our hearts, to assume the worst, to let our anger and fear
and angst rule us when we talk about Israel. That may be the hardest part of
the test we face.
Friends, just as Isaac was bound, so are we bound. Just as
Abraham was tested, so are we now tested, and while the answers elude us, we
must keep at it with our hearts open, or we will surely fail.
Now is not the time to give up hope in a Jewish state. Now
is not the time to give up hope in the Israeli citizen craving peace—perhaps
not Shalom, wholeness, but at least sheket—quiet. Now is not the time to
give up hope on the Palestinian who nurses his hurts and wounds but is still
has a place in those hills. Now is not the time to give up hope on our
neighbors and the non-Jews in our lives and assume each would wear a red
armband were this the 1940s.
When I speak of hope, I don’t speak of blind faith, or naiveté.
I don’t pretend that Gaza will suddenly turn into Norway, that Hamas will magically
become Canadians. Israel is in a tough neighborhood. Nor will I pretend and
wish away the issues internal in Israel; while the majority of Israelis want
the Jewish state to be also a democratic state, we have members of the
government who are uninterested in nuance. While most Israelis were horrified
by the murder of Muhammad Abu Kheder, too many members of the government or
political parties within government acted sanguine. And this is not to say
anything of the hostility from the settlers in Hebron toward native Arabs. While
most Israelis want a two-state solution, many of them are wrestling with the
thought that it may be a one-state solution, with another failed state or
no-state on their border. All of this in a larger picture of ISIS, the Syrian
civil war, Iran, and an intensity of anti-Semitism not seen in the postwar
period. When I say hope, I recognize that it’s awfully hard to be hopeful.
Nevertheless, we must have hope. The same hope that Abraham
carried in his heart as he brought Isaac, his son, to be sacrificed on a
mountain in the desert. We read tomorrow as Abraham says to Isaac, “God will
see to the sheep for the sacrifice.”
We must have hope, and we must act on that hope. Hope, not
force is the remedy to fear. Hope, not rage, will give us the strength to
respond. Not grief, not anger, not even certainty, but hope.
Hope gives us the strength to respond to our non-Jewish
friends to show them that Israel is neither an apartheid state nor should be
the source of their angst. Hope gives us the will to stand up to the
anti-Semite with calm and grace. Hope gives us the power to reach out to the
stranger and build community, to plant roots together and secure a future
together. Hope makes the sacrifice worthwhile.
We must have hope and act on that hope—in the streets, in
our lives, all the time—if we are to see justice done in this world, to see
bigotry finally banished not only from public discourse but private thought, to
see the world we imagined for our children. We must have hope to see a new
religion born on the hill, of freedom and righteousness and equality for all.
For if we don’t, if we give in to fear, then the sacrifice will be our children
after all, and we will set their future ablaze.
We must remember that Israel’s anthem is “Hatikvah”, the Hope,
a hope that has sustained us for millennia. And in singing about that hope, we
focus on the wrong words. We emphasize lihiyot
am chofshi b’artzeinu, eretz tzion yeriushalayim: to be a free people in
our land, the land of Tzion, Jerusalem. That is what we sing the loudest, what
we sing twice. But the most important
line is before that, the one responding to the Prophet Ezekiel: Od lo avda tikvateinu: we haven’t given
up our hope. We mustn’t give up our hope. We may not give up our hope, for to
give it up means to give up on Israel, on our Jewishness, on the world, on each
other.
I have read that Israeli soldiers, on their way into Gaza,
sang the Hasidic song Kol Ha’Olam Kulo:
all the world is a narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid. We
must not be afraid. More than that, we must have hope, hope to see us through
the fear, hope to see us through our temporary failure, hope so that our voices
return to us, laughing and crying. Od lo
avda tikvateinu, we haven’t lost our hope. May it always give us strength,
strength to overcome fear. Amen.
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