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.

Renew Our Days as of Old

"An apocryphal story is told of Napoleon Bonaparte entering a darkened synagogue and observing weeping Jews, sitting on low stools. Asking what misfortune had occurred to cause such behavior, he was informed that it was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av.

On that day, as Napoleon learned, Jews commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem and the fall of the Fortress of Betar. The day, marked with a 25-hour fast and a public reading of the book of Lamentations, signifies not only the loss of Judaism's singular holy site but the end of independent political sovereignty and the eventual expulsion, a second time, into exile.

On hearing that story, Napoleon exclaimed: "A people that cries these past 2,000 years for their land and temple will surely be rewarded." " (Yisrael Medad, from this article).

Today is the 9th of Av. For Liberal Jews (and most American Jews) it is not a day of special commemoration. For some of us, the day only makes sense if we assume ourselves to be in galut, or exile, which many of us do not, even if we live in the diaspora. For others, there is nothing to mourn; the Temple Cult was an archaic practice of animal sacrifice and we as a people have moved on to a higher, more ethical and spiritually meaningful mode of religiosity. For yet others, there is a sense we should be celebrating the return (and over 60 years) of a Jewish state in Israel.

For many Jews, however, it is still a powerful day. There is nothing like going to the kotel, the Western Wall, on the eve of the 9th of Av and seeing an endless sea of people of all ages sitting low to the ground, reciting the liturgy in small groups and literally weeping. And this is in Israel, in Jerusalem!

For what do they weep? I think that's a worthwhile question for us to ask, even if we feel ambivalence toward the day. This is a chance, some 7 weeks before Rosh Hashanah, to take stock. And there is much to lament. There are too many of us are not free: those in Darfur. Those in Iran. Those brought to this country to work in near-slavery conditions. Gilad Shalit. There too many of us are in exile, physical and spiritual, who feel a disconnect from their neighbors, their land, their country, their people, their God. Too many of us worry that Israel is going down the wrong track, that synagogues and other Jewish institutions are missing opportunities to be relevant, that Jews are increasingly voting with their feet, and are voting for something other than their tradition.

Will Eisner, in Dropsie Avenue, his 3rd novel of the "Contract with God" trilogy, views the lifespan of a neighborhood as a constant cycle of people moving in and people moving out, either by choice or happenstance, where to remain is to be exiled from opportunity but to depart is to abandon identity. The 9th of Av gives us an opportunity to look at the world around us and its brokenness--as well as our own sense of alienation, whatever it may be--and just have a moment of catharsis, a big cry-off so we can approach the New Year with, as the prayerbook says, "hope in our hearts and eternity in our thoughts." It is that nadir, that depth that allows us to rise again to move to creation, redemption and revelation again.

Lamentations ends with the words we recite at the end of the Torah service: "Renew our days as of old!" We long for an idealized past, be it through "King Arthur" fantasies or retro music stations , but we also look toward a future Redemption, a wholeness that we can only make together.