Texts

High Holidays, 5763

September, 2002
Jim Levinson

Israel & Hatikvah; Israel & Hope

When I accepted this position in Brattleboro, my Uncle Earl, Rabbi Earl Grollman whom many of you heard speak here in August, gave me two pieces of advice. “Jimmy, he told me, “if you want to avoid world wars in your congregation don’t give sermons about Israel and don’t give sermons about abortion. Anything you say on either subject will get you into trouble.

Uncle Earl may well be right. At the same time, I can’t imagine that you want as your Shaliach Tzibur someone who doesn’t take occasional risks.

So later this year I will have some thoughts to share with you on abortion – the gist of which is that, whatever our position on abortion, NOONE likes the idea of having one – indeed even for the most ardent pro-choice individuals, an abortion can be a terribly traumatic experience of loss. What I will share with you on that occasion, and indeed share with you this evening, is that Judaism which is so remarkable in its rituals of bereavement, has not had such rituals for miscarriage or for abortion, although, it’s worth noting, there is one included in the most recent edition of the Reform Manual for Rabbis. What I want to say to you is that should any of you desire such a ceremony, I will be there with you.

Now on to difficult subject number two. I make no secret about my feelings concerning the land of Israel. My ancestors were among the halutzim – the pioneers – in pre-independence Palestine, and were active in getting illegal refugees from Europe off their ships and into the Yoshuv. My great grandfather, while still living in Poland in the late 19th century, wrote the first Zionist song in Hebrew. I was the first American civilian to cross the Sinai – all the way to the Suez Canal – after the ’67 war. Louise and I nearly settled on an Israeli kibbutz.

But, as I’ve said to many of you, I also have had many Palestinian and Lebanese and Jordanian and Saudi Arabian students and professional colleagues in the food and nutrition work that I do, and have had occasions to speak late into the night with these friends about problems in the Middle East, as I have with my many cousins in Eretz Yisrael. I have heard lots of stories, most of them terribly sad.

I will resist the temptation this evening to dwell on the specifics of today’s political stalemate. Don’t get me started on frustrations with Yasser Arafat, indeed with the absence of any semblance of transparent Palestinian democracy, or about the step-child status accorded to Palestinians by their Arab neighbors – all sentiments, interestingly, with which most of my Palestinian and Egyptian colleagues agree. Ironically, the very intransigence of Arafat seems to have had the effect of bolstering the popularity of Ariel Sharon, a leader who has never been a favorite of mine.

Rather, what I would like to do this evening is to step back, seek to get a little perspective, and try to visualize a lasting peace between our brothers and sisters in Eretz Yisrael and their neighbors. In so doing, I would like to try and imagine what mutual understandings might have been necessary to achieve that lasting peace. Here are some that have come to me in the course of those long nights of conversation in Ramat Gan and Haifa and in Cairo and Minia.

The first relates to one of the quintessential stories of our Hebrew scriptures, namely the story of David and Goliath. We love this story and we throughly identify with it as a people. Throughout our history, whether with the Maccabees, or Bar Kochba, with the Warsaw ghetto resisters or the Jewish partisans, with the Hagannah or with the Irgun we identified with little David facing the Philistine giant.

And we never identified more with that young boy and his sling shot than during the past 54 years as tiny Israel sought to survive while surrounded by Arab nations vastly outnumbering it, Arab nations at least at times fully committed to Israel's extinction. In the words of one Israeli writer, it has been the equivalent of a 54 year Salmon Rushdie experience - a 54 year collective death sentence.

So it was more than unsettling for us, more than unnerving for us to discover that this mantel of our beloved David, the persecuted underdog, was simultaneously being appropriated by our most immediate adversaries, the Palestinians. And from the perspective of the Palestinians that mantle was authentically worn in their struggles with Israel where confrontations often took the form of tanks against rocks.

This history of Israel and the Palestinians is, by any measure, a unique and complicated one. But an important clue in understanding this history, these generations of enmity, may be this fact that both Israelis and Palestinians have perceived of themselves as little David facing the giant.

Similarly, both Arabs and Israelis have considered themselves victims of European persecution and came to perceive of the other as one more incarnation of that persecution. The Arabs were for hundreds of years victims of Christian European colonialism and imperialism. They were victims of oppression. They were victims of exploitation. It is useful to watch the lengthy film "Lawrence of Arabia" not simply as a sweeping dramatic epic, not simply as the story of a dashing romantic hero portrayed by Peter O'Toole and seemingly propelled by that haunting background music we all walk away humming. It is also useful to watch this film as the story of Lawrence's efforts to remedy the horrific treatment of Arabs by their European masters.

If we identify even slightly with the Arabs' history of persecution by Europeans, it should not be surprising to imagine how they viewed the arrival of Jewish settlers beginning in the early decades of this century but peaking, of course, during and immediately after World War II. It should not be surprising that we were viewed not as refugees, not as survivors, but rather as one more incarnation of white, colonizing, sophisticated, technically advanced, and inevitably humiliating European oppression.

At the same time, no group ever was more a victim of European oppression than the Jews: discrimination, pograms and eventually mass murder. Finally, in the words of Michael Lerner, we jumped out of the burning buildings of Europe and unintentionally landed on the backs of Palestinians. But how could we begin to feel their pain when we were carrying the accumulated suffering of 2000 years? How could they complain about losing houses when we saw our families murdered? How could they raise moral questions about us when as a people we had just crawled out of the gas chambers and crematoria?

And how did we view the Arabs mobilizing their armies to drive us into the sea? We did not see them as an oppressed people seeking to defend their homeland but rather as incarnations of our own past oppression: Philistines, Cossacks and Nazis. They may have looked different wearing mustaches and wrapped in Kaffiyehs, but to many Israelis they were after the same thing - cutting Jewish throats. Yasser Arafat was simply a less well armed Adolf Hitler.

And this may provide a second crucial insight into our history: two battered children of the same cruel past; and the understandable but tragic inclination to see the other not as another wounded and vulnerable victim but as the old enemy incarnate.

It has struck me that the greatest victims of the violence in the Middle East may well be the mothers of young Israelis and young Palestinians. There may be no curse worse than the pervasive, the constant fear of a mother that her son or daughter will be the victim of a sniper, a land mine, or a tank. We all know what this means if we are mothers or have one - this even in peaceful environs. How much worse for an Israeli mother. And it is the same when the mother is Palestinian, no matter what the verbiage of the despicable suicide bombers.

One of the most insulting and ill informed condemnations of people different from ourselves - and I have heard it often though gratefully never from a member of this congregation - is that other peoples value life less. I have heard it describing Vietnamese. I have heard it describing Africans. And I have heard it describing Palestinians - which also means Palestinian mothers. Having worked now in over 40 low income countries around the world, having seen the nearly unimaginable lengths to which mothers will go to feed and protect their children, having witnessed the deaths of countless children and the broken hearts of their mothers, I have seen something of the valuing of life. So has my son Noah who has had many such people die in his arms in Calcutta, a story we heard about on Rosh Hashanah.

We need only be human to weep with them - to extend our hands and our hearts to Palestinian and Israeli mothers and also to share in their ecstasy with each new possibility for peace. This understanding of such a basic commonality may itself be a third clue to understanding the history unfolding before us.

And now a difficult and more painful understanding: In her classic volume on the history of fundamentalism entitled, The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong makes the point again and again that religious fundamentalists, whether they be Muslim or Jewish have certain attributes in common: a belief that they are fighting for the survival of a faith in a world that has become, in their eyes indifferent or hostile to religion, a belief among these fundamentalists that the enemy is not simply or even primarily the infidels of other faiths, but rather the secular modernist mainstream of their own religions. Also common both to Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists is a willingness to be very selective in their retrieval of doctrines and practices of their religious pasts, indeed a readiness to reshape the myths and symbols of their religions to serve their narrow and unfortunate purposes. In these ways, Armstrong argues, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists may well have more in common with one another than with the mainstream traditions of their own religions, and a recognition of this difficult truth may also be a key to the peace that eventually will prevail.

The bottom line for Israelis and for Palestinians, for Jews and for Muslims is this. We must not allow ourselves to be defined by our extremist elements; and we must not define others by their extremists. When 500 Palestinian intellectuals, professionals and human rights activists recently signed a newspaper advertisement rightly and unequivocally denouncing the suicide bombers and terrorist attacks, they were drawing a line in the sand. They were refusing to be defined by those extremists, in the same way that we refuse to be defined by Baruch Goldstein, in the same way that we refuse to be defined by Menachem Livni, Yehuda Etzion, and Yeshua ben Shoshan. Livni, Etzion and ben Shoshan, believing that the Dome of the Rock, built on the site of the Temple in Jerusalem, was “the abode of evil forces on the Other Side,” stole large quantities of explosives from Israeli military camps in the Golan Heights in 1977 with the intent of blowing up the Dome – an act which our own State Dept later noted, would not only have mobilized the entire Muslim world against Israel but which could well have triggered World War III. We will not be defined by our extremists, and we will not define others by theirs.

Some of us in America, particularly those of us who are liberally inclined, occasionally fall into the well meaning trap of assuming that the problems of Israelis and Palestinians - or the problems of Indians and Pakistanis, or the problems among Bosnians, Croats and Serbs are simple matters of misunderstandings which could be resolved just by bringing people together for group therapy in pleasant surroundings or, perhaps for a cup of coffee together.

As writers such as Amos Oz and his Palestinian counterparts have made clear over the years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been anything but a simple misunderstanding. It has been nothing less than the profound tragedy of two peoples loving the same homeland. It has been the tragic clash between right and right. And, perhaps, this realization is clue number four in our efforts of understand this history of our time, and from it to seek some basis for hope.

Israelis and others have put forward many proposals over the years for a negotiated peace, some in the early years of Israel's existence, some more recently. A cruel irony is that what the Palestinians are likely to receive from any negotiated settlement today is substantially less than what they would have received in 1948, the time of the original U.N.-voted partition; less now than they would have received in 1948 - - 54 years earlier, five wars earlier, over 100,000 killed or maimed Arabs and Israelis earlier.

So where is Hatikva? Where is the hope? Does it lie with Jews who, demonstrating for Israel in Washington some months ago, listened to the U.S. Defense Department’s pro-Israel speaker Wolfowitz and then booed when Wolfowitz remarked that we also had to remember the pain of the Palestinians? Is that the basis of Hatikva? Are those the kind of Jews we would choose to be? Or does Hatikva lie with Yitzhak Frankenthal, the Israeli who lost his son to Hamas terrorists in 1994 and who leads a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost children to political violence. When asked, Frankenthal said that if Israeli soldiers had his son’s killers in their sights but knew that innocent Palestinians would die as well, Frankenthal said he would demand that they hold their fire. We may not this evening be able to untangle the complex web of Middle Eastern politics. But we can ask ourselves where Hatikva lies – we can ask ourselves which of those sets of Jews we would choose to be.

And, of course, the Palestinians and their supporters must ask themselves the same kinds of questions. Their own voices of reason must be supported by their press, and their clergy, and their schools, and, in the inevitable struggle within the Palestinian community, those voices of reason must prevail.

My hope – I believe our hope - is that we, and the Palestinians, will some day reach that point where we can remember our malignant past without being its slaves. Our hope is that we, and the Palestinians, will some day reach the point where we don't have to act out on others the pain that was acted out on us. Our hope is that we will some day reach the point where the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael finally can be reconciled. And as that day approaches, the hope is that we, the supportive community of diaspora Jews, will be as supportive of Israel in its quest for peace as we have been supportive of it in times of grave insecurity.

We are, dear friends, a people of hope, it is embedded in the Torah, it is embedded in the Talmud, it is embedded in the concept of Mashiach, it is embedded in the very idea, in the chutzpah of Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. And particularly in these rapidly changing times, we will not give up that hope. Let us rise for the singing of Hatikvah, the hope.

Amen