2004 Kol Nidre Sermon
Jews in the World Today: The Curse of Fundamentalism
During the past year we have spoken together on several occasions
about Jews in the world – and specifically about the more
precarious situation in which we, as Jews, have found ourselves
in recent years. The topic is a vitally important one – so
important that it may merit taking some time, during this holiest
of seasons, and amidst our careful examination of our own lives,
to consider these increasing dangers facing our people around the
world. Let me express my thanks to Lou, Margie,
Bob, and Bill whose bounteous flow of e-mail
attachments has helped keep me up to date, and also to my cousin
Noa in Israel who made it possible for me to experience the
Israel-related pieces of this again firsthand this past spring,
and to rediscover all that I love about that country. Of course
I hold none of these persons responsible for my words this evening.
Let me say at the outset that no combination of words
spoken by anyone on this subject would satisfy all Jews – even
all Jews in this congregation – and that, rather than being
a liability, is part of the greatness of Judaism. The very name Israel means “wrestling
with God.” All I can assure you is that these words are the
outgrowth of lots of discernment and lots of struggle on my part
- - and I offer them with all the sincerity and humility of which
I am capable.
Not surprisingly, the problems we Jews face in the world today,
as has been the case over the centuries, relate in good part to
religious zealotry and fanaticism. We experienced this most painfully
during the Crusades, during the Spanish inquisition, during the
pogroms in Eastern Europe, and through a perverted nationalist-racist
aberration of religious zeal, during the Holocaust.
And here we are again. Today, however, we discover an interesting
twist in the scenario. We find ourselves besieged not only by Muslim
and Christian fundamentalists, but also by Jewish fundamentalists.
I’d like to take a few minutes this evening to speak about
all three, to talk about the ways in which they make us vulnerable,
to reflect on what they have in common, to suggest that all three
groups are minorities tyrannizing the majority of their co-religionists,
and to indicate some things we might do about these terribly serious
problems.
Let’s begin with Muslim extremists, the groups most familiar
to us, the groups about which we hear daily in our newspapers and
on our TV screens. To make the Muslim issue clearer, however, let’s
try at the outset to separate out the occupation issue,
whether that occupation be in Iraq or in the West Bank or Gaza.
No proud people, Jews included, are willing to sit back and be
occupied. When I read about our ancestors who took up arms and
engaged in guerilla warfare against the Greek Syrian occupiers
of Eretz Yisrael, and later against the Roman occupiers, and still
later against the British occupiers, or when I read about American
farmers who took up arms and engaged in guerilla warfare against
the British occupation of this country in the 18 th century, I
begin to have some understanding of the resistance to such occupation
today.
Yet even when we subtract the occupation, what we have left, sadly,
is plenty of Islamic anti-Semitism in the world. As you know, I
am most careful about the use of the term anti-Semitism. I am upset
by the sometimes reckless use of the term by Jews in this country – as
reckless as the sometimes arbitrary use of the term “racism” by
African Americans. I am particularly upset when legitimate criticism
of Israel (of course much of it is not legitimate) – but
I mean legitimate criticism of Israel is branded as anti-Semitism.
But no, friends, here I am talking about an anti-Semitism
propagated by very vocal minorities in the Islamic countries in
which I work, an anti-Semitism which far too often does not distinguish
between Jews and the State of Israel, an anti-Semitism which is
related, but not wholly related to Israeli occupation, an anti-Semitism
which is stunningly uneducated, an anti-Semitism which runs counter
to the very teachings of the Koran, and an anti-Semitism which,
far too often, is being propagated by uninformed and irresponsible
Muslim clerics. When I see the early 20 th century anti-Semitic
forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, being serialized
on television or see TV programs making reference to the medieval
blood libel against the Jews, or hear about the anti-Semitic acts
carried out by young Muslims in France, I see a situation dangerously
out of control. Even UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, not normally
a supporter of Jewish causes, has acknowledged “the growing
and dangerous scourge of anti-Semitism in the world.”
Let’s move to Christian fundamentalism. Some of us are upset
and worried about an American president, much influenced by the
Christian right, who believes he was chosen for his position by
God, who believes that God wanted him to attack Iraq, who has been
appointing judges with extreme Christian right wing views, and
who has been chipping away at the rights of women. We’re
also worried about a federal government which has been disbursing
huge sums of money to “abstinence-based” sex education
programs, to church-run marriage initiatives, to social services
based on religion and to other “faith-based initiatives,” while
withholding government funds from international family planning
efforts not consistent with Christian belief. As my mother was
fond of saying, “It’s not good for the Jews.”
There is enough right there to cause us alarm. But there’s
more.
Christian fundamentalist doctrine being propagated in this country – and
here I quote directly from their sources – distinguishes
between “the natural sons of Abraham” who did not accept
the Christian gospels and “the spiritual sons of Abraham” who
did. The unbelieving part of Israel, we are told, was cut off,
we are told, their Temple was destroyed, they were dispersed from
the land, and they were rejected by God. The “they” being
talked about is you and I.
But hold on, it’s not over.
In what are referred to as “the latter days,” the
unbelieving Jews will be “regathered.” At that time,
the Jews shall cast away their old infidelity, they shall abhor
themselves for their past unbelief and obstinacy, they shall, at
last, accept Jesus as Messiah, and the second coming of that Messiah
will take place – but only – let’s not
miss this – but only if the Jews are in possession of all
the lands given to them by God.
When the Christian Coalition of America met in the Washington
Convention Center, a conference which began with a video taped
benediction from the Oval office, members of that Christian Coalition
were waving Israeli flags, they were blowing shofars, and they
were carrying signs saying, “Just say no.”
“Just say no?” Say no to what? To drugs? To pre-marital
sex? Not at all. “Just say no,” read the signs, “to
a Palestinian state.”
Let us not delude ourselves into thinking that just because some people voice support for Israel, that they are being overly influenced by the less
than 3 percent of American voters who are Jewish. Some are being influenced by Christian conservatives who, according
to Karl Rove, head of the Bush re-election campaign, represent
18% of the American electorate. When, a few years ago, at the urging
of Colin Powell, the president asked Israel to withdraw its tanks
from the West Bank, the president received more than 100,000 angry
e-mails from Christian conservatives. These are the same folks,
needless to say, who have been so supportive of Mel Gibson’s
shameful film.
Interestingly, at the Christian Coalition Convention I’ve
been describing, Reverend Barry Lynn, one of the Coalition leaders,
began his speech by saying, “The bad news is that the Christian
Coalition is collapsing. The good news is that the people who ran
it are all in the government.”
How do we, as Jews, respond to these folks? Ariel Sharon greeted
them in Jerusalem, and the Christian right treated Sharon like
a rock star. Rabbi Jerome Epstein, a spokesperson for Conservative
Judaism says, “I’m going to take their support because
Israel needs it.”
Friends, this is just plain wrong. These Christian fundamentalists,
a minority within Christianity, a minority which would be rejected
by most of our neighboring Christian faith communities, but a minority
which is very vocal, have none of our primary interests
at heart, least of all our hope for a peaceful and secure Israel.
We need to be united in rejecting their overtures, and in rejecting
every bit of their “second coming” scenario for Israel.
Finally, friends, to our own fundamentalists.
Jewish fundamentalism is hardly a new phenomenon. As Rachel Prabhakar
reminds us, the defenders of Masada were Jewish fundamentalists.
The Macabees were Jewish fundamentalists. The part of the Chanukah
story we don’t tell our children, is that after
the expulsion of the Greek Syrians from Jerusalem, the Macabees
went around forcibly circumcising Jewish men who had assimilated.
Some believe that it has been these very fundamentalists who have
kept Judaism intact during trying times. Today’s Jewish settlers
in the West Bank and Gaza, in some fashion, model themselves on
these earlier heroes. But, in contrast to those earlier defenders
of Judaism, these settlers, many of us believe, constitute a serious
danger to the state of Israel and to Judaism.
In discussing the settlers this evening, I’d like to focus not on
the majority of settlers who are there to take advantage of the
real estate bargains and the substantial government subsidies,
but specifically on the 50,000 or so of them – 1% of the
Israeli Jewish population - who are both ultra-nationalist and
ultra-orthodox, people who for some Jews assume the aura of the
holy and the mantle of the heroic as they seek to protect or reclaim
all of the land given to Abraham and his descendents in the Book
of Genesis. Who are these people? To begin with, lots of them are
from New York, and they are financed, in part, by Orthodox Jews
in this country. Moshe Saperstein grew up in the Lower East Side.
Lenny Goldberg is originally from Queens. Mike Guzofsky is from
Brooklyn. As kids, some of them were beaten up by – the word
they use is shavartses. Others grew up in surrounding
Arab countries and were tormented by Arab kids. The notorious “hilltop
youth,” teenagers and young men who build makeshift settlements
on mountaintops in the West Bank, are mostly high school dropouts.
On the walls of some settler houses are photographs of their own
contemporary heroes: Meir Kahane, the zealot rabbi from Brooklyn
who sought the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, and Baruch Goldstein
who, in 1994, killed 20 Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
Ironically, these settlers who pride themselves as being the fiercest
defenders of Judaism, have more in common with Muslim and Christian
fundamentalists than with the Jewish majorities in Israel and in
the rest of the world. And they may, in their way, pose as great
a threat to Israel and to Judaism.
Like the Islamic militants, the extremist settler movements are
willing to sacrifice their followers, even their children, even
their prime minister – and not only Rabin, for absolutist
visions. A report under review in the Knesset lists as many as
200 settlers who have expressed a willingness to assassinate Sharon;
and Rabbi Avigodor Neventzal of Jerusalem has announced that anyone
who gives up a part of Israel, even a single settlement, to a non-Jew
can be a legitimate target of religiously sanctioned murder.
Like the Islamic militants, the settlers’ vision of the
ideal state is one run as a theocracy, a government run by clerics
according to religious law. Like Al Qaeda, these settlers would
welcome a global war between Muslims and Jews, and some of the
settlers pray actively for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock
at the site of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, an act which, most
certainly would set off such a war. And like the Muslim and Christian
fundamentalists, the settlers are motivated by unbridled religious
zeal and a firm belief that they alone are following the
commands of God.
Additionally, like these other fundamentalists, the extremist
Jewish settlers have no tolerance for persons of other faiths. “The
Palestinians are like dogs,” one of them states without embarrassment. “God
has placed them in our way simply to test our resolve.” The
settlers also have nothing but scorn for the majority of secular
Jews, whom they refer to as Hellenizers, a reference to
the Jews who took on Greek ways during that occupation of Israel
in the second century BCE and were accordingly despised by the
Macabees.
But how can such a small group of settlers have such a major effect
on the Middle East and hence on Judaism? The fact is that for many
in the Israeli Government, the settlements, far from serving a
security purpose for Israel, represent a serious security burden,
and their very presence exacerbates the tension between Israelis
and Palestinians. The Israeli army has to operate deep into the
occupied territories to defend these settlers, and while most Israeli
soldiers, like most American soldiers seek to act with the responsibility
we expect from armed forces, there is always a critical mass who
do not. In the words of one Israeli analyst, “Occupation
has never been possible without dehumanization.”
Let me be quick to add my conviction that Yasser Arafat, one of
the most unsavory and corrupt leaders alive today, thrives and
depends on just that dehumanization. By doing the minimum possible
to prevent suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks on Israel,
he assures Israeli responses, assures that Palestinians will continue
to suffer, and reaps political advantage from all of this.
Yet, because of the settlements, Israel seems compelled to make
Arafat’s vision a self fulfilling prophecy. If the security
fence being erected in the West Bank simply tracked the so called “Green
Line” that divides the West Bank from Israel proper rather
than veering into the West Bank itself to protect the settlements,
it would be just as effective in keeping suicide bombers out of
Israel, but would not have necessitated a case in the Israeli Supreme
Court and would have produced very different votes in the Hague
and in the U.N. General Assembly. When the route of the fence does
veer into the West Bank, it is seen by the rest of the world as
a de facto annexation of that land into Israel – this
aside from the hardship it imposes on Palestinians.
Meanwhile, as we know, political supporters of the settlements
within the Israeli Government, and large numbers of right wing
Israelis have strongly opposed the government’s plans to
withdraw even from Gaza alone, because that would mean the abandonment
of 21 of these settlements. And their opposition is nothing compared
to what we would see if Israel began withdrawing from the West
Bank. When the government finally did succeed in pushing through
the Gaza withdrawal plan, it was only after agreeing with the demand
that the settlers could destroy the homes and other buildings they
were leaving behind, so that Arabs couldn’t live in them.
Friends, this vocal minority of ultra-orthodox, ultra-nationalist
settlers does not speak for me. And it does not speak for the majority
of Jews in the world. We need to say no to this group
both because we are committed to a lasting peace in Israel
and because what they are doing is the antithesis of the most basic
of Jewish values. Listen to this – and if you remember only
one story from these remarks this evening, remember this one:
An American Jewish journalist from the New Yorker magazine interviewing
a settler whose colleagues had been responsible for burning the
olive trees of neighboring Palestinian farmers, asked the settler
to imagine himself in the place of one of those Palestinians.
And what did the settler respond, or rather yell back at the question. “Stop
being Jewish!” he screamed at the interviewer. “Stop
being Jewish!” And the settler continued, “Only a Jew
would say, ‘Imagine yourself as a Palestinian!’”
Think about this, friends. What the settler is expressing is a
willingness to sacrifice even Jewish values, even the essence of
Judaism itself, for their absolutist vision.
Let us, the Jewish majority, offer a resounding “No” to
that demand and to the tyrannizing minority of our people who voice
it. Let us never never stop being Jewish. Let us never never abandon
the responsibility we have carried so proudly through the ages,
the commandment of tikun olam – of healing the world,
rather than destroying it.
This, friends, is what we are about. Our Yom Kippur Haftorah makes
this so abundantly clear: When we care for the needy, when we erase
evil from our midst, we will be called repairers of the breach.
When Hillel was asked to provide the essence of the Torah while
standing on one foot, he said…[stand on one foot and
congregant responded: "What is hateful to you, do
not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, all of it;
the rest is commentary."]
And when Leo Baeck, the great rabbi of Berlin, emerged from the
concentration camp and was accosted by an angry Jew saying, “Now can
we let go of our chosenness, Baeck replied that now, more than
ever, we must cling to the responsibility we were chosen to uphold:
tikun olam, healing the world.
This, friends, is not the small print, this is the headline in
neon lights; this is the very essence of our people, our primary
purpose in the world.
So let us, as the Jewish majority, recognize and reject the voice
of fundamentalist religion wherever we hear it.
This means offering a resounding “No” to the overtures
of the Christian fundamentalists so eager “to save us.” Let
us rather help send the Christian conservatives back to their Christian
Coalition and get them out of our federal government.
This means doing everything we can to strengthen the voices of
moderation and introspection and reform in the Muslim majority,
so that they will insist upon honesty and responsibility
by Muslim clergy, and so they will reject their own extremists
as we seek to reject ours.
And however vocal the fundamentalists may be, we need to remember
that each of these groups is a minority. We must never allow ourselves
to be defined by our extremist elements, and we must never define
other peoples by their extremists.
In sum, friends, let us resolve during these holiest of days to
hold fast to our values, at the same time that we work for a secure
and lasting peace for Israel, for all Jews, for the Palestinians,
and for the world.
Amen
|
