Rosh HaShanah Day Two on Israel - October 4, 2024

On November 29, 1947 Zipporah Porat an American student studying at Hebrew University, wrote this to her family:

I walked in a semi-daze through the crowds of happy faces, through the deafening singing, "David, Melech Yisrael, Chai, Chai ve Kayam", past the British tanks and jeeps piled high with pyramids of flag-waving, cheering children. I dodged motor cycles, wagons, cars and trucks which were racing madly up and down King George Street … their running boards and headlights overflowing with layer upon layer of elated happy people. I pushed my way past the crying, kissing tumultuous crowds and the exultant shouts of "Mazal Tov" and came back to the quiet of my room...to try to share with you this never to be forgotten night.”

Her report from the night the United Nations agreed to partition Palestine and offer Jewish Palestinians an opportunity to create a Jewish State for the first time in 2000 years echoed the words of the haftarah we read this morning: I will build you firmly again, O Maiden Israel! Again, you shall take up your timbrels and go forth to the rhythm of the dancers.  Again, you shall plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria; Men shall plant and live to enjoy them … Come, let us go up to Zion… For thus said the Lord: Sing with joy for Jacob…! Sing aloud in praise, and say: The Lord has saved his people, the remnant of Israel.

The joy that the prophet foretold in the 6th century before the common era unfolded in rapture in 1947.

And yet the architect of this watershed event in Jewish history could not join in the celebration.  David Ben Gurion noted that evening as he watched the dancing in the streets, “I was like a mourner at a feast” for he knew what was coming – a war for existence.  In the poet Haim Gouri’s poem Yerusha, Heritage, he recalls the Akeidah, the almost slaughter of Abraham’s son, Isaac, our Torah portion this morning.  The poem concludes “Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed.  He lived for many years, saw what pleasure had to offer, until his eyesight dimmed.  But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring.  They are born with a knife in their hearts.” 

The dueling images of joy and gladness at rebirth and a heritage of pain and war are emblematic of our relationship to the people of Israel and the nation of Israel.  This past year has been particularly difficult for the Jews of Israel and we Jews who live in Diaspora.  For me, this has been a year of brokenness. Maybe you feel the same.

At this time we wait with bated breath to know what will be with Iran’s attack on Israel.  Will Israel respond and a larger war ensue?  And all Lizzie and I can think about is our beloved nephew Mati, called to his unit on the Lebanese-Syrian border with Israel. 

It has been almost a year since the holiday of Shemini Atzeret/ Simhat Torah turned joy to hell.  The most vicious and barbaric destruction of Jewish life since the holocaust occurred and the slaughter was comparable to any description of blood lust you have ever read from the Nazi era.  It was not just the number of people murdered, 1200, it was the ecstasy with which the Palestinian killers expressed, filming it and sending the pictures proudly back home.  A poem by Ran Shayit, attempted to describe:

“A breeched gate and a fence/ stuttering/Smoke/A head/And a knife/And a body lying by an axe/That cannot be/And a puddle of red trickling/Into the green grass/And remnants of a safe room,/ Like crumbs of life under/Barrages of sirens./There are no words for this/A strong smell of suffocation from the depths of a well/Like the palms of a dead man/ Holding onto the foundation of a house/And the inert body of a baby/In the playground/His mother’s long arms stretching towards him/Protecting, far away from Gaza.”

Shayit’s last line reminds us that this was an invasion by a foreign military force into sovereign Israeli land.  250 Jews, Muslims, Buddhists were captured that day, many severely wounded who received little if any medical care.  Many died in captivity.  Lizzie and I saw the destruction, heard the stories of brutal killings.   

And then a nation, already torn from months of protest against its government’s attempt to shut down its independent judiciary, the only check in Israeli democracy against full authoritarian control by majority rule, had to pull itself together to defend itself.

Perhaps the most potent symbol for this year of brokenness is the shofar.  For as the poem stated, there were no words to describe the devastation and gleeful hatred.  The first sound we hear at the shofar’s blowing is a solid blast, the tekiah, symbolic of Israel’s confidence before October 7.  The tekiah is followed by shevarim, three moaning blasts that represent wailing.  The Talmud in a turn of noble empathy compares the shevarim to the weeping of the mother of Sisera, Israel’s enemy, at the news of her son’s death. 

This year the wailing came not only from Israel but also the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died including many children and babies.  Hospitals do not have basic supplies to help heal the wounded.  Whole families, of a dozen people or more have been wiped out.  Polio and other diseases run rampant.  It is stomach churning to see the video reports of the destruction in Gaza and to hear the reports from journalists and doctors who are on the ground in Gaza.  Israel has always bragged that it has the most moral army in the world.  But the stories coming from Israeli newspapers accusing Israeli soldiers of abuse make it clear the Israeli army is no more moral than any other army.  Wasn’t the Jewish state supposed to be different?

Wasn’t the Jewish state supposed to exist to save and protect Jews?  To never abandon its own?  Pidyon Shevuyim, redeeming captives, is among the most important and pressing community mitzvot for our people. And yet this government has continuously refused to do what is necessary to save those who still languish as captives in Gaza. People have speculated why does Israel not act to get its hostage back: Netanyahu is desperate to hold on to power and when the war ends he knows his career is over; Otzma Yehudit, the fascist coalition partner, does not care about the hostages because they lived on liberal or leftist kibbutzim, not all the hostages are Jewish.  Whatever reason, 100 hostages remain and they are in imminent danger of being killed.

And now Israel is fighting on its Northern front.  We are once again in awe of Israel’s precision and intelligence at undermining their enemy.  The world owes Israel a grateful thank you for killing Hasan Nasrallah, one of the most evil terrorist leaders in the world.  Israel insists they are entering Lebanon now with a limited ground operation.  But the last time they said that they got stuck in a quagmire for 18 years.  As the great Israeli president Yitzak Navon, told my class at Hebrew University 40 years ago, “If Israel must go to war, we will and we will be victorious.  But our problem is that each time we come back we have fewer people to celebrate with”.  That is the fear, that in victory, less young Israelis are returning to celebrate.  Lizzie and I worry, does Israel have a post Hezbollah strategy that protects Israel and our Mati?  We are being told that Israel must respond to Iran’s attack.  But do they have a strategy beyond reacting?

In the Bible, the dynamic of exile and return depended solely on the people’s fidelity to the Covenant.  Israel was never considered to be above sin and thus immune from disaster.  Noah Feldman writes, in his book To Be A Jew Today “The risk of that sin looms larger today than ever in Jewish history, because never before in Jewish history have Jews achieved such strength and prosperity in a land they called their own.”

The sin of arrogance has always been the danger for our people’s settlement in the land. Before the people entered the land Moses warned them, “Beware… lest you eat and become satisfied, and have built fine houses to live in … and your heart grow haughty and you forget the LORD your God who freed you from the land of Egypt…and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.”  The result would be that they would be destroyed like all the other forgotten nations.

Hundreds of years later, the Prophet Isaiah warned the people that their wealth and arrogance would bring them down: (A)ll that is lofty—it will be brought low.”

It is easy for we modern thinking Jews to read such verses with distance.  That was long ago.  We don’t read the bible like fundamentalists who seek predictive results in the prophetic verses.  Nevertheless, why is the sin of arrogance linked to the danger of exile from the Land?  Because as Feldman points out when the sin of pride is allowed to spread it leads to a nation believing that they are always in the right and their enemies are always wrong.  This is true for all nations, including our own.

This is why it is so dangerous when students are taught a sanitized version of American history.  Without admitting a nation’s flawed history, how do we correct it?  And without acknowledging that one’s nation is not always right and our enemies not always wrong, we end up stuck in tragedies like the Vietnam war.  Feldman’s argument broadens the dynamic of teshuvah, from the individual Jew to the status of nation.  Just as an individual cannot do teshuvah without acknowledging and admitting his transgression, neither can a nation.

It is okay for us to watch Israel from here and get upset; it is our responsibility as Jews to state that Israel today and its government is not fulfilling the aspirations that Israel itself set forth in its Declaration of Independence.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

 Where is that promise of equality – when non-Orthodox Jews are treated as second class Jews or when Nationalist settlers rampage Palestinian villages without consequences?  Where is the promise of justice – when the majoritarian government attempts to erase any checks to its power?

Shai Held writes, “Sometimes we get angry at people precisely because we respect them; our anger is in fact a manifestation of our respect.”  This should be true with respect and love for the State of Israel.  The modern state of Israel is the greatest gift we Jewish people could have imagined.  From receiving and sheltering Jewish survivors from the Holocaust, and refugees from Arab nations, from the Soviet Union, from Ethiopia where their lives were intolerable, to rebuilding and developing the very land of Israel itself, to creating a first world nation for its inhabitants – Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze – within the short lifespan of 75 years, to making the world a healthier and safer world with the numerous technological and cultural inventions, Israel is a wonder.  However, to paraphrase the words of Carl Schurz, our watchword should be “Our Israel right or wrong, when right to be kept right, when wrong to be put right. 

Now admittedly, it can be uncomfortable to register anger at Israel when Israel is libeled, and attacked unfairly.  Still, it is fair to question, as so many Israelis do, what strategic benefit is there to a continuous militaristic stance towards enemy armies.  Couldn’t honest diplomacy achieve more success without putting soldier and civilian lives in danger? Shouldn’t the hostages come first?  Why are Jewish fascist parties, the disciples of Meir Kahane, allowed in the government when Israel outlawed his party years ago?  And why do the Ultra-Orthodox get to benefit from Israel’s financial success but not be required to share in its sacrifices?

What are we Jews here in South Bend to do?  The Talmud warns us that whoever is able to protest against the transgressions of the people of his community and does not do so is held responsible for the transgressions of his community. We have the capacity for agency, to build and shape worlds even if, when it comes to Israel, we must be careful in how it is done.

So let me make a suggestion.  When it comes to the state of Israel as it exists today, we have to love more, love harder and love better.  What does that mean?

First of all, if you have never visited Israel, you have to visit.  And if you have visited, go again. It is impossible to speak with any understanding or authority about the country if you are unfamiliar with it.  Our community is part of a Partnership group that links us and 13 other small American Jewish communities and Budapest with the Western Galilee, one of the most beautiful regions in Israel.  The Partnership is offering an insane deal to go visit Israel for $100 plus airfare in February.  Save up for the airfare and go.  Because the Western Galilee is also one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions in Israel you will also be inspired to see what Israel can be at its best.

We also need to increase our tzedakah to Israel, but with a caveat. 

         Send money to organizations that represent the best in Israel.  Here is a small taste of organizations we support:  the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel; Yad Sarah which provides a vital array of health and home care services for people of all ages; Leket Israel, the leading food rescue organization in Israel; Yemin Orde, a Youth village near Haifa that delivers an all-encompassing school and home environment for at risk youth; Beit HaLochem, which cares for those wounded in the line of duty and are now disabled; the New Israel Fund, which supports equality of life for all Israelis and is run by Mickey Gitzin a former Shaliach here in South Bend; The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, an interreligious organization which promotes an inclusive society for all religious, ethnic and national groups; and Sadakah Reut, that educates and empowers Jewish and Palestinian Israeli youth and university students to pursue social and political change through bi-national partnership.  We don’t buy bonds and we don’t plant trees – they plant the wrong trees anyway, that start fires in the Negev.

You can see that our list includes many tzedakahs that support inclusion and equality.  Maybe for you it will be about arts and culture or education or medical facilities but the important thing is to donate generously to organizations that build a kind, healthy and ethical Israel.

And when representatives from the Israeli government come to town like the Consul General, we can’t be afraid to challenge them and the government’s policies.   

Finally, we need to take this period of reflection seriously.  Our tradition teaches that when our people are in danger we look within and strive to be better, individually and as a people.  As the prophet Jeremiah preached in our haftarah this morning at a time of exile and sorrow:

         I can hear Ephraim, that is, Israel, lamenting: You have chastised me, and I am chastised...Receive me back, let me return, For You, O LORD, are my God.    Now that I have turned back, I am filled with remorse…         Truly, Ephraim is a dear son to Me, a child that is dandled! Whenever I have turned against him, my thoughts dwell on him still. That is why My heart yearns for him; I will receive him back in love.”

After the Shevarim, the three wailing sounds, comes the teruah, the staccato blasts that can be the sound of shattered hearts or perhaps the sound of a heartbeat, waiting anxiously to hear news of a loved one on the borders or if missiles will be landing in one’s neighborhood.  May all of Israel be blessed this year to survive the fractured notes and to arrive at the return of the solid unbroken tekiah.

May this coming year be a year of peace in the Holy Land and peace in our hearts, may the Jewish people’s heart be united to love to champion her when she is right, and to encourage her to do right when she is in the wrong.