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Love & Inheritance III: Whom do we Love? - A Sermon for Yom Kippur Evening 5785

10/11/2024 09:00:07 PM

Oct11

“Why don’t you move to Israel?”

Oded asked me that question.  He was one of five students in Ben Gurion University’s Leaders Entrepreneurship Program with whom Terri and I were having dinner.  What started as an early dinner in a modern Italian restaurant, had evolved into a late-night heart-to-heart in a quiet park in Beer Sheva.

I'm used to Israelis asking blunt questions.  Still Oded was the first to ask me this particular question; the big question; the question my family had been whispering among ourselves for several months by then.  It was asked with genuine curiosity and just the hint of a plea.  Like so many young people I spent time with in Israel last May - and on our earlier trip in December - Oded had spent much of the past months in מלואים - military reserve service.  And like all of them, he put his own life on the line to protect his family, his country, and - just as importantly - what his country means for Jews all over the world.  So his question - why don't I move to Israel - was the natural one from someone who had risked so much for someone like me.  

I answered by telling him a story about my father-in-law,עליו השלום , who, as someone who was typically asleep by 7pm and wide awake at 2am, had developed a penchant for the television preachers who inhabit the airwaves of insomniacs.  Amid all those purveyors of hell-fire and brimstone, an Israeli rabbi caught his attention.  As my father-in-law told it, this rabbi had a message for all of us: “You American Jews are all coming to Israel.  How you get here is your choice.  You can come now and be greeted as heroes, or you can come later and be taken in as refugees.” “Well,” I would tell my father-in-law, who somehow believed I would find this argument persuasive, “I guess we're coming as refugees.”

I told this story to Oded, mistakenly believing the humor of it would survive the journey of 5000 miles and a generation in time.  But Oded didn’t laugh.  He answered me with the earnestness of an intelligent, idealistic young man who had just risked his life for the promise that is his country.  “You will never come here as a refugee,” he told me.  “Whenever you come, you will come as a brother.”

It was moments like this - and over the two trips Terri and I took to Israel this past year, there were lots of such moments - that made me fall in love with this tiny, beleaguered country.  Oh, I loved Israel before these trips, and before the war that was their impetus.  But it was a different kind of love.  It was a love based on pride in Israel’s history, admiration for its many accomplishments and innovations in all fields of human endeavor, and appreciation for the promise Israel held out to all of us as, yes, a refuge in troubled times.  But this year I fell in love with Israel for something far more important, far more fundamental.  I fell in love with it for its people. 

Israelis are often likened to the sabra fruit - the cactus pear that grows in the wild throughout the land.  Like the fruit, Israelis are said to be tough and prickly on the outside, yet soft and sweet on the inside.

So it was that on one of my first trips to Israel, our American-born tour guide wanted to teach us what he thought was an important Hebrew word.  The word was friar, which in Hebrew means sucker.  “Don't be a friar,” he insisted.  “Don't say ‘excuse me’ every time you bump into someone.  And don't pay the price on the tag in the market.  Only friars do that.”

On the crowded streets and markets in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem you understand his point.  Life in those places feels like a zero-sum game, where all personal gains come at someone else's expense.  There's what to some is an electricity, and for others a tension in the air in such places.  People have their guards up, determined to protect what is theirs.

This is the Israel that I knew - the Israel the tourists encounter.  It's the Israel of the tough outer skin.  For those who look closely, you can find hints of something different - a wise smile, or wink; an extra helping added to the bag after the transaction is concluded.  In subtle ways, Israelis betray their inner sweetness.  But you have to look to see it.

The Israel in which Terri and I landed in December was not that Israel.  You sensed it as you walked through the eerily empty halls of the normally bustling Ben Gurion Airport.  This country had been abandoned.  On the streets, every overpass was decorated with photos of hostages and exhortations to bring them home now.  Billboards proclaim פדיון שבויים מצווה גדולה -  the redemption of captives is a great commandment. Others say simply ביחד ננצח - together, we will win.

The nature of these public displays hints at the state of the people who posted them. Israel is a country ripped open.  That tough outer skin has been torn away and the soft, sweet, yet bleeding inside is exposed for all to see.  Israelis are determined and defiant.  They view the conflict in which they are engaged as a struggle for their very survival, and they are determined to survive.  But at the same time they are tense and feel intensely alone.  Their situation is captured in another banner you see as you drive Israel's highways or walk its neighborhoods: אין לנו ארץ אחרת - we have no other land.

Until we were there in December, I had never seen this for myself.  I had read about the Israel where people wander into their neighbor’s homes on Shabbat afternoons, where strangers instinctively look after others’ children at a playground, where the boundaries of family are stretched beyond all recognizable limits, while those of privacy are shrunk to a fig leaf.  But I had never experienced that Israel for myself: a place where no one wants the protection of that tough outer shell; where people feel no shame or vulnerability in admitting that they are in pain and they need you by their side.

This is the Israel with which I am in love.  It is the Israel where, as Oded said, I would always be welcomed as a brother.  I know that, because that is already how they have welcomed me.

People have suggested to me - even members of this community of ours - that my depictions of the conflict have been too one-sided; that I have failed to give due attention to the suffering and the loss of those in Gaza.  I must admit, I find myself speechless in trying to answer this concern.  I am not a neutral observer to the events over there.  I am a Jew - a part of a covenantal people, and a people long despised for being so.  I love the Israeli people who are defending their homeland in part because it is my refuge.  They have sacrificed so much, and they need me as a brother.

The people of Gaza are not my brothers and sisters, nor would they welcome me as such.  But I have no hatred for the many innocents among them.  In fact, as someone who loves Israel, I have an abiding concern for their happiness.  I have tried in the past - and I have tried mightily this past year - to understand their situation.  Indeed, I suspect I have made a greater effort to understand the history and the plight of the Palestinian people than most of those wearing keffiyehs or waving Palestinian flags. 

In June, I spent an entire Sunday afternoon here explaining and answering questions about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In preparation, I extensively consulted Palestinian sources so that I could present their side of the conflict as sympathetically as possible.  While I believe the full weight of justice favors the aims and the claims of Zionism, I will readily admit that the Palestinian Arab story is a compelling one.  I can even understand their decision to go to war in 1947 rather than submit to partition of a land they believed was theirs and theirs alone.

But having turned to arms to settle this dispute, I cannot abide the Palestinian determination never to lay them down.  In 1956, the famed Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan stood in Kibbutz Nahal Oz and delivered a eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg who was murdered by Palestinian gunmen while standing guard over his community.  Dayan said that his was the generation whose hands must never grow weak, “for if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”  Sixty-seven years later, Hamas terrorists entered that same kibbutz, murdered fifteen and took seven others hostage.  And now it's Oded’s generation whose fists must ever clutch the sword.

But my purpose tonight is not to relitigate the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Rather, I want to frame our thoughts about Israel through the lens of inheritance; through Rabbi Sacks’s observation that what we love we inherit and what we fail to love we lose.  

I have been extraordinarily blessed to have, through this terrible crisis, fallen more deeply in love with Israel than I ever had before.  Through that unique combination of determination, brio and brilliance that is my wife, Terri has built both personal and institutional ties with Israel that have given us a level of intimacy with that country that has been sustaining for both of us through this past year.  But what we experience there is not unique to us.  If crowded cities and a lifetime of grasping the sword have forced Israelis to grow a tough exterior, they are a people that desperately wants to share their soft and sweet side with all of us.  They will bear the pain, but as they do so, they need us by their side.  They need our love.

Too many of us are turning away.  Too many of us want a Judaism of idle talk about good deeds and repairing the world.  But Judaism's real substance comes in dealing directly and intimately with life’s messiness: with the constant struggle between the world as it is, and the way we hope it could be.

No people are living this struggle like the people of Israel.  The true nature of that struggle was laid bare for the world to see last October.  They have engaged it not only with a will to survive, but with a need to be worthy of survival - to be worthy of being a Jewish state.  All they seek from us, their brothers and sisters, is our assurance that they are indeed worthy.   If we cannot give them that, if we cannot give them the love they so desperately need, then we are the ones who will lose, because their struggle is our struggle too.

Such, then, the challenge Israel poses for all of us.  This lonely and beleaguered people of a beautiful but beleaguered land desperately wants to reach out to all of us as their brothers and sisters.  “We are your inheritance,” they say, “and we are trying, really trying, to be a noble one.  For our sake, for your own sake, won’t you love us?”
 

Fri, February 14 2025 16 Shevat 5785