Rabbi Micah Citrin

October 19, 2007

Parashat Lecha L’cha-A Promised Land

            Do you remember where you were when President Kennedy was assassinated?  Do we remember where you were on 9/11?  When I was growing up I had a hard time understanding what these kinds of questions meant.  The question, where were you on November 22, 1963, Kennedy’s assassination, would come up from time to time in conversations between my parents and their friends.  But the way the adults talked about it, it seemed as if that moment was frozen in time; that when they talked about it with one another, they were immediately transported to that place.  The footage that I had seen of people hearing the news on that day, weeping and mourning, confirmed that sense of time standing still.  Everyone on those newsreels seemed to understand the monumental nature of that moment.  They appeared so present in the rawness of the episode, but in mind my, it seemed that everyone also sensed the historical significance of the event.  It was as if they had 20/20 hindsight as the tragedy unfolded.  I always wondered if I would ever find myself asking the same question of myself and of my friends, “where were you when…?”  Would it feel as big to me as those who went through President Kennedy’s assassination?  Would I be as attuned to the moment?

            My answer to that questions came 12 years ago this coming Monday, according the Hebrew calendar.  I was on my junior year abroad at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem .  It was Saturday night and I was returning to Jerusalem by bus from Haifa where I had spent Shabbat with close family friends.  The normal two hour bus ride became what seemed an interminable three hours as the usual post-Shabbat traffic was worse due to a massive peace demonstration in Tel Aviv.  Hundreds of thousands had turned out to rally around Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s vision of peace with Israel ’s Arab neighbors.  The silent majority that supported this path turned out en mass to drown out the loud but relatively small number of radicals who had been monopolizing the public dialogue, casting Rabin as a cross between Yasir Arafat and Hitler.

            When I finally returned to the dorms on Mt.Scopus, friends approached me, “Did you hear?  Rabin was shot.”  It was unbelievable.  As a supporter of the Oslo Peace Process, my heart sank.  My first thought was that an Arab shot Rabin and with it the peace process.  In some ways that would have made sense, or at least fit into a familiar rubric of Arab/Israeli violence.  Only later did I realize the complexity, confusion, and unimaginable damage that Rabin’s Jewish assassin would cause. 

            Now I had the answer to the question, “Where were you when…?”  But I did not feel like I had the presence or clarity or grasp of the moment that I thought I was supposed to have, like those who mourned JFK on documentary footage.  Instead it felt surreal, numbing, and overwhelming.  It was like walking in a foggy nightmare that one cannot escape.  I now understand that presence of mind is an illusion in the face of shocking tragedy.  Such a moment is elusive at best.  I did not know what to do.  I ended up joining thousands who made their way to the Knesset, Israel ’s seat of government.  I stood in line for hours with a throng of people clamoring to enter the expansive Knessest court yard and pay my respect to Prime Minister Rabin lying in state.  The scene around the grounds of the Knesset was a mass of people crying and holding each other; young people huddled around make shift memorials, the fragile glow of candle light, broken voices singing, prayers scrawled murals of paper. 

            I know where I was when Rabin was murdered, but it has taken 12 years for the magnitude of the event to seep in to my being.  It has taken 12 years of suicide bombings, stalled negotiations, and frozen progress to feel the weight of his absence.  We miss his message, like the one he offered with honesty and courage on the White House lawn after signing the Oslo Peace Agreement in 1993.  He said, “The signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, here today, is not so easy neither for myself as a soldier in Israel’s wars, nor for the people of Israel, not to the Jewish people in the Diaspora who are watching us now with great hope and mixed apprehension…We have come to try and put an end to the hostilities so that our children, our children’s children, will no longer experience the painful cost of war, violence, and terror…Let me say to you, the Palestinians:  We are destined to live together on the same soil, in the same land…We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice.  Enough blood and tears.  Enough.  We have not desire for revenge.  We harbor no hatred towards you.  We, like you are people, people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men.”       

            So we ask ourselves the question over and over again, and our children will ask us this question, “Where were you when our people lost Yitzhak Rabin?”  We ask ourselves tonight, where we are now 12 years later, dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians slowed to trickle, and the U.S. reengaging in the peace process after years of neglect.  Our Torah portion this week, Lech L’cha, the same portion that we read on November 4, 1995 just hours before Rabin’s end, guides us as to where we might go from here.  Lech L’cha reflects where Yitzhak Rabin was trying to take the State of Israel, and the future he was seeking to guarantee for the Jewish people.  Lech L’cha opens, “Adonai said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your native land and from your father’s hours to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.’” (Genesis 12:1-3)  God, challenged Abraham to leave the place of familiarity, status quo, and inertia in a land of idols.  God sparked Abraham’s imagination to consider what might be possible and promising in a new land with a new awareness of the Divine, and the desire to create a new kind of society.  Abraham did not know exactly where he was going, but he did know what he was leaving behind. He had faith and courage in himself and in God to go out in search of this promised and promising Land.

            Yitzhak Rabin went out from his native land of soldiers, he went out from the household of generations marred by war.  Yitzhak Rabin sought to lead his nation toward greatness, the greatness of a people who can step out of their own pain toward the blessing of peace.  He drew from Israel ’s strength to step into the unknown of being vulnerable for the sake of a different future.  He traveled into the unmapped lands of taking bold steps regardless of whether others, Jew and Arab, would accompany him.  Ultimately, he set off toward a promised land of peace not fully knowing when he would arrive. 

            When I think about where I was on that night in 1995, I know that part of me is still there.  But a large part of me still looks for Rabin’s legacy to lead us toward the frontiers of peace.