Rabbi Janet Marder

Erev Rosh Hashanah - September 22, 2006

Kol Yisrael

         Let me tell you a story. It’s a true story, and it’s about Congregation Beth Am. Last spring, 42 of us went to visit Israel – many for the first time. There are many sweet memories from our two weeks together, but this is one of the sweetest.

         We came to Caesarea , a port city on the Mediterranean seacoast built by King Herod more than 2000 years ago. We sat down in the ancient amphitheater, where thousands of spectators once watched gladiator games and theatrical productions, enjoying the view of the blue Mediterranean .

         All around us were groups of Israeli kids on class trips – some little ones, others in high school. We could hear their teachers explaining the history to them, as teachers will, while the students stood around looking bored, as students will.

         One member of our group knew what to do in a theater. Alan Podell stepped confidently into the arena, stood before us and prepared to organize a performance.  Raising his arms to conduct and lifting up his strong baritone voice in song, he led the Beth Am group in an impromptu rendition of “Eli, Eli – O Lord, My God.”

         The super-cool teenagers nearby rolled their eyes at the sight of a group of middle-aged tourists singing their hearts out in their American Hebrew accents. Some of them were clearly amused. Then something amazing happened. We heard the kids’ voices, all of them, joining with us in song. Alan, never missing a beat, turned to include them and conducted the whole ensemble to a stirring conclusion.

         It was a beautiful moment in which differences of age, culture and nationality were bridged by words of our shared Hebrew song. What brought us together that day was also a deeper, unspoken understanding.

         The Israeli kids knew, as Alan did, why it was appropriate to sing those particular words in this place. They knew that the words were composed by Hannah Senesh, a heroic builder of the State of Israel who once lived on a kibbutz nearby. Every Israeli schoolchild knows her story.

         Hannah came to Palestine alone, as a teenage girl. During the Second World War she volunteered to go back to Europe to save Jews from the Nazis. She joined a small group of young people who parachuted behind enemy lines in Hungary . There she was captured and tortured but refused to betray her comrades. She was executed in 1944, at the age of 22.       

         On that sunny spring morning in 2006, a group of Israelis and Americans shared the memory of Hannah Senesh, and the poignant words of a poem she wrote called “Walking to Caesarea ”:

         “Eli, Eli, sheh-lo-yigamer l’olam…

         Oh Lord, my God

         I pray that these things never end:

         The sand and the sea

         The rush of the waters

         The crash of the heavens

         The prayer of the heart.”

         Tonight, on Rosh Hashana, I am thinking about matters of the heart. I’m thinking about how we sang together in that beautiful place by the sea the words of a young girl who gave her life for her people. Above all, on this night I am thinking about something that is at the heart of being a Jew.

         Our Rabbis taught in the Talmud: when the community is in trouble, do not say, ‘I will go to my house and I will eat and drink and all will be well with me....’ Rather a person should share in the distress of the community [Talmud Ta’anit 11a].

         Kol Yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh: all Jews are responsible for one another [Talmud Shevuot 39a].

            It is deeply rooted in our tradition – the idea that we Jews are bound together in mutual responsibility, that we have a special obligation to stand up for one another and to take care of our own. Contrary to what you might think, this is not the Talmud’s way of transmitting good old Jewish guilt. This idea is based on something else. It’s based on love.

         So the great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik called his essay on the relationship of American Jews to Israel “Kol Dodi Dofek – the Voice of My Beloved Knocks.” The image comes from the Biblical Song of Songs:  in the middle of the night the lover knocks on the door of his beloved’s house, and she asks herself, “should I get up out of bed to answer the door?” 

         That, for Soloveitchik, was the call of Israel to the Diaspora Jew: the voice of our beloved – calling our name, pounding on our door, banging on the frontiers of our conscience. The voice of our beloved…summoning us to action, demanding that we get out of our comfortable beds, and answer the call.

         This is for some of us a difficult kind of love to understand. Why should we give priority to the needs of other Jews? How can we say that we care for them more than we care for human beings of all religions, nations and cultures?   And what does it mean to us, as American Jews, to speak of Israel as our beloved?   

          Tonight, I want to address these questions. I want to speak from my heart about Ahavat Yisrael – our special concern for the Jewish people, our special love for the State of Israel.

         Like most kinds of love, this one is hard to describe in words. You know this love if you’ve ever felt its power in your life. In May of 1967, when Arab armies massed on the borders of Israel, its people waited in dread of a second Holocaust, and Cairo radio announced, “The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.”

         American Jews reacted instinctively, as we do when someone we love is threatened. Huge numbers of volunteers flew there to help – more than Israel could absorb. They lined up at Federations to give money; some cities raised several million dollars in a day. They poured into the streets and marched. Aliyah went up 500% right after the war, and tourism from North American Jews doubled.

         In the following years American Jews rallied again to save the two million Jews trapped in the Soviet Union . They demonstrated and picketed and wrote letters and lobbied; they traveled to meet with Soviet refuseniks behind the Iron Curtain to let them know they were not forgotten. And after 25 years of political action, together with the heroic acts of their counterparts in the Soviet Union , they won a great victory. One and a half million of those Jews left the Soviet Union – the greatest exodus in Jewish history. Some of those courageous refuseniks are part of our congregation today. They experienced in their own lifetime the power of Jewish solidarity.

       Ahavat Yisrael – love of the Jewish people, love of the State of Israel – has nothing to do with Jewish superiority, Jewish exclusiveness, Jewish chauvinism. It doesn’t erect a wall between us and the rest of the world. You can be devoted to your family without disparaging those outside the family. Love for my family doesn’t keep me from being a good friend or a good citizen. Family gives me the strength to be who I am. My family, the Jewish family, teaches the value and dignity of all human beings.

         Torah challenges us to extend our capacity for care and responsibility outward, in ever-growing circles. We’re taught to love ourselves, and then to love our neighbors, and then to love the stranger, the one who is not like us. But our tradition also teaches that the love of those who are close is never superseded. We never grow out of our responsibility to those who are near and dear.      

         So the Jew who gives tzedaka to those in distant lands but ignores needy members of her own family has her priorities out of whack. So the Jew who speaks eloquently about peace and social justice but neglects his own spouse and children has failed in some essential way. The first duty of love is to be there for the people who depend on you.

         There is a Talmudic story about a couple that once upon a time gave birth to a two-headed son. When, after many years, the father died, the son came before the court and demanded a double share of his father’s inheritance. The judge did not know what to do, so the case passed to the highest court in the land, the court of King Solomon.

         Solomon asked: how shall we determine if this is one creature with two heads, or two separate and independent organisms? He said: let hot water be poured on one of the heads. If the other head cries out, this is one person, entitled to one inheritance. But if the other head does not cry, they are two separate beings, each with his own portion [Tosafot on Men.37a].

         Rabbi Soloveitchik said that this is a story about the Jewish people.  In our journeys all over the Diaspora we have sprouted many heads, many languages and cultures and customs and opinions. But as long as one head feels the pain of the other and cries out; as long as there is shared suffering, we are one people. We are one family.  “If hot water is poured on the head of a Moroccan Jew,” he wrote, “the prim and proper Jew in Paris or London must scream. And, by feeling the pain, he is loyal to the nation.” [Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchi, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” English translation published in Halachic and Theological Reflections on the Holocaust, p.83-75]

         As many of you know, I was in Israel this summer, when the Lebanon war broke out. Many of you asked me what it was like to be there during that time, and you told me how concerned you were for my safety. You should know that I was there at the same time as Rabbi Citrin and 20 of our Beth Am teens, who had come to Israel on their post-Confirmation trip. I hope I can speak for all of them tonight, when I say that I was glad to be there during those difficult days in Israel .

         Because when your family is in trouble, you want to be with them. You want to help them in any way you can. You want to share in what they are feeling, and to do your part to relieve some of their pain, because it is your pain, too.  Your family is not on probation, forever having to prove that it is worthy of your love.  Family means that you belong to each other, and you can count on each other, when fair-weather friends walk away.

         What can I say about the Lebanon War? We have all been reading about it for weeks now, and we have all absorbed harrowing images of misery and destruction.  Like you, I grieve for the suffering of innocent civilians trapped in a situation they did not create. It does not diminish the justice of our own cause to grieve for the Lebanese victims of war. So Prime Minister Olmert of Israel expressed profound regret for those killed because, tragically, Hezbollah guerillas are embedded in their midst. "I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for all deaths of children or women…." Olmert said. "We did not search them out... they were not our enemies and we did not look for them."

         The terrible truth is that innocent people die in necessary wars. Many thousands of Japanese and German civilians died when their cities were bombarded in the Second World War; thousands died in Yugoslavia in 1999 when NATO armies bombed the country to end the massacres of Slobodan Milosevic.

         For the past year, ever since Israel withdrew its settlers and troops from Gaza , Palestinian terrorists have fired rockets into Israel , terrifying the people of Israeli towns such as Sderot. For the past six years, since Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon, Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah terrorists have been firing rockets across the border into Israel, and have been intensively re-arming for a major assault. By this summer they had amassed an arsenal of some 13,000 rockets, some of which had a long enough range to hit Tel Aviv.

         On July 12, Hezbollah committed a major act of aggression against the Jewish State by launching missiles into the Galilee while sending a squad of guerillas across the border to attack an Israeli patrol, killing three soldiers and abducting two others. Israel responded by sending a small force into Lebanon to pursue the kidnappers. That force was ambushed and five more soldiers were killed. Israel then bombed bridges in South Lebanon to prevent its soldiers from being transported out of the area. Hezbollah fired more missiles into Israel . Ultimately it would fire more than 4000, causing a third of the population of Israel to flee from their homes.

         Israel ’s first duty is to its own people. Its leaders struggle with excruciating life and death decisions under the most difficult circumstances. Government leaders, responsible for the security of the nation; military officers, responsible for the lives of their troops; ordinary soldiers, responsible for protecting their own families. All of them are faced with decisions:

         How to respond to ongoing terror assaults in a way that does not encourage more terrorism. How to conduct a war against a ferocious enemy that is indistinguishable from the civilian population; one that targets your own civilians in indiscriminate attacks. How to abide by international law and one’s own moral values when facing an enemy bound by no such restraints.

         How to pursue peace when confronting Islamic radicals who have no interest in negotiating for peace, whose stated aim is the destruction of your own country and its replacement by a Muslim theocracy.  How to end the occupation, knowing that so far withdrawal from the territories has only led to further attacks. I would not wish such decisions on any of us. But Israel can’t avoid them.

         We American Jews whose politics were shaped by the wrenching debate over Vietnam ; we who rarely know anyone who serves in the army; most of us have never had to sully our hands with the wretched business of war.

          When we think about Lebanon we should remember that Israelis have never had the luxury of abstaining from this wretchedness – never.  Since 1948 they have lived among Arabs unwilling to tolerate a Jewish State in their midst. Since 1948 they have had to justify, again and again, the simple right to exist.

         Not by their own choice, Israelis have had to send their sons again and again to kill or be killed – a fact which is just as agonizing to the parents of Israel as it would be to us.  And whatever decisions they make, they make in the terrible knowledge that their children will pay the price for what they do.

         Did Israel achieve its objectives in this war? Was the fighting in Lebanon worth the terrible price they have paid? What mistakes were made by those at all levels of command? Even now the people of Israel are intensely debating these questions.

         Israelis know that you can love your family and you can love your country without agreeing with everything they do. Israelis, in fact, may be the most corrosively self-critical people in the world – that is a sign of their strength and the vitality of their democracy. They will learn from the experiences of this war and they will emerge, as they always do, stronger and more resilient.

         But make no mistake: they also emerge with pain that is almost unbearable. Because we are family, we should feel that pain as well. These are the words of David Grossman, Israeli novelist and peace activist whose son was killed at the age of 20 by an anti-tank missile in Southern Lebanon on August 12, two days before the ceasefire. Grossman spoke these words at the funeral of his son, Uri, whose name means “my light.” 

         “Uri, my beloved:

         Throughout your brief life we all learned from you….You were the left-winger in your battalion, and they respected you, because you held fast to your opinions without dodging a single one of your military responsibilities. I remember you telling me about your roadblock policy – you spent a lot of time manning roadblocks in the territories. You said that if there is a child in a car you pull over, you always begin by trying to calm the kid down, to make him laugh. That you always remind yourself that the kid is about [your sister] Ruti’s age. And you’d always remind yourself how frightened he is of you. And how much he hates you, and that he has reasons for that, and still, you will do all you can to make that terrifying moment easier for him, while doing your job, without fudging.

         “When you went to Lebanon , Mom said that the thing that most scared her was your volunteer complex. We were very frightened that if someone had to run to save a wounded man, you’d charge straight into enemy gunfire, and that you’d be the first to volunteer to bring more ammunition. That’s the way you were your whole life, at home and in school, and in the army. You willingly gave up your home leave when some other soldier needed it more than you did. You’d do the same in Lebanon , in the war.

         “….You illuminated our lives, Uri. Your mother and I raised you in love. It was so easy to love you with all our hearts, and I know you felt it. Your short life was a good one. I hope that I was a father worthy of such a boy.

         “….I won’t say now anything about the war you were killed in. We, our family, have already lost in this war. The state of Israel will now take stock of itself. We, the family, will withdraw into our pain, surrounded by our good friends, enveloped in the powerful love that we feel today from so many people, most of whom we do not know. I thank them for their support, which is unbounded.

         “May we be able to give this love and solidarity to each other at other times as well. This is perhaps our unique national resource. It is our greatest human national treasure. May we know how to be a bit more gentle with each other, and may we succeed in saving ourselves from the violence and hostility that has penetrated so deeply into all aspects of our lives.

         “….Uri was a very Israeli boy….He was the quintessence of the Israeli I would like to see. …He was a man of values. In recent years, that word has faded. It has been ridiculed. Because in our disjointed, cruel, cynical world, it’s not cool to have values. Or to be a humanist. Or to be really sensitive to the distress of others, even if the other is your enemy on the battlefield.

         “But I learned from Uri that it’s possible and necessary. That we need to defend ourselves, but in two senses: to defend our bodies, and not to surrender our souls. Not to surrender to the temptations of force and simplistic thinking, to the corruption of cynicism. Not to surrender to boorishness and contempt for others, which are the really great curses of the person who lives his entire life in a disaster area like ours.

         “….Dear friends,

         On Saturday night, at 11 o’clock, our doorbell rang. Through the intercom they said, ‘From the town major’s office.’ And I went to open, and I thought to myself: That’s it, our life is over.

         But five hours later, when Michal and I went into Ruti’s room and woke her up to tell her the horrible news, Ruti, after her initial weeping, said: ‘But we’ll live, right? We will live and go on trips like before, and I want to go on singing in the choir, and we’ll continue to laugh like always, and I want to learn to play guitar.’ And we hugged her, and we said that we would live.

         “….Our lives are not over. But we have suffered a very severe blow. We’ll take the strength to withstand it from ourselves, from our togetherness…And we will also take our strength from Uri. He had enough power to last us many years. He radiated life, vitality, warmth and love so strongly, and his light will continue to shine on us, even if the star that produced it has gone out.

         Our love, it was our great privilege to live with you. Thank you for every moment that you were ours.”

        I love Israel for so many reasons. Because the land is beautiful – rugged, sunburned, full of color and light. Because the idea is beautiful – a place where all Jews can feel at home; the place where we all began.  Because of the vibrant culture and the peace of Jerusalem on a Shabbat afternoon.

         But most of all I love Israel because of her people, my brothers and sisters: the opinionated taxi drivers and the commentators on the talk shows, all of them yelling at the same time; businessmen in shirt sleeves who never wear a tie; fruit sellers, falafel-eaters, women who remind me of my grandmother. The beautiful open-faced children playing in the park who will grow up into super-cool teenagers and then, perhaps, into heroes like Uri Grossman.

          Eli, Eli, sheh lo yigamer l’olam…Lord my God, I pray that these never end: young men and women with the strength of Hannah Senesh; courageous soldiers who do not glorify war; who serve their country not with hatred but with the deepest kind of love. May they give their strength for life and not for death.

         Hillel said: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  But if I am only for myself, what am I?Tonight I am asking our congregation, which has stood up for so many others, for the victims of the tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina, and for the hungry and homeless here on the Peninsula, for whom we raise some $25,00 a year – tonight I ask our congregation to stand up for our family – to stand up for Israel. 

         Over the last six years the Israeli government has faced massive expenditures – as a result of the suicide bombings of the second intifada, the building of the security fence and the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The war in Lebanon cost the Jewish State $2.5 billion dollars in military expenses alone [Ha’aretz, Sept.7, 2006]. The damage to homes, schools, and small businesses was devastating; the trauma inflicted on the million residents of the north, incalculable.

         We can help. The funds we gather tonight, and through this High Holy Day season, will be directed in three areas. One: we will partner with our local Jewish Federation to support the people of Kiryat Shmona, on the northern border of Israel . One hundred percent of these funds go to Israel – to provide trauma services for victims of the bombing, to rebuild the communal infrastructure, and to assist vulnerable populations without other resources: the elderly, the disabled, new immigrants and low-income families.

         Two: Our donations will provide direct support for the brave soldiers of the IDF – personal care packages for the young men and women on the front; aid for needy families of wounded soldiers, and assistance to the families of those who fell in the war.   

         And three: our donations will go to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, which provides lifesaving assistance to all residents of the country – Jews and Arabs, Muslims, Christians and Druze.       

         I would like every one of us to participate in this fundraising effort. If each of our 1450 households gave $18 we would raise $26,000.  I hope that many of you will give multiples of 18, the Jewish symbol of life. One of our recent B’nai Mitzvah has given us a head start: he just donated $700 to our Israel emergency relief fund from the gifts he received. You can donate through the tzedaka box in the Flint Center lobby, or send your checks to the Beth Am office, earmarked for Israel Emergency Relief. This is a generous community, this is a community full of love, and I know that together we can do something beautiful.          

         Kol dodi dofek: the voice of our beloved comes, knocking on the doors of our hearts and souls, reminding us of what it means to be a Jew. This is our glory – not uniformity but unity of commitment. So may we always remain – a people with many perspectives, many visions; one heart, one body, one prayer, one inheritance, one family.

         Kol Yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh: all Jews are responsible for one another.