You may be familiar with a New Yorker cartoon from a few years back, one which hangs – both proudly and uneasily – on our refrigerator at home. The drawing depicts Moses, leading the people of Israel through the Red Sea, with two individuals in the front row engaged in conversation. The caption reads: “He’s all right; I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel.”
I want to talk with you today about Israel, about what it might mean for us to be “a little more pro-Israel ”, about the relationship and connection between our Jewish community and Israel and her citizens, and about how we can talk with one another about Israel, Zionism, Palestine, peace and more without tearing ourselves apart.
A few personal notes – this is not a theoretical topic for me – Nomi and I met in Israel, and right now one of our children lives there and another is currently there for a trimester as part of high school. For me, for us, Israel is personal – as a friend, and fellow parent put it as we put our kids on the bus a week ago: “Israel is a part of who we are. ”
Israel is a part of who I am – I like that phrase. What does it really mean? What might it mean for us as American Jews, for us as a Jewish community, for us as 21st century Jewish people?
For a long time now I’ve had a sense that we need a new conversation about Israel and that we need to begin to articulate a new or renewed Zionism. As our son Josh made the decision to make aliyah, and in particular during the course of Josh’s two year Tzahal (IDF) service, that sense deepened for me. The recent Gaza conflict and the American Jewish community’s divided responses to it similarly punctuated that growing sense.
I’m far from the first to think so; calls for a new Zionism are as old as the Zionist movement itself – Ahad Ha’am’s debut essay, called Lo zo ha-Derekh “This Is Not the Way!” appeared in 1888, a full 9 years before the 1st Zionist Congress in 1897!
And calls for a new American Jewish conversation about Israel are as old as the State of Israel if not older. In recent years those calls have only grown louder and more insistent.
Most of the calls for a new conversation and a new/renewed relationship between Israel and the American Jewish community have a political tone and focus on the perceived differences between American Jews and Israeli Jews in ideological disposition and temper. All well and good.
Yet, missing from that call is a spiritual or religious voice, a voice that reflects our deepest traditions as partners in a shared covenant, a brit, that dates back to the Abraham and Sarah of whom we’ve read these two mornings of Rosh Hashanah.
For me, the conversation starts with an appreciation of the idea of belonging to the Jewish people. Mordecai Kaplan seems to be the coiner of the term ‘peoplehood’ as a description of the Jews as an entity. But it was my teacher, Rabbi Gerson Cohen, who gave the concept its most colorful articulation. Much of what follows draws on an essay that Dr. Cohen published 35 years ago, a piece written in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.
Here are some of Rabbi Cohen’s words: “As a consequence of my Jewishness I not only can, but do and must, feel a deep kinship with other Jews that transcends citizenship and time and place. That means that my Jewishness not only gives me ties with Jews everywhere, but places special obligations on me to Jews everywhere.” For my teacher, and for me as well, connection and loyalty to the Jewish people is the organizing principle and the underlying assumption of contemporary Jewish life anywhere in the world.
Over the course of our history, there have been many metaphors for the Jewish people – one body, one soul, one flock, one tree.
— The early rabbis in Mekhilta d’Rashbi focus on the word goy (nation) and comment that the people of Israel are k’guf ehad v’nefesh ahat (like one body and one soul). Picking up on a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah, they add: “Israel are scattered sheep” (Jeremiah 50:17), ‘when one lamb is struck/harmed, all feel it!’
— GD Cohen writes: “Israel is a vital part of my Jewish body and mentality”… AND “exclusive or even predominant concern for any one of my vital parts (is) an absurdity. I do not know which is more central to my body – my heart, my liver, my kidneys, or my nervous system.”
— Tomer Devorah (a 16th century Kabbalistic classic) describes the one soul metaphor in a fascinating way: she’ha’n’shamot k’lulot yahad…yesh b’khol ehad helek ehad mi’haveiro! ‘The souls of all of Israel are gathered together…within each one’s is a piece of her fellow’s. Consequently, if one errs, she injures herself and the part of herself within her fellow!’
— Chaim Nahman Bialik, the great Hebrew poet and early Tel Aviv resident, pursues the tree metaphor. Hear some of his words: ‘our tree has many branches which yield many (different) fruits, which is a good and healthy thing!’
— And the Siddur and Mahzor itself, repeatedly refer to the Jewish people as ’Amkha beit Yisrael! YOUR people, the house of Israel, which is to say, our sacred community’s very name, Beth Am Israel!
With a commitment to the centrality of the Jewish people as a starting point, I want to share with you a handful of new (at least to me) sources of inspiration in crafting and beginning to articulate a renewed Zionist idea.
Among my birthday gifts this year, I received from Josh and Dani a copy of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche’s memoir, first published in 1930. Chelouche was born in Jaffa in 1870, a member of a celebrated family of builders and entrepreneurs, and among the founders of Tel Aviv. Toward the end of his memoir, he turns his focus to the relationship between the Jews of the land of Israel and the local Arab population, whom he consistently refers to as neighbors. “We can build this bridge if we only adopt this true outlook…if we approach it with pure and correct attitude, with true and compassionate relationship, not one sided, by party politics or foreign motives, which are contrary to the way of peace and truth.”
Another new source of inspiration for me is Netanel Ellinson’s remarkable new book, ’A Brief History of Israeli-ness’ which centers on the thought that the Jewish people is, and has from the beginning been, a collection of tribes. Ellinson’s sources include the ancient rabbis — Sifre Devarim 39 describes 12 lands, one for each tribe, each with its own distinct fruits and flavors —
ר’ שמעון בן יוחאי אומר: י”ב ארצות ניתנו, כנגד י”ב שבטי ישראל, ולא שוו טעם פירות ארצו של זה כטעם פירות ארצו של זה, ולא טעם פירות של זה לטעם פירות של זה
and Bialik who had this to say in a 1934 address to the World Sefardic Union: ‘I don’t think it a disaster that the people of Israel is split into tribes. We were divided into 12 tribes from the beginning. Our tree has had many branches which bore much fruit; it’s good for a tree to have many branches. It would be a grievous loss if we had only one face rather than a multiplicity of faces. Of course there needs to be one soul and one heart, but the more branches and limbs the greater our strength.’
My teacher and friend, Raba Tamar Elad-Appelbaum sees the Zionist project as an unending work (a la Herzl) which involves the returning of lost spiritual and cultural treasures to the people of Israel and, ultimately, restoring shekhina (the immanent Divine Presence) itself to Zion!
Israel’s current Minister for Diaspora Affairs, Nahman Shai, shared an open letter with American Jewish leaders just this week, urging rabbis to talk about Israel in our Yamim Nora’im messages this year. “And not just Israel. Talk about the bonds between us, as a Jewish people, about our shared past and imagined future. Talk about the challenges, but also the opportunities…Most importantly, share with your communities that Israel desires to be your partner, to not let our politics or diverse identities serve as barriers to our fundamental belief that we are a people with a common fate and destiny…Despite the very significant challenges that stand between us, the truth is that we need each other, and I am convinced ultimately want to be in relationship with each other.”
We’ve finally caught up with Dr. Cohen three and a half decades later: “sustained, meaningful and productive interaction between Israel and the Diaspora are predicated on the assumption of a common destiny even in the face of the absence of external pressures.””…mutual kinship and respect…””an expectation of solidarity””kinship of spirit”.
How can we talk about this without tearing oursleves and our communities to shreds? A very beautiful Midrash offers us an approach: א”ר ינאי לא ניתנו דברי תורה חתוכין אלא כל דבר ודבר שהיה הקב”ה אומר למשה היה אומר מ”ט פנים טהור ומ”ט פנים טמא. אמר לפניו רבונו של עולם עד מתי נעמוד על בירורה של הלכה. אמר לו (שמות כג ב) אחרי רבים להטות. רבו המטמאין טמא רבו המטהרין טהור.
Rabbi Yanai teaches: the words of Torah weren’t given in a clear cut way; rather with each word conveyed by God to Moses, God would also articulate 49 faces pure and 49 face impure. Moses to God: ‘at what point and in what way do we clarify the law?’ God to Moses: ‘incline after the majority’; if the majority declare ‘impure’ then it is ‘impure’; if the majority declare ‘pure’ then it is ‘pure’.
Or in the Mahzor’s words this morning: God is shomea kol t’ruat amo yisrael b’rahamim — שׁוֹמֵֽעַ קוֹל תְּרוּעַת עַמּוֹ יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּרַחֲמִים — the One who hears the broken voice of the people of Israel with compassion. We’re invited to emulate the Divine example.
Ellinson concludes his book with a series of agreements, the first of which is this: we are all part of the same big story; consequently we have responsibility toward one another.
Or as the mahzor puts it — ye’asu kulam aguda ahat la’asot r’tzon’kha b’leivav shalem – ‘make of us one gathering to do Your will with a full heart.’
Easy in theory, very hard in practice. With a commitment to hearing one another’s anguished cries with compassion we can do it. In my view we have no choice. Ken y’hi ratzon. So may it be!
