Israel

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Rosh HaShanah - Saturday, September 23, 2006

Some people feel strongly that the only place where one can be fully Jewish is in Israel. They argue that it is only in Israel that being Jewish is completely natural, where the society around you doesn’t conflict with your Jewish life. Time in Israel is Jewish time and so Shabbat is part of the natural rhythm of your life and not an uphill battle. Jewish Holidays are taken for granted and there are no quandaries about missing work or school. You don’t feel like you are making a nuisance of yourself when someone tries to arrange a meeting in late September or early October and every date they suggest is a yuntef. Even keeping your home kosher is not an added burden in Israel, but something you end up doing anyway, unless you go out of your way to find some “white meat.”

More significantly, living in Israel, the language you use in your everyday life will be rich in Jewish allusions, full of words and phrases from the Torah and Rabbinic literature and built on Jewish concepts. For example, at the end of our trip to Israel this March, after a little dispute with our car rental company, I was reading the fine print on my contract. Where you would expect the businesslike words null and void, I found B’teilim um’vutalim, words I recognized from the Kol Nidrei prayer, which mean null and void but also resonate more deeply.

In addition to being rich with Jewish allusions, the language you speak in Israel will not impose categories on your thought that are external to Jewish culture. It is very different than our own experience in America, where the English we speak is a language whose natural cadences come from the King James Bible and whose words themselves create Christian categories in our brains.

The word prayer for example comes from a root related to supplication, from the Christian idea that prayer is basically asking God for something. That is how we use it in everyday speech too, but what we do when we Jews pray is something different. Rather than beseeching a cosmic bellhop, we are more frequently expressing gratitude for all the good we have, or developing humility by reflecting on an infinite God as contrasted with our own limitations. The Hebrew word for prayer, lehitpalel, actually means to judge oneself and so strictly speaking tefillah is a kind of self-reflection. None of this is captured by the English word prayer.

Similarly the word religion is not found in ancient Hebrew as the Jewish understanding of covenant and people-hood was so different from the way Greek and Latin speaking cultures later thought about faith. It remains true today that Judaism does not fit comfortably into the category religion, causing endless debate as to whether Judaism is truly a faith, a nationality, or some strange category defying hybrid.

Earlier this year, back in the spring, before the war in Lebanon, there was a big stir in the Jewish world because of a talk the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua gave at a meeting celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Jewish Committee. In front of many of the most prominent Jews in America, he stated that he could only really be Jewish living in the land of Israel. You can imagine the reception his words received at that gala in Washington DC.

A.B. Yehoshua is a prominent Israeli novelist, who often speaks out on major issues of the day. Several years ago, he and two other prominent writers, David Grossman and Amos Oz, formally joined Reform congregations in Israel, in solidarity with the egalitarian and inclusive values of our movement.

A.B. Yehoshua and these same two colleagues also spoke out this summer during the war in Lebanon, standing with Israel in its insistence that any government has the right and duty to protect its citizens from shelling, but urging that Israel nonetheless seek a cease fire to prevent further deaths and casualties. They observed that even a decisive victory would contribute little to resolving the basic conflict. To their minds, cutting off the flow of arms from Iran, reigning in Syria, and strengthening the Lebanese government, all required a diplomatic solution with pressure and support from many countries. The unilaterialist approach of the recent past with Israel withdrawing from Lebanon, as it did in the year 2000, and from Gaza in 2005; without a diplomatic context has not lead to peace and security. The three writers argued that there is a limit to what facts on the ground can achieve. Tragically, just a few days after their joint public statement urging a cease fire, David Grossman’s own son, a young soldier, was killed in combat, and his burial was the first time a Reform rabbi, in this case his Rabbi Maya Leibovic, was allowed to officiate at a military funeral.

It happened that several days after A.B. Yehoshua’s controversial talk last spring and in the midst of all the broo–ha-ha, I was sitting at lunch at Google with a bunch of Israelis in the high tech industry. These were Israelis who for a shorter or longer time had decided to live in the United States. I was arguing that though it was more comfortable to be a Jew in Israel, in some ways, being an outsider had become an important aspect of Jewish identity through the centuries. I pointed to the split consciousness of Diaspora Jews, of being a “Jew And” as a source of Jewish creativity and part of our unique cultural heritage.

In the Talmud there is an argument about whether one can be fully Jewish outside of Israel. In early rabbinic writings, in the Tosefta and in the Bereitot, living in Israel was considered as important as all the other commandments combined. It was better to live in Israel, even in a city without a significant Jewish population, than to live outside Israel, even in a very Jewish community. But for the last sixteen hundred years, our texts have leaned toward the position that being Jewish is much more than attachment to a land. Being Jewish is the Torah in the fullest sense, a heritage that we can take with us. We are in Israel, metaphorically, when we sit at a synagogue service, or study a Jewish text, and even when we are actively struggling for social justice when this comes from a place of Jewish commitment.

The Israeli contingent then asked me about the relationship of American Jews with Israel. If being Jewish is a portable identity, anchored in folkways and heritage, why do we need a homeland? Is Israel just an insurance policy in case the world turns hateful again? Or if we are more optimistic about our ultimate prospects in America, do we support Israel solely for our less fortunate co-religionists who don’t have a green card, and can’t come to the United States when there are problems in the country in which they are living?

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, wrote recently on the subject of Jewish identify: “Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jews defined themselves as the people loved by God. Since then most Jews, wittingly or unwittingly, have defined themselves as the people hated by Gentiles.”

Is our Zionism solely a political response to the reality of anti-Semitism? Is our relationship to Israel merely an international extension of our involvement in the Anti-Defamation League, or other Jewish defense organization?

Recently we have watched Israel become the Jew among the nations, given a pariah status that goes well beyond any realistic assessment of its failings. If being associated with Israel creates insecurity for us rather than security, as some feel on college campuses or in other very anti-Israel communities, what will happen over time to the role of Israel in our own Jewish identity? For some people the war this summer in Lebanon, heightened their connection to Israel, for others it threatened it, and for some it paradoxically did both. As Israel is likely to continue to be in difficult situations, fighting unconventional wars and making controversial decisions, how will we balance our loyalty and concern for Israel with other more universalistic values that we hold?

Shlomo Carlebach a storyteller and singer, who died about ten years ago, spent a lot of time visiting American campuses. He used to say: "I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catholic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew."

It wasn’t that college kids at the time Carlebach was touring, were embarrassed or afraid to say that they were Jewish, it was more that they had embraced a universal identity, and one that we in our liberalism had implanted in their souls. The kids Carlebach sang to were citizens of the planet earth who felt they had more in common with someone with whom they shared interests or experiences than with someone who just happened to be Jewish. The most important thing was to be a good person, and we had taught them that Judaism teaches that you don’t have to be Jewish to be good.

This universalism, though modern, has ancient roots. Think of our Torah reading this morning. This ancient text, this Torah which is the root of our religious faith, begins not with the father of the Jewish people, but with the idea of ADAM from whom all peoples descended. This single ancestor reminds us of our very basic relationship with each other, across all barriers of nationality, religion, and race. The idea of ONENESS so core to Judaism, is not just a rejection of a multiplicity of gods, it is also an insistence on the unity of humankind.

So how do we get from this idea of every human being created in the image of God, which would seem to dictate a morality in which every person, every country, every inch of earth is of equal concern to us as citizens of the globe, to Zionism, a particular relation with one place and one people?

For me it is the text and the midrash, which we as Jews study together. The text reminds us of our human sameness but the midrash extols our individuality. The rabbis saw the Roman Emperor creating coins bezelem d’mut tavnito, with the form and image of their creator and each of the coins was just alike. But human beings created in God’s image were manifestly different, one from the other, and this difference too was understood as part of God’s design. From the Talmud: “If a man strikes many coins from one die, they all resemble one another; in fact, they are all exactly alike. But though the Holy One fashioned every person from the die of the first Adam, not a single one of them is exactly like his fellow. Hence, each and every person should say : The world was created for my sake.”

My support for Israel is part of my understanding of human life as a tapestry and not a monoculture. It is analogous to the work I do to prevent the extinction of animal and plant species. This is my understanding of what Classical Reform Jews called the Mission of Israel. I believe that the continued existence of the Jewish people has some unique good to offer the entire world. Further, I believe that the existence of the Jews is meaningful only as a unique, discrete and recognizable culture, and that the state of Israel supports and enhances the continued existence of Judaism in the world.

That the state of Israel is important for Jewish security is undeniable. In 2002 when we were in Israel for our sabbatical, in the midst of that terrible winter of incessant suicide bombings, Jeremy’s ulpan class was filled with Jews from France, Argentina and Iran, and from parts of the former Soviet Union, who even under those conditions felt more secure as Jews in Israel than in their homelands. Even with Israel so persecuted as a nation, even with the targeting of Jews by anti-Israeli terrorist. I believe that on balance every Jew in the world is more secure because Israel exists. Israel’s existence is an inhibitor of anti-Jewish activity and with Israel, one can never become a stateless nomad with nowhere that will take you in and no embassy that cares if you live or die.

But Israel is more than that. Today more of the world’s Jews live in Israel than in any other country. Israel is the home away from home for many Jewish cultures from countries in which Jewish life no longer exists. Much of Mizrachi Jewish life with its centuries of traditions from Yemen and Iraq, from the Sudan and from Egypt, exists only in Israel. Israel is the hothouse, not only for the development of new inventions in medical technology, but also for the development of Jewish culture. Especially for those for whom Jewish identity is about something other than the belief in God and religious observance, Israel provides models and expressions of another kind of Jewish identity.

In San Jose if you want to be Jewish, whether you are religious or not, the synagogue is the locus of Jewish activity and the place to pass on your heritage. But the fact that we express that heritage in a variety of ways that are not necessarily religious, is in part because of the influence of Israel on Jewish life around the world.

Today, as Israeli forces once again withdraw from Lebanon, we hope that the losses and suffering experienced this summer, find some meaning in improved security for Israel and in positive movement towards stability and peace in the region. We know that our fate as Jews is deeply connected with the struggles of our fellow Jews living in the land of Israel. We look forward to the day when our discussion of Israel will not so often be centered on issues of military strategy and difficult security decisions, but can turn to a deeper exploration of our identity as Jews and the added meaning in our life from our connection with those living a Jewish life in the state of Israel.