Israel Sermon

Rosh Hashanah Day 2, 5760 (1999)

There’s an old joke about the American Jewish tourist who goes on a trip to visit Israel. While he is in Jerusalem, he goes to the famous Biblical Zoo, which I’m sure many of us have been to. They have animals that appear in the Bible, and in front of every animal is a quotation from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, which refers to the animal. So this American Jew comes up before this one cage that has that famous quote from the prophet Isaiah about how, in the end of days, the lion will lie down with the lamb (see Isaiah 11:6-9). And inside the cage, sure enough, is a lion lying down with a lamb. The American Jew is simply overwhelmed. He can’t believe it. There they are, calmly nestled in, side-by-side. He goes to the Israeli zookeeper, and he says, "You Israelis are just amazing. You can do anything. You can make the deserts bloom, you win wars in six days, and now you’ve gotten the lion to lie down with the lamb. Tell me, how did you do it? How did you get the lion to lie down with the lamb?"

And the somewhat bemused Israeli responds, "Simple! Every day, we put in a new lamb!"

This story tells us a lot about the way North American Jews often see Israel. It’s easy to believe that Israel is a place built on miracles and a place that can work miracles.

I can relate to that joke.

I came of age during the 6th Day War. Literally. On the Friday night just before my Bar Mitzvah, I vividly recall the then-emeritus rabbi of my congregation, Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen, speaking forcefully to the congregation. All of our members were being urged to write or send telegrams to then-President Johnson, urging him to support Israel. Gamal Abdul Nasser had closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli ships and it looked like war was imminent. Indeed, it broke out within two weeks.

Those were harrowing times. Not many people remember this, but Elie Wiesel, that great witness to the greatest Jewish catastrophe in modern times, went to Israel shortly before the war. He so feared for the safety of the state that, he later said, if it wasn’t to survive, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Abraham Joshua Heschel captured that sense of existential Jewish dread as follows:

"Between the middle of May and the middle of June, 1967, the Jewish people had ‘a rendezvous with history’… Psalm 83 was on our lips, a psalm that read as if it were written in May 1967:

Elohim, al domi lach!
Al tech-rash v’al tishkot El!
O God, do not keep silent;
do not hold thy peace or be still, O God!
For lo, thy enemies are in tumult;
those that hate thee have raised their heads.
They lay crafty plans against thy people;
they consult together against thy protected ones.
They say, ‘Come, let us wipe them out as a nation;
let the name of Israel be remembered no more!’

"This psalm was our continuous prayer for weeks, while we were witnessing how the Arab rulers were forging a ring of vast armies, tanks, and planes around Israel, … proclaiming a ‘holy war’ of extermination.

"Terror and dread fell upon Jews everywhere.

"The spirit of those days was like the spirit of the Days of Awe in the life of Jewish piety. … In those days many of us felt that our own lives were in the balance of life and death and not only the security of those who dwelt in the land; that indeed all of the Bible, all of Jewish history was at stake, the vision of redemption, the drama that began with Abraham."

I was in college during the Yom Kippur war. Then too, I remember that sense of deep dread. Was this it? Waves of Syrian tanks rolled over those Israeli units stationed on the Golan Heights and the Egyptian army easily crossed over the Suez Canal; during the first several days of that war, it looked pretty grim.

I remember that famous picture of a surrendering unit of Israeli soldiers stationed on the Suez Canal, one of them carrying a Sefer Torah with them into captivity: a chilling image suggesting a painful and powerful reversal of Jewish history.

Throughout much of my youth and early adult life, it was easy to think of Israel in quasi-apocalyptic terms: the fulfillment of many of our Messianic hopes and dreams and yet on the brink of disaster.

And yet, one of the goals of at least one of the strands of early Zionist thought was for the Jews, through statehood, to become just like all the other nations on earth, to become a normal country with men, women and children striving to live ordinary lives.

Of course, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Given the extraordinary challenges of building up the State in the wake of a terribly costly war of independence, defending it from five hostile nations, contending with the thorny issue of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees fleeing from what became the Jewish State, absorbing an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were expelled or who fled in the wake of the War, and doing it all in a land without much water, oil or other natural resources – to quote Yitzchak Rabin, one of the heroes of the War of Independence, who was speaking almost fifty years later about the continuing challenges facing Israel: "It’s not so easy!" It’s hard to call Israel, a state that has since then absorbed millions of Jewish refugees from all over the world: the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia – it’s hard to call Israel a "normal" country.

And there’s one more reason Israel isn’t a normal country, and that is the Jewish People. Jews, even those who’ve never set foot in Israel, have a potentially intimate relationship with this very non-normal country because it is the expression of a two-millenium age-old dream to restore Jewish sovereignty. Israel was not created as a result of the twentieth century disaster we call the Holocaust; it came into being in response to the disaster which occurred in the year 70, when the Romans destroyed the Temple, and in response to the disaster which occurred in the year 135, when the Bar Kochba rebellion was brutally suppressed, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were exiled from the land, not to return until 1800 years later.

The idea of Israel is as old as the Jewish people.

What is true of the past is true of the future. What is true of our history is true of our destiny.

The fate of Israel is inextricably bound up with the fate of Judaism and the Jewish people.

Our future as a nation – not the American nation, but the Jewish people -- is connected with Israel.

We therefore have to make Israel part of who we are. Not just because Israel was created partly to be a miklat (shelter) and will continue, God willing, to be. But because to be fully Jewish at the turn of this century is to have within us a powerful Israel-consciousness. As Heschel puts it, "Israel is a personal challenge, a personal religious issue [for Jews]. It is a call to every one of us as … individual[s], a call which [we] cannot answer vicariously."

What are the steps to doing so? How, for those of us who might not feel within themselves such a connection, can one develop that consciousness?

1. First, go to Israel. Go directly to Israel. Do not pass Go (i.e. Europe -- or rather, do bypass Europe), and go directly to Israel. This is a not so subtle pitch for our congregational trip in February, but that’s not the only way to go to Israel. Many members of our congregation have gone and I encourage others to go, on trips of their own creation. Just go.
   
   
2. Send your kids to Israel. I can’t really think of a good reason not to participate in Passport to Israel. A risk-free savings plan? What could possibly be the objection? If, for financial or other reasons one can’t take advantage of the savings, one can always withdraw them. But not to take advantage of CJP’s and the congregation’s commitment to help send all of our children to Israel?
3. Learn Hebrew. Don’t be an American imperialist. Be a Jew. Learn the Jewish language already! Again, there’s no excuse not to, and there’s no better place to go to practice your newly acquired linguistic skills than Israel.
   
   
4. Support worthy organizations in Israel. There are loads of them. Let me mention two of them:
   
   A). First, The Foundation for Conservative Judaism in Israel, the Masorti Movement. The Masorti movement is the Israeli branch of the Conservative movement. They need our help. There are a growing number of Conservative shuls in Israel but, unlike their Orthodox counterparts, they get virtually no governmental support and often face hostility and governmental opposition. Recently, the Masorti and Reform movements in Israel were prohibited from purchasing ads on Israeli radio informing the public that there is more than one way to practice Judaism. Every one of us should be a supporter of Masorti. (Here I’m clearly alluding to those envelopes that I hope you picked up -- and which, if you didn’t, we’ll be mailing to you this week.) Every one of us should be a supporter of religious freedom in Israel and the best way to achieve this is to support our like-minded Israeli brothers and sisters.B). Second, The New Israel Fund. The New Israel Fund supports homeless shelters and other humanitarian agencies in Israel; it supports the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and other groups striving to further civil rights and freedom; and it supports efforts to bridge the social and economic gaps in Israeli society between the secular and the religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardi and Arab and Jew. Last year at this time, we distributed solicitation cards for the New Israel Fund and I was thrilled to learn that seventy-five members of our congregation contributed. This year, for technical reasons, pledge cards were unavailable, but I hope that when and if we are able to put them in your hands in the future, you’ll give generously.
   
   
5. Invest in Israel. It’s been said that there’s nothing dearer to Americans than their IRA’s and 401(k)’s. Well, in this respect, be both an American and a Jew. Put some of your money where your heart and soul are telling you Jewish history is being made. Make Israel a part of your future in a very intimate way. I urge any one with even a few hundred dollars – if not more -- to invest, to buy an Israel bond. Even if it’s a small denomination. Contributions to Israel are important, but buying a bond is making a significant, perhaps more significant statement: it’s linking your financial future even if only in a limited way, to the stability and security of the State of Israel.

* * * * *

I would like to conclude with a story. I was recently chatting with a member of our congregation who grew up in Israel, not even five miles from the Jordanian border. It wasn’t always such a comfortable place to be. Before ’67 there was often shelling across the border, and even afterwards there was always a danger of terrorist incursions.

This woman grew up knowing the Land of Israel like the palm of her hand. Hiking and exploring the length and breadth of the country. But all of her explorations were on the western side of the Jordan River; the East Bank, the Jordanian side, was off-limits.

Then, as we all know, relations thawed between Jordan and Israel. Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein, the two late, great leaders of Israel and Jordan, signed a peace treaty, and within months, Israelis were traveling across the border. This person did the same. She went into Jordan and one of the first things she did was to ascend Har Nevo, the Mount Nebo mentioned in the Bible as the site of Moses’ death and burial.

There she stood, with a magnificent view before her eyes: the Land of Israel, stretching all the way from the Jordan River and the Dead Sea in the foreground, to the Judaean hills, the coastal plain and then beyond it the Mediterranean shore. From the Negev in the south to the Galil in the north. It was, she recalled, an astounding site for her: a nation she had thoroughly explored from within, but never viewed, in quite this way, from across its border. She felt, she said, extraordinary empathy for Moses who was said to have died and been buried with that magnificent view before him, gazing longingly toward the Promised Land he would never get to enter.

When I heard this story, I thought of how lucky we, the Jewish People, are. For two thousand years we were indeed like Moses, able only to gaze at the Land but not to enter it, much less to live in it as free citizens. Now, through God’s help, we have that opportunity: to cross that border into the Land, to enter the Land and to explore it to the fullest. To refrain from doing so would be to ignore two thousand years of Jewish yearning. It would be an extraordinary loss.

Israel truly is a land of miracles. There may not be lions lying down with lambs, but we see evidence of the miracles of the Jewish renaissance:

• the rebirth of the Hebrew language,
• the restoration of Jewish pride and esteem, and
  
• the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty.

We have an extraordinary opportunity to share in those miracles.

According to Psalm 126, one of the Shirei HaMa’alot, one of the pilgrim songs which we sing before Birkat HaMazon on Shabbat and holidays, those who endured the exile and lived to witness the redemption declared,

When God helped us return to Zion,
it was as if we were dreaming!

Let us be like those pilgrims. Let us not stay asleep while others dream. Instead let us share in that dream.