Temple Aliyah

By Rabbi Carl M. Perkins

“A Response to Murderous Zeolotry”
Parashat Mas’ei (August 5, 2005)

Today’s parashah begins with a list, traditionally chanted in a sing-song, that lists many of the places where the Israelites encamped in between Egypt and the Promised Land.

Each year, as we recite this, we’re reminded that, in a powerful way, this describes the norm for the Jewish People. During two thousand years, this was Jewish existence: not, on the one hand, slavery, and not, on the other, total freedom in a land that was undeniably ours, but somewhere in between, at places that we might inhabit for a few months, a few years, but which we would eventually leave.

This makes the contrast to what we see when we go to Israel all the more striking. To see Jews living in their own land, speaking their own language, following their own calendar, and managing their own affairs, is strikingly different from much of previous Jewish existence. And for that reason, it presents big, big challenges for Jews and Judaism, some of which have been noted and addressed, but others of which have been swept under the carpet.

Let me give you a simple example of just how great the contrast is.

We’re here in shul in the United States. This institution is a non-profit and it’s protected from interference by the government. Down the street, there’s a less observant Jewish congregation; down another street, a more observant one. There’s “us” (i.e., all of us who are in shul, whichever one it happens to be, this day) and then there’s the world outside our shuls, the broader society in which we live. We pass back and forth, but the two worlds are distinct. We might say a prayer for our country, but it’s pro forma—there’s no obligation to do so, and few of us would confuse our shul with a governmental institution.

Think how different it is in Israel. There’s a much greater overlap between the practice of Judaism and the living out of one’s life as an Israeli. This is felt in a variety of ways:

1) The prayer for the “government” is couched in religious language.
2) A MiSheberach for soldiers included in the prayerbook.
3) The shul itself may have a governmental employee as its rabbi. More significantly, national domestic and foreign policies can be traced back to the Bible.
4) Most significantly, there’s a link between what’s going on in the shul and real estate. In the States, shuls are very transient. As such, they represent the Jewish community. In Israel, the sense is “we’re here to stay.”

As a people, we haven’t sufficiently processed what it means to have a Jewish state. What, indeed, does it mean to call it that? Is Israel a “Jewish” state in the sense that it has something to do with Judaism? If so, how does that get expressed? How much influence should religious authorities have over public life? Should there be freedom of religious expression? How is that possible, once one institutionalizes Jewishness into the governmental fabric?

Should it be a Jewish state in the sense that it is the State of the Jews? But if so, what are the rights—or should be the rights—of non-Jews? Lest you think that the only people who live in Israel are Jewish, just visit Jerusalem. Just about every retired, elderly, infirm person has a Philippino aide. (They speak English, by the way.) And what about the Arabs in Israel? Leaving aside the question of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, what kind of identity is an Israeli Arab supposed to have?

Yesterday, an Israeli youth, a young man who’d left the army because he felt that he couldn’t participate in the evacuation from Gaza, shot and killed four Israeli Arabs before being killed himself. Upon hearing this, we might feel revulsion. We might feel outrage. Anguish. Indeed, there were condemnations of the attack from all quarters yesterday.

And yet, it just begs the question: When does religious zealotry cross the line? Is a certain amount okay, but no more than that? Is it okay, for example, to throw stones at secular Jews who are driving on Shabbat? Is it okay to attack homosexuals at a rally because they’re demonstrating for equal rights? (This was something that occurred while I was in Israel.)

Listen to this passage from today’s parashah (Numbers 33: 50-56):

In the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their figured objects; you shall destroy all their molten images, and you shall demolish all their cult places. And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess. You shall apportion the land among yourselves by lot, clan by clan: with larger groups increase the share, with smaller groups reduce the share. Wherever the lot falls for anyone, that shall be his. You shall have your portions according to your ancestral tribes. But if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live; so that I will do to you what I planned to do to them.

Is this, instead, the organizing principle of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel? There are those who think it is. Thankfully, they are a distinct minority, but they are feeling very, very oppressed, and very, very betrayed, spurned, despised, and condemned within Israel today, and one only hopes that there won’t be more outbursts of religious enthusiasm of the kind we witnessed the other day.

The only way to argue with that kind of vision for Israel today—an exclusionist vision that disparages and disdains the rights of other peoples to inhabit the Land alongside the Jews—is to remind ourselves that the idea of democracy, the idea that all human beings deserve respect, whatever their background, their national origin or identity, their religious faith, is not an invention of the 19th century. Its roots are as old as the Bible.

I think it was marvelously insightful of the rabbis to have us read, together with Parashat Masei, a passage from Jeremiah. Jeremiah is speaking to the people in a comparable situation. This time, they’re poised not to enter the Land, but to be exiled from it. And listen to the words he uses to describe the key issue, the core concern:

If you return, O Israel,
If you return to Me,
If you remove your abominations from my Presence
And do not waver,
And swear, As the Lord lives
In truth
In justice (and)
With righteousness—-
Then, Nations shall bless themselves
by you, And praise themselves by you.

That’s all Israel has to be devoted to: Truth, justice and righteousness. Could we possibly imagine that those concepts apply only to Jews and not to Arabs?

As so the haftarah is a useful, crucial counterpoint to the Torah reading, reminding us that, in the real world in which we live—the world in which Jeremiah lived, not the mythic world of the future that Moses is speaking of when he tells the Jewish people what they should be doing when they finally get to the Promised Land—we have to reach beyond ourselves. We have to stand for truth and justice and righteousness for everybody—or we won’t merit the privilege of having it for ourselves.

Israel must never become a state which is complacent about the rights of non-Jews. (Fortunately, this hasn’t happened yet. The civil rights of all Israeli citizens remain secure, though the threat is real.). Israel must remain a state where the interests of non-Jews as well as Jews are protected, where the interests of all Jews, and not just some, are protected.

With political power comes responsibility. Perhaps it would have been easier, from the perspective of our reputation, for Jews to remain stateless and landless. But would any of us ever want to sacrifice the blessings of sovereignty for that? I would hope not. Let’s support Israel in its effort to remain free, independent, Jewish and democratic—offering “liberty and justice to all.” Amen.