Untitled
Passover Sermon 5762 by Rabbi Stanley Davids
Jerusalem and Buenos Aires
Rabbi Stanley M. Davids
March 22, 2002
I am struggling tonight, struggling just as you are struggling. Passover is almost at hand. Our families are preparing either to travel or to receive joyous throngs of relatives and friends at our own tables. Most of us have already completed shopping for those wondrous ingredients that combine to create the Charoset, the egg soup, the roasted main course, and the elegant desserts that are the hallmark of this the most widely observed festival in the Jewish religious calendar. The wise among us have already pulled out and begun to explore our own personal assortment of Haggadot – from Maxwell House or the Kibbutz Movement, the Reform Movement, Women’s Liberation groups, interfaith dialogue groups, family education groups and the like. By the time Wednesday night arrives, we will have mixed, matched, created, elaborated, truncated, summarized and revised our way into a Seder that will engage us all in song and celebration, in dialogue and in debate.
And yet we can’t find a way to turn inward on the Seder and its charming sanctities without drawing in along with us the painful realities of our own world. The news is relentlessly tragic. Who can even stand to pull up CNN.com on our computers, or to turn on the television or radio? Our brothers and sisters in Israel are bleeding from wounds that cannot properly be bound up. There seems to be no possibility of healing, no chance for us even to catch our breath. Zinni is obviously not Elijah, heralding the coming of a messianic Cheney. In his stupid arrogance Pharaoh, wearing Arafat’s kaffiyah and with an automatic weapon strapped to his back, seems capable of rising like a phoenix from one fiery disaster after another even as he blocks every pathway to the Reed Sea and to the Promised Land of security and of peace. Everyone knows that Arafat cannot win. Everyone knows that he is a heartless killer whose deepest preference would be for the disappearance of the Jewish State. Everyone knows that he is deceitful, unreliable and cruel. Yet everyone also knows that in one of history’s nastiest tricks – he stands astride our people’s very lifeline.
And we keep looking for our own Moses – the leader in our own day who hears God’s voice calling to him or her from out of a bush that burns but is not consumed, a Moses who could challenge the world’s greatest monarch and still succeed in bringing his people to freedom, a Moses who somehow magically blends military genius with a rich spiritual and ethical passion. We surely know who isn’t Moses – but our desperately yearning hearts find no one who today can lift our eyes, steady our trembling hands, wipe away our tears, strengthen our resolve – and lead us into a healing and meaningful future.
Ready now to celebrate that incredible moment when the Israelites accepted our national destiny in covenant with God, we find ourselves looking at a world in which the tears our people shed are more often tears of grief and sorrow than tears of joyous celebration. Evil seems to possess the momentum. Hope is being brutalized. Those who cling desperately to the shreds of what was but two or three years ago a sturdy cord of optimism, now find ourselves either scorned or misunderstood or condemned.
As those of you know who read our emails from Israel, this time around Resa and I were shaken by what we experienced in Jerusalem – shaken not only by what we saw and what we heard – but shaken as well by the horrendous contrast between the Israel of January and the Israel of March.
Terror moved beyond the abstract for us. We traveled a road in the Negev, only to hear that travelers along that same road were murdered by snipers two hours. Our sleep was shattered before 5 AM one day by the sounds of Israeli F-16’s flying low over our hotel, and by the muffled explosions of bombs exploding in Bethlehem. We ate in one of Jerusalem’s most upscale outdoor cafes, a cafe in the very neighborhood in which we have rented our apartment for the sabbatical beginning this coming October – leaving that cafe but 20 minutes before the suicide bomber entered strode onto the patio. Several of our friends had been in the cafe – had witnessed the heroic efforts of a waiter to disarm the bomber – and who were unable to control their sobbing three days later. Resa sat in our hotel room, exhausted by the day’s activities – a window open to capture the beautiful nighttime breezes of Jerusalem. A sharp explosion. The sudden sound of ambulance sirens wailing their warnings. CNN International carrying live images of the neighborhood of our hotel – because the Cafe Moment was but a block away. No one wants to see one’s hotel live on CNN in the midst of an emergency news broadcast.
There is no Pharaoh in a Kaffiyah in Argentina. But there is suffering and fear, and the Jewish community has in a matter of several months has been transformed from one of Latin America’s most affluent and successful communities into a community that literally has 25% of its population living below the poverty line, 25% of some 200,000 people. Picture men in Armani suits standing in line at a soup kitchen, unable to find the money to purchase food for the family table. Picture one of the world’s largest networks of Jewish day schools shutting the doors to new enrolment, closing facilities, firing teachers, sharply curtailing programs. Parents literally no longer have money for books or uniforms or even for school buses. Picture families being torn apart as young people in their 20’s struggle to obtain visas that will take them anywhere – to Israel, to Spain, to Italy, even to Poland – because their homeland is bereft of hope.
And then don’t be surprised that the poisonous viper of anti-Semitism has already begun to crawl out from behind its rocks of concealment. When 8000 new poor are added to the Argentine lists each week, with 12 out of 36 million now subsisting below the poverty line in a country that lacks the social welfare safety net that social security and unemployment insurance might provide, where 2 million people are literally starving - then scape-goating is almost inevitable. It certainly happened here in the United States during the Great Depression. And it is certainly happening in Argentina. After all, anti-Semitism is no stranger to Argentina, no stranger to the country that opened its doors warmly and wide to Nazis seeking to escape the collapse of the Third Reich and the demands from the world for justice at Nuremberg. Just last week, one of the larger provinces of Argentina, La Platte, woke up to find its major buildings smeared with Swastikas. There was no surprise.
During the 1970’s and 1980’s, a period marked by harsh military dictatorship – more than 30,000 Argentineans simply disappeared – and their bodies have never been recovered. Of the 30,000, more than 13% were Jews, while Jews comprise only some 1% of the population. Among those fortunate enough to have been arrested and imprisoned – it is publicly acknowledged that the Jewish prisoners were treated far more brutally than the others.
I had come to Argentina just this past Monday morning at the invitation of Edgar Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress. Nine rabbis from North America were asked to spend just 30 hours in Buenos Aires – to bring with us money to help pay for community Seders throughout the country – and to pay as well for Pesahdikhe supplies for synagogue-run soup kitchens. Bolstered by the generosity of many members of Temple Emanu-El, and supported by friends and colleagues across the country, I brought in more than $18,000 – part of our total of close to $150,000. We met with synagogue and Jewish communal leaders. And we were granted a one hour meeting with Argentina’s president in the CASA ROSADA, the Pink House – Argentina’s equivalent of the White House.
From the briefings I had received, I wasn’t supposed to be surprised by what I heard from the president – but I found myself almost gasping for breath when, in response to my question, the President asserted that there is absolutely no record of historic anti-Semitism in Argentina. A bald-faced lie made by a man whose own Mafia-like paramilitary organization played no small role in creating the 30,000 so-called “disappeared.” “You are wrong, Rabbi. There is no anti-Semitism in Argentina. A few bad incidents perhaps. But we are a people free of engrained European prejudice.”
There is strong suspicion that the current president’s friends were directly involved in the fatal bombing of Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center, and in the earlier bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires – events that deeply traumatized the Jewish population. The trial of some of those implicated in the bombing began just five months ago – after a seven-year delay. And that trial is nothing more than a charade put on to quiet international criticism.
The President expansively assured me that the perpetrators of the bombings were probably part of an international Muslim conspiracy – and that when the United States crushes Muslim religious extremists and terrorists, then the Buenos Aires bombings will have been resolved. We were dumbstruck. He had blithely pushed all responsibility for pursuing the murderers away from his government, out beyond the borders of his own country, washing his hands clean and feeling proud of his passionate concern for his Jewish citizens.
I must note that I was pleased to discover that Argentina’s press is still free enough to allow for the open discussion of such matters. I was interviewed both on television and for the largest daily and asked about the current government’s responses to the concerns of its Jewish citizens. My uncensored comments were carried live and in full.
There are two substantial congregations affiliated with Progressive Judaism in Argentina. I spent a great deal of time with Rabbi Danny Goldman - a passionate and charismatic laborer for social justice and a pioneer in the area of religious pluralism for the Argentine Jewish community. Danny, who spent two years with Rabbi Schwartz and Rabbi Balaban studying in Cincinnati, spoke with me about synagogues that are full to overflowing with worshipers – but whose staff now works basically without pay. His family members routinely defer the purchase of prescription medicine because of the need to buy bread. Few would have been able to obtain Passover food without the money we had brought in – as more than 800 people come to his own synagogue’s soup kitchen each day. And this in a community which for decades had raised millions of dollars in support of Israel, whose teenaged children are fluent in Hebrew, and whose community institutions at one time rivaled our own. It is now projected that 6000 of Argentina’s Jews will move to Israel this year - choosing the situation in Israel over the crisis at home.
It is refreshing, almost comforting to note that the Chabad and Orthodox rabbis exclude Danny and his colleague from all rabbinic gatherings. The chief rabbi of the Syrian synagogue said in our presence that “pigs would fly” before he would ever allow a non-Orthodox rabbi to speak from his pulpit. So few things change in our world.
I brought money to Argentina because of the Haggadah’s imperative: KAWL DICHFIN, YAYTAY V’YAYCHOL: Let all who are hungry come and eat. I continue traveling to Israel because of the Haggadah’s 2000 year old imperative: L’SHANA HA-BA-ah B’YERUSHALAYIM.
And my heart is broken because of my people’s suffering. I will not despair. We Jews are forbidden to despair. But neither will I allow myself to be distracted this Passover from the tasks at hand: To rouse a still mostly unresponsive American Jewish community to those grieving in Jerusalem. We as a community will stop canceling our trips to Israel. We will stop condemning our brothers and sisters there to isolation. We will become politically active, generating support for Israel in Congress and in the White House. And to rouse a still mostly unresponsive American Jewish community to those desperately frightened and isolated in Buenos Aires. We in Atlanta will soon be called upon by Federation to generously support an emergency campaign to assist the Jewish community of Argentina. We will not need to be asked twice. HASHANAH AVDAI. This year, my friends – we are indeed slaves. L’SHANAH HA-BA-AH B’NAI CHORIN: But next year we will all be free. Free from fear. Free to build our ancient homeland. Free from hunger. Free from hatred.
Passover demands of us to move now from AVDUT L’CHERUT: From bitter slavery into unfettered freedom. It is time for us to begin to help our people undertake that journey. We will cross that Sea. We will indeed reach the Promised Land. Keyn Yehee Ratzon.
AMEN