Hope abides for us
Rosh Hashanah 5763 Sermon by Rabbi Davids
On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: Who shall live and who shall die; who shall achieve a ripe old age and who shall not; who shall perish by fire and who by water; who by sword and who by beast; who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled; who shall be cast down and who shall be lifted up.
The great Shofar is sounded; a still, small voice is heard. Fear and trembling seize the angelic hosts as they are forced to proclaim: HINEY YOM HA-DIN. This is the Day of Judgment.
Who shall live and who shall die? Who waiting for a bus and who sipping coffee at a café? Who at a Bar Mitzvah and who at a Seder? Whose limbs will be shattered and whose heart will be broken? Who will be filled with fear and who will be consumed by hate? Who will abandon all hope and who will reclaim hope? Who will collapse in tears and who will erupt in rage? [after Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg]
The great Shofar is sounded; the still, small voice is heard. Fear and trembling seize the angelic hosts as they are forced to proclaim: HINEY YOM HA-DIN. This is the Day of Judgment.
She was a student at the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University. Her intention was to strengthen her skills in the languages and culture of the Middle East so that she could return to the States and become a teacher in a Jewish Day School. In a letter written this spring, she commented on the ultimate sense of powerlessness she felt to control her destiny: ‘Every day when I leave my apartment, I have to choose whether I will turn to the left or to the right. Both directions will take me to my bus stop in the same amount of time. But that choice now is a life and death choice. Left? Right? Which direction will allow me to continue on my way? Which one will bring me into an encounter with violence? I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
She chose to have her lunch on July 31st in the Hebrew University cafeteria, to be with her friends. It was not a good choice. Her life was brutally torn away from her, and now she has no more choices to make. As the reports spread about the nine who were murdered that day, crowds gathered on the streets of Gaza to sing and to fire off their weapons. ALLAH BE PRAISED. The Zionist enemy is bleeding once again. The body parts of its children splatter walls and floors. ALLAH BE PRAISED.
On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. MI YICHYEH U-MI YAMUT: Who shall live and who shall die. A group of foreign laborers gathered around some shops in a desperately rundown district known as Old Tel Aviv. They had wanted to be at work, because their families back in Rumania, in Turkey and in Thailand totally depend upon their earnings. The explosion that took their lives wasn’t intended for them. But the homicide bomber had not been told that most Israeli shops and public places are closed on Tisha B’Av. The foreign laborers died just because the murderer couldn’t find any Jewish targets. And he couldn’t wait. He was anxious for his martyrdom, for his happy entrance into Paradise.
Who by sword and who by beast? As fear and trembling seize us all.
Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote: “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of dreams.” I want to dream. I want to dream beautiful dreams, the kind of dreams described in the Seven Wedding Blessings, the Sheva Berachot: “Adonai our God, may there always be heard in the cities of Israel and in the streets of Jerusalem KOL SASSON V’KOL SIMCHAH, KOL CHATAN V’KOL KALLAH: the sounds of happiness and of rejoicing, of bridegroom and of bride, of young people feasting and partying.” This is my dream. Not explosions or the throbbing sirens of rescue vehicles. Not weeping. Not the grim recitation of the locations of the latest funerals. Not the stories of young people who will struggle the rest of their lives to cope with pain and dependency and disfiguring scars. And not the echoing silence of KIKAR ZION, Zion Square, once the central gathering place for Israeli teens who wanted to hang out with their friends on Saturday nights: to eat pizzas at Sbarros; ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s; and chicken with the Colonel.
How torn Resa and I were this summer as we stood in a similar public square in Vienna on a Saturday night, feeling the crowds of young people surge back and forth around us. There were street vendors and musicians. Puppet shows and preachers. They could not possibly understand how fortunate they were not to have to look over their shoulders for suspicious strangers, for ownerless parcels, for someone dressed too warmly for the season. They were just enjoying themselves. No big deal. They never even stopped to notice those two Americans with tears in their eyes. And if they did notice, they didn’t care. They were just living their dreams.
My dreams, our dreams, emerged out of a land that has been part of our people’s story for more than 3000 years. We, the land and us, were made for each other. Through sunlit days and night skies that whispered of mystery, WHERE we were shaped WHO we were. Together, that land and that people laid the foundations for Western civilization. There we celebrated the infinite value of every human life, and there we embraced holiness not just in prayer and song, but in acts of justice and loving-kindness. Our priests, prophets and kings strode that land, while Ruth pledged her loyalty to God, David battled Goliath, Isaiah thundered against human indifference, and Job pleaded for someone to believe in his innocence.
We have never left that Land. Even when our physical homes were behind ghetto walls or in impoverished Shtetls, even as we became the intellectual bridge that brought the glories of Muslim culture to a backward Christian Europe, – we yet shaped our calendar around the land’s seasons, repeating over and over: If I forget thee, O Zion, if I fail to set thee at the forefront of my concerns, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, let my right hand lose its cunning.
Without the land, we were everywhere strangers, alien intruders. Without the land, we had no secure refuge. Had there been an Israel in 1938, the world Jewish population today would be closer to 30 million than 13 million. Every door was shut to us then, as our bodies ascended as ash through the chimneys. Outside the land, even here in America, this place of broad and deep acceptance, we still feel our otherness. Even here, our synagogues direct our eyes eastward to Jerusalem, and our prayers still express our ceaseless yearning.
But as we flowed back to our land, many still called us intruders. The killing of Jews in Palestine, the murder of civilians, women and children, began in the 1930’s. Not after 1967. Before there ever was a West Bank. Not in the 1980’s. Not after the collapse of the Camp David meeting hosted by President Clinton. In the 1930’s. Even then we represented a despised western world. Even then our embrace of liberal democracy made us hated. Our values were highly offensive and profoundly threatening. For those who nourish their children with hatred, for those for whom corruption is preferable to the voice of the people, for those who insist that God’s will is expressed in the oppression of women, and who hold that Judaism and Christianity are an insult to their own pathetically twisted understanding of Islam, there would be no negotiations, no compromise, no co-existence, no end of violence. The more we sought to live our dream, the more our blood flowed. It has been almost 70 years now, and still there is no end in sight.
Standing here now, on this Day of New Beginnings, there is so much that is beyond my control. The choices that I make reflect my best intentions, but those choices surely don’t determine the future. There are too many variables. I understand chaos. I accept its role.
But I do have some control. I can decide even now that I will not surrender to despair. The economy of Israel is shattered; foreign investment has dried up; unemployment is at 10% and rising. A few years ago, 1000 Americans were studying on Mt. Scopus; now 125. A few years ago 1300 North American Reform teens spent the summer in Israel; this year, less than 20. Restaurants and hotels are empty shells. Parents no longer dream that their children will graduate high school and enter a peacetime army. Now soldiers standing at bus stops are targets. Ordinary citizens who can afford not to ride buses have special arrangements with cab companies that they can trust. Almost all programs aimed at deepening understanding between Palestinians and Jews have been shuttered. Concrete walls now rise up to create a separation driven by hostility, not by hope.
Even knowing all of this, it is yet to Jeremiah I turn: “KO AMAR ADONAI: MINI KOLAYCH ME-BECHI, V’AYNAYICH MI-DIMMAH. KI YESH SACHAR L’F’ULAHTEYCH, V’YESH TIKVAH L’ACHARITAYCH. Thus says the Eternal: Withhold your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded: there is hope for your future.”
This is not our first struggle, nor even our most difficult struggle. We have been and we remain an embattled people. History has a message for us, but it is not the message of Temples destroyed, of Inquisition and Crusades, or even of the Shoah. The message is that for reasons far beyond our understanding, we are an Eternal People. We didn’t arise yesterday. We have no intention of disappearing tomorrow. Our insights, our fundamental teachings already hold sway over half the world. Time and again enemies have risen up against us. Time and again our blood has flowed. We suffered grievously.
But still we studied Torah and worshiped God; still we wrote poetry and philosophy; still we trained and trusted our minds to uncover new truths about the world; still we remained more phoenix than folk: rising up from the ashes, bringing new life and hope to all. And still we taught our children to celebrate the joy, the privilege, of being Jewish.
I believe this. I believe this with all of my heart. Today’s pain is horribly real. But YESH TIKVAH L’ACHARITAYCH. Hope abides for us. It is forbidden to despair. I will not despair.
And along with that hope stands my commitment not to allow the current crisis to erode my embrace of Judaism’s central values. Confronting barbaric murderers who prefer conquest to compromise and who hate us with every fiber of their beings: I will nevertheless continue to raise my voice in support of morality, of compassion and of justice. God forbid that our enemies can succeed in robbing us not only of our lives but of our humanity as well.
I know every good reason why Israelis should not sit down with Palestinians to search for a negotiated settlement. Trust me. I know absolutely every good reason why such talks cannot possibly bear fruit. But I embrace negotiations; I embrace meeting with those who may yet offer a passageway to a just and fair peace. Even as I fully support Israel’s right to swift and relentless responses to terrorist brutality, so do I fully support a relentless pursuit of peace.
And I will not be silent in the face of errors made by Israel, even while asserting that there is no, absolutely no moral equivalency between terrorism and the response to terrorism. My dream is not diminished as I side with those who anxiously await the closing of most Israeli settlements on the West Bank. If we want to hold onto the trust and understanding of our own young people, we must be able to maintain our ethical integrity along with our absolute clarity regarding Israel’s right to self-defense. I know all about the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed by the United States in its pursuit of El Qaedeh; but their deaths do not make me feel any better about the deaths of innocent Palestinian non-combatants. I know that the Palestinian leadership is unfathomably corrupt – but I will be counted among those who plead with the Jewish State to find ways to assist Palestinian children whose malnutrition serves more to increase hatred than it does any moral geopolitical purpose.
And my dream will not allow me to be silent about the raging anti- Zionism and anti-Semitism sweeping our world – especially Western Europe. The United Nations remains captive to those who despise us; the Durban Conference this year raised hypocrisy and political outrage to record heights. European anti-Semitism, fueled by a dramatic influx of Muslim refugees, driven by a desire to lessen the stature of the United States and abetted by the shortest political memory since first human beings stood upright and left the forests, is playing directly into the hands of those who want Israel’s destruction. The lies, half-truths and misrepresentations regarding Israel by much of the media, including media locally based, cannot be tolerated. I will not be silent, nor will I engage in dangerous denial.
And finally, my dream requires every single American to hold our president to his post 9/11 promise to fight terrorism everywhere. The president’s failure to maintain the integrity of his position is going to be a disaster for the United States and for free, democratic people everywhere. President Bush is fighting terrorism in Afghanistan, but he refuses to follow the absolute clarity of his logic elsewhere. He has failed to make a case against Iraq; he refuses to indict the Saudi financiers who made bin Laden viable; and he won’t commit active American support to help Israel combat Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. His words are beginning to ring hollow; his spine seems to be bending in the wind. He must do better. And we must insist that he do better, for the sake of our dreams for America as well as for the sake of our dreams for Israel.
Now I need something from you. I need your understanding and I need your blessing as well. On the 7th of October, Resa and I will depart for Jerusalem for six months – there to study, to be with friends and family, to walk together in ways that our competing schedules have never permitted during the first 39 years of our marriage, and to deepen our own individual and shared ties to the land of our dreams. Please let me be clear: We aren’t going because we yearn to put ourselves daily in the position of deciding whether to go to the right or to the left as we leave our apartment. We have been trying to make this sabbatical possible for some 18 years. We see no reason to change our plans now. We are blessed with our children and now four grandchildren. We are blessed in the friendships and opportunity that we have discovered here at Temple Emanu-El. But we are literally ecstatic, overwhelmed by joy, as we prepare now to embark upon what we consider to be our personal sacred pilgrimage.
We want you to know that we will be thinking of you. We want you to know that we will welcome your email, your prayers and your visits. CHALOM CHALAMNU – we have been dreaming a beautiful dream. ASHRAYNU: how fortunate we are to have the privilege of seeing that dream fulfilled.
So: We will not despair.
And we will not abandon our core values.
We will not be silent in the face of our enemies.
We will embrace our Jewish heritage with boundless joy.
And we will give thanks to God for the privilege of dreaming. AMEN