Heroism at its Twilight

Heroism at its Twilight

As I right thousands of opponents to the disengagement are descending on the boundary of Gaza to confront 20,000 police and soldiers who will not let them enter the closed off Strip. This is just a few days after Hamas send Qassam rockets into Israel and a suicide bomber killed five in Netanya. The papers are filled page to page with coverage of the rising tension and everyone here is nervous about violence breaking out from one of several directions. As you can imagine it is hard to concentrate on anything else. But it should be emphasized that most Israelis support the disengagement and that most of Israel is engaged in a regular work day.

The opponents of the disengagement wear orange ribbons while the proponentss wear blue. A colleague suggested that orange connoted fire and blue connoted ice. Certainly the passion and zeal flows from the settlers and their supporters who seem to get more and more enraged by the day. It is hard to get passionate about disengagement. Its the right thing to do, but no one savors it, especially as everyone here expects chaos to reign in Gaza when Israel leaves. I am one of the icy ones, because I fear the fires ignited by the religious fervor of the settlers will scorch us all.

I am struck by how far Sharon is prepared to go to make the disengagement happen. He has closed Gaza. He has deployed thousands of troops to deter protesters. The authorities have declard the today's huge protest at the southern border to be illegal. People in buses headed to Gaza are being stopped by police in an effort to prevent them from reaching a march at which the organizers are expecting 100,000 people. It appears that Sharon will do almost anything to stop the settlers and their supporters from slowing down the evacuation. My view is that he is showing Abbas the type of political needed to suppress extremists. Abbas is weak. Sharon is not. The bulldozer will crush his opposition. How ironic that Sharon, the champion of the settlers is villified by them and will not back down before their fury. It is amazing to watch all this transpire before our eyes. No one knows how this will turn out. But the next few days appear to be pivotal.

Meanwhile I am in what I call the Hartman bubble. In the Hartman bubble we sail around Jewish history and thought without the distractions of events of the day. We are here to reflect and absorb and shlep our insights back to America. I would say that the spirit of Yochanan ben Zakkai hovers in this place. He was a rabbi who stepped out of Jewish history to continue Judaism in the beit midrash. He was a rabbi who lived during the revolt against Rome. He realized that history would not be kind to the Jews so he decided he had to bring together the rabbis, make accomodation with Rome, and perpetuate Judaism through his gatherings of the sages.

We are not in such dire straights, but Israel's historical current historical drama can become an obsessive concern. So we use the old rabbinic technique of returning to the texts to leave history for a while and see Judaism, Jews, and humanity with the longer view. I come to Israel in the summers to study at the wonderful institute for the month in a special program for rabbis from around North America. This summer the theme is religion, ethics, and violence. So instead of hanging out at demonstrations or making field trips to Gaza or the West Bank, we struggle with the issues as faced by previous generations. The past speaks then in the midst of this uncertain present.

Today David Hartman taught us one of the great texts in Jewish history: the Epistle on Matyrdom. Over 800 years ago Maimonides lost his temper when he read about a rabbi who gave bad advice to Jews who were forcibly converted to Islam. The rabbi urged them to matyr themselves instead of carrying on as Jews in secret. Maimonides rejected with fury the all or nothing approach of his colleague. He argues that the Jews should not matyr themselves, live outwardly as Muslims, but continue their secret devotion to Judaism until better times allows them to reemerge as Jews. Hartman calls Maimonides Epistle a treatment of the question of unheroic behavior. Is matyrdom the only choice?

I hear the echoes of these texts and the accounts of more recent times such as the Shoah. What is the heroic path for Jews today? In the heat of argument in Israel it is the settlers who see themselves as spurned heroes, defending the land, guardians of the outposts facing the enemy. But many in the country do not see them as heroes. There are many who once saw them as heroes but no longer feel this way. In the age of disengagement it is hard to point to heroes. This is the age of accomodation to harsh realities. It is not at all like Jews in Maimonides times who made decisions from a stance of profound vulnerability. Instead Israel has to weigh the limits of its power and the limits of its heroics. During this month as Israel attempts to leave Gaza, it will have to leave behind its illusions about what consitutes a Jewish hero. A new form of heroism will have to emerge.

Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
7/18/05, Jerusalem