Israel’s New Reality
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
January 29. 2006
29 Tevet, 5766
Now this is strange. Every Israeli Jewish politician from left to right agrees. France is echoing the words of the Israeli government. Europe and the United States echo each other. As shocking as the victory of Hamas is, it has unified the West and unified for at least the present moment the political opinion in Israel. I have been asking people wherever I go their reaction to the Hamas victory. Almost everyone tells me that now that the outlines of the Palestinian-Israeli divide are clear. The hatred of Hamas for Israel is transparent unlike the duplicity of Fatah. “Those Hamas guys are straight shooters.” “We don’t have to figure out their intentions.” Most Israelis I meet are grateful an election that clarified the boundaries and shattered illusions.
On the other hand, behind the bravado there is worry. A generation of conflict is being seeded and hopes for peace are dashed. There is now a new factor that governs the Palestininian-Israeli conflict and that is radical Islam. In 1980 when I was a rabbinical student I went to
Egypt after Sadat’s visit to Israel. I visited the El Azhar University and met some Muslim students. I asked them their view of Israel. They unapologetically informed me that Israel
must be destroyed because all former territory of Islam must be reconquered. The Jews who remain will be treated well, they reassured me. We can tolerate Jews, but we cannot tolerate a Jewish state on Muslim land. At the time in the buoyant days after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, I was relieved that these views were drowned in a sea of hope.
But this view is now the official view of the party that won the Palestinian election in a landslide. Ideology trumps pragmatism for those who adopt this peculiar notion of Islamic politics. We should have no illusions. Israelis have none and American Jews should follow suit. Hard times lie ahead and it is hard to predict what will happen next.
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1 comment:
Dear Rabbi,
I find myself writing to you again.
Your writing of January 29th, Sharing Judaism, has brought up so much for me that I am hard put to prioritize a single reaction.
Flashback: two years ago or more. A gold-haired woman and a dark-haired man are packed together on a crowded commuter bus. This man has been her friend for years; a few months he came to sit up with her when she was fresh out of the hospital, and after he left she could not stop missing him. She finally realized that she had fallen in love with him, or perhaps that she had always loved him. Today she has asked to see him so that she can tell him this, but she does not know how. They are crammed together on the bus, alone in a crowd, and as he looks out into the darkness and the rain weeping down the windows, he begins to tell her about his childhood. He tells her about his grandmother, the light of his young life. And he talks about seeing the numbers on her arm for the first time.
We have so many questions that no one can answer. What was his grandmother's maiden name? What was her Hebrew name? What happened, that she survived Bergen-Belson, but was not part of its simmering afterlife of marriages and reconnections? Was she just too young? How did she survive after the war, without family or community? When did she fall in love with her Gentile husband? Why, in America, did she continue to eat kosher, to cherish her Yiddish, to identify herself as a Jew and to speak hopefully of her children, her grandchildren claiming a Jewish identity, but never reached out to make Jewish connections herself?
So many questions that can never be answered... does their weight add itself to the one question we must answer every day? How do we honor her spirit?
Who could have forseen the implications of that question? He wears a kippah every Friday and Saturday. I write my own grandmother once a week. Somehow my whole week leads up to, and then rolls away from, the lighting of the Shabbos candles. Expect nothing of me, he begs me, reminds me, expect nothing of me-- and then I find him swaying and singing to my tape of Hebrew prayers.
I came to your Yom Kippur service this year.
I think *we* will come to your Yom Kippur service next year.
I think the reaction that must take the greatest priority, is to say, "Thank you."
I think the only answer to the question of, "How much outreach to non-Jews is too much?", is the question of, "Which non-Jews?"
Tree
1/30/06
(This comment has been transferred from the old blog site to this new new blog site.)
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