A Person, A Poem, An Idea: Israel at 60

A Person, A Poem, An Idea: Israel at 60
2nd Day Rosh Hashannah, 5768, September 14, 2007
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg Temple Beth Shalom
I thank my friend, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, for inspiring this sermon.

This appeared in the LA Times on Monday. “With eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union under arrest, Israeli authorities said Sunday that they had broken up a violent neo-Nazi gang that desecrated synagogues and staged at least fifteen attacks on religious Jews, Asian workers, drug addicts, and homosexuals. Video said to have been taken by the skinhead gang to document its beatings was shown at Sunday’s Israel Cabinet meeting, triggering urgent debate over what to do about immigrants who came as Jewish offspring, but grew up to commit hate crimes and shout, ‘Heil Hitler!’. “

This was a big story in Israel with one paper printing on the front page headline just one word in large caps: “UNBELIEVABLE!”

This year we will celebrate the 60th birthday of the State of Israel. 60 years into its existence Israel has discovered it has a Neo-Nazi problem. How do we make sense of this great irony? Is the younger generation forgetting the story of creation of Israel? Have young people not been given the history of Israel’s emergence as a nation in the wake of the Holocaust?

But despite the neo-Nazis, most of the rest of the Jewish people have a very strong attachment to the Jewish people and to the land of Israel. My friend, Rabbi Ed Feinstein, shared with me this interesting observation. Let’s say that someone got up at services and proclaimed. “I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t accept that God gave the Torah to Moses. I don’t believe that the Mitzvot are divine laws.” How would we react to such a public confession? Oh, we would say, “Goldberg, sit down already.” We might actually admire this person’s Hutzpah. Some of us would even agree with him.

But what about this alternative case? Let’s say the same person got up and proclaimed. “I am an anti-Zionist. I don’t believe in the State of Israel. I think the state of Israel is a cruel, monstrous state that oppresses the Palestinians. It has no right to exist. The Jews should return to Europe and let the Palestinians have their state.”

No one would yawn at that. The congregation would be outraged. And calls would be made to throw that person out the door. We would have to call a police escort.

The point I want to make is that 150 years ago the first public heretic, the God denier, the Kofer Ba’ikar, would outrage the congregation. But in our own times a Jew who does not believe in Israel, certainly a Jewish neo-Nazi, woe until him. While not all of us believe in God, the Jews overwhelmingly believe in Israel, in its right to exist, and its legitimacy as a Jewish state. We may be critical of Israel’s government or its policies, but the belief in the right for Israel to exist is as close a thing that Jews have to a dogma in our time.

Recent studies show that while there are few Jews who deny Israel, many younger American Jews are disconnected or indifferent to it. They may not get up and publicly deny Israel’s importance. They are certainly unlikely to become neo-Nazis. But the main concern is that many 20-30-somethings have little interest in Israel. Only 25% of American Jews have visited Israel. This alarming fact was so disturbing to leading Jewish philanthropists that they put their millions into a program called Birthright Israel which offers college age students free trips to Israel.
Many in this room were alive when Israel was founded. I know that moment changed your lives forever. But do your grandchildren feel the same way you do? How connected are they to Israel?

The creation of Israel is truly one of the great stories, not only of the Jews but of world history. But like any great story, it must be told over and over again and in new ways. Like Passover we have an obligation to pass it on to the next generation. Without knowing this story, those who follow us will not appreciate the remarkable courage and determination of the Jewish people to respond to catastrophe and to create a Jewish state.

In retelling this story I ask you, How has the existence of Israel changed you? What does Israel mean to you? How do we forge a stronger relationship with Israel as it enters one of the most critical periods of its existence?

Why is it that for 2000 years the Jewish people, scattered among the nations, never decided to return in Israel? Maimonides visited there and decided to live in Egypt. The expelled Jews of England in 1290 or the Jews of France in 1306 or the Jews in Spain in 1492 chose not to go settle there in mass. The Jews living amongst the Muslims chose the fleshpots of Baghdad or Fez or Cairo or Istanbul over the Holy land. But something changed in the late 19th and early 20th century. Jews moved from dreams to action and began to return in large numbers to the Promised Land.

The story of the creation Israel has infinite dimensions, but I want to look closely at only three. A person, a poem, and an idea. In telling the story of a person, a poem, and an idea we can understand the passion that led to the birth of Israel.

The story begins with a person. Why did an illiterate, assimilated Jew at the end of the 19th century begin a mass movement for Jews to return and create a Jewish state in the land of our ancestors? Theodore Herzl, despite being culturally assimilated and a leading public figure in Vienna in the latter half of the 19th century, experienced the indignities of being a Jew. Vienna like any major European had a long history of Jew hatred.

But the Jews of this era had hope and optimism. That hope lied in the West and that was France. Like many assimilated Jewish Europeans, Herzl admired France for its tolerance and legal acceptance of the Jews as full citizens. France was the paradigm of the future that he hoped would be imitated throughout Europe. The Jews of France had reached the highest levels of French society in literature, government, the military, the theatre, the arts, and in sport. Herzl believed that France pointed the way to the future of all of European Jewry. But he was in for a shock.

France got into an ill advised war with the emerging German nation state. France lost badly to Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian war. The mood in defeated France was ugly. People were looking for a scapegoat. No one thought that the identity of an officer accused of traitorous activity would matter, but when the officer, Albert Dreyfus, was accused of spying, the large mobs at the rallies calling for his punishment did not shout, “Down with the Traitor.” Rather, in rally after rally hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen shouted, “Death to the Jews”.

Herzl, covering the Dreyfus story for a Vienna newspaper, heard the cries of the mobs and never was the same man. In one shocking moment Herzl saw that the dream of emancipation for Europe’s Jews was a lie. The most progressive country in Europe seethed in the hatred of Jews. Herzl saw what no one else saw. He recognized that the Jew hatred stirred up by the Dreyfus case was not the old variety of the European-Christian kind. The Christians of Europe had for nearly 1500 years followed the teaching of the Christian sage, Augustine of Hippo (d430CE). He came up with the doctrine: Persecute the Jews, but do not destroy them. The Jews in their sorry state would be an enduring symbol to Christendom and to non-believers for their rejection of Christ.

But Herzl saw that the new Jew hatred was something different. It had been coined by others as anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews based on economic, cultural and most of all popular racial theories of his time. The new anti-Semites in Europe saw no reason to preserve the existence of the Jews. Herzl realized that the new anti-Semites would ultimately insist on the annihilation of the Jewish people. Herzl anticipated Hitler’s final solution. He saw it as clear as day. Like one who was struck by lightning and survives to tell the tale, he became meshugeneh about getting the Jews out of Europe. There was no future there. He became an advocate for the Jews reestablishing a state of their own in a place of their own.

His initial ideas were quite astonishing. He was in such a hurry to find a place for the Jews that he developed a short list. Palestine, Azerbaijan, Uganda, Argentina, and Arizona. Any one would do. Herzl, already feeling that time was running out in 1898 went around Europe talking to any rich or influential man who would let him in the door.

The people around him thought he was crazy. Rothschild threw him out. Rulers sat amused as he laid out his dream. His friends sent him to a shrink in the capital of shrinkdom, Vienna. His shrink, Max Nordau, the most prominent psychologist besides another young man by the name of Freud, listened to the fervent idealist for three sessions and became a disciple, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement.

Here is a passage from one of Herzl’s writings that summarizes his elevator pitch-what he tried to say to the influential people he met. They laughed. We cry.

“We are a people -- one people. We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-loyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands, where we have lived for centuries, we are still decried as aliens....The majority decide who the "alien" is; this and all else in the relations between peoples is a matter of power...In the world as it is now and will probably remain for an indefinite period, might takes precedence over right.

The whole plan is essentially quite simple...Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe adequate to meet our rightful national requirements; we will attend to the rest The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in obtaining sovereignty for us.”

The Jewish people got a state by the skin of their teeth, and held onto it tenaciously. We have attended to the rest as Herzl said.

The second part of our story is about a poem. As Herzl push started the new Zionist movement, other forces were at work that would transform the passive, long suffering Jews. In 1903 a particularly horrible pogrom took place in the city of Kishniev. There was a Jewish poet, beloved by Eastern European Jews, who witnessed the pogrom. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote a Hebrew poem, “The City of Slaughter”. Never has a poem left such a mark on a generation.

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) "The City of Slaughter" (1903)

“Arise and go now to the city of slaughter; into its courtyard wind your way;
There with your own hand touch, and with the eyes of your head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay, the spattered blood and dried brains of the dead... Descend then, to the cellars of the town, there where the virginal daughters of your folk were fouled, Where seven heathens flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother, the mother in the presence of her daughter, With bloody axes in their paws compelled thy daughters yield.
Note also do not fail to note, in that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath the bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood! Watching from the darkness and its mesh. The lecherous rabble portioning for booty their kindred and their flesh!
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; they did not stir nor move; they did not pluck their eyes out; They beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray: A miracle, 0 Lord,—and spare my skin this day! Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke, beheld their life polluted, the light of their world gone out— How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?
They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord, they offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word. The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi's house they flitted:
"Tell me, 0 Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted?"
The matter ends; and nothing more. And all is as it was before.
Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs the privies, outhouses and pigpens where the heirs of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions! Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame, So sanctified My name! It was the flight of mice they fled, the scurrying of roaches was their flight... They died like dogs, and they were dead!”

This is a poem about cowardly Jews, powerless Jews. The poet is disgusted with their cowardice, and shakes all his readers. This cannot go on.

What was Bialik saying to his generation? If we cannot defend our children, we are nothing. Powerlessness brings no dignity. Anyone who read and was struck by this poem came to one conclusion. Jews, need power to survive. Jews would have no dignity until they had power.

I read Bialik’s poem for the first time in 1975 during my junior year abroad in Israel for my advanced Hebrew class. This poem made me understand Israel’s special character which I could not fully appreciate growing up in America. The following year an Air France plane was high jacked. The terrorists landed the plane at the Entebbe airport in Uganda and immediately released the non-Jews and kept all the Jews as hostage. We know what happened next. Israel in a surprise raid freed the hostages, killed the terrorists, while losing one man, their commander, Yonatan Netanyahu. What was Israel saying to the world at Entebbe. Don’t mess with the Jews. We are no longer cowards. Bialik’s poem was answered.

The third part of our story is about an idea. There was this fellow name Asher Ginzberg. He was a dreamy fellow, not particularly social. But he had an idea and it possessed him. He was so inspired by the idea that he created a pen name which described his audience of readers: Achad Haam-literally ‘One of the People.’

Achad Haam was a very learned Jew. He was also a modern man. Achad Haam was troubled by the Jews in the Western Countries and by the Jews in the Eastern countries. The Jews of England, France, and Germany were assimilating, leaving traditional Judaism, abandoning its practice, its language, its culture. The Jews of the East, the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, the Ukraine, and Russia were deeply steeped in Jewish learning but because of circumstance and choice, were completely cut off from modern Western culture. This combination, radically assimilated Jews in the West and narrowly parochial, isolated Jews in the East prevented the Jews from healthfully entering the modern world.

Ahad Haam believed fervently that Judaism had to change in order to reclaim its Jews. He believed that the central problem of Judaism in modernity was that it could not create a compelling modern culture which would hold the allegiance of Jews but would open up new ways. He wrote in one of his most famous essays,

"Law of the Heart" (1894) “A people of the book, is a slave to the book. It has surrendered its whole soul to the written word. The book ceases to be what it should be, a source of ever-new inspiration and moral strength; on the contrary, its function in life is to weaken and finally to crush all spontaneity of action and emotion, till men become incapable of responding to life without its permission and approval. The people stagnate...the book stagnates.
It is not only Jews who have to come out of the ghetto, Judaism has to come out, too. ... [Judaism] can no longer tolerate the Galut-Exilic form which it had to take on, in obedience to its will-to-live, when it was exiled from its own country; but, without that form, its life is in danger. So it seeks to return to its historic center, where it will be able to live a life developing in a natural way, to bring its powers to play in every department of human culture.
We must keep alive the idea of the national renaissance. Only then can the Jewish soul be freed from its shackles and regain contact with the broad stream of human life without having to pay for its freedom by the sacrifice of its individuality.”

For Achad Haam, the Jews were the people of the dead book. It wasn’t just that the Jews had to strive to be modern people, but Judaism had to be made modern as well. This could happen if the Jews gathered anew in their land. There, they could become a modern nation required to deal with all the issues of being a modern state and culture. Could Judaism take its place among the great cultures and engage people in all areas of human endeavor. Achad Haam believed that any re-gathering of the Jewish people required a makeover of Judaism. The new homeland cannot be just another ghetto. It had to be the starting place of a new renaissance.

Israel is the product of a Meshuggeneh person, an angry poem of protest, and a dreamy idea of a Jewish renaissance. The efforts of a Meshuggeneh person lit a fire in the Jewish people, created a movement, and helped to eventually fulfill Herzl’s dream. Bialik’s poem became a prism through which many Jews saw the Holocaust. The Holocaust could happen because the Jews had no power. Ahad Haam’s idea of a modern Jewish renaissance inspired many Jews in Israel and outside to experiment with modernizing Judaism. The efforts to find a secure modern Judaism remains the most elusive dream of Jewry. We are in the midst of many modern experiments to both modernize Judaism and to redefine the Jews. In fact, as a Conservative synagogue we are only one example of that ongoing experiment. Jews remain locked in a great cultural and religious turmoil about how to apply Judaism in the modern world.

In Israel the question of cultural renaissance was deferred in favor or a practical approach. Do what has to be done to create and run a Jewish state. So there are Jewish policeman, there are Jewish telephone repairman, there are Jewish cable installers, there are Jewish traffic controllers, there are Jewish economists, Jewish government officials, Jewish tax collectors, Jewish customs officers and Jewish generals. Jews embraced the challenge of building a workable state, a functioning democracy, a modern economic society. They have done this and they have spent huge amounts of their resources fighting and giving up their lives to preserve their accomplishment.

We who live in America have our own story as Jews who have succeeded in the most hospitable country to Jews in history. The story of Israel and America are intertwined and the lessons of one are important for the other. We enter an uncertain period in Israel’s history. The future of Israel is now inextricably linked to the United States. Israel is on the front lines of the war against a virulent Islamic ideology that seeks its destruction and the end of the Western world as we know it. The war in Iraq and the instability in the Middle East will test the resourcefulness and patience of our Jewish brothers and sisters like never before. And the emergence of a fascist Islamic state in Iraq, racing to get nuclear weapons is the greatest threat of our times, not just for Israel, but the entire world.

The discovery of Jewish neo-Nazis must be understood in context. The neo-Nazi Jews are another pathetic type of Jew, an angry alienated counterpart to the timid Jewish men of Kishniev. These disturbed youth, none of whom served in the Israeli army, sadly represent an ugly side of the reality of statehood. One of the prices of having a state is that some young people become alienated from it and drop off its edges. Israel is also old enough to reveal its shortcomings which as a state. It suffers from an ineffective education system and a poor safety net.

In my visits to Israel, my friends there always complain to me about people’s perception of it as a country under siege, bristling with guns, on edge for the next terror attack. This is simply an untrue characterization of Israeli life. One of our tasks as fellow Jews in America is to maintain a close relationship with our Israeli brothers and sisters. This means frequent trips, cultural and religious exchanges, opportunities for study and fun. Israel is family and the most important act we can do is stay in contact and interact with family.

We can also connect more deeply by rededicating ourselves to learning the Hebrew language. This is one of the great miracles of modern Israel. To participate in it means to return to the Hebrew language which is the most authentic expression of Jewish culture throughout the ages. I would love if everyone committed themselves to learning Hebrew well enough to enjoy the Joseph story in Genesis or to read a modern Israeli novelist.

One thing my friends in Israel yearn for more than anything is that they be treated like normal people trying to live good and productive lives. I end this story with another poem, that captures the the yearnings of many Israelis. This is the side of Israel we don’t see in the newspapers and on TV. It is the side of Israel we should strive to appreciate, just like spending a sustained time with a beloved family member.

Yehuda Amichai "Tourists"
Visits of condolence are all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb and on the top of Ammunition Hill. They weep over our sweet boys
And lust over our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets
at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their
target marker.
"You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head."
"But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself. redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."