Rabbi's
Sermons
Rosh HaShanah
Day 2
Sunday AM, September 24, 2006
With the advent of embedded reporters in military units, war is brought home to us in our living rooms like never before. This is true in Israel as well. In the recent war in Lebanon, TV media people were interviewing and filming Israeli soldiers in the midst of their duties. As families in Israel were anxious about the welfare of their children and husbands and since everyone is connected, watching these reports helped families get an inkling of where there soldiers were and what condition they were in. During one report, an anxious mother looked carefully at the screen. The red hair, the build, the face. No doubt about it, this was her son. Immediately she called his cell phone. To her joy he picked up the call. “Hello?”, he answered. “Eli, it’s Ima. I can see you on TV. Eli, put your helmet on!”
There are many differences between Israel and its enemies. But this one is the most stark. It is the chasm that for so many Jews we just cannot find a smidgeon of understanding. For Jewish parents, their children’s safety is paramount and their love for their children means all efforts, cultural, educational, societal, even military must be directed to giving our children opportunities for safe and wholesome lives. We do not celebrate our children’s deaths, we do not wish for them that their lives are dedicated to murdering other people’s children. It was Golda Meir who famously said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children but we cannot forgive them for making our children kill their children”. But today we live in a world in which Arab mothers praise their children for growing up to become shaheeds who destroy the lives of innocents while killing themselves. This is sanctity? This adds holiness to the world?
And yet, we Jews do have one example where a parent did not restrain himself and sought the death of his son as a holy act. That exception was the central subject in our Torah portion this morning. The Akedah, the binding of Isaac, is a Torah reading so troubling that each year we struggle with the meaning of this parasha. How could God command Abraham to do such a thing? How could Abraham, who so valiantly defended the corrupt of Sodom, agree to this disturbing request?
Our sages were troubled by this passage just as much as we are. Midrash allowed them to respond to this painful request without overtly criticizing the Divine. According to a midrash found in the Tanhuma:
When God commanded the Abraham to desist from sacrificing Isaac, Abraham said: “Why did you make me do this if You could look within my heart and know I am completely faithful?”
God responded : “It was My wish that the world should know of your greatness, and that it is not without good reason that I have chosen you from all the nations and have sworn that your descendants will keep My covenant.”
Abraham said: “You swear, and also I swear, I will not leave this altar until I have said what I have to say.”
“Speak!”
“Did you not promise me that my descendants would be as numerous as the sand of the sea-shore and that Isaac would be my child through which this promise would be fulfilled?”
“Yes.”
“I might have reproached You and said, ‘O Lord of the world, yesterday You told me, “In Isaac shall your seed will be called”, and now You say, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, and offer him for a burnt offering”’. But I restrained myself, and I said nothing. Therefore I insist that when the children of Isaac sin and fall upon evil times, be mindful of the offering of their father Isaac, and forgive their sins and deliver them from their suffering.”
“Alright”, says God, “In the future when I will sit in judgment upon Isaac’s children on the New Year’s Day, if they desire that I should grant them pardon, they should blow the ram’s horn, and I, mindful of the ram that was substituted for Isaac as a sacrifice, will forgive them for their sins.”
According to this rabbinic response Abraham was able to extract a powerful promise from God despite the unfathomable request. Another midrash teaches that the ram that was caught in the thicket was not caught by serendipity; God had created this particular ram at the outset of creation for just this purpose.
One wonders, though, had the Akedah taken place in our time in the Galil would the ram have been caught. God may have made sure the ram existed but it was assumed that a thicket existed to catch the ram by its horns. Today there might not have been a bush or bramble to trap the ram, so great is the devastation of Israel’s forests and green spaces up North. While Israel was spared a far more devastating destruction due to the inaccuracies of Hezbollah’s thousands of rocket attacks the open forests and preserves were not as lucky. Fires created by the explosions destroyed 16,500 acres of forests and grazing fields. About 1 million trees were lost. What was once green is now black and grey. According to the Jewish National Fund it is estimated that it will take 50 years for the forests to grow back.
The shofar was not only a reminder to God to be merciful but a reminder to us as well. Moses Maimonides declared that the Shofar was an alarm to warn us against moral complacency. In Israel in the 21st century the siren has replaced the shofar as the preferred alarm. The shofar preserves us from spiritual death just as the sirens in the Galilee warned the residents up North to protect themselves from physical destruction. But those sirens also remind all of us even in the relative safety of our nation that we cannot be complacent in the face of evil. Those sirens remind us that those who would destroy Israel seek to oppress and destroy Jews everywhere, that we cannot run away from our shared destiny. Those sirens warn us that no matter how important dialogue and compromise are, there are those who for whom there is no answer but “kill the Jews”. The trick of course is knowing when compromise can bring accommodation and when it is futile and dangerous.
But if the siren is the Shofar of 5767 than it too is a reminder to God. A reminder of the great faith and strength of his people Israel, the true descendants of his servant Abraham.
Throughout this war numerous acts of courage and bravery were recorded including the story of one commander, father of two small children, who fell on a grenade and perished in order to save the lives of the men of his battalion. There were numerous acts of hesed and achavah, kindness and unity in the thousands of Israelis living in the South of the country who took in residents of the North. The Masorti movement, the Conservative movement in Israel organized day trips, and hospitality for northern residents but also sent representatives up north to comfort and assist those who could not leave. One Conservative Rabbi, Mauricio Balter, whose community is in Kiryat Bialik in the Galilee wrote several times a week to his colleagues around the world to give us insight to his world.
After the ceasefire went into effect, Rabbi Balter wrote of conversations that took place with teachers in schools up north that give new understanding to the power of the siren, our modern shofar:
After the war, life goes on, the question is: How does life go on? We all make a great effort to come back to routine, routine that allows us to "control" what surrounds us.
(T)he school year began here in Israel. I arrived
to give a talk to the teachers… (T)they were all sitting in a classroom together with the head of the school, her staff and the pedagogical psychologist of the school.
Coordinated by the psychologist, …(e)ach of us (shared) a personal story. One of the teachers said that all the time she looked at herself as somebody afraid of everything but the war taught her she could be very strong indeed and (could be) a support to all her family. Another teacher said she had always thought of herself as very brave but discovered that she totally afraid…A very young teacher told about her experience when she was traveling in her car and was stuck between two large trucks at a red light when the siren started to sound. She knew there was nowhere to hide and that it was not safe to leave the car to look for shelter. Her little daughters who were in the car with her cried out, " Mom what do we do?" She put the music very high and told them "now we sing together with all our strength"…Another teacher who always refuses to participate in prayers at school told of how a siren caught her on the road with her daughter. They got out of the car and desperately looked for a place for shelter which they did not find. They stood behind a thicket and held each other very tightly. Her daughter looked at her and asked what they could do under these circumstances, and she could only answer "let’s just pray". Rabbi Balter concludes, “We cried with anguish and laughed at stories that now looked ridiculous, but the intensity of that moment (made us connect with one another) very strongly. Life goes on and these teachers, like thousands of others in the country get ready to (return to routine). The media will tell us about the collective war, but the real one, that was lived in every one of us, that one, we will have to process very slowly.
In the aftermath of the Akedah, one could ask who won? Abraham followed God’s command, so did God win? Abraham extracted an eternal pledge of mercifulness from the Divine, perhaps Abraham won? Isaac survived to tell about it, did he win? No, I don’t know if there can be a winner in such a situation.
Now that the war is over in Israel the analysts are assessing who won? Hezbollah, because they still have the soldiers, their remaining armaments and will never be demilitarized by a toothless United Nations force? Did Israel win because they severely damaged Hezbollah’s capability, pushed them off the border and forced the Lebanese army to finally take control of southern Lebanon? In the words of the Israeli writer David Grossman whose son, Uri Grossman, a peace activist often out of sorts with his comrades and one of the last soldiers to die in the fighting wrote, “I don’t know who won the war but my family lost”.
In military terms and political terms it might be optimistic to declare even a partial Israeli victory. But in an editorial by Guy Benyovits of Ynet News titled “We Won” he writes, “We won because we didn't lie. Losses were reported honestly, even when they were difficult. A reserve officer who returned from the north of the country spoke about hearing fluent Persian on Hizbullah's two-way radios. Add this piece of information to the report about the bodies of Iranian fighters uncovered by the IDF. Do you think you'll ever hear about it from the other side? You'll hear nothing – Iran already denied it.
Yet this is not the only lie: We also had the "massacre" in Qana, the "thick smoke" produced by the creative photographer in Beirut, and many more. We don't lie, for better or for worse. Mostly for better.
We won because … we remained united. (Despite a few on the radical left or radical right) in between we were left with 99 percent of a stubborn people conveying a united message: This is a war for our home, we must continue.
Last week I met my barber and saw black circles around his eyes. Tiredly he told me that he and his partner decided to drive up to Kiryat Shmona to give the people in bomb shelters haircuts and make them merry. They were there until 2 a.m. Nobody forced them to go there, or paid them to do so; they simply decided to do it. We won because of such Israelis.
We won because we're coming out of this war beaten, but on our feet.
We lost our best sons. We sustained several painful blows to our military pride… Israel is a country that makes mistakes, but also one that analyzes its errors without hiding and lying. Everything is open to criticism, both political and on the part of the media, and everything can be fixed and changed. Yes, this also means replacing our leadership, if you wish.
And this, perhaps, is the secret of our great triumph over Nasrallah's culture of lies. Despite all, we won.”
Benyovits message is a powerful one for us individually on this Rosh HaShanah. It is also a way to understand the very enigmatic closing verses of our Torah portion this morning.
These closing lines are puzzling because they seem to drain all the drama out of this wrenching parasha. The ram slaughtered, the father returns home, Isaac seems to remain alone on the hilltop and then we read: Some time later, Abraham was told, “Milcah has borne children to your brother Nahor: Uz and Buz, Kemuel, the father of Aram, and Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel”—Bethuel being the father of Rebekah. … And his concubine, whose name was Reumah, also bore children: Tebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Maacah.
What a dry closing! Who cares how many children Nahor, Abraham’s brother, had? Rabbi Saul Berman, explains that the ending is in fact the final test for Abraham. After the Akedah, Abraham is left with Ishmael exiled, Isaac alone and a survivor. And he still an immigrant in a strange land. But his brother who stayed back home and lived a comfortable and complacent existence within the tribe, is wealthy enough to have two wives, and is blessed with 12 children! Abraham who left the easy path to follow truth, to lead a life of righteousness and compassion, and to teach it to a world not willing to hear that message easily, he has but one child. And the final test, states Rabbi Berman is to ask oneself, Is it all worth it? If the world lies and calls Israel barbaric for fighting back against an enemy who willingly sacrifices its citizens instead of building underground shelters to protect them;
If the media accepts every terrorist distortion as truth and criticizes Israel for defending its borders as disproportionate;
If the enemy citizens under attack voted for the genocidal party with enthusiasm and still Israel warns them to move away from areas under target;
Is it still worth it for Israel to be honest, to try to find some ethical balance even in war between mass destruction and resignation, to allow for political disputation? Like Abraham before us the answer is a resounding yes.
And we Jews who do not have to make the sacrifices that Jews living in Israel must make, who do not have to consider sending our sons to the battlefront we must be willing to share their battles. We must be in unity with our brothers and sisters in Israel. On Tuesday evening, October 24th we will join together with all members of our South Bend community, Jews, Christians, perhaps even Muslims, to honor Israel at the Century Center. Let us support Israel through our community’s Israel Emergency Fund, through the Masorti movement, through environmental groups such as Haganat HaTevah, the Israel Environmental Defense Fund. When we do that than there will be no dispute: for surely the Jewish people will have won. In our unity we find our victory.
