Pull quote -
There is disagreement between Sefardic and Ashkenazi Jews as to the proper mood for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Ashkenazim believe that Jews should rejoice on Rosh Hashanah because it is yom ha’rat olam, the birthday of the world, and be fearful and anxious on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, when God’s judgement is passed. Sefardim, on the other hand, believe that Rosh Hashanah is the serious day because it is when God begins the process of sitting enthroned in judgement, balancing the scales of our deeds to decide who shall live and who shall die, while on Yom Kippur it is a festive and joyous day, since on that day, we are forgiven and the slate is officially wiped clean.
I will be following the Sefardic tradition this year with the tone and tenor of this sermon. It’s serious, and perhaps, dour, and for that I am sorry. However, you all know me to be a pretty honest and transparent guy, which sometimes manifests itself in my propensity to drop a swear word from time to time. High holidays is historically the time when synagogue attendance is high and therefore sermons tend to take on loftier and more important topics than during the rest of the year, when discussing whether an egg that is laid on the first day of passover can be poached for your breakfast on day 2 is a perfectly acceptable subject. For Day 1 RH, we need to go bigger.
Nothing is a bigger elephant in the room in every synagogue on earth right now than the conversation on Israel. It is effectively a wedge issue dividing the folks in row 4 and row 5, that even when they agree on 98% of everything else with regards to Israel, they may refuse to speak to one another at kiddush because they disagree about the war in Gaza.
I was recently in Los Angeles visiting my family over Shabbat, and at one of the mainstream Conservative synagogues, they say the prayer for IDF soldiers and a prayer for peace and a prayer for hostages, and they end the service with Hatikvah. When I asked an old friend about those choices, she said not everybody was happy with those decisions, and folks who identify more left have departed for a more politically left-aligned egalitarian service about a half a mile south. In other synagogues, from New York to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, the choice of what prayers to say over Israel, over soldiers, over Palestinians, and over hostages has created conflict and discord. I myself have been confronted by congregants who specifically entreated me to add a certain prayer or not say another prayer or add Hatikvah.
I understand that folks are passionate about the crisis, and want the shul to express their values. But I also try and remind folks that while synagogues can help project and solidify the communal values of American Judaism, your rabbis do not have a hotline to the Netayahu administration in terms of policy or action. We are almost completely powerless.
I am going to share with you now seven observations about Israel and Gaza right now. My intent in sharing this is not to state an opinion, or to stir up controversy. I believe it is important, as we begin the New Year, to take stock of where we are as a global Jewish community. The simple message I offer you today, the beginning of a New Jewish Year 5786, with these seven points, is this: Israel is at a crossroads. Just as our lives hang in the balance on the scales of justice before God, Israel’s future hangs precariously in the balance too.
Point 1:
1) Israel has never been more unpopular in the world as it is right now.
After World War II, wracked with guilt and seeking some semblance of moral absolution for the inability to stop the Holocaust or for their direct participation in it, the nations of the world voted to create a Jewish state in the land of Israel and supported its growth and development. And until the intifada in 1988, Israel was seen as David compared to the Goliath of the hostile Arab armies surrounding them. Things began to change with the Intifada, as Israel’s contentious relationship with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza rendered them less favorable in the global community.
Two years into Israel’s sixth war in Gaza since 2008, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the IDF has destroyed at least 70% of buildings there. There are approximately 64,000 casualties in Gaza according to the British medical journal the Lancet.
The global reaction has been almost uniformly negative towards Israel. Many European countries have responded with a symbolic diplomatic move of recognizing a state of Palestine. Many have called for a war crimes tribunal at the Hague for Israeli leaders. Momentum has been gathering on college campuses amongst a generation of young people who think of the Holocaust as ancient history for a full a complete dismantling of Israel, and see our people - our cousins, our siblings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, not as refugees from European genocide, but instead as European colonizers themselves. You and I probably grew up calling ourselves Zionists. Today, if I were to announce myself on a college campus as a proud Zionist, I’d probably get hit with an egg.
A lot of these attitudes I’ve just documented are wrongheaded or misguided. A lot of the criticism of Israel conveniently forgets that Hamas struck first, took hostages, and committed unspeakable atrocities on October 7th. But it is still incredibly important to take stock of the fact that Israel has never been as globally unpopular as it is today.
2) The IDF’s code of conduct famously includes a paragraph called ‘purity of arms’ - in Hebrew, Tohar HaNeshek. It reads as follows:
החייל ישתמש בנשקו ובכוחו לביצוע המשימה בלבד, אך ורק במידה הנדרשת לכך, וישמור על צלם אנוש אף בלחימה. החייל לא ישתמש בנשקו ובכוחו כדי לפגוע בבני אדם שאינם לוחמים ובשבויים, ויעשה כל שביכולתו למנוע פגיעה בחייהם, בגופם, בכבודם וברכושם.
The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.
When I was growing up, I was taught about the amazingly moral and righteous nature of the IDF’s purity of arms - the code of conduct of Israeli soldiers. That code has not been discussed much as of late as something the IDF is practicing. And in fact, a significant number of Israelis, as well as Israeli leaders, are even calling to remove that clause from the army code of conduct.
In a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, more than 63% of Jewish respondents agreed with the statement that “a neutralized terrorist should be killed even if they no longer pose a threat” — a position that stands in direct opposition to the law, IDF orders, and its core values.
In the same survey, 60% of Jewish respondents believed that adherence to the principle of “purity of arms” prevents the IDF from fulfilling its missions.
And there are calls from Israeli politicians to remove the purity of arms code from the IDF manual.
This is all to say that Israel’s war in Gaza has not lived up to the ethical standards the IDF used to hold itself to. In war, of course, civilian casualties are unavoidable. Additionally, we will never know what proportion of the casualties in Gaza are civilian and which are military, since Hamas is an insurgent group that uses human shields and operates out of hospitals and schools. Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, there are approximately 64,000 casualties in Gaza. Conservative estimates say at least two-thirds of those are civilians.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Yossi Klein HaLevi, who I would describe as a centrist voice in Israeli politics, wrote this last week:
“But we also know that something has gone very wrong in Gaza. That two years of fighting the most brutal war in Israel’s history has inevitably affected the standards and behavior of parts of the IDF (though we don’t yet know to what extent). That the Netanyahu government, a coalition of the fanatical and the corrupt, is disgracing the Jewish state.”
Israel was forced into a terrible war, and in the fighting of that war, its army has lost its moral direction.
3) Israel has spent 77 years attempting to chart a path between being a Jewish state, a Democratic state, and a state within the community of nations all at the same time. It seems like it is on the verge of abandoning at least two of these core principles, and/or it is struggling to balance these three things.
A big part of this is around Israel’s administration of the West Bank. After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the West Bank was treated as Palestinian autonomous zone - as sort of an incubation stage for the creation of an independent Palestine. But today, Palestinian Terrorism in the 2000s coupled with Israeli settlements and checkpoints have eroded that incubation stage. Now the West Bank is mostly just hanging around in limbo, neither a future state nor a part of Israel. Residents there don’t vote or have Israeli citizenship. If Israeli settlers steal their sheep or vandalize their homes, nothing is done about it.
This is what I mean when I mention that Israel’s attempt to be a Jewish state and a Democratic state are at odds right now. Israel has 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and don’t vote, and they don’t really have a say over their destiny.
With the creation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as occupied territory in 1967, and then semi-autonomous zones in 1993, Israel was attempting to balance being a Jewish country with being a state where all of its residents had the right to vote. Israel is moving in a direction of annexing both Gaza and the West Bank, and ending any talk of a state of Palestine. Which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the residents of those territories are given passports and citizenship and the right to vote and equal protection under the law to the Jewish residents of the state. Those things, of course, are not part of the plan. And one might say ‘well of course not rabbi, if 6 million Arabs and 6 million Jews live in a democracy together, it won’t be a Jewish state, it’ll be a mixed state.’
And that’s my point: the Israel of the near future might only be a democracy in name. This is the crossroads we face.
4) American Jews have been effectively sidelined in the conversation about Israel’s future by both American and Israeli political realities.
Jews in US synagogues and Jews at American universities debate hotly what direction the state of Israel should take post-October 7. However, the American Jewish community is not a factor in the decisionmaking process. The American president and the US Congress have given the Netanyahu government a free hand to pursue whatever policies they want. Past US presidents - in fact, literally nearly every US President going back to Truman, would from time to time cajole either the Israelis, the Arabs, or the Palestinians to restrain themselves, and sometimes it would work. President Carter brokered peace between the Israelis and Egyptians on the White House lawn. President Bush convinced the Israelis not to attack Iraq in the first gulf war despite Saddam Hussein firing scud missiles at Israeli civilians. The current president hasn’t exerted any effort to broker a truce. A recent survey by UC Berkeley of American Jews showed that just 31% support the war of the past two years while 58% oppose it.
Regardless of whether American Jews SHOULD have some effect in how Israel conducts its policies, which is an interesting conversation for another sermon, the simple fact is American Jews oppose the war, and support an immediate end to it, and yet that majority opinion counts for virtually nothing.
5)Israel’s government, two years into the war, maintains that it can militarily eliminate Hamas from Gaza. Many analysts think that is unrealistic.
The US military is roughly ten times the size of the Israeli military, and spent twenty years in Afghanistan trying to eliminate the Taliban, and we all know Afghanistan is run today by the Taliban.
Don’t take it from me, though. Wednesday the news was reporting that as Israel began an invasion of Gaza City that Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, was opposed to the final invasion. He is concerned about the exhaustion and fitness of reservists, and about the military’s becoming responsible for governing millions of Palestinians. Or take it from a former Israeli military special ops soldier and security analyst Michael Milshtein, who told the NYT friday “It’s naïve to believe Israel can put an end to Hamas in short order.It just doesn’t work that way.”
I want to be careful not to speculate about the future, because none of us knows whether Hamas can be fully destroyed and replaced with some kind of functional authority that is willing to co-exist with their neighbors in Israel. I only want to point out that the effort to eradicate pro-palestinian terror groups has been ongoing since the 1960s. Some things that are political in nature cannot be solved militarily, and yet the war goes on.
6) The conversation inside Israel, and to some degree inside the organized Jewish community in the US, is completely different than the conversation in the mainstream media for the rest of the world.
Israelis are telling themselves that either reports of humanitarian suffering in Gaza are exaggerated or that Hamas is responsible for the hardships there. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is reporting that the Israelis are responsible, and some reports actually have exaggerated the nature of the humanitarian suffering. The word ‘genocide’ is thrown out frequently without restraint. And so both sides, rather than address the problem, contend that it isn’t their fault and that someone else should help.
In other words, this conflict and the reporting and perspective around it has been warped beyond recognition by the side you want to hear. Many Israelis see the war through the perspective of the horrific experience of October 7. They see Hamas as a modern day iteration of the Nazis, bent on destroying them all. And therefore, like a modern Dresden, they see collateral damage as lamentable, but necessary. Much of the rest of the world sees the famine and hunger in Gaza and the devastation of buildings as evidence of some malevolent Israeli evil. As I said in my sermon a year ago on this topic, Chalila lecha, far be it for you, God, and far be it for us, humanity, that we have been reduced to such a condition where so much violence and suffering has been wrought, and so much of the world would prefer to choose a side and wave one flag or another, rather than scream ‘enough’. I want to choose only the media outlets that tell the ugly truth about both sides while also reminding us that humans are capable of far better than this. To date, I’m not sure that outlet exists.
7) All of this amounts to something of a split in the road, where the Jewish values that Judaism has been espousing for over 150 years: tolerance, co-existence, loving your neighbor, caring for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, acting as a moral army, standing for justice - those values are at odds with the realities of war in the BEST of circumstances.
And the war in Gaza with the use of hospitals as shelters and the use of airpower to strike targets and the huge death toll for civilians has not been the best of circumstances.
The Conservative movement has been very careful to stay as politically neutral and cautious as possible. But a few months ago the Rabbinical Assembly issued a statement that included these words:
As rabbis of the Conservative/Masorti Movement, we are increasingly concerned about the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We recognize the need for urgent action to alleviate civilian suffering and ensure aid delivery, as leaders continue to focus on returning the hostages and ending this war. The Israeli government must do everything in its power to ensure humanitarian aid reaches those in need. The Jewish tradition calls upon us to ensure the provision of food, water, and medical supplies as a top priority. We continue to call for the swift release of all hostages being held in Gaza, an end to the violence, and a future rooted in justice, dignity, and safety for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The war in Gaza has been an incredibly destructive war. It is unlike any other war Israel has ever fought. In 1948 and 1967 and 1973, Israel fought standing armies from well-established nations wearing uniforms for the very survival of the state itself. In Lebanon in 2006, and in Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2014, Israel fought in limited combat against a guerilla force. This war in Gaza, in which there is total devastation and the only option left is for Israel to occupy and reconquer the land, and potentially rebuild it, is unprecedented in the history of Israel. Not since the time of Joshua - before the existence of the Talmud and the rabbis, before the diaspora and the expulsion from Spain and the Holocaust - has Israel been in a position like this.
In other words, our religion preaches certain values and moral expectations. And the necessity of exercising Jewish power in order to maintain a Jewish state has bent and even broken some of those values in practice. Two years on in the war, with an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and no clarity as to the intent of the IDF and the Israeli government regarding what happens to the Palestinians in Gaza in the future, we have to ask a very serious question: is the Jewish state a Jewish state if it doesn’t practice Jewish values? Is it just a state of ethnically Jewish people, fulfilling the rituals and mumbling the words while ignoring their meanings?
This is the crossroads of Israel at this moment. Is it a Jewish democracy? Is it Jewish? Is it a democracy? Will the future Israel be something the Jewish people can be proud of as a nation that demonstrates our Torah values in its every deed or action. Or will it be regarded as just another nation with a smattering of moral stains on its historical record? Or will it be seen as even less than that? And what will Jews of good conscience, our children and our grandchildren, how will they view Israel? Our parents and grandparents used to walk door to door with little blue pushkies to raise money for Israel - will future generations of Jews even recognize the country they built?
I want to wrap up by being very honest about the purpose of this sermon. As I said before, I’m not here to convince you of anything, or to argue a point. I attempted to present as objective a statement of where we are right now, without sugar coating or spinning things.
This is not in an attempt to convince you of a perspective or galvanize you to some kind of action. A classic American sermon ends with a resolution or a prescription or a blessing. Because I said X, we should all do Y. This sermon is a little different. I don’t have a prescription for what ails the Jewish people right now. I aimed only to diagnose the condition we are in an honest appraisal.
Two final pieces of Torah to send us on our way - hopeful pieces. First;
The text we read today in our Torah portion is the story of course of Hagar being cast out by Abraham at the request of Sarah. It is a difficult story with many possible meanings. A few years ago I spoke on Rosh Hashanah about how, if we refocused the story to be from Hagar’s perspective, the story becomes about making someone into the Other, capital O, and about absolving ourselves of responsibility for the Others. This year I want to note that this is a story about the estrangement of two peoples, of the progenitor of the Arabs in Ishmael and the progenitor of the Jews which is Isaac. The story of the casting out is about two peoples who are estranged from one another, and the choice is made for them to go separate ways and leave one another alone. However, the story we will read tomorrow in the Torah is of Abraham and Isaac going up to Mt Moriah for a sacrifice.
The Torah tells us in Genesis 22:3 -
“So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac.” And our commentators, who like to fill an informational void where one exists, asks a question - who are these two unnamed servants? And Rashi, the commentator par excellence, says they are Eliezer, Abraham’s trusted servant, and Ishmael, his son. In other words, according to Rashi, Ishmael was cast out, but a little while later, he and Abraham come back together. Their paths, like the paths of Jews and Arabs in the land of Israel, are inextricably linked. And the Torah seems to be implying here also that reconciliation is possible. What has been rent can be mended.
Second: The central symbol and device of Rosh Hashanah, we all know, is the shofar. The shofar carries so much symbolism, much of it you know. It reminds us of the ram, caught in the thicket, in the story of Abraham and Isaac that we read tomorrow. It reminds us of the goat of azalzel that we sacrifice in place of our sins on yom kippur. It reminds us of the sound of the shofar that called out to us at sinai as we received the Torah, our laws and our moral direction. It reminds us of the conquest of Joshua, who used the shofar to destroy the walls of Jericho as he and his armies conquered the land. It reminds us of the call to muster our armies in the book of numbers as we arranged ourselves camp by camp, troop by troop. And it also calls us to wake up to teshuvah, to repentance, to search our deeds and our actions that we might be better in the year to come. This year, the shofar also calls Israel to a decision at the crossroads.
We pray that the direction it takes will be for good, and for life, and for justice. In Psalm 81 we say
תִּקְע֣וּ בַחֹ֣דֶשׁ שׁוֹפָ֑ר בַּ֝כֵּ֗סֶה לְי֣וֹם חַגֵּֽנוּ׃
Blow the horn on the new moon, on the full moon for our feast day.
כִּ֤י חֹ֣ק לְיִשְׂרָאֵ֣ל ה֑וּא מִ֝שְׁפָּ֗ט לֵאלֹהֵ֥י יַעֲקֹֽב׃
For it is a law for Israel, the justice of the God of Jacob;
For 5786, let us read it like this -tiku bchodesh shofar - blow the shofar - ki hok l’yisrael - that Israel find the path of justice - mishpat lelohei yaakov - and that together we follow the law of our God. Shanah Tovah
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