Before Shabbat

This past Wednesday morning I had the great pleasure of walking into the Old City of Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. It’s always enormously exciting to enter the Old City. The sights are immediately breathtaking. For me, it’s the mix of humanity. I see African tourists, Asian pilgrims, a Japanese group that comes to Israel every year to ask forgiveness for a terrorist attack perpetrated at Lod Airport by the Japanese Red Army in 1972, Hasids, delusional seekers, Swedish hippies ― and this is within the first 500 feet of the entrance… The cacophony of languages mixed in with Arab storekeepers hawking their tchotchkes, little kids yelling, and so forth ― it’s a bracing moment, like walking headlong into a strong, warm wind.
As we navigated our way down the steps, we arrived at the Sinjlawi family store. I love this place and the copious jewelry they sell. I’ve been several times, and the owner, Eddie, always gives me a big hug. We spoke briefly and then he said, “Do you know what happened in Florida?” I sadly informed him that I had heard the awful news. And then Eddie looked at me with such sadness, and said, “I am so sorry for all those families. It must be so hard to live in such a violent country.”
Eddie said these words without a trace of irony, words of consolation for a foreigner from a country with a big problem. Odd, isn’t it? All these years I’ve looked at the Middle East and the high stakes of life here. This, the land of Israel, is the place of tsuris, the place of violence and terrorism. This is the place with a government sold on divisiveness as a legitimate form of statecraft. Israel is the place where the leader is leading under a cloud of doubt about his illegal behavior, where law enforcement officials are characterized as a tool of the opposition.
Eddie’s genuine empathy broke my heart and thoroughly confused me. As I listened to various broadcasts later that day from leaders who want to talk about mental health and not the public health risks of copious easily obtainable AK 47s, I realized the extent to which we have lost enormous moral standing in the free world, and amongst ourselves as Americans.
How long can a country endure when its public school space, the pride of our nation, the melting pot of American society, is contaminated by violence? When children develop school phobia after a murder spree, how can we blame them for their anxiety? How do we explain to them why nothing has changed since Newtown?
I’ve written about children being murdered before. I have expressed outrage. I have bemoaned the terrible lasting damage done to families that have lost their babies to bullets. I have angrily called out elected officials on the dole from the NRA, demanding justice transcend campaign gifts.
It is cathartic to have a place to express my personal pain and my moral outrage as your rabbi. But I already feel deep in my soul that, like before, nothing will change. I’m beyond anger ― it has been extinguished by too much disappointment. I fear that cynicism, borne in the crucible of inaction and indifference, has tarnished my soul. “It must be so hard to live in such a violent country.” It is hard. It is manifestly obscene.
What happens now? Nothing. Children will be taught new duck and cover strategies. There will be more drills. Experts will sell school systems Kevlar vests and blankets. And mark my words; in three weeks we will have another school shooting. Parents will weep. Children will stay awake at night in anguish and fear. And we will comfort the afflicted with love and sympathy, while those who might make a difference will play on, protecting their self-interests, mocking the dead with their inaction. Every time a child is murdered in a school, our nation sinks lower than a flag at half-mast. It’s all so clear from the City of Peace.

When I traveled to Israel for the first time, in 1972, I worried about how much my mother would worry about me. I was just 17; you know what I mean… Freshly graduated from high school, I was about to embark on what they now call a gap year. I was the first-born child, leaving behind a single mother with my three younger siblings, all of whom were in their own unique and, shall we say, erratic orbits. What would she do without me? I said to her, “Mom, I don’t know how many days it might be before I have any access to a telephone. What should I do? Do you want a telegram?”

I will never forget my mother’s response. This little, 4 foot 11 inch, prematurely grey-haired woman said, “Don’t worry about it. If your plane crashes, I’ll hear about it.” She said it gently, but her intent was clear: you’re a big boy now, and you’re in good hands.

It was a major hassle to make an international call home from Israel in 1972. The most direct way was to go to the central Jerusalem post office where there were some little booths with telephones inside. You’d walk to the window of a certain clerk. She’d stare at you as if you were creating a serious inconvenience for her. You’d write down the number you wanted to call, tell the exasperated clerk how many minutes you wanted to talk, and then pay. She would then assign you a booth number. Such a lot of red tape and complexity!

My mother appreciated that she didn’t need me to check in with her much when I was away. She had enough to worry about. Her philosophy was: “Don’t look for trouble. If it wants you, it will find you.”

I called home twice over nine months. Once for Mother’s Day, and once for my mom’s birthday. Yesterday would’ve been her 88^th birthday. She was born on February 8th, 1929 and died on October 26, 2009. Her birthday was the first date I ever remembered besides my own birthday.

Nine years after her death I can see more clearly than ever how she influenced me and my life. I won’t dwell on the negative stuff, though that’s there, too. Her love of music and standing up and belting it out in front of a crowd, large or small; that is most definitely in my DNA.

It’s nine years since my mother died. I still miss her – not every day, of course. When I sing a particular song (she would’ve loved Mi Chamocha Blues), I imagine her beautiful smile. When I hear certain melodies, especially some jazz standards, I can hear her crooning. Whenever I see some good looking strawberries, or cook her famous brisket, or cry at the slightest provocation: I think of her. It makes me wistful: simultaneously happy and sad. That’s the way it is as we lose loved ones and friends. They don’t disappear. Instead, they take the shape of music or aroma or a rainstorm or a tear.

I will always miss my mother. That’s a fact that just seems to go with the territory of living. There is literally nothing I can do about her loss or any other loss. I can only be thankful for every gift she ever gave me. I will always be indebted to her trust and her love of music that changed my life forever.

In nine months I only called my mother twice from Israel. No guilt, no recrimination, no disappointment. No trouble. Just joy. That was my mother.

Happy birthday, Mom.

The Holocaust is never far from mind. It churns on the horizon of Jewish consciousness like some malevolent poisonous cloud. It takes only one throwaway picture of smokestacks. The mention of the word ‘camp,’ or ‘gas,’ not to mention ‘German.’ It’s not like that all the time – but the atmosphere is always charged. The Jewish psyche has a hair trigger when it comes to anything even vaguely Holocaust-related.

In these last few weeks, the Jewish sensitivity to Holocaust conversation has been blasted from the subliminal and ambiguous to the explicit by a very controversial law that’s set to pass in Poland.

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party vowed to push through the “Death Camps Law,” soon after coming to power in 2015, depicting it as a way of protecting Poland’s good name. A key paragraph of the bill states: “Whoever claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich… or for other felonies that constitute crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or whoever otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes – shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.”

After an initial uproar, the issue seemed to have been dropped, only to reappear last week, when the lower house of parliament approved it on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Polish government officials argue the law is needed to fight expressions like “Polish death camps” for the camps Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

Poles were among those imprisoned, tortured and killed in the camps, and many today feel Poles are unfairly depicted as perpetrators of the Holocaust. While “Polish” is almost always used as a geographic designator, Poles still object because they feel it defames Poland for the Nazi-run camps, where Poles made up the largest group of victims after Jews. Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexing part of it to Germany and directly governing the rest. Unlike other countries occupied by Germany at the time, there was no collaborationist government in Poland. The pre-war Polish government and military fled into exile, except for an underground resistance army that fought the Nazis inside the country. The Polish Senate approved the bill Thursday despite mounting international opposition. The final step will be approval by President Andrzej Duda, who strongly supports it.

The Polish government is not the first to try to shape the history to its advantage. The Soviet Union long preferred to refer broadly to “victims of fascism,” avoiding any specific reference to Jews, and Austria for years painted itself as the “Nazis’ first victim,” denying all responsibility for its crimes.

Yet it is… undeniable that Poles were directly or indirectly complicit in the crimes committed on their land and that Poles were guilty of anti-Jewish pogroms during and after the war. These are the facts of that terrible history, and the Poles, like all other nations conquered by Germany that became embroiled in the Nazi atrocities, have an obligation to the victims and to the future to seek the full truth, however painful.

The response has been swift. Historians have vehemently protested, suggesting that this law allows the state to determine what is permitted or forbidden to say or write. State-sanctioned history is not history at all, but rather a form of propaganda. The Holocaust Memorial Museum stated its “deep concerns” about the law that would “chill a free and open dialogue addressing Poland’s history during the Holocaust” which takes place in “Polish schools and universities as well as in the media.”

Holocaust survivors are livid, contending that this bill defames the victims of the Holocaust who were murdered in Poland. It is, for many of them, a horrible betrayal of their suffering. For some Israelis, including the prime minister, it is an attempt to rewrite history and deny any complicity of Poles with Nazis working together to round up and execute Jews.

This Death Camps Law is an odious endeavor. It comes from an emergent nationalistic right-wing party in Poland seeking to rebrand Poland’s reputation. The new Polish law is fundamentally wrong. We should not be deterred from telling the historical truth that there were many cases in which Poles killed their Jewish neighbors before the Germans got to them and that in some places after the war, pogroms broke out as the Jews tried to return to what had once been home. But Polish suffering must have its space in the collective Holocaust memory as well. And Jewish life, not only death, should be celebrated in the thousand-year historical memory of what was one of the largest and most successful Jewish communities of the Diaspora. Poland was so much more for the Jews than just a massive graveyard.

This is one of the central conundrums of Jews in the 21^st century. As we move further away from the Holocaust, it begins to look different and feel different. As the example par excellence of genocide, it is referred to by many cultures. It cannot be – must not be – our historical touchstone only. We can say Poles suffered during WWII without diminishing our own historical truths.

The last survivors of Auschwitz are in their 80s and 90s. It will be up to us to understand the Holocaust and the complexities of our history to explain them to the next generations. This Polish law is way off the mark, but it won’t deter us from speaking our deepest truths.

At first glance, to the untrained eye, this find from a cave outside of Haifa looks a little suspect. Is it trash? A rind of an ancient fruit? But once you see that those are teeth, it becomes clear. Israeli archaeologists found the remains of a nearly 200,000-year-old human jawbone in a cave on Mount Carmel, a discovery they predict will change what we know about the evolution and spread of our species.

It’s been a commonly held belief that homo sapiens first appeared some 200,000 years ago in East Africa. These ancestral humans emerged from Africa around 70,000 to 60,000 years ago, occasionally interbreeding with Neanderthals and other hominids as they dispersed throughout the world.

The origin of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (AMHS) and the fate of the Neandertals have been fundamental questions in human evolutionary studies for over a century. A major obstacle to the resolution of these questions has been the lack of substantial and accurately dated hominid fossils from between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Only now it seems that we have to completely revise our timeline. Physical anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz, the lucky man whose dig made the discovery, says the find suggests our ancestors arose far earlier than thought. “[If] our species was in Israel 200,000 years ago, it suggests our species is very old—not just 300,000 years old, but older.”

I am fascinated by paleoanthropology, the field of study that seeks to trace the origins of humanity. They look at bone fragments, textiles, fossils, tools, burned out, ancient campfires, whatever they can find, to figure out how we got here. It is a science that just keeps morphing as new finds continue to turn up.

I used to think that humanity arose along a very linear plane: from the ocean to the shore, from the shore to the jungle, from the jungle to Newton Center. However, the latest science indicates that there were all kinds of hominids walking around Africa before homo sapiens made the eventual migration northward and into the rest of the world.

The important point is that, as the timeline keeps changing, we do too. In other words, 300,000 years ago our ancestors were emerging into the world. They are ALL of our ancestors. All those hominids who look like apes, the Neanderthals with large middle part of the face; the Australopithecus who climbed in the trees; or the Sahelanthropus with the sloping face, very prominent brow ridges, and elongated skull.

We have the choice to keep evolving and thus make the world livable for the next generation. I assume most of us who are homo sapiens have a similar impulse to protect our young, to see to it that they will be safe and happy. So why is it that we seem to fail so miserably? Why do nations commit atrocities against their people? Why do people of one race think that they are somehow better when it is clear that we are all descended from the same hominids? I mean, I hate to let the alt-right know this, but 300, 000 years ago, there were no white people…

And here I am, once again at a theme close to my heart. We are charged with building bridges, not walls. We are challenged to be inclusive, to see the other as a relative, not an alien.

That jawbone discovery is a celebration of the complexity and mystery of human existence. We’ve come a long way to finally get here. It would be nice if we could work harder to keep the world in one piece rather than break it into a million pieces of lost potential.

Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a directive to his national security adviser earlier this month to draft a plan for the expulsion of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers who entered Israel illegally over the last decade. Israel said recently that migrants would be given the choice of receiving a one-time payment of $3,500 to be deported to an African country or be sent to a detention facility for an indefinite period.

The asylum seekers who crossed Africa and entered Israel at its southern border were part of the wave of Africans who fled the continent, seeking better lives and in some cases refuge from wars and upheaval. Many of the migrants claim they are seeking refugee status, but of the some 60,000 who have come through Israel, only ten have ever been recognized by the state as refugees, according to UNHCR data – eight Eritreans and two Sudanese.

Israel started erecting a barrier on the Egyptian border in 2010, completing it in 2013, which has stopped the flow of migrants. The Israeli Defense Ministry said there were only 11 successful attempts to cross the border in 2016.

The forced deportation of these African refugees is a terrible idea for so many reasons. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of ADL, and Mark Hetfield, the CEO of HIAS, wrote a joint letter reacting to Netanyahu’s intention.

Our objections to the new Israeli government plan stem from numerous reports which indicate that those asylum seekers who previously left Israel have been unable to return safely to their home countries, and many have encountered violence and inhumane living conditions in countries they have sought refuge in, Greenblatt and Hetfield explained.

Testimonies of people who were relocated by Israel to third countries in Africa indicate that they did not find durable protection there and risked their lives by taking dangerous onward journeys through conflict zones in South Sudan, Sudan, and Libya to seek protection elsewhere. Some have drowned at sea en route to Europe, while others were reportedly detained, tortured and extorted by human traffickers.

As American Jews, one of our greatest concerns is the well-being and security of Israel; we want to see it prosper and overcome all of the challenges its precarious location imposes on it. We also care about our shared Jewish values and refugee heritage—a very human concern that reaches across borders and distances—and unifies us as a people.

That the state of Israel would send away people who came to Israel seeking safety and freedom contradicts so many essential aspects of Jewish tradition and values. Why do I have to bring up the adage from the Torah, the one that appears 36 times, that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, and that therefore we must have compassion for all strangers… to the Israeli government?

What a disaster! For the Africans who face deportation and their families, it is a nightmare. And for the state of Israel, could there be any more Jewishly inconsistent and alienating act? Do you think Millennials have a problem relating to Israel now? This will create a mess no Birthright trip can salvage.

If this expulsion goes through, I fear that it will be a terrible blow to the heart and soul of the Jewish State. We Jews have come too far and seen far too much not to be horrified by the prospect of Israeli troops and police rounding up Africans and putting them in chains.

We must stand for and with others, particularly the downtrodden and the vulnerable of the world. I’d like to believe that Elie Wiesel would be among those leading the moral opposition to this action by the Netanyahu government. In fact, there is a new nonprofit in Israel called the Anne Frank Home Sanctuary Movement. Hundreds of Israeli rabbis have pledged to provide sanctuary to as many African asylum seekers as they can accommodate, evoking Anne Frank’s memory as an emotional bridge.

I don’t want to descend into melancholy over this political and moral crisis. I don’t want to be a cynic, shaking my head and succumbing to this morose slow-motion train wreck. I will do my best to reach out to the positive, to support the work of the rabbis and activists in Israel to protect the lives of our African brothers and sisters. There is no other option. This is life and death. We cannot stand idly by as our neighbor bleeds.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in Israel. I know my first time was in 1972 when, after high school, I went on Young Judaea Year Course. To say it was a wild and crazy experience is the height of understatement [can an understatement have height?] My most recent time in Israel was last February with our 10^th graders on the TBA annual Boston-Haifa excursion. Francie Weinberg (our fabulous youth educator) and I, along with our wrecking crew, bounced all over Israel and had a ball.

As for the intervening 44 years, I just don’t remember. That truth is not meant to be braggadocio. If anything, it is a sign of my increasingly unreliable memory… But I can say with authority that I was excited and very enthusiastic about every trip, whether with a large temple group, a gaggle of 10^th graders, a sabbatical trip with my wife and a few kids in tow, CCAR conventions, and so forth.

The promise of the state of Israel resides deep in my heart. From my first nickel in the pushke (the blue and white tin for donations to the JNF) at my Uncle Izzy’s sandwich shop in East Pittsburgh, to Sunday School classes looking at pictures of kibbutzniks with rifles in one hand and shovels in the other, to the Six Day War, I was all in. My Jewish identity was, and is still, inextricably tied to a beautifully naïve, sincere Zionism. Like many baby boomers and older folks, the roots of my Zionism were unsullied by Israeli intransigence, triumphalism, and profoundly dysfunctional governance at every level.

But that was then, and this is now. It is this terrible yin/yang effect that so hurts my soul. All of those dreams of the mythic Israel are shattered. Read Shavit’s book, My Promised Land. Read David Grossman’s shattering novels or Amos Oz. Read Chemi Shalev or Brad Burston. You will discover that the dream known as Israel has become a much more complicated place when it comes to democracy and plurality and equality. The Israel of today is more than a great start-up nation – and less. The Israel of Bibi and the religious right and the security guards who strike Reform rabbis and men and women who dare to walk together with a Torah towards the Western Wall; the Israel that is deporting Africans who walked across the wilderness seeking asylum there.  This is the Israel we did not hear about in temple growing up.

That’s a problem because the cognitive dissonance between the faded mythic representation of the Jewish state and the real-time nation is creating a generation of American Jews who feel misled, or worse by their Zionist elders. There are Millennials who loved Birthright, but still wonder why they were never told about the complicated stuff. They feel alienated by the things they read and see. Of course, there are lots of unflattering hyperboles and outright lies about Israel and the Jews. But the stuff we read is not all anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. To disregard it all is to live with the myth alone, and that isn’t sustainable. No nation, no people can live with a two-dimensional framework.

The Israel dream that sustains me on every trip is one I cannot forget. Whenever I get upset with some outrageous act or statement by a fascistic alt-right racist or a fawning politician, I reread the Bill of Rights. It reminds me that the USA, at its very core, is built, not on the hate and ignorance that spews out of certain places like toxic fumes from a sewer, but rather it is built on the ideals of freedom and justice for all.  Whenever I read some rabid hate speech directed to my Reform community and me by an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, or hear a press conference by a smug, triumphalist Israeli political hack, I reread the Declaration of Independence of Israel. The part I almost know now by heart is as follows:

The state of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

 These words are the hope for the future of Israel and the Jewish people. These words define my definition of progressive Zionism. For the rest of my life, for as long as I have the true blessing of going to Israel, whether as a group leader or a group participant, I will visit the places and people of Israel who best exemplify this spirit of openness and freedom, of bridges and not walls. I will always honor the myths of Israel and how they inspired me. But I will not pretend that they are the foundation of Israel. The foundation is still being built.

Oy. I briefly considered writing the word ‘oy’ a thousand times for this week’s Before Shabbat. Because that’s how I feel at the end of this week. I’d like to believe this dark, heavy feeling is due to the excess tryptophan from all that turkey last week. Or maybe I could blame it on the quiet house and the absence of my kids and grandkids after the Thanksgiving festivities – you know, those post-holiday blues.

Only I know that’s not it, at least, not entirely. For one, there’s the growing list of men who have sexually harassed and/or assaulted women or other men. I look at all of those names, and I feel so let down. Among them are men of renown. Trusted men of erudition and insight. Creative, enlightened men. Politicians who have worked for the empowerment of women and minorities in various contexts. Men of power and presence possessing true gravitas. Men who have debased women with an attitude and with actions that are shameful and narcissistic and some of which are criminal.

I don’t know how to understand this story, how to ‘metabolize’ it. It is complicated. But at the center of its dark heart, it is grim news.

Next, there’s the North Koreans’ latest missile launch which seems to prove that they’re getting closer to creating a way to nuke us. I’m not building a fallout shelter anytime soon, but it doesn’t make me feel good to have this on my anxiety radar screen.

Of course, there’s the President’s tweet the other day of unattributed violent anti-Muslim videos retweeted from a British alt right website. I would assume that even if you voted for the sitting president, you’d agree this latest round of tweets isn’t particularly good for our bond with the British. Why would he risk destabilizing our relationship with such a loyal ally? This unpredictability is sometimes nerve-wracking (see the previous paragraph).

I won’t continue the list, though you’re most welcome to send me your anxiety nominations. I will tell you that I went to http://www.globalgoodnews.com in desperate search of something cheery. This website, connected to the Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation empire, seemed a bit sketchy at first. Their examples of good news stories included stuff like, “Growing demand for Spanish organic fruits and vegetables in Sweden,” or “Pennsylvania offers $30 million to create solar jobs”. This hardly counters the big-league negativity I’ve been complaining about. But… there’s also this: “Woman raises more than $60K for homeless man who gave his last $20 to rescue her”, or “Pioneering climate fund for developing world gets a boost at U.N. talks”. These articles prove that the world is only filled with bewildered innocents and horrible perpetrators of every imaginable sin.

I am such a dualist, a true Hegelian fascinated with and held prisoner by the endless dialectical Mobius twists. To that end, any news item that ends without bloodshed, arrest, or mendacity is worth looking at. I need it to gain some sense of spiritual balance. Good news never makes bad news better; it just reminds us that the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train – sometimes.

Shabbat Shalom

rebhayim

A few days ago, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the URJ and, parenthetically, a longtime friend, was in Israel to celebrate the ordination of the 100^th Reform Israeli rabbi. For all Reform Jews, it was something to rejoice about. Here’s an account of the event from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.

“About 150 Reform Jews, both from Israel and overseas, arrived at the Western Wall in the morning to participate in a special prayer and Torah-reading service in honor of four new rabbis scheduled to be ordained by the movement at a special ceremony on Thursday evening. The delegation included the entire board of governors of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, which ordains Reform rabbis in Israel.

Participants in the morning event first held a prayer service at the temporary egalitarian plaza located at the southern side of the Western Wall. Carrying eight Torah scrolls with them, they then proceeded to the upper plaza of the Western Wall – an area designated for national ceremonies. Security guards tried to stop them, and a scuffle broke out.

“Many of those holding Torah scrolls were hit and punched by the guards,” said Kariv. “I saw Rabbi Rick Jacobs taking the brunt of the blows.”

All the security guards at the site are employees of the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the Orthodox-run organization that administers it.

The group participants ultimately broke through the guards and held a Torah reading service at the upper plaza that included women. They sang Hatikvah, the Israel national anthem, at its conclusion.”

There’s some video footage of the struggle online. It’s shaky – because it’s a riot… But what’s clear is that a bunch of security guards, with complete impunity, are working hard to take the away the Torah scrolls being held by our Reform leaders. In Israel.

My first response is my relatively new, dark take on big-stage politics. It goes like this: I have less and less faith in any national government – ours or

Israel’s – to effect true progressive change. In Israel, this relates to many things, from making peace to dealing with rising nationalist violence to acknowledging the presence and the rights of deeply passionate Jews who happen not to be ultra-Orthodox.

Given this “glass is half-empty” philosophy, I ask: why would Women of the Wall along with my friend, Rick, and great leaders like Anat Hoffman, waste their time at the Western Wall? Why try to further their agenda of inclusion and acceptance in a place where ultra-Orthodox bureaucrats, ensconced in positions of power, will do anything to stem the tide of Jewish pluralism? Why, my dear friends and Reform leaders, do we bother sticking our hands in a yellow jacket nest, knowing only that we will be stung, the press will gasp yet again at this internecine struggle, and the Israeli government will do nothing. Absolutely nothing. The security guards will not be punished. There will be no apology.

It just feels so futile, like a recipe for failure. There must be another venue where we can do something powerful and positive. Doing battle with our ultra-Orthodox brothers and sisters will only accentuate our religious disenfranchisement in Israel. It’s not good for the Jews…

And yet… Surely, Martin Luther King and the great civil rights leaders of the 60s and the anti-war demonstrators of the 60s and 70s felt themselves to be up against insuperable odds. And there were lots of naysayers in the black community itself, saying things like I’m saying.

Perhaps my politics of resignation and hopelessness are a sign of how tired I am of feeling like there’s so little recourse for change beyond the local. But I have to listen to my friend, Rabbi Rick Jacobs who says that the incident expresses “very loudly and clearly that we’re not going away. We’re not going to wait for our rightful place to be protected. Everyone has a place at the Kotel and should be respected… We will not accept anything less than equality at the Western Wall, equality in marriage, conversion and funding. Today is just another step in a long journey and millions of Jews walk forward with us.”

My second response to the violent handling of Reform leaders and rabbis is to double down. We know the ultra-orthodox are implacable foes in this arena. They will not move. Netanyahu will not move despite what he’s promised to the rest of the world’s Jews, which was to welcome all Jews at the Kotel.

So we will move. We will keep fighting the good fight. Because what we’re doing is the right thing to do. It is the Jewish thing to do. It is declaring that we are one people with equal access to public holy sites. It is time to knock down the walls of prejudice and ultra-Orthodox hegemony. No more status quo.

I’m not sure if this means the cup is half full. What it does mean is that we are committed to democracy in Israel, and here in America, too. It shouldn’t feel like a struggle. We live in a country that is built upon the ideology of freedom and respect for all. But we are being called upon to safeguard that ideology. It is no different in Israel.  Without that freedom, there is only darkness – and that cup is only empty.

Shabbat Shalom,

rebhayim

If I were elected to be king of the Jews, I would immediately invoke the 11th commandment: “Thou shalt vote.”  We Jews remember all too well the countless places where we lived and struggled.  There was no justice, no representation, no power.   We relied on bribes and payoffs and ransoms to protect ourselves.  We had nothing else. We were the hapless objects of history, moved around like pawns on a chess board.

The sense of powerlessness can become toxic. It sometimes rendered us as passive. We believed that there was no way to alter the game. It’s like that terrific scene in the Torah portion Shlach Lecha when the Israelite scouts return from their reconnaissance mission. They tell Moses and the Israelites, “We felt so diminished compared to the inhabitants of Canaan. We must have looked like grasshoppers in their eyes.” Notice that no Canaanite made that comparison. The grasshopper analogy was based on the scouts’ own fragile sense of vulnerability. It was about their lack of confidence. They assumed a powerless stance and could not move beyond it.

If the nadir of Jewish powerlessness was the Holocaust, then the life-altering rise to power was in 1948 with the birth of the state of Israel. That event changes everything. The world saw Jews in a brand new light. More importantly, Jews saw Jews in a new light. We were powerful. We were resolute. No one would mess with us anymore. The 6 Day war underscored that expression of power.

It is worth mentioning that Israel has shown us what happens when the exercise of power becomes hubris. When those in power become arrogant and make decisions utterly devoid of a desire for compromise or collaboration, it creates true obstacles to understanding that the other is us.

To live in an open and free nation is a blessing of profound dimensions.  To have a say in our political destiny is still rather new for us along the spectrum of history.  The 115th Congress’s freshman class boasts the largest percentage of Jewish members in recorded history, at 8%; we’re 2% of the total US population.  In the 114th Congress, just 1% of freshmen members were Jews. It’s truly a modern political miracle.

Only it doesn’t happen via miracles.  Campaigning is hard, sweaty, backbreaking, challenging work, regardless of the level of office. Ask any TBA member who’s run for local or regional office.

I love this country, and I love my city of residence. I am proud that TBA is a voting site. I don’t vote in the temple’s ward, and I’m sorry about that. I regard the voting stations like shrines to democracy, a system of government that eschews any co-mingling of church and state. No one is registered to vote by religion or race. All citizens are invited to the table of freedom.

I won’t tell you who I’m voting for in this Before Shabbat. Ask me in the parking lot… But I will tell you this: I am voting on November 7^th. I can also say to you, my beloved congregation, “Thou shalt vote!”

Shabbat Shalom.

rebhayim