When I became your
Rabbi 13 years ago, I was asked by a congregant about my goals. I
answered that one of my goals was to help Congregation Beth Shalom develop a
closer relationship with Israel. As a University Junior I had been a
student at the One Year Program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Israel
became the centerpiece of my Jewish identity. I longed to return. It took
me 33 years before I was able to take my second trip to Israel when I had the
opportunity to study at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Rabbinic Torah Study
Seminar in Jerusalem in 2006. Since becoming your Rabbi I have traveled to
Israel fifteen times, including leading several invaluable rich and
transformative congregational trips. Naturally I am aware that many of
you must have visited Israel on your own. Many of our students
have visited Israel through organized trips like Taam Yisrael for eighth
graders or Birthright for young adults. We have had congregants who have lived
in Israel for extended periods of time, and some have made aliyah to Israel. We
have studied about Israel through the Hartman program, through the Melton
program and in the Thursday morning Study Group. In addition, we have had a
series of guest speakers who have further enhanced and contributed to our
knowledge of Israel. Also, for the past several years adults have been able to
study and learn modern Hebrew through our Adult Education Program. From
where I stand I would say that we as a congregation have become more
inquisitive and more knowledgeable, more understanding and more connected as
well as more cognizant and closer to Israel
Yet, American Jewry has
been drifting away from Israel, particularly when it comes to our younger
generation of Jews. The recent Pew Study of American Jewry found that
Twenty-seven percent -- about one quarter of those between 18 and 29 say caring
about Israel is not important to them, compared with 8% of those over 65 who
say the same. Support for boycotting Israel — at 13% — is nearly double
in that age group compared to older generations. 25% of American Jews agree
that Israel is an “Apartheid State”.
This rather
alarming and painful situation has been hard, both for those of us who
love Israel in the United States and for Israelis. Ron Dermer, former Israeli
ambassador to the United States, caused a bit of a kerfuffle back in May when
he said that Israel would be better off prioritizing building relationships
with American evangelicals than with the American Jewish community. He opined
that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is Evangelical
Christians, both because they far outnumber Jews in the United States and
because of their -- and here I quote -- “passionate and unequivocal support for
Israel”. American Jews, he added are - quote -- “Disproportionately among our
critics”.
Rabbi Daniel
Gordis writes in his 2018 book, Divided We Stand, that American Jewry’’s
ambivalence toward Israel is not only about what Israel does, but, more
fundamentally, it is related to what Israel is. Based on what Rabbi Gordis
postulates in this book, I want to outline three reasons that can help us
understand the ambivalent, sometimes turbulent and often confusing
relationship between American Jews and Israel.
First, we need to
recognize that Israel's purpose and mission is fundamentally different from
that of the United States.
Second, we need to
understand that Israeli Jews and American Jews have very different ideas about
Jewish identity.
Third, we need to
acknowledge how our hopes and expectations of Israel to be “a light unto the
nations” in the words of the prophet Isaiah, have not been fully realized, and
how painful that is for us.
Point number one:
Mission and purpose:
Israel is a Jewish State
created for Jews. And the United States?
Engraved on the base of
the Statue of Liberty, the iconic symbol of America, is a poem by the American
Jew, Emma Lazuras. In part, it reads
From her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes
command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Give me your tired,
your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of
your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me; I lift my
lamp before the golden door.”
The United States,
according to this poem, has a mission to welcome all the people in the world.
We are, as we say in Yiddish, Die Goldene Medina, a beacon of hope, a
land where dreams come true. Throughout American history, at times, some have
been more welcome than others. But as an ideal, as an aspiration, and at times
as a reality, people from around the world, of all religions,
of all races, of all ethnicities, have been welcome to our
shores.
Israel’s mission is
different. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 favors the establishment of “a
national home for the Jewish people” in British ruled Palestine. The United
Nations Partition agreement of 1947 divided the British Mandate into two
states, one Jewish and one Arab. Unlike the United States, Israel was conceived
as a particular land for a particular people.
Like the United States,
Israel is committed to equal rights for all. Non- Jews may be citizens and have
equal rights under the law. However, in order for Israel to remain a Jewish
State for the Jewish people, a significant majority of the population must be
and remain Jewish. When, as demographers tell us, the United States has a
majority minority population by 2046, it will be in keeping with our motto and
our mission, E pluribus unum, “Out of many- one”. We are a country of peoples
from all over the world, joined together to form one nation, the United States
of America. If, on the other hand, Jews cease to be the majority of the
population in Israel by 2046, the Zionist dream -- the dream of Jewish
self-determination, “to live as a free people in our own land” in the words of
HaTikvah -- would have failed. This is why there must eventually be a two-state
solution, with the Jewish State and a Palestinian state living side by side in
peace. In one, binational state, Arabs would outnumber Jews, thus making Jews,
once again, a vulnerable minority in a majority, Muslim land. That has proven
too risky and dangerous in the past.
Point number 2 -- Jewish
identity
Israelis Jews and
American Jews also view their Jewishness differently. In 1955, American
intellectual and political scholar Will Herberg published a book with the title
Catholic Protestant Jew. In it he argued that America was “a three-religion
country” and that people no longer identified themselves by their ethnicity,
but rather by the religious community to which they belonged. In America,
Judaism is a religion. In Israel, Judaism is an ethnicity, a nationality. In
Israel You are an Israeli Jew or an Israeli Arab.
This difference in understanding
our respective identities plays out in a number of ways. For instance, the
average Israeli has very little understanding of the differences among Reform,
Conservative and Orthodox Judaism in the United States. Therefore, when
American Jews advocate for equal standing in the public sphere for Conservative
and Reform Judaism in Israel, most Israelis have little idea of what we are
talking about. When American Jews criticize Israel for its lack of religious
pluralism, Israelis counter that their society is an incredibly pluralistic
one. There are secular people who eat shrimp on Shabbas, there are Hassidim who
follow all the mitzvot, there are communities from North Africa, Yemen, France
and South America who have their own synagogues and follow their own particular
rituals. How much more pluralistic, how much more tolerant, how much more
accepting of differences, does Israel have to be, they ask? Some progressive
Israelis may be sympathetic to the Women of the Wall, a group that seeks to
achieve the right for women to wear prayer shawls, pray and read from the Torah
collectively and out loud at the Western Wall (Kotel) in Jerusalem. But Israeli
progressives’ energies are primarily directed toward issues of foreign policy
and social equality, not toward whether women can bring a Torah to the Western
Wall.
Point 3 -- Myth versus
reality
A third factor
contributing to the American Jewish drift away from Israel is the myth of
Israel coming into conflict with the reality of everyday life. Let me
explain! My generation grew up in the aftermath of Israel’s War for
Independence in 1948……. As we know in that war a geographically tiny
Israel fought for her life and survived the onslaught of five Arab
armies. It was without question a costly but heroic victory. Israel was
poor in those years, but determinedly plucky. My generation experienced the
lightning victory of the Six Day War, the remarkable rescue at Entebbe, the
harrowing vulnerability of the 1973 War with Egypt. But statecraft is messy
business, politics requires compromises, and the reality of surviving in a
hostile region forced successive Israeli governments to make difficult
decisions that, at times, led to questionable decisions and actions that are
difficult to defend.
Some of these decisions
and actions, in turn, have led others to question Israel’s very right to exist
as a nation.
Without taking into
account the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, campaigns have
been launched that equate Israeli treatment of Palestinians with the apartheid
policies of South Africa in the mid-20th century. They demand divestment of
Israeli companies from university, church, municipal, union and other
portfolios. They demand the boycott of Israeli products, professionals,
professional associations, academic institutions, and artistic performances. They
demonize Israel and seek to isolate
Israel from the rest of the nations of the world. They assign one-sided blame
to Israel, and, by association, supporters of Israel, for the conflict. They
demand that Israel fix the problem without asking anything in return from
Palestinians or other Arab states, who are consistently described as powerless
victims of Israel.
This “anti-zionism” is
increasingly difficult to distinguish from anti-semitism, and, in fact there
have been significant increases in verbal and physical attacks against Jews in
the West. This has led Israeli politician and intellectual Einat Wilff to
suspect that “it’s not that attacks on Jews in the West are the unfortunate and
unintended consequence of the persistent demonization of Israel, but rather the
demonization of the Jewish state is undertaken so as to re-legitimize attacks
on Jews in the West.” In other words, Israeli actions are not the cause or
precipitant of expressions of anti-semitism in the West; they are an excuse for
expressions of anti-semitism in the West.
Scholar and Rabbi
Yitz Greenberg, one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary Jewish
life, writes, “The Jewish state—no matter how it strives—is incapable of being
ethically without blemish. All exercises of power by all human entities are
inescapably flawed. Therefore, Israel’s right to exist cannot depend on its
meeting the perfection standard of ethics……….. If the Jewish state’s fate is
conditioned on its meeting a certain standard of moral excellence—and other
nations not so—then this is a double standard that endangers Israel.
…..unrealistic expectations and conditioned support for its right to existence
are unfair and immoral.”
My main message for you
this morning is, please, don’t give up on Israel. It is not the perfect country
that we would wish for -- but no country is perfect. Israel does not always
make us proud; it sometimes makes us sad and often exasperates us. We
are critical of the lack of separation of church and state resulting in the
stranglehold that the Haredi community has over lifecycle affairs in Israel. We
are hurt by the dismissive attitude taken by Israeli religious authorities to
American expressions of our Jewish faith. We are frustrated by the seemingly
endless wars, by the settlements in Judea and Samaria and by the lack of
progress on the Palestinian front. Our response, however, should not be to wash
our hands of Israel, to turn our backs on the Jewish State. Rather, as partners
with God, we American Jews must redouble our efforts to strengthen Israel, even
when her actions elicit conflicting feelings in us. Part of that effort
is to encourage Israel to treat all her citizens, Jewish and Arab, and her
neighbors, including the Palestinians, with dignity, with decency and with
respect. We must convince Israel that there is more than one expression of
Judaism, and that Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and other
formulations of Judaism need to be recognized, accepted and legitimized.
Finally we must use our influence as American citizens to assure that the
United States remains a reliable -- and understanding -- ally on the world
stage.
Shana Tova
Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
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