Shabbat Bereishit 5784 – Israel at War
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
My knowledge of “secular music” as Cantor Zoe calls it, or at least current music, usually comes through the walls of an almost teenager’s bedroom or accompanies lifts to and from school; it even makes the sounds of guitar lessons a pleasure to have echoing around the house but it’s what gives me the reference point of Irish singer-songwriter Cian Ducrot. His song “All for You” tells the story of a man in mourning for a lost relationship, wondering what he could have done differently to prevent the great absence he now feels in his life:
“And I should have called
And I should have tried
And I should have walked you home every night
And I should have kissed you ten thousand times
Just to tell you I love you.”
It is to ‘a love-lost’, the environmental equivalent of the rather less current 1970s Joni Mitchell “Big Yellow Taxi,” mourning the loss of the beauty of green spaces for the convenience of carparks:
“Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”
I’m worried that this week’s Torah portion is the biblical warning I’ve never heard until this devastating week. The paradise of Eden, the love of a brother, how many warnings do we need to understand this message of not knowing how lucky we are, how fortunate we are to have something, until we have lost it.
This week I heard the warning but I don’t know what to do with it. This week I stand here genuinely frightened for the future of the State of Israel as a homeland and safe-haven for the Jewish people. Having been born in 1979, six years after the Yom Kippur war, I have known horrific terrorist attacks, suicide bombings and I thought I knew the challenges of life in Israel having been studying in Jerusalem during the outbreak of the second intifada. Yet I have only known the military might of Israel, only ever needed to encourage peace, only ever wanted to quash what often felt like the Goliath response to the stones of David.
Until last Saturday when everything was different. A day which will go down in Jewish history in the list of devastating days we commemorate on Tisha B’av. A day when more Jewish lives were lost that in any other day since the Holocaust. This week I’ve been forced to ask the question, have I taken my relationship with Israel for granted for too long? Am I going to be singing my own song of loss and regret when it has slipped from my grasp and I didn’t know why I needed it, didn’t know it was there? Until, until…I can’t even think it could happen.
And as I say those words there will be rye smiles and shrugs. Those who will say she’s being dramatic, those who will say it won’t end like, that it can’t, and those who will say she’s making it sound worse than it is and I was transported back into the words of Jonathan Freedland in his book, “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World.”
“Walter’s escape had been built on his initial conviction that facts could save lives, that information would be the weapon with which he would thwart the Nazi plan to eliminate the Jews. Witnessing the fate of the Czech family camp, and its residents’ immovable faith, despite the evidence all around them, that they would somehow be spared, had led him to understand a more complicated truth: that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed, especially when it comes to mortal threats. On this, if nothing else, he and Yehuda Bauer might eventually have found common ground: only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action. The French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, ‘I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”
I’ve sat through hours of news, I’ve scrolled endlessly through photos of the massacred, the wounded, those who have been taken hostage and those telling stories of life between rushing to and from bomb shelters and I know that we have so so much information and I question if any of us can really believe it. I am not for one second meaning that in the sense that the trolls of Twitter would like me to mean it, I am not doubting if these horrific scenes took place or if the numbers have been inflated. I am asking can I truly comprehend it and does that disbelief, that incomprehensible nature of the horror let me off dealing with the question which cuts to the heart of this, have the events of this week posed such an existential threat to the very existence of the future of the State of Israel and if so what on earth are we doing about it to ensure that we don’t realise too late?
Six million is one of those numbers that I’ve never been able to fathom. I walk round the empty, echoey synagogues of Eastern Europe as a tourist and I can’t really imagine that there was once a thriving shul like this in Budapest, Prague and Amsterdam. I’m sickened to the pit of my stomach as I walk round Auschwitz, Birkenau and Teresin. But as Walter proved, facts, information is not enough. Faced with the realities of horror its too easy to say it can’t be. That quirk of the human mind meant people filed into cattle trucks and walked to their own deaths. We need information and we need to believe it. Because in the same way as I say, “in 1938 they were given a ticket out of Berlin and they didn’t take it, how could they have been so naïve as to what was to come.” I don’t want my son and my grandchildren saying to me, we had a Jewish homeland, you should have done more to make sure it was still there for us. How could you have been so naïve? How could you have never thought defeat was a possibility?
When we teach about the Holocaust we don’t teach about facts and the horrifying magnitude of the scale, we stand one person up at the front of the room and they tell their own personal story. This is what happened to me. This was my experience. I might not be able to fathom six million but I know the stories of Eva Clark, Ziggy Shipper and Rudi Leavor.
We cannot sit here and talk about the catastrophic number of people who were killed this time last week, we need to be telling their stories and we need to be telling the stories of those for whom Israel has been the safe-haven these 75 years, the place that took them in when being a Jew elsewhere was not safe.
We are all connected to the stories of the individuals whose lives have been lost this week. Members of FRS alone are the nieces and nephews of the founding members of Kibbutz Be’eri where so much blood was shed. Members of FRS were at school with the guys on security at the music festival where atrocities were committed. Members of FRS have cousins taken hostage and are mourning IDF soldiers they’ve known since they were in nappies then killed in cold blood.
We cannot have the information without the knowledge, we cannot let the magnitude let us settle on it being incomprehensible, we can’t be naïve enough to say that Israel has always fought back and won so why should this time be different. We have to say we are on the precipice of losing our homeland, we have a duty to the next generation to face this moment square on and say, I have a role. My role is to tell the story of these individuals and make it known why the narrative of occupation and apartheid is giving people permission to turn the other cheek and think that we don’t need allies and supporters as much as the Palestinians need allies and supporters which they absolutely do as well.
So if you are watching the news endlessly, being weighed down by the grief and loss, remember your natural default position will be that it’s an incomprehensible situation and that everything will turn out ok in the end because it always does. There will be scars that will run deep but there always have been. Then you need to stop and find the story of the individual. Not the story that says this is sad and unfair but the story that says this is the person who fled Iran, or Germany, Iraq or Ukraine, Israel is their home. This is the person who raised their family and invented irrigation systems to feed the planet or navigation systems that keeps cars moving round London. This is the individual who is studying, researching, inventing in some of the greatest institutions in the world. This is not a war zone, it’s a home. A home to Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze and if Hamas take control, there will be no “happily ever after”, there won’t even be echoey museums.
It cannot be the politically correct default position to condemn Israel. Truly fighting the cause of the Palestinians means freeing them from Hamas control so that they are not used as weapons against Israel. Bringing knowledge rather than information means telling a story of individuals who desperately want to live in peace. A peace which can only come when we see each other as human and not as sides.
Maps change, countries come and go but we cannot allow ourselves to stand by and watch something disappear because we didn’t know how much we loved it, needed it until it was gone.
We can’t be sitting here with our modern take on “By the Rivers of Babylon”;
“If only I’d done something, if only I’d thought it possible, I didn’t know what I had 'til it's gone?”
We have a collective responsibility, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Brits, left and right, to say Israel has the right to exist and Israel needs the support to ensure that continues to happen.
Od lo avda tikvateinu
Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of 2,000 years, to be a free nation in our own land.
