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Partition Day: November 29, 1947

On this day in 1947, November 29, the United Nations approved a plan for the partition of British-governed Palestine into three areas: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a UN-governed enclave encompassing Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The entire area would be joined in an economic union.

The Jewish Agency, which was the official Jewish leadership of the territory, immediately accepted the proposal. The Arab Higher Committee in Palestine as well as the Arab League of other nations all rejected the proposal, because of the Jewish state.

The Arab State of Palestine would have come into existence in 1948, had the Arabs decided to accept the UN plan and proclaimed the state.

Partition was no one’s ideal – not the Jews, not the Arabs within Palestine, not the surrounding Arab countries, not the British. It was the least bad solution the UN could come up with.

No Jew or Muslim believed they should give up Jerusalem, as all would have been required to do. No one by 1947 was interested in a completely joint, binational governing mechanism, which had been discussed at various times within the British administration but not implemented, and among Jewish-Arab groups like Brit Shalom that had dissipated years earlier. The Arab leaderships in and around Palestine rejected the Jewish return to the land entirely. The Jews did not love the partition in principle. They were concerned about whether the small amount of land dedicated to the Jewish state would be defensible and could sustain the population. There were Jewish groups opposed to partition who had militias. The main difference the Jewish Agency Executive fought back against those militias for the most part in their attempts to sabotage the UN plan.

So partition was the UN’s proposal. The Jews’ representatives accepted the UN partition plan, and the Arabs rejected it. The Jews would have abided by the terms and map of the plan and were prepared to up until the moment of the British withdrawal, even after months of fighting, had the Arab armies not invaded.

When the new phase of fighting broke out beginning November 30, 1947, while the British were still present and then beginning their withdrawal, the Jews’ objective was to secure the areas assigned to the Jewish state, plus an open road linking Jewish areas assigned to the prospective state with Jewish areas in Jerusalem. Jewish Jerusalem was very quickly under a complete siege, with little food and water as well as bombardment and terror attacks. The road from Jewish areas on the coast went through a narrow pass in the hills that was controlled by the Arabs and frequently blocked.

The Arabs’ objective was to take over all of the territory, including that assigned by the UN to the Jewish state.

Today could have been a national celebration for Israelis and Palestinians, the 76^th anniversary of a world-changing event. So many lives and communities could have been saved. If only. Instead there was a war, and the map changed because of who won or lost which battles in which areas.

There is much more to say also about what drove the parties’ considerations in 1947-1948, who prevented a Palestinian-governed state even in 1948, and the displacement of both Palestinians and Jews in the territory and throughout the Middle East in the immediate aftermath. But today 76 years ago, it all could have been prevented.

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A few connected and somewhat-connected links:

Here’s a glance at partition proposals from 1937 to 2008. The video is from 2019, so the “proposal” at the end is not something I’m endorsing here; it seems like a very bare minimum. I really recommend the Unpacked series of educational videos and podcasts. They are from a Jewish-Israeli point of view, self-critical about and within that point of view, embrace complexity and value coexistence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYWII25cxM

This is an account of the Abbas-Olmert negotiations of 2008, and an indication of how serious and close to agreement they were and where the major problems ended up remaining: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13Israel-t.html

Here is the very long August 1947 report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). It’s illuminating for its detail about the nature of the land and the conflict to that date:
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/NL3/729/28/PDF/NL372928.pdf?OpenElement

O Jerusalem! is a classic book about 1947-1948, from the partition vote through the war. The focus is on Jerusalem and the voices are local Jewish and Arab, with also some detours to the "halls of power". I imagine there is better history and historiography since its publishing, but it's solid and fair and descriptive. https://bookshop.org/p/books/o-jerusalem-larry-collins/7488416?ean=9780671662417

Gratitude Is Our Name (Even Now)

This is my D'var Torah for Parashat Vayetze, "Shabbat Thanksgiving" 5784. I wrote it while feeling grateful for the hostages who have been returned, heartbroken for those still captive and the families not returned whole, and grateful for the naming celebration at services this Shabbat.

It is Thanksgiving Shabbat and what a better time to be celebrating namings! It’s just what we need for the time we’ve been going through. Thank you to the family for giving us something extra to gather around in gratitude.

 

Giving thanks is not just an important Jewish spiritual practice. Gratitude is the essence of both Shabbat and the Jewish people.

It’s the essence of Shabbat, which we know from a song we sing from the psalms -- mizmor shir l’yom haShabbat, tov l’hodot l’Adonai -- a song for the day of Shabbat: Good to give thanks to the Divine (Psalm 92:1). L’hodot is the same Hebrew root or shoresh as todah, the familiar way to say thank you. The midrash says that is the first song ever written, by Adam and Chava in the Garden of Eden, and it was inspired by their first Shabbat.

 

And gratitude is the essence of the Jewish people because our name Yehudim comes from a moment of thankfulness. In our parasha, Leah Imeinu (our mother) gives birth to her fourth son and the Torah says: This moment I am thanking the Divine, ha’pa’am odeh et Adonai (Genesis 29:35), and she called his name Yehudah. Yehudah also comes from the same shoresh as todah. Yehudah is Judah, and Yehudi gets transliterated from Hebrew to Greek down the line eventually to English as “Jew”.

 

So gratitude is literally the name of the Jewish people, and it’s the original song of Shabbat. We are meant to be the thankful people, and Shabbat is Thanksgiving Day every week.

 

These two origin stories for Jewish gratitude have something in common, the Garden of Eden and the birth of Yehudah, and that thing is that both of them seem at first like non-gratitude moments.

 

The midrash makes Adam and Chavah the authors of the song tov l’hodot, it’s good to give thanks, and here’s how it happened. In midrash the whole drama of the Garden of Eden happened on the first-ever Friday afternoon. The people got to the Garden, learned their way around, heard about not eating the fruit, ate the fruit. Rupture with God, decree of exile effective immediately... and then according to the midrash, Shabbat itself came to God and said basically: I exist already but just in theory, I was getting ready to make my entrance into the world, and if you don’t let humanity have even one Shabbat in the Garden of Eden, the whole universe is going to implode.

 

So God said all right. And the first two people experienced Shabbat and it was a weird Shabbat. Because they knew what was coming after, that they would have to pack their bags. So they spent Shabbat looking around the Garden, and talking, and reflecting on their first six hours of existence before Shabbat and then what they had on Shabbat. And they wrote a song, and the first word is tov, which means good.

 

You’d think they’d write, I don’t know a breakup song -- how could you do this to me. You’d think they’d be basically angry, or basically scared, or plotting to get away from this God who has such an interest in which fruit they eat, and who showed them this glorious place and then said you can’t live here anymore.

 

Instead Chava and Adam start with tov, with good. They’re in a garden so they write what they know, which is botany -- the wicked flourish like grasses, miles wide but an inch deep, growing fast but withering easily, and the righteous like a palm tree will flourish, tzaddik katamar yifrach, deep- rooted righteousness overlooking everything. Even within themselves, they’re thinking, there’s all this that tempts us to act not right, it comes fast, but it can be cut off easily if we try, and we are capable of towering things. So Chava and Adam sing their way to gratitude, to tov l’hodot, for what they have glimpsed and what they can dream of, for this Garden that exists and is worth striving to get back to.

 

And that’s every Shabbat, a garden, where we sing together songs of what could be, where we make this beatiful garden of righteousness and righteous dreams, and we make it out of us, who we are and who we have been this week and all the stories we’ve been given as a people.

 

The other origin story for Jewish gratitude, about our name Yehudi, the Thankful-People: Leah doesn’t express gratitude immediately when she has her first child. We know there’s a long story of bitterness between Leah and Yaakov, between her and her sister Rachel. Leah has all kinds of good reasons to feel resentful and angry. She called the first son Reuven because the Divine has seen my suffering, and the next two names she gives are like that. But when the fourth child is born Leah says this time I am giving thanks.

 

Leah’s gratitude is not a contentment of having things good all in all. It’s not a blessing she says at a turning point in her life from bad to good. That doesn’t happen after Yehudah is born. Leah’s gratitude is a decision -- that to quote Rabbi Shai Held you can be disappointed and thankful at the same time. At a moment when it’s not easy in her life, Leah says todah, and she gives all of us our name.

 

The world right now isn’t making it easy to feel gratitude, and I know too there are many people among us for whom the holiday weekend makes a time of loss or loneliness harder. That’s the hardest part of gratitude for me, because when I’m so thankful I am impatient for anyone who is missing a blessing that I could be doing more to help them have or help you have. I don’t want my gratitude to become selfish or complacent.

 

Leah Imeinu gives us our name, Yehudi or Jew. She teaches us gratitude in a moment and gratitude in-spite-of. The Jewish people know how to be thankful for the first moment of awareness every day, the first breath we take and turn into Modeh Ani (thankful am I), and for each chesed we experience. And when there’s not something right here to be thankful for, we’re thankful for knowing we are people who deserve blessings, and we’re grateful for our stubborn visions of what everyone deserves.

 

Adam and Chava give us Shabbat as gratitude. They teach us to stop and notice the perfect within the imperfect world, and the perfect dreams that we will use to mend the imperfect world.

 

Here we are, aligned as we sing here in the Sanctuary and learn Torah together and talk over Kiddush, sharing food that is enough for everyone, celebrating the gift of life and the next chapter in the lives of families and our people. Shabbat makes us stop to notice these things, so we don’t miss them during the week either and feel thankful -- whenever we hear voices joined together for joy or for justice, whenever there is enough food for everyone, whenever there is a Torah bringing its insights to the world. Shabbat teaches us to notice such things all week and to be profoundy grateful each day.

 

And so especially now, thank you for making Shabbat together a part of your Thanksgiving weekend, and thank you to the celebrating family for bringing us together today in joy and gratitude.

 

Shabbat Shalom!

Yitzchak's Wells: Digging and Re-Digging Today

Genesis 26:17-18, from the Torah reading for the past week:
“Yitzchak (Isaac) went from there and encamped in Nachal Gerar and lived there. And Yitzchak went back and dug all the wells of water that they had dug in the days of Avraham his father, and the Philistines had stopped them up after Avraham’s death, and he called them names just like the names that his father had called them.”

A nachal or wadi is a river bed that flows in the rainy season and is dry in the summer. In the verses that follow in Genesis 26, Yitzchak’s people don’t just re-dig old wells but also dig new ones, and they quarrel about them with the Philistines. Quarreling is probably not just verbal. Yitzchak names two wells after the quarrelling itself – “Struggle” and “Accusation”. Then he moves a bit away and digs a well and there is no quarrel, so he names that one something like “Breadths”, “for the Divine has given us enough space for us to be fruitful in the land.” Soon after the Philistine king, along with one advisor and his military chief, approaches Yitzchak and he is surprised, believing they hate him. Instead they say they have seen that the Divine has blessed Yitzchak. So they propose a treaty, and each sides swears to it. Another well is found, and Yitzchak names it after the treaty-making.

1. This whole episode takes place in the area from the Gaza Strip to Be’er-Sheva (Beersheba). In biblical times, this is a border region for the Israelites and the Philistines. Part of the scenes take place in what today is a part of Israel called Otef ‘Aza or the “Gaza Envelope”, the communities just outside the Gaza Strip which were attacked savagely by Hamas on October 7.

2. Rabbi Matt Berkowitz of The Schechter Institutes in Israel wrote last week about Zionism something like this: Through centuries of exile Jews kept connected with the places of their ancestors in the Land of Israel and the names of those places. When they returned, they reclaimed the old wells, came to live in the places and restore their ancient names.

3. Palestinians have the same dream about the villages the lost in 1948. They say that Israel has filled in the wells, erased the ancestral names of the villages they abandoned or were forced out of in the war of 1947-1949, even when those towns were settled with new residents. That’s true in many places, though not all. It’s also even more complicated than that. Arabic place names are often themselves versions of Hebrew names from the Bible. Many places in Israel have names in both languages. Some sites have ancient names or labels, Hebrew or Arabic or given by Christians, but the sites are near yet not quite exactly right on the biblical spots.

In Israel, bus and train and destination signs within Israel are in Hebrew, Arabic, and English all at once, coexistence encoded in multiple names. Still, so much of the conflict itself is embodies in names. The war of 1947-49 Israelis call Milchemet Hashichrur, the War of Liberation, and Palestinians call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. However you assign the responsibilities leading up to it, it is clearly both.

4. The Torah talks of digging into the ground, in search of water. I shudder over and over as I read those words this year. In Washington last Tuesday Rachel Goldberg, the mother of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, reminded us about 240 people whose lives are literally underground. #BringThemHomeNow. So much of the Gaza war is about tunnels underground.

And so much of conflict in Israel-Palestine and throughout the Middle East is about access to water.

5. As I listened to all the speeches about anti-Semitism in Washington last week, and all the historical events they referenced, I realized something about Yitzchak and the naming of the wells in Genesis that I had never paid attention to before. Some of the wells Yitzchak calls by the names his father gave. Some Yitzchak names in relation to the conflicts of his own day, or the respite from conflict, or gloriously at the end the making of a treaty.

Not all the names are the same names Avraham had given. Yitzchak carries those names, but chooses when to use them and when to name in relation to the dynamics of his day – with his current enemies, or with his current frosty-but-nonviolent neighbors, or with his current treaty-partners.

We Jews often talk about anti-Semitism today as though every act and every manifestation is the same as what happened in Shoah or the European pogroms or the Bible. It all has the same name, the name my own generation inherited from our parents and our ancestors before that. (Though those are not actually all the same, biblical and Christian and modern anti-Jewish hate.)

But we also have to know when to name things in our own way, in the context of now.

Some anti-Semitism is just like before, and some is new. Some of the dynamics are another iteration of the same history – but some of the dynamics Jews have to be able to name in relation to the people here with us now. Intertwined or nearby, in the Land of Israel or other lands. A struggle is different from an accusation; neither is good but they are not identical. Not-fighting -- giving each other space to breathe or even prosper -- is not the same as treaty-making.

To say that it’s all the same anti-Semitism over and over can trap us, prevent us from finding reconciliations, and at worst become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the same time, the unique new “struggles” and “accusations” against Jews today are frightening in their own way, and against those we Jews have much less experience to lean on, perhaps.

The chapter with the wells is the only chapter that centers Yitzchak and Rivka themselves, their own life and their own generation. It is sandwiched between two much more well-known stories in which their lives are subordinated to a conflict within the next generation, their sons Yaakov and Esav (Jacob and Esau). Even Yitzchak and the Philistines can’t help but notice in their interactions all kinds of echoes of Avraham’s and Sarah’s own interactions with the Philistines of their times.

Still Yitzchak and Rivka are trying in some way to live in their own generation. To navigate the conflicts of their region in their prime, to figure out what’s just like before and to make room for their own language about what’s happening.

So too for me, in my fifties. I live so much of my Jewish life with the people of my parents’ generation, who can remember when there had not been an Israel and who can remember 1967 and 1973 when Israel’s very survival was threatened by war. My own generation takes Israel for granted, and shared in the struggles to liberate the Jews of the U.S.S.R. and then Ethiopia after that. After me comes a generation who know only a strong Israel and a Jewish people with stature and power in the U.S.

How do we appropriately name the wells we find that were named in previous generations? When do we focus on those who tried to stop them up, and when on our accomplishment in finding life-giving water? How do we learn to give our own names, to the places and struggles our people has been in before?

6. To end on hope: The Torah can’t agree with itself on why Be’er-Sheva, the treaty city, has its name. Or which treaty it acknowledges, the one negotiated by Avraham the father or Yitzchak the son. Genesis 26 and Genesis 21 argue about it, give different accounts. Is the name because of the treaty-making oaths, or it is because of the gifts and meals that celebrated the treaty?

What a privilege it would be to have such a thing to argue about, to have too many stories of peace.

Reflections on Marching and Lobbying for Israel on Nov. 14

This is the note I sent out to the congregation and posted on Facebook.

Dear Friends:

This past Tuesday along with about a dozen people from our synagogue, I was in for the March for Israel at the National Mall in Washington. About 20 people from the Southern New Hampshire Jewish community were there in total, along with a student group from Dartmouth and perhaps some others I’m not aware of. Together we helped make up a crowd of 290,000 people, according to the highest count reported. If that number is anywhere near accurate, something like one out of every thirty American Jews was together for an afternoon! I took a group before and after the rally to meet with Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Representative Annie Kuster and their aides, and others met with staff in the office of Representative Chris Pappas.

I had about ten days’ notice about the rally, and I didn’t know at first that I would go. I am one of two working parents with a child at home, and even though I work for the Jewish community it’s not easy to take an impromptu midweek trip out of town. I don’t usually like mass events and the simplistic speeches. But it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going, or for Laurie and me to work out the details to make it possible.

I went first of all for you in our community who are Israeli, for my Israeli family and for yours, all our Israeli family and close friends. For people who have suffered losses, who know hostages held in Gaza, whose lives are in danger right now in the fighting. Your needs and their needs are important, and it was important to show you and the public that our community notices you and the people you are connected with. That I notice. One of the goals of the march was simply to show human solidarity in a hard time. Especially when Israeli grief and danger are being drowned out or denied entirely by so many.

I went for the hostages in Gaza and for their families, who have been screaming at all of us and at those in power to do something for the immediate release of about 240 people still being held, for 41 days as I write this. #BringThemHomeNow. The most powerful part of the day were the speeches of three family members, and you should take the eleven minutes to watch that (click here).

I went for our kids who are college and graduate students, including my own, who are suddenly living in environments of ongoing physical threat and danger across the country.

If you haven’t read a good news report on the rally and want to, look it up at the Times of Israel or the Jerusalem Post or Ynet or the Forward. Here I wanted to share my overall impressions and reflections, and then tell you about our meetings on Capitol Hill.

1. As I said above, the most intense moment of the rally program came when three family members of hostages spoke. Orna Neutra is the mother of Omer. She called out his name, and called on us to match Omer’s own compassionate being with our own compassion back to him and all the hostages. Alana Zeitchik has six family members being held, including small children – she began with love and ended with peace. Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, asked us present and asked the world in the name of each hostage, child and adult: Why are you letting them stay in the dark, buried in the earth’s crust.

The speakers challenged us to keep the more than 240 hostages in the consciousness of the public and our leaders every single day. They spoke about how inhuman it is subordinate the hostages’ lives to any political, military and diplomatic strategy. I don’t think any of us outside their circle know how to hold that perspective, other than to take action each day that keep the hostages’ lives front and center. (Small thing I did just now – a note to the White House, since the switchboard is closed today.)

2. Natan Sharansky spoke. He talked about what it meant to know he wasn’t alone when he was in prison in the Soviet Union, and how much the gathering in DC means to him and to Israelis now. I was a child and a teen when Sharansky was a refusenik, a household name among us, and I was in college when he was released. Almost thirty-six years ago was the massive march in DC for Soviet Jews, and now here he was in front of us. Just seeing him was a living hope, and he told his story to us with no anger, only reassurance.

3. The student speakers were amazing. Confident, proud, empowered. I hope they took some of the strength from us back home and back to campus with them.

4. This was not in any way an anti-Palestinian gathering. The enemy was defined over and over very specifically as Hamas. From the microphone I heard no gloating over deaths of Gazans in war. Some speakers mentioned peace and innocent Palestinians suffering. I don’t mean to say this was a peace rally, by any means, and there was no talk at all about what specifically will happen after the fighting ends.

Near me, one person was holding a sign calling all Gazans members or supporters of Hamas. Some people asked her to put down her sign, and in the end someone put up an Israeli flag to block the view of her sign, and when those arms were tired another bigger sign obscured hers, “LA Stands With Israel” I think.

The rally was sponsored only by two national umbrella Jewish organizations, so that no other organization would have to decide to endorse some specific other Jewish organization’s participation. As a result, the charedi Agudah movement was there with very secular Jewish groups; AIPAC and J Street were both there; the Zionist Organization of America, pretty right-wing on the Israel-Palestinian question, came and so did Americans for Peace Now.

5. It was remarkable that the one word I heard only a single time all day was: “Netanyahu.” The State of Israel was represented by President Isaac Herzog. (The president is not the head of government, but the head of state. He is elected every few years by the Knesset, the parliament, and functions like the British monarch minus the land and wealth.) Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. also spoke, Michael Herzog, and yes, the president is the ambassador’s young brother. This was all about solidarity with Israelis as a people. And because of Israeli Arabs and Druze, and because of so many visitors and foreign workers in the area outside Gaza on October 7, this was also about more than Jews and even more than Israelis. Near me was a sign for one of the Thai hostages, part of a set of posters you’ve probably seen for every single of the hostages.

6. The music was very special, songs I knew and songs in Hebrew I didn’t know but apparently every young person there did. (Generations present: When Debra Messing spoke, the college kids were trying to figure out who she was; one of them mentioned “Will and Grace” almost as though it was as old as “I Dream of Jeannie.”) At the end, Matisyahu sang his anthem “One Day”, and the Maccabeats joined him: All my life, I've been waitin' for/I've been prayin' for/for the people to say/That we don't wanna fight no more/There'll be no more wars, and our children will play”, and in the crowd that might have been the loudest song of all. We had sung “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah” two hours before.

7. That actually wasn’t the end. There were some non-Jewish clergy who gave long sermons right after, but it was overtime and people left, including our group for a meeting on the Hill. Pastor John Hagee spoke, and this was the most controversial thing about the event. He is a prominent “Christian Zionist” with a history of hateful words and ideas, including anti-Semitic. It was absolutely correct to have the bipartisan leadership of the two Houses of Congress represented, even though everyone at the rally had someone among them whom they despise. Pastor Hagee wasn’t needed and his presence on the program was over the line. At least by then most people were leaving.

8. I stood on my feet stuffed in one place for at least four hours, having had only a small breakfast and some granola bars to nosh on. I didn’t have any water with me. I don’t get inspired by speech after speech saying much of the same thing, as was a lot of the program I haven’t mentioned. And yet, the time felt like nothing at all. I had a random talk with a man who was commuting to work on the train in from the airport at the start of the day, a man about my age with political opinions and life perspective, and we blessed each other. I was with hundreds of people I know who I didn’t get to see at all because who could find each other. And yet, something about the moment helped me feel connected, and when better days come we’ll tell more of our stories about Tuesday.

Before the rally six of us met with Representative Annie Kuster, and afterward with Senator Jeanne Shaheen. For me, this was an essential part of the day. Having something concrete to do, something more in my element. It grounded me.

Rep. Kuster and a senior member of her staff met us in the Capitol, in the members’ dining room. She told us how that morning, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had screened the video of Hamas atrocities for all House members who were willing to see it, and how many members were shocked beyond anything they had seen before. She talked about the efforts to move the supplementary appropriations for Israel’s military needs, which she supports. We thanked her for her personal support and outreach to our Jewish community, and her staff’s calls to me on a regular basis.

Much of our conversation was about increased anti-Semitism. Each of us in the group spoke about our own child’s experience on campus, and the physical and emotional danger to Jewish students that is accompanying certain slogans and accusations of genocide against Israel. The degree of all this was obviously surprising to Rep. Kuster.

We turned then to the matter of Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her use of phrases like “from the river to the sea”, “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Rep. Kuster said she did not vote for the censure of Rep. Tlaib for a variety of reasons. She told us that she talks with Rep. Tlaib directly and within the Democratic caucus generally about why this language is unacceptable, and that she has made some public statements to that effect.

I am absolutely convinced that Rep. Kuster thinks and has done the things she told us. We pressed her to take more responsibility as a public official to be more specific about why specific characterizations of Israel are both false and physically dangerous to Jewish students in particular, to make her statements more frequent and audible, and to call on other public officials to stop making such characterizations. Already this week there is some evidence that she and her staff heard us. They asked for my help in drafting a statement about our meeting, and incorporated some of what I suggested. You can read her statement here.

I gave Rep. Kuster and her office a copy of a book I often recommend, Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which also includes letters back from Palestinians. She wrote me subsequently that she plans to read it and then pass it along.

After the rally we met with Senator Shaheen. We were actually expecting only to meet with a couple staff members, since Sen. Shaheen had talked with some of us just a couple weeks ago at the Jewish Federation.

Sen. Shaheen is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the subcommittee for the Near East. She talked to us about a briefing she had been at concerning negotiations for the hostages’ release, which we of course emphasized. Sen. Shaheen too has been a longtime supporter of U.S. defense assistance to Israel.

We asked her about a letter she and other Senators had sent to President Biden asking him to raise certain concerns with Israel about humanitarian issues in the war in Gaza. Her public statement about that letter is here.

Both Sen. Shaheen and her staff were also very affected by what we told them about college campuses. Despite a lot of recent stories about how aides to Democratic members of Congress are at odds with their bosses about Israel, everyone we spoke with in both offices told us how engaged they are with the issues facing Israel and American Jews, even after our meetings formally broke up. It has been my experience that all the members of New Hampshire’s delegation in Washington have some of the best and most knowledgeable staff on all of Capitol Hill.

Some of you have asked what you could do in terms of advocacy around these issues. I would say in brief that over the next week or two, you could send notes to Sen. Shaheen and Rep. Kuster thanking them for meeting with us. Then you could thank them for their continued support of our community’s needs and Israel, urge them to press for the immediate release of all hostages, and ask them to take a strong and specific public stance whenever any public official. I can help you craft that if you'd like.

A couple final personal spiritual thoughts after this week.

I have a pretty wide Jewish definition of joy. Sometimes I stretch it so far that means something like “feeling purposeful.” But to be honest with you, I can’t say that on Tuesday I felt particularly joyful. Sometimes rallies like this are like camp reunions. This didn’t feel that way for me at all. There were small moments of joy for me: Finding our group in front of the Capitol, a building that takes my breath away. Running into someone I have known for a long time. Dinner after all of it with my nephew. I hooted at times and waved my sign, and sang along when I could, but it wasn’t out of joy overall. Still, I know I feel different after Tuesday than before.

I feel better; that I can say. Part of it comes from the analogy of mourning that a lot of people have been using over the past month. I am not right now an immediate mourner for October 7, but I have been part of an extended Jewish family in mourning. As I tell every family, no one mourns the same way or on the same schedule. Just for me, Tuesday in DC was a kind of shloshim occasion, like the traditional thirty-day mark. Not an end, by any stretch. I just feel a bit more ready to talk with more people in more dimensions about what is going on, and a bit more ready to be in the wider community discussing and educating, returning to my familiar modes. It was good to be talking to our representatives. That seemed more like me, even though the conversations were unlike any I have ever had with them. I am not fine yet.

I am grateful: for the Jewish people, for the United States of America, for my family’s safety and wisdom, for community, for all the teachers and inspirations who brought me to this week, for everyone who is standing up for us and for what is right.

Please feel free to ask me more. I will go now and light an extra Shabbat candle and put some extra tzedakah in the box, for the people who need us now.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jon

Seven Years Old, Twenty Years Old, One Hundred Years Old

This is the D'var Torah I plan to give tomorrow for Parashat Chayei Sarah 5784, November 11, 2023.

One of the weekly Divrei Torah that are always worth a look comes from Rabbi Josh Feigelson, leader of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This week Josh started by talking about the idea of the “multiverse”, which he first learned about from one of his kids. Josh mentions the TV show “Rick and Morty”, which his son loves, and it’s about a scientist and his grandson who can travel between alternate versions of the universe and different times in those universes and different versions of themselves.

I thought where Josh might be going was to our fantasies of an alternate universe in which, say, the Palestinians had finished negotiating a peace deal with Israel in 2000 at Camp David, or just any other version of the universe after October 7. I also thought he might go to the commentaries on the first line of our Torah reading, which describe Sarah Imeinu, our ancestor Sarah, as the ultimate human multiverse. He didn’t but he helped me to.

The Torah says (Genesis 23:1) that Sarah’s life was me’at shana v’shiv’im shana v’sheva shanim, 100 years and 20 years and 7 years. It’s a distinctive way to express 127 years, and the commentaries cluster around this thought: That Sarah at every phase of her life lived with the qualities of a 7-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 100-year-old.

The Sfat Emet explains: For most people, as you grow in life you become wiser, building on your middot, your qualities, and purifying them. Which means that for most people, the only complete moment of life is the final one, when you are the most perfect you’ve ever been. But Sarah managed to grow without having to reject any of the previous iterations of herself. Sarah’s multiverse was present with her all of the time, and she always had access to all the dimensions of it, while standing in exactly the time she was in.

To be less abstract about it -- as a child, and an adult, and an elder, Sarah always had the best qualities and capacities of each of those stages.

Even as a child, she had the wisdom that most people need long life to attain.

Even as an elder, she had the wonder and freshness of a child experiencing the world, the constant urge to discover and see if this or that might be a worthwhile interest or a worthwhile friend.

Even as a child and even as an elder, she had the purposefulness of her prime, the ability to pursue a path with capacity and with her full energy. The well-formed dreams of how the world ought to be.

In Jewish tradition, we have an opposite character who helps us understand what was so special about Sarah. Shlomo Hamelech, King Solomon, is said to have authored three of the books of the Bible. It is said that when Shlomo was young, he wrote the Song of Songs, Shir Hashirim, a book of intense love poetry. In his prime he wrote Proverbs, Mishlei, a book of advice for how to succeed and prosper. In his old age he wrote Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, a book of often bitter reflections on whether life has any meaning or whether things just circle again and again -- “there is nothing new under the sun”, ein kol chadash tachat ha-shamesh.

After October 7 we’ve felt like Shlomo Hamelech in his old age. How can we be like Sarah Imeinu?

How can we recapture freshness and energy and wisdom, all at once, even seeing and knowing everything we see and know?

Our Torah reading is framed by two funerals, Sarah’s and then Avraham’s. And yet between them is the first concrete foothold of Israel in the land, the purchase and sale agreement between Avraham and Ephron the Hittite, the translation of Divine promises into something very specific. 

Then the introduction of Rivka, the generous young woman who transcended the small-mindedness and materialism of her culture in Aram, who saw a thirsty stranger and his camels and gave them water, even before she knew the stranger was send on a mission to find the woman suitable for his master’s son Yitzchak in marriage. Rivka is the one who delivers on the promise of that our people are to be rachanim b’nai rachmanim, compassionate people descended of compassionate people.

Then we hear of Avraham’s golden years, of life after mourning, and when he dies there is a remarkable reunion of his sons, who have been estranged from their father and from each other, as Yitzchak and Yishmael come together to bury him.

These possibilities the Torah lifts up for us, in a reading framed by two burials. The promise of a homeland; chesed and rachamim, boundless compassion; even reconciliation between Yitzchak and Yishmael -- these are the multiverses that remain present. That we try at least in our minds and hearts continue to leap to, as the descendents of Sarah.

Last Motza’ei Shabbat, last Saturday night, was the annual fundraising dinner for the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. It felt very strange to go to what was after all a nice party, and I know I wasn’t the only one who felt strange as we walked in. Over the course of the evening, I saw something like twenty-seven members of our Jewish community there. The event was co-chaired by our own Mindee Greenberg, and the new executive direction of the organization is our own Jane Goodman. 

I was so proud to be part of a Jewish community that is so committed to feeding people from week to week and helping people become self-sustaining and flourish. And to be so recognizable as Jews in this wider community because fo that work. I was amazed that so many of us could find a way across the multiverse of our Jewish pain in this moment, and make that mission and the joy of being a part of it the central of our lives for an evening.

100 years old and 20 years old and 7 years old. These days we are thinking about all our 7-year-olds, the children held hostage in Gaza or who lost their parents or whose parents are at war, and the children of Gaza, and our own children who we want to shield from an awareness that this is the world still.

And we are thinking about all our 20-year-olds,those who were just joyfully celebrating with music when they were attacked, young people fighting for Israel’s defense and berated on college campuses in this country.

And we are thinking about all our 100-year-olds, our elders, some of whom too are being held captive, Holocaust survivors retraumatized, people who thought they would never have to see what we have been seeing.

As we hold all of them, all of you, in our prayers and in our Torah, we reach for the blessing of our ancestor Sarah. That we can find in ourselves, and help each other find, the best of the 7-year-old within, the 20-year-old, the 100-year-old. That we continue to live with wonder and discovery, with purpose and energy and capable compassion, with wisdom. All at once, 100 and 20 and 7. All in the same life, even now.

Shabbat Shalom.