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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

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.

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
    
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
    
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

41 Thoughts on Genesis 18

This is not the D’var Torah I will be speaking from the pulpit, even though Genesis 18 is in this week’s Torah reading, Vayera. I’ve been making these tentative notes through the week, reading the chapter with the actuality of Israel and Gaza ever present. H/t to Rabbis Tali Adler and Aryeh Klapper, of whose types of Torah recently this is a very pale imitation, and they have nothing to do with anything specific I write here. It’s suggestions and questions more than pat interpretations or answers. 

1. This week in the Jewish cycle includes one of the most glorious chapters in all of Torah, Genesis 18. It begins with an act of radical hospitality, Avraham and Sarah taking three strangers into their home to feed them, and concludes with the argument between Avraham and the Divine over the fate of the evil cities of S’dom and its environs.
   
   
2. The chapter number, 18, is a special number in Hebrew. It’s traditionally written with the letters for “chai”=being alive, being living, related to the word l’chayim=to life, based on the numeric values of the letters. (That the two stories are in the same chapter doesn’t come from the original. There is a long Jewish tradition of paragraphs and longer sections, which predates the system that Christian scholars came up and now Jews use for reference too.)
   
   
3. I knew the two stories were near each other but somehow hadn’t noticed they were one immediately after the other, in the same chapter, until about 16 years ago. I’ve written and spoken about this chapter often, including before elections and at the interfaith CROP Hunger Walk.
   
   
4. I’ve talked about it in terms of two sides of a coin. Service and justice activities. Up close, and the view from on high. Action in the moment, conceptual work.
   
   
5. Rabbi Donniel Hartman has said something like -- There are two kinds of Jews: Genesis 18 Jews and Genesis 22 Jews. Genesis 22 is also in this week’s reading, the binding and near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. It’s the paradigm of faith as complete submission, of doing something specifically beyond (?) the humanistic and that’s how you know it’s devotion to God. It’s a source for religious extremism. Genesis 18 is about faith through a kindness and justice that is far beyond (!) caring, any normal human inclinations of empathy.
   
   
6. So, Genesis 18. Both the visitors episode and the debate with the Divine happen on the same day.
   
   
7. As I’ve been writing for weeks, I’ve been avoiding letting Avraham and Sarah stand squarely in front of me this year. Even though they are the ones my synagogue is named for. Our annual rewind to Genesis began in Israel on Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas atrocities, and outside Israel the very next day. Sarah and Avraham are a revolution and a high standard on all kinds of levels, a quantum leap for humanity. It’s hard to figure how to get to that height or into that discourse right now. Yet they have been camped in front of me for a couple weeks now, and we don’t not read the weekly parasha (Torah reading). So here goes, tentatively, with some things kicking around in me this week.
   
   
8. I have in the past emphasized that Avraham’s concern, in both the first and second stories, is not about the flowing of love to those he already loves or even those he knows in his community without love. The three strangers are not just strangers he bumps into. They are out far away, and he can’t know if they are friendly or not. Also, it’s incredibly hot outside. As for the people of S’dom: they are known from Genesis 13 to be “evil and sinners to the Divine very much.” Which I take to mean both terrible to each other in human terms and spiritually degraded in a way that sucks their religious ideology into justifying their brutality.
   
   
9. Also according to the Jewish midrashic tradition, Avraham is in physical pain this particular day after his (self-)circumcision.
   
   
10. The pain Avraham is experiencing is not just physical. It is bound up with the covenant. His difficult and important mission is experienced in his body not only as a euphoric rush, an excited heartbeat, but covenant pain. “Covenant placed in our flesh”, in the words of the Jewish circumcision ritual. For Sarah, there is also pain at this time, perhaps? As she and Hagar have been set against each other for more than a decade, two women enacting the consequence of a man’s (Avraham’s) doubts or impatience about the pace of the covenantal promises coming true?
    
    
11. So these acts of generosity and justice-seeking come somehow within (or even derive from?) a pain Avraham and Sarah feel in their bodies and a psychic, spiritual pain. At the same time, these acts are foundational to who Avraham and Sarah are. One Jewish interpretation is that when the strangers appear on the horizon, Avraham steps away from God, Who is trying to pay him a sick call and soothe him, because connecting with the strangers who might need something is irresistible to this man of the covenant.
    
    
12. Sarah and Avraham don’t have a party when the strangers turn out to be messengers bearing amazing, miraculous news about a birth of a son in their old age. The “party” is the initial meal itself, before the news. When Yitzchak actually reaches the age of weaning, when the promise is looking more solid, only then will there be a party.
    
    
13. I think it’s significant the messengers come to deliver a message about a birth in their old age specifically. Sarah and Avraham already know that their people’s destiny, to be populous and a blessing in this land, is far, far off and they won’t get much of a glimpse of it. But they will get to see just a bit of it beyond what they expected even in their lifetime.
    
    
14. Avraham walks the people-messengers out along their way after their meal and conversation – hospitality extends far past the front door. It’s dangerous territory they are headed into, and taking responsibility for people heading into dangerous territory becomes in Jewish tradition part of the hospitality paradigm, and part of the broader responsibility paradigm.
    
    
15. Okay, enough stalling. So the Divine “above” decides that this issue of the evil cities in the valley below is a matter that Avraham has to be involved in, if Avraham and his people are indeed going to become a blessing for the earth through justice.
    
    
16. The words the Divine uses to describe what is happening below are murky, even in the original Hebrew. They involve outcry, wrongdoing, the question of whether the outcry and the wrongdoing are entirely aligned, and whether the entire story in the cities is the wrongdoing. It’s a muddled introduction, and indeed the Divine God’s-self states to Avraham a desire to know more of the story.
    
    
17. Avraham waits until the messengers leave to open his mouth. Does he not want to be heard in public saying these words? Does he not trust other people to hear his words as he intends them? Does he not want to be distracted from his kavvanah, his intention? Is this a paradigm of intimate, individual prayer?
    
    
18. When he starts, he leaps to a question: “Will you sweep away innocent with guilty?” Then comes even stronger language from Avraham. First summoning an image of humanity, fifty hypothetical innocents. Something about not just sparing the innocent individuals, but “lifting” something off the city (guilt and responsibility? Just the coming destruction?). Then the big quote, something like “Profane-of-You it would be, will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” Imagine accusing the Holy One of becoming the Profane One!
    
    
19. Avraham has no illusions about S’dom and its four neighboring cities. They have been up to now lush and beautiful places on the outside. But Avraham knows what corruption and brutality are like from his whole life. What is amazing is that he has some picture of justice, because other than himself (and not even all the time) he has never seen it. Only his spiritual quest has given him that picture, or at least an idea.
    
    
20. It’s hard to know what to make of the negotiation that follows. Does the Divine accept Avraham’s bigger premise, about what it means to deal with this situation justly? I would think yes, because of what the Divine had said to the-Divine’s-self right before. Yet there is no statement from God, “Good job, that’s what I hoped you’d say.”
    
    
21. Maybe it’s an act from “God”, the character that the Divine is playing in this conversation. I should be clear – the whole thing to me is somehow metaphor. But even in the narrative’s own terms, it’s hard to make out God’s “position” in this negotiation. Except if God is coaxing and scaffolding Avraham’s own judgment, saying things back to him to place the responsibility for the situation entirely on Avraham.
    
    
22. Avraham’s position is hard to pin down also. He starts with what seems like an argument about individuals – no innocent should be killed because a guilty one nearby deserves to be punished.
    
    
23. Our tradition links Avraham with Noach – Avraham making the argument that Noach never did when being forewarned by God about the Flood.
    
    
24. Then the argument shifts to numbers. The final number in the argument – ten -- comes in Jewish tradition to be the minimal definition of community. Ten could represent the smallest group whose righteousness, or innocence, could still possibly influence the wider environment for good.
    
    
25. Some Jewish commentators say it’s not even ten in a city, but two in each of the five cities. All it would take is two, what Judaism calls a chavruta, a Torah study partnership.
    
    
26. So which is it, the protection of innocent individuals or an argument about even the smallest hope for the cities?
    
    
27. It should be said that Avraham is not arguing for his own people, or on behalf of people who have fought against him. He is not exactly analogous to Israelis today. Is he the Americans? (With trembling I wonder who God would be analogous to, not the real God but God the character. If there were such a thing as enemies of God, the people of S’dom seem to be like that.)
    
    
28. Avraham *could* have been a citizen of S’dom in some alternate history. Back in Genesis 13, when he and his nephew Lot needed to split from each other and divide up the land, Avraham let Lot choose where to live, and if Lot had chosen the mountains Avraham would have moved to S’dom.
    
    
29. The Torah suggests that Lot was always going to choose S’dom. It was at the time one of the most beautiful places on earth. The midrash suggests that Avraham knew enough about the area that he would have subtly influenced Lot to be the one to choose that place, so Avraham himself wouldn’t have to live there and endure that test of his character.
    
    
30. Still Avraham had some connection to S’dom in addition to Lot. When the kings of S’dom and the other four cities had been engaged in a war with the powers of Mesopotamia, and Lot was taken prisoner along with others of the local kings’ peoples, Avraham mobilized a group and rescued all of them. But no enduring relationships came out of that event.
    
    
31. In the end, it’s total destruction for the cities and their people, and a humanitarian corridor out for Lot and his family.
    
    
32. Is the rescue justice or mercy? Lot we soon discover is only marginally better than the people of S’dom generally. Though one could argue, as Resh Lakish does about Noach, that he was doing the best one could expect given where he lived and who he was surrounded by.
    
    
33. The rescue of Lot was not part of Avraham’s justice argument. The remaining messenger, presumably on behalf of the Divine, urged Lot to leave with him.
34. I certainly wish that there were clear statements to derive here for right now. Such as: as a matter of justice if there are any innocents in an area it cannot be destroyed utterly, though some other kind of action is justified and warranted. That’s not what the story says. I think the rescue of innocents, even relative innocents, is a clear implication.
    
    
35. On the way out of S’dom, the remaining Divine messenger-escort cautions them about looking back. Looking at S’dom in the process of destruction is dangerous. Not look back is also dangerous. Lot’s wife looks, and turns into a pillar of salt. Salt is: a static look? The loss of one’s blood, one’s humanity? By not looking back, what does Lot lose?
    
    
36. In the Torah, S’dom foreshadows Deuteronomy’s “wayward city”, the ‘ir nidachat. If an Israelite community in the land turns completely to idolatry, the Torah says destroy it and let nothing ever be built on its site again. The Talmud, in one opinion, says this is a thought experiment, never a law to be implemented. This whole story of S’dom then would also be a thought experiment (I am sure it is). The thought experiments are important. So is the notion that they are only thought experiments.
    
    
37. Avraham does look on. From afar, from the hills above. He sees not the individual deaths, but the smouldering smoke. The people of S’dom and the other cities remain as they were to him, abstract but significant.
    
    
38. The Torah says that in that moment, “the Divine remembered Avraham.” Rashi explains it this way: In S’dom, the Divine remembered one act of difficult loyalty Lot had displayed toward Avraham in the past, at a time when they were together still but Avraham’s life path had put Lot in danger. For that one act, in spite of anything evil Lot had done, the Divine had compassion on Lot and rescued him.
    
    
39. What did seeing the destruction of the cities do to Avraham? Some say after this he was never the same, that the person who argued with the Divine and was present through Genesis 18 disappeared. That Avraham didn’t even do as much for his two sons as he did for all the strangers in this chapter. Genesis 22 Avraham is all that’s left. I don’t agree. I think there are signs in the chapters that follow this one that Avraham and Sarah are who they were in chapter 18, in his prayers for the Philistines in Gerar (which is not far from Gaza) and his actions in their land after, and the rest of his life. That’s a whole other thing to write.
40. Hope springs eternal? Out of the absurd story that immediately follows, where Lot’s daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, comes the line that will become the line of Ruth. Lot and his family become the ancestors of King David, the ancestors of the Messiah. Lot the citizen of S’dom becomes necessary to the puzzle of redemption.
    
    
41. I will end here. Even though there are callbacks and ripples to Genesis 18 in the chapters that follow immediately and so many other places in the Torah. I didn’t expect easy-to-map parallels and equivalencies, to Hamas and to the Gaza operation. May we find ways nonetheless to persist in the pain-draped, difficult kindnesses and just acts that Avraham and Sarah show us in Genesis 18. May this Torah somehow help, and be lifted up for the sake of the lives of the hostages, all the mourners, all the innocents, those who are in danger as they press a just fight, those who continue even this week to work for a deeper peace.

You Are Not Alone, You Are a Blessing

This is the D'var Torah I plan to give tomorrow in services, October 28, 2023 for Parashat Lech L'cha, the opening of the saga of Sarah and Avraham, three weeks after the Hamas attacks of October 7 and as the war continues in Gaza.

Who said the Torah had to be divided into 54 roughly equal sections? Why aren’t we able to stay with Bereshit and Noach for longer -- to talk not just about the Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Flood, but Cain and Abel, the giants, the rainbow, the Tower of Babel and subsequent spreading out over the globe. If it were up to me I would stretch those out for a few weeks. We could easily catch up later and read all of Leviticus in just three weeks.

This is what I think every year. But if you’ve been tracking my Divrei Torah since we started the Torah again, a week after October 7, you’ll know how much I haven’t wanted to have Avraham and Sarah in my face, just yet. Dreading them, really. Sarah and Avraham are about a burst of spiritual excellence into the world, they are a vanguard of new consciousness and beginning to build a community around that.

I have not this week wanted to be told to look hard for those things, or to tell you to. I don’t feel ready for excellence. And so I have said two weeks ago and last week. 

And most of all, I just want in my words and my actions to help take care of us who are here -- here dealing with everything, in Israel and our own lives; here displaced from homes in Israel, here connected to what’s happening in any way.

But Torah is wise, and so too the rabbis who made this schedule and did not base it on any week’s events, so here we are. 

Our Torah reading starts (Genesis 13:1) with a call to Avram, Lech L’cha, and an implicit call to Sarai, Lechi Lach. Go, you -- go as you, from where you are to a new place I will one day show you. You will be a great nation, blessed, a blessing for all the families of the earth. And those who bless you will be blessed. Now be a blessing.

It is good to hear that again right now. I think left to ourselves we might be saying this, that we are a blessing, and so many people are hollering the opposite at us. But -- You will be a great nation, a blessing, and those who bless you will be blessed.

Well this whole Torah reading, it could be ripped from the headlines. Avram and Sarai are called and arrive in the Land of Israel. But soon there’s a famine, and immediate exile. Sarai is taken into captivity in Egypt, and then she is rescued. 

Avram and his nephew Lot, their shepherds quarrel, and they end up partitioning the land they have just come back to. Lot goes to live in the area of S'dom, and Avram stays in the central mountains.

There is a regional war, and Lot is taken captive, along with others and their property, and Avram launches a military operation to get them back. 

One of the kings, the King of Shalem which may be Jerusalem, offers to reward Avram with riches in appreciation of liberating his captives, but Avram refuses to take any more than what he needs to pay his men and their expenses.

When God appears to Avram one night, God says: Don’t be afraid. I am protecting you. But Avram says: I am walking alone. How do I know this future will actually happen. (Genesis 15:2)

And God shows him the stars of the sky and repeats the promise, and God asks Avram to arrange a sacrifice, and puts Avram into a deep sleep, and tells him that his people will endure a long difficult oppression, 400 years, and then the promises will be fulfilled.

Sarai tries to speed up the process, by offering Hagar, her servant, to have a child for them. But the two women quarrel, and Hagar is banished, until an angel comes to her and tells her that her son will be great, though she Hagar will have to return to the home and suffer in the meantime. 

God appears again to Avram and repeats the promises, about the land and their future people, gives him the covenant of circumcision, brit milah, announces the birth of child to Sarai, and changes their names, to Avraham and Sarah, bringing the soft sound of God’s own name into theirs.

Lech l’cha. Lechi lach. Go, you. Be blessed, others will be blessed by you. Those who bless you will be blessed. Now be a blessing.

Ani holech ariri. But I am walking alone. So says Avram to go, so many of us feel this week.

Lechi lach. Lech l’cha. Go, you; you are a blessing.

There are types of interpretations of the words Lech l’cha in our commentaries, and they are based on the ambiguity of a prefix, of the lamed in l’cha. One interpreation says: Go for you, and the other says: Go to you. 

Rashi says go for yourself -- go because it’s good for you, and it will bring you benefit. A lot of the chasidic writers jump off and say further -- go toward what’s good for you. Go there because there is good for you. Go and become a blessing.

This is a hard one right now. Go toward this land of Israel which is good for you? it is, fundamentally, but so much is not good in living there just right now. It’s dangerous.

And go, us, and become more of a blessing? That is so hard right now, there and here.

And yet many people are doing it. In small acts of chesed, in remaking old connections, so people will not have to say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone. By picking up something to read or a podcast to listen to, to be better grounded. I am tremendously impressed with the response of Jewish leaders and alumni around some universities, where we are replying and standing up with strong and thoughtful statements and actions, not sinking to the level of the intimidations our students feel or the extreme and sloppy statements of opposing groups. Students feeling very alone are feeling a bit less ani holech ariri.

The second interpretaion is that Lech l’cha means go to yourself. Right now one of the most important things we can realize is that a lot of the things we need are in us already. It’s not that we know everything, that we’re all political scientists, and it’s not that any of us know the future and what the fighting will mean for Israel or for Jews.

But each of us knows something enough to say a comforting word to someone. Each of us can find a feeling that is authentic, a truth that is true in our core and generous to a person who needs us. Each of us knows something about we feel blessed to be Jewish at this time in our lives and our history. It doesn’t have to be the same for all of us; far from it. And from those things you know, none of us have to say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone.

Lechi lach, lech l’cha, go to yourself because that’s what you have. Sarai and Avram, when they first got the lech l’cha call they were already on the way, they knew something about why they were going even though they didn’t know the whole thing and God wasn’t telling it all to them.

And some of what it means collective lyto go to ourselves is to go to our Torah, which is the repository of all our souls and all our stories. I read out to you what’s in the whole week’s parasha because we already have been in some of these places already. We walk with our generations. We have their experiences, their wisdom about the things recorded in the parasha. We are blessed through them -- we are not alone.

I still hope to meet Sarah and Avraham as our avatars of spiritual excellence, maybe this week while their story is still before us in the weekly parasha and for sure sometime soon, as long as we meet in this House of Sarah and Avraham, this Beit Avraham v’Sarah. 

But even this week, the call of L’chi lach, lech l’cha is emphatically for us. When we might say ani holech ariri, I am walking alone -- we are not. Go as you are now, from where you are to a new place I will one day show you. You will be a great nation, blessed, a blessing for all the families of the earth. You are a blessing. you are a blessing. And those who bless you will be blessed. It's good to hear those words again. Now be a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is my D'var Torah for October 21, 2023, Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in binational democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To figure out how to fight an asymmetric war both successfully and ethically, and not fight until we've figured it out. Or else to decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did, who would do it again, because somehow the alternative is worse.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Re'im, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

Righteous Enough for the Time

This is what I think will be my words in the synagogue tomorrow, October 21, 2023, for Parashat Noach.

When Noach was born, the human world had only just stopped being young. If you do all the math, you see that Adam had lived to see nine generations including his own. I can imagine that people had begun doubting whether Gan Eden had ever existed, whether the ideal mattered anymore, but there had always been Adam to respond. Noach’s generation was the first one who had no Adam, no one with them who could say I saw it with my own eyes, I was there.

The Torah isn’t clear whether humanity’s spiral into violence and lawlessness began before Noach was born, while Adam was still alive. (The Hebrew word for this situation is actually chamas. The name of the terrorist group is actually not related linguistically to the biblical word, but it’s hard to not hear the similiarity.) Whether or not Adam was there as a presence, things were bad enough that Noach was given a burden the moment he was born. His father Lemech named him: Noach, meaning rest. And also he added more layers of meaning -- Zeh y'nachameinu mi-maaseinu u'mei'itzvon yadeinu, min ha-adamah asher eir'rah Adonai. This one will comfort us, or maybethis one will turn us around, because of our deeds, and the sadness of what our hands have done out of this earth that the Divine has cursed (Genesis 5:29).

Imagine being given that name, that hope, right at birth.

Maybe all of Noach’s life or maybe just some of it, the earth was beyond redemption, except without drastic and unthinkable measures.

When the point of no return had been reached, the Torah tells us this about the adult Noach had become: Noach ish tzadik tamim hayah b'dorotav -- Noach, a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations (Genesis 6:9).

Our medieval guide Rashi says: Some interpret this as praise and some interpret it as an insult. He references this argument in the Talmud about it: Rabbi Yochanan said: Noach was righteous in his generations -- the many generations he overlapped -- but in other generations he wouldn’t have been considered righteous. Resh Lakish says: If Noach could be righteous in the era he was living, when there was not a single other righteous person, how much more so would he have become righteous in any other generation?

Rashi seems to take Rabbi Yochanan’s side, that the Torah is giving Noach faint praise, adding: About Noach the Torah says he walked with God, meaning he needed God’s assistance to be a tzaddik; but about Avraham the Torah says he walked in front of God, by himself. Noach built an ark to save a small number. Avraham argued to save every life in the five most evil cities of the land.

But Resh Lakish stands for the idea that Noach was as righteous as one could be in his time, and that he was righteous enough. You know I don’t use the word “righteous” a lot as a translation for tzaddik, but I think for us today it gets the job done. When you can’t fix everything, or maybe anything, and when there’s nothing to do but gather who you can in an ark -- you gather who you can in an ark, and that’s what it means to be righteous.

As much as we might want to be Avraham, as much as we are sitting today in Beit Avraham  after all -- I think we need to consider whether there’s a time to be okay being Noach the way Resh Lakish sees him.

I think about this every year the week of Parashat Noach -- about being a good-enough parent or a good-enough citizen or a good-enough man -- and all this week I’ve been thinking about what it means at the moment to be a good-enough Jew.

It’s only two weeks since the atrocities of Oct. 7. It’s not really  two weeks in the past, because it is still happening, funerals and hostages and more rockets and our soldiers and our people displaced from their homes. And in the newnes and the overwhelm, there is so much pressure on Jews to be more righteous than our generation, to be righteous against the standard of a time we’re not in. And that pressure comes from the outside world, and from within our community, and inside our own neshamot and our hearts.

It sure seems that the world expects the Jews to be more perfect than our generation, to be the ones to turn us around from sadness and the terrible deeds that human hands have done in the world.

We Jews are expected to be the best universalists, to look out for every human life as much as those of our own people, while we are in mourning and we are shaking and we are physically overwhelmed.

We Jews are expected to take care of Israeli and Jewish lives, and also to take care of another people whose own leaders aren’t taking care of them and have repeatedly betrayed them and even now put them in harm’s way.

We Jews are expected by the world to be the ones to figure out the solution to complexities of nationalism and democracy, group solidarity and minority rights. Or some people expect us Jews even right now to go first and transcend the nation as the basis for a state, to give that up and be a pilot project in multiethnic democracy, even at the risk of our lives.

We Jews are expected to know how to go from powerlessness to the kind of power we’ve had in the world for maybe half a century, maybe that long, without being affected by the collective trauma of centuries that fifty years does not erase. 

We Jews are expected to be the best in the world at wielding ethical power. To decide not to fight a war necessary to defend lives and defend the state, to choose instead to leave in place a group that would do what Hamas did because we might not do it right, or to figure out how to fight a war where innocents on the other side are almost never killed and not fight at all until we’ve figured out how to do that.

And right now it’s just not possible to be expected to be all of these things. I don’t know if you feel those expectations but even if you haven’t articulated them, I think you do feel them. It is exhausting to carry that weight anytime, as we often do, and it’s particularly exhausting right now.

And I think we experience these as impossible pressures because in our neshama we do want to be much of that list. Along with our current agony and along with our collective generational trauma, we have generational idealism, and we don’t want to put in a position right now where it feels like we have to lose it or to have it taken from us by Hamas, or by the harsh hearts of some in the world around us.

I think it’s all right to be Noach as Resh Lakish sees him, and not Avraham, in the context of the current war. Maybe for a week or two, or maybe at moments ahead of us off and on as the war goes on, or maybe through the whole time of this mabul, this Flood.

Some of this pressure to be more righteous than our generation comes from within our group also. I’ve been registering how people seem in conversations the past week or so. It’s dawned on me that we may be putting certain pressures on each other unintentionally.

I’ve noticed that my question to people about who you have right now in Israel and how are they can also be taken as a kind of pressure. Like if you don’t have someone directly who you know, who you’re WhatsApping with regularly, or if you don’t have the name of a hostage that you know, then maybe you don’t have the same right to speak among peole who do. 

If you do post something about Israel or Gaza on social media, you have to know the perfect way to say that your concern for Israelis is paramount, otherwise you’re not entitled to speak or raise a question. You have to know the perfectly convincing response to an outrageous post, informed and ethically airtight.

I’m concerned that these kinds of expectations, intentional or unintentional, push some of us away from each other and from the synagogue community. So to everyone within our community I want to say it’s all right as a Jew to be Noach, and to show up to take care of people any way you can.

It’s okay to be Noach, sometimes and more than sometimes. It’s impossible right now to be zen y'nachameinu, the one who will turn everything around. Pirkei Avot 5:2 teaches that there were ten generations from Noah to Avraham, to teach us how patient is the Kadosh Baruch Hu, how patient was the Divine, for as much as the world was infuriating during those times, there would be a generation where Avraham could start to make a difference, and then everything that happened before would not be in vain.

It’s hard to be that patient with ourselves.

And it’s hard to be that patient with others. On Monday and Tuesday I was very off -- I mean we’re all off, but just in my particular way I was off. But the more I tried to take Resh Lakish to heart, the more I could also release my need for all my non-Jewish friends and colleagues to be at the level of Avraham. I started to see and appreciate the Noach-ish things as righteous enough for right now.

I see all the mutual support people are giving here. One parent last Sunday, with very close ties in Israel to Kibbutz Be'eri, said how grateful she was just to sit in a room with other Jews for the first time since it all began.

I sat with a Muslim acquaintance over coffee and we exchanged concerns for each other’s safety in our places of worship, and offered to help protect each other’s communities and to come and teach.

I heard from and had my usual get-togethers with Christian colleagues whose denominations have published statements that sicken me, in underplaying what Hamas has done. I realized that people here didn’t write those, and they are listening to what we say because they know us, and they are reading what I write, and they are worried for us and are not abandoning us.

We learn from the Torah too that there is a certain basic level of righteousness that goes with being a Noach. After the Flood, the Divine says even though the nature of people’s hearts includes harm from when we are young, nonetheless there will be a covenant which our tradition says includes a basic code of seven mitzvot.

So I think we each have to define what it means to be like Noach, righteous for the time we are in and the generations we have been a part of. We have to find a few certainties that we cling to no matter what.

One certainty is chesed. Each of us needs to bind our hearts to a mitzvah of caring, for people here  in our Jewish community and in Israel, for anyone at all. Zeh y'nachameinu -- if Noach’s name means  simply “this one will comfort us”, we can be a comfort by our presence and our mitzvot. We need to infuse our spiritual bloodstream with chesed; we need that even physically to steady ourselves.

Another certainly is that all people are created B’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. Rabbi Aryeh Klapper has pointed out that the Torah reteaches this after the Flood, and that the first meaning is that when lives are taken by human hands, they demand justice in response. So lives taken by Hamas require response; it is a moral obligation.

And being a people who believe in Tzelem Elohim means we recognize that when Israelis kill enemies in a just war, it is still a spiritual burden, and it lasts far longer than the war itself. Which is why that burden is shared across society in Israel. It is too much for only a small group to live with.

And Tzelem Elohim means that when innocent civlians are killed in the course of a just war, sometimes their death is not a crime and sometimes their death is a crime, and we remain accountable for the difference, but always their death is a tragedy. When Golda Meir z”l famously said that when peace comes at last, she could forgive the Arabs for killng our children but she could not forgive them for forcing us to kill their children, I think all this is what she was trying to say.

And these kinds of minimal things we can in fact expect from others, to do and to understand. Too many university leaders, by and large, are not doing the minimum for our kids -- not taking care of them, not standing up for a principled understanding of Tzelem Elohim, whatever language they would use for that.

Noach ish tzaddik tamim haya b'dorotav -- Noach was a man, righteous, blameless was he in his generations. I know this community well enough to know that we want to be righteous and we have done so much the past two weeks in that spirit. Thank you. And whatever it is for you to be in this mini-Mabul, flooded emotionally or spiritually or physically, some of the time or all of the time, I hope you’ll let yourself in those moments just be as good as Noach. Get yourself into an ark, take someone in or let someone see you and take you in. That what it means to be righteous in this time.

Shabbat Shalom.

What Happened at Al Alhi Hospital in Gaza, and Why the Truth of It Matters

The explosion at the Al Alhi Hospital in Gaza was unquestionably a massive tragedy, and why and how it happened in the context of war probably matters little to the families of the dead and wounded. To all of them, our prayers for healing and consolation.

 

For the rest of us, how it happened is in dispute. Why does it matter to get it right, or at least to try? It’s worth thinking about now also because this won’t be the last thing we have to learn about or assess in this war, and make decisions based on what we learn or assess.

 

One reason it matters to get it right is that especially in a chaotic situation, the truth matters. As much as the Israel-Hamas fighting is part of a continuing story, it’s emphatically not just a repeat. We can’t rely only on our preconceptions going in to interpret what’s happening now. Learning what actually is happening is part of how we honor the lives of people involved. It’s how we acknowledge that people are real, that they exist now in their unique individual lives; they are not just concepts or symbols. Responding to an event based on what someone just thinks happened compounds all of our cynicism. When the reaction is from officials or crowds or media, it can close off options for something better and it can lead to a cascade of even more violence than would otherwise happen.

 

Another reason it matters to get it right is because assigning responsibility and then holding people accountable -- morally and/or politically and/or legally -- matters.

 

At the moment, the reporting comes from sources that anyone might be critical of for one or another reason – Hamas, Israel’s military, the U.S. government, journalists with an anti-Israel bias. Hamas says the rocket is Israeli. Israel has furnished video and audio that it says shows the rocket came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group, and was misfired. For anyone who wants to form our own opinion – whatever multiple sources we look at, we have to take a highlighter and pick out facts in one color, and then well-supported interpretations in another, and cross out all things that are mere opinion or leaps of logic.

 

Let me outline an ethical assessment process of all the scenarios. I am holding back my own current view on which of these scenarios is the truth.

 

If an Israeli rocket struck the hospital, intentionally or even indiscriminately – then the act is a crime of war committed within a justified war. It would reveal something disturbing about either the culture or skill of Israelis generally or a particular unit.

 

If an Israeli rocket struck the hospital in an attempt to strike a different target, a legitimate military target; or if it struck the hospital because there was an actual military target in the hospital – then we have a set of moral questions about civilians whose death was not intended but happens in any war that’s not in the middle of nowhere, even a just war. There is a whole complex ethics around human shields, trapped civilians, how much risk a military has to take on itself to extricate the civilians from the legitimate target. If this is what happened, I would want to know from Israel what the nature of the target was that it was trying to destroy. It would be important to reveal something substantial about that to its own public and to the world, despite the risk I imagine there would be to soldiers in revealing what the army knows and how.

 

If a Palestinian rocket struck the hospital unintentionally – then it would in all likelihood have been a rocket intended indiscriminately at Israeli civilians, and it would be a crime of war for that reason if no other. This part hasn’t been much commented on in the American press on a daily basis, but nearly all of the rockets fired at Israel from Gaza are indiscriminate attacks on civilians. They are fired all over the place, and they also kill and maim. Some of them hit hospitals as well.

 

If a Palestinian rocket struck the hospital intentionally, then the act is a crime against their own people, possibly by its leaders or some of those who claim to be, and would reveal a lot about those who fired it.

 

I hope writing this and reading this is worthwhile, and not a distraction from something more important. Thank you to everyone reaching out to anyone in support and trying to make any of this better.