Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Israel's Declaration of Independence

 

 

I am posting this on the eve of Israel's 75th anniversary of independence. The translation is based on what I found on the Israeli Knesset website with my own revisions to bring the words closer to the Hebrew at the sacrifice occasionally of an equivalent English idiom. I have chosen to translate the term "Eretz Yisrael" throughout as "The Land of Israel", though there might be room to understand the term at the same time as "Palestine" in the sense it was understood in 1948, as that territory in question over which the British Mandate applied.

 

 

In Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) the Jewish nation arose. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first lived as a polity, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Out of this historic and traditional connection, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent generations they returned in their masses. Pioneers, immigrants in defiance of restrictive legislation and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave specific international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to establish anew its national home.

The Holocaust which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – proved anew the imperative of solving the problem of its homelessness and statelessness by re-establishing in the Land of Israel the Jewish State, which would open wide the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a full and equal member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi slaughter in Europe, as well as Jews from other lands, did not stop migrating to the Land of Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of the Land of Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.

Accordingly we have assembled, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish community of the Land of Israel and of the Zionist movement, on the day of the conclusion of the British Mandate over Palestine, and by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the basis of the decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel: the State of Israel.

We declare that beginning at the moment of the conclusion of the Mandate tonight, the eve of Shabbat, 6 Iyar 5708 (May 15, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the constitution which shall be adopted by the elected constituent assembly not later than the October 1, 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish state, to be called "Israel".

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

The State of Israel is ready to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of the Land of Israel.

We call on the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to receive the State of Israel into the family of nations.

We call – even in the midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and take part in the building of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend a hand in peace and neighborliness to all neighboring states and their peoples, and appeal to them for cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to contribute its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We call to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of the Land of Israel through immigration and upbuilding and to stand by its side in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream of the redemption of Israel.

With trust in the Rock of Israel, we hereby affix our signatures in witness to this declaration, at this session of the Provisional Council of State on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, the Eve of Shabbat, 5 Iyyar 5708, May 14, 1948.

David Ben-Gurion
Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner

Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
David Zvi Pinkas

 

 

 

Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

 

My Testimony on "Divisive Concepts"

I testified at two committees of the New Hampshire legislature on bills to change or repeal our new "divisive concepts" law -- Senate Judiciary and House Education. I said essentially the same things at both hearings. Here it is, video and my written statement (they are the same).

 

Mr. Chairman and Honored Representatives: Thank you for your service and for this opportunity to address you. I am Rabbi Jonathan Spira-Savett. I live and work in Nashua, and I am the father of three children who are students and grads of our Nashua public schools. I myself have been a high school teacher of American history and literature, and I currently serve on our state’s Commission for Holocaust and Genocide Education. I come to speak to you in strong support of HB 1576.

This country saved the life of my family and my wife’s family, from the tyranny of the czar and the genocide of Hitler. I am a proud American and a religious person who says a blessing over freedom whenever I vote – and on voting days and occasions like today, I wear those commitments together on my body, above my head. I feel that my own group’s history obligates me in gratitude to be a civic leader in this country, and I carry responsibilities as a member of both a religious minority and the white majority.

Earlier in my career I had the opportunity to create from scratch a course for juniors about America in place of the usual AP history and literature out of that sense of obligation. I was working at a private Jewish high school, and together with a colleague, we set out to give our students interdisciplinary tools to look at American history and culture, and to look at themselves as critical citizens -- connected critics, to use the terminology of the political philosopher Michael Walzer. Perhaps this was natural for us as Jews, a group of whom so many have lived the “American Dream” and a group so often the targets of violence and discrimination even in this country. But what we did in that school was to prototype a concept with application far beyond our specific group and private school setting.

I am proud that the alums of that course have become those connected and critical citizens – doing work in everything from our national defense and intelligence, to representing the underrepresented before our Supreme Court. Facing all of our story as a nation, in an honest and questioning spirit, only fueled their engagement and their intense dedication to our country, their resilience to keep working on problems especially in times of crisis from 9/11 through now.

How will we motivate our public school students to locate themselves as creators of a more perfect union? How is it possible to draw lessons about the dynamics between one’s ideals and group pressure, if you don’t learn about three-fifths compromise and sit in shame and embarrassment, as well as understanding of political strategy? How is it possible for our students to learn about the inner challenges of actual leadership, what it’s like to sit where you sit where we hope they will one day -- unless they can probe Thomas Jefferson in both his idealism and his cowardice? Why bother reading Thoreau if we don’t allow students to take seriously his indictments of the nation and even of his own friends? How can we study Twain without asking whether he was lampooning the racism of his time or swept up in it?

Sometimes as teachers we have to make sure that a perspective that was or is in our history, that is so opposite of what a patriot teachr like me would ever want to entertain or say out loud, is made vivid and alive in class so students know what’s at stake – slaveholder, or Stalinist -- so it can be addressed in the safe and trusting container of our classrooms.

If the creators of divisive concepts laws such at the existing one are concerned about America lapsing into an unpatriotic socialism – well it is the hallmark of socialist dictatorships to write laws that hide their implications behind innocent sounding words, in order to sow doubt about whether you or someone else is breaking the law, and to create a situation where an official or another citizen can take legal action against you or just threaten to do so. Which is exactly what is happening in New Hampshire and elsewhere with such laws.

Members of my Jewish community have lived under such laws in our lifetimes in other lands, and that’s why they came here. I have had conversations with people running for school board or attending meetings – they are at my kid’s school, in my American neighborhood -- and there is never any actual incident of a teacher declaring that someone is “inherently racist” or that America is. There is only “I have heard of a few times”; “no, I can’t tell you the name of a school” and “I’m just trying to make sure it doesn’t happen here.” That is what the current law is, and it sure doesn’t sound like the American Constitution to me.

If that is not how you intended the current law, then consider my remarks to be teacher comments on an essay whose thesis was confusing and needs a rewrite. If you are serious about education for a proud and patriotic American citizenship, not just for diversity but for a difficult unity -- and I hope that you are, then show you are serious, by getting engaged with the fine work of our social studies leaders and our civic education thinkers. Pump more substantive standards into our system and invest in the resources and training for our educators around critical citizenship and a true patriotism. And in the meantime, get these words out of our current laws and pass HB 1576. Thank you for your time and I am happy to respond to any questions.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day was chosen by the UN because it is the day in 1945 when the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was finally liberated after the world woke up too late to the extent of Nazi atrocities. In 1942, a week earlier in the calendar, the Nazi leadership had convened the Wannsee Conference, a retreat at a fancy villa where plans to coordinate the "Final Solution" against the Jews was discussed and worked on.

 

We mourn all those who were murdered in the Holocaust -- Jews as well as Roma, disabled people, LGBT, political opponents of the Nazi regime. I mourn, for members of my own extended family and Laurie's family, and I think about how profoundly and concretely the Shoah affected our families.

 

I share this video made in New Hampshire for the purpose of supporting the education of students in public schools about the Shoah. There are interviews with survivors, family members, educators and others. Please share with anyone, especially with those who are teachers.

 

Violence and murder of one group by another is ancient, and the targeting of Jews is ancient as well. What makes the Nazi "Final Solution" different is the mobilization of culture, media, science, and industrial organization in a coordinated way to the goal of exterminating one group.

 

I am a member of our state's Holocaust and Genocide Education Commission, created to help our state's public schools fulfill a new mandate to teach about these things in middle and high schools. There are so parts of the specifics of the Shoah as a case study and the general themes that people ought to learn, among them:

• anti-Semitism in its modern forms and its many sources
• the systematizing and systemic mobilization of hate, discrimination, and violence against a group by a majority
• the sociology of followers and bystanders
• the "pyramid of hate" that helps us locate individual acts of bullying and violence in relation to larger trends of bias and violence
• the redemptive power of social leadership and individual moral courage

May the memories of all the individuals who were murdered in the Holocaust be remembered for a blessing.

 

Chatting Up the Local Proud Boys

That's me right after a conversation of about half an hour last night with a few members of the Proud Boys, who have become an unfortunate fixture around meetings of Nashua's Board of Education. Knowing they would be there I could not stay home. This is my family's school, and my community, and people I know who are being harassed by them.

A few thoughts:

1. It is more than distressing that this group is now a public fixture in Nashua particular at Board of Ed meetings. It is incredibly reassuring how easy it was to gather another group in much greater numbers outside the school against white nationalism. That latter group has developed an energy of ease and confidence, of genuine joy to see each other. It's not defensive or reactive, beyond the reactive element of choosing when to meet. There were no attempts to shout at the Proud Boys or chant at them, and in fact if had I read some things ahead of time from local organizers I'd have stuck with the plan of not engaging them at all and just focusing on being a pro-democracy coalition glad to be with each other.
2. I hope it's clear that when I'm talking about the Proud Boys, I mean just them, and not people generally who are politically conservative or Republicans.
3. I went to talk to a few of the Proud Boys. I introduced myself as a Jew and a rabbi. I wanted to stand that ground on their side of the sidewalk. A couple of them told me they have Jews in their local group. I'll be honest, I thought my presence might bait them, though I figured probably not, and it didn't.
4. So I had to decide whether to talk further or not. I take conversation seriously, and I don't enter into it as a stunt. My credibility on this point is perhaps all I uniquely have as a local leader, and I would not squander it for gamesmanship or a cheap self-congratulation. So I was willing, as long as I was talking, to talk with them based on what was right there on the sidewalk in their signs, in whatever came up in their words of our conversation, to talk about things in our actual community and not an image they had or I have about someone else, not something I had heard third-hand about them.
5. They were wearing body cameras, a couple of them. I don't know if they were real but they said it was for transparency. So perhaps the part of the conversation with the camera'd-up men is recorded somewhere and used for some purpose.
6. I asked them about their signs -- about Marxism, critical race theory -- and they told me about what Black Lives Matter leaders are trying to do and where they are trained, and what is being taught in Nashua schools. Except they couldn't tell me anything that was actually happening in any of our schools, or any specific curriculum, or any specific website. Nothing they referenced was anything other than vague. I gave them specifics about people in town, in the schools and the activist community, and in the course of that a couple of my interlocutors just walked away. I told them some things about website and incidents I thought they might be referring to, and what the facts are around those things that they might actually celebrate. No response. I said I was giving them the benefit in this conversation of not talking about general things I had read about them, and invited them to talk to me that way too.
7. I talked to them about accountability for bad things one's own group does on a number of levels. I told them about anti-Semitic intimidation in town from members of the Proud Boys, and they told me they don't stand for it and encouraged me to follow up with specifics. They gave me contact information that turned out to be bogus when I tried to follow up today. I told them what I do when there is anti-Semitism in groups I'm a part of or even groups I'm more loosely allied with, and how much time I spend speaking to groups or engaging people over coffee around that. I suggested that they could demonstrate something by doing the same, if they want to be taken seriously as a group for racial equality which is what their signs said last night.
8. Since they wanted to engage me in friendship as a Jew, I tried to work an analogy from exploring the history of white and Christian anti-Semitism even today, when a Jew like me has it good in white and American Christian society. I said it's essential to face this history, because that's part of making things better, and doing so doesn't make me anti-Christian or make the wounds of the past worse. In fact just the opposite, and I am quite the proof about it. They said that rehashing slavery and such is just "opening up wounds for no reason."
9. I talked about my patriotism, and my choice to live here and not in Israel, and how nothing in the exploration of the history around race in the U.S. makes me less committed to being American. I said it's possible to be ashamed of certain actions in the past of one's group or family, without being ashamed to be part of that group or family. This is how we heal. They didn't like that at all.
10. One person I spoke with said he was religious, and we talked about the sense of responsibility that comes with being a religious person and the awareness of how groups go astray that is also part of humanity. He said he thinks of human nature as susceptible to sin, but not any particular groups as groups. So groups within humanity don't need to confront their own past wrongs or explore themselves as groups; just humans as humans.
11. I told them about what members of my own family who are Black have experienced, and friends of mine in the local community, and asked if they have any sympathy for that, and got no response at all.
12. They asked me if I was aware of the law Gov. Sununu recently signed about teaching around race in schools. I explained to them what the Attorney General just announced about how our history can be taught. I think they thought the law supports their position and their case about the schools, and they were going to tell me how. But it turns out that it doesn't; just the opposite.
13. In this picture above I see one of the Proud Boys giving the OK sign. I understand this is either a trolling poke at me and who they take me to be -- maybe they wondered what I would be doing with that picture -- or it's an actual not-so-secret white nationalist signal meant to outsmart me for posting this picture. Neither of these is awesome, but I suppose I could have said I was taking a picture and would be writing about this and sharing the photo, so I'll call it a draw.

I was prepared, if the controversy about "critical race theory" was brought up in the Board of Ed meeting, to make a speech based on what I think democratic education is about. I have a pretty good speech, if I say so myself -- it's not the usual stuff, I think it's original, and I'll publish that at some point or maybe use it at the next Board of Ed meeting. I left the meeting inside pretty quickly because I'm not ready to be inside with a group that way. So I don't know what happened after I left, and I have to catch up.

Why did I bother with this? I wasn't going to change anyone's mind. But more and more, I think that when a group like the Proud Boys projects themselves, the important thing is to meet them not just as protestors, but as "I am the reality here." I can feel a change here in town; I could feel it in my body. My heart was not in any way pounding, as it usually is in these situations. That's because of this coalition that is coming together here in Nashua with confidence and dare I say love. It's the early days and it's not a uniform coalition who agree on everything when it comes to justice. Usually, the handful of times I've talked to activists like the Proud Boys I leave feeling frustrated and like I didn't come close to doing my part well. This time I knew I had the better of the argument, and they were far more tired of talking to me than vice versa.

Why did I bother? This makes me stronger and sharper. It tells me that the time I have spent slowly getting to know more people from religious and cultural groups outside my own is in fact making a difference. There are answers to some of the divisive questions today that are not just compromises or safety valves. I am proud to be in the mix, which is all that I am, and I would be proud to bring any of you who are local along with me.

The Sacrifice of Yitzchak: Remembering Rabin on the Anniversary of His Assassination

October 29, 2020 is by the Jewish calendar the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin z"l, by a Jewish religious extremist opposed to Rabin's peacemaking with the Palestinians. This is the D'var Torah I gave five years ago for Rabin's yahrzeit.

This is the week of the 20th yahrzeit for Yitzchak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel who was assassinated by a Jewish religious religious fanatic.  By the Jewish calendar it was last Sunday, and by the secular calendar next Wednesday.  His murder took place in the first hours of the week of פרשת וירא, this morning’s reading, and I will never forget one of the headlines in an Israeli paper the week of his funeral:  עקדת יצחק, the sacrifice of Yitzchak.

There is a particular story told about Yitzchak Rabin in all the biographies and memoirs from Israel’s War of Independence.  It was June of 1948, only about a month after the State of Israel officially came into being.  The Jews of Jerusalem were under siege, living truly near starvation, because the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was cut off around its midpoint by the Arab Legion, which was holding a police fortress in a place called Latrun.  The Israelis had already tried several times to storm Latrun without success.  The fortress was on ground just high enough to see the plain around it, and the Israelis did not have enough troops to take it by overwhelming force.  The battles for Latrun had been some of the costliest in the war in terms of lives lost; many of the soldiers had been refugees from the Holocaust, just liberated from displaced persons camps, with almost no training and no language in common to hear instructions in battle.

As dire as the siege was in Jerusalem, there were Arab armies threatening Jewish areas all over the country.  The Israeli commanders felt they had to make choices about where to deploy their limited number of trained forces, and they knew that attacking Latrun again would be futile  But David Ben Gurion was obsessed with Latrun and had summoned his army leaders repeatedly to demand an attack on Latrun to open the road to Jerusalem.

The commanders responsible in early June for the area of the road to Jerusalem included Mickey Marcus, an American Jew and experienced solider who had come to volunteer.  Some of you may know him and this part of the war through the film “Cast a Giant Shadow”, where he was played by Kirk Douglas.  Also Yigal Allon, commander of the Palmach, the most elite and well-trained Jewish fighting group.  Yitzchak Rabin was the young commander of the Harel Brigade of the Palmach.  Ben Gurion summonded his commanders, and Alon and Marcus knew they would be asked to divert their scarce resources to Latrun, and when they would object they would be subject to Ben Gurion’s fury.

So they decided instead to sacrifice Yitzchak.  The 26-year-old Rabin went by himself to talk to Ben-Gurion, to present an alternative proposal.  By accident, one of Rabin’s underlings had discovered a way to go around Latrun, out of sight of the Arabs, and create a path for supplies to get to Jerusalem.   Rabin would propose that they pave a new supply route and avoid Latrun altogether.

When Rabin came to Ben Gurion, the prime minister lived up to his name, son of a lion cub, and flew into a two-hour rage.  Yitzchak was astounded as Ben Gurion at one point threatened to shoot his own commander, Yigal Allon, in the head, but Rabin stood his ground.  Where other times Ben Gurion had overruled a more senior commander and ordered an attack on Latrun, not this time.  The attack did not take place, the road was built, and the siege of Jerusalem came to an end just in the nick of time.

For people who knew Rabin or wrote later about his life, that confrontation with Ben Gurion exemplified a couple key things about the man.  His wife Leah wrote in her memoir that as a commander and a statesman, Yitzchak was fanatical about his goals and but always looking for the least costly way to achieve them.  He tried to minimize risk to soldiers in battle -- by doing his own detail work of intelligence and reconnaissance to outmaneuver his enemy, by considering creative alternatives, rather than relying on superior force alone which could lose more more lives.  After Ben Gurion, Rabin was probably the most detail-oriented and methodical prime minister Israel has ever had.

The confrontation with Ben-Gurion also showed how little Rabin was interested in ingratiating himself with anyone if those things put the mission at risk.  He didn’t care overly about the feelings of his peers or his superiors, but about the many people he knew less well, the men who served under him.  So Rabin didn’t bother to join Mapai, Ben Gurion’s political party, even though he would have advanced much faster if he had.  He had no hesitation when he was prime minister about cutting his own mentor, Yigal Allon, down to size when he disagreed with him.  

Later on, as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. and then as prime minister, Rabin could be plenty sharp and critical.  He could seem detached.  But at the same time, and this was key -- as long as he could win he had no need to demonize the people who disagreed with him.

These were not the things we call people skills.  Rabin was not a jolly man, and in no way a glad-handing politician.  Leah reprints a letter she received when they were dating in the mid-1940s and Yitzchak was imprisoned by the British, and it was more like a business letter than a love letter.  Rabin was not beloved or revered, the way his peers like Moshe Dayan would be.  He didn’t unite his country when he was prime minister or when he signed the agreement with PLO on the White House lawn.  It seemed ridiculous to me when Bill Clinton called Rabin his friend.

Yet without the typical people skills, Rabin was able, at key times, to surprise people and earn their trust.  How could Rabin have possibly negotiated with the Palestinians?  For fifty years, he had not only defeated them in battle -- he had out-organized and outwitted and outsmarted them.  He had every reason to have contempt for them, as soliders and leaders, and therefore to doubt their ability to do the things they were promising -- but he chose to see them simply as opponents.  Just as in 1948, Rabin was willing to fight only the battle that was necessary, in the 1990s Rabin was clear about exactly how much he needed to be the PLO’s opponent and in what ways he could be their partner.

Rabin knew that in order to bring Israelis along with the peace process, he would have to teach through his example how to balance peace ahead with justice and grief looking back.  At first, he wasn’t going to go to the White House to sign the Oslo agreement, but eventually he figured out that if he didn’t, Israelis would write it off as a ridiculous dream cooked up by Shimon Peres.  Rabin managed every step so carefully, relating just as in 1948 not to his fellow leaders but to the average Israeli.  So he opened his speech at the White House by talking about Israeli families who would never stop grievning, he shook Arafat’s hand in the only way he could, politely but not enthusiastically.  

At the White House and in later ceremonies to sign agreements with Arafat, Rabin put on his non-Israeli-style suit and looked like an adult, and made Arafat look like a child who could not take off his costume.  Rabin made sure to have a working relationship with Arafat and to show that when they appeared together, but he was also carefuly not to portray to Israelis that he and Arafat were becoming friends.  He was perfect for the role; he wasn’t big for smiling or scolding, his natural face and voice were holding back even when he tried to do revolutionary things.

Rabin understood that leadership is not like other relationships.  He didn’t try to use on the people skills he didn’t have, because that’s not what leading his people is only about.  And Rabin could lead because he was aware that he was modeling a new way of being a Jew in a new world.  Not just modeling, but maybe inventing it as he went along.

In 1994, at an award ceremony honoring Israeli writers just a year after the White House handshake, Rabin said:  “These days we are in the midst of a battle without cannons in a war without fire, which may turn out to be perhaps one of the most significant and decisive battles in the annals of the Jewish people in recent generations.”  In that speech, he said:

Let us admit the truth: the atmosphere of siege, the hostility, and the war have elicited tremendous energies from us for almost five decades. Much of what has been achieved in the State of Israel in all areas is a direct or indirect outcome of the necessity to defend our existence, of the atmosphere of siege from which we are so glad to free ourselves these days. Ours was a productive unity, a healthy unity, standing shoulder to shoulder against the manifestations of enmity and facing a hostile world. Just between us, we have become accustomed to this lifestyle, and, already, we think we cannot do without it. Perhaps we have even come to love the pleasant warmth of power and the encircling siege.

And now? What are we to do now? What message should we deliver to our people these days? How should we avoid becoming entangled in delivering a double, and contradictory, message: are we on the brink of peace, or do we expect another war? How do we change the atmosphere that has characterized our state for generations? What should we choose – should we declaim again and again: "a state under siege," "the whole world is against us," "all the Arabs are the same"? Or perhaps we should bear a new message: "the new Middle East," "the peace of the brave," "nation shall not lift up sword against nation," "He who makes peace in heaven above..."?

How do we become accustomed to a world of new concepts, to a different culture, a different style, and at the same time not completely abandon the old world, just in case, God forbid, we might need it again? How do we maintain the invigorating rhythm of our lives, the Jewish mind, all those tremendous energies of ours, our unity – without the sword hanging over our heads?

This is the Rabin who was taken from us by his assassin. How do we become accustomed to a world of new concepts,.... and at the same time not completely abandon the old world, just in case, God forbid, we might need it again?  This is who the Jewish people lost on the 12th of Marcheshvan 5755.  Not necessarily the man who signed the Oslo agreement, which may well have stalled even had he lived.  We lost the man who fought wars until the moment he thought they were not necessary, and was prepared to fight them again if necessary.  We lost the one who hoped we might figure out how to live as Jews in the world we are in and not in the mythic worlds of dreamy peace or eternal Jew-hatred.  

Rabin’s assassin took the worst message from the Akedah -- that to be Jewish is to live as though you were always just escaping a knife at your throat; and that extreme atrocities are beloved to God.  That is a Judaism of no joy and no hope, an impossible Judaism -- and in the square 20 years ago a desecration of God’s name.

Yitzchak Rabin was the truer heir of the biblical Yitzchak.  He lived through the wars of survival and knew they were over for his people, and he didn’t pretend to know for sure what was next or how long it would take.

We would honor Yitzchak Rabin’s memory most if we could find a way as Jews of being comfortable with our power, and with taking responsibility for how we use it.  We would honor his legacy if we could take the proper measure of the threats to Israel, and to Jews, and fight them rather than our ghosts, and take satisfaction when we are defeating them  That is the true spirituality of Zionism.  To know the perfect place between the smile and the scold, to scowl appropriately while trying revolutionary things.

Yehi zichro baruch -- May Yitzchak’s memory be a blessing.

My Passover Haggadah Commentary for This Year

I just finished these thoughts. They are a combination of commentaries, reflection pieces, discussion prompts related to the Seder text, the Pesach Haggadah. You could read them before or after a Seder, or even during. Wishing everyone a good festival and a Zissen (sweet) Pesach.

https://images.shulcloud.com/544/uploads/Pesach/sederthoughts5780.pdf

What Are Jews?

A bad week for anti-Semitism in the U.S., wrapped around a controversy about anti-Semitism itself. There was the murder of Jews at a kosher market in Jersey City, which seems to be an anti-Semitic hate crime. The president of the United States, addressing the Israeli-American Council, threw in some gratuitous remarks about the Jews in front of him (wealthy, real estate developers, "not nice people at all"), his own ambassador to Israel ("he loves this country, but he loves Israel"), and in general the ways Jews should love Israel. The president's rhetoric frames a question of how to assess a leader with power who says and does things that are good for Jews and also says and does things that are bad for Jews.

The bigger controversy has been about an executive order the president signed related to anti-Semitism on college campuses. The debate within the Jewish community has been about whether the executive order defines what Jewishness is in a way that is detrimental to Jews as Americans or simply counter to how we define ourselves. (There is another debate about the right of free speech; I'm not addressing that here.)

I'm posting here links to a number of texts that relate to how the concepts of "nation" and "religion" apply to Jews. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it's a suggestive one. These come from both inside the Jewish community and outside. One is not friendly.

There is an inside question for Jews of "what kind of group are we", and a number of outside questions including "how should our group be described in American law."

Pittsburgh Platform of American Reform Judaism (1885)

Balfour Declaration (1917)

Palestine National Charter (1968) -- scroll to article 20

Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective (1976)

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance "working definition" of anti-Semitism, widely used in legal and policy settings

Proposed legislation: Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, co-sponsored in the U.S. House in 2018 by Reps. Nadler and Deutsch (both Jewish and both Democrats)

Executive order of President Trump from this week

I may add to this list. I am going to speak about this on Shabbat morning.

Shabbat Shalom!

My Letter After Poway

This is the letter I wrote our congregation today.

Dear Friends:

Once again we are mourning and raging after an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue over the weekend. Lori Gilbert Kaye was a dedicated member of Chabad of Poway, and she was killed as she tried to protect Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who was injured. Almog Peretz and his 8-year-old niece Noya Dahan were also wounded. We pray for their healing, and for consolation for the Kaye family.

I have been and remain determined not to give any anti-Semite the victory they want in any way. They want to push us out of this society. They want us to be too afraid to gather in our places, or to live our lives as Jews out in the open. They want us to feel that we do not belong.

But it is they who do not belong. It is they who are being overwhelmed. Our mitzvot – the deeds that we do, our whole reason for being as the Jewish people – our mitzvot are simply and inevitably more powerful than their violence.

Our place in America is part of what America is all about. Every time an anti-Semite shows his or her face, ten or a hundred or a thousand of our friends and allies come to our side. Within hours after news of the shooting, our synagogue received messages from Christian pastors in our Greater Nashua community, and from the Islamic Center, which offered us any help we might need and sent a note to their entire congregation.

Tomorrow, Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., we gather at Rivier University as we do each year, to commemorate the Shoah (Holocaust) and learn something new about what happened, how people responded at the time, and how people have lived with purpose and hope after the Shoah. That will be our opportunity to be together after the Poway shooting. I urge you to come – with your pain and with your resolve, to comfort each other. To declare our unity and resilience as a Jewish community and a wider community in the face of anti-Semitism and hate. To honor the Shoah’s victims and survivors, and to keep learning its lessons for us today. Please invite people you know outside the Jewish community to come tomorrow as well.

We have spoken with officials at Rivier to go over security for the event, and there will be an extra security detail. Our own Security Committee has been working continually and is in the process of preparing an update for the congregation.

I have reached out with calls and messages of support on our behalf to Chabad of Poway and the other two synagogues in that community, as well as to the Krinsky family, who lead our own Chabad in Manchester.

We will not stop being who we are, even during a week like this. We are the people of the House of Avraham and Sarah who spread Torah and goodness into the world.

L’shalom,
Rabbi Jon

After Pittsburgh: A Narrower Bridge, A Net Like Never Before

Here is my D'var Torah from Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018, the Shabbat after the killings at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh. You can read it or download it as a pdf file here.

It is so good to be here together this morning. I know that it is a great comfort to our friends, our sisters and brothers in Pittsburgh, to know that people are gathered in synagogues all over, thinking about them, mourning with them, and doing something to live in the legacy of the eleven people who were killed at Tree of Life Congregation, while they were doing what we are doing. I have been in touch with Jewish professional colleagues in Pittsburgh, and they are exhausted, and also amazing. It means a lot to them that we care and that we are here in our congregations this Shabbat.

We are drawn here this Shabbat, at a time when we need to reach beyond ourselves -- for the divine, for each other, and deep into ourselves. I know for me, having Shabbat waiting during a difficult week helps me find my footing -- knowing there will be a chance to take a breath, that precious words will be set up for me to sing with other people and say alone, that we will celebrate.  We are drawn to a Bat Mitzvah, so we can be inspired, and I want to acknowledge and thank Lexi and her parents, Matt and Kyle, for being Beth Abraham’s partners in this particular Shabbat which suddenly became different from what any of us anticipated.

I want to welcome you who have come for the occasion of Lexi’s Bat Mitzvah, and you who have come to be with us because all over America people have decided to join with the Jewish community, in solidarity and in defiance.

I hope all of you know that our synagogue leadership has been focused this week on taking care of you -- thinking about how you can be safe here, being available for you. We have had children and staff and members and guests here from first thing Sunday morning throughout the week. Many people have spent a lot of time going over security decisions and listening to anyone who has reached out and needed to talk on any level. I want to say a thank you to the Nashua Police Department for being so responsive to us from last Saturday onward, even anticipating our needs.

Last Saturday at the Tree of Life Congregation, eleven people were murdered and six were injured by a man who wanted to wipe out Jews, because he believes that we and the other people we stand by are a threat to white America.

And despite what he did, we have seen the unbelievable spirit of the Jewish neighborhood in Squirrel Hill, and the unstoppable force of mitzvah, even in the midst of horror and exhaustion.

The shomrim who stay with bodies before a Jewish burial who had to fulfill that responsibility at an active crime scene.The chevra kadisha groups who prepare bodies for burial, and the chevras from elsewhere who came to help, in case it was too much for the local people to bear to prepare friends whose bodies had been torn by bullets. The Jewish medical staff who treated and stabilized the gunman and even talked with him. Mitzvot are relentless.

I have had to give too many sermons at times like these. I have reread them all in the past few days. I don’t want to say the same thing again and again, with just the locations and details changed. I believe we are at a point of tremendous power and risk -- when we could tip into disillusionment, about anti-Semitism and white nationalism in this country -- or when we could help fuel a cascade in the other direction, the direction of tikkun. That would take some courage, and an ability to look hard into the darkness in new ways, but I believe the opportunity is there. And to Lexi, to you and to your classmates, I say that being Bat and Bar Mitzvah has never been more important, being a mitzvah person, and we need every single one of you to get to work with us.

I put on the study sheet a teaching from the Mishnah,the first book of Jewish law after the Torah, from about the year 200. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: I am like a man of seventy years, and I did not achieve an understanding of why the Exodus from Egypt is said at night until Ben Zoma explained this verse from the Torah to me: “In order that you will remember the going out from Egypt all the days of your life” (Deuteronomy 16:3) -- “the days of your life” means the days; “all the days of your life” means the nights. But the Sages say: “the days of your life” means this world; “all the days of your life” means to bring the messianic days. [Mishnah Berachot 1:5]

If you have been to a Passover Seder, you might recognize this paragraph -- it’s one of the paragraphs you might gloss over with discussion or event skip. But this week the passage called out to me all of a sudden, the way Torah does when we really need it.

The Talmud says Rabbi Elazar wasn’t actually old when he taught this teaching -- he was eighteen. But looking out on his world one day, he suddenly felt like he was seventy.

As though there would not be enough time in his life to see the world he was dreaming of. As though he couldn’t escape the trauma of the persecutions of Jews before his lifetime. One day at the age of eighteen, all his hair suddenly turned gray.

Rabbi Elazar was thinking about how we recall the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It’s is the original story of anti-Semitism, the first violent attack on Jews as a group for being Jews, the first time someone gives a supposed “reason” for that. Rabbi Elazar had seen this story as a story about the day of liberation -- about the march of the Jews into freedom at high noon, with their hands held high. As a story about light -- of a mighty God whose outstretched arm could overpower any worldly oppression.

Ben Zoma taught him that it wouldn’t be enough to tell that story that way -- you have to face the story of the night as well. The Exodus is the power of God on the side of the hated -- but it is also a story about that hate. The worry that it is not actually gone but just something we ran away from, that will find its way back to us again.

I used to think that there were two kinds of Jews: those who were obsessed by the darkness, and those who could see light and be inspired by it. And I had no patience once upon a time, for the Jews who chose to look at the darkness so much. But as my own hairs are slowly graying, I think I have started to get what Rabbi Elazar learned from Ben Zoma.

When you are basking in the light of Jewish freedom, don’t pretend there is no darkness. And when you are in the darkness, as we have been this week, don’t close your eyes to lights that might in fact be growing.

Yesterday, the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had, across the top, in large Hebrew print the words יתגדל ויתקדש שמה רבה Yitgadal V’Yitkadash Sh’may Rabbah, the opening words of the Mourners’ Kaddish. And every single page of the paper’s desktop website had those words at the top. The business page, the sports page. Even the page with an article about the downtown Pittsburgh Christmas tree lighting. When has that ever happened?

Our U.S. Senator, Maggie Hassan, made phone calls this week to each one of the rabbis in New Hampshire personally. We are a minority in a small state, but Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein can’t do what she did.

It wasn’t for a perfunctory conversation. We talked for some 15 minutes, and she asked if there was anything specific we needed. We talked together about how all the different levels of hate and animosity today do or don’t interact. She said that I should tell you that tens of thousands of Granite Staters are thinking about us and standing with us.

Some of the most remarkable things have happened when Jews were not even around. I’ve been carrying with me all week these notes that the Unitarian Universalist Church took time in their service last Sunday to write us, adult words and some scribbles and pictures from children even. This is just one example of all the support sent to me and to us this week.

And at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Nashua, something happened last Sunday, which was a special day in their calendar, the anniversary of the founding of Lutheranism, of the day Martin Luther pinned his theses on the church door.

Pastor Dave said to the congregation that they could not just celebrate all the wisdom and leadership of Luther --  they also had to mention Luther’s anti-Semitism, and to mention how Luther’s words were later used by the Nazis. They didn’t talk about this because he and I had spoken, which we haven’t, or because we were there, because none of us were.

This is people who don’t know that many Jews being told that they have to reckon with their own religious group’s responsibility in the history of anti-Semitism. Not during an educational program, or a joint Holocaust remembrance. When has that happened?

I have long said that we live in a time when Jews have more more allies than ever before. And this week we can see that we are standing in a new daylight, as Jews in this country. This is not the same as what has been before. Somehow, even in the dark, we need to see that.

And yet, Rabbi Elazar learns from Ben Zoma that it is foolish to say this unless we have the honesty to talk about the night and face it. Night represents anti-Semitism lurking where we didn’t see it coming and we don’t expect it. Night is where the factors that drive anti-Semitism and white nationalism are hard to sort out, where the relationships among them are murky.

I was a person who shut my eyes to extent of American anti-Semitism especially in its white supremacist form, for years. Last week was the anti-Semitism of hate and violence, but there is also an anti-Semitism and a white nationalism of ideas that sound, like the new Pharaoh’s words at the start of Exodus, kind of reasonable to enough people.

This predates the president, and I said before the election from this pulpit that if he lost, I feared that we would think we were out of the woods. He is not an anti-Semite personally; the white nationalists revile him for having Jews in his family and his inner circle and his cabinet. And he is in the next room over, so to speak, calling his political opposition people who have “launched an assault... on the safety of every single American,” as he said in Texas the week before the shooting. That’s talking about born Americans, not even outsiders. It’s not surprising if someone who hears that, and already wants to intimidate or harm someone in a minority group, is emboldened. Not when so many people who we wouldn’t call white supremacists hear this kind of thing and cheer enthusiastically. In the dark, we don’t know how exactly how all of that stirs together, but it does.

I know a lot of you are on the very narrow bridge between hope and disillusionment. This week the bridge seems even narrower, and it takes courage to keep walking. We are in an unstable situation. It takes strength and balance not to fall off. But we have a net below us like we have never had. I no longer believe it’s enough to stand pat, just bank the relationships we have and grow them with interest. Now we will have to take some risks. But the chance of reward has never been greater.

Some of us have to risk a venture into the darkness. We have to go where people misunderstand us, or invite people who misunderstand us or haven’t thought about us, to come and talk with us. Even people who already have biases or stereotypes about us. Tomorrow I have a piece in the Nashua Telegraph inviting people to talk to me, to arrange to come to the synagogue or to invite me to speak somewhere, and any question is on the table, no matter how potentially offensive.

And some of us have to take the final step of the Mishnah, the argument that the Sages make against Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah -- that these stories have to impel us toward messianic days.

I ask myself -- when communities and churches were attacked in other places, why have I and why have we not responded with the kind of concern and love that others have shown to us this week? Where were our songs, our flowers, our offers of food? And truthfully, have we even been there this way when Israelis have been victims of terror?

And I remind us: that as tenacious as anti-Semitism and white supremcism have been, they are at least easy to denounce. But doing so does nothing about even more tenacious problems of poverty, suffering, and injustice in our society. Those can’t be solved by humanizing the other -- that just gets us, barely, to the starting line.

I do not want to feel old and spent, before I understand all of this.

If I am going to be old about these things, I want to be old like one of our oldest members. Where is Shirley?

Shirley is our fourth oldest member -- born in Europe, a person who knows what that world was that she and her family had to leave. She is 94.

When we had our service on Monday evening, with about 100 people, what Shirley wanted to say into the microphone most of all was this: that in the first day, the Muslim community in Pittsburgh took the initiative to raise tens of thousands of dollars to help the Jewish community. This is the same Shirley, who feels every act of anti-Semitism in the world, and every small bigoted insult about Jews where in the complex where she lives, piercing her inside.

I called her over after the service and remarked on that -- that you Shirley contain in yourself the most finely tuned sensitivity and worry about our place in the world as Jews, and also the ability to see generosity and support and possibility in that same world.

Shirley can tell you that this is a difficult place to live, almost unbearable. But that is precisely where we need to be. That’s the message of the Mishnah about Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Ben Zoma, and the Sages. I say, let’s be old like our 94-year-old Shirley, and let’s be young like our newest mitzvah-people, like Lexi and all you B’not and B’nai Mitzvah. You young people already have a head start on these challenges of this world. Pull us with you back toward the idealism we need.

This week we have mourned, and we have looked at the darkness, but we can also tell a story of light, and even see to bringing our world toward messianic days. I will not let the gunman or the supremacists take my faith in America from me. I will be ever grateful for all of you here, for those who are with us, and for those who inspire us.

We will talk more and make plans. Anti-Semitism and white supremacism are violent, and they are largely built on words -- words that trick and deceive, words that bully, words on the web and words between people. We will fight it and we will defeat it with our own words -- words that love, words that encourage, words between people and even words on the web. Words that describe the real world and words that describe the world we dream of.

May God and may this gathering of ours bring some comfort to all those mourning those were killed in Pittsburgh, and may our lives make their memories a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom.

Ki Tetze -- Learning from a Vigil at ICE

These are fairly unprocessed reflections, on a day when I went up to the Federal office building in Manchester, NH, to be part of an interfaith prayer vigil. Today, as on many days, people are being summoned to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to show they have plane tickets to leave the country, or they will be detained. My understanding is that the first family we saw this morning got a reprieve until March. Otherwise today, the parents would have had to leave and their children would have been taken home by someone else. They were in tears when they came out of the building, after a harrowing experience no doubt.

The Torah portion opens: Ki tetze lamilchama al oy'vecha... "When you go out to war on your enemies." Today it strikes me why the Torah uses wording that seems extraneous. Who else would you war against, if not your enemies? What else should you do against your enemies, but go to war? The Torah says -- war and fighting is for enemies, and enemies alone.

But in fact, today we get confused about who our enemies are. Immigration politics for over a century has been about turning groups of people into enemies. That happened to Jews, as in the 1940s during and after World War II, when the arrival of Eastern European Jews was resisted because we were accused of being not refugees but Nazi (!?) or communist infiltrators.

But when people in any group actually adapt to America, contribute not just economically but by becoming part of the community, become grateful patriots of this country -- those people are not our enemies. One person drove by our vigil and a car, a young man in his late 20s, and asked us why we want to commit suicide by bringing in people who want to destroy our faith. He doesn't know that the family in the Federal office building is not our enemy. There is a real issue of law, and people are working to reform our laws and figure out how to enforce existing laws. But we have to distinguish between who is our enemy and who is not.

This week I have been reading a book that I have mentioned almost annually on the High Holy Days the past few years, called Countrymen, by Bo Lidegaard. The book is about the safe escape of the Jews of Denmark during World War II after the Nazi authorities called for their deportations to camp. I'm only about a third of the way through. The part of the story that current grabs me is the specific day when Danes generally and Danish Jews particularly began to process the Nazi charge that Jews were enemies and not Danes.

For both Jews and non-Jewish Danes, there had been through the 1930s and early 1940s no language to even talk about "the Jewish problem", no language of separation even though Jews were Jews and other Danes weren't. It's heartbreaking to see Jews facing this question about themselves, and wondering about what other Danes would think and do under pressure. It's also illuminating, and inspiring, to see how many Danes rose to the occasion, and not just the infrequent "righteous gentile." Something was going on that enabled a whole society to refuse to see Jews as the enemy, despite being told so by propaganda backed by force.

This same society was clear about the difference between citizens and war refugees, or between patriotic citizens and totalitarians, whether Nazi or communist. It's possible to define your enemies, and fight specifically against them.

I know the language of enemies is harsh, but the Torah uses it. It's not a language of hate. Most of what we did this morning was a "Jericho Walk" around the block of the Norris Cotton Federal Building, seven times around the block in silence. This gave me the chance to take in everything -- the families we were there for, the flags of the USA and the state of New Hampshire and what they stand for, the fire station nearby, the ICE agents trying to do their jobs and enforce the law. The people who talked to us with encouragement, or honked horns. The people who laughed and jeered at us casually, who aren't neo-Nazi activists. There is nothing to hate here. There are some battles to fight, and some specific enemies.

May we have the wisdom to know the difference between enemies and not. May we have the courage to fight the right wars.