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Yom Kippur 5766
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation B’nai Israel
Toledo, OH
NOTE: To register for the World Zionist Congress election, or for more
information on Mercaz, go their website:
www.mercazusa.org
This past summer I sat in a living room in Neveh Dekalim, a Jewish
settlement in Gaza which no longer exists, and watched a clash between two
competing visions of Zionism.
One of the Gaza residents told us that her husband grew up in a house that
used to belong to an Arab in Ashkelon, a city south of Tel Aviv which has
always been part of Israel. She said “what’s the difference? Why should we
have to give up Neveh Dekalim, but we get to keep Ashkelon?” To her, all of
Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea belongs to Israel,
there is no difference between Tel Aviv and Gaza, and if we’re entitled to
any of it we’re entitled to all of it.
“Why should anyone lose their child so you can live here, surrounded by
millions of Arabs who hate you?” was the heated response from an older
secular Israeli who lost a child serving in the Israeli Defense Forces.
One of the other visitors said “as painful as the disengagement is for you,
are you totally incapable of seeing the pain of the Palestinians?”
The demonstrations, for the moment, are over. The disengagement is a fait
accompli. Despite the settlers’ fervent prayers, the Messiah did not come,
Ariel Sharon did not change his mind, the soldiers obeyed their orders.
But that doesn’t mean the struggle for Israel’s soul is over. The fault line
is still there, running deep in Israeli society. Those who were opposed to
the disengagement are catching their breath and preparing themselves for the
next phase in the struggle—the settlements in the West Bank.
A withdrawal from many of the settlements in the West Bank probably won’t
come too soon—everyone in Israel is still trying to recover from the pain
and cost of the disengagement from Gaza. But it will come eventually.
Either as a part of a negotiated peace agreement with the Palestinians, or
as a part of Sharon’s unilateral disengagement strategy, but it will come.
And when it does, I fear for Israel. Unlike Gaza which never was part of the
Biblical Israel, the land of the West Bank was all part of ancient Judea and
Samaria. The attachment to the land runs far deeper, there are many more
settlements, and they are more geographically dispersed. When the time comes
to withdraw to militarily defensible borders in the West Bank, the turmoil
is going to be tremendous.
Both sides in this debate – the religious Zionists clinging to the land on
the one hand, and the secular Zionists clinging to a vision of peace on the
other hand – believe THEY are the REAL Zionists, and the other people have
tarnished the vision of Zionism.
Who’s right? Will the real Zionists please stand up?
Jews have always had a strong connection to the land of Israel. In the
weekday Amidah, which the observant Jew recites three times a day, we ask
God to restore our people to Israel. Every weekday we ask God to “Sound the
great shofar to herald our freedom, raise high the banner to gather our
exiles. Gather us together from the ends of the earth. Praised are you Lord,
who gathers the dispersed of his people Israel.”
Our prayers don’t tell us when we should go to Israel, if we all need to go
at once, and our prayers don’t tell us what the borders of Israel should be.
Even though our prayers don’t specify the borders of Israel, they do remind
us to raise our eyes to Zion—Jerusalem—for Torah comes forth from Zion.
For almost two thousand years, most Jews believed that this prayer meant
that one day God would send the Messiah and somehow we would all magically
be transported to the holy land.
Waiting for the Messiah to come and bring us home required a great deal of
patience. They say that the town of Chelm in Poland hired a watchman, so
that if the Messiah came in the middle of the night he could run around and
wake everyone up and let them know the good news. The job didn’t pay very
well, but it was steady work!
A little over a hundred years ago, some Jews got tired of waiting. In
1897 Theodore Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel,
Switzerland. The 200 delegates were mostly secular Jews from Europe,
convinced that Jews would always suffer from anti-Semitism unless they had a
home of their own. They were not religious Jews responding to the call of
Zion—they briefly even considered establishing a Jewish state in Africa.
They were motivated by a desire to live in dignity in a place where Jews
could ply any profession, belong to any country club, serve at all levels of
government. They were tired of being second class citizens wherever they
lived.
After substantial debate, the delegates agreed on a statement of the key
principle of Zionism: "The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people
a home in Eretz Yisrael secured by law."
Even this idea—that we shouldn’t just wait for God but we should go ahead
and work to bring the Jewish people home on our own, was controversial in
its day. The vast majority of Orthodox Jews didn’t support it because they
believed we shouldn’t try to “push God’s hand.” They believed we should wait
for God to bring us home when the Messiah comes. Many Reform Jews didn’t
support the idea, because at that time they believed they were transcending
narrow nationalism by striving for acceptance among the nations. Reform
writings from the time even say the exile from Israel was a good thing,
because we couldn’t be a light to the other nations if we weren’t living
among them. The first of the major movements to embrace the idea of Zionism
was actually our own Conservative movement. In 1906, Solomon Schechter, one
of the guiding lights of the Conservative movement said “Zionism is the
Declaration of Jewish Independence from all kinds of slavery, whether
material or spiritual.” Schechter also believed that Zionism was a positive
force because it brought a lot of Jews who previously had no interested in
Judaism back into the Jewish fold, even sparking an interest in religion in
some of them.
The founding generation in the Zionist movement, the ones that “did the
heavy lifting,” who made aliyah and built organizations like the Jewish
Agency and Histradut were mostly secular Jews from Eastern Europe, Jews
fleeing persecution. Hence their vision for Israel was as a haven to escape
anti-Semitism—not as a place to fulfill Messianic expectations.
Even though most of the founders of Israel were not religious, they felt a
sort of spiritual connection to the land, they felt a sense of mission, and
they felt a connection to the Torah as a repository of the Jewish people’s
history. They were idealists, in the words of A.D. Gordon: “As we now come
to re-establish our path among the ways of living nations of the earth, we
must make sure that we find the right path. We must create a new people, a
human people whose attitude toward other peoples is informed with the sense
of human brotherhood and whose attitude toward nature and all within it is
inspired by noble urges of life-loving creativity. All the forces of our
history, all the pain that has accumulated in our national soul, seem to
impel us in that direction... we are engaged in a creative endeavor the like
of which is itself not to be found in the whole history of mankind: the
rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered
to the winds...”
Members of Israel’s Labor Party are the spiritual descendants of A.D.
Gordon’s philosophy. They have a vision of Israel as more than just a home
for Jews, but as a place where we apply the moral vision of Judaism.
These Labor Zionists are not so concerned with the exact borders of that
land—after all, Ben-Gurion agreed to the UN Partition Plan in 1947, which
would have left them with a much smaller Israel, and with Jerusalem under
international control.
The attitude of today’s secular Zionists is most eloquently expressed by the
famous Israeli author, A.B. Yehoshua: “We, who love our homeland and suffice
with the Land of Israel inside the Green Line, are regarded by the opponents
of the disengagement plan as alienated folks who have betrayed the 'Land of
Israel' of the Zionist vision.” Yehoshua analyzes how much land is in
Israel, how much in the West Bank, and how much is not currently populated
by Palestinians—and he concludes that the whole battle is over what to do
with eight percent of the western land of Israel—a large part of which is
the Judean desert, as if Israel lacks for desert. He continues “And because
of that small area, the opponents of disengagement want to stay in this
bloody cycle, and to pollute Zionism, to drag themselves over the rocks, to
paralyze the state and to threaten a civil war?... The God that governs
these people's hearts and guides their action is a god of 'quantity of
soil.' A tragic and absurd degeneration of the Jewish spirituality of yore.”
If the secular Zionists are clearly the spiritual descendants of the
founders of the Zionist movement and the founders of the state of Israel,
from where do the religious Zionists draw their claim that THEY are the REAL
Zionists? Why are they so obsessed with holding onto every square inch of
the land of Israel?
At first, the vast majority of Orthodox rabbis were opposed to Zionism and
the establishment of the state of Israel. One exception was the man who is
considered the founder of religious Zionism--Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak haKohen
Kook, appointed the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel in 1921. Like the
secularists from Ukraine and Poland, Rabbi Kook believed that all Jews
should move to Israel—but for a completely different reason. Rabbi Kook
wrote “Apart from the nourishment it receives from the life-giving Jew of
the holiness of Eretz Yisrael, Jewry in the Diaspora has no real foundation
and lives only by the power of a vision, and by the memory of our glory,
i:e., by the past and the future. But there is a limit to the power of such
a vision to carry the burden of life and to give direction to the career of
a people-and this limit seems already to have been reached. Diaspora Jewry
is therefore disintegrating at an alarming rate, and there is no hope for it
unless it replants itself by the wellspring of real life, of inherent
sanctity, which can be found only in Eretz Yisrael.”
The secular Zionists said there was no hope for Jews living in the Diaspora;
Rabbi Kook said there is no hope for Judaism living in the Diaspora.
For the religious Zionists, settling the land of Israel is not primarily
about escaping anti-Semitism. It’s primarily about fulfilling the prophecies
that the Jewish people should be restored to their land, and about
fulfilling commandments to live in Israel and to settle the land of Israel.
In the early days, most religious Zionists saw the state of Israel as
neutral in regards the coming of the Messiah. Maybe it would help the
eventual redemption, maybe not. They also weren’t too worried about the
exact borders of Israel. Most agreed with the various negotiations that
resulted in Israel’s borders.
All of that started to change in 1967—after Israel regained Biblically
important lands in Judea and Samaria, as well as the land in the Gaza Strip.
A more radical strand came to the fore—Gush Emunim, Bloc of the Faithful,
who believe that the creation of the state of Israel IS the
start of the redemption process. Not only that, but they therefore
believe it is our divine destiny to hang on to every inch of the land of
Israel.
The Gush Emunim rely heavily on the first comment by the great rabbi Rashi
in the Torah. Rashi asks why does the Torah start with the book of Genesis?
Why not start with Exodus, which really tells the story of the Jewish
people, where we are given the Torah at Mt. Sinai? His answer is that
Genesis is part of the Torah in order to teach that “God has showed His
people the power of His works, that He may give them the heritage of the
nations" As Gush Emunim and its sympathizers understand it, this means "that
the promise of the entire land of Israel is a pledge of absolute divine
validity. No moral consideration can stand against it, and any Arab national
rights have no weight against it."
The Gush Emunim—and their successor, the “Yesha Council”—have come to
believe that it is a sin to give up an inch of land in “greater Israel,”
without regard to how many people will die defending that land, without
regard to world opinion, and certainly without regard to the feelings or
situation of any Arabs currently living on that land. Their rabbis like to
quote Numbers 33:53, “And you shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land,
and live in it; for I have given you the land to possess it.”
Today Israel is in tremendous conflict because of a head-on clash between
these two competing visions of Zionism: the religious Zionists insist that
to give up an inch of land is forbidden by halacha, it goes against God’s
will and promises to the Jewish people, and it’s foolhardy to boot. The
secular Zionists insist that peace is more important than land, we have no
business oppressing other people, and the sooner we get out of the West Bank
and let the Palestinians have a country, the better.
Most of the time, those of us living outside of Israel can only sit on the
sidelines and watch what happens politically in Israel. This year is
different. This year we have a vote.
The World Zionist Congress convenes once every four years. It’s a meeting of
the World Zionist Organization or WZO, the organization founded by Theodore
Herzl in Basel in 1897. The WZO controls a large portion of the hundreds of
millions of dollars spent every year by the Jewish Agency.
The representatives to the WZO determine how that money will be spent.
Every Jew over the age of 18 who supports the idea of Israel as a Jewish
state is eligible to vote for who represents him or her at this Congress.
You can register to vote by mail or online, it only costs $7, and it only
takes about 5 minutes.
There are 500 voting delegates to the Congress which will convene next June.
145 of them come from the US. Your vote helps determine the makeup of that
145. In the last Congress, 32 of the representatives came from the
Conservative movement.
In this election, you do not have to vote for either a secular vision which
sees religion as unimportant, or a religious vision which values land over
lives. You can vote for a third way. What you vote for is who will represent
you at the Congress—and you can vote for the Zionism of Mercaz USA, which
represents the Conservative movement at the Congress.
If religious Zionism is founded on the teachings of Rav Kook and secular
Zionism on the teachings A.D. Gordon, the Zionism of Mercaz could be said to
be based on the teachings of Ahad Haam. Ahad Haam was an advocate for a
strong two-way relationship between Israel and the Diaspora, where each
nourished the other. Shortly after the First Zionist Congress, he wrote:
“This Jewish settlement, … will become in course of time the centre of the
nation, wherein its spirit will find pure expression and develop in all its
aspects up to the highest degree of perfection of which it is capable.
Then from this centre the spirit of Judaism will go forth to …all the
communities of the Diaspora, and will breathe new life into them and
preserve their unity.” Mercaz shares Ahad Haam’s vision of Israel and
the Diaspora culturally and spiritually nourishing each other.
We know the power that Israel can have on our young people. Kids who go on
USY Pilgrimage come home infused with energy and enthusiasm, proud of their
Judaism. Programs Mercaz supports, like bringing young Israelis to Toledo to
work as camp counselors, benefit both us and them. Our kids had a great time
learning Israeli songs and cultures from young people like Ayelet, who
stayed with us for a few weeks this summer. And Ayelet had her eyes opened
to a completely different way of being Jewish – she never knew there was
such a thing as a Jewish woman who keeps kosher and wears short pants in the
summer!
If the religious Zionists base their concept of the land on the first Rashi
in the Torah, one might say that Mercaz’s form of Zionism bases its concept
of the land on Nachmanides’ first comment. Nachmanides says that the Book of
Genesis as a whole is there to teach us that our hold on the land is
conditional on our obedience to the word of God. As Uriel Simon said in an
essay, "There is a need for this warning, for clinging to the dangerous
delusion that God will be on our side unconditionally, by virtue of our
covenant with Him, may lead us to sin.” We cannot hold on to all of the land
of Israel at the price of shedding unnecessary blood, at the price of
oppressing other people, at the price of forgetting that the Torah commands
us to treat the stranger kindly for we were strangers. MERCAZ USA has
consistently supported all of the Israeli government’s peace efforts founded
on the principle of trading territory for security. Mercaz also demands that
the Palestinians carry out their obligations to stop violence, arrest
terrorists and eliminate incitement as found today in Palestinian textbooks,
curricula and sermons.
In line with a vision of Israel committed to principles from the Torah, it
seems that in the rush to build a country, some important principles have
been left behind—the commandment not to turn our eyes from our poor brother,
and the commandment of bal taschit, not to damage the environment, for
example. Mercaz supports social justice and protecting the environment.
Israel is a land that belongs to all Jews, not just Orthodox Jews. In a
letter to the First Zionist Congress Rabbi Mohiliver wrote: "For the success
of this assembly it is necessary to establish that all the "Sons of Zion"
whose hearts are loyal to our cause should live together in complete love
and brotherhood, even though they are in conflict as to matters between man
and God.”
Sadly, today in Israel the government takes sides in matters that are
between man and God. The secular Zionists who founded Israel were not very
concerned about religion. Coming from Eastern Europe, they knew nothing of
Reform or Conservative Judaism. In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes
those pioneering Zionists made was to give the Orthodox a monopoly on
religion in Israel.
Conservative and Reform rabbis are not allowed to perform legally recognized
weddings or conversions in Israel. The government provides a vast amount of
funding for Orthodox institutions, and virtually nothing for Reform or
Conservative institutions.
MERCAZ contends that the government of Israel should not be in the business
of maintaining and financing only one form of Judaism. Rather, it should
support all forms of Jewish life. Religious pluralism, the right of every
Israeli Jew to choose his/her Jewish lifestyle, is ultimately a matter of
equal civil rights for all men and women. WZO can direct that money from the
Jewish Agency go to support pluralism in religious expression in Israel.
We believe pluralism is important not just because we want “our cut of the
pie.” But we believe that Israel desperately needs our vision of
Judaism—Judaism solidly rooted in tradition and halacha while at the same
time participating fully in the secular world. The past President of the
Conservative movement in Israel, Ehud Bandel, said that most Israelis are
Conservative Jews, they just don’t know it yet.
According to one recent survey, over a third of Israelis said they would go
to High Holiday services at a Reform or Conservative synagogue if there was
one in their neighborhood. For most Israelis, there isn’t. Israel and the US
have about the same number of Jews – yet there are 800 Conservative
synagogues in the US and only 50 in Israel. A lot of what’s holding us back
is money. It’s very tough to raise money to build synagogues and pay rabbi’s
salaries when Orthodox synagogues and rabbi’s salaries are paid for by the
State.
We have made progress—50 congregations is a lot more than we had 20 years
ago—in part thanks to those who took the time to register for Zionist
Congresses in the past who voted for Mercaz. Thanks to the funding Mercaz
representatives have been able to secure, we have Israelis enriching our
children’s lives at Camp Ramah and USY Conventions. Future leaders of
American Jewry are studying in Israel on the USY Nativ program, spending
time on a Kibbutz, learning at Hebrew University, seeing Israel from a
modern, Conservative perspective. These are the kids who will come home and
stand up to the anti-Israel Arab propaganda which is flooding our college
campuses. And they are supported by funds from the Jewish Agency which are
the result of votes for Mercaz.
Fliers with information on how to register for the World Zionist Congress
election can be found on the tables in the entry hallway to the sanctuary.
In Pirkei Avot, Hillel says "If I am not for myself, who is for me? and if I
am only for myself, what am I? and if not now, when? Mercaz supports us, and
it supports an inclusive vision of Zionism. And now is the time to support
them.
In the last election for the World Zionist Congress, only 110,000 people
voted. 2% of the Jews in America voted. If everyone in B’nai Israel voted,
it would be almost enough to send another Mercaz delegate to the Congress.
Your vote makes a big difference.
May God grant the leaders of Israel the strength, wisdom, and courage to
bring about an era of living Zionism which sees Israel at peace with her
neighbors, an Israel where all ways of practicing Judaism receive equal
support. May God help us realize Rabbi Mohliver’s vision of an Israel where
all “Sons of Zion whose hearts are loyal to our cause live together in
complete love and brotherhood, even though they are in conflict as to
matters between man and God.”