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SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO—THE ISRAEL APP
“Should I stay or go?” I asked myself. Should I leave Israel earlier than anticipated or not? Bombs could fall within days. Who knows? Maybe this time they will reach Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. After all, that’s what the terrorists are boasting will happen. Will I be able to handle the sirens, the bomb shelters, the stress? What is my obligation to my family, to the Jewish people, to myself? I wrestled and wrestled in my mind and finally came to a decision.
These were my thoughts, not in July of 2014, but in January of 1991, when I was a first year student in rabbinical school in Jerusalem, just before the first Persian Gulf War. Saddam Hussein boasted that he had a nuclear bomb, and while it turned out to be just bluster, I didn’t want to take the risk. So I left my program five months early, and it has tugged at my heartstrings ever since. If I was ever faced with a similar dilemma, I told myself, I vowed that I would stay in solidarity and support. And as this week’s Torah portion, Matot, tells us, a vow is serious business.
Well, the situation presented itself again, and there was very little wrestling to do, because, thankfully, my family of Zionists felt exactly the same way as I did. All of them, feeling like Israel is their second home, wanted to stay to be with our Israeli brothers and sisters, express our support for them, and to continue to contribute mightily to their economy. Yes, we bought 4 tallitot, 2 sets of tefilin, 4 women’s hats, many kippot, several kinds of jewelry, and ate out every night other than Shabbat.
Before I continue, I want to recall a conversation I had with my 14 year old son Micah while in Israel. He told me I should be more passionate in my sermons. He said something like: “Dad,” I know how passionate you are about Israel, but it doesn’t come across like the ones we heard here.” Micah, at 14, is now one of my best and seriously helpful critics. I thought about it and know he’s right. Maybe it’s because I am in customer service as a rabbi, maybe it’s because I consider myself to be more of a teacher than a preacher, but if I’m honest, I know it’s also because I am afraid to offend people. So I express my point-of-view, but I equivocate. Today, I am going to try not to do that as I talk about my recent trip to Israel. If I offend people, so be it. It doesn’t mean that I don’t respect your potentially very different opinion or welcome you here, and it certainly doesn’t mean I care about you any less as a member. But today, from the pulpit, I’m going to express my views without equivocation. I apologize only for the fact that it will be too darn long!
Today’s parasha, Matot, is all too relevant to the current situation in Israel. It describes a brutal battle by the Israelites against Midian, which couldn’t have been easy for Moses, given that his wife was from there. In the text the Israelites kill all the kings, they kill the prophet Balaam, and they also kill the children and the women, or at least those women who had a hand in seducing the Israelite males to the cult of Baal-Peor. It’s a horrific passage, and our tradition has always been uncomfortable with what is certainly a painful passage about war and blood and vengeance.
The Midrash (SifreiMatot 157) records a fascinating debate about the Jewish army’s battle tactics. According to one anonymous opinion, “they surrounded [Midian] on all four sides.” Yet, Rabbi Natandisagrees, insisting that “they left the fourth side [open] so that [the Midianites] would flee.” Rambam codifies Rabbi Natan’s position as normative halachah, writing, “When a siege is placed around a city…it should not be surrounded on all four sides, only on three. A place should be left for the inhabitants to flee and for all those who desire, to escape with their lives.” (Laws of Kings 6:7) A Jewish army must always allow an adversary to withdraw, avoiding unnecessary violence and bloodshed.
That is exactly what Israel did in Operation Protective Edge. In the recent exchange with Hamas, Israel has done just that, giving Hamas every opportunity to halt its rocket fire. It happened at the beginning of the conflict and twice more, where cease fires were offered but Hamas refused.
I am sure you have also read plenty of articles about how Israel has done more than any army in history to lessen the civilian casualties, to “give residents the opportunity to flee” to put it in the language of the Torah, dropping leaflets, making phone calls, tapping on roofs, warning people when and where it will attack so they can leave. Would any other army in the world do such a thing? Has any army in history? In the future, military experts will study Israel’s conduct during this war as a model for how to minimize civilian casualties, despite the fact that there are many of them. For that, the blame falls squarely on Hamas for placing civilians in harm’s way. I’ll have more to say about that in a few minutes.
In a different year, I might describe some of the meaning derived from that, or from visiting the different synagogues and the food and the holiness of the streets, but this year, was, well, obviously, a little bit different. What people want to know is “what was the mood like there?” I can answer that question in three different ways: in terms of personal experience, communal experience, and political experience.
Beginning with the communal experience, what was the national mood like? Simply, put, it was one of unity, and in at least three different ways.
When I arrived the nation of Israel was unified in mourning over the three Israeli teenagers: Gilad, Naftali, and Eyal.
Then, the nation was unified in moral outrage over the vengeful crime of the three Israeli teenagers who murdered and burned Mohammed Abu Khedeir alive. The nation was outraged, as they should have been, as we all should have been. This was not just the moderate left with whom most of us associate, but even right wing, ultra OrthodoxHaredi Rabbis appropriately asking for communal soul searching. How could someone would think that this is OK, according to Jewish teachings? At an Orthodox service we attended with many Haredim present, the Rabbi gave a sermon expressing just that. The parasha wasPinchas, and I was cringing, praying that he wouldn’t use Pinchas’ actions to call for vengeance. He said exactly the the opposite. Pinchas did the right thing, he said, according to our tradition, but he had God’s blessing. We don’t. We don’t take justice into our own hands. And, thankfully, the suspects were found quickly and arrested, not protected as the murderers of the three Israeli teens were by Hamas.
Then, Israel was unified in pain and resolve over being attacked indiscriminately by Hamas rockets. There we were as a people, in the bomb shelters, in reading the news, in praying for the IDF, in knowing that Israel had to take action to meet the first obligation of any government—to protect the safety of its citizens.
And what I was least looking forward to in leaving Israel was leaving that unity, that solidarity, that strength of knowing that Israel was and is defending itself, to come back to the United States to be put on the defensive. To reading about how it’s all Israel’s fault, how if they would just end the occupation, how Israel commits genocide and apartheid and ethnicide, to seeing Jews get attacked, at least verbally, and now physically, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Paris, where pro Israel supporters were literally trapped in a synagogue by anti Israel protesters. That is why I didn’t want to leave.
And that leads me to the political experience. Make no mistake about it, we are at war. I could say Israel is at war, but I consider myself a part of Israel, the people and the land, so I will continue to say we.
As I stated earlier, Israel is the most moral army in the world. Leaflets, roof knocking, medicine and food and electricity and treating Palestinian victims in Israeli hospitals. Can you imagine that happening if the situations were reversed?
We are held to double standard, triple standard. I don’t mind that. We should be a light unto nations, we should be more moral, more ethical, but when we are not even allowed to defend ourselves, it crosses a line.
In all this we should have tremendous sympathy for Palestinians. They are dying while playing on the beach. There is massive collateral damage. It is awful. But the blame lies with Hamas. They are encouraging human shields. Hamas leaders are openly telling their residents not go get out of harm’s way. They arelaunching rockets from schools and mosques and hospitals. This has been well documented. Netanyahu put it succinctly: “We use our missiles to protect our civilians. Hamas uses its civilians to protect its missiles.”
We should also remember that this is not about the occupation. Israel doesn’t occupy Gaza. We left in 2005. The occupation was over. But instead of using the time to build markets and companies, Hamas has used it to build tunnels and bombs. The same thing happened in Lebanon. Israel gave up the security zone, and the result was Hezbollah lobbing rockets into Israel.
Tragically, in my view, this sets the peace process back years, if not decades. Israel is not going to leave the West Bank, which is more than 10 times the size of the Gaza Strip, knowing that such a large area would be impossible to control and that those same rockets that sent us to our shelters in the last few weeks will come from meters instead of miles away, with the possibility of much more accuracy, right to the heart of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and not just Sderot and Ashdod. I might want Israel to give up territory in exchange for a flimsy promise of peace, but until Israel can trust that they won’t actually be driven to more war by giving up territory, they are simply not going to do it, no matter how great the international pressure. No amount of International Pressure will force Israel to put more of its population at mortal risk.
Perhaps Israel would get more sympathy if more Israelis would die, but what nation on God’s earth would do that? And we have seen that tape before. People telling us they wanted to kill us and being led, at least in most cases, like “lambs to the slaughter.” Even for those who fought back in Warsaw and Kovno and in the forests as partisans, we didn’t have the power to fight back effectively. So we swore to ourselves as a people that we would never let that happen again. And now that another enemy tells us they want to kill us, at least as a nation and sometimes even as individuals and we do have the power to fight back, this is what it looks like. It is its own kind of tragedy, to be sure, and we would not be Jews if we didn’t have tremendous sympathy for the many innocent Palestinians who have lost their lives as a result of Hamas’ continued willingness to martyr themselves, but we are doing what we must to make sure “never again” is more than just a slogan. This is what “never again” means in realpolitik terms.
So what good is this sermon, then? Am I just circling the wagons? A sermon should end with an action plan, and if a sermon doesn’t propose something that brings us closer to peace, why bother? But there is an action that everyone in this room can take. What Israel does need right now is to know that they are not alone.Increasingly, they feel the isolation. Most Israelis that I have talked to express the idea that they feel they are being attacked by the rest of the world and that no one supports their right to even defend their children. As the niece of one of our members put it, “I think it is great that you are here during the difficult time.” It has been a terrible time for all of us and our friends around the world seem to be diminishing on a daily basis.” Letting a nation that you understand their pain is not nothing, so if there is an action you can take, it is to call, e-mail, text anyone you know in Israel and let them know that you care about them and are thinking about them. You/we are there for them. Communicate it as often as you can to as many people as you can. That’s the action to take here. Please do so generously.
I want to conclude with the personal experience. Many of you read this story in my blog about the Red Alert App for the Iphone. Yes, there’s an App for that. The Red Alert App lets you know when a bomb is headed your way. It will tell you what city it is predicted to land in, and it is instantaneous, so you have 15-30 seconds to take cover. I highly recommend that you download it so you can get a taste of what it feels like for the Israelis.
Well, we downloaded it for our devices. Most of the alerts were for the cities in the South--Sderot, Ashdod, Asheklon, MoatzaEzorit, and others. The fact that bombs were not falling close to where I was staying in Jerusalemriddled me with guilt. After all, these are still the people of Israel, people I think of as nothing less than my extended family. Am I so self-centered that my first reaction is not "how terrible for the people of the South," but "thank God that my family and I are safe?" I couldn’t really begin to imagine what it must be like having to worry every single moment that a rocket may be on its way in about 15 seconds.But now I was getting a small taste of this.
My 11 year old son Jonah, who is very attached to social media, as you might imagine, would call out the cities every time an alert came on. “Ashdod, Beersheba, Sderot, etc.” he would call out. Well, finally, he yelled out: “Jerusalem. Daddy. It’s Jerusalem.” So we quickly ran down four flights of stairs down to the shelter. Why didn’t we hear the siren? We had never stayed in a luxury apartment before with an air conditioner and a dryer. Our apartment was sound proof. Maybe we should have paid a little less for a less than sound proof apartement. From then on we left the windows open.
But after making friends in the bomb shelter, the all clear was given. Then, you have a decision to make? Do you hunker down in the apartment in fear, or do you go out as normal to “not give the terrorists a victory?” It’s amazing how quickly Israelis get back to normal. We decided to go out to Ben Yehuda Street. So we began the walk up King George Street, past the Great Synagogue on the left and the Leonardo Plaza, formerly the Sheraton, on the left. If you know that area, there’s a large park in front of the Sheraton, and we were not sure what we would do if there was a siren. There is no place to seek shelter there, so we quickened our pace. And having the illusion of it "not being in our yard" shattered, every sound on the walk to Ben Yehuda Street made us just a little bit jumpy-- a truck running over a metal grate, a door slamming, a siren from a police car with an extremely loud announcement from a bullhorn, which turned out to bejust apolice officerpulling someone over for speeding. The strangest sound of all, though, came from a car blasting a radio. The drum beat, in our state of mind,sounded like an explosion. It turned out it was just music being blasted, though..
Then again, it wasn't "just" music. After we decided it wasn't a bomb, we thought that maybe it was a rap song it was playing so loudly. But no, the car was blasting the song from the morning service."V'ha-ereineinub'toratecha, v'dabeklibeinub'mitzvotecha," enlighten our eyes with your Torah, and let our hearts cleave to your commandments."
And there was our sign. In this time of fear and uncertainty and red alerts, I pray O God, for the people of Israel, for the peace of Jerusalem, and that none of us of any religion or nation should have to live in such fear. Instead, as the song says, “let us cleave to You, O God, and enlighten our eyes to Your Torah, to peace, and to hope.”