I Am Proud To Be A Jew

I Am Proud To Be A Jew

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor
Rosh HaShanah First Day
September 23, 2006 - 1 Tishrei 5767 

I.

On July 3rd an intrepid group of nineteen people with Ruby and I landed in Israel. We immersed ourselves in the sights, sounds and history of the State of Israel. From sunrise to sunset we walked the highways and byways of our capitol, the ancient and modern city of Yerushalayim. We followed in the footsteps of King David, climbed the Castel where Israelis fought hand to hand combat to save Yerushalayim in the War for Independence, walked part of the "Burma Road" created by the American Colonel David 'Mickey' Marcus that enabled the Israelis to break the siege of Yerushalayim, saw the history of the fall of the Jewish Quarter, cut off and destroyed for nineteen years until its liberation in 1967. We saw the monastery at Latroun which could not be taken in 1948, and had a moving visit at the headquarters of the Armor Corp nearby. Who could have known the fate that would soon befall the young men we saw on the parade grounds? We explored Masada, which while part of earlier history, is very much part of the psyche of the modern State. Yitzchak Lamdan wrote a stirring poem with the rousing line: Shaynit, M'tzadah Lo Tipol - A Second Time, Masada will not fall! And we prayed at the Kotel, amidst the throngs, and left our k'vitels, letters, in its cracks. I wrote prayers on behalf of those from our congregation who were ill and carried notes written by others.

The streets of Yerushalayim were filled with the hustle and bustle of citizens and tourists. Ruby and I were overwhelmed. We had visions of the empty street, cafes and stores of the summer of 2002 and even the fall of 2004. This was a 'mechaya!, and we were part of it. We didn't have to be called the "Brave American Tourist," as we were greeted on previous trips. We heard languages from all over the world. Youth from many countries were running, dancing, singing. It was alive! It was electric!

At Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where David Ben Gurion proclaimed the State in May 1948, we were given an impassioned speech that raised goose bumps on our arms. I wish all of you could have heard this woman's flaming oratory that captured the march of Jewish history to that historic moment and to this very day. When we left that room wefelt - beyond knowing - how and why there was, is and forever will be a Jewish State, Medinat Yisrael.

Then we traveled to Tzfat high in the mountains of Galilee for our base while touring northern Israel. But first we visited Kibbutz Lochamei HaGetoot, the kibbutz founded by fighters and survivors of the ghettos, particularly of Warsaw. We met with one beautiful, old lady, who spoke in simple English that had us enraptured. You didn't want to break the spell. She was a living link to the old there and here in the new. She represented the symbiosis of Jewish history, of a people so long exiled, persecuted and murdered, now resurrected and resuscitated in its original place on earth. When we got to Tzfat they were in the midst of a great klezmer festival. The pedestrian mall was filled wall to wall. The alleys in the old city of the famous synagogues and artist colony were flowing with people. We tasted wine at the winery at Dalton ever so close to Lebanese border. This was a grand time to be in Israel. It was dynamic!  

II.  

It was July 12 th, while sitting on the Golan Heights and learning about its strategic importance, overlooking the upper Galilee that we heard the opening sounds of the war. I don't know if what we heard was the Hummer being blown up, the murder of the soldiers and the capture of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, but I knew that those sounds did not augur well. The next morning we awoke to sound and feeling of a rocket striking the mountain south of us, Har Meron. Without haste we left Tzfat on schedule. The remaining days were spent by the group in Tel Aviv until their departure. Ruby and I stayed another ten days, first in Netanya with friends, then in Emek Hefer, our partnership region, back to Yerushalayim for Shabbat, and the last days with our friends in Efrat.

It is hard to describe how you look at young men in uniform going off to fight an unconventional war. What do you say to friends when it is their son, their nephew, or their brother? You clasp hands firmer, embrace more tightly, bite your lip, and give a firm clop on the back, many times. We watched the news incessantly, saw and heard real time the attacks on Haifa, Kiryat Shmonah, Kfar Giladi. We heard the sirens on TV and radio as they were happening. While the beaches in Tel Aviv and the large mall in Yerushalayim were still full, the country was at war. We watched the Apache helicopter gunships going up and down the coast and saw the jet planes in the sky. And we understood that the entire northern quadrant of Israel was getting blasted, indiscriminately, civilians, cities and towns. And we saw the announcements of the funerals, of the soldiers and civilians, some being held even during the attacks. And yet,

We saw hundreds of Ethiopian children brought from the absorption center in Tsfat to a school in Emek Hefer where they would be housed, fed, taught, protected, for however long it would take.

We saw a ticker tape running on the bottom of the television screen announcing the name, town and phone number of hundreds of families, maybe thousands, who were prepared to take in families from the north without question, without hesitation, and without pay.

We saw the resilience born of indeterminable testing of a tough country, of a tough people. Now they will argue like meshugenas. But in the midst of war, whose script you only can read when it is over, Israelis showed their mettle, theirbravery, their courage, and their strength. Moses did not call us a stiff-necked people for naught.

When Ruby and I left the evening of July 25 th we felt like traitors.  Our place was with them, not here. If it were not for my obligations to you and to my family, we would have stayed much, much longer. Regardless of your position on Israeli politics and policy decisions, the people of Israel are our flesh and blood.

III.

In the Jerusalem Post of August 11 - 17 th, 2006, Yehuda Avner wrote an excellent article entitled "The Barbarians of the North." Please contact me for complete copies.  I quote one small piece:

Our soldiers were never meant to be soldiers. We are not a martial people. War is not in our blood. Unlike our enemies, our legendary heroes are not warriors and conquerors, but prophets and scribes. Yet we have had to learn to fight with ferocious proficiency in order to stay alive in this merciless and unforgiving neighborhood….It is a neighborhood whose masses aggressively reject our right to exist. And it is a volcanic, volatile neighborhood, considerable strategic sections of which are in the grip of an inhuman brand of militant Islam preaching and planning to wipe us off the map. We fight front-line troops of Iran. It is the fight of our lives. It is Tehran versus Dimona. And to win it requires more than a mere civic duty; it requires a passionate Jewish patriotism.

This is the call of the hour: passionate Jewish patriotism. 

IV.

How can we, here and now, have passionate Jewish patriotism? There are at least four ways:

Jewish pride ; Jewish identity; Jewish giving; and, Jewish presence.  

A.

A colleague, Rabbi Arnold Stiebel in Woodland Hills, California forwarded to colleagues a piece entitled "Why I am Proud to Be a Jew."  I share some of it with you.

• I'm proud to be a Jew because Jews don't kidnap.
• I'm proud to be a Jew because Jewish education does not consist of teaching martyrdom and hatred.
• I'm proud to be a Jew because our religious leaders and religious services don't whip us into a frenzy to kill others.
• I'm proud to be a Jew because in the middle of a war, Jews still demonstrate & protest to protect the rights of the Arab-Israeli minority to voice their opposition to the war.
• I'm proud to be a Jew because even when Israel is wrongly and falsely accused of killing innocent civilians, Jewish leaders apologize immediately for any loss of life, instead of celebrating these deaths by passing out candy and shooting celebratory gunshots into the air.
• When the world accuses Israel of massacre in Jenin,  when the world accuses Israel of bombing civilians on a Gaza beach,  when the world accuses Israel of shooting a child cowering against a wall,  when the world accuses Israel of bombing a Lebanese apartment building killing 56 civilians, when all of these accusations turn out to be totally false, to be vicious anti-Semiticlies, and when all along I knew in my heart that these stories just could not be true,and I'm later proven to be right, I'm proud to be a Jew .
• I'm proud to be a Jew because the Israeli Army is so good, that when it takes more than four weeks to wipe out a sophisticated enemy who has prepared six years for this war, the world criticizes the IDF for not getting the job done quickly.
• I'm proud to be a Jew when my army, the Israeli army, drops leaflets and makes calls to Lebanese citizens on their cell phones to warn them to evacuate before bombing begins.
• I'm proud to be a Jew when entire Israeli towns in the north, Nahariya, Kiryat Shimona, Tsfat, are reduced to ghost towns due to the constant shelling, and yet not one looter has appeared to empty out the property of others.
• When Israel must defend its very right to exist, when it must fight a well armed enemy, when Israel must conduct this war on terror with its hands tied behind its back so as not to take an innocent life lest the media have something true to report, that it must fight this war of survival under the cloud of "disproportionality", as if thousands of Katusha rockets falling on its citizenry is somehow "proportionate" when Israel simultaneously pushes back these threats both in the North and in the South under the added pressure of a biased media, then I'm proud to be a Jew.
• I'm proud to be a Jew when a Russian/Israeli businessman single-handedly creates not one but two tent cities on the beach to house Israelis fleeing the North and provides shelter, bedding, food and drink, showers and bathrooms, all done without red tape in a matter of 24 hours, to house over 6,000 Israeli's.
• I am proud to be a Jew when Israelis from Jerusalem give shelter to families from Haifa, when food from the Negev is donated to feed soldiers at the front, when the IDF deploys soldiers on special assignments to deliver diapers to shelters and to entertain and calm the frightened children.

It must well up from within your innermost soul, from the throbbing of your heart and declare:

I am proud to be a Jew.

I am proud of the Jewish people.

I am proud of the State of Israel.

I am proud of my faith. I am proud of my history.

I am proud of the values of my heritage.

I am proud to be a Jew!

This is passionate Jewish patriotism!  

B.

Passionate Jewish patriotism is not relegated to any time or place. It is always and everywhere!

It is at home, by ourselves or with our children and our grandchildren.

It is the mezuzah on the doorpost,

The kosher food on our table,

The art on our walls and curios, and

The music we play on CDs.

It is the values by which we live, work and interact with others.

It is here in the synagogue.

The community that we built here praying together,

The outward reach to God and the inward reach to our souls,

The Shabbatot and the Chagim observed in their glory, and

The friendships created that elevate joys and sustain us in sorrows.

It is outside our homes and synagogues, at work and in school.

Everyone should be proud to be identified as a Jew,

Prepared to affirm one's faith in the face of any missionary, and

Testify to our identity through our conduct, our language, and our manners.

It is our knowledge of Judaism, of Israel, of Hebrew, of our history.

Everyone must know the journey of our people,

Having a working facility in the language that binds us together

Transmits our values, and

Tells our story, and

Know the basic elements of our faith that is our essence.

I offer this to you in my Basic Judaism class here on Wednesday nights.

Our Jewish identity is one pulsating,complementary whole, connected by invisible bonds that transcend time and distance. Our pride in Israel must be intertwined with pride in our religion. Our activism in one dimension must be interwoven with our engagement with all others. No part of our Jewish identity stands alone, separated or hyphenated from the rest. We are whole Jewish beings! And every part of our identity must be infused with passion, impregnated with enthusiasm and permeated with loyalty to the totality of our history, our people, and our faith.  

This is passionate Jewish patriotism!

C.

"Halavay" Israel had no oil resources to create billion dollar revenues. The world will give money to Lebanon but not to Israel, though there is a petition that I have forwarded through our listserv to at least protest the inequity. The destruction caused to the cities and towns of the north is quite substantial. The ecological damage is significant, due to the number of forest fires that the katyushas caused throughout the north. The cost of housing the population that was evacuated is immense. I know that everyone here responded to the needs of the populations in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from hurricane Katrina a year ago. We have responded to other devastations. Without reducing the donations that we will give to the synagogue, Federation Welfare Campaign and other worthy organizations, it is due, fair, proper to give additional funds to the special campaign of the Federation, the Magen David Adom whose ambulances you saw in every picture, and to the Jewish National Fund that will reforest the devastated areas in the north, and our Masorati Movement whose synagogues and youth movement were harmed in the war and will not receive any governmental monies. While this is not such a lectern thumper subject, where, how, how much, and to whom we give is a true act of passionate Jewish patriotism.  

D.

A true act of passionate Jewish patriotism is to come with Ruby and me to Israel this coming summer. In light of what we learned and experienced last summer we are working on a different itinerary. It will be magnificent.

We are not "just" tourists.

We are pilgrims following the path of earlier generations who came by foot and boat.

We are following Moses' command to go up and discover the Promised Land.

We walk in the footsteps of David, of Mattathias the Maccabee, and of Deborah the prophetess.

We absorb the panorama of Jewish existence.

We need to be in Israel, especially after this war.

We need to show the world that the Jews of the Diaspora don't run scared.

We need to show ourselves what we are made of.

We need to show Israel that even as we live here, we are filled passionate Jewish patriotism.

Details of the trip will forthcoming in the next weeks.

So let me tell you a little story. As part of our getting to know Emek Hefer we visited and spoke to different groups. One day we went for lunch to the Kibbutz Ramat HaSharon It was cafeteria style and everything smelled scrumptious. Ruby and I took our food and then went on line to pay. When we came to man at the register he said to us: "B'tayavon" which means "Bon Appetite," and then he said simply "Welcome home." Afterwards, when we finished shopping in the small store adjacent to the cafeteria he bid us good-bye and closed with the salutation "Welcome home." I was touched more by those two words that all the speeches I have ever heard.

This is another part of our passionate Jewish patriotism. Even as we pledge allegiance to America, land of birth for most of us, with English as our native tongue, "let's go home," at least for a visit. We will weave in splendid beauty the three-fold chain of the land of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the God of Israel.  

Conclusion

May the day come quickly that the captives of Israel, Ron Arad from long ago and from recent days, are returned to their families and nation. May the day come even more quickly that the echoes of gunfire will cease from the land, so that Jews and Moslems, Israelis and Arabs will live in peace and tranquility. Lu yehi, may it be. And if all our other requests on these days before God go unattended, may just this one, the one for peace, be answered, Speedily and in our day.

And let us say, "Amen."