I Think About Israel

March 8, 2002
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

 

I have had many reasons for making sermons. Sometimes it was to encourage us to act: repent during the High Holy Days; observe more of our tradition; remember our dead in a constructive manner. Sometimes I preached in here hoping that someone would hear out there and it would affect the world. Sometimes I preached in order to teach some value from Torah or explain our faith. Tonight, in simplicity and brevity I want to reflect on a little bit of our history in the eretz Yisrael. Not for theatrics. Not for the outside world, though I wish they would listen. Not to scream, yet the anger and pain at events is deep within me. Just for ourselves. To strengthen ourselves as we watch events far away. Maybe it will help answer coworkers, neighbors, friends or even your own children.

Where to begin?

Is it some four thousand years ago? Then Abraham and his small family came from Mesopotamia to a very empty land that was even then racked by warfare, as the Torah records. God promised this little shtickle, little piece of land that wasn't rich in oil or minerals or water, but was the crossroads of the known world between Africa, Asia and Europe as a place to propagate the faith in the One God. And if we could find and exhume Avraham Avinu and test his DNA, the scientists would find that it is a perfect match with ours.

Is it possible? The answer is "Yes." Despite all the wars and exiles, there is an unbroken chain, a direct linkage between us here today and Abraham then and there. We have carried on our bodies the sign of his covenant with God. We have reread and retold the story of our birth in that land, from that man and his wife Sarah, from generation to generation. We teach it in our religious school just as you and I learned it earlier. It is fascinating to think that no other ancient people survive personally linked to their antiquity. Italians are not Romans. Egyptians are entirely racially different than the Pharaohs. Babylonians, Assyrians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Amalekites and Canaanites disappeared from history eons ago. All of the ancient peoples mentioned on papyri and carved on steles are gone save one. Us.