Walk On Water

May 27, 2005 
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

Last night Ruby and I went to see the Israeli movie "Walk on Water" which had a very short run at the Westhampton Theatre. Its themes are many, complex and intertwined. This sermon cannot do justice to them all. If it plays again or is released on DVD I urge you to see it. It speaks to this moment in Israeli history and the totality of Jewish history. It is provocative and insightful. Its true end is yet to be written, and no one knows the script.

In essence: Eyal, a hit man for the Mossad, is given the mission to track down the very old Alfred Himmelman, an ex-Nazi officer, who might be still alive. Having just returned from a successful assassination of a Hamas agent in front of his wife and son, Eyal finds that his own wife has committed suicide because of Eyal's occupation. Pretending to be a tourist guide, Eyal befriends Himmelman's grandson Axel, in Israel to visit his sister. He wants to convince her to come back to Germany for their father's birthday part. The two men set out on an extended tour of the country during which Axel's frank and open attitude, especially towards Palestinian Arabs, challenges Eyal's rigid, clichéd values. Their friendship grows until he learns of Axel's homosexuality. With this final straw he leaves. To finish his mission, Eyal has to go to Germany. He meets Axel once more and succeeds in being invited to the family party. There, when the grandfather is revealed and Eyal has the opportunity to kill him, he doesn't and breaks down.

There are a few more twists, but I will leave them for you to watch the movie. Let me focus on the following thoughts.

For many correct reasons, we have what I would label "The Amalek Complex." Amalek in the Torah is that people which attacked the Children of Israel after the Exodus from Egypt (1) for no reason and (2) in their most vulnerable time and (3) from the most vulnerable position. All those who have sought to destroy the Jewish people and usually fit one or more of these aspects, we call Amalek. In the battle in the Torah Amalek is not vanquished but just defeated. In that moment God says to Moses and the Israelites remember what they have done to you and don't forget. Wipe their memory from the face of the earth. And we have carried those words on our hearts ever since. Samuel commands King Saul to finally wipe them out. He doesn't and loses the kingship because of it. In the Megillah of Esther, Haman is portrayed as a descendant of Amalek, and though he and his sons are killed, the evil is not cut off. The Rabbis considered Rome and its destruction of the Temple, the people and the land to be akin to Amalek. And, perhaps more than metaphorically, call Hitler a descendant of Amalek as well. When we fear anti-Semitism, it is like we are seeing an Amalek behind every rock.  And some, even many Israelis see the Arabs in the same light. Using the Amalek experience as a prism, one must have a very cold, hard and unyielding analysis of our history and how to survive it.

The very opening scene of this movie presents us with a reality very different from you and me. Just like the battle with Amalek in the Torah and by Samuel and by Mordechai and against the Romans, defending the existence of the Jewish people has been a bloody affair. Words cannot transmit the reality, no matter how hard we try. From antiquity it has been either vanquish or be vanquished. And that is not such old history. If Hitler and Nazi Germany had not been defeated then all Jews within their reach would have been murdered, gassed and burnt. The State of Israel has survived, not because of niceties, the terrorism in the all the years preceding its birth, the invasion to preclude its birth, the terrorism of the 1950's, the Six-Day War, the following terrorism, the Yom Kippur War, the continuing terrorism, and two intifadas, but in blood. Before Ruby and I went to Israel last September, there were the continued suicide bombings of cafes, buses, schools and discos. Why did it stop? Because of the opening scene, the active elimination of those doing it, in addition to the wall/fence combination aimed at keeping them out. The movie portrays how after a "piguah," an attack, the country went into quasi mourning with its own type of music. The "Amalek Complex" of kill or be killed has been part of our historical psyche for over 3,000 years. It is not easy to give it up.

Golda Meir is quoted as having said to Anwar Sadat that she could forgive Egypt for killing Israelis in war, but not forgive for making Israelis kill Egyptians. This movie portrays the toll it has taken on the neshama of the Jewish people through the person of Eyal and the continued gritty determination and steel-like souls of others. It accurately reveals the wind shears that so apparent in the body politic of Israel by the confrontation of Shalom Achshav, Peace Now, and Yesha, the council of the Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, called by them by their Biblical names of Shomron and Yehudah, Samaria and Judea. Ruby and I attended the passionate rallies pulling Israel in opposite directions, leave Gaza versus not giving up an inch, after all, they will be closer to Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheva and Tel Aviv with their missiles. Eyal's behavior in the Arab shuk, the market in the Old City of Jerusalem clearly shows how some Israelis, having fought in all the wars, lost friends and family to bus bombings, the descendants of survivors of the Shoah, detest the Arabs and will never believe that they will make a true, honest, complete, irrevocable peace. Ruby and I stayed by a family in Emek Hefer, a man who fought his way up the Golan in 1973, my age, who readily bared his soul, his attitude and his hatred. What I could not do, in that short visit, with no vested interest because we were not staying to continue to run the risk of living in Israel, returning to our relative safety, I could not and did not have the courage to hold up to him a mirror and show him the corrosive effects of his hatred, no matter how well deserved, earned and merited. The next to last scene of the movie painfully shows this.

There is another theme running through this movie: how long can you hate the Germans for the Holocaust? To what lengths should one go to bring the last living ones to justice? This is not the issue of forgiving. Eli Wiesel excellently made it clear that I, who did not live during the Holocaust, who was not in the camps, and did not lose any close relatives, do not have the right to forgive. But I can hate them. Personally, speaking just for myself, the German language grates on my ear and the word Germany makes my hair bristle. I will not knowingly by a German made product. I have that visceral reaction. It is not that I point a finger that any individual German. Because of my study of Jewish history, study of the development of the Jewish religion, I understand quite clearly that the Germans did more than kill and murder over six million Jews and maim physically and psychologically for life millions more. They wiped out an entire Jewish civilization. The fabric, the weave, the content and context of European Jewry and European Judaism, the people, places, piety, study, music, language – except in Hasidic Brooklyn- was wiped off the face of the earth. Our history was changed irrevocably by them. And I feel it most acutely. What do we do with this? What do I do with this? In part, it explains why I became a rabbi, to reclaim, rebuild, perpetuate and propagate the faith, the people and civilization of the Jews and Judaism. How am I expected to feel about those who wanted and tried to annihilate us? Once I wrote the following line: Maybe a generation not born in the 20 th century but rather the 21 st, will feel differently than I, and make a new beginning. I am rooted where I am.

These are two of the themes deeply embedded in this provocative and stirring movie; two sides of the same coin: Amalek and the Nazis, hate and survival.

Without revealing the actual content of the last scene, and not referring to other scenes that are in harmony with it, let me just say that we, the Jewish people, are stronger and more resilient than is ever imaginable. Despite all that has occurred to us over the millennia, we are here. We have a State of our own. It is vibrant. It is creative. It is strong.

May we pray for a utopia, where hatred ceases and killings end?

May we dream that Israelis and Palestinians will both sleepy peacefully in the night?

May the messiah and its days of complete peace come soon for the entire world.   

Amen.