Israel Is A Miracle
Rosh HaShanah Day II, 5770
September 20th, 2009
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor
Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel is a "nas," is a miracle. Every time I fly over the coastline of Tel Aviv and land at Ben Gurion Airport I am filled with awe and radical amazement. Upon landing Ruby and I always recite Shehecheyanu. And while that beracha surely voices our thanksgiving for safely returning to Israel again, my mind is conscious that I am equally thanking God that we have arrived at this time in the chronicles of the Jewish people to have a state to which to return. I never, ever take this for granted. When I walk down the long corridor towards the luggage area and pass the sign welcoming me "home," my heart skips more than one beat. Every mile of the flight from Richmond to Israel is more than a measure of distance, it is a measure of history, it is a calculation of destiny. I walk much wherever I go. I feel that my steps on the streets of Jerusalem are paces through the journey of the Jewish narrative and not just my going from place to place. I believe there is a transcendent purpose for the Jewish people in the existence of Medinat Yisrael. This meaning and purpose clutches at my heart even in the most mundane details of daily living in Israel.
The Rabbinic imagination holds Eretz Yisrael as the most unique place on earth. They said that ten beautiful places were created in the world, nine of them in Eretz Yisrael. The medieval Jewish cartiologists (mapmakers) drew maps with Jerusalem as the center, as it is called the "bellybutton" of the world. Looking down at the Kineret, the Sea of Galilee at dawn or sunset, the sunset over the Mediterranean from the beach at Tel Aviv or looking at its glow from the city of Tzfat high in the upper Galilean mountains, the quietude of the Kotel at night, captivates me and captures me as no place else.
It is not that Israel is perfect. Ben Gurion is quoted to have said that he wanted everything in the Jewish state that everyone else has, Jewish garbage men, Jewish policemen and Jewish ladies of the night, and he got it. There are many imperfections in Medinat Yisrael. But looking at Jews in the rainbow of colors and in the cacophony of languages, in military khakis, M-16's on their shoulders, walking the streets, studying at the universities, shopping in the modern malls, building a country out of marsh and barren mountains - we have wandered and waited, we have suffered and endured for two thousand years, until we could do it in a place of our own, in the place of our beginning, in the place where we were born, four thousand years ago. We are not interlopers on this land. Medinat Yisrael does not exist because of the Holocaust, despite President Obama's remarks in Cairo.
It exists because it fulfills Judaism, because it fulfills Jewish destiny.
It is the liberation of the Jewish people.
It is the restoration and expression of our national being.
My feelings and writings develop from my thinking about the existence of the Jewish people. My first encounter of Israel was as a child with a little cellophane bag of sand, purported to have come from Eilat and a fifteen piece puzzle. I treasured it. It was a little bit of Israel from far away and from all the ages of the past. As I have grown and studied, as I have stood on the Golan Heights and on the Temple Mount, I have pondered and meditated on a series of questions:
Where do Jews belong?
Are we supposed to be citizens of the world?
Is my being an American an accident?
Should we all pack up and move to Israel?
What organizes my life? That is a question about me.
What am I? What are we?
And, "how" am I? "How" are we? Jew? American?
What comes first, last or not at all?
What determines how I live, the dreams that drive my life?
What language should I speak?
English is my native tongue and Hebrew I acquired.
What does having a common language imply?
And what does it mean not to have one?
Will Hebrew literacy or lack thereof bind us together or disconnect us?
How do we see the world and its politics?
Specifically, the areas under dispute,
Do you know where they are?
Do you call them "The Territories, "The West Bank."
"Judea and Samaria, Yehudah v'Shomron"?
What should Israel do with the settlements? Where are they?
Do you really care? What's the implication?
Who remembers June, 1967, October, 1973, 1956, besides pre-1948?
And lastly, who has been to Israel? For how long?
How many here today never intend to even visit,
while going everywhere and anywhere else in the world?
What message does that give to your children, grandchildren?
Where is home?
I can only share a small amount of the thoughts in my heart.
I.
The liturgy, ritual and inner dynamics of Judaism and the Jewish people always oriented Eastwards. While current synagogues like ours were built to fit into the block, it was almost universal to face Jerusalem. Jewish homes had a piece called a "Mizrach" which means "east", secured to the eastern wall of the house, pointing the way. My grandmother as a child in Poland nailed a piece of matzah at the end of Pesach on the eastern wall of the house that stayed there until erev the next Pesach. Jews faced east with their heads, their hearts and their bodies. To pray the Machzor that is in your hand, the Siddur the rest of the year, to read Torah, is to affirm the centrality of the land of Israel in and for Jewish existence. We close the Seder and Yom Kippur, not with a memo to our travel agent but with a religious exclamation: L'shanah HaBahah BeYerushalayim. It has always meant: By next year may the Jewish people return home to Eretz Yisrael. Of all the generations that have come before, we alone are the privileged generation to have Medinat Yisrael.
II.
This consciousness, this physical and spiritual posture was based on the vision that Jews outside of Israel are living in the Exile, in Galut. The very use of that word makes clear the belief that Jews belonged, at least predominantly, in the land of Israel. One moment which made me melt, was standing in line to pay for a meal in a town in Emek Hefer, our partnership region, and the cashier, having never met me before yet clearly recognizing my being an American, said softly, "Welcome home." Maybe that is why the singular question so many Israelis ask is: "When are you moving here?" It is asked with sincerity, with love, it is asked with four millennia of longing, that the Jewish people should be one, should be whole, should live its national life with vibrancy, with normalcy impossible any place else.
Yet most Jews in the world choose to remain in the lands of their domicile. Israel is coming to grips with the fact that while it is now the numerical center of the Jewish people, the Galut, the Jews of the Diaspora will endure and need their/our own vibrancy, too. But if we are going to stay here, there are some things I must say:
III. A.
Israel must never be for us "just another place in the world." In a sense world Jewry lives vicariously through Israel. Without it, the Magen David would be missing from the international ensemble of flags. Israel puts us on the world stage. Without it, the Jews of the world would have no defender.//// Remember Entebbe.//// Without it, we would not have our self respect, as Jews. Without it, Jewish culture in all its manifestations would be stilted, like a soul without a body. Without Israel, there would be no magnetic force, no centripetal force to unite people that have such diversity and distance. My list is endless. No matter how we existed pre 1948, we cannot live like that again.
Here let me insert from my writing to you during our visit this summer:
The last time we went to Yad VaShem was 36 years ago - 1973. It has been totally remade and expanded. The experience here is totally different from the Museum in Washington, D.C. and ours in Richmond. But one memory of our visit stands out sharply and indelibly. Many units of the army, border police and Jerusalem police were on organized and guided tours at Yad Vashem. At a model of a concentration camp stood two soldiers, motionless, expressionless, staring, poring, riveted to the model. Both wore kipot and one had payot, both in the uniform of the army of Medinat Yisrael. Perhaps is was just me, but maybe this was what was going through their minds - the juxtaposition of them, their age, their religious being, their strength, their military service, the existence of the State embodied in them, the soon to be observed Tisha B'Av - remembering the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Jewish Commonwealths resurrected by the blood of those previous to them, and the model of a place of our destruction, that their blood will prevent in the future. I hope they didn't see me staring. I did not want to interrupt or intrude on them. More than the displays -- these soldiers caught me completely.
Would we have been chased out of every country,
would we have been burned at the stake,
would we have had to endure centuries of endless, bloody pogroms
and burned in the furnaces of the Holocaust,
if we had had a State of our own?
That question, above all others, disturbs my life, haunts me,
and is answered with each grain of earth of Medinat Yisrael.
I feel that answer in the soles of my feet as I work each step on the soil of Eretz Yisrael.
I see that answer in our daughter's face, a proud citizen of Medinat Yisrael.
III.B.
Without intending to whitewash anything, the Jewish heart in the Galut, in the Diaspora, must be in sympathetic beat with Medinat Yisrael.
We must be its defenders.
We must be its spokesmen.
We are better than you read in the newspapers.
Just because Medinat Yisrael exists,
quite clearly does not mean, that the world loves us!
Quite the reverse!
The discrimination against Medinat Yisrael is virulent,
in every language, in every electronic format, ceaselessly,
even if you don't read it in the World Street Journal or the
Times-Dispatch.
So let me ask:
How many here have been to Ashdod?
How many here have been to Ashkelon?
How many here have been to Beersheva?
How many here have been to Shderot?
I have been to all of them.
And I hope that the office can electronically attach my photos to this sermon when published on the listserv. At the Rabbinical Assembly Convention held in Jerusalem this past February, we traveled to these four cities/towns. I first had to sign a waver releasing them from liability in case I suffered any harm. I visited schools, Conservative synagogues, and an old age center. As civilian centers, they were the targets of the thousands upon thousands of missiles fired from the civilian population centers inside Gaza. They aimed at the water treatment centers, the electric plants, the ports, the apartment houses. 12,000 rockets of all varieties. And I saw them! When we came to the Conservative synagogue in Ashkelon, the first thing said to us was not, "hello," was not "we welcome you." It was: "If you hear a siren, this part of the room goes out that door to that shelter and this side of the room goes out that door to that shelter." That was my "Hello" sitting in shul in Ashkelon. Then we went to the lions den. I stood with my colleagues on the hillside of Shderot facing Gaza, as if I was standing on Broad by MCV and looking at Church Hill. And from those residential, civilian housing complexes in Gaza were fired the katyushas, the rockets, the missiles without end upon the civilians, citizens of Israel, their homes, their shops, their schools, their hospitals.
And the world did not care. And the world did not stop it.
And the U.N. did not send any commissions.
And the world did not condemn Hamas.
It doesn't seem real to me standing here in this shul in Richmond, Virginia. You can't feel the fear of parents with their children in school, their parents in their old age impossible to get to shelters, that your steps are measured in the distance to which bomb shelter you should run, in the sense of isolation that the rest of the world that doesn't care what happens to you, how much you will suffer, and in the words of the Unetaneh Tokef, "who will live and who will die."
This doesn't excuse any crime. But the report released this week is a sham, at best. When released on the listserv, I will attach President Shimon Peres' remark that are most eloquent. I don't stand here as an apologist for Israel. I don't stand here as a Rabbi. I stand here as a Jew. It was a terrible war. It was fought under the most difficult conditions. There were mistakes. There was the heat of the battle. The stories of the bravery of Israeli soldiers trying to protect Palestinian civilians will unfortunately never be told until too late, and nobody will read them, and nobody will care. But us. We care. That will have to be enough. I have faith in the fathers and sons, the mothers and daughters who defend their parents, their grandparents, their children, when the world doesn't care again, if Jews live or die. I have faith in Medinat Yisrael, without making excuses, without having to white washing the truth.
III.C.
It is a mitzvah - a commandment - that every Jew must visit Israel, at least as a tourist, if not for longer. Every Jewish child must visit Israel: on youth tours, Birthright, for their junior year of college abroad, or at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem after they graduate. If I could rewrite the Machzor, if would add it to the list of Al Chets, if we don't. My words are just words. There are no words that substitute for walking the streets, looking into their faces, listening to their voices and seeing the miracle of Medinat Yisrael. The gap between American Jewry and Israel, our lack of knowledge, our disconnect, our disinterest is a sin. Atonement will be made by going there, for which beating our hearts cannot replace.
Conclusion
When I first heard of the Kotel, "The Wall," it was called the "Wailing Wall." That term was coined by the British who translated it from the Arabic. They mistook our praying on Shabbat eve, with our kisses upon the ancient stones, the place of our glory, as cries of anguish, when it was really tears of adoration and of love for our holiest site. In all our history we never called it "The Wailing Wall." It was just "HaKotel" or "HaKotel HaMa'arvi," "The Western Wall." I believe that if God had not watched over us to preserve at least a saving remnant, we would still be weeping. The Guardian of Israel has saved us, as we have joined in saving ourselves. The Kotel is a place of joy. I wrote about the soldiers pledging their allegiance to serve, protect and defend Medinat Yisrael, in the courtyard before it. When Ruby and I watched them I did my best to hide my tears of pride, to suppress my feeling that our entire history was fulfilled, and the absolute faith, that from this land, with whatever borders will ever be drawn, we will never leave again. I share these feelings, these insights, my imploring you to go to Israel, from the deepest recesses of my heart. May God protect and shelter the defenders of Israel and our State. May Gilad Shalit return home soon.
May we love Medinat Yisrael as we love life itself. Amen.
