Sermon for Second Day of Rosh Hashanah 5768

Beth Jacob Synagogue, Norwich, CT

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

            It was the morning of December 25, and the El Al 747 from New York to Tel Aviv had just set down on the runway of Ben Gurion Airport.

            The flight attendant got on the public address system and made the following announcement: "Please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened until we have reached the terminal and the captain has turned off the seat belt sign."

            To those of you who are seated with your seat belts securely fastened, "Merry Christmas."

            To those of you who are standing in the aisles and removing your carry on luggage from the overhead compartments, "Welcome Home."

            The story itself may be apocryphal, but the reality it describes, I can assure you as one who has spent four years in Israel plus numerous visits, is not.

            First time visitors to Israel are often surprised if not shocked at the difference between their expectations and the Israeli reality. Some people expect Israel to be a biblical theme park, and are surprised to find high rise skyscrapers and massive traffic jams, a toll road that collects tolls by snapping a picture of your license plate and sending you a bill in the mail, or that all of downtown Jerusalem is a no-charge wi-fi hotspot. Camels -- at least those with four legs -- are hard to find but SUVs, though still less common then they are in the United States, are growing in popularity.

            Israel is not a biblical theme park nor is it a gigantic synagogue. A recent survey of restaurants by one of the Israeli newspapers showed that there are approximately 5400 restaurants in Israel of which around 1700 have kosher certification. Most Israelis do not go to synagogue except perhaps for a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. The Israeli Foreign Ministry actually gives a course on synagogue skills to new diplomats before they are posted abroad. Why? Because if the new Israeli consul is invited to give a talk on Shabbat morning at a shul, he is likely to be offered an aliyah, and the chances are that without this crash course he wouldn't know what to do and thus cause embarrassment.

            At the same time, in many ways the average Israeli is more observant than the average American Jew. The overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews, even if they call themselves "secular", light candles and say Kiddush on Friday nights and fast on Yom Kippur. They can quote chapters and chapters of the Bible by heart and know who Rashi and the Rambam were (of course, there is a Rashi St. and a Rambam St. in almost every Israeli town, so that helps).

            Most visitors to Israel quickly take note of the difference between anticipation and reality, adjust their expectations, plunge right in and have a great time. But for some, the cognitive dissonance is too great. Israeli psychiatrists have even developed a new diagnosis, "Jerusalem Syndrome." Jerusalem Syndrome patients flip out, often make for themselves a toga-like garment from the bed sheets in their hotel room, and wander around the city shouting Psalms or singing hymns and urging immediate repentance. While a certain percentage of Jerusalem Syndrome sufferers have a previous history of mental illness, many do not. Dr. Yair Bar-El of the Kfar Shaul Mental Hospital in Jerusalem says that for some of these people, it is precisely the difference between the Jerusalem of their imagination and the Jerusalem of contemporary reality that triggers the syndrome. Fortunately, most of these folks recover after four or five days of hospitalization and go back home with no lasting ill effects except perhaps a lingering feeling of embarrassment.

            Whether or not Dr. Bar-El is right about what triggers Jerusalem Syndrome, I have led enough trips to Israel that I know there is a disconnect between what people expect on a first visit and what they encounter. And I suspect that the reason has to do with the attempts of American Jewish organizations to raise funds for Israel and mobilize American Jewish political support. So the picture that is painted is of an impoverished third world country whose inhabitants are fearful for their lives, liable to be blown up at any moment by a suicide bomb or Kassam rocket.

            But the reality of Israel is very different. Already by the late 1990s, -- the most recent statistics I could find --56 percent of Israeli households owned a car -- and the percentage has surely grown since then. Almost all Israelis have cell phones. Almost all Israeli homes have a computer with high speed Internet access and cable or satellite TV. Israelis regularly vacation in Europe. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv both have some very excellent and very expensive restaurants and they are filled night after night, mostly with Israelis. When Keleigh and I visited Eilat this summer, we stayed at a Dan hotel, the most upscale chain in Israel, and the hotel was full -- and almost all of the other guests were Israeli. Yes, there are pockets of poverty, especially among Ethiopian immigrants and to a lesser extent among immigrants from the Former Soviet Union. And as Jews, we surely have an obligation to help our fellow Jews. But by and large, Israel is a well-off nation and, with the exception that Israeli homes and cars tend to be smaller than their American counterparts, Israelis live lives whose level of material comfort is not that different than ours.

            But what of the security situation? The last time I had visited Israel, in June 2002, things were really bad. I was one of three guests staying in my hotel, and there was really no tourism to speak of. Many of my favorite restaurants had closed for lack of business. At the entrance to every shop or restaurant there was a guard, and he went through your bags very thoroughly. You then either went through a metal detector or were wanded. I had to promise my family that I would not take buses while I was there -- since so many buses had been blown up by suicide bombers -- and as a result I spent quite a bit of money on taxicabs.

            This past summer things were very different. I already mentioned that the restaurants are full. There are still guards at the entrances to stores and restaurants, but typically they did not bother to look inside our bags when we entered, and most places don't bother anymore with the metal detectors. There has not been a bus bombing in quite some time and we frequently rode the bus from the area of our hotel to downtown Jerusalem or other places.

            Though terrorist violence has declined, it has not disappeared. Sederot, the nearest Israeli city to the Gaza strip, is regularly hit by Kassam rockets fired by Hamas terrorists from Gaza. While security checks are generally relaxed, the guards are well trained and ready to increase their level of vigilance if necessary. But on a day to day basis, most Israelis and most visitors feel relatively secure.

            At the same time as Israelis are generally prosperous and relatively secure, we noticed this summer that Israelis as a rule are not so optimistic about the future of their country. The Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, took office less than two years ago amidst optimism. It was generally conceded that he lacked charisma but he was considered to be a competent technocrat. His leadership was disastrously compromised some months later by the Israel army's poor showing in the Lebanon War of 2005. In a parliamentary system, in such a case the prime minister would normally be expected to resign, but Olmert has not done so and he still commands a slim majority in the Knesset though less than 20% of Israelis find him to be doing an acceptable job.

            While we were in Israel this summer, then-president Moshe Katzav, who had been charged with raping at least one of his female office staff and making unwanted advances to several others, pled guilty to a reduced charge, stepped down and was given a year's suspended sentence. A former cabinet minister, Haim Ramon, who had pleaded guilty to assaulting one of his female staff members and had stepped down as justice minister in August 2006, rejoined the cabinet in July 2007 as deputy prime minister in charge of state policy. Israelis are fed up with a political leadership that seems to be more concerned about the perks of their office than the well-being of the people, but they do not see any likelihood of change on the horizon.

            The peace process seems to be perpetually stuck. The security barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories has made daily life safer within Israel. At the same time it has made daily life much worse for the Palestinians. Many villagers find their homes on one side of the wall and their farm lands on the other. The nearest hospital might be two miles away but on the other side of the wall, and accessible only in a roundabout way, at the whims of teen age Israeli soldiers staffing checkpoints, or not at all. Because Palestinian workers either cannot get into Israel at all or can do so only irregularly, they have been replaced with guest workers from Asia, Africa or Eastern Europe. The Palestinian economy is in a shambles and the unemployment rate is around 40 per cent. The current situation provides short term security for Israel but breeds long term hostility, and most Israelis agree that it is untenable in the long run. That a long term solution must be found, virtually all Israelis agree. What that solution should look like is a source of tremendous disagreement.

            Yesterday I spoke of Judaism as a conversation. More than being a religion, a nation or an ethnicity, Judaism is a conversation about how to create a sacred community, how to understand the Torah, how to relate to God and to each other. Israel, the State of Israel, is of course a nation-state, but it is also a conversation of sorts. A conversation about Jewish destiny, the Jewish role in the larger world, and how to create a polity and a state that is both Jewish and democratic. It isn't easy.

            In any human endeavor, there are polarities which must be balanced. Conservative Judaism, for example, seeks to balance our commitment to tradition with our openness to contemporary culture. Our reverence for the sanctity of the Torah with the intellectual honesty to explore its origins and development. Our commitment to the Jewish people with our concern for the well being of all of humanity.

            Zionism, too, attempted to balance ideas which are in conflict. Some Zionists believed that the goal of Zionism was to create a state that was as normal as any other. So the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote that the Zionist dream will be realized when a Jewish policeman arrests a Jewish prostitute who will be sent to jail by a Jewish judge. But if you read the writings of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, or of A.D. Gordon and the founders of the kibbutz movement, they had no interest in bringing the pathologies and injustices of Europe to the Middle East. They hoped to create an exemplary state, one based on utopian ideals of justice, equality and peace.

            Zionism and the State of Israel were meant, of course, to solve the Jewish problem, but what problem exactly is that? For some, it was the problem of the Jews -- to create a place of refuge, where Jews would be safe from persecution. For some, it was the problem of Judaism -- a place where the language of daily life would be Hebrew, where Jewish religious and cultural creativity would flourish, where Jews could figure out how to create not only a communal but a national life using the Bible and the Talmud for guidance while also being a part of the larger region and world.

            Israel will be 60 years old this coming spring, and the dilemmas are very much with us. During my studies at the Hartman Institute this summer, Keleigh and I had a one day seminar and field trip exploring the Israeli Arab community -- Arabs who live in Israel proper, not the West Bank or Gaza, hold Israeli citizenship, vote in Israeli elections, and for the most part speak fluent Hebrew. Yet, because Israel is understood as a Jewish state; because the symbols of Israel are the menorah and the Star of David; because the Israeli national anthem speaks of the "Jewish heart's yearning"; and because most Israeli Arabs have relatives on the other side of the Green Line and some of them have either helped Palestinian terrorists or committed terrorism themselves -- they are not fully part of Israel. And yet, they identify as Israelis and have made quite clear their desire to remain Israeli citizens with their villages as part of Israel, even if a Palestinian state is eventually created on adjacent Palestinian land. Shouldn't Israel be a state with whose symbols all its citizens can identify? Shouldn't it serve the needs of all its citizens? But wasn't Israel established precisely so that it could be a Jewish state? Shouldn't it promote the well-being of Jews and develop housing and infrastructure for Jews from throughout the world who come to live in Israel -- even if this might mean that economic development in the Arab sector gets the short end of the stick?

            There are so many problems and dilemmas of contemporary Israel that, as I am thinking about them, my head is beginning to explode. It is tempting, as many younger Jews who are troubled by these dilemmas, and some who are not so young, to simply ignore them and walk away from involvement with Israel altogether. Or conversely, as many Jews who are leaders of Jewish organizations, or those who look back on the 1940s and 1950s with a certain nostalgia do, to deny that these dilemmas exist, to ignore them, to attack those who raise questions, and to retreat to the image of Israel as a biblical theme park. But I prefer to think of Israel as the place where an important conversation is going on about what it means to live as a Jew today. Both American Jewry and Israel are important conversions, but Israel is a conversation with an army and an air force and so the stakes are a little bit higher. As Rabbi David Hartman says, for two thousand years we did not have to deal with questions of the moral use of power. Now we do. What is the proper way a Jew, a Jewish nation, uses a gun or a tank or an airplane? This is perhaps the central Jewish conversation of our time.

            But Israel is more than a nation or a conversation, it is also a family. And so I want to leave you with another vignette, a story that happened to me in February 2001. I was traveling in Israel with about 20 other Conservative rabbis. Our trip had been organized by a travel agency which, frankly, was trying to convince us to use their services when organizing congregational trips to Israel, and so the hotels and everything else were really top notch. We were spending the night at a hotel by the Dead Sea when we saw posters announcing that Motorola was putting on a concert for its employees that night, and some of us wanted to go.

            We asked our guide to make arrangements, and he tried, but it was impossible. The event was strictly for Motorola employees, admission was by invitation only and no tickets were being sold under any circumstances. He tried to speak to them about Zionism and Jewish solidarity, but to no avail.

            We were disappointed, but our guide Ezra said that he wanted to see the concert too and that the best bet was for us to simply show up and see if we could talk our way in. So five of us plus Ezra headed off to the tent where the concert was held, and went to the back entrance to see if we could talk our way in. When we got there, the guard asked to see our invitations, which of course we did not have. But somehow, one of our party, Rabbi Neil Brief from Chicago, the only one in the group who was in his 60s -- the rest of us were in our late 30s or early 40s -- had been given an invitation by one of the Motorola employees who didn't plan to attend. So Rabbi Brief showed the guard his invitation and we started to walk in.

            But the guard stopped us and said "zeh bishvilcha -- mah eetam?" This is for you -- what about them? And Rabbi Brief pointed to the invitation and said "katuv po, l'chol ha-mishpacha" -- it says, this invitation is for the whole family. The guard laughed, said "beseder, beseder" -- OK, OK, and waved us all in. And we enjoyed a wonderful concert, a buffet and an open bar, courtesy of Motorola Israel and Shmulik the guard.

            All Jews are, indeed, family, and Israel is an important part of our family. Israel is not perfect, indeed, it is far from perfect. But our family members do not have to be perfect in order to receive our love and our support. On the other hand, it is not a good idea to pretend that a family member is perfect when there are real problems. I hope that in the coming year we will all engage in the conversation about Jewish destiny which Israel represents, and I hope as well that enough members of our Beth Jacob family will join the Beth Jacob Israel trip we hope to put together for 2009 to make that trip a reality. Shanah tovah.