Responding to Israel as Liberal Jews
Rosh Hashanah Morning 23rd September 2006
– 1st Tishri 5767
A few weeks ago, the front wall of our synagogue was
daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti: A hooked-nose caricature in profile –
and these crude, blatant pearls of hatred: ‘kill the kids’; ‘nuke
the Jews’; ‘Jews you are next’. Why did this happen? It wasn’t the
first time we have we have been targeted for anti-Semitic abuse: Our
windows have been broken on three occasions; red paint thrown at the
front-door – and once, a much smaller, but, nonetheless, graphic image
was scrawled on one of the panels of the front-door: A Star of David, with
an ‘equals sign’ followed by a swastika. But the latest incident was a
little different. For one thing, it must have taken a bit more time to
execute: to climb the lower wall, and to cover all that space.
The scale of anti-Semitic attacks rose sharply in
Britain during July and August. In general, the media assumed that the
increase in attacks on Jews was linked to the conflict between Israel and
Hizbollah that engulfed Lebanon and northern Israel – and, of course, it
was. But this automatic linkage begs a few questions: Why target Jews? Why
the same old anti-Jewish images and slogans? Why does some anti-Israel
feeling get expressed in anti-Jewish terms?
The simple answer to this is that Israel is a ‘Jewish
state’. And it follows that if Israeli Jews are doing things that some
non-Jews don’t like, Jews in the Diaspora will become the targets of
anti-Israel protest. But still, the question remains: Why does some anti-Israel
feeling get expressed in anti-Jewish terms – in venomous hatred,
and calls for the annihilation of ‘the Jews’? Other people asking
similar questions have arrived at easy answers: It’s the work of a few
crack-pot right-wing fascists, who are still around, and like to take
advantage of such crises, to target Jews; or, more likely – it’s the
Islamicist extremists; they hate the Jews, because of Israeli injustice
against the Palestinians. No one can be surprised by classical right-wing
anti-Semitism, but even if so much of the recent upsurge in anti-Jewish
feeling is being generated by Islamicist extremists, this still doesn’t
explain why Israelis are equated with Jews, and why the tone of the abuse
is so virulently anti-Jewish.
And where does it all leave us – the congregation
that is Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue? For the first time in the
seventy-one years of our existence, this congregation now has a regular,
weekly security rota; our liberal, open community is a bit more guarded
and vigilant. But it’s not just that we have been forced to confront an
increase in anti-Semitism on our own front-door; we are having to grapple
much more directly with Israel, and ask ourselves what, indeed, that
place, that state, created as a refuge for the Jewish people, has to do
with us, here in the city of Brighton and Hove. We are being
identified with Israel, but do we identify with Israel? How do we relate
to Israel, as Jews, as Liberal Jews, as a congregation that encompasses
non-Jewish friends – as well as Jewish members, with a broad variety of
backgrounds?
The current climate and the on-going crisis between
Israel and the Palestinians, forces each one of us to ask these questions.
It might be helpful for us, as we try to explore them, to know a little
bit about the history of the relationship between Liberal Judaism – and
more broadly, Progressive Judaism – and both Zionism, as an ideology,
and Israel as a state.
Interestingly, in the wake of the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, Liberal Jews at that time also found themselves asking
these questions. When I went up to London for the September meeting of the
Rabbinic Conference, I picked up a pamphlet, entitled, Progressive
Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel (LJS Publications, 1983),
written by Rabbi John Rayner, Zichrono Livrachah, may his memory be
for blessing containing the text of four lectures he gave at the Liberal
Jewish Synagogue in St. John’s Wood in January and February 1983. In the
course of the four lectures, Rabbi Rayner charts the changing relationship
of Progressive Judaism to Zionism – and later Israel – from its early
days as a non-Zionist – indeed, anti-Zionist – movement, through its
increasing advocacy of the Israel during the early decades of the state,
to the early 1980s, at which time, he argued that Progressive Judaism was
called to challenge the Revisionist right-wing Zionism expressed by the
government of the time, and join forces with mainstream liberal Zionism,
in the task of ‘seeking’ and ‘pursuing’ a peaceful and just
settlement with the Palestinian people.
That brief summary of a thirty page pamphlet outlines
Rabbi Rayner’s purpose in giving the lectures, but I need to share a
little more of what he said if we are going to understand the issues
underlying what started out as a contest between Progressive Judaism on
the one hand, and Zionism on the other – and if his work is going to
help us to work out our own relationship with Israel today.
As I’ve said on other occasions, Progressive Judaism
was a product of Enlightenment and the political Emancipation of the Jews
of Western Europe that enabled Jews to leave the confines of the ghetto
and become full citizens in the wider society. In response to this
development, Progressive Judaism championed Universalism, and urged Jews
to abandon the nationalist features of Judaism. When Progressive Jews
emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, this Universalist perspective, which had already
involved omitting all references to the Return to Zion and the hopes for
the re-building of the Temple from the liturgy, reached its zenith. Rabbi
Rayner quotes the Rabbi of America’s oldest Reform synagogue in
Charleston, South Carolina, who declared in 1841, ‘This synagogue is our
Temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine.’
(Rayner, 1983, p.3 – quoting David Philipson, The Reform Movement in
Judaism, p.34).
Successive gatherings of American Reform leaders in the
late 1800s made the stance of Progressive Judaism very clear. In 1869, at
Philadelphia, these leaders adopted a statement of principles, which
proclaimed that: ‘The Messianic aim of Israel is not the restoration of
the old Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a separation
from the nations of the earth, but the union of all the children of God in
the confession of the unity of God.’ (Rayner, p.3, quoting Philipson,
p.354). And the Platform adopted at the Pittsburgh Conference in 1885 was
even more robust: ‘We recognize in the modern era of universal culture
of heart and intellect the approaching of the realization of Israel’s
great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth,
justice and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation
but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Zion,
nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of
any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.’ (Rayner, p.3, quoting
Philipson, p.356).
Unfortunately, the vision of the early Reformers of the
emergence of a ‘universal culture’ and ‘the establishment of the
kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men’ were not fulfilled.
As Rabbi Rayner puts it: ‘If Reform was an endorsement of the
Emancipation, Zionism was a response to its failure.’ (Rayner, p.4).
Contrary to the hopes of the passionate exponents of Progressive Judaism,
the world did not become an oasis of peace and harmony; Emancipation was
patchy and partial – and it did not reach Eastern Europe. The birth of
political Zionism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was a
response to the persistence of anti-Semitism – and the revival of
anti-Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia – and also reflected the impact of
a new secular identity among Jews in the Russian Empire, fostered by the
emergence of the Haskalah, the Eastern European Enlightenment,
which focussed on Hebrew culture and the development of Jewish national
awareness.
On the eve of the twentieth century, Progressive
Judaism and Zionism could not have been further apart. In 1898, the
Central Council of American Rabbis, the assembly of progressive rabbis
established in 1889, ‘unanimously adopted a resolution saying: "We
totally disapprove of any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish state.
Such attempts show a misunderstanding of Israel’s mission…(and) do not
benefit, but infinitely harm our Jewish brethren where they are still
persecuted, by confirming the assertion of their enemies that Jews are
foreigners in the countries in which they are at home… We reaffirm that
the object of Judaism is not political nor national, but spiritual, and
addresses itself to the continuous growth of peace, justice and love in
the human race…"’ (Rayner, p.5, quoting David Polish, Renew
Our Days: The Zionist Issue in Reform Judaism, p.57).
Fine words; expressed with confidence – but gradually
other progressive Jewish voices emerged. Once the Balfour Declaration in
1917 had declared the interest of the British government in establishing a
‘homeland’ for the Jewish people in Palestine, the realisation of the
dream of Zion became much more real. And then there was the devastating
impact of the First World War, which shattered the spirit of optimism,
exemplified by Progressive Judaism, which modernity had engendered. Then
there was economic collapse in 1930s; the rise of Nazism; the Shoah.
Like the early Reform leaders in the United States before them, the
leaders of Liberal Judaism in England, Lily Montagu, Claude Montefiore and
Israel Mattuck – an American Reform rabbi, who settled in England, and
became the first rabbi of LJS in 1912 – expressed a distinctly
non-Zionist vision of the nature and purpose of Jewish existence, centred
on the view that the Jews are, in Rabbi Mattuck’s words, a ‘people of
religion’ not a nation (Rayner, p. 11, quoting, Papers for Jewish
People, No. XXXII, pp.122f.). But the events of the early years of the
twentieth century, and, especially, the Shoah transformed the terms
of the debate completely. Rabbi Rayner points out that the man who, as
Chairman of the American section of the Jewish agency, presented the case
for the Jewish state before the General Assembly of the United Nations in
1947 was Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, a graduate of the American Reform
seminary, the Hebrew Union College, who was also at that time, President
of the Central Council of American Rabbis (Rayner, p. 8).
Once the State of Israel came into being, the stance of
Liberal Judaism in England also began to shift. Significantly, in June
1948, just two weeks after the state was established, the new Rabbi of LJS,
Leslie Edgar, wrote in Liberal Jewish Monthly: ‘As we write, a
Palestinian State of Israel has just been proclaimed and the Jews of
Palestine are, unhappily, having to fight for their very existence. Every
Jew, whatever his attitude towards a Zionist state, must surely feel for
them, praying most earnestly that they will secure their survival and that
an honourable and just peace will speedily be attained in Palestine… If
the State of Israel does succeed in perpetuating itself, it will be the
duty of every Jew to help secure that this state is worthy of the high
traditions of Israel. It would be irresponsible for any Jew, because he
owes no national allegiance to such a state, to say: "It is no
concern of mine." A Jew is concerned for the character of Jewish life
everywhere.’ (Rayner, p. 12, quoting LJM, Vol. XIX, No. 6, p.61).
‘A Jew is concerned for the character of Jewish life
everywhere.’ – and after May 1948, ‘everywhere’ definitely
included Israel. But that is still a far cry from the Zionist view, which
sees Israel as the centre of Jewish life, and the ‘ingathering of the
exiles’ as the major purpose of Zionist activity. In 1949, Rabbi Leo
Baeck, Zichrono Livrachah, may his memory be for blessing, whose
fiftieth yahrzeit we will commemorate in November, gave an historic
Presidential address to the World Union of Progressive Judaism Conference
in London, in which he described the Jewish world as an ‘ellipse’ with
two foci, ‘Israel’ and ‘the Diaspora’ (Rayner, p.12), a stance,
which has remained at the heart of Liberal Judaism in this country to this
day, and is reflected in the revised leaflet on Zionism and Israel,
published by the Rabbinic Conference in May.
But the ellipse dual-foci view belies the extent to
which Progressive Judaism in general – and British Liberal Judaism in
particular – became actively engaged with Israel after the Shoah
and the establishment of the state. In a sermon he gave on Shabbat Ki
Tavo, September 18th 1965, just over a week before Rosh
Ha-Shanah, Rabbi Rayner argued that: ‘Our Union’ – that is, the
Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues – ‘can no longer be
"neutral" towards the State of Israel. It must openly call upon
its congregations and members to play their full part, with all other
sections of Jewry, in supporting those organisations which assist the
State of Israel to fulfil its humanitarian tasks.’ (Rayner, p. 17). And
so, the new Liberal Siddur, Service of the Heart, published in
1967, edited by Rabbi Rayner and American Reform Rabbi Chaim Stern, Zichrono
Livrachah, may his memory be for blessing, was the first progressive
prayer book to offer a creative liturgy for Israel Independence Day
(Rayner, p.13).
Published in 1967 – but written before the Six Day
War of June that year. After the Six Day War, of course, the world Jewish
community was united as never before over Israel – and during the early
1970s, the World Union for Progressive Judaism moved its headquarters from
New York to Jerusalem, and founded its first kibbutz, Yahel,
in the Aravah desert of the southern Negev desert in 1976.
The Six Day War in 1967 – and, indeed, the Yom
Kippur War in 1973 – deepened allegiance to Israel among Progressive
Jews the world over to an unprecedented extent. But the determination of
Israel to hold on to the territories occupied in 1967, the rise of the
PLO, and the re-emergence of a distinctly right-wing expression of Zionism
in Israel, represented by the Likud government that came to power
in 1977, and was re-elected in 1981, not only created a new political
reality in Israel, but, once again, challenged Progressive Judaism to
adopt a distinctively progressive stance towards the State.
The invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the eruption of the
first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, and the development of the
Peace Process in the early 1990s – all these developments have demanded
that Progressive Judaism find its unique voice once more – not the
anti-Zionist voice of pre-State days, not simply the measured
pro-Zion/pro-Diaspora voice of the 1948 to 1976 era, but a clearly
liberal, clearly progressive voice that supports the State of Israel and
recognises the security needs of Israel, and at the same time, both calls
for, and works for the fulfilment of the vision of the founders of
Progressive Judaism, for whom ethical values and conduct were of supreme
and universal importance.
In practice, this means, both calling for and working
for the equality of all the inhabitants and citizens of Israel, Jewish and
Arab, Orthodox, Progressive and Secular, European Jewish and Arab Jewish
and African Jewish, and also, both calling for and working for the
peaceful and just resolution of the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians. The new Liberal Judaism leaflet is very clear and to the
point: ‘We applaud all sincere peace initiatives, directed at both
creating a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel and
establishing the conditions for peaceful coexistence between the two
peoples.’
As we face the challenge of working out how we relate
to Israel, it is helpful to know where Progressive Judaism has been and
where it is now. It is also instructive to remind ourselves of what today’s
Torah portion teaches us – albeit obliquely – about the
necessity of addressing the needs of both the Israeli and
Palestinian peoples.
Traditionally, there are two Torah readings set
aside for Rosh Ha-Shanah, Genesis 21, which is read on the first
day, and Genesis 22, which is read on the second. Since Liberal
congregations observe only one day, we read these portions in alternate
years. This year we turn to Genesis 21, which recounts the birth of Isaac,
and also the expulsion of Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael, together
with his mother, Hagar. At first glance, the central message of Genesis 21
is that only one son would inherit the covenant that the Eternal
One promised to make with Abraham – Sarah’s son, Isaac.
But a closer reading of the end of the story tells us
something else: Abraham’s eldest son is not simply to be banished into
the wilderness. Echoing Hagar’s earlier experience of meeting with the
Eternal One in the wilderness, when she was pregnant, recounted in Genesis
chapter 16, the text tells us at Genesis 21, verses 17 and 18: ‘God
heard the voice of the lad; and the messenger of God called to Hagar out
of heaven and said to her:" What’s wrong Hagar/ Do not fear; for
God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. / Arise, lift up the lad,
and hold him fast by the hand, for I will make him a great nation."’
Yishma’el means ‘God shall hear’.
The name of the son of Abraham and Hagar is not mentioned in Genesis 21;
earlier, in Genesis 16, the messenger of the Eternal tells the pregnant
Hagar that when she bears her child she shall call him, ‘Yishma’el,
because the Eternal has heard your affliction.’ (:11). The Eternal One,
the Creator of all life, is the God of Ishmael as well as the God
of Isaac. So, while Isaac received a Divine promise; so, Ishmael, too,
received a Divine promise.
Thousands of years separate Isaac and Ishmael from the
Israelis and Palestinians of today, but the principle remains the same:
The conflict today over one piece of land, what Amos Oz calls a conflict
between ‘right and right’ (How to Cure a Fanatic, Princeton
University Press, 2006, p.4), can only be resolved if the land is shared
between them. On Rosh Ha-Shanah we are obligated lishmo’a
kol Shofar – ‘to listen to the voice of the Shofar.’ As
we listen to the voice of the Shofar today – on the day which
also marks the beginning of the sacred Muslim month of Ramadan –
may we hear the voice of Ishmael as well as the voice of Isaac, and
resolve to add our voices to the call of all progressive peoples
everywhere for justice and peace, and a new lease of life for both
peoples. And let us say: Amen.
© Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton & Hove Progressive
Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut
Rosh Hashanah
Morning 23rd September 2006 – 1st Tishri
5767
