50
Years after the Yom Kippur War Yom
Kippur 2023
I thank Helen Mirren for bringing the
character of Golda Meir, the Prime Minster of Israel, to life, especially for
younger audiences who cannot comprehend the trauma that faced Israel 50 years
ago, on this date in the Jewish calendar. I am sure that many of you here are
old enough to recall that terrible moment when, on the day of judgment, the
fate of Israel weighed in judgment. Some of you were actually in Israel at that
time facing the enemy guns and bombs.
I
well recall that I had only come back from my year in Israel as a rabbinical
student just a short while before and was serving a congregation in New Jersey.
I recall someone running in with the news that Israel had been attacked and
then the rest of the day and the next several weeks were a time of agonizing anxiety.
During that time, my brother-in-law, who was here just a few weeks ago, was hunkered
down in his tank, barely surviving, while his wife, back in the rear, had no
word of his fate.
I mention
this to remind us all that what is going on in Israel today may seem like an
apocalyptic disaster, yet I want to keep in proportion the reality that Israel
has gone through more such disasters. Somehow the Israelis managed to pull
themselves up back on their feet.
It
was just 30 years ago, in contrast, that Israelis were caught up in euphoria
because the Oslo accords had been signed and peace was finally at the doorsteps
for the people of Israel and for the Palestinians. I recall having brought here
a spokesman for the American Muslim community, Salam Al- Maryati, to speak
about how wonderful it would be. Yet as you well know, true peace was still far,
far over the horizon and still is, the Palestinians carried out terror attacks,
and Israelis suffered the most shocking terror attack, the assassination of
Prime Minister Rabin, by one of their own. It would then be followed by a wave
of Palestinian terror bombings of public buses, just when our daughter was in
Israel as a student.
Just before I came to Hollywood Temple Beth
El, in 1990, I had spent four years in Israel, where I worked as director for
the Central Institute for Jewish Studies of the Histadrut-Labor Federation, at Bet
Berl, that is the Labor party's college.
We don't realize it, but Israel is,
after all, smaller in population than
Los Angeles metropolitan area, in a way, a very large village, in which
everyone knows and is related to everyone else.
In
the course of my work, I had met so many public figures, on both left and
right. Prime Minister Rabin, then Minster of Defense, and President Peres, then
Minister of the Treasury. Yigal Amir, the assassin, lived in my wife’s aunt’s
neighborhood, and the assassin’s ex-girlfriend was the grad-daughter of a great
Israeli, Rabbi Pinhas Peli, who had given me guidance in setting up my program.
A speaker that I had brought as a presenter of Judaism and science, a notable
head of Yeshivah and trained academic philosopher, a liberal Orthodox Rabbi,
was accused of having encouraged the murderer.
What is my point ?
There is no simple " Us" and
" Them" in Israel.
There is a saying in the Talmud: Kol
Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh."
"All Israel are legally liable for each other." The word " Arev" comes from the
word for mixture, or interweave.
The historic Jewish people, as well as
the people of the State of Israel, is so closely interwoven and bound up each with
the other, that it impossible to distinguish " Us" from "
Them". A fight, quarrel or disputation is a fight within the midst of
family, whether functional or dysfunctional.
When I was a student at the Hebrew
University, one of my professors explained that the great miracle of Israel is
not that it had withstood constant onslaughts by more powerful armies, but that
it achieved it even though Israelis could not speak peaceably one to another.
I could only reflect on that years
later, when I sat in the office of the Minister of the Treasury, then Labor
coalition partner with the right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He
complained bitterly about the threats to democracy that his partner posed, and
then went on to serve in different positions with his erst-while “ enemy of
democracy” opponents.
Perhaps that is inevitable for us Jews
when we have kept the dogs of Jew-hatred away from us. We then play it safe, “
sha-shtil”, don’t rock the boat.
But
when we disagree with each other, and there is no one outside threatening us,
we pull out all the stops.
Perhaps precisely because we feel safe
with each other. When we deal with gentiles, we are insecure, we are cautious,
so we watch our language, lest there be a riot, lest there be a pogrom.
With fellow Jews, we let out all the
stops. Jews, after all, don't riot against Jews. Jews ,after all, don't kill Jews. Jews, after all,
don't take Jews to lawsuits. Until it is too late.
If anyone has watched the Israeli
Knesset in session, one can see how easily the language turns vicious. It is
not new. No one is free of blame.
There is the left-right clash.
Opposition Jews call Jews
"Fascist" . Coalition members call the leaders of the IDF and the
security services “traitors.”
A century ago, there was a
controversial Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who broke ranks with the
World Zionist Organization, and with the leadership of the Labor Zionists. He
was a dramatic orator and thinker, whose ideas did influence the Zionist
leadership. Nevertheless, his enemies blasted him as a " Fascist", a "
Mussolini".
Just
to confuse you, as I mentioned Prime Minister Shamir, the head of the
right-wing Likud, he was a member of the very militant group, Lehi—which was
po-Stalinist, pro-Bolshevik. It’s just to tell you that it is hard to tell left
from right.
The left-right split is complicated by
the religious-secular split.
Religious Jews speak of the secular
Jews with disdain. The word in Hebrew for secular is " Hiloni, " but
many pronounce it "Holani",sick.
In 1990, the leader of the
Ultra-Orthodox, Lithuanian party, Rabbi Schach, was to have supported Labor in
favor of negotiations with the Palestinians and was to have declared his
support for the Labor Party. Instead of talking about the need for compromise,
which he supported, he suddenly began to lambast the Kibbutz movement, Labor's
vanguard . When he said " mechaleley Shabbes, boalei nidos, ochlei
nevelos",(Violate the Sabbath, have sex with menstruants, and eat
carrion) , broadcast live over Israeli
television, any thought of coalition politics vanished.
The language of militant secularists
is hardly better.
An Israeli journalist, a staunch
secularist, in a respectable " Mekoman", a local paper, which is
often more exciting than the major national papers, wrote of a horrible "Big Brother State" ,
dominated by the religious parties. He used description of sexual molestation
and body snatching by haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, in language that would have
well fit any anti-Semitic tract.
The French have a great phrase: “Plus
ça change, plus c’est la même chose”-The more it changes, the more it stays the
same. Or, to take from our own source, Koheleth, “Mah she Hayah-hu sheyihyeh”
That which as been, is that which shall be.
But we sit here, in the US. We are
comfortable, at ease ( sort of).
Older Americans, non-Jews and Jews alike, have followed the news in general, and know that Jews in Israel have
been the target of historic aggression by outside armies and internal attacks
by terrorists.
However,
I look at surveys of young Americans. And I am concerned. Younger Americans can
barely find Israel on a map of the middle east, if they can find the middle
east in the first place. That, I recognize, is part of a historic pattern of
Americans being, in general, indifferent to the outside world, as two large
oceans separate us physically, and even after Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, and
9/11 reminded us we can’t turn a blind eye, still, we do tend to be distant
from other nations’ turmoil. Thus, three Presidents in a row have been trying
to pull us out of the Middle East ( with no luck).
But
I am concerned about our younger Jews, who like Esther, are reluctant to run to
the King on behalf of her people. Our
younger Jews know somewhat more about Israel, but they, like so many young,
want to be seen as progressive, as on the side of justice and the underdog, and
like their non-Jewish counterparts, have been sold on the idea that Israel’s
very existence is an act settler colonialism and white supremacy.
I
just give you one example, of a review of Golda by a Noah Berlatsky,
criticizing Golda on CNN:
In
“Golda,” casting Mirren —
a White, internationally renowned, British actress — is a metaphor for the way
the film blurs Israeli identity with a generalized White, Western identity. By
doing so, it attaches Israel’s moment of crisis to a tradition of triumphalist
American military films that validates the virtue of the US, of Israel and of
whiteness.”
….
“Golda” turns that into a straightforward story of righteous White Western
victimization and ultimate triumph. It’s able to do that, in part, because it
makes sense, to Western audiences, for a famous White actor like Mirren to
play a Jewish leader like Meir who also broadly fits in the cultural
category of “White” for most Western audiences.”
(https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/26/opinions/golda-meir-movie-helen-mirren-history-berlatsky/index.html)
True,
Anwar Sadat was on the dark side, but his wife, Jehan, was half-Brit and fairly
white.
The
Syrians, who attacked from the north in the same Yom Kippur War, were white-bread
as well. Certainly, the Syrians I have met, are lighter than me, and lighter
than half of Israelis. In, fact, except for the cast of the movie “Exodus”, can
you find me some actual “ white “ Jews?
I
mean, in Europe, we were Asians, and killed for that, but in western Asia (
yes, Israel is Asian) we are attacked for being Europeans.
Playing
this white card, by a Jew, can be a very dangerous game.
For
those of you who escaped the former Soviet Union, you recall the Yevsetkzia,
the Jewish apparatchiks in the system who betrayed their fellow Jews,
until they in turn were betrayed and
liquidated. Or those of you who fled from the Khomeinist regime, you know of so
many young Jews who rallied behind Khomeini and against the Shah, believing in
a better and open society.
So,
I am very concerned for our young Jews, who have no personal experience of the
Israel’s precarious existence, and whose professors at Princeton force required
textbooks that state that Israel uses Palestinians for body parts.
Yes,
it is very easy to turn away from Israel at the sight of turmoil and
accusations of “ dictatorship” of the courts, versus “ dictatorship” of the
masses.
So
it becomes our job, the old guard, to remind or teach our young Jews what
Israel has achieved, despite the flaws and despite the divisions.
I
say it as “ we”, because, even as Jews of the diaspora, in our support and
backing, have had a hand in this.
We,
a defeated and devastated people, despised by Christians and Muslims alike, for
nearly 2000 years, a people who had one
third of our body chopped off in the space of a few years, came back to life to
create an independent state, one that held its own against overwhelming
military odds, multiple times.
We
breathed new life into a land that had been neglected and laid to waste by
centuries of misadministration by outside conquerors, especially the Ottomans,
not the Europeans.
We
gave new life to a language , Hebrew, that had been relegated to pious prayers
and religious texts, one of the oldest languages in continuous use on earth,
and is now the spoken tongue of millions of Jews and Arabs as well.
A
people that had been scattered over the entire planet, a people disconnected from each other in many
ways over the centuries, a people of many tongues and customs, a people some of
whom were creating the Avant Garde of modern civilization and some of whom were
still living in antiquity, have been brought back together to shape one nation,
despite such unbridgeable differences.
A
people who, at the start of independence, 75 years ago, had to ration the very
basics of food, has become Start Up Nation, a nation whose largest city, Tel
Aviv, ranks now as the world’s most expensive.
A
nation that brought into its borders many times over its population over the
space of a few years, people often malnourished, ill, physically devastated,
Today, the Israelis occupy spot number 10 in in world in life expectancy, and 4th
happiest place in the world, according to a UN report. Israelis are
happy-despite facing existential dangers—it is almost Disneyland by that
measure.
So,
when I look at the demonstrations on the street, in Israel, now going on for
close to a year, yes it is demoralizing, and yes Israel does not now seem like
the happiest place on earth. However for us all, both Jews here in the United
states and for Israelis, both Jews and Arabs (who want to be part of this state
of Israel not part of a Palestinian state), it is essential to look back at what
has been accomplished despite all the obstacles and despite all the
impossibilities.
Theodore
Herzl , the visionary founder of the concept of the state of Israel, stated
“
When one will it, it is no legend.”
The
State of Israel is no legend. Yes, it is still going through its growing pains,
after ¾ of a century, but it is no legend. The people have made it past 1948
and past Yom Kippur of 1973. They will make it past the struggles of democracy
and the courts of 2023 and we here are part and parcel of that story. Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live.