Thirty Days Since Hamas's Terror Attack

Dear Temple Beth Shalom community,

Today marks thirty days since Hamas’s gruesome Simchat Torah terror attack on Israel.

In our Jewish tradition, at the end of the first thirty days of mourning – a period known as sh’loshim – we take a moment to pause and reflect on how we’re feeling. With this in mind, I wanted to write and share some of the feelings that I’ve observed among our congregation over the course of the past month.

Many of us have been feeling sadness and anger – sadness at the loss of life, and anger at the brutality of Hamas’s attack. Many of us have relatives and friends – or, at the very least, are only a few steps removed from people – who have been directly impacted by the terror attack, whether they were injured, killed, abducted, or have been called up for military duty.

Many of us are feeling heartache – already grieving for the innocent Israelis who were killed by Hamas, and now also pained by the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Many of us are concerned about the worsening humanitarian crisis there, knowing that there is a difference between the people of Gaza and their terrorist leaders.

Many of us are feeling hopeless – sensing that Israel might be in an impossible bind right now. Many of us believe that Israel has the obligation to redeem the hostages, and also to destroy Hamas’s ability to ever again carry out an attack like this one. And yet, we worry about whether those obligations are achievable: that it might not be possible to find and rescue the hostages, and that even if the IDF is able to destroy Hamas, another terror organization could easily arise in their place.

Many of us are feeling worried about the possibility of a widening conflict – watching with trepidation to see whether Hezbollah in Lebanon will more forcefully enter the fray, perhaps setting off an avalanche towards a wider regional conflict.

Many of us are feeling afraid for our own safety – as antisemitism around the globe and here in the US once again rears its ugly head. Many congregants have said that they considered whether to take down their mezuzah on Halloween, and whether to hide their Star of David necklace while in public.

Many of us are feeling isolated from our friends, neighbors, and peers – some of whom seemingly do not understand, on a gut level, the deep-seated trauma that Hamas’s terror attack has stirred up in us. For those among us who identify as politically and socially liberal or progressive, the feeling of isolation has been particularly intense – feeling like the leaders and causes we’ve supported do not fully understand us.

Many of us are feeling lost – struggling as we try to identify the differences between critiques of Israel’s policies, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. Many of us are feeling unsure of what to do when we hear loaded terminology like “colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.” Many of us feel that we are suddenly expected to be experts in the Arab-Israeli conflict – and that even if we are well-read, we are not confident enough to engage in conversation.

These uncomfortable feelings, and so much more, hang over our synagogue community. And yet, as Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, affirms, there nevertheless are reasons for hope.

I have been inspired, during these past thirty days of sh’loshim, to see that our synagogue community has been able to engage in difficult conversations without devolving into argument. We have held five small-group discussions for adults. In each one, congregants came not looking to score political points, but rather, approached the conversation with humility – recognizing that no single person has all the right answers.

I have been inspired to see that our synagogue community is seeking – and is in fact able to hold – multiple truths at the same time. I have seen that our congregants are not interested in bombast, but rather, in moral clarity and in nuance.

I have been inspired by our youths. We offered a three-week, optional course for 4-6th graders called “Israel 101,” on Israel’s history, politics, and current events. We hoped that ten students might sign up for it. Instead, 25 students enrolled.

A fourth grader in the congregation had the idea to organize a bake sale for Magen David Adom (Israel’s emergency responders) during Religious School. He thought he and a few friends would bake cookies and raise a few bucks. Instead, 22 families volunteered to bake, and we raised more than $1600.

On multiple occasions, we have asked our 7th graders and our teens how they would respond to some of the dilemmas of our current moment. In each of these conversations, our young people showed a sophistication and a moral seriousness that far exceeds their years.

And perhaps most of all, I have been inspired by the power of community. In all of our gatherings (with our Religious School students, with our teens, with our college students, with adults, and when the wider congregation came together for a vigil of solace), we have seen the comfort that comes from recognizing that none of us is alone – that no matter how we might be feeling right now, there likely are other people in this community who are feeling similarly.

Today, the period of sh’loshim comes to an end. But the tumult of feelings – both those that are uncomfortable, and those that give us reason to hope – will decidedly continue to be with us. Throughout it, our Temple Beth Shalom community will be here for us – to provide us with a space to feel all of our feelings, and hopefully, to help us feel less alone.

The Hebrew word tikvah means “hope” – but it also means “thread”: as if to suggest that hope starts out as something thin, but when woven together, can eventually become strong.

Over the coming months, we will continue to weave ourselves together as a part of this synagogue community.

B’tikvah – with a thread of hope,

Daniel

Hastings Vigil for Israel

In 1903, Chaim Nachman Bialik, the noted Hebrew essayist, wrote a poem entitled “In the City of Slaughter.” He wrote the poem just a few months after the Kishinev pogrom – describing the scenes of that horrible massacre in Eastern Europe, in which 120 Jews were murdered by their neighbors. That massacre – and Bialik’s widely circulated, grim poem about it – marked a turning point in modern Jewish history, causing thousands of young Eastern European Jews to turn towards Zionism, insisting on the Jewish right to self-determination.

An excerpt from the poem reads:

Get up and walk through the city of the massacre, 

And with your hand touch and lock your eyes

On the cooled clots of blood

Dried on tree trunks, rocks, and fences; it is our kinsmen. 

Go to the ruins, to the gaping breaches,

To walls and hearths, shattered as though by thunder. …

Those holes are like black wounds,

For which there is no healing and is no doctor. 

If Bialik’s disturbing poem described the brutal massacre of 120 Jews, I shudder to think of the poem he would have composed in the wake of Hamas’s terror attack against Israel two weeks ago – in which the number of Jewish lives taken was more than 10 times what Bialik felt so pained to describe, and in which, what’s worse, more than 200 hostages were abducted.

Since the terror attack, many Jews – including me – have felt incredibly uneasy. Over the past two weeks, many of us have not been sleeping well; we have had trouble focusing on our responsibilities; we’ve been constantly buzzing with anxiety.

These uneasy feelings are only in part a reaction to Hamas’s terror attack. Equally, these uneasy feelings are a reaction to the thousands of years of attacks that the Jewish people has suffered, in nearly every country in which we have lived – an age-old, recurring trauma that is deeply embedded in our psyches.

The painful truth is that Bialik’s grim poem about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom was not the first Hebrew elegy – nor, unfortunately, will it be the last – to be composed for our murdered fellow Jews. Regrettably, our literature of destruction stretches all the way back to the Bible – all the way back to the Book of Lamentations, in which the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah described the massacre that took place in Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE. Jeremiah’s ancient words are eerily similar to Bialik’s:

Prostrate in the streets lie

Both young and old.

Women and men alike

Are fallen by the sword.

They were slain on the day of wrath, 

Slaughtered without pity.

Hamas’s terror attack re-triggered these deep seated memories – which have been with us for thousands of years. Any Jew whom you know today is here because, somewhere along the line, their ancestor was a survivor. And survivors are burdened with trauma.

Because of Hamas’s actions, the State of Israel now faces an incredibly difficult task. It must simultaneously defend itself, making sure that Hamas is never again able to terrorize innocent civilians in Israel – and also, at the same time, it must do what it can to protect innocent civilians in Gaza, whose reckless leaders have once again dragged them into the line of fire.

Facing this nearly impossible task, it would be understandable for Israelis, for the global Jewish family, and for people of conscience around the world to easily lose all hope.

But when hopelessness starts to overcome us, we must turn to another influential Hebrew poem written at the turn of the 20th century, a poem that would later be set to music, and serve as Israel’s national anthem – a poem which proclaims that even when the world tears us down, that even though we have known thousands of years of trauma and suffering, still, od lo avdah tikvateinu, we, the Jewish people never give up hope. 

May this be true in our day. Amen.

Vigil after the Simchat Torah Attacks in Israel

One of my most cherished memories of the time I’ve spent in Israel comes from the year that my wife, Leah, and I lived in Jerusalem during my first year of rabbinical school. We had been there a little less than a week – settling into our apartment, wandering all over the city in search of its many hidden wonders, meeting my classmates, practicing our Hebrew.

The end of that first week was our first Shabbat in Israel, and the rabbinical school organized an outdoor Shabbat service for us on campus, in a lovely, shady garden overlooking the walls of the old city. It was a perfect Jerusalem summer night: a warm breeze, familiar Shabbat melodies, Leah and I – still just boyfriend and girlfriend, though we would become engaged later that year – seated together, among new friends who would soon become cherished classmates and colleagues, at the beginning of one of the most impactful years of our lives.

And just as we and our class community finished singing the Shabbat song Lecha Dodi – the very moment in the service where the introductory songs of welcome end, and main part of the Shabbat evening service formally begins – immediately after we finished singing Lecha Dodi, in the quiet lull between that prayer and the next, as the only sound you could hear was the leaves rustling in the warm breeze – suddenly, softly, for the first time that year, we heard the low purring sound of the Shabbat siren: the official public notice, broadcast from towers throughout Jerusalem, letting the city’s inhabitants know that the sun had officially set, and Shabbat had officially begun.

What a wonder: to be in a country that is so attuned to the rhythm of Jewish life, that a soft, soothing siren sounds to let you know that Shabbat has begun.

What a painful contrast to the sirens that blared in Israel this past Shabbat. This past Shabbat, the sirens were not a soft, soothing purr, but rather, a blaring alarm. This past Shabbat, the sirens were not to tell Israelis that Shabbat had begun, but rather, to warn Israelis to take cover. What a stark and devastating contrast.

Like many other people that I’ve spoken to, including many people here in the congregation this evening – over the past several days, I’ve had trouble peeling myself away from the news. On Saturday, I was glued to immediate reporting about the crisis: what had happened, where, how many people had been killed, injured, and abducted. On Sunday and Monday, it was not reporting, but rather, analysis that devoured my attention: how could this have happened, what were the implications for global geopolitics, how was the war-of-public-opinion shaping up on social media?

There were dozens of articles to read, podcasts to listen to, commentators whose opinions I wanted to hear. But at some point on Monday afternoon, it became too much. I was on information overload. I turned off the podcasts, and distracted myself with washing the dishes.

And in that silence – as I was finally able to stop the steady stream of gut-wrenching information and analysis with which I had been willingly bombarding myself for the past two-and-a-half days – at last, the emotional gravity of what we, the Jewish people, had just endured caught up with me, and I collapsed into tears on the kitchen floor.

Over the past four days, each of us may have experienced a variety of feelings. Perhaps we felt sad for the tragic loss of life; angry at the brutality of the perpetrators; worried about our friends and family who live in Israel; confused about where to get reliable information; self-doubting about our level of knowledge of this complicated conflict; hurt by what we’ve seen others post on social media; scared for our own safety, even though we live thousands of miles away from where the fighting in taking place; helpless to do anything, even though all we want to do is help.

These, and likely many other feelings, we bring into our sanctuary tonight, to be held alongside our fellow congregants.

Many of us have heard the painful stories – and maybe even seen the unbearable images and videos – that have emerged over the past four days. Because they are so upsetting, I hesitate to describe them now. Nevertheless, I feel it is my obligation to do – although I hasten to add, I intend to do so without resorting to overly graphic imagery, and without describing what I believe are some of the most upsetting stories and images of the past few days.

I share these stories and images not out of a sense of voyeurism, but rather, as a part of what we Jews believe is our sacred obligation. We are called upon to bear witness, to raise our voices, in the face of human suffering. As the scholar David Roskies argues – in one of Rabbi Schecter’s most frequently quoted books, The Literature of Destruction – we Jews have a long history of transforming our pain by speaking about it and writing about it: from the ancient biblical Book of Lamentations, to the medieval Jewish poetry composed in the wake of the Crusades, to the memoirs of Holocaust survivors. We Jews are a people who speak our pain aloud.

Perhaps we’ve heard some of these stories. (And again, I intend not to be overly graphic.) The story of 260 young people gunned down at an outdoor music festival. Of dead bodies strewn across the highways. Dozens of people held hostage for twelve hours inside the dining hall at Kibbutz Be’eri. The incredibly upsetting video of a young woman and her partner, as they desperately plead not to be taken, split up by Hamas militants, each loaded onto a separate motorcycle and driven towards Gaza. A Palestinian woman in Gaza – and many others like her – her home destroyed in an airstrike, identifying her sister’s remains in a body bag. Israelis calling their TV and radio stations from the locked safe-rooms of their homes, pleading in a quiet whisper for help. Israeli parents, siblings, and spouses not knowing where their loved ones are, begging the government to help find them – or, devastatingly learning of their fate by seeing their faces on Hamas-posted YouTube videos. All of these haunting images and stories – and many others, much worse, that I will not describe here now.

There are also the much-needed – though significantly fewer and farther between – stories of resilience and hope, stories of human triumph in the face of unbelievable challenges.

For example, the much-circulated personal story of the journalist Amir Tibon. Tibon lives in a small kibbutz less than 2 miles from the Gaza border. When he and his family heard the sound of rockets, they headed to their safe-room. When it was no just longer the sound of rockets, but also, the sound of machine gun fire from only a few streets away, Tibon made two phone calls – one, to his journalist colleagues to let them know what has happening, and the second, to his mother and father in Tel Aviv. Then, the cell phone service was cut off.

For ten hours, Tibon, his wife, and their two small children, ages one and four, hid in their safe room – trying to keep the kids calm, helping them to understand that they all needed to be completely silent. 

Meanwhile, Tibon’s mother and father, retirees in their early sixties, loaded into their car and started driving from Tel Aviv towards the kibbutz. After a long and difficult drive – including an unexpected detour, to help bring a group of injured Israeli soldiers to the hospital – Tibon’s father arrived at the kibbutz.

Suddenly, after ten long hours, Tibon, from the dark of the safe room, heard not only the sound of machine guns, but also, the sound of a gun fire. At last, he thought, the army has come to rescue. A few moments later, a knock on the door. A familiar voice spoke to them in Hebrew. The door opened. And Tibon’s four-year-old daughter exclaimed: sabba higiya! “Grandpa is here.”

Or, perhaps you’ve heard the remarkable story of another couple in their sixties named David and Rachel: how five Hamas gunmen climbed into their apartment through the bedroom window, and held them hostage there for 15 hours – how Rachel offered them coffee and cookies, how she kept them preoccupied with small talk and conversation, how she bandaged the bleeding hand of one of the wounded militants, until, 15 hours later, their adult son was able to arrive on the scene, provide the security forces with information about the layout of the apartment, and the military broke in through a skylight in the bathroom, rescuing and Rachel and David, alive and unharmed.

Perhaps you’ve heard stories of how quickly ordinary Israelis around the country have mobilized – in many cases, utilizing the same community-organizing tactics that sustained the pro-democracy protests over the past ten months – to help their fellow citizens who are in harm’s way: opening their homes to displaced people; collecting food, clothing, and household supplies; providing transportation; organizing childcare and hot meals for families whose loved ones have been called up to reserve duty; opening online mental health clinics, to provide professional support through this immense emotional burden; and many other everyday acts of heroism.

And yet, despite these heart-warming stories, for me – and, I imagine, many others in this sanctuary – the main feeling in my heart is pain.

I feel heartbroken – sick to my stomach at the devastating loss of life. It is has been widely commented that this past Saturday was the single deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. It has been described as the Israeli 9/11, or the Israeli Pearl Harbor. Other commentators have described it as like a pogrom – with Jews mercilessly slaughtered in their own places of residence.

I feel angry. How could Hamas have such little regard for human life? How could they so callously slaughter innocent civilians? How can they possibly believe that it is OK to abduct children and grandmothers, and make them endure public humiliation that I will not here describe?

I feel shocked. How on earth did this happen? How could Israeli military and intelligence forces have been so blindsided by this attack? How could Hamas – who only a few years ago could barely guide a rocket towards its intended target – suddenly have the ability to plan a sophisticated and complex attack, right under the noses of Israel’s vaunted intelligence services?

I feel frightened. I fear for the fate of the more than 150 Israelis who have been taken captive by Hamas. I feel – in only the tiniest fraction of a degree – the unimaginable anxiety that their loved ones must currently be under. Are there relatives alive? What kind of conditions are they being made to endure? In the worst-case scenario, will we ever definitively know what has happened to them? In the best-case scenario – where, God willing, they are returned home alive – how will our lives be forever altered by these unbearable events?

I worry for the Palestinians of Gaza – who are not the same as Hamas, but who will continue to suffer and be killed because of Hamas’s actions. Before this attack, Gaza was already an incredibly difficult place to live. After the attack, the lives of innocent Gazan civilians will be made only worse: with tighter restrictions, and more in the path of violence and danger.

I worry for the 300,000 reservists who have been called to the front lines, and for their families. Will they return home? Where will they find the courage to carry out their mission? When they are faced with moral dilemmas, as they inevitably will be, will their leaders guide them with wisdom?

As I was tucking my kids into bed last night – and again this morning as I said goodbye to them at the bus stop – the obvious occurred to me: why it is that I feel so shaken by these events. I – and, I imagine, many others of us as well – feel so shaken, at least in part, because of how easy it is to imagine ourselves, our kids, and our loved ones in the Israelis’ shoes. For most of us, it is a matter of mere historical accident that our family wound up in the United States, rather than in Israel. It could have just as easily been us in Amir Tibon’s safe room, scared in the dark for 10 hours, praying beyond hope that perhaps sabba higiya, that grandpa might arrive.

But there is another reason why we feel so shaken by these events. As several Israeli commentators have noted, when we ask the question, so common in Israeli society right now, “How could this have happened?” we are not merely asking “Who is to blame?” We are not merely asking “What were the military and intelligence failures that allowed this attack to take place?” We are also saying something much deeper.

When we ask “How could this have happened?” we are also acknowledging how destabilized we, the entire Jewish world, suddenly feels. Israel, which, at least since 1967, has been the symbol of Jewish security and safety; Israel, the country that was established so that the Jewish people could at long last be in control of our own destiny, no long subject to the whims of history; Israel, which is supposed to be a place where Jews around the world who fear for their physical safety can find a refuge and a haven; Israel, the ultimate symbol of our people’s safety suddenly seems far less safe than we realized. It upends our own feeling of safety. It is disorienting, destabilizing, and deeply troubling.

After all, for much of the Jewish people, Israel is more than just a country in the Middle East. It is a symbol, an aspect of who we are, one tile in the mosaic of experiences that comprise our Jewish identity.

Last week, a group of TBS congregants who participate in our Gather initiative met in the sukkah and talked about the metaphor of “home.” For the Jewish people, “home” is one of the most powerful metaphors that we possess. Jewish life doesn’t just take place in the synagogue; equally, it takes place in the home. Our Torah story is one long narrative of our people’s homecoming: from the Land of Israel, down to slavery in Egypt, and back home again. On the level of a human life, we Jews believe that our souls originate from the Source of Life, and that when we die, they return home again. “Home,” God willing, is where we feel safe, where we feel loved, where we can be our truest selves.

The Jewish people has many homes. The actual, physical houses and apartments in which we live. The old neighborhood in which we grew up. The countries all around the diaspora of which we are citizens. The synagogues in which we feel grounded.

And also, for many among the Jewish people, Israel is also some kind of a home. Even if we do not live there, many of us might feel a deep connection to the place, feel a sense of responsibility for what happens there, feel a deep sense of pride when the news is good, feel a deep sense of pain when the news is heartbreaking.

This weekend, one of our homes was attacked. And along with it, many of us might feel that our own safety has been attacked, that our sense of self has been attacked, that our Jewishness has been attacked.

But it is precisely when our home is attacked, more than ever, that we need to remember that “home” is about so much more than just a physical place. On a very deep level, home is about also about family.

And so we come together tonight as a family – with our immediate family, our spouses, children, parents, siblings, and grandparents; we come together with our extended congregational family, the people with whom we share lifes joys and sorrows; we come together with our global Jewish family, the people around the world with whom we share a common history and heritage, and feel sense of kinship with, even though we’ve never met.

When our home is attacked, we do the only thing we can do: we open our arms up wide, and wrap them around our family.

The Food Chain

This Yom Kippur morning, I’d like to share an old story – or maybe I should say, a very old story: a story, in fact, that is so old, it begins two-and-a-half million years ago.

Two-and-a-half million years ago, out of the long and twisting tunnel of evolutionary history, there emerged a new species of life on earth – an animal that would eventually refer to itself as “human.”

For the vast majority of their time on earth, these humans barely scraped by at the middle of the food chain: constantly on the lookout both for predators and for prey, sizing up every creature that they encountered to assess who was stronger than they were, and who was weaker.

But then, a mere half-a-million years ago – relatively recently in the very old story of human evolution – suddenly, all that changed. Because their brains had grown, because they had learned to fashion more sophisticated tools, because they had learned to cooperate in increasingly complex social structures, suddenly, these humans sped to the top of the food chain – now able to hunt not just the animals that were weaker than they were, but also, the animals that were stronger.

So rapid, in fact, was their rise to the top that, although their eating habits quickly changed, their mental habits did not have time to keep up. Two million years of constantly comparing themselves to all the other creatures around them proved a difficult habit to shake. And this old habit left them in an unusual position: making them at once both one of the most powerful animals on earth, and also, one of the least self-assured – a potentially dangerous combination – breeding in them the deeply human feelings of competition, envy, jealousy, and rivalry, in a story that is indeed very, very old.

Here now is another old story – not two-and-a-half million years old, but still, verifiably ancient. It is the story of a group of twelve brothers that was riddled with jealousy and rivalry. One of the brothers, whose name was Joseph, aroused in his siblings so strong a feeling of jealousy that they could not stand to be around him – so they sold him into slavery in Egypt. And because of this jealous outburst, some four hundred years later, their entire people will find themselves enslaved there in Egypt – so that what began as a petty fraternal rivalry will eventually culminate in explosive catastrophe for the entire Jewish people.

Our sages say that the day Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery was the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei – which just so happens to be today. And ever since that mythic act of jealousy, we, the Jewish people, gather together every year to undertake a ritual of forgiveness – to mark a Day of Atonement – not only for what Joseph’s siblings did to him, but also, for all the ways in which we, their descendants, continue to act out our own feelings of jealousy and rivalry.

Rabbi Ellen Lewis writes that Yom Kippur is a day for retelling old stories – not just the stories that come from our Jewish tradition, but also, the stories we tell about ourselves and who we are. We retell our old stories, she writes, in hopes that, by doing so, we might discover something new: a new insight into who we are, a new perspective on the things we have done. If we can learn to reimagine our past, then perhaps we might also be able to reimagine our present and our future.

This morning, let us do precisely that. Let us try to reimagine an old story, the story of Joseph and his brothers, in order to better understand why we humans are so prone to jealousy and rivalry – and also, in hopes that we might be better able to harness these feelings that have been with us for two-and-a-half million years.

***

In our usual telling of this story, we tend to portray Joseph’s brothers as the villains. But what if we try retelling the story from their point of view? Rather than centering Joseph as the protagonist, let us, instead, try telling the story from the perspective of one of the lesser-known brothers – say, for example, from the perspective of Naphtali: a character about whose life we know almost nothing, a character about whom the Torah contains barely a single sentence.

All his life, Naphtali has been overlooked – overlooked not just by the narrator of the Torah, but equally, and far more painfully, overlooked even by his own father. We might wonder: what was Naphtali like? Perhaps he was a skillful archer. Perhaps he loved to count the stars. The Torah does not tell us. But whatever Naphtali may have been like, his father, Jacob, does not seem to notice him. In Jacob’s family tree, Naphtali and his fellow less-well-known brothers are, at best, marginal characters: on the outside, always looking in.

And then one day, their father brings home for their brother Joseph – a child for whom he has seemingly endless time and affection – a beautiful, colorful coat. Now, every time that Naphtali and his brothers see Joseph, they are reminded not only of how deeply loved he is, but also, how deeply unloved they are.

Perhaps we are able to recognize this feeling – the feeling that we are insignificant, inadequate, unworthy. We see the beautiful, colorful lives that other people seem to have, and it makes us feel inferior. Our neighbor’s house is bigger than ours. Our colleague got the good job. Our sibling is smarter or more creative than we are. Our friends’ kids are more well-adjusted than our own.

It is as if we have put a social-media filter over our own eyes: viewing everyone else’s life as if it were an endless stream of happy memories and charming anecdotes – forgetting all of the moments that we do not get to see, all of the unfolded laundry, all of the dinner table arguments, all of the failures, the doubts, the pain. Seeing only that everyone else’s life seems to be better than ours, we begin to forget what it is that makes our own life good.

This, precisely, is what happens to Naphtali and his brothers. Joseph’s coat is, for them, a painful reminder of how inadequate they all feel. They will do seemingly anything to make the feeling go away.

From a distance, they see Joseph coming. Who could miss him, strutting around in that pretentious, colorful coat? They grab hold of him, strip him of the loathsome garment, and sell him into Egyptian slavery. They take the coat and tear it to shreds – splattering the tattered remains with blood.

When they show it to their father, he asks them what happened. “He was mauled by a wild animal,” they tell him. “A predator got him.”

They mean it as a lie. In fact, it is the truth. And that predator, of course, was them. 

***

It is likely that none of us has ever acted out our jealousy in quite so vicious a way as Naphtali and his brothers. And still, we might be able to identify with the feelings that gave rise to their heinous crime: feeling unseen, insignificant, inferior – reverting to our two-and-a-half-million-year-old habit of sizing ourselves up in comparison to every creature that we encounter.

But if we are going to undertake the kind of transformation that Rabbi Ellen Lewis tells us is possible on Yom Kippur, then we need to retell our old stories not just from one perspective, but rather, retell them from as many perspectives as possible. So let us tell it again, and see if we might be able to find a more sympathetic view of Joseph.

***

In our usual telling of this story, we tend to portray young Joseph as self-aggrandizing and egotistical. But what if we try to understand him on his own terms?

Even before he was born, Joseph was already being doted upon – the long-awaited first pregnancy of Jacob’s most beloved wife. And after he was born, his father could not help but see reflections of himself in his young son: a bookish child; a younger sibling; a dreamer, as he had once been – as on that famous night of his youth, in which he dreamed of a ladder that stretched to the sky.

Add to this that Joseph is, in fact, quite gifted. He will eventually prove himself to be talented both in the arts and in the sciences – both as an interpreter of dreams, and also, as Pharaoh’s minister of agriculture.

What’s more, he is irresistibly charming. Seemingly everywhere he goes, he is adored: Potiphar adores him, and makes him head of his household; Potiphar’s wife adores him, and tries to seduce him; in prison, the warden adores him, and puts him in charge of the other prisoners; when he is released from prison, Pharaoh adores him, and practically adopts him as his own son.

But despite being doted upon, despite being gifted, despite being loved everywhere that he goes, Joseph feels lonely. For all his many talents, he struggles to form deep and meaningful relationships. In his house growing up, he had a dozen siblings – but he could not call a single one of them his friend.

Even if we do not experience it to quite the same extreme degree, perhaps some of us might be able to identify with Joseph. We have plenty of casual acquaintances, people who know our face and our name – but very few people who know us on a deep and personal level.

Others of us might be able to identify with Joseph for a different reason. His talents drove his brothers away from him. So too, we might sometimes feel that we need to diminish ourselves in order to fit in. Perhaps you are a person who asks serious questions, or has strong moral convictions, or is quick to learn new skills. When we show these traits to other people, they sheepishly back away – unsure whether they can relate to us. It is as if the world wants us to be someone other than who we are – to diminish ourselves, so that we do not inadvertently make other people feel inadequate.

For Joseph, his talents only make him feel more alone. How could anyone else in the world – least of all, his brothers – possibly understand the dilemma of being exceptional.

And clearly, his brothers do not understand it. From the day that they ambush him and seize his coat, Joseph’s loneliness only continues to grow. He is alone as he is sold into slavery; will be alone, as he sits in his prison cell; alone, as the sole Israelite in a vast empire of Egyptians.

There, in faraway Egypt, Joseph thinks of his brothers, and compares himself to them. True, he had his special talents; but they, at least, had one another. If he could trade with them, he would.

***

For two-and-a-half million years, we humans compared ourselves to every creature that we encountered as a matter of survival. Today, that instinct serves us far less well. Today, our comparative nature tends to harm more than to help: causing us, like the eleven overlooked brothers, to feel that we are inferior – or, alternatively, causing us, like Joseph, to feel that we need to diminish ourselves for the sake of others.

But this Yom Kippur morning, we have the opportunity to reimagine things – to break free from the pain that our comparative instinct so often inflicts upon us. To help us do so, let us finish retelling our story – to see how the story ends, and to imagine how the future could be different.

***

For these rivalrous brothers, who have been trained their entire lives to think of their family system as a food chain, it seems entirely fitting that the event that eventually brings them back together is a famine.

For years, the eleven overlooked brothers have been starved for attention. And although they have now rid themselves of the brother in whose shadow they felt so inadequate, still, their problem has not gone away. The father who had so single-mindedly put all of his energy into loving Joseph now single-mindedly puts all of his energy into grieving for Joseph – and the eleven overlooked brothers continue to go hungry.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, Joseph is at the top of the food chain. Because of his careful planning, he and the entire kingdom have stored up enough food to survive the famine. And although he has plenty to eat, still, he is starved for companionship. He may be Pharaoh’s second-in-command, but despite his position, deep down, he continues to feel lonely – so much so that he gives his firstborn child the name Menasheh: a name that, in Hebrew, means “forgotten.”

The eleven brothers – starved not only for attention, but also, for bread – journey down to Egypt in search of food. When Joseph sees them, he recognizes them immediately – although they do not recognize him. Joseph devises a series of tests to see if his brothers have changed. When they prove that they have – that they are no longer consumed by sibling rivalry – he gives them food, and at last reveals his identity. They share a tearful reunion. And the brothers, for the first time in their lives, are now able to truly see Joseph: not the boy that they had once found so irksome, not the boastful kid in the colorful coat, but rather, their brother – who had spent his entire life alone, hiding within his colorful coat, wanting nothing more than to be seen.

Their whole lives, these twelve brothers had believed that, in order to survive, they needed to compete with one another. Now they realize that the exact opposite is true: that their survival depends on their cooperation. Joseph provides his brothers with food, and they provide him with companionship.

This, after all, is precisely what propelled us human beings to the top of the food chain in the first place. It was not merely that our brains grew bigger, or that our tools grew more sophisticated. Equally, it was that we humans learned to live in complex social groups. Competing with one another may have helped us to survive, but it was cooperating with each other enabled us to thrive.

It is deeply human to compare ourselves to other people. After all, it is a habit that we have been practicing for two-and-a-half million years. So when that old instinct arises in us, we need to be especially careful – and instead of falling into self-criticism, remember the things that make each of us valuable.

When we start to feel bad about ourselves because it seems that other people have more friends than we do, we need to remember that although our circle of friends may be small, it is exceptionally tight-knit.

When we start to feel bad about ourselves because it seems that other people are smarter than we are, better informed, more well-read, we need to remember the gifts and talents that make us special: that we are surprisingly handy with tools, or that we are a fantastic cook.

When we start to feel bad about ourselves because we are worried about our kids – worried that they will face more life challenges than many of their peers, that they struggle in school, that they have difficulty regulating their emotions, that they have trouble making friends – we need to remember that, although we cannot take away their challenges, we can support them to grow from their challenges.

When we start to feel bad about ourselves because we fear that we will never be able to match the example of our parents – that they were around more than we are, that they were better providers than we are – we need to remember the things that make us good parents: how much we love our kids, and how much they love us in return. 

We will never outgrow the habit of comparing ourselves with others. But we can outgrow the habit of evaluating ourselves in comparison with others – and instead learn to recognize that we all are merely different.

***

We gather together on Yom Kippur to tell the story of how a group of twelve brothers was nearly consumed by their comparative instincts – and how, regrettably, the same so often happens for us.

But Yom Kippur is not a day to wallow in regret, not a day to lament how vulnerable we are to the relics of our evolutionary history. Rather, it is a day on which we affirm that we can overcome that history: that we can change, that our future can be different than our past.

The story we are retelling might be very old. But today, we get to write one that is new.

A Fork in the Road

This past March, the world mourned the death of the great Jewish actor Chaim Topol, who is best known for his iconic portrayal of Tevye in the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof.

Fiddler was a favorite in my house growing up. Every Friday night, my parents would put the soundtrack to the movie on the record player, and we would sing “Tradition! Tradition!” as we cleared the table after Shabbat dinner. So after Topol died, I found myself wanting to revisit that classic film of my childhood.

Rewatching the movie was wonderfully nostalgic. But even more than that, I was surprised to find how stirred I was by the film, despite having seen it countless times.

In particular, I was struck by the movie’s final moments. The very last image that we see as the villagers are leaving Anatevka, never to return again, is not a shot of the empty synagogue, as we might expect – not a shot of Tevye’s dilapidated home, not a shot of the town square. Rather, the final image of Anatevka is an overhead shot. From above, we see a group of ten villagers – a minyan – standing at a fork in the road, praying. Their prayers conclude. And one by one, they slowly disperse – each of them heading down one path or the other, following either the left fork or the right fork: some of them, like Yenta the Matchmaker, on their way to the Land of Israel, and others of them, like Tevye, on their way to the United States.

This final image of Anatevka is a fitting metaphor for our era in Jewish history. For hundreds of years prior to the 20th century, Jews were spread out across many different countries, with thriving, culturally distinctive Jewish communities in France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, and many others. But in the 20th century, all that changed. The Holocaust, economic opportunity in the United States, and the flight of Jews from Arab lands after the founding of the State of Israel, created a world in which, today, the vast majority of Jews – 80% – live in just two countries: the United States, and Israel.

Today, perhaps even more so than when Fiddler was first made, the image of a fork in the road is all the more striking. Over the past several decades, it has often felt as if the Jewish community in the United States and the Jewish community in Israel are each on their own path – that, although we share a common heritage, we are steadily moving in different directions, slowly growing further and further apart, to the extent that we are to each other sometimes unrecognizable.

Before I continue, I should acknowledge that some of us may be starting to feel nervous. For many of us, conversations about Israel or about American politics make us feel uneasy – wondering what is going to be said, worrying whether we will agree. These feelings are entirely natural. Difficult conversations often make us feel this way, because we intuitively sense that the stakes are high. But even though these conversations are hard, they are critically important.

To be sure, describing American Jewry and Israeli Jewry as being on two separate paths is to paint with a fairly broad brush. There are, no doubt, many things that are shared in common between our two communities – and also, within each one, there is a great range of ideological diversity. And still, there is often a value in distillation, in looking for broader trends – in hopes that, by doing so, we might be able to make sense of the patterns.

Here, then, are a few of the differences between our two communities. Jews in the US are a cultural minority; in Israel, Jews are the majority. Jews in the US live in an enormous global superpower; and while Israel is strong economically and militarily, it is tiny both in population and in landmass. In the US, more than half of Jews identify as Reform or Conservative; in Israel, those groups comprise a mere 5%. In the US, two-thirds of Jews identify as Democrats; and although the American left-right spectrum does not map neatly onto Israeli politics, in Israel, it is the Center and the Right that hold the bulk of political sway.

How are we to account for these differences? The writer and Jewish public intellectual Danny Gordis helps us to do so by looking at each country’s founding. [1] The United States, Gordis notes, was founded with a universalistic vision – imagining, at least on paper, that our experiment in democracy was for the benefit of all humankind. Israel, by contrast, was founded not with a universalistic vision, but rather, with a particular one: to establish a national homeland for the Jews. Hence, the US Declaration of Independence begins with the phrase: “When in the Course of human events” – while Israel’s Declaration begins: “The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel.”

Perhaps this, then, is the ideological fork in the road that helps to explain our differences: Jews in the US tend to prioritize the universally human, while Jews in Israel, by contrast, tend to prioritize the particularly Jewish.

If we try to make sense of this core ideological divide, then maybe, we might be able to understand why it sometimes seems that these two Jewish communities are drifting further and further apart – and perhaps, even discover what we can do about it. 

***

In all of Jewish history, our people’s experience in the United States has been truly unique. In our popular imagination, we attribute our success to this country’s promise of economic opportunity. Our great-grandparents dreamed of a country where the streets were paved with gold, where, with hard work and determination, anyone could succeed and achieve the American Dream – referring, in Yiddish, to their new Promised Land as the goldene medina, “the golden land” of opportunity.

And while the United States has indeed been quite good to the Jewish people, the primary driver of our success here has not been economics. Rather, what makes this country unique in all of Jewish history is not that it has been the goldene medina, but rather, that it has been, in Hebrew, a malchut shel chesed [2] – a “benevolent government,” founded not around a specific religion, but rather, at least on paper, founded on a universalistic vision in which “all [people] are created equal.”

Of course, we know that the United States has not always lived up to this vision. We bear the disgraceful legacy of slavery, the decimation of indigenous people, the disenfranchisement of women, and so much more.

And still, this country’s founders believed in a universalistic ideal. James Madison, in Federalist Paper #10, advocated on behalf of that ideal. He observed that the new American republic – comprised as it was of thirteen individual states, each with its own unique identity – would never be completely homogenous. Rather, he believed that this diversity of opinions and worldviews would help to strengthen American democracy – that it would cause elected officials to make decisions based not solely on the interests of their own particular group, but rather, on behalf of the greater collective good. With this principle in mind, Madison advocated that the Constitution not include a religious test for elected officials – and the Jewish people’s malchut shel chesed was born.

From that moment onward, a tendency towards the universally human has been a core part of much of the American Jewish experience. For example: political scientist Kenneth Wald has noted that American Jews are unusual in our voting habits – that we tend to vote based not on our own economic self-interest, but rather, based on our perception of which policies will best advance our belief that all people are created equal. Or, for example: consider our popular use of the word mitzvah. The word literally means “commandment”: a specific set of obligations enumerated in the Torah and required uniquely of the Jewish people. However, in common parlance, the word mitzvah has taken on a second, unofficial – but nevertheless recognizable – meaning: a “good deed,” of any kind, by any one.

But our tendency towards the universally human does come with a cost. In our pursuit of the greater common good, many non-Orthodox American Jews have begun to lose a sense of our own group identity. In an earlier era, Jews in this country needed to learn how to become Americans. Today, the exact opposite is true: now, we are fluent in American culture; it is our Jewishness that does not come naturally to us, our Jewishness that we need to go out of our way to acquire.

Many Israeli Jews see these trends and scratch their heads. They wonder how American Jewry could so casually part ways with our own identity. Don’t we American Jews see, Israeli Jews might ask us, that our embrace of the universally human is imperiling our very survival?

***

Let us return now to Tevye’s fork in the road, in order to follow it down the alternative path: in order to better understand Israeli Jewry – who, in contrast to us, tend to place their emphasis not on the universally human, but rather, on the particularly Jewish.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence declares that the state shall be not only a political haven for the battered Jewish people, but also, shall seek to promote the cultural, spiritual, and civilizational flourishing of the Jewish people.

In this capacity, Israel has succeeded far beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. It is a country in which, in 2021, the most-played pop song on Israeli radio – both in the religious cities and in the secular ones – draws its lyrics from a passage in the Mishnah. It is a country in which, every Friday afternoon, the highways and trains are packed with young people – returning home from university or from their job in the big cities, in order to have Shabbat dinner with their family. It is a country in which, at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list are serious, intellectual books not on figures like Winston Churchill and Alexander Hamilton, but rather, on Maimonides and on the Book of Deuteronomy.

There are, of course, aspects of this Jewish cultural renaissance that might trouble non-Orthodox Jews: say, for example, that there is no such thing as civil marriage in Israel – that all marriages between Israel’s Jewish citizens must, by law, meet the religious standards of the Orthodox rabbinate. Or, for example: that there is no egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall Plaza – that Torah can be chanted there only by men. If they wanted to, my own daughters could not become Bat Mitzvah at the Western Wall.

But if Israel’s tendency towards the particularly Jewish is sometimes a challenge even to its Jewish population, then how much the more so to the one-out-of-every-five Israeli citizens who is not Jewish. It has been well documented that Arab Israelis are disproportionately prosecuted by the criminal justice system, and meanwhile, are disproportionately underserved in educational opportunity and in economic advancement. [3] For Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, who live under Israeli military control, the challenges are still worse.

Despite these troubling trends, Israel’s tendency towards the particularly Jewish has only continued to deepen in recent years. This past November, Israelis went to the polls and elected the most religious, most nationalistic government in the country’s history. For many Israelis, their vote was a sign of their disillusionment with the Peace Process. Although, in 1993, Yitchak Rabin and Yasser Afarat had shaken hands on the White House Lawn, their historic agreement did not bring peace, but rather, led to the Second Intifada: cafés and buses exploding all over the country. Although, in 2005, Israel withdrew all of its settlers from the Gaza Strip, the disengagement led to the election of Hamas and a regular barrage of rockets. These experiences, and others like them, pushed many Israelis to embrace intensely nationalistic politicians, taking Israel’s natural tendency towards the particularly Jewish to the extreme.

Many American Jews are troubled by these trends. They wonder how Israeli Jews could embrace so parochial a worldview. Don’t Israeli Jews see, we American Jews might ask, that their embrace of the particularly Jewish is potentially leading them down the path to becoming an ethnic theocracy?

***

We have before us two Jewish communities, separated by a long-ago fork in the road. One, here in the United States, has, in order to navigate a pluralistic society, tended to prioritize the universally human – but in so doing, has inadvertently imperiled our cultural survival. The other, there in Israel, has, in order to help our civilization flourish, tended to prioritize the particularly Jewish – but in so doing, increasingly runs the risk of veering into ethnic theocracy.

Over the past several months in particular, I have heard many American Jews – including many people in this congregation – ask whether the distance between US Jewry and Israeli Jewry may now be too wide to bridge: that perhaps it is time for American Jews to cut our ties with Israel. And similarly, I know from my conversations with many Israelis – with friends, with taxi drivers, and from reading the Israeli newspapers – that many Israeli Jews are also asking the same question: wondering whether perhaps it is time for Israeli Jewry to stop groveling for the support of an unsympathetic American Jewish community and instead look to Evangelical Christians, or to Russia, or to China as Israel’s greatest advocate.

Perhaps the fork in the road is already too far in the past for these two Jewish communities to ever again feel that we are a part of the same global family. Perhaps the wheels have already been irreversibly set in motion – that both groups will continue to drift further and further apart, until each group is absorbed by its extremes: that universalistic American Jews will slowly assimilate into nothingness, and that particularistic Israeli Jews will slowly harden into a fundamentalist enclave.

But now precisely is the time that we need to do the exact opposite. Rather than cutting ties and letting one another veer off into our separate distances, what we need now, instead, is to retether ourselves to one another, so that we do not vanish into our extremes.

Now, perhaps more than ever, these two Jewish communities need each other. We need each other not so that we can try to convince the other of the superiority of our worldview. Rather, we need each other so that we can each act as a counterbalance, a corrective – a trusted, familiar hand that, when the other begins to stray off its path, can lovingly help guide it back to the road.

When segments of Israeli Jewry begin to promulgate policies that we American Jews recognize as dangerously particularistic, it is our responsibility, as members of the same global family, to speak up: to bring to the conversation our lived experience about the need for a pluralistic society.

And also, when we American Jews begin to lose touch with the customs, the stories, the commitments that make us Jewish in the first place, it is Israeli Jewry’s responsibility to speak up: to bring to the conversation their cultural creativity, the Jewish civilizational renaissance that they have pioneered.

We need one another: to help us see our own shortcomings, and to lend our strengths to the other.

Ours, after all, is not the first era in which the Jewish people has been divided by a fork in the road. In fact, from the very beginning, it has been a trademark of our history.

In Biblical times, there was not just one Israelite republic, but rather, there were two: the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and also, the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

In the Rabbinic period, our sages produced not just one compendium of Jewish teaching, but rather, produced two: writing both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

In the Middle Ages, our greatest scholars recorded not just one opinion on matters Jewish Law, but rather, recorded two: with Ashkenazi rabbis saying that rice was forbidden on Passover, and Sephardi rabbis saying that it was permitted.

In the 1800s, our great-great grandparents had not just one definition of Jewishness; rather, they had two: with Jews in Western Europe insisting that Judaism was a religion, while Jews in Eastern Europe insisted that Judaism was a collective identity.

In each of these eras, and in many others like them, the Jewish people was not torn apart by our differences. Rather, we were strengthened by them.

***

Long before Tevye and the other villagers of Anatevka stood at that fork in the road – in an earlier scene, practically at the movie’s very beginning – in one of the film’s most quotable exchanges, Tevye and his companions are debating whether they should read the newspapers and worry about the world outside their village, or go about their daily lives without concern for current events. 

 “Why should I break my head about the outside world?” says one of the villagers. “Let the outside world break its own head!” To which Tevye responds: “He’s right!” 

“Nonsense,” pipes up young Perchik. “You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.” And again, Tevye responds: “He’s right!” 

A third villager chimes in: “He’s right, and he’s right? They can’t both be right.”

Tevye considers this. And with inimitable wit, he says: “You know, you are also right.”

Today, we would do well to learn from Tevye: to recognize that, although the global Jewish family has been divided by a fork in the road, we need one another – to help keep us on the path. After all: that has always been our Tradition.

_____

[1] Danny Gordis, Impossible Takes Longer (2023), p. xvi.

[2] Rav Moshe Feinstein, Darash Moshe, “Drush 10” (1939): https://yaacovhaber.com/rth/participating-in-the-political-process-a-torah-view/

[3] Danny Gordis (quoting the well-regarded non-profit Freedom House), Impossible Takes Longer (2023), p. 142.

Jack Be Nimble and Jill

200 Billion Trillion

The Fire Next Time

This week's Torah portion tells how the Israelites were accompanied on their journey through the desert by a Pillar of Smoke and a Pillar of Fire -- much like the smoke that filled our air this week, wafting from the fires in Canada. What can our ancient story tell us about the ecological threats imperiling our planet?

Contact our congregant Linda Moot to get involved in synagogue's efforts to combat climate change.

Blue and White

One of my earliest Jewish memories comes from my childhood synagogue when I was five years old and in kindergarten. It was the holiday of Simchat Torah – a time when we take our Torah scrolls out of the ark and parade them around the sanctuary. The whole congregation (it seemed, in my five-year-old imagination) was there – marching, singing, and dancing in the aisles.

Our kindergarten religious school teacher had given me and my classmates each a flag to carry as we marched in the processional. The flag, I remember, was blue and white: with two blue stripes against a white background, and in the center, a big, blue Jewish star. I took the flag in my hand, joined the parade, and waved it to my heart’s content. I was so filled with joy, I could have done cartwheels down the aisles. And although I did not know what flag I was waving, I knew in the depths of my heart that this flag was my flag – that blue and white were my colors.

This past week, Jews all around the world celebrated Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. And this year, it was a milestone anniversary, marking 75 years since that iconic moment when David Ben-Gurion – standing at a long dias, with a portrait of Theodor Herzl hanging above his head – read the Declaration of Independence aloud into a tinny microphone, and then a rabbi, his voice trembling with emotion, stammered his way through the shehechiyanu blessing, as Jews all around the world crouched beside their radios and wept with tears of joy.

If you’ve never celebrated Yom HaAtzmaut in Israel, it is a special experience. Israel is a small country – so seemingly everywhere you turn, there’s a celebration happening. There are people singing and dancing in the streets until all hours of the night, fireworks in every city, everyone dressed in blue and white, and Israeli flags and banners hanging from every street lamp. The next day, after sleeping off the previous evening’s festivities, the whole country, it seems, goes out to their nearest public park or garden – bringing with them their mangal (their portable grill) for an outdoor barbeque picnic. The air grows thick with the smell of burning charcoal and roasted meat – a scene that has often been compared to what it must have been like in ancient times when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, and worshippers would bring burnt offerings before God: an aroma that the Torah describes as “an odor pleasing to God,” a delight to the nostrils.

Looking back at that formative childhood memory, of marching around our synagogue’s sanctuary and proudly waving the Israeli flag, I recognize that a powerful feeling had been planted within me: a seed that was only just beginning to grow, that would continue to mature and blossom in the decades to come – and although I certainly did not have a word for it back then, I knew, in the depths of my heart, that I was a Zionist.

In recent years – and this past year, in particular – there has been much conversation in the Jewish world about the meaning of the word “Zionist.” If you listen to American political discourse, you might reasonably imagine that “Zionist” is a binary term: something you either are or you are not, an ideology that you are either for or against. This is so often our tendency in American political life: to reduce the conversation into two opposing camps, and to force each of us to pick which side we are on.

But of course, we Jews understand that the word Zionist is much more nuanced than this. In 2011, Moment Magazine published a symposium, a series of short essays written by prominent Jewish thinkers and leaders, on the question “What Does It Mean to be Zionist Today?” The range of answers was fascinating: a broad spectrum of ideas, some of them complementing one another, others of them contradicting one another. Clearly, in the Jewish community, Zionism is not some monolithic ideology which you are either for or against. Rather, the term is nuanced, textured, and layered – such that, although two Jews might both describe themselves as Zionists, they might each mean something completely different in their use of the word.

This past year, in particular, the meaning of the word Zionist has been up for debate. The State of Israel is undergoing enormous social change. The recent November election brought to power the most right-wing and most religiously observant governing coalition in the country’s history. Politicians who have trafficked in inflammatory rhetoric – against the Palestinians, against the Arab citizens of Israel, against the LGBTQ community, against Reform and Conservative Jews – have been appointed to the cabinet, at the helm of powerful government ministries. Perhaps most recognizably from the newspapers, a proposed set of judicial reforms would alter Israel’s system of checks and balances, diminishing the role of the Supreme Court, and effectively empowering the Knesset to pass whatever laws they might like without any judicial oversight.

In response to all of this, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens have taken to the streets in protest. And as a result of their demonstrations, the judicial reform has been put on pause – at least for now.

And also in response to all of this, many American Jews have found themselves wondering how they should relate to the State of Israel, and whether they should continue to call themselves Zionists. Over the past several months, Rabbi Schecter and I have facilitated dozens of group conversations in which TBS congregants have time and again wondered the same thing: Given all that is happening there, can we continue to support Israel? Do we recognize ourselves in the state? Should we continue to give our funds? Should we continue to send our children? Is it perhaps time, I have heard American Jews ask, to give up on the Zionist project entirely?

Let me say now, so that you don’t have to hold your breath, that I strongly believe that we should not give up on the Zionist project. And to help us understand why, let us first try to understand exactly what it is that we are talking about when we use the word “Zionist” – that term that, on its surface, seems to be a binary: something that you either are or are not, as clear as black and white (or, if you prefer, blue and white). Let instead try to scratch beneath the surface: to reach for a more nuanced, more textured understanding of the word, in order to help us make sense of our current political moment. 

***

The word “Zionist” was coined in 1890 by a little-known Jewish writer from Vienna named Nathan Birnbaum. He was only a university student at the time, publishing a small student magazine devoted to politics and Jewish thought. And it was in that little magazine, published nearly a decade before Theodor Herzl would begin to write about the topic, that the word “Zionism” first appeared in print: Zionismus, in Birnbaum’s native German.

But even though Birnbaum gave us the word, he did not give us its definitive meaning. Especially in those early years, there were Zionists of many stripes.

There were those who used the term in a plain and simple way: seeking to establish a sovereign, independent Jewish State in the Land of Israel.

There were those, by contrast, who would call themselves only “territorialists”: seeking a Jewish state, but not convinced that it needed to be in the Land of Israel – happy to settle for any tract of land that could be made available, with supporters proposing as possible locations Uganda, Argentina, and (no joke) Buffalo, New York.

There were political Zionists, who believed that the most important factor in establishing a Jewish state would be persuading the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations to get on board with the project.

There were agricultural Zionists, who believed that the most important factor wasn’t convincing the nations of the world, but rather, moving to the Land of Israel – buying farms, planting orange groves, and “making the desert bloom.”

There were cultural Zionists, who believed that the most important thing would be fostering a Jewish cultural renaissance: a rich, new civilization rooted in the Land of Israel, where Hebrew songs, Hebrew plays, Hebrew art, and Hebrew philosophy would flourish, thereby enriching the culture not only of the Jewish state, but also, of the entire Jewish world – an antidote to assimilation.

There were American Zionists, who – uniquely in the tapestry of Zionist thought – felt comfortably at home in their nation of origin, and expressed their support not by moving to the Land of Israel, but rather, by providing philanthropy: first, by putting nickels in their little blue JNF tzedakah boxes, later, by investing in Israel bonds, and today, by securing congressional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

There were Zionists who were vociferously opposed to the diaspora – who believed, in Hebrew, in the principle of sh'lilat ha-golah – that 2000 years of homelessness had left the Jewish people weak, passive, with too many brains and not enough braun, that the Zionist project would never be complete until all the world’s Jews were safely relocated to the Land of Israel.

And there were those who were opposed to Zionism – who cared deeply about the Jewish people, but did not believe that our collective identity needed to be expressed through the establishment of a sovereign state.

As the Jewish historian Noam Pianko has observed: his field is not the history of Zionism, but rather, the history of Zionisms.

Just as, in those early years, the word “Zionist” did not mean just one thing, the same is true today. There are Religious Zionists, Ultraorthodox Zionists, religious pluralist Zionists, Greater Israel Zionists, liberal Zionists, Two-State Zionists, One-State Zionists, Christian Evangelical Zionists – the list goes on and on.

Given this range of meanings, it is easy to understand how two people might both describe themselves as Zionists, but each mean something completely different in their use of the word. In the years since Nathan Birnbaum first coined the term, it is a word that has (to frame it in the positive) been able to support a multiplicity of definitions. Or, alternatively (to frame it in the negative): it is a word that has suffered from a confusion of meaning.

To help us make sense of our current political moment, it might be helpful to look for a new word: to do as Nathan Birnbaum did and coin a new term – not to abandon the Zionist project, but rather, to find new language that clarifies exactly what it is that we feel for the State of Israel.

Near the end of his life, Theodor Herzl wrote a novel called Altneuland – a German title, which means: “The Old-New Land” (referring, of course, to the old Land of Israel, which would soon be made new). Following Herzl’s lead, perhaps what we need is not a new word, but rather, an old-new word – a word from the Jewish past that we revive and reclaim, to help us clarify our feelings for Israel.

To do so, let us look to the very beginning of the Zionist movement, before David Ben-Gurion, before Herzl, even before Birnbaum, to the very earliest stages of Jewish national aspiration – to a little group in Eastern Europe who are considered the forerunners and precursors of the Zionist movement: a group whose name in Hebrew was Hovevei Tzion, a term that means “the lovers of Zion.”

Hovevei Zion was a loose network of small, local Jewish groups that sprung up all across the Russian Empire in the wake of pogroms of the 1880s. They saw that their safety in Europe was at risk, and decided that the best solution would be to leave for the Land of Israel. They came from small towns and villages, had little money, had even less influence, and had received only a traditional Jewish education. Their strategy for establishing a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was to work piecemeal – acquiring, in the words of their Hebrew motto, od eiz v’od dunam, buying “one more goat, and one more quarter-acre of land” at a time. They were not well organized; when they tried to plan a conference for all of their followers, a mere thirty people attended.

But what they lacked in organizational acumen, these “lovers of Zion” made up for both in passion and in courage. In 1882, a group of ten Hovevei Zion activists packed what little they had, left the Russian Empire, moved to the Land of Israel, and established the town of Rishon LeTziyon – the first new Hebrew city.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, Theodor Herzl – who had been raised in a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family in the big city of Budapest, and had himself never personally experienced the kind of anti-Jewish violence that his coreligionists in the Russian Empire had endured – Herzl, more than a decade after the founding of the first Hebrew city, suddenly was awakened to the threat of European antisemitism – when Alfred Dreyfus, a high ranking Jew in the French military, was wrongly accused of espionage. Herzl quickly sprung into action, trying to convince the most influential Jews of Western Europe – the biggest philanthropists, the most important businessmen, the chief rabbis of major cities – to support the establishment of a Jewish state.

Herzl decided to organize a conference, and invited all these influencers to attend. But one by one, they each said no – afraid that this political activity might jeopardize their standing in their home countries.

With the conference fast approaching, and no prominent Jews planning to attend, Herzl decided to instead turn his attention elsewhere – seeking not a handful of wealthy and influential supporters, but rather, a vast swath of poor, marginal, but nevertheless deeply passionate Jews whom he had heard about, a group that had already for quite some time been making slow progress towards establishing a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel: a group known as Hovevei Zion, “the lovers of Zion.”

It was a perfect pairing. With Herzl’s political acumen and financial connections, and Hovevei Zion’s sheer numbers and fervent belief in the cause, the conference – which would later be known as the First Zionist Congress – was an enormous success, what the scholar Daniel Polisar has referred to as “the most politically significant meeting of any group of Jews in the last 1,800 years.”

***

Today, when we think about Zionism, we think about Herzl. What if, instead, in our search for a new, more helpful term to describe our feelings for the State of Israel, we looked not to Herzl, but rather, to his partners? What if, instead of using the ambiguous word “Zionists,” those of us who care deeply about the State of Israel instead referred to ourselves as Hovevei Zion, as “lovers of Zion”?

Love, after all, is a complex emotion. It has room both for critique and for admiration, both for anger and for care.

Love, after all, is what all those hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been expressing as they take to the streets week after week in protest. They are out there not because they can’t stand their country, but rather, because they love it. Perhaps you’ve seen the stirring images of the protestors. They are out there not in pink hats, like at the 2017 Women’s March; they are out there (and, to be clear: with no equivalence between the Women’s March and what I’m about to describe) – the protestors are out there not waving the Confederate Flag, like at the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Rather, they are out there by the hundreds of thousands waving the Israeli flag: expressing their patriotism, their love of the country that they, and I, and I hope many of us hold so dear; showing that they are not giving up on this place, and neither should we; showing that they are Hovevei Zion – lovers of Israel, proudly waving the flag, a sea of blue and white.

This, after all, is the sensation that I felt when I was five years old and marching around the sanctuary of our synagogue; the feeling that I did not yet have a word for as I was proudly waving the flag; the feeling not only that this flag was my flag, and that blue and white were my colors, but rather, something much deeper than that: a feeling of love for the Jewish people – the feeling, though I did not yet have the words, that I was a Hoveiv Zion.

This is why, when we recite Israel’s national anthem, we lift our voices and sing: kol ‘od balevav penimah / nefesh Yehudi homiyah / … ‘od lo avdah tikvatenu. “As long as in the heart within, the Jewish soul still yearns… then our hope is not yet lost.”

Israelis protesting the judicial reform

The Eternal Relevance of Purim