One congregant told us about her experience studying abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Throughout the semester, she would regularly ride a city bus from the university’s campus into the center of town. And then one day, during the morning rush hour – when, thankfully, she was still in her dorm room, getting ready for class – a suicide bomber blew himself up at the bus station right outside the front door of her dormitory.
Another congregant told us about his experience working as a journalist in Israel. He was doing a story about former Israeli soldiers who had decided to speak out about some of the military duties they had performed that they felt were unethical. Our congregant told us about the kinship he had felt with those soldiers, who spoke out not as an act of rebellion, but rather, as an act of deep patriotism – helping the country they love to live up to its own highest moral standards.
A third congregant told us about how, in his adolescence, he had purposefully decided to distance himself from his Jewish identity. That is, until Yom Kippur morning of 1973. He had gone with his parents to synagogue, and he heard from the bimah the news that, overnight, on the holiest day of the year, a surprise attack had been launched against the state of Israel. And it struck him that, regardless of how he might feel about his own Jewish identity, in the eyes of much of the world, a Jew would always be a Jew – and an object of contempt, at that.
The congregants who told these three stories span across a wide swath of the political spectrum. And I imagine that if each of us were to share a core memory that we have about Israel, the range of experiences would only widen.
This coming Monday will mark one year since the brutal Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 – a day that forever changed Israel, the Jewish people, and the world. This past year has been a difficult one. It has been a year of grief. A year of turmoil. A year of anxiety. It has been a year in which hardly a day goes by when Israel, the hostages, Hamas, the Palestinians, Hezbollah, and Iran have not been in the headlines.
It has been a year in which local towns, college campuses, political races – and, in many cases, our relationships with our own family and friends – have been roiled with discord over the terror attack and the ensuing war. Over the past year, I have regularly heard from congregants from across the political spectrum who have felt agitated by – or, worse, estranged from – their neighbors, their coworkers, their friends, and also other members of their own Jewish community.
For decades now, but especially this past year, our Jewish communal conversations about Israel have tended to be highly charged and deeply divisive. There are understandable reasons why this is so. First of all, we recognize that lives are at stake. This is no mere conversation; rather, five thousand miles away, our differences of opinion are expressed in actions that could result in life or in death.
Second, for many Jewish people, Israel is not just a country. Rather, it is also a symbol – a stand-in for Jewish safety. When Israel is threatened, many of us feel ourselves to be threatened – and consequently, the conversation becomes especially intense.
Third, we recognize that, in the eyes of much of the world, Israel is a representative of the Jewish people. For some of us, this means wanting to make sure that the world fully understands Israel’s unique predicament. For others of us, it means wanting to make sure that Israel lives up to the highest moral standards of the Jewish people. But in either case, because we feel that Israel represents us, we are diligent to make sure that we are not even one inch off message.
These three factors combine to make our conversations about Israel highly charged, highly polarized – and, thereby, often highly explosive.
And yet, despite these challenges, Israel remains an essential topic of conversation – one that we avoid discussing at our own peril. In order to help us engage well around this critical and highly charged issue, the Shalom Hartman Institute – a leading Jewish think tank and education center – proposes a different approach to talking about Israel than the one we are usually accustomed to. The Hartman team suggests that, before we try to discuss our widely differing political positions, we first try to articulate the values that inform our political positions.
The group of congregants who met over the summer to talk about Israel sought to engage in exactly this kind of values-based conversation. Our goal was not to solve the conflict; that is a task that would be well beyond our capacity. Neither was our goal to try and convince one another which of us is right. Rather, we had two specific goals in mind: first, to try and articulate the values that inform our own political positions; and second, to come to better understand the values that motivate the people with whom we disagree.
It has become clear over the past week or so that, devastatingly, the war is far from over. As we prepare ourselves for what could be many more weeks or even months of conflict, I want to share this morning two of the values that emerged for me over the summer as central to the way that I think about Israel.
To be clear: these are not the only two values that are important to me. Indeed, I discovered that there is a broad range of values that inform my own convictions.
Importantly, I should stress that I am not asking anyone to be in alignment with me. My hope, rather, is that by starting with values, we, as a sacred community, might be better equipped to engage in this critical conversation, rather than breaking apart over our fault lines.
So here they are: two values that inform how I think about Israel’s conflict with its neighbors.
***
For me, the first value is self-preservation. This has always been an important value for me; but especially since October 7 – which was the worst experience of violence against Jews that we have seen in my lifetime – the weight that I give to self-preservation has only grown.
From the start, Zionism was rooted in self-preservation. Theodor Herzl and the other leaders of the early Zionist movement did not set out to establish a sovereign Jewish state in the ancient land of Israel because they thought it might be a nice place to live. Rather, they recognized that Jewish life in Europe was increasingly untenable; that the Jewish people could no longer rely on the all too often mercurial goodwill of foreign nations; that, if we were to be protected from violence – or worse, from attempted annihilation – the Jewish people would need to take responsibility for our own self-preservation.
It is devastating to acknowledge that what was true in Herzl’s day is still true in our own. The threats may be coming from different places, but nevertheless, 130 years later, there still are powerful forces in the world – Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and others – who would seek the destruction of the Jewish people.
Our Jewish tradition is unambiguous in asserting that self-preservation is a virtue. Take, for example, the great sage Hillel’s famous three-part aphorism about social responsibility. It begins with a statement not about our obligations to others, but rather, with a statement about our obligations to ourselves: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” [1] Or, consider that, while the Jewish legal tradition is clear that murder is utterly prohibited, [2] our sages insist that acting in self-defense is not only permitted, but rather, is required. [3] Or, consider the argument made by the Jewish philosopher and Holocaust survivor Emil Fackenheim. He said that when you prioritize survival in a world that would otherwise wipe you out, you are performing an act of faith – enacting the belief that hope is more powerful than despair. [4]
In our current moment, there are many ways in which the value of self-preservation is being expressed in practical terms. We see it in Israel’s determination to dismantle the Hamas and Hezbollah regimes, working to ensure that the country not have at its borders terrorist organizations whose stated goal is to wipe Israel and the Jewish people off the map. We see it in Israel’s long-term strategic investment in its air defense systems, enabling the country to keep its citizens safe, even when Iran launches 180 ballistic missiles in its direction. We see it in Israel’s efforts to restore its deterrence capabilities – showing the world that you can’t throw a punch and expect that Israel will do nothing.
And yet, as is the case with any value, self-preservation can be taken to an extreme. At the very least, overemphasizing self-preservation can lead to a distrust of others, insisting that we rely only on ourselves. For Israel, this has sometimes meant rejecting the advice of key foreign allies, when, in reality, multinational cooperation is critical to Israel’s security.
On an even more consequential level, the pursuit of self-preservation can lead to a callousness about the casualties of war – in which, despite the military’s stated intentions, far too many journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and innocent civilians have been killed.
Because self-preservation can be taken to an extreme, a second value is needed to temper its influence. Hillel may have begun his famous three-part aphorism with, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But the aphorism did not end there. Rather, he continued: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” And it is this second question that informs my second value. For me, the second value is justice.
Our Jewish tradition recognizes that justice can mean many things. At its most basic level, to do justice means to do no harm: “You shall not steal;” “You shall not murder.” [5] At a deeper level, to do justice means not only to avoid wrongdoing, but also, to actively seek to do good: “to feed the hungry;” “to clothe the naked.” [6]
But the specific kind of justice that I am thinking about here is yet another one – a category of justice that, especially on these High Holidays, we refer to as atonement: the deeply human process of acknowledging past mistakes, apologizing for them, making reparations, and committing to not making those mistakes again.
Over the centuries, our Jewish tradition developed a robust school of thought – our sages wrote volumes upon volumes [7] – about the art of making amends. The holiest day on the Jewish calendar is not Passover, our holiday of freedom, but rather, is Yom Kippur, the day on which we acknowledge and try to fix the things that we have done wrong.
Although it is sometimes difficult for us to acknowledge it – perhaps especially in a vulnerable moment, like the one we are in now – Israel, like any sovereign nation, has indeed sometimes done things wrong. It is true that over the past decade, the Israeli government has undermined the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, its most viable partner for peace – thereby strengthening Hamas and diminishing the likelihood of a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. This past year, the government has ignored the hostage families, not sufficiently prioritizing among the war goals the safe return of their loved ones. And, by empowering extremist politicians with powerful positions in the cabinet, Israel’s governing coalition has tacitly allowed violent Jewish extremism to run rampant in the West Bank – not cracking down forcefully enough on the near-daily raids on Palestinian villages that have resulted in injury, arson, and death.
When it comes to the conflict, the Jewish state has often had trouble enacting our tradition’s deep wisdom about atonement. There are reasons why this is so. For starters, Israel’s leaders recognize the unfairness that, when the country admits to wrongdoing, the parties on the opposite side of the negotiating table are often not willing to do the same. What’s more, they understandably fear that by acknowledging wrongdoing, they are providing ammunition to their critics and their enemies.
But our Jewish tradition is clear: acknowledging one’s own wrongdoing is not a sign of weakness. Rather, it is a sign of great strength. This, after all, is one of the core messages of the High Holy Days: that a person – and, we might add, a country – can acknowledge their mistakes without forfeiting their right to exist. [8]
***
So there you have it – two of the values that are central to how I think about Israel: self-preservation, which is about protecting ourselves in an often hostile world, and justice, which is the ability to acknowledge and fix our own mistakes.
These two values do not cancel each other out. Rather, they balance one another. They need each other. If we are concerned only with self-preservation, we might become callous and cruel, and forget to do justice. And if we are concerned only with doing justice – focusing only on our mistakes – we might forget about all that is worthwhile and good in ourselves, and deserving of self-preservation. The one needs the other, and the other needs the one.
This is why we, as a sacred community, should strive to understand the values that motivate the people who approach the conflict differently than we do. Doing so not only humanizes them, helping us to appreciate their point of view. It also humanizes us, helping to balance our commitments with additional perspectives.
Some might say that there is a time to focus on self-preservation and a time to focus on justice. They might say: “Don’t bother me right now with justice. Don’t you see that we are under attack? ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’”
Alternatively, they might say: “Stop focusing only on self-preservation. Don’t you see that we are committing real harm? ‘If I am only for myself, what am I?’”
But in our messy world, we do not have the luxury to designate a separate time for self-preservation, and a separate time for justice, and still additional separate times for the many other values that might inform our approach to the conflict.
Rather, we need to have the wisdom, the flexibility, and the courage to affirm many different values all at once. Because, as the great sage Hillel reminds us, we need to be able to hold more than one idea all at the exact same time. As Hillel once asked us: “If not now, then when?”
__________
[1] Pirkei Avot 1:15
[2] Exodus 20:13: “You shall not murder.”
[3] Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72a: “If a person comes to kill you, kill him first.”
[4] “In this present, unbelievable age, even a mere collective commitment to Jewish group-survival for its own sake is a momentous response, with the greatest implications. I am convinced that future historians will understand it, not, as our present detractors would have it, as the tribal response-mechanism of a fossil, but rather as a profound, albeit as yet fragmentary, act of faith, in an age of crisis to which the response might well have been either flight in total disarray or complete despair.” -Emil Fackenheim, “The 614th Commandment,” in To Mend The World (1982).
[5] Exodus 20:13
[6] Isaiah 58:7
[7] See, for example, Maimonides’s Hilkhot Teshuvah; Bachya Ibn Pekuda’s Duties of the Heart – Treatise 7: On Repentance; Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair; and countless others.
[8] See, for example, Ezekiel 33:11: “It is not [God’s] desire that the wicked shall die, but rather, that the wicked turn from their evil ways and live.” Or, see Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 55a: “The Rabbis taught: If a man wrongfully appropriates a beam and builds it into his house – Beit Shammai says that he must demolish the whole house and restore the beam to its owner; Beit Hillel, however, says that the latter can claim only the monetary value of the beam, so as not to place obstacles in the way of penitents.”
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