Kindness, Connection & Israel
Rabbi Elliott Tepperman Rosh Hashanah 5785/2024
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This has been a hard year to be a Jew. Rabbi Ariann and I chose the theme of kindness hoping for kindness to rain down on us. October 7th is Monday. There is more to process than one sermon can hold. |
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Today I am only going to talk about Israel. Again one sermon is not enough.
Just in the last few days, Israel has sent forces into Lebanon, terrorists attacked in Tel Aviv, Iran launched ballistic missiles, AND the war continues in Gaza, where hostages are still held captive.
I am not speaking about any of that. Mostly, I will save political analysis for another day.
Today is not about what is justified or who is to blame.
Rather l will speak about interconnection, between us and the people who live there.
About how kindness and compassion can frame our thinking about Israel and guide our actions with each other,
I will tell stories of Israelis and Palestinians who in these hard moments are choosing love, kindness and connection. Brave stories, to heal our damaged souls, and which might help us navigate this rough terrain.
So let’s take a moment to take a breath.
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One way of translating kindness into Hebrew is Ahavah - Love. The Jewish Zen poet, Norman Fischer1 teaches that for all the nice things we can say about feeling love and being loved, what makes it love is that inevitably it includes a compassionate willingness to feel the suffering of another. Love is a willingness to remove the separation between ourself and another. |
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To recognize a reality of underlying connection.
The rabbis2 have long imagined that each of us, is a separate part of God’s body. They use this metaphor to describe how God feels pain, when any person is hurt. They warn that harming another inevitably will also cause us harm. We are all part of the same body.
They say, If you bite your tongue, don’t knock out your teeth.3
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Sha’anan Streett is a Jewish Israeli hip-hop star. His band Hadag Nachash is know for its song about all the bumper stickers you see in Israel.
He applies this principle to Israeli Jews and Palestinians saying:
“If you understand that everybody is staying here, nobody is going. you have to also understand that every day of violence is going to cost you in the future. And if you can have less days of violence your are going to pay less of a price in the future.”4
In a recent interview, he told the story of another song of his called Waltz with Sha’anan.
This song recounts the danger and drudgery of his service in Gaza during the first Intifada.How once a refrigerator was dropped from a rooftop with him as the target. It narrowly missed him. He can’t remember his mission that day but remembers just walking on numbly.
He was inspired to write the song by a memory of the day the Madrid peace accords were made public. He went with his platoon into Gaza with their guns and flack jackets but this day instead of facing stones they were showered with flowers, rice, and candy.
This is not a story that people have talked about much in the intervening thirty years. And he began to doubt if he was remembering it correctly.
So at a performance for generals in Jerusalem, Sha’anan asked did this really happened. It turned out that yes, on that day in 1991 throughout Gaza and the territories, and the Golan. These top-ranking members of the military had their own memories of Palestinians spontaneously showering Israeli soldiers with gestures of peace.
Sha’anan Streett, affirms with perfect clarity that we should commemorate our losses. We should remember every terrorist attack. He has spent this year performing for those who have been displaced or in some cases lost everyone they love.
But he asks why can’t we also commemorate the moments of love, celebration, connection and kindness?
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Loving another person, means facing their pain and suffering. Loving relationships aren’t really loving relationships if we run away during hard moments.
It is part of a mature kind of love to know we need to be compassionate with each other, especially in moments when we might also feel anger, frustration, and disappointment.
Rachamim Compassion is about having enough empathy that you are willing to stay present with another in their suffering. Compassion is about remaining kind and loving even when that accompaniment might require us to carry another’s pain.
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Sally Abed, spoke at Bnai Keshet 2 years ago. She is a leader of Standing Together and a member of Haifa’s City Council.
She is a Palestinian and an Israeli citizen. This dual identity embodies interconnection.
She mourned friends who died on October 7th, she prayed for the release of friends held hostages, she offered support to neighbors with family in the army. And she worried about and ultimately mourned for Palestinian family and friends under Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
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No one talks about it when you join a synagogue, so that your child can attend Hebrew school, or you have a place to learn and pray on Saturdays, or just to meet other Jewish people in town, but joining a synagogue has the effect of intertwining your life with the lives of others; with people you mostly haven’t yet met.
Judaism affirms that we have a covenantal relationship with Jewish people throughout time and throughout the world.
Synagogue is the place where we can most directly experience this covenant. It is a place where we experience kindness being directed toward us and find opportunities to practice being kind to others. This is covenantal love. This is why disagreements here, give rise to big emotions. Tension is more stressful in a synagogue precisely because we are meaningfully tied to each other.
This is especially true when we are talking about questions of Jewish security, ethics and identity. The exact issues that guide our responses to Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During this year we have to synagogue in need of comfort and searching for understanding. It is because we all are bound up together that it is so critical we treat each other with disproportionate kindness.
Another word for kindness in Hebrew is Hesed, loving-kindness. Hesed is the kind of unqualified, unearned love that showers down, in loving relationships. Hesed is the foundation for caring communities.
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Marriage counselors5 have observed that couples in healthy resilient relationships find 20 or more opportunities a day to express their love and appreciation for each other. And they maintain this ratio in times of difficulty and discord.
It turns out that when hard things need to be said to the people we love, we need a balance of about 1 critical thing to 20 positive, loving appreciative things or our relationships start to spiral downward.
The Prophet Micah says regarding hesed,
What does God require of you:
Only doing justice
Loving loving-kindness,
And walking humbly with your God6
Each commandment in this phrase comments on the one before.
YES, We should do justice,
BUT we must LOVE loving kindness,
(maybe 20 times more)
and we must approach both justice and loving-kindness with spiritual humility.
Micah is imploring us to pursue what is right and just, but he tells us to disproportionately love hesed.
We have to stop believing that if our cause is just, urgent and righteous we can express it in ways that cause harm.
Because we are connected. Verbal stabs & emotional slights directed at others, harm us and harm our community.
Consider if in your discussions about Israel with people you know are kind, you ever raise your voice, speak over them, interrupt, take pride in your zingers, or speak negatively of those you argue with when they are not present.
Too often when trying to convince each other of what is right, we fail to hear Micah’s demand that we prioritize love and humility.
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October 7th hurt us as Jews in particular because we feel a visceral connection to other Jews.
It says in the Talmud7 Kol Yisrael Aravim Zeh b’Zeh. The entire Jewish people are connected, bound up, one with the next.
Some love this idea and others bristle to be associated with certain parts of the Jewish community. But the bristling is its own sign of connection. It's just true, our fate is intertwined with the fate of other Jews. With nearly half of all Jews living in Israel, our fate is particularly intertwined with theirs.
Whether you think of Israel mostly as a source of pride, security, and love or you approach it with anger, judgment, or even shame, or all of the above, the intensity of these feelings is an expression of this visceral connection.
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I recently had the chance to meet Yisrael Piekrash. Yisrael lives in Efrat, one of the more established settlements of the West Bank. He is a Religious Zionist. Religious Zionism is an Orthodox political movement centered on the land of Israel, the people of Israel and the Torah.
Yisrael is the CEO of a peace group called Anahnu, Anachnu means - Us. Anahnu has a vision for a two-state solution that on the surface looks like many others. It is what he means by “Us” that makes this vision unique.
Yisrael Piekrash argues that the dominant theory of security for Jewish Israelis has rested on two principles, Jewish unity and separation from Palestinians.
Since the first Intifada in the late 80s, Israel has been on a path of increasing separation from the Palestinian population.
Each separation has in the short term made it seem safer, but he argues that if we look at the overall trajectory greater separation has been accompanied by greater violence: rocks, and Molotov cocktails, gave way to suicide bombing, then missiles and more deadly attacks from Gaza. This was the trajectory before October 7th.
Without setting up a false equivalency he also catalogs the harm done to Palestinians
to create this separation, lost jobs, home demolitions, walls separating relatives, daily checkpoint crossings, war in Gaza every few years, and of course the devastating war this year.
Piekrash notes that during this same period, the unity of Jewish Israelis has unraveled into polarization.
He argues that to move toward security and peace The first essential step is to take Jewish unity seriously. This has to include his neighbors in the settlements. Orthodox settlers make up 40% of his organization.
He argues the second step required to assure a secure, free and democratic Jewish state, is to accept that this goal is inextricably bound up in the national aspirations of Palestinians for freedom, security and sovereignty.
We might call his principle, Kol yoshvey ha’aretz arevim ze bazeh.
All the inhabitants of the land are bound one to the other.
He points out that in the Bible, every moment of Jewish sovereignty in the Promised Land has included sharing the land with non-Jewish neighbors. People with different religions and their own languages.
This is why the prophets are always arguing about intermarriage. This is why the Torah keeps repeating, “There shall be one law for you and the stranger who dwells among you”8
When we built the 2nd Temple we did so under the authority of the Persian empire.
There are about 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians living between Lebanon and Egypt, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan Valley.
So much of the violence has been the result of those who imagine the existence of one of these groups can be ignored, erased, or undone.
The fate of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are inextricably linked, whether they live in Haifa, Jerusalem, Hebron or Gaza City.
Maybe we should take another breath.
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When I went to Israel in May with thirteen other rabbis, I had the opportunity to visit the Bedouin village of Susya.To reach it we had to walk because radical settlers had placed a giant boulder in the road making it impossible for their cars or our bus to enter or exit the village.
Our Bedouin host shared with us his story of being rounded up by the IDF along with neighbors fifteen years ago after the killing of a settler in a nearby town. He was at the time just a teenager. He was kept lying on the ground all night with his hands tied behind his back. If he moved his face out of the dirt to the side to make breathing easier he was kicked.
After fifteen hours he was released but had to make the long trek home by foot. As he climbed the last hill before arriving home, he was distraught to see that his home and village were not there, they had been demolished.
He shared with us how he went to sleep that night filled with rage and committed to vengeance even if it meant sacrificing his own life.
But the next day, a group of Jewish Israelis came to his demolished village with food and tools to help rebuild. Until that day he had only viewed Jews as the enemy an occupying force. But these Israelis, who had come unexpectedly with the kindness of food and helping to rebuild caused him to rethink his assumptions. This he told us was the beginning of his journey toward becoming a life long activist for peace.
True to form, as we sat listening, his son had been treating us with kindenss serving each of us strong hot sweet tea in small paper cups.9
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That same day we visited Netiv HaAsara. This moshav sits exactly on the northern border of Gaza. Here Hamas infiltrated by flying in on gliders.
We visited what had been the home of Bilha and Yaakov Inon, two of the very first people murdered on October 7th. Their home had been so thoroughly destroyed by a rocket that only the cement foundation remained. Bilha and Yaakov's five adult children immediately understood that their parents had died and that there were no bodies to bury. They were the first family in Israel to sit shiva.10
I first learned about one of their five mourning children, Ma’oz Inon, in 2009. My family spent two nights at a small guest house in Nazareth that he had recently opened. I didn’t know then that he had opened it with the express hope of building relationships of understanding between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. His vision of building peace through tourism, though not very profitable, continued to expand over the next 15 years.
October 7th could have been the end of this vision. Instead, he and his siblings have used their grief to fuel a renewed commitment to peace. He now has an audacious five-year plan to enact peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
One of my colleagues asked Maoz, “How were you able to so quickly engage in peace activism after losing your parents and so many other friends and neighbors?”
He replied “I still cry every day, most days twice.”
But then said “To me, it makes perfect sense. When a person is lost in the desert, they cry out for water. When a person is lost in this kind of grief, it is normal to cry out for peace.”
Let’s take another breath.Just notice without self-judgment how you are feeling.
Do you feel connected to the people in these stories? Do they seem naive? Inspired?
I tell these stories not because they’re the only stories, but because these individuals who have faced extraordinary loss chose to respond by doubling down on kindness, care and connection.
Their stories remind us that we also can make similar though hard and painful choices.
In a world where we are inextricably bound together this may be the realistic choice available.
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And this is not a new Jewish approach to tragedy. On the 9th of Av we still mark the catastrophic destruction of the Second Temple, by the Romans.
When the rabbis asked, what caused this tragic destruction, their answer was love’s opposite, sinat chinam, senseless hate.
The story of the destruction of the Temple is told as one of moderates, being supplanted by ever more polarized radicals who fomented rebellion and then could not put aside their hatred for each other even when Jerusalem was under siege.
There is a rabbinic story11 written in response to this catastrophe:
Once, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, and Rabbi Yehoshua were walking outside Jerusalem and they passed the ruins of the destroyed Holy Temple.
Rabbi Yehoshua cried out, how can we go on when the place where all of Israel’s sins are forgiven is in ruins.
[Rabbi Yohanan] said to him: My son, do not be distressed, we have a form of atonement just as powerful.
And what is it?
Acts of loving kindness, hesed
In the face of destruction, hatred and unimaginable loss Rabbi Yochanan calls on Jews to atone with love and kindness.
That story begins with a quote from Psalm 89, “The world is built in love.” or “Olam Hesed Yibaneh.” This song has become something of an anthem throughout the Jewish world.
It was written by my colleague Rabbi Menachem Creditor, in honor of his daughter born in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Walking down Broadway with the debris from the collapsed Towers still present, and his tiny baby daughter in his arms. He says this song of love emerged as a prayer for a newborn child in the shadow of destruction.
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The word rachamim - compassion, |
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The world could not come into existence, until God built Rachamim - loving compassion,
into the world’s foundation. Just as the soul cannot be born without a womb - rechem, the world could not be born without compassion - rachamim.
Today is Rosh Hashanah, the day we say Hayom Harat Olam.
Today the world is born.
The world being born today, for the Jewish people whether in Israel or right here in this room needs, our rachamim our compassionate willingness to sit with pain, our chesed - our unending loving kindness and our ahava, our disproportionate love.
Leshanah Tovah,
May it be good year of Ahava, Rachamim, v’Chesed
A year of connection and a year of peace.