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SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO—THE ISRAEL APP
“Should I stay or go?” I asked myself. Should I leave Israel earlier than anticipated or not?
Bombs could fall within days. Who knows? Maybe this time they will reach Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
After all, that’s what the terrorists are boasting will happen. Will I be able to handle the sirens, the
bomb shelters, the stress? What is my obligation to my family, to the Jewish people, to myself? I
wrestled and wrestled in my mind and finally came to a decision.
These were my thoughts, not in July of 2014, but in January of 1991, when I was a first year
student in rabbinical school in Jerusalem, just before the first Persian Gulf War. Saddam Hussein
boasted that he had a nuclear bomb, and while it turned out to be just bluster, I didn’t want to take
the risk. So I left my program five months early, and it has tugged at my heartstrings ever since. If I
was ever faced with a similar dilemma, I told myself, I vowed that I would stay in solidarity and
support. And as this week’s Torah portion, Matot, tells us, a vow is serious business.
Well, the situation presented itself again, and there was very little wrestling to do, because,
thankfully, my family of Zionists felt exactly the same way as I did. All of them, feeling like Israel is
their second home, wanted to stay to be with our Israeli brothers and sisters, express our support for
them, and to continue to contribute mightily to their economy. Yes, we bought 4 tallitot, 2 sets of
tefilin, 4 women’s hats, many kippot, several kinds of jewelry, and ate out every night other than
Shabbat.
Before I continue, I want to recall a conversation I had with my 14 year old son Micah
while in Israel. He told me I should be more passionate in my sermons. He said something like:
“Dad,” I know how passionate you are about Israel, but it doesn’t come across like the ones we
heard here.” Micah, at 14, is now one of my best and seriously helpful critics. I thought about it
and know he’s right. Maybe it’s because I am in customer service as a rabbi, maybe it’s because
I consider myself to be more of a teacher than a preacher, but if I’m honest, I know it’s also
because I am afraid to offend people. So I express my point-of-view, but I equivocate. Today, I
am going to try not to do that as I talk about my recent trip to Israel. If I offend people, so be it.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t respect your potentially very different opinion or welcome you
here, and it certainly doesn’t mean I care about you any less as a member. But today, from the
pulpit, I’m going to express my views without equivocation. I apologize only for the fact that it
will be too darn long!
Today’s parasha, Matot, is all too relevant to the current situation in Israel. It describes a
brutal battle by the Israelites against Midian, which couldn’t have been easy for Moses, given
that his wife was from there. In the text the Israelites kill all the kings, they kill the prophet
Balaam, and they also kill the children and the women, or at least those women who had a
hand in seducing the Israelite males to the cult of Baal-Peor. It’s a horrific passage, and our
tradition has always been uncomfortable with what is certainly a painful passage about war and
blood and vengeance.
The Midrash (Sifrei Matot 157) records a fascinating debate about the Jewish army’s
battle tactics. According to one anonymous opinion, “they surrounded [Midian] on all four
sides.” Yet, Rabbi Natan disagrees, insisting that “they left the fourth side [open] so that [the
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Midianites] would flee.” Rambam codifies Rabbi Natan’s position as normative halachah,
writing, “When a siege is placed around a city…it should not be surrounded on all four sides,
only on three. A place should be left for the inhabitants to flee and for all those who desire, to
escape with their lives.” (Laws of Kings 6:7) A Jewish army must always allow an adversary to
withdraw, avoiding unnecessary violence and bloodshed.
That is exactly what Israel did in Operation Protective Edge. In the recent exchange with
Hamas, Israel has done just that, giving Hamas every opportunity to halt its rocket fire. It
happened at the beginning of the conflict and twice more, where cease fires were offered but
Hamas refused.
I am sure you have also read plenty of articles about how Israel has done more than any
army in history to lessen the civilian casualties, to “give residents the opportunity to flee” to put
it in the language of the Torah, dropping leaflets, making phone calls, tapping on roofs, warning
people when and where it will attack so they can leave. Would any other army in the world do
such a thing? Has any army in history? In the future, military experts will study Israel’s conduct
during this war as a model for how to minimize civilian casualties, despite the fact that there
are many of them. For that, the blame falls squarely on Hamas for placing civilians in harm’s
way. I’ll have more to say about that in a few minutes.
In a different year, I might describe some of the meaning derived from that, or from visiting
the different synagogues and the food and the holiness of the streets, but this year, was, well,
obviously, a little bit different. What people want to know is “what was the mood like there?” I can
answer that question in three different ways: in terms of personal experience, communal
experience, and political experience.
Beginning with the communal experience, what was the national mood like? Simply,
put, it was one of unity, and in at least three different ways.
When I arrived the nation of Israel was unified in mourning over the three Israeli
teenagers: Gilad, Naftali, and Eyal.
Then, the nation was unified in moral outrage over the vengeful crime of the three
Israeli teenagers who murdered and burned Mohammed Abu Khedeir alive. The nation was
outraged, as they should have been, as we all should have been. This was not just the moderate
left with whom most of us associate, but even right wing, ultra Orthodox Haredi Rabbis
appropriately asking for communal soul searching. How could someone would think that this is
OK, according to Jewish teachings? At an Orthodox service we attended with many Haredim
present, the Rabbi gave a sermon expressing just that. The parasha was Pinchas, and I was
cringing, praying that he wouldn’t use Pinchas’ actions to call for vengeance. He said exactly the
the opposite. Pinchas did the right thing, he said, according to our tradition, but he had God’s
blessing. We don’t. We don’t take justice into our own hands. And, thankfully, the suspects
were found quickly and arrested, not protected as the murderers of the three Israeli teens were
by Hamas.
Then, Israel was unified in pain and resolve over being attacked indiscriminately by
Hamas rockets. There we were as a people, in the bomb shelters, in reading the news, in
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praying for the IDF, in knowing that Israel had to take action to meet the first obligation of any
government—to protect the safety of its citizens.
And what I was least looking forward to in leaving Israel was leaving that unity, that solidarity,
that strength of knowing that Israel was and is defending itself, to come back to the United States to
be put on the defensive. To reading about how it’s all Israel’s fault, how if they would just end the
occupation, how Israel commits genocide and apartheid and ethnicide, to seeing Jews get attacked,
at least verbally, and now physically, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Paris, where pro
Israel supporters were literally trapped in a synagogue by anti Israel protesters. That is why I didn’t
want to leave.
And that leads me to the political experience. Make no mistake about it, we are at war. I
could say Israel is at war, but I consider myself a part of Israel, the people and the land, so I will
continue to say we.
As I stated earlier, Israel is the most moral army in the world. Leaflets, roof knocking,
medicine and food and electricity and treating Palestinian victims in Israeli hospitals. Can you
imagine that happening if the situations were reversed?
We are held to double standard, triple standard. I don’t mind that. We should be a light
unto nations, we should be more moral, more ethical, but when we are not even allowed to
defend ourselves, it crosses a line.
In all this we should have tremendous sympathy for Palestinians. They are dying while
playing on the beach. There is massive collateral damage. It is awful. But the blame lies with
Hamas. They are encouraging human shields. Hamas leaders are openly telling their residents
not go get out of harm’s way. They are launching rockets from schools and mosques and
hospitals. This has been well documented. Netanyahu put it succinctly: “We use our missiles to
protect our civilians. Hamas uses its civilians to protect its missiles.”
We should also remember that this is not about the occupation. Israel doesn’t occupy
Gaza. We left in 2005. The occupation was over. But instead of using the time to build markets
and companies, Hamas has used it to build tunnels and bombs. The same thing happened in
Lebanon. Israel gave up the security zone, and the result was Hezbollah lobbing rockets into
Israel.
Tragically, in my view, this sets the peace process back years, if not decades. Israel is not
going to leave the West Bank, which is more than 10 times the size of the Gaza Strip, knowing
that such a large area would be impossible to control and that those same rockets that sent us
to our shelters in the last few weeks will come from meters instead of miles away, with the
possibility of much more accuracy, right to the heart of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and not just
Sderot and Ashdod. I might want Israel to give up territory in exchange for a flimsy promise of
peace, but until Israel can trust that they won’t actually be driven to more war by giving up
territory, they are simply not going to do it, no matter how great the international pressure. No
amount of International Pressure will force Israel to put more of its population at mortal risk.
Perhaps Israel would get more sympathy if more Israelis would die, but what nation on
God’s earth would do that? And we have seen that tape before. People telling us they wanted
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to kill us and being led, at least in most cases, like “lambs to the slaughter.” Even for those who
fought back in Warsaw and Kovno and in the forests as partisans, we didn’t have the power to
fight back effectively. So we swore to ourselves as a people that we would never let that
happen again. And now that another enemy tells us they want to kill us, at least as a nation and
sometimes even as individuals and we do have the power to fight back, this is what it looks like.
It is its own kind of tragedy, to be sure, and we would not be Jews if we didn’t have tremendous
sympathy for the many innocent Palestinians who have lost their lives as a result of Hamas’
continued willingness to martyr themselves, but we are doing what we must to make sure
“never again” is more than just a slogan. This is what “never again” means in realpolitik terms.
So what good is this sermon, then? Am I just circling the wagons? A sermon should end
with an action plan, and if a sermon doesn’t propose something that brings us closer to peace,
why bother? But there is an action that everyone in this room can take. What Israel does need
right now is to know that they are not alone. Increasingly, they feel the isolation. Most Israelis
that I have talked to express the idea that they feel they are being attacked by the rest of the
world and that no one supports their right to even defend their children. As the niece of one of
our members put it, “I think it is great that you are here during the difficult time.” It has been a
terrible time for all of us and our friends around the world seem to be diminishing on a daily
basis.” Letting a nation that you understand their pain is not nothing, so if there is an action you
can take, it is to call, e-mail, text anyone you know in Israel and let them know that you care
about them and are thinking about them. You/we are there for them. Communicate it as often
as you can to as many people as you can. That’s the action to take here. Please do so
generously.
I want to conclude with the personal experience. Many of you read this story in my blog
about the Red Alert App for the Iphone. Yes, there’s an App for that. The Red Alert App lets you
know when a bomb is headed your way. It will tell you what city it is predicted to land in, and it
is instantaneous, so you have 15-30 seconds to take cover. I highly recommend that you
download it so you can get a taste of what it feels like for the Israelis.
Well, we downloaded it for our devices. Most of the alerts were for the cities in the
South--Sderot, Ashdod, Asheklon, Moatza Ezorit, and others. The fact that bombs were not
falling close to where I was staying in Jerusalem riddled me with guilt. After all, these are still
the people of Israel, people I think of as nothing less than my extended family. Am I so selfcentered that my first reaction is not "how terrible for the people of the South," but "thank God
that my family and I are safe?" I couldn’t really begin to imagine what it must be like having to
worry every single moment that a rocket may be on its way in about 15 seconds. But now I was
getting a small taste of this.
My 11 year old son Jonah, who is very attached to social media, as you might imagine,
would call out the cities every time an alert came on. “Ashdod, Beersheba, Sderot, etc.” he
would call out. Well, finally, he yelled out: “Jerusalem. Daddy. It’s Jerusalem.” So we quickly
ran down four flights of stairs down to the shelter. Why didn’t we hear the siren? We had never
stayed in a luxury apartment before with an air conditioner and a dryer. Our apartment was
sound proof. Maybe we should have paid a little less for a less than sound proof apartement.
From then on we left the windows open.
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But after making friends in the bomb shelter, the all clear was given. Then, you have a
decision to make? Do you hunker down in the apartment in fear, or do you go out as normal to
“not give the terrorists a victory?” It’s amazing how quickly Israelis get back to normal. We
decided to go out to Ben Yehuda Street. So we began the walk up King George Street, past the
Great Synagogue on the left and the Leonardo Plaza, formerly the Sheraton, on the left. If you
know that area, there’s a large park in front of the Sheraton, and we were not sure what we
would do if there was a siren. There is no place to seek shelter there, so we quickened our pace.
And having the illusion of it "not being in our yard" shattered, every sound on the walk to Ben
Yehuda Street made us just a little bit jumpy-- a truck running over a metal grate, a door
slamming, a siren from a police car with an extremely loud announcement from a bullhorn,
which turned out to be just a police officer pulling someone over for speeding. The strangest
sound of all, though, came from a car blasting a radio. The drum beat, in our state of
mind, sounded like an explosion. It turned out it was just music being blasted, though..
Then again, it wasn't "just" music. After we decided it wasn't a bomb, we thought that
maybe it was a rap song it was playing so loudly. But no, the car was blasting the song from the
morning service. "V'ha-er eineinu b'toratecha, v'dabek libeinu b'mitzvotecha," enlighten our
eyes with your Torah, and let our hearts cleave to your commandments."
And there was our sign. In this time of fear and uncertainty and red alerts, I pray O God,
for the people of Israel, for the peace of Jerusalem, and that none of us of any religion or nation
should have to live in such fear. Instead, as the song says, “let us cleave to You, O God, and
enlighten our eyes to Your Torah, to peace, and to hope.”