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Republican Craziness and Hubris Explained

22 Sunday Sep 2013

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Paul Krugman and Marty Kaplan did not talk to each other last week nor coordinate their op-ed pieces in different newspapers, but they well could have.

Marty writes in “The Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever” (The Los Angeles Jewish Journal, and The Huffington Post, September 16) that recent studies show partisanship undermines reasoning skills:

“…say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.” http://www.jewishjournal.com/marty_kaplan/article/most_depressing_brain_finding_ever or http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/most-depressing-brain-fin_b_3932273.html

Krugman picks up where Marty left off (“The Crazy Party” – New York Times op-ed, September 19):

“Republicans are coming off an election in which they failed to retake the presidency despite a weak economy, failed to retake the Senate even though far more Democratic than Republican seats were at risk, and held the House only through a combination of gerrymandering and the vagaries of districting. Democrats actually won the popular ballot for the House by 1.4 million votes. This [i.e. Republicans] is not a party that, by any conceivable standard of legitimacy, has the right to make extreme demands on the president. [My emphasis]” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/opinion/krugman-the-crazy-party.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130920

We now have brain science to explain the bizarre and destructive impulses and positions taken by the Republican Party and their irrational and extremist base vis a vis The Affordable Care Act, the United States budget and the US debt ceiling.

If the researchers are correct, then the more real facts, information and logic that bonafide experts in various fields (e.g. economics, health care, science, climate change, etc.) present, the more convinced will be the extremist ideologues and their followers of whatever nonsense they started out with in the first place, and they will stick to what Stephen Colbert once called “Truthiness!”

I asked Marty what he thought was an effective game plan against the purveyors of such craziness given the Republican Congressional leadership, Fox “News” and Cable right-wing syndicated television and radio, and he said, “We have to fight stories with stories, and not let their bubbameises destroy our dreams!”

Note: Definition of bubbameises – a type of urban legend, or “tale” based in superstition or folklore; filled with unverified claims, exaggerated and/or inaccurate details – i.e. nonsense!

We Are The Descendents of Believers – A Response to Ian Lustick in Light of Sukkot

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Holidays, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Uncategorized

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University of Pennsylvania Political Science Professor, Ian Lustick, touched a raw nerve in the Jewish world this week after a piece he wrote called “Two-State Illusion” appeared on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Review (September 15). He said, among other things, that the State of Israel’s lease has expired, that the Zionist project is dead (or almost dead), and that the only way forward, after a catastrophic war, is a one-state solution combining anti-Zionist extremist religious Jews, post-Zionist secular Jews, Jews from Arab countries, and secular Palestinians. It was an outrageous and defeatist piece, depressing to Zionists and lovers of Israel the world over, and embraced by few if any Jews or Palestinians.

Ian Lustick wrote:

“The disappearance of Israel as a Zionist project, through war, cultural exhaustion or demographic momentum, is…plausible…Many Israelis see the demise of the country as not just possible, but probable.”

The timing of his piece the day after Yom Kippur and days before Sukkot was upsetting and challenging because not only were his ideas unworkable, but they were contrary to everything this festival of Sukkot is about.

Much has been said about the symbolism of Sukkot. The Rashbam, Rashi’s grandson, says that Sukkot is connected to Moses warning the Israelites at the end of his life that there’s danger in feeling too secure and affluent, recalling Deuteronomy 8:11-14 – “Hishamer l’cha pen tishkach et Adonai Eloheicha…Take care lest you forget Adonai your God. When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in…beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget Adonai your God, who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief Rabbi of Great Britain, points to a verse from Jeremiah, “Zacharti l’cha chesed n’urayich ahavat clulotayich – I remember the loving-kindness of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown” (Jeremiah 2:2) (God is speaking to Israel) as a key in understanding Sukkot. He notes that the Jeremiah verse is one of the few in the Hebrew Bible that speaks in praise not of God, but of the Jewish people’s love for God and that this is what this festival is really all about.

Yes, the sukkah represents the Jewish people’s vulnerability throughout our history, that our tents and homes are flimsy, our lives impermanent, and the future uncertain, but that in building a sukkah we exercise control over our lives and communities, and that we can take history into our own hands just as we did when Nachshon ben Aminadav led the way with Moses in crossing the Red Sea, and just as did the founding generations of Zionists and Israelis who built the state of Israel. It has taken a lot of faith for the people of the State of Israel to do what they’ve done against great odds, and that is one of the most remarkable aspects in the history of the Jewish people.

Reish Lakish, a Babylonian 3rd century sage, 1700 years ago reminds us in the Babylonian Talmud that when Moses questioned the people’s faith during the period of the wandering, God knew their hearts and reassured his prophet saying, “The [children of Israel] are believers, [and] the descendants of believers.” (Shabbat 97a) In other words, don’t worry, my servant Moses, my people have what it takes and they will not only do well but they will do what is necessary to survive and thrive as a people.

As we think about Ian Lustick’s article, the festival of Sukkot reminds us on the one hand that, yes, we’ve always been historically insecure, but also that this is our season lismoach, to rejoice, in spite of whatever circumstances we have faced in our history. Indeed, another name for this festival of Sukkot is Z’man Simchateinu – the Season of our Rejoicing.

We Jews are experts at insecurity, but we’ve never lost faith because we are  “believers and descendents of believers.”

Shabbat shalom and chag Sukkot sameach!

Ian Lustick’s NY Times Review Rant on the “Illusion of a Two-State Solution”

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Uncategorized

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I was stunned by Ian Lustick’s front page above-the-fold NY Times Sunday Review (September 15) article of 2339 words (long by most standards) with huge graphics not only because of the immense space The NY Times gave to a very small minority position within any community, but also because of its timing – the day after Yom Kippur and in the middle of serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians to find a two-state solution. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/two-state-illusion.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I knew Ian Lustick when we were students together at UC Berkeley in 1970-71. We were both part of a left-wing Zionist group on campus that published a newspaper called “The Jewish Radical.” Ian was a brilliant and charismatic graduate student in Political Science, as I recall, and he was a strong Zionist at that time.

What happened? I honestly do not know as we were only acquaintances and I have had no contact with him since. But, in reading his article, he has clearly changed and given up on the most extraordinary phenomenon in modern Jewish history, the restoration of the Jewish people in the historic homeland, the establishment of a Jewish state for the first time in 2000 years, and the dreams of Israel’s founders as expressed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

Ian’s analysis of the growth and number of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is not wrong. As he says, the United States should have put pressure on Israel to stop this long ago when a two-state solution would have come more easily.

It did not happen, but that does not mean that all is lost, and Ian’s conclusion that a two-state solution is an illusion is defeatism in the extreme especially at a time when the United States is engaged actively in negotiations that represent the only chance there is to preserve Israel as a democracy and the national homeland of the Jewish people.

I am including, by permission, a “Letter to the Editor” penned by my friend and teacher, Rabbi Richard Levy, past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, who has been involved in the peace movement reaching back to the days of “Breira,” (the first American Jewish organization calling for a two-state solution in the early 1970s) and who is now an important voice amongst J Street Rabbis. Richard shines a strong light on the absurdity of Ian’s prescription for a one-state solution. I hope the NY Times Letters page publishes Richard’s piece. They should!

TO THE EDITOR:

Seldom have I read a crueler, more heartless prescription for the Israeli-Palestinian struggle than Ian Lustick’s condemnation of Israelis and Palestinians to enduring the horrible trials of the Irish under Great Britain and South African blacks under apartheid. If the two-state solution is illusory, what are we to make of Mr. Lustick’s fantasy that if Israelis and Palestinians are forced to endure mutual violence long enough in a single state that “anti-nationalist Orthodox Jews might find common cause with Muslim traditionalists,” bridging a huge abyss not only of political but religious animosity, and “Israelis whose families came from Arab countries might find new reasons to think of themselves not as ‘Eastern’, but as Arab”–when the way Jews were treated in those countries led them to be among the Israelis most hostile toward Arabs? Furthermore, secular Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank are already finding allies among secular (and liberal religious)

Israelis–allies for a two-state solution. And if diplomacy has to give way to decades more of “blood and magic”–what are we to make of the successful diplomacy ending the strife in Northern Ireland? Why should the Israelis and Palestinians be denied the opportunity to attempt diplomacy once more in the quest for two states?

Perhaps the answer to these questions lies in Mr. Lustick’s comments about “post-Zionist” and “statist Zionism.” For him, Zionism would appear to be the main culprit, for which a two-state solution is but a scapegoat. For a two-state solution would preserve a Zionist state, run democratically by a Jewish majority–and Mr. Lustick wants to eliminate that possibility.  Not only to eliminate it, but to crucify it on a one-state platform of “ruthless oppression, mass mobilization, riots, brutality, terror, Jewish and Arab emigration and rising tides of international condemnation of Israel,” all of which would result in the withdrawal of American support.

It is easy to condemn a policy of supporting two states if the only state that currently exists is the one a person wishes to be destroyed. Mr. Lustick’s piece was well titled. It is an illusion to think he opposes a two state solution–it is the Zionist state that he opposes, and sets out a blueprint to destroy.

Rabbi Richard N. Levy

Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles

Syria, Russia, Israel, and American Moral Responsibility

15 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Uncategorized

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I chose not to comment on the Syrian atrocity during the Ten Days of Repentance because my attentions were primarily elsewhere, on the greater themes of the High Holidays and with my congregation. However, I have been thinking about it, and the following are some of those thoughts:

For me the greater issue, beyond the tragedy in Syria itself, is on what moral responsibility the United States bears as the only world superpower. Though the UN does some important work in international relief (i.e. in Jordan today), the Security Council is a dysfunctional body because it demands 100% agreement to do anything, a demagogic principle if ever there was one. That being the case, moral responsibility for such tragedies passes to the US.

It is distressing that this Syrian crisis is the only world tragedy that seems to garner American interest, given other catastrophes in Darfur, the Congo and Burma.

Of course, this is nothing new. American bombers could have destroyed the train tracks leading to Bergen Belsen in WWII, but did not. The US was absent during the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, after chemical weapons use on civilians by Sadaam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and after Hafez Al Assad’s murder of 20,000 civilians in Hama in the 1980s.

I understand the quagmire into which the United States would step if it becomes the world’s policeman, and that gives me pause, but it is painful as a Jew to stand by idly while others bleed (Leviticus 19:16) especially in the wake of our people’s experience in the Shoah when no one came to our people’s aid. Given these two opposing impulses, I stand on the side of active engagement whenever and where ever a humanitarian crisis, such as those I listed above, occurs.

I understand American hesitancy to get involved in Syria, because there is no good-guy in the Syrian opposition, and the next dictator is likely to be just as bad as the current one. However, President Obama’s “red-line” is a critical one to enforce every time it is crossed, and it needs enforcing now.

Another worry I have is concerning the perceived loss of American credibility relative to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. There are a number of causes behind the weaker perception of America today including the serious damage done by the Bush Administration’s wrong-headed and tragic Iraqi War adventure, current congressional timidity and partisanship, and misjudgments by President Obama. For the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to succeed with a two-state solution resulting, the United States must be engaged actively and, I believe, with muscle. The weaker America appears, the worse that is for the future of a secure democratic and Jewish State of Israel.

Finally, though I understand the international power play in which President Putin is engaged, I do not accept the view that President Obama has somehow sunk the American ship. If the Russian-American agreement on Syrian chemical weapons succeeds in keeping Assad from ever using them again, it is a win-win-win for the United States, Russia, and any future population that could be similarly attacked.

Before Yom Kippur, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (representing 2500 Reform Rabbis world-wide) made the following statement on Syria, with which I agree:

The Central Conference of American Rabbis condemns the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons to kill more than 1400 persons, including some 400 children, as a violation of international law and a crime against humanity. As Jews, we are well acquainted with a tyrannical regime’s use of lethal gas to commit mass murder and of the failure of democratic governments to intervene.

The CCAR applauds the President’s decision to respond to the Syrian authorities’ illegal and morally reprehensible conduct and to seek the complete, prompt, and verifiable removal of chemical weapons from Syria by means of diplomacy, if possible, before resorting to the use of military force.

We reaffirm the principle that the use of force should be undertaken with utmost reluctance, only when reasonable alternatives have been exhausted or prove unavailable.

We call on other governments throughout the world to join the effort to ensure that Syria does not commit another such atrocity.

We believe that effective action regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons is essential to deter the use of weapons of mass destruction by others and reinforce the credibility of U.S. policy concerning such weapons.

We support the firm and unequivocal determination of the President and Congress to prevent Iran from developing or obtaining nuclear weapons.

We express our deep concern for the State of Israel and its citizens, who have been threatened with retaliation in the event of American military action, and reaffirm the CCAR’s steadfast support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens from all who seek to harm them.

We yearn for the arrival of “the days to come” that Isaiah foresaw, when nations “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war.”

We pray that the Jewish New Year, recently begun, will see the dawning of peace for the entire human family.

 

 

 

40 Years Later – Memories of Jets and Sirens

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Stories, Uncategorized

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Forty years ago on Yom Kippur I was studying as a first-year rabbinic student in Jerusalem. I will never forget that day as long as I live.

I left my student dorm near the President’s House in Rehavia at 5:45 AM that morning, and walked the quiet streets to the Kotel to pray. When I reached the bottom of the then undeveloped valley between the King David Hotel and Jaffa Gate, three US-made Phantom jets flew in formation going south over the city of Jerusalem.

I was stunned and wondered; ‘On Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the year over the holy city!? Where are they going and why?’

Eight hours later, just before 2 PM, the air raid sirens sounded throughout the country. I turned on a small transistor radio to learn on the BBC that 1300 Syrian tanks had crossed into Israel over the Golan Heights and that the Egyptian army had crossed the Suez Canal and breached the Bar Lev line in a coordinated surprise attack on the Jewish people’s holiest day of the year.

Israeli radio called up all units. Within 24 hours Israeli soldiers were in place and the fighting was intense. The civil reserve took up residence on the ground floor of my dorm in the event that Jerusalem would come under attack.

Classes ceased, and I worked throughout the war in one of Jerusalem’s two large bakeries producing 75,000 loaves of bread nightly. The only workers there were Jews over the age of 55 and foreign students. Young Israelis had been called up and Arabs were frightened to come in.

Each night I walked through blackened streets to a pick-up point, and worked the 8-10 hour shift until 6 AM.

Israeli casualties were high. By the end of the three-week war Israel had suffered 2656 dead and 9000 injured, equivalent  to 230,000 Americans.

Despite Israel’s heavy losses and the catastrophe of the war itself, the Yom Kippur War is considered the greatest of all Israeli military victories. In three weeks Israel pierced through Egyptian lines, built a bridge across the Suez Canal, surrounded the Egyptian army, and threatened Cairo.

In the north, Israel pushed the Syrian army back into its own territory, and threatened Damascus.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger understood that hope for a future peace would require preserving a measure of Arab pride. Consequently, the United States forced a cease-fire permitting Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to claim victory. Five years later he traveled to Jerusalem eventually resulting in the Camp David Accords.

Historian and Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren spoke to American rabbis just before Rosh Hashanah this year and reflected on the Yom Kippur War’s 40th anniversary. He described four stages in the war against Israel.

The first stage constituted wars waged by Arab armies (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973).

The second stage was a war of terrorism that began soon after 1967. Prosecuted by Arab fedayin guerrillas and Palestinian terrorists, it includes the War of Attrition (1968-1971), the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics (1972), the murder of children in Maalot (1974), ongoing attacks on the northern town of Kiryat Shemona, two Intifadas, multiple suicide bombings, and rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza on Israeli civilian communities.

The third stage was the “internationalization of the conflict” in the United Nations using diplomacy with the intention to delegitimize the State of Israel.

Ambassador Oren says that we are now in the fourth stage, bi-lateral negotiations intended to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a two-state agreement.

So much history has transpired during these past forty years. Israel is a very different place than it was then, as is the Middle East and the world as a whole.

This coming October 6 I will be once again in Jerusalem, and I expect I will ruminate on those three phantom jets flying over Jerusalem on that quiet Yom Kippur morning forty years ago and upon the piercing scream of the sirens that shattered the holiest day of the year and the hearts of Israelis.

I am bringing 23 members of my synagogue community with me to lend our support to the people of the State of Israel, and to meet with Israelis from all political points of view inside the Green Line and living in the West Bank to better understand their thinking and current state-of-mind, and we will meet with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah and Rawabi to learn more about who they are, what has been their experience under occupation, and what are their needs and dreams.

“Sha-alu shalom Yerushalayim – Pray for Jerusalem’s weal!” (Ps. 122:6 – The Book of Psalms, translated by Robert Alter)

G’mar chatimah tovah – May you be sealed in the Book of Life.

Turning and Returning: A Journey Outside Time and Space

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry, Quote of the Day, Uncategorized

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These ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur is the time of turning and returning, as the psalmist says, “O God, bring us back, and light up Your face that we may be rescued.” (Ps 80:4)

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav used to say that “Everywhere I go, I am going to Jerusalem. “ He probably meant that his every thought, prayer and deed brought him closer to his true spiritual home, to that time when the Jewish people was one with the land of Israel, the holy city, and with Torah.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, however, differed and said, “Everywhere I go, I am going to myself” as if peeling away the skins of an union to rediscover his core spiritual essence.

We too are called by tradition to ask in these days of turning and returning, ‘What is our spiritual essence, the core within that we cannot abandon without walking away from ourselves?”

The psalmist said, “Torat Elohav b’libo – His God’s teaching is in his heart” (Ps 37:31), meaning that we can be truest to ourselves as Jews when we learn and embrace and become living Torah scrolls ourselves.

This High Holiday season is our annual corrective to everything in the past that has fragmented, shattered, distracted, frustrated, disappointed, hurt, offended, humiliated, angered, and taken us away from our truest selves.

Rabbi Eliezer taught that the time to do t’shuvah is brief. He told his students, “Turn one day prior to your death.”

They asked, “Master, how can anyone know what day is one day prior to their death?”

He said, “Therefore, repent today, because tomorrow you may die.” (Talmud, Shabbat 153a)

Central to Yom Kippur is that we use every opportunity to break from the inertia to which we’ve become accustomed and take the first step to turn ourselves around and return to the right path that represents a new beginning. God promises a great reward saying, “You are as if newly created. What happened in the past has already been forgotten.” (Sifre Devarim, Piska 30)

At my weekly Men’s Torah study recently I had a difficult time moving the discussion away from one point we were discussing on the theme of t’shuvah that seemed to take over the hearts and minds of many participants. I had an agenda for our hour long session, and we were not getting quickly enough to what I considered the main and conclusive issue. One of the participants said, “Don’t worry Rabbi – if we don’t get there today, we always have next year!”

He was right, of course. We read Torah every year, and over time fulfill Yochanan ben Bag Bag’s instruction, “Hafoch ba, v’hafoch ba, d’clua ba – Turn it over and turn it over again, for all is contained in it.” (Tanna De-Vei Eliahu Zuta 17:8).”  

The special kind of t’shuvah that comes as a result of Torah learning transports us beyond past and present as we know it, because Torah has no time. It occupies Eternal time, and as such is always current.

Torah stands also outside of space as we understand it. When we learn Torah we are on a spiritual journey towards our essence, as Levi Yitzhak taught, and towards Jerusalem, as Rebbe Nachman taught.

Rabbi Brad Shavit-Artson reflects movingly on the nature of religious turning in these words:

“I think about turning and turning without end… just another word for a dance. It may be that the turning we are called to do before God is one of rapture and joy, of dancing in the presence of the Holy One, as did King David when he returned to Jerusalem with the Ark. Maybe the turning that we should focus on is not one of sorrow and mourning, but of exultation – that we are in the presence of something so magnificent, so unpredictable, so unanticipated and unearned that all we can do is click our heels and spin and dance.”

The 13th century German mystic, Matilda of Magdenberg, expressed it this way:

“I cannot dance, O Lord, /  Unless you lead me. / If you wish me to leap joyfully, / Let me see You dance and sing. / Then I will leap into love – / And from love into knowledge, / And from knowledge into the harvest, / That sweetest fruit beyond human sense / And there I will stay with you, turning.”

May this time of turning be restorative for us all.

G’mar chatimah tovah. May you be sealed in the Book of Life.

Note: I am grateful to Rabbi Brad Shavit-Artson, who assembled some of the above text material and the last poem in an article on T’shuvah in 2003. Translations of the Psalms are taken from The Book of Psalms, by Robert Alter, 2007.

A Prayer for Peace in the New Year

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Health and Well-Being, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry, Social Justice, Uncategorized

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I offer this prayer in the New Year 5774, and wish for you, your families, friends, colleagues, and students a year of good health, renewal, and happiness.

*  *

May we hold lovingly in our thoughts / those who suffer from tyranny, subjugation, cruelty, and injustice, / and work every day towards the alleviation of their suffering.

May we recognize our solidarity / with the stranger, outcast, downtrodden, abused, and deprived, / that no human being be treated as “other,” / that our common humanity weaves us together / in one fabric of mutuality, / one garment of destiny.

May we pursue the Biblical prophet’s vision of peace, / that we might live harmoniously with each other / side by side, / respecting differences, / cherishing diversity, / with no one exploiting the weak, / each living without fear of the other, / each revering Divinity in every human soul.

May we struggle against institutional injustice, / free those from oppression and contempt, / act with purity of heart and mind, / despising none, defrauding none, hating none, / cherishing all, honoring every child of God, every creature of the earth.

May the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and all peoples / know peace in this New Year, / And may we nurture kindness and love everywhere.

L’shanah tovah tikateivu

Rabbi John L. Rosove

Seeking Higher Intuitive Purposes – D’var Torah Nitzavim

30 Friday Aug 2013

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Rosh Hashanah is but days away, and this week we read the double Torah portion, Nitzavim-Vayelech, that’s always read on the Shabbat before the New Year. Due to its timing, there’s an urgency about its message it on the one hand, and a tone of encouragement on the other:

“Surely this Instruction (i.e. mitzvah) that I command you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it too us, that we may observe it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it. No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.” (Deuteronomy 30:1)

The rabbis debated what specifically this “instruction” or “mitzvah” is.

Most commentators say that the mitzvah is t’shuvah, repentance, which explains why the Torah portion Nitzavim might come just before Rosh Hashanah.

Each of us begins this High Holiday season in a state of chet (sin), which the great Rav Kook taught is a state of alienation and separation from our true tasks and true identity. Only through t’shuvah (repentance/return) is a corrective possible, and only through t’shuvah can we come back whole-heartedly to ourselves, families, friends and colleagues, community, Torah and God.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik taught that sin isn’t just limited to our lack of observance of some ritual and ethical law. It includes our obligation to ‘get right’ with our own souls, to focus more on the life of our higher intuitive purposes.

Soloveitchik teaches that “Returning to the heart” is the first necessary step in that spiritual process.

Most of us wait to do t’shuvah until this season, if we do it at all. Intrinsic to the process, however, isn’t just recognizing that we’ve done some specific wrong, but that chet means that we’re out of relationship with the Torah itself.

This Yemenite Midrash explains:

“They say to a person: ‘Go to a certain town and learn Torah there.’ But the person answers: ‘I’m afraid of the lions that I’ll encounter on the way.’ So they say: ‘You can go and learn in another town that’s closer.’ But the person replies: ‘I’m afraid of the thieves.’ So they suggest: ‘There’s a sage in your own city. Go and learn from him.’ But the person replies: ‘What if I find the door locked, and I have to return to where I am?’ So they say: ‘There’s a teacher sitting and teaching right here in the chair next to you.’ But the person replies: ‘You know what? What I really want to do is go back to sleep!’ This is what the Book of Proverbs (26:14, 16) refers to when it says, ‘The door is turning upon its hinges, and the sluggard (i.e. lazy one) is still upon his bed…the sluggard is wiser in his own eyes that seven that give wise counsel.’” (Yalkut Midreshei Teiman)

Do we recognize ourselves here, not just in relationship to Torah but to what is truest about ourselves? Do we see that perhaps we’ve been negligent or lacking in will in making necessary  changes, that we may wish to do things differently but always find a way to rationalize why we don’t.

Change is always difficult, often threatening, sometimes destabilizing, and frequently disruptive. Changing the way we eat or neglect our health, how we control our passions and anger, refuse to leave relationships that are destructive or change from a job that’s killing us, or take charge of our addictions that enslave us, or control an expense account that’s bankrupting us – all change relative to these destructive parts of our lives require enormous acts of clear-thinking and will.

So often we just don’t want to do what we know we have to do, to acknowledge that what we’re doing is destructive both to us and to the people we love, and that it’s high time for us to get help and support from family, friends, professionals, and clergy.

It’s time, however, to make those changes. No one is stopping us except ourselves.

We know it won’t be easy, but if we can change one thing this year about ourselves, the effort will be worth it.

Chazak v’eimatz – strength and courage.

L’shanah tovah u’m’tukah.

J Street’s Unfair Exclusion From Denver JCRC

26 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Social Justice, Uncategorized

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I am a member of a closed list-serve called RAVKAV that includes all Reform Rabbis. There everything under the sun is discussed on a daily basis. The agreement is that all communications are confidential.

That being said, there has been some confusion of late about J Street and JStreetPAC that I and several other colleagues cleared up, and since we rabbis were confused I must assume that many in the Jewish community beyond rabbinic circles are likewise confused. Hence, the purpose of this blog-post.

The matter was raised concerning the Denver JCRC’s exclusion of J Street as a member organization in May of this year. One of my colleagues pointed to JStreetPAC’s endorsement of candidates for national political office (i.e. the House and Senate) as justification for the Denver JCRC excluding J Street from membership.

The Denver JCRC is a coalition of nearly 40 organizations, synagogues and at-large members in the Denver area and acts as a service provided to the community by the Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado.  The purpose of this JCRC is to convene the ‘common table’ around which member organizations can engage in civil discourse through open dialogue to address issues and design strategies on issues of concern to the Jewish community. Included in the list is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The nearly 40 member organizations can be found here http://www.jewishcolorado.org/page.aspx?id=241337

If this is an inclusive organization, why did the Denver’s JCRC exclude J Street?  I do not have an answer, but I do believe it is important to clear up confusions about what J Street is.

J Street’s mission is simple – “We believe in the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in Israel, in the Jewish and democratic values on which Israel was founded, and in the necessity of a two-state solution.” www.jstreet.org

J Street includes an Educational Fund and has a division within it called JStreetPAC. My colleagues confused the two divisions of J Street, their functions and the legal distinctions, and on that basis one stated that the Denver JCRC’s position vis a vis J Street is correct and appropriate.

The J Street Education Fund is a 501c3 entity and is legally independent of the JStreetPAC that does the political work.

For the record, J Street is a member of other JCRCs including in Boston, Westchester, Atlanta, and Baltimore that all recognize that J Street’s community based work is done by the J Street Educational Fund.

With regards to the Denver JCRC, an overwhelming majority of those voting yay and nay on J Street’s application voted in favor. The final vote was 18 in favor, 12 opposed, and 8 abstentions. J Street did not attain the needed votes because of arcane rules for JCRC membership that require a two-thirds majority (a super-majority!).

For the record, the litmus test is not whether a candidate is Republican, Democrat or Independent for an endorsement by JStreetPAC. The litmus test is whether said candidate supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and advocates an activist American involvement in mediating between the parties, as the United States is currently doing.

JStreetPAC has supported two Republicans in the past on this basis. The fact that all 71 candidates that JStreetPAC endorsed in the last election cycle, of whom 70 won their elections in the House and Senate, were Democrats is a reflection not of JStreetPAC’s partisan orientation at all (it is not partisan in the sense of supporting one American political party over another), but rather because the two state issue was not embraced according to J Street’s principles openly by Republicans, nor did Republicans welcome JStreetPAC’s endorsement in the last cycle.

JStreetPAC would be delighted to work with any Republican or Independent that embraces openly the principle of the two-state solution.

One colleague justified excluding J Street from the JCRC based on the fact that the JCRC then would have to include the Republican Jewish Coalition. But would the RJC be open to Democratic candidates for office? Obviously not, as it is purely partisan whereas JStreetPAC endorses candidates based on a clear policy position not party affiliation. This is a distinction with a clear difference.

I suspect that as time progresses Republicans may be open to JStreetPAC endorsements given that even the Israeli ruling coalition (or that part of it that is not against a two state solution) and a significant majority of members of the Knesset are in favor of an end-of-conflict two-state solution with a state of Israel sitting securely side by side with a state of Palestine.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Reversal on Israel

23 Friday Aug 2013

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Recently, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was in Israel and, in response to a question, acknowledged that the UN was not always treating Israel fairly. Then, a short while later, he reversed himself and said it was.
 
The Secretary-General is a good man, and he was right the first time. In fact, one might conclude after observing the United Nations’ debates, reading its resolutions and walking its halls (especially since 1967) that a principal purpose of the world body is to censure Israel.

The campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel in every UN and international forum was initiated by the Arab states together with the Soviet Union after the 1967 Six Day War, and supported by what became known as an “automatic majority” of Third World member states. UN bias against Israel is overt in bodies such as the General Assembly, which each year passes numerous resolutions against Israel and almost none against most other member states, including the world’s most repressive regimes.

While Israel has been the target of disproportional UN attention, a mere handful of the UN’s other 191 countries have been cited only once. Since its creation in June 2006 the UN Human Rights Council has criticized Israel on more than 30 occasions in resolutions that grant effective immunity to Hamas and Hezbollah, and their state sponsors Iran and Syria.

In the first year of its existence, the Council failed to condemn human rights violations occurring in any of the world’s other 191 countries.

In its second year, the Council criticized one other country when it “deplored” the situation in Burma, but only after it censored out initial language containing the word “condemn.” It even praised Sudan for its “cooperation” while it was conducting a genocidal campaign against the people of Darfur.

The UNHRC’s fixation with Israel is not limited to resolutions. Israel is the only country listed on the Council’s permanent agenda. Moreover, Israel is the only country subjected to an investigatory mandate that examines the actions of only one side, and presumes those actions to be violations and therefore not subject to standard review.

Emergency Special Sessions of the United Nations General Assembly are rare. Between 1983 and 1998 no such session was ever convened with respect to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the slaughters in Rwanda, the disappearances in Zaire or the horrors of Bosnia.

Israel is the only member nation of the UN that is prohibited from serving on the UN Security Council.

As anyone reading my blog knows, I am hopeful that the current Israeli-Palestinian talks bear fruit and result in an end-of-conflict two-state solution with the creation of a state of Palestine sitting side by side with the state of Israel. I pray that both sides do everything possible to make this happen and that the people of Israel and the people of Palestine vote in separate referendums by majorities to affirm the peace agreement.

That being said, the interest of truth requires the world to characterize the consistent demonization of Israel in the United Nations as a “rogue” nation as an assault not only on truth, but on common decency and simple fairness. The hate of the “automatic majority” in their ongoing war on the state of Israel is a cancer in body politic of the world body, and should be treated as such.

This past week, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee wrote an open letter to the UN Secretary-General in articles in the Huffington Post and the Jerusalem Post, which continues the list of discriminatory practices against Israel.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-harris/an-open-letter-to-un-secr_b_3797849.html?msource=DAH082213

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/open-letter-un-secretary-general-ban-ki-moon?msource=DAH082213