The Peace of Wild Things

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Quote of the Day

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“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

by Wendell Berry

300,000 Israelis Take to Streets – May You Live in Interesting Times!

07 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Israel/Zionism

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There is a clear linkage between the huge unprecedented protests (300,000 last night) now building weekly in Israeli cities, the Israeli government’s obsessive efforts to expand settlements in the West Bank, the government’s historic funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the ultra-Orthodox religious community, and the right-wing extremist assault on democratic freedoms of speech, political organizing and religion in the State of Israel.

The account below from “Media Line” (a superb independent American based media service – I recommend your subscription – medialine@list.themedialine.org) overviews the economic crisis in Israel which is a consequence of deregulation and de-funding of many essential industries in the 1990s and the unwise funding of West Bank settlements and the ultra-Orthodox.

It should be noted, however, that the deregulation and elimination of government subsidies in the 1990s under then Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also had the effect of creating an entrepreneurial class of Israelis that has enabled Israel to rank second in the world after the United States in start-up companies in bio-technology and communications technology.

The current protests are now stimulating a debate that perhaps Israel needs to return to a more socialist oriented economy not only to enable middle class Israelis to survive, but also to bring greater equality to the citizenry as it was in its initial period of Israel’s history.

The Israeli government today has two major challenges – the economy and the scheduled Palestinian statehood UN vote in September. In thinking about how monumental each issue is for Israel’s future I am reminded of the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times!”

The following is the post this morning from Media Line:

Israel Takes to the Streets: More than 300,000 Nationwide Protest

By some estimates it was the nation’s largest-ever outpouring of citizens demonstrating for a cause with as many as 300,000 Israelis turning out on Saturday night as economic protests continue to build. The demonstration in Tel Aviv alone reportedly drew 250,000 while 30,000 others crammed into streets near the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem. The cost of living and lack of spending power provided the impetus for rallies that many noted had crossed the political divide – a rarity in protests here. On Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will name a panel combining experts with politicians to make economic recommendations the government hopes will stem the national angst. Netanyahu’s finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, is reported to be his choice to head the committee even though demands for Steinitz’s firing are among the most frequently heard demands. Three weeks in to the mass demonstrations, there appears to be no end in sight. The target is the massive gap between the “haves and have-nots”; the high cost of living and low spending power compared to other nations. Israelis find it impossible to make ends meet after paying high rents, costs of goods and services that are considerably more than comparable countries and taxes that rank among the world’s highest. The economic revolt is the first serious challenge to the Netanyahu government since it took office 27 months ago.

Despair and Hope: The Challenges of Tisha B’Av

07 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Holidays, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

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One of the least commemorated holydays in the Jewish calendar cycle comes this Monday evening and Tuesday, Tisha B’Av, the day marking the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem (586 BCE and 70 CE). Each was a horrendous and traumatic event in the ancient Jewish world. Historical documents record that blood flowed like a river through the streets of Jerusalem, that all was destroyed, that the survivors, such as there were, became slaves to the Babylonian and Roman conquerors respectively, and that God was driven into exile with the people.

Beyond the geo-politics of those events, sages of later generations linked the two destructions to the people’s behavior. Following the first destruction they explained mip’nei chataeinu gilinu m’artzeinu (“because of our sins we were exiled from our land”). The sins included the perversion of justice, disregard for the needs of the widow, orphan and stranger, and worship of the false gods of profit and materialism. Following the second destruction, our sages said mipnei sinat chinam gilinu m’artzeinu (“Because of gratuitous hatred [of one Jew for another] we were exiled from our land”).

Over the centuries Tisha B’Av became a day of national mourning. For modern Jews focusing on the sins of the people as the first cause of the destruction raises difficult theological and moral problems especially after the Holocaust. Yet, even if we believe we are individually and collectively innocent of the oppressive and hard-hearted conditions that characterize our era, Rabbi Heschel reminds us that “some are [indeed] guilty, but all are responsible.”

Towards the end of the day, during Minchah, the mood of Tisha B’Av abruptly changes. At that hour, tradition teaches, the Messiah will be born. Thus, our mourning is transformed suddenly into celebration and our dejection is converted into anticipation of reunification with God.

Though national in character, Tisha B’Av has personal parallels. This past Friday evening during Shabbat services I witnessed the  devastation that death brings in its wake and that Tisha B’Av commemorates for us as a people.

A dear long-time member of our community who had raised both her daughter and son at Temple Israel had just returned from New York where she buried her 60 year-old daughter. Her younger son had died at the age of 51 five years ago. She had come to say Kaddish.

A parent’s absolute worst nightmare had been visited upon her twice. As I prepared to say Kaddish with her I recalled Rose Kennedy’s loss of four children in her life-time and the words she taught her children when they were young as recalled by Ted Kennedy in his memoir True Compass:

“The birds will sing when the storm is over;  The rose must know the thorn;  The valley makes the mountain tall.”

May Tisha B’Av be a day when as we recall our national and personal traumas we also remember that as long as we have life there will come a new day if we are patient enough.

From Cult to Canon – D’var Torah – D’varim

03 Wednesday Aug 2011

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The reading of Parashat D’varim (the first Torah portion in the 5th book of the 5 Books of Moses – Deuteronomy) always precedes Tisha B’av (lit. 9th of Av), the Holyday commemorating the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem (587 BCE and 70 CE). Why, and what might this juxtaposition of holiday and parashah mean for us?

The Hebrew word d’varim (singular davar) means “word(s).” The Hebrew root daled, bet, resh also takes the form d’vir (“oracle”). In 1 Kings 8:6, the earliest occurrence of this verbal form in the Hebrew Bible, we read, “The priests brought the Ark of the God’s Covenant to a place underneath the wings of the cherubim, in the Shrine [D’vir] of the house in the Holy of Holies.”

Here, d’vir appears in one verse in parallel with m’komo (his Place – the rabbis always interpreted “Place” as the equivalent of God) and with Kodesh ha-Kodashim (Holy of Holies), the shrine from which God spoke. Much later the Talmud invested the d’vir with new meaning and connected it with the holy word itself, or The “Book.”

This development from shrine to word is not an accident. The Talmud asserts that despite the destruction of the two Jerusalem Temples, the embodiment of holiness (formerly found in the sacred precinct – i.e. the Holy of Holies) and God’s presence amidst the people in that shrine did not disappear from the Jewish people upon the Temples’ destruction and the people’s exile.

Evoking the essence of what the Jewish people’s sacred duties are, Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel asked, “Why and for what purpose was Abraham chosen to become a great and mighty nation, and to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth? Not because he knew how to build pyramids, altars, and temples, but ‘in order that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of God by doing righteousness and justice’ (Genesis 18:18-19).”

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, put it this way, “Judaism survived because it replaced its cult with a canon. A portable and imperishable book that could transcend the traumas of history provided the bridge to eternity once ensured by a sacred space. Wherever the Jewish people might go, God went with them. The Torah became the inexhaustible wellspring for law and life, for piety and polity, the most treasured object of a religious culture that privileged literacy and learning. In the synagogue, the ark that houses it came to replicate the Temple’s inner shrine…book and shrine serve to perpetuate the experience of revelation, the verbal distillation of ‘that still, small voice’ that joins soul to Soul and mind to Mind.”

The rabbis believed that the first Temple was destroyed because the people had veered far from Torah and that they had forsaken the fundamental principle of tzedek, justice (“Tzedek tzedek tirdof – Justice, justice shall you pursue!” Deuteronomy 16:20). They believed, as well, that the second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred between one Jew and another.

Theirs is not an ancient message for an ancient time. The message of justice, compassion, love, and faith is ever relevant today in our Jewish community, in this country, in Israel, and throughout the world.

Tisha B’av is commemorated Monday evening and Tuesday, August 8-9.

“All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”

02 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in American Politics and Life

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So said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto (“Behind an Anti-Shariah Push”, Sunday’s NY Times, July 31, p. 16).

The front page Sunday Times article (above the fold) reviews well the nativist, paranoid and right-wing effort to create a straw dog of American Muslims and then attack them. This campaign (to my great shame and embarrassment as a Jew) is being led by an American Orthodox Jewish lawyer, David Yerushalmi.

Given that there is no organized push by Muslims to impose Shariah law anywhere in the country, Yerushalmi himself says that this is a prophylactic measure so that “if” Muslims try to take over the legal system of the United States (as he says they are doing in Europe), a law will be in place to prevent it, as if the US Constitution and our democratic system of checks and balances wouldn’t be enough by themselves!

This organized grass roots effort to demonize the American Muslim community as the perpetual outsider, interloper and enemy, and to attack Islam as a religion is based on motivations that are contrary to facts and reason.

The paranoia of the right-wing and their historic search for a scapegoat (Communists, homosexuals, African Americans, Latinos, liberals, and now Muslims) says far more about them than the object of their obsessive fears and hatred.

Facts, of course, are irrelevant when confronting masses of people who are convinced of their “truth.” Here is a relevant fact – The American Muslim population (Pew Research Center, 2009) was 2.5 million, a mere .86% of the American population.

The article is worth reading and I recommend it if you have not already done so.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/man-behind-anti-sharia-state-law-push-130845197.html).

A Shabbat Conversation and an Alternative UN Proposal

01 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism

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This past Kabbalat Shabbat at Temple Israel I reflected on three meetings I had in the 36 hours that preceded the lighting of Shabbat candles; a national phone conference with Jeremy Ben-Ami, President of J Street, that included 25 other individuals among whom were Rabbis and leaders of the J Street national board, a lunch meeting attended by 7 other Los Angeles Rabbis with Brigadier General Nathaniel Dagan, the former chief education officer of the IDF, and a breakfast meeting with an old friend, Daniel Sokatch, now the CEO of the New Israel Fund.

The conversations all concerned Israel and addressed the expected September UN Palestinian Statehood Resolution, the anti-democratic turning of the current Israeli government (arguably the most extreme right-wing government in the history of the State led by settler groups, ultra-Orthodox political parties, and the Russian “Putinist” party of the Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman), and the unprecedented middle class economic revolt (150,000 Israelis took to the streets on Shabbat in at least 10 cities across party lines) protesting strained economic conditions because they cannot afford housing based on their salaries despite the very healthy Israeli economy.

I said that the facts are clear; namely, that unless Israel works out with the Palestinians a 2 states for 2 peoples end-of-conflict agreement she cannot remain both Jewish and democratic.

The first fact is that the government’s policy of building West Bank settlements to the tune of billions of shekels over many years and supporting the ultra-Orthodox Yeshivot and institutions with billions more have exacerbated the problems within Israeli society by misdirecting funds away from building more apartments in Israel itself and sustaining its social networks. Despite the success of a burgeoning Israeli economy the middle class is being squeezed.

The second fact is that unless Israel returns to the 1967 lines with appropriate land swaps and settles all other issues with the Palestinians in an end-of-conflict agreement Jews will constitute 48% of the population of Arabs and Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, just 3½ years from now. If the status quo continues, and Israel denies West Bank Arabs the right to vote, it will turn into an Apartheid State. If it opens the doors to equal citizenship for West Bank Arabs, Jews will be a minority and the Zionist vision of building a Jewish state will be consigned to the trash bins of history.

On Saturday morning following services, a young man (about age 15) who had been at services the evening before, approached me and said, “My name is Jacob and I am a member of a Conservative synagogue in Florida [he was in LA to attend the bar mitzvah of his cousin], and my Rabbi holds the exact opposite position as you about the Middle East conflict.”

I asked, “So…what do YOU think?”

He said, “I agree with you.”

He then explained that his high school debating club had a debate this past spring on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that he was assigned the position of arguing the Palestinian side. “Because I had to research the Palestinian story, I now understand why they want a state of their own and why they have been so frustrated for so long.”

“True!” I responded. “There are two narratives here, Israeli and Palestinian, and this conflict is not simply a political zero-sum game, but a moral one involving two peoples and two nations. We cannot claim for ourselves what we deny others.”

I told him, “Jacob – You keep at it. We need visionary, smart and strongly identified Jews such as you.” We shook hands and wished each other Shabbat shalom.

I was heartened by this young man and thought that if this is what we can expect from the younger generation, then there is reason for hope.

Back to my meetings of last week – Several weeks ago there appeared an article on the Op-Ed page of The NY Times written by four Israeli experts on the upcoming UN Palestinian Statehood Resolution; Yossi Alpher, Colette Avital, Shlomo Gazit, and Mark Heller. I recommend that you read it – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/opinion/25iht-edalpher25.html

Stay tuned. Now that the debt limit crisis seems to have ended, we turn to the Middle East. These next 6 to 8 weeks are going to be very interesting indeed!

The Opposite of Peace?

31 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in American Politics and Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism

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When I ask people what they believe is the opposite of “peace” most pause suspecting that it’s a trick question because the answer seems so obvious. After a moment they answer war!

This isn’t wrong, of course, but I think that the real opposite to peace is “truth.” Consider the nature of each.

Truth is hard, absolute, cut-and-dry, black or white, unbending, rigid. Its yay is yay; its nay is nay. There’s neither middle ground nor gray. It’s an all or nothing thing.

Peace on the other hand requires subtlety and nuance. It’s delicate, pliable, flexible, and soft. It’s neither cut and dry nor black and white. It’s the gray of the in-between and necessitates give-and-take, compromise and accommodation.

Whether the conflict is between peoples and nations, political parties, business interests, spouses, siblings, friends, or enemies, peace cannot be sustained if one or both parties insist always on adhering to its truth without regard to the truth of the “other.” Henry Kissinger once quipped that a successful outcome to negotiations means that both sides end up unhappy.

What’s taking place in Congress with the debt limit crisis is the same malady that is infecting the American Jewish community vis a vis our disagreements about Israel and the Palestinians, and it is the same problem within the Israeli government and the Palestinian community. Neither side can have it all. There are legitimate narratives to be heard and understood by each party. Everyone ignores this truth at its own peril.

President Obama was right when he noted this week that “compromise” has become a dirty word in American politics. I fear the same is true within the current Israeli government, that peace is not its real goal.

Shaalu shalom Yerushalayim. Seek peace O Jerusalem!