The first time I ever went to Israel I might have ended up just going to Bethlehem and nowhere else. My school up until when I was thirteen was a high Church of England school, with a strong link to the Shrine at Walsingham and weekly mass with bells and smells. So when, in my final year there in 1976 the school offered an educational cruise on the SS Uganda around the Mediterranean with a day in each country – Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Crete and Israel, the school chose a programme in Israel that would suit most of the boys.
We were going to dock in Haifa, take a coach to Bethlehem, explore the Christian heritage sites and then come back to the ship and set sail for Egypt. That was not the programme that I wanted as thirteen year old Jewish boy for my first ever trip to Israel. I will never forget the kindness of one of the teachers with us on the trip, Mr Brown, who agreed instead, and I can’t remember how we got there, to take me to Jerusalem, to visit the Western Wall, the Cotel. When I got there I put a little slip of paper on which I had written a prayer into the cracks in the wall and the visit was, from my perspective, a success.
Since then I must have visited Israel 25 or more times. I have been a Kibbutz volunteer who developed a talent for picking up chickens and staking up banana trees. I have studied Ivrit in a Jerusalem Ulpan. I have led pre and post B’mitzvah trips throughout the land, I have led numerous adult study trips to Israel on history, society and more. I have visited museums and galleries galore. I have spent time with Palestinian Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank learning about the challenges that they face first hand. I have visited and even given sermons in Israeli Reform Synagogues throughout the country. I even had the ultimate chutzpah of managing, through a friend, to book a committee room in the Knesset and get a Meretz, Kadmiah, and Likud, Member of the Knesset to come to speak with a British Synagogue tour group that I was leading. I think that I have been a good Diaspora Jewish friend of Israel.
I feel that is something that we all need to be. There are now seven million Jews in Israel – close to half of the Jews in the world. Israel is a centre of Jewish creativity, whose music, art, history, language and culture inevitably infuses every Synagogue wherever it is in the word. Israel’s story is part of our story and, nearly 75 years since the independence of Israel, the vast majority of Jews living today have never known a time before the Jewish state came into existence. And of course for so many of it is the country where our own family lives, children, siblings, parents, cousins.
Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue, like all Synagogues needs to engage with Israel because our links are so multi-factorial, because we can benefit from Israel and Israel can benefit from us. The two Israeli Madrichim, youth leaders, who joined our EHRS Kaytana summer camps this last summer and will, hopefully, return this summer, brought wonderful skills and personal links with them.
We need to engage with Israel because when, in our Passover Sederim, we have drunk the four cups of wine, we will offer a fifth cup of wine to the mythical Elijah the prophet. We will relate that God made five promises to the people Israel the fifth of which was ‘I will bring you the land of your ancestors’ (Exodus Chapter 6).
We need to engage with Israel because in the words of Talmud Eiruvin ‘Col Yisrael Arevim zeh ba zeh’ – All of the people Israel are guarantors one for the other, and no more so than when Israel is under existential threat.
Right now Israel is under existential threat. But it’s different from what we have experienced before. This is not a threat from the countries surrounding Israel – she is at peace with Egypt, Jordan, much of the states of the Arabian Peninsula, there will be Israelis doing Seder in Dubai this year, and those with which she is not at peace, such as Iran and Syria, she is strong to be able to deter.
This is not right now a threat from the Palestinians who live outside Israel. Their situation and, in the West Bank, their self determination and in Gaza their ability to thrive is still as unresolved as ever in way that casts no credit on any Israeli government. But it won’t put an end to Israel, rather it compromises the Jewish values of the State that Palestinian life if not equal to Israeli life.
No this existential threat is right inside Israel, from two completely different visions of how Israel should be run.
One of the weirdness’s of having been on Sabbatical over the past three months is that I have not been called upon, as a Rabbi so often is, to give perspective and leadership on the unfolding situation in Israel. I have of course been following the horrendous political struggle, the racist and homophobic language of some of the men entrusted to be government ministers, the obscenity of people davening after creating a pogrom in an Arab village, the country choked up by demonstrations which have spread to the diaspora. With Isaiah and so many others who love Israel: ‘for Zion’s sake I will not be silent.’ There is no genuine and positive vision of Israel which requires diaspora Jews to say nothing when our Jewish State is in such trouble.
I am not a politician, I am a Rabbi leading with my colleagues a Jewish community which will I hope always be engaged with and activist with Israel.
We need, as a congregation in London, to make sure that our links with the reality of life in Israel are very strong so that we can continually join our Israeli brothers and sisters in the lives that they are living. We need to be part of their development, understand their struggles and support what they are trying to create. We also need to participate in the arguments and discussions that are going on in Israel now. We do not need to be slavish supporters, rather wholehearted participants.
We need there to be a strong Israel Movement for Reform Judaism for ourselves because, as Rabbi Richard Hirsch, former Director of the World Union for Progressive Judaism wrote “if we don’t establish ourselves as a significant presence in Israel in a generation we will be at margins of Jewish history.” (q in CCAR Journal, Fall 2017, p.38)
We need to create and attend events in our congregation where we hear the different views as to how Israel should be run. Overall, with our Movement for Reform Judaism we choose democracy. We certainly do not choose the curtailment of women’s rights in Israel to shop and travel exactly in the same way as men. We choose to uphold the right of LGBT+ people in Israel making Israel the only safe country in the Middle East for queer people to live free. We choose that Israel continues to be a place where civil society can be a place of creativity challenging the government when it is not effective and trying new ways to solve social problems. We choose that Israel will continue to be a place where you can choose your Judaism, Reform, Masorti, Orthodox and where conversions to any are fully respected by the State as granting Jewish status, as they are in the rest of the world. We choose that Israel’s borders do not continue to encroach on the West Bank and that the building of Jewish settlements there ceases. In short we choose Israel to be the place in the world where all Judaism and Jewish values can thrive. That’s how Saul and Dylan as they grow up have a chance of being as proud of Israel as I have been in my life.
How though? Does it need to be the continuation of a Supreme Court system which can overrule the Knesset? Does it need to be ruled a simple majority of cobbled together self-interested party coalitions giving them the ability to ride roughshod over the interests of others? Is there a vision of reform of Israel;s government that has a chance of succeeding and bringing the county back together? We need to hear the ideas that must make this happen.
In the Torah portion Tzav we continued to hear about sacrifices that our ancestors were to bring to the Temple in Jerusalem. Today’s was the shelamim sacrifice – the sacrifice of wholeness, peace, well being, offered when you had something to be thankful for. In English sacrifice means giving something up but not in the Hebrew of our Torah. The Hebrew word is Korban – which means to bring near, to offer yourself. That is what we need to do for Israel. Offer ourselves in gratitude that there is a Jewish state, offer our time, our interest, our support to help our Jewish state be a place that we can be proud of, especially at this extraordinary time.
