In a week like this one with enormous stresses as a Rabbi working with leading a community through such a tough time for the Jewish people, with pastoral responsibilities, which can feel unbearable, people often ask how we Rabbis cope. This week I can give an easy answer. It is because we have wonderful moments of respite that are integral to our role.
For me this was Thursday morning. All week our EHRS Youth team, Jack and Mia have been leading a half term camp for the children of our community, nearly fifty 5-10 year olds. We were proud to be able to include Israeli children who had been evacuated from Israel in the current conflict. I was asked to come for a session, which Jack and Mia and their Madrichim had planned. It was a simple ‘Ask the Rabbi’ session.
The children prepared questions for me and they were wonderful. Some were simple like ‘how do you train to become a Rabbi?’ Others were interesting, as they could have had various answers, like ‘do Rabbis wear a uniform?’ And though I said no – I realised and shared that actually I do pretty much every day wear dark smart trousers and a blue shirt and keep a jacket with me because you never know if you will be needed to dress smart for a pastoral encounter or a meeting with a family in distress. There was ‘why do rabbis have beards’ which they obviously don’t all and this was an opportunity to explain Jewish diversity. There was the important question of ‘Do Rabbis eat pizza’ – to which my answer was yes – as it’s an easy quick food to find when you need something vegetarian and great for community gatherings.
One of the most searching questions was this one: ‘Who started Judaism and when.’
The answer I gave goes straight into the essence of the Torah portion we heard today. Judaism’s origin story that we tell every year is of two people who set out on a journey, originally from Ur in southern Mesopotamia, via Haran in what is now Syria to the land of Canaan, where Israel is now situated.
The two were called Avram and Sarai and in this week’s Torah portion they are renamed Abraham and Sarah as God establishes the covenant with them. This covenant has several aspects and is the foundation of the Jewish people, something like 3700 years ago in Torah chronology.
God says that this land of Israel will be the centre point of Jewish life forever, that Abraham and Sarah will be beginning of a great people and that they will come to walk in the ways of God. All of this is in the Torah portion we just heard – and nothing of it has changed in essence since that time. Israel remains essential to Jewish identity and our sense of place in the world. Our people has made a blessed impact on the world. We continue to try to work out throughout our history what it means for our time to walk in the ways of God.
But the first of these you would not necessarily have thought was the case if you were listening to BBC Radio Four or the World Service’s explanation of the origins of the State of Israel, as it worked to make sense of the war between Hamas and Israel.
Now I am absolutely not a BBC basher. I greatly appreciate what our national broadcaster provides and learn a great deal from the BBC as well as enjoying its entertainment. But on this occasion it got it wrong. The explanation of the Jewish connection to Israel I heard on the BBC started, yes started, in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration that the British Mandate would provide a homeland to the Jews of the world. Yes, the explanation included that there happened to be a number of Jewish settlements in the land that would become Israel, dating back as far as the 1880’s.
But this history completely ignored everything going back through the Jewish community that never left Israel, through the mystics of Safed in the 17th Century, through the Jewish communities clinging on in Israel since the bulk of Jewish dispersion after the Roman period, to the Jewish autonomy in Israel under the Hasmoneans, to the return of the exiles from Babylonia to Israel, to Kings David and Solomon and the Temple in Jerusalem, to the return of the enslaved Israelites from Egypt to their Promised Land, to that original promise and purchase of land made by Abraham and Sarah. Not to mention the millennia of our saying ‘L’Shanah Habah B’Yerushalayim’ (next year in Jerusalem’ and our prayers and Torah portions suffused with this special land to which we always felt connected for thousands of years. No, in this particularly unhelpful piece of analytical journalism on the BBC, Israel was just a colonial project by Britain to settle Jews in a place which they controlled about a hundred years ago as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. It is this project which is at war with and challenged by Hamas.
Of course this is a dreadfully and dangerously untrue picture of the reality. Israel is a homeland for the Jews of the world because it has always been. We have tragically not had access to it or freedom within it for a larger part of our history but, since 1948 we truly do and we work out a substantial aspect of our Jewish destiny, values and contribution to the world within it.
The Torah portion Lech Lecha sets out many ways in which this will be. From the earliest days of the Jewish story Abraham’s people are a minority that must work with the other peoples of the world to walk in the ways of God. Within Lech Lecha Abraham and Sarah have to go to Egypt at a time of famine, and Abraham has to negotiate with Pharaoh for the release of his wife, who is taken prisoner by him. Abraham has to, as a local leader, get involved in the wars of other local kings and tribal leaders, he becomes a peace broker. From him comes a whole additional people, the people of his son Ishmael, from which stems the origin story of Islam. The people of Abraham will always have to co-exist with others in their land of Israel.
From this need comes the essential tolerance and respect of others that should be core to Judaism. From this comes the Jewish imperative to be open to the diversity of humanity and to celebrate different ideas and different ways to find one’s way to God.
This is to me why the real Israel is a place where Jews and Arabs can live together and thrive together. You see it when you walk on the promenade in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, or through the Rail Line park in Jerusalem. Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel sharing the land. Or when you see that LGBT Arab people are truly free in Israel in a way that is nigh on impossible anywhere else in the Middle East. You see it at Hebrew University where Jews and Arabs study together. You see it in the respect that a great part of the Israeli political spectrum has for the equality of life and opportunity of all who live in Israel.
That equality is anathema to the vision of Hamas, which wants complete domination of the whole land of Israel by an Islamist ideology and an Arab hegemony. Israel cannot live with Hamas. We are not military tacticians and we should weep at the blighting of the lives of civilian Gazans that is a by-product of Hamas’s terror and Israel’s necessary response. We want peace and dignity in our co-existence with the Palestinian people in their diversity. We cannot be without them and they will not be without us. Abraham and Sarah’s story says so much – from three thousand years ago to the present day.
But this must not be a struggle for Israel’s domination, it must be a struggle to make and keep peace. This week we saw another picture on the BBC, and there is a link to it on the Israel 2023 page of the EHRS website. It is the video of the extraordinary dignity of release hostage Yocheved Lifschitz as she left her Hamas captor. She returns to him, shakes his hand and says Shalom. That is the true dignity of a spiritual descendent of Sarah.
And on that same page you will see a beautiful video of what happened at the end of my ‘Ask the Rabbi’ session with our children. We began it with song and ended with song. Two of the children asked that we sing the peace song – Od Yavo Shalom Aleynu – we and all the world will have peace. There is a short video of our children signing this. It tells you that we truly are a people who go back to Abraham and Sarah and that, though we are in a terrible existential struggle for Israel now, there is yet hope for our future and our continuation of our Jewish values.
