September 23 , 2006 - THE CHALLENGE WHICH WE MUST CONFRONT- ( ROSH HASHANAH 5767)

Try as I might to enter into the spirit of the High Holidays, I must “have done” with one subject. If my soul is to be able to respond to the traditional, low-key joy which accompanies each Jew as he or she comes into the New Year, I need to sound a cultural-societal shofar. For, whereas these Yameem Nora’eem are meant to celebrate the cycles of life, we Jews have recently come through the valley of the shadow of death. Whether we are speaking as American Jews or as members of a world wide Jewish community, we, like the miner’s canary, have encountered and are fighting an enemy which knows no bounds, respects no laws, and will stop at nothing to achieve its aims.

Though another rabbi tried to warn his congregation of the threat several years ago, he managed only to ire some of his bal-a-bateem, convincing them that he was spreading bigotry or some neo-con blather they felt was inappropriate for their holidays. I do not make this comparison with what I am doing today lightly, and I understand its implications, as I do so on this High Holy Day. But I wonder if, at other times and in somewhat similar circumstances, had the Jews of Germany—indeed, of any place in Europe---listened with sufficient caution and apprehension when their rabbis warned of the scourge of Nazism and its impending plan to make an end of world Jewry, would they have believed and acted?

I am obviously begging the question of Germany and European Jewry. That war is long over; our millions long dead. But when the world has faced fascism and totalitarianism in the past, it has tended to ignore it, to appease it, to pooh-pooh it, to hope, faithfully, perhaps fitfully, that it would go away. The world has also tried to cajole and love it away; to embrace it as though it were putting forth some necessary truth; but finally the nations have either had to fight it or die from it.

What has entered our midst is our most modern expression of that self same threat. It has come in the guise of radical Islam. Once again, we are encountering and witnessing those same knee jerk responses. As Israel, this summer, acted to assert her right to live, we witnessed the world’s incredible, critical responses. Have they not been altogether remarkably self serving and/or naïve? The denial of the threat to Israel’s existence seems to be a function of world-wide, residual, and ever festering anti-Semitism which appears in the guise of anti-Zionism or anti-anything-Israel-does to attempt to live peacefully with her neighbors. When Israel’s citizenry in the north of the country was in great peril and her ground forces were at even greater danger, the countries of the world condemned her for using disproportionate force and for responding as occupiers and murderers of people who were obviously being used as human shields, and were being set up to die for the Hezbollah cause. When Koffi Annon condemned Israel for the deaths of U.N. peacekeepers (the idea that these people actually were acting in any way effective is a joke), he dragged the United Nations into a morass of propaganda, and fell victim to the “Big Lie.” It is the same propaganda technique that the Nazis created and perfected in World War II: Tell a big enough lie long enough and the world will believe it.

The United Nations which, above all organizations in the world, ought to demand adherence to the Laws of Armed Conflict…that no people, no movement, no terrorist body can use U.N. forces or civilians as shields….instead of condemning Hezbollah, laid its condemnation on Israel for the deaths of its troops.

Was the world body beguiled? If so, it was because it wanted to believe that Israel was acting unlawfully. That Israel was acting unlawfully…the bitterness of the irony, given the cravenness of what Israel was then dealing with and is still facing, is so overwhelming that it begs rational credulity.

The U.N. isn’t the only two faced critic of Israel which aggravates and disgusts me.

I am sick to my soul of duplicity, of a too-often one sided play to placate the hundred of millions of Arabs and Moslems in the world; of concern more for appeasement than for God’s and humanity’s laws; of concern more for Israel’s flaws than for the people who attempt to live there; of a stance during this past war with Lebanon, which strikes me as no different an abandonment of us Jews than what was committed when there was a shared refusal to oppose and condemn the Nazis.

I am sick to my soul of so many on the far left whose blindness to radical Islamic tactics is so deep that they would send their emissionaries to places like Baghdad and Kabul, and expose them to unspeakable tortures and beheadings at the hands of thugs and barbarians who have absolutely no regard for human life; these “militia militants” have no regard for Western values, and they certainly have no regard for human decency. Can it be that these all too well meaning believers also, on some level, desire their heavenly rewards more than their earthly challenges?

I am most disturbed by the number of self-hating, self destructive Jews who harbor nothing but contempt and enmity toward the Jewish homeland and toward Judaism in general---who are ever-at-the-ready to accuse Israel of moral indiscretions, of brutality and of misanthropy which seems more descriptive of their behavior than of Israel’s. If you hear a Jew claiming that peace supersedes the value of life, run away as fast as you can. You are in the presence of a charlatan, and you life is worth no more to him or her than that of a lowly bug.

I want to climb onto the Hubble telescope or the International Space Station and shout down to earth: wake up, people. This is a fight for our lives. This is a struggle for everything that humankind has achieved since the beginning of time. This is a question of whether we and our children and our children’s children will still exist on this planet at the close of this decade. Why do I say this? Because I want to be right?! Because I don’t love peace more than the Dali Lama? No, it is because it isn’t a matter of our having differing values from those of the Arab street or the Persian Ayatollahs. It is the fact that in three, five or ten years, depending upon whom you choose to believe, the Iranians will have developed their own nuclear weapons. It’s because there is another Hitler-type madman in Tehran who is explicitly announcing, just as Adolf Hitler, y’mach sh’mo, did about world Jewry, his Iranian intentions to wipe Israel off the globe before coming for the rest of Western civilization.

“Rabbi,” you say, “you’re being paranoid; you’re being overly political…and this, at this most special time of year. We didn’t come to these services to be harangued, but for a spiritually uplifting message. We need to give you more vacation time. You are going to extremes. You really, fundamentally, don’t believe what you are saying. You’re just trying to scare us.”

I am not one to give into fear, good people. In my lifetime I am one who has tried to determine what reality we are facing and, then, finds the means to cope with it. It is true that I don’t live my life cowering in some corner. Those of you have served on our Temple Board know this. But this isn’t a matter of the direction of our congregation. This is a question of what we shall do to protect our very own lives and the lives of our children. We face a world-wide enemy who will stop at nothing, including the deaths of a vast number of innocents---ourselves included---to achieve their aim which, like all totalitarian regimes, is world domination through the use of force. Unless they are confronted and defeated and defeated and defeated, they will keep coming. And, don’t be discouraged when I tell you that they will keep coming.

This isn’t a question of Republican or Democrat. I don’t care what political party you belong to or how you intend to cast you vote…although I do hope that you will vote.

There will even be some who will say that it is better to live under such a regime than to risk ours and the world’s destruction. That is something, indeed, to ponder, because we haven’t yet been asked to lay our lives---yours and mine---on the line. But let Iran go nuclear, and we may well soon be faced with that choice.

The question of how much we value our lives may soon come into conflict with the question of how much do we value our values? And this, good people, is what these High Holidays were ever meant to convey to us, just not so physically, but, rather, spiritually. What are our most important values? To what do we aspire in our lives most fervently? What do we want from life? What do we care about more than anything else?

I must lay aside this present threat if I am, during these days, to reach a state of resolution within my life and with my God. I am not at peace with my fellow human beings because there is no way I see, short of defending ourselves and having to kill some of them, that I can achieve that reconciliation. We are at an impasse, and I deny that it is of our own making. And, although I understand that Judaism’s foremost vision is to seek peace, it can only be achieved when there is a common understanding and an agreed upon consensus about what constitutes justice. When life itself is expendable in the name of or as the will of God, then death has ascended to the pinnacle of our adversary’s cosmology and theology. They stand in contradistinction to everything we Jews believe in and have struggled for throughout our three thousand-plus year old existence on earth. After all, Abraham in this morning’s portion, the Akedah, learns that God, in fact, does not desire the death of Isaac. The message of the value of each life pores forth from Torah.

We, as the miners’ canary for the world, need to be chirping as vociferously and gesticulating as vigorously as we possibly can. We need to be slamming ourselves into the ‘media-enclosed bars’ of our cages. We need to be crying out at the tops of our lungs: we do not want and don’t intend to be victims. We don’t want to sacrifice ourselves and our children to any foreign god, be it Moloch, the Canaanite god of fire of Abraham’s day, or, in our own, a fierce-some, beguiling and blood thirsty, radical Islamic portrayal of Allah.

During this last Israeli-Hamas-Hizballah war, I spoke, wrote, argued and lost sleep over this latest, most pernicious threat to Israel’s existence. We all watched as your generous 60th birthday tribute to me, 100 trees planted in Israel, was consumed in the fires caused by the Hizballah ketyusha barrages that struck and burned down Israel’s northern forests. All that effort, all that money….. all those lives…all those lives…lost!, all those lives forever scarred…and all in the name of what? Yes, all in the name of Jew-hatred, in the name of punishing a successful society which has built something worthwhile, something which ought to be emulated in the region and the world, something which has given so much back to the world, from diagnostics for breast cancer and other advances in cancer cures to cell phone technology; from being the 2nd highest per capita nation in the world in publishing new books, to the developer of many innovative, alternative sources of energy and of water purification systems.

The forces of nature, whose creation we celebrate at this time of year, were left by God to us human beings to tame and control. Water beats on and seeps into rock, ultimately breaking down the stone and carrying it away. Unless planned for, controlled and harnessed, water will destroy everything in its path given a long enough period of time. And yet, it is the substance without which there can be no life.

The same is true of the human spirit. Planned for…that is to say, educated and oriented with proper values; controlled…that is to say, fenced in and bound by a system of laws and a consensus understanding of what constitutes decency; and harnessed…that is to say, directed toward what improves God’s world and helps to repair what hinders and threatens life, the human spirit can be a wondrous force for good in this universe.

Let us resolve courageously and faithfully to heed the dangers which threaten us, to stand up to them and to rededicate ourselves to God’s greatest gift to us…the one we cherish and so deeply appreciate…at this time of year and beyond….the gift of life! L’chayeem! Let us say it to one another, L’chayeem! For with life secured, it will be a shana tova… a truly good year! For this we can fervently pray as we say together, “Amen.”