Jun 22, 2007 - TO BE LIGHTS UNTO THE NATIONS - (6th of Av, 5767)

Woe to the nation that does not follow its own code of morality and law. Woe to the country which acclaims itself a light unto the world and then drapes acts of darkness over the globe.

Several High Holiday seasons ago, I spoke about the sins of Abu Graib and how the United States would have to spend many years, even decades, living down its use of torture, its sanctioning brutal and sometimes lethal methods of eliciting information that violated the Geneva Conventions. How could we, who have been the light to the nations, who fought and won two World Wars against tyranny, oppression and genocide, now hold our heads up to the world and assert our leadership, when we ourselves, caving to fear, forsook the tenets of our own Constitution and made a huge end run around our courts and our system of law? How could we actively condone spying on our own citizenry and imprison people without giving them any recourse to Due Process?

I have said before and shall tell you again at the outset that we as a country and the West as a civilization aren’t dealing with nice people when we attempt to cope with the Jihadists. There are people in Guantanamo prison who, if released, would tomorrow be at our door with bombs strapped to their bodies in an effort to kill as many Americans as they could. I have no illusions about with whom and why America is at war.

But we have lost our way as a nation. Our credibility in standing up for freedom is questioned because we have denied it to ourselves and have subverted the very principles upon which this nation was founded.

Tonight I tell you that the greatest threats to our way of life come when the three branches of our government seek to undo each other. Calling our Judiciary names and disparaging judges who are attempting to understand and apply the law according to their interpretation of the Constitution undermines the faith of the people in the rule of law. That rule of law undergirds the entire American way of life. If the people lose respect and fear, in the Biblical sense of the word, “awe”, for the law, then there will be nothing left but chaos, and despotism that will replace it. We’ve been down that road before once before in this country. We dare not go there again. Gratefully, there now seem to be forces that are pulling us back from the abyss.

If there are those who do not agree with the decisions of the judiciary, let them pursue remedies through the courts or the legislative systems, not through the media, maligning and condemning that which checks and balances the other two branches of our national system of government.

When I teach our B’nai Mitzvah students, I talk about how the prophets, speaking for God, came to the kings and the people of Israel to remind them of God’s ardent desire that they should follow God’s law and not their passions and temptations. When Israel filled with corruption, when judges began taking sides and ceased judging fairly, when kings and their ministers indulged themselves in bribery and corruption rather than in the welfare of the people, they sowed the seeds of disaster for the entire nation. Who would stand up to defend a monarch whose greater interest was self-indulgence and aggrandizement than to care for the orphan and the widow, the indigent and helpless? What nation, riddled with deceit and false promises, can continue to claim the loyalty and devotion of its people?

There will be those here tonight who will think that my words are politically directed; but they are not. They are morally directed and patterned after the messages of the prophets of old—Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel---who bewailed the conditions of the kingdom and warned of the dire consequences if the people didn’t repent and move away from their sinful ways.

There in Gaza, over this past two weeks, we have seen what corruption, bribery and deception have wrought. Yassir Arafat stole millions from the world, proclaiming himself the leader and liberator of the Palestinian people. But he didn’t liberate them. He taught them the fine arts of terrorism. But, when it came to statecraft, he was a sham, a joke, a fraud! He was no more interested or able to create a Palestinian state than Elmer Fud. What he did do was to line the pockets of his cronies and his wife. He managed to murder scores—hundreds--thousands of people, his own as well as Israelis and Americans. It was his perfidy and graft that led to the downfall of Fatah in the elections that brought Hamas into power. The people saw how their leaders behaved…how they cared more to feed their own bank accounts with the billions in aid money they misdirected, than the populace; and the people reacted in kind.

Now, just for a brief moment in history, the United States and Israel may have a chance to capitalize on the split that has occurred in the Palestinian world to raise up a partner for peace. It is possible, although by absolutely no means a certainty, that by supporting Mahmoud Abbas and by carefully strengthening and nudging forward the moderate forces that /do/ exist on the West Bank, that the Palestinians living there might be tempted to set aside their Jew-hatred and clasp the vision of a state of their own, a more noble life for themselves and a peaceful, fruitful future for their children.

Against this dream is the fact that given the P.A.’s corruption and Abu Mazen’s weakness, the Olmert’s government’s own scandal and flaw-filled regime and, concomitantly, the one with lowest popular support in Israel’s history; and the Bush administration’s credibility problems in the world due to its own track record, the chances of pulling off this so delicate effort are probably slim to none. And so, the sins of having repudiated God’s laws and having undermined these nations’ rules of law and justice may now lead to an ironic ending in that there is not now enough energy, trust and fidelity left to bring about a long sought-after solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

At times of change and upheaval in the Middle East, the greatest opportunities also open. The window here is so very small, the moorings are so very shaky. And yet, with some creativity and assertiveness, perhaps ways can be found to put the Palestinian people back to work, developing a new economy and giving the Palestinian street something more to live for than producing more suicide bombers. Their choices of jihad and war, and corruption, dire poverty and hopeless misery can be mitigated if the wisest heads can be employed, and the goal of lifting this suffering people into nationhood can be kept in the forefront and not relegated to being a back-burner people, balanced between refugee terrorist and beggar.

Where two weeks ago, the best that Israelis could say was that they would continue managing the Palestinian problem, the entire scene has potentially changed. Given the fact that Hamas has stupidly managed to isolate itself in the coastal wasteland of Gaza, its Iranian backed rejection of Israel has relegated it to non-player status. Everyone can and will mostly ignore Hamas and Gaza for the time being. Even an offer of negotiations over the fate of Gilad Shalit won’t be enough to turn the Olmert government’s attention away from this West Bank opportunity, although one notes that Israel continues human services to the Palestinian entity in Gaza, even as that entity continues lobbing kassams into Sderot and Askelon..

And what do we here in B’nai Chaim now do? We monitor and applaud the fact that our electoral and court systems have moved our nation back toward constitutionality and sanity rather than fear-based subterfuge. We need to call for and then support efforts to prosecute those who broke and are breaking laws. Scooter Libby needs to go to jail! We demand of our government those stances and acts that have traditionally defined American values in the world: caring for the victims of AIDS, TB and malaria, promoting international efforts to curb terrorism and thuggery, helping the less fortunate nations to move forward in their development, and leading the world in efforts to mitigate environmental damage. It is time, as the number one example I can give, that the United States move a coalition of nations against the Iranian drive to develop nuclear weapons. It is time for America to resume condemning human rights violations in Saudi Arabian, Syria, Egypt and most of all in Sudan. It is time for us to make gestures of apology for the wrongs that we as a nation have done in promoting torture and the brutalization of innocents. And it is time for us to pray as a nation for leadership which will pursue peace over power, and study, know and respond to the difference between those who can be dealt with through negotiations, and those we must, with many, many allies, militarily respond to.

The prophets of old didn’t waffle and they didn’t flinch when it came to holding their government officials and the people to the standards God had set for them. And you know what? They were right to do so---not just because God told them to do so, if that alone weren’t enough! But being human beings, we often have to learn the hard way through testing God and these ancient truths. History is replete with lost nations, causes and peoples. We Jews have a prescription for right living; we Americans have a document upon which our society and government is based. We ought to be upholding both of these, for to do otherwise is to jeopardize what we have achieved to date, and to miss those chances to advance our purposes for our own good, the good of other peoples and nations; and indeed, for the entire world.