Nov 21 2008 - CHAYE SARAH: UPHOLDING A STANDARD OF TRUTH

Sarah dies in Kiryat Arba, today’s Hevron. Abraham, deep in his grief, knows that he must find a place in which to bury his life-long companion. He goes to the locals and asks to purchase the Cave of Machpeleh as a burial site. The Hittite owner sells Abraham the land…at top price. We remember that Abraham could well have claimed the land that God had promised him; but, instead, he bought it at a premium. Abraham understood that, whereas God may have promised him this land, there were others, indigenous people, who also claimed the land was rightly theirs. Although Abraham could have set his jaw and fought over the parcel, and, given his profound emotions at the moment, he well could have been moved to anger, striking out at others. Instead, he did what was honorable and legal, and paid for what he wanted, thereby upholding the neighborly, societal conventions.

Such is not the case today on the West Bank among many of the Israeli settlers there. Because they, too, feel that God has promised them this land, they deem their presence there as a sacred duty, trust, and privilege. Although what they are doing in consistently trying to create “new facts on the ground” is in every way illegal, they claim a religious right to be there because of God’s promises to our ancestors.

When Israeli soldiers have come to remove these people and tear down their buildings, the settlers have attacked them and vilely cursed and abused them. The acrimony has turned violent in several recent cases, and the rhetoric has become so enflamed and outrageous that some Israeli leaders, Ehud Barak, foremost among them, have warned that the pitch and tone of the threats is now all too similar to what suffused Israeli society when Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated by the right wing ideologue Yigal Amir.

Vicious anti-government rhetoric and incendiary speech can be tolerated in a democracy only to a point. When elements of any society feel it is their rightful position to threaten harm and incite chaos, violence or murder, government must step in and take stern measures to calm and correct the situation. Israel will not long stand as a nation if elements of its Jewish population behave in ways that subvert, menace, and act to supersede or circumvent authority. Put simply, for any governmental system to work, there must ultimately be a will on the part of all segments of that society to adhere to the decisions of that elected government. People can and should be free to disagree, but in the final analysis, they must abide what their elected officials resolve to do. At the very same time, the government has the obligation to ensure that all elements of society conduct themselves within the law and obey, with respect, the directions it chooses to take. There is no alternative. And the longer Israel or any nation tolerates incendiary rhetoric, the more dangerously charged the public atmosphere will become. It is within this acrid milieu that terrible things become feasible, brutality being excused for “the greater cause.”

This is true whether we are talking about nations or religions. We have come to a moment in history where, much to our disgust and sorrow, causing as much psychic pain to one’s enemies as possible has become palatable. So, as I pointed out in my Yom Kippur sermon, we have the Iranians denying the Holocaust and Israel her legitimacy. Just this week, we have Al Qaeda taunting our President Elect with racial innuendo and derision. And even it the light of Abraham’s righteous act of giving his wife a proper burial, we have any number of Jewish cemetery desecrations occurring throughout Europe, as much as if to say, your dead and their resting places are meaningless to us

Two weeks ago, we read of the Mormon Church whose members, having been admonished and whose leadership promised to put a stop to the practice, are nevertheless still offering the souls of Jewish Holocaust victims for baptism into the Mormon Church, posthumously.

Cemetery desecrations, anti-Semitic Holocaust denial, or practicing unwanted and deeply disrespectful and hurtful rites all need to be challenged in the court of public opinion or, if possible, in courts of law. These kinds of despicable acts only feed upon and spread hatred, engendering a sense of their being somehow acceptable; but they are not. And their vicious perpetrators need to be refuted and told so, over and over and over again.

It was Joseph Goebbles who recognized the fact that if you create a lie that is big enough, and you repeat it over and over again, people will begin to believe it. This is what Mahmoud Achmedinejad has been attempting to do as he libels and curses Israel, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. He has quite a following in the guise of the Untied Nations Human Rights Commission which has spent the overwhelming majority of its time and energy criticizing Israel while ignoring the dire situations in the Congo where Hutus and Tutsis are once again murdering each other, or in Sudan and their genocidal war on Darfur, or in Tibet where the Chinese have brutally suppressed and oppressed the Tibetan people, telling the world that Tibet is theirs and they have a right to do what they will.

This is the reason that no matter for whom or for what people might be speaking; their words must be compared to a standard of objective truth and law. We’ve just come through an election wherein we witnessed the truth bent and twisted in so many different directions. Hyperbole only excuses a portion of the out and out lies that were thrown back and forth among candidates. When Americans come to accept this as “the price and coin of politics,” our system itself becomes severely weakened and vulnerable. I have to believe that the most recent results were, in great part, a rejection of the bold faced lies that some of the candidates were flinging at their opponents. If this is, indeed, the case, then it is a good thing. And when we stand up, as Israel just this week did by withdrawing from the Second Durban Conference on Racism that is to be held in Geneva in April of 2009, and call untruths and disparagements what they are, we are doing something that is profoundly restorative and healthy for ourselves, our society, and for the hope that we can live in a better world. It makes absolutely no sense to feed the beast by attempting to humor the bigot or ameliorate the theologically fanatic. One must confront their tactics, calling them what they are and then go about using the apparati of the available legal system, or, lacking that, absent oneself from the evil arena in which others seek to do us, proclaiming to the world the rightness of our position and our unwillingness to accept calumny, falsehoods, mendacity, deception, and deceit which are too often so poisonously effective in our modern world and which have lead all too often to atrocity.

Abraham took the high road when he set about burying his beloved Sarah. In doing so, he set an example for us always to seek the peaceful, noble and dignified path in our dealings in the world, for surely this is the path of blessing.