On laws that must be broken

On laws that must be broken By Ilana Hammerman | Sep. 24, 2013 Haaretz

When laws are being legislated by a parliamentary majority whose express ideology is a system of injustice, these laws demand one response: Civil, nonviolent revolt.

"Legally mandated destruction." That is how Haaretz's editorial on Sunday described the destruction of the village of Khirbet Makhoul in the Jordan Valley. “The structures in question are unlawful and were built without construction permits. The structures were demolished in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rejection on August 28, 2013, of the petition that had been filed against their demolition.” That is how a spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories responded to a report in last Friday’s paper on the destruction by Gideon Levy and Alex Levac.

For 46 out of its 65 years of existence, Israel has implemented military laws on an occupied civilian population; what is the law here and what is the High Court of Justice? And what is the validity of laws of this type and what is the word “justice” doing at all in such circumstances, which in international law were intended to be temporary yet have become permanent here, to the point that they’ve become the very essence of the State of Israel? After all the personal and collective damage to property and persons, which has been conducted systematically all these years on hundreds of thousands of people; these are serious, extreme violations of the law, also of the Basic Laws of the State of Israel. These basic laws, and even standard criminal law, are violated regularly, starting with denial of freedoms and ending with torture and killing. Many of these violations and crimes are done under the patronage of the High Court of Justice.

But there are very few Israeli citizens who think about this with complete seriousness and internal honesty, then reach the dire conclusion: These laws must be broken. Moreover, at this late stage of deterioration, when Israel’s laws are now being legislated by a parliamentary majority whose express ideology is this very system of injustice, then these laws demand one response: Civil, nonviolent revolt.

This rebellion cannot be carried out by the residents of the destroyed village of Khirbet Makhoul. They are without rights, without property, helpless before the orders forced on them with the power of weapons. They are few and weak against the many and strong. The citizens of Israel are responsible for the fate of the residents of the village of Khirbet Makhoul and the other Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley, who have been harassed for years by the lack of permits for houses and schools, and the destruction of buildings that were built nonetheless; by the denial of the supply of water and by their expulsion - alongside the cultivation of the neighboring Jewish settlements, which are being built and are prospering under the auspices of the very same system of laws. The actions and reality that have been created are clear to see: Every Israeli citizen speeding in his car on Route 90 through the Jordan Valley can see it. Those responsible for the expulsion and destruction and the decree of annihilation by thirst on this burning region of the country are Israel Defense Forces soldiers - in other words, citizens of Israel serving three years as soldiers in its army and acting as the operational arm of the state’s political and legal institutions.

This is the logic of things and there is no other beside this logic, distorted and despotic: From the time it was set it motion, this logic has acted with enormous dynamism, moving forward unrestrained in front of our eyes. Only the blind and the brainwashed, and mostly those who do not want to see or know, place here on the other side of the scale the conflict between the two peoples and the right of the Jews to a sovereign state. For a long time it hasn't been so.

So despite the brainwashing from childhood through old age, Israel still has thousands of citizens who know this and their hearts are crushed. But with this knowledge they need not just to read with an angry soul the heart-breaking articles from the Levy and Levac’s "Twilight Zone," but to show up themselves there with their bodies. Not just one or two but hundreds of thousands must stand up there with determined spirits and empty hands to face the bulldozers and soldiers coming to destroy. To tell them: In our names do not do this. And if only the village of Khirbet Makhoul was an allegory: No high court of justice ever created was entitled to deny people the right to remain where they live and make a living, all in the name of the right of “firing zones" to be there instead.

A civil society that after so many years does not have people who are just and courageous enough to arise for such a civil rebellion - this is a society that is gradually losing its ability to defend its civil existence. And without that, it will not be able to survive over time. Many of us know that too, and are standing by the side. How have we become so spineless?

Yom Kippur Sermon 2013

שנה טובה,

¹⁵ “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, ¹⁶ in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in God’s ways, and to keep God’s commandments, statutes, and judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess. ¹⁷ But if your heart turns away so that you do not hear, and are drawn away, and worship other gods and serve them, ¹⁸ I announce to you today that you shall surely perish; you shall not prolong your days in the land which you cross over the Jordan to go in and possess. Deuteronomy 30:15-18 (NKJV)

This is this morning’s Torah Portion – classic verses that convey the main narrative of our holy Bible. This portion is quoted on Yom Kippur as reminder that the world is symmetrical – doing  good, which is what God tells us to do – will be rewarded.  This is a recurring theme in the Bible and the Jewish prayer books.  This message establishes our expectation that there is a link between the way we live our lives – and the quality of our lives.  This may be the core and heart of the Bible – perhaps a stronger message than the belief in monotheism, the message that this world is marching to the drumbeat of reward and punishment.

However, this is not the only voice in our Bible. The Torah and the Bible do not speak in one monolithic voice; there are many beliefs and narratives expressed in our Bible, many ways to find your path to God.

The prophet Isaiah describes the relationship between God and the world with the following words: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things (Isaiah 45:7)

This verse has been incorporated in the prayer book, but it is the only verse from the Bible that is misquoted on purpose. The theology conveyed in it is difficult, the idea that God is not only the creator of the good but also created evil; the editors of the prayer book ‘corrected’ it to be: “who makes peace and fashions all things”.

פאוזה

For Isaiah, God created all, thus created also evil, Isaiah reminds us that believing there is only one God means that the one and only God is the source of all things, good and bad.

In light of this, we need to ask how can we worship the God that is also the source of all evil in our world? What kind of God are we praying to?

Monotheistic religions convey the message that God is a morally perfect deity. This is perhaps one of the basic, crucial assumptions of monotheism, that the commanding God is also perfect from the moral sense of point; this is why we succumb and accept God’s demands, and give up our personal, human sense of judgment. This is, assumingly the definition of religion.

As we might expect – this is not the only definition of our religion and our belief. Going back to the source, to the Torah, we can find voices that denounce God’s moral perfection, and contest God’s moral judgment.  Not only that – these voices are not heretics or blasphemy, rather these are profoundly religious voices. These voices express an authentic religious cry demanding God to see us as partners, believing that otherwise it will be bad for the world and bad for God, as we and God are profoundly morally imperfect and need each other’s help striving for perfection.

One exemplary story recounts Abraham contesting God’s decision to punish the sinners of Sodom.  After God declares the ruination of all Sodom’s people, women and children included – Abraham rebukes God and says: “Far be it from you to do such a thing--to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Genesis 18:25

This is a story where clearly the roles are changing – instead of God warning and reproaching Abraham – the reverse is happening.  Abraham teaches morals to God and attempts to convince him to spare the innocent.

A similar story is recounted later in the Torah, in relation to the story of the Golden Calf. God notifies Moses of his plan to annihilate the people of Israel as punishment for the worshiping of the golden calf – men, women and children.
As happened with Abraham – Moses too is arguing with God and says: Exodus 32:32

‘But now, please forgive their sin--but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written."

Moses puts an ultimatum to God – forgive the people or I am not your partner any more, and God makes a compromise and pardons part of the transgression of Israel.

The Talmud refers to this controversy. It quotes God’s request to Moses to allow God to wipe out the people of Israel: Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation." Exodus 32:10

The Talmud quotes Moses answer: “Moses sought the favor of the LORD.’ ‘LORD," he said, "Why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?’” Exodus 32:11

The Talmud explains: Rabbi Abahu said: ‘Were this verse not written, it would be impossible to say it. This teaches that Moses seized the Holy one blessed be God, like a person who seizes his friend by his garment, and said to God, Master of the universe! I shall not release You until you forgive and pardon them!

According to the Talmudic narrative, Moses literally holds God from killing Israel.

Moses will repeat similar criticism when God will want to annihilate us after the sin of the scouts, and again in the story about Korach when Moses challenges God saying ‘will you be angry with the entire assembly when only one man sins?’  (Numbers 16:22).

פאוזה

Jewish tradition has clearly created heroes who can argue with God and contest the righteousness of God’s decisions. This has radical implications – the Jewish theological center of attention has been moved over from God – onto us. The moral responsibility has been shifted away from God to human beings – and a true hero is one who can contest God, and won’t automatically abide to God’s will.

We would like to believe in what we read in the Torah this morning, a simple, symmetrical narrative of crime and punishment, good deeds and rewards.  A world were fulfilling God’s commandments ensures immediate rewards. But we understand that such a world doesn’t and cannot exist, a world when a mitzvah is immediately rewarded, and a crime is punished automatically.

 Only when we realize that God and the world God has created are far from perfect, we can start believe in ourselves, in mankind. Then, we can demand ourselves to take responsibility. Theodicy – trying to justify every act of God and everything God has created – actually takes away from us.  Taking responsibility is where the term ‘Tikum Olam’ has emerged – the idea that we are empowered, and it is on us, to make this a better world. The power is transformed from God to us, because I am dissatisfied with the world that God created, I have criticism on the world and on God. Only then I can help make this world better. This is what Hassidics call a Sacred Hutzpah – the guts to stand before God and ask for better terms, for a better world.

The Divine promise we read in the Torah this morning actually makes it harder to accept the world as it truly is and to understand reality. When we finally discover that God is not perfect and has created an imperfect world, then we can begin to cope with all the hardship in our lives and in our world and even try to make the world a better place.

 Let us pray for a Shana Tova, a good year – a year of success and health, a year of love and happiness, of prosperity and peace, Shalom. Let us make this world, and our congregation of friends and families, to be a better place, and let us say –

 Shana Tova!

Israel Should Allow Freedom of Jewish Faith to All - Is Israel Jewish Enough?

Israel Should Allow Freedom of Jewish Faith to All

Is Israel Jewish Enough?

Freedom to Choose: Israel won’t be truly Jewish until it allows all its citizens to practice religion as they see fit.

By Tamar Elad-Appelbaum

Published September 07, 2013, issue of September 13, 2013.

Last June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity. What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world while holding onto ancient tradition. This is the continuation of that discussion.

Jewish life in Israel is often measured in quantities: How many Talmud pages did we conquer? How many mitzvot did we perform? How many times did we say “Baruch Hashem” in one sentence? How many Jewish children did we bring into the world? How wonderful is it that here in the State of Israel we have more yeshivas and rabbis than we ever had before, and more Jewish state laws than we ever dreamed of?

We live in a state of quantity, as if Jewish civilization is solely a matter of how much we do, as if quantities are a guarantee against the extermination of our ancient heritage. Is this true?

The accumulation of quantity, a known human weakness, is also an inevitable consequence of a miracle called Israel, where for the first time in Jewish history we exercise our heritage in the modern bureaucratic state, dealing with everything through the lens of the mass. Yet, essentially, to be truly Jewish is to engage in a higher quest: the religious quest to be personally called, to choose carefully one’s quality of life and then commit and practice it in community with others.

In order to make this choice of a religious life, one needs a will. A will that enables a person to choose to live rather than survive. In order to grow that will, one needs freedom. Freedom to question, to answer, to exercise different approaches to Torah and life, to find a place within the ancient covenant and commit, to add one’s voice to a nation ever-standing at the foot of Sinai and to hearing a voice.

The State of Israel might be full of people who were born Jewish, but as long as it doesn’t provide freedom to grow such a will, it is not yet a Jewish state.

I dread the thought that this magnificent moment in Jewish history might turn out to be a tragedy for the Jewish condition and its calling in the world. I dread the thought that Jews in Israel and around the world will count on the strength of what seems like an everlasting state, physically built, while neglecting, abandoning, an ancient trust in the transparent realm of theruach, the spirit, the deepest power in human life. The built State of Israel entered the delicate void of thousands of years yearning, and the task of this generation is to ask how we make way for the challenges of embodying ruach in Jerusalem. This is our task.

What we really need is to recuperate the natural instinct of freedom here in Zion. We can’t wait for the status quo to be changed; it will not be changed easily, and we are losing precious time, precious generations. In a world in which the new Jew is the Haredi Jew, what we need is to deepen the grassroots movement of Jewish freedom — individuals and communities exercising a Jewish life of their choice: marrying, celebrating, mourning, learning to translate modern autonomy of the individual into a life of shared values and deeds. We need more Jewish thinkers leading such a life; declaring that they do so; sharing their thoughts, practices; making way for others by their own quest to weave their unique personality into that of a community in its state.

“If Ben-Gurion, in the peak of his leadership days, would choose to go to a Reform community on Yom Kippur instead of sitting home, reading Spinoza or Aristotle, he could have given with his great authority legitimacy to another possibility of religious authority,” A.B. Yehoshua wrote in 1984. “There is no hope for real normalization of the Jewish people without deeply treating questions of our heritage. If we want to see a significant change in 100 years, we need to plan it now. We need to make sure that secular Jews are deeply involved in these questions…. Orthodoxy (as an ideology) does not want the change; the change will come only by creating new centers of Jewish authority.” And I, too, think to myself, if Shimon Peres, in the peak of his presidential days, would have asked for a blessing or prayer of six different Jewish (and non-Jewish, of course) leaders from different schools of thought in one evening, what a gate he would have opened to our people.

What I write here is a plea, that we demand every Jewish leader we know exercise and speak words of freedom, and continue to fight for state laws that enshrine that freedom. The coming 65 years should be dedicated to this pursuit of pluralism, and the more Jews involved, Israelis and partners from all around the world to whom this place belongs, the more of a chance we will have to live in a truly Jewish state.