Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana 2006

by Harold M. Schulweis

I was ten or eleven when my zayde came forward and brusquely ripped off the pin I was wearing on my lapel. The pin said, in Hebrew, “Tzion” “Zion”; and my grandfather was angry. He told me that he could not go to synagogue with me wearing a pin of Zionism. My father had given me the pin and my grandfather removed it, and I was caught between two powerful men.

When we returned and had our lunch, Zayde took out a gemorrah from the library, opened up to the tractate called “Ketubotth” and read it out loud.

There are three adjurations, three oaths imposed on our people by God:

(1) The people of Israel shall not go up to Israel. No aliyah.

(2) Jews should not rebel against the idolatrous nations of the world.

(3) The nations of the world are not to oppress Israel too much.

Then, the Talmud offered their proof text from the Prophet Jeremiah:  “They shall be carried to Babylon, and there they shall remain until the day that I remember, says the Lord.”   That was and remains the solemn oath we took, my grandfather explained. We must not, on our own, make aliyah, and we must not rebel against our oppressors. That was the credo of most religious Jews and the most vociferous anti-Zionists today, strictly held by the Satmer Hassidim who, from time to time, will protest against Israel before the consulate in New York.

In Israel, you will find stores selling Sabbath cloths and Kiddush cups in Mea Shearim, but you will see no Israeli flag, and you will never hear the Israeli national anthem. They will pay no taxes to the Jewish state or serve in the defense forces.  The theological ground for anti-Zionism is based upon that oath: God and only God controls history.   God and only God, in God' s own time, will return us to Zion.  God and God alone will redeem our people. The people cannot free itself. What is left for us to do is to wait. Wait for the Messiah who will come in God' s good time.

“I believe in perfect faith the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry,  I retain my belief. “A Jew is to wait, to pray, to study and to ask forgiveness. This is in our festival prayers:   “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land, and banished from it, and we cannot make our festival pilgrimages before You because of the hand which was let loose on Your sanctuary.  Have mercy upon us and Thy sanctuary. Rebuild it speedily.”

My grandfather thought of my father, and of his ilk, as a secularist, a Zionist who violated the oath.  Anti-religious apikoros.  My father, in turn, saw my zayde as fanatical, backward and unworldly.  The words I heard from him were, “fanatisch,” and “nisht weltliche.”   A conflict of Jewish character.  From my father' s point of view, my zayde' s outlook turned Jews into passive, acquiescent, subservient, unheroic, effeminate people.  My grandfather, in turn, cited a Midrash: “God came to Israel with a sword in one hand and book in the other.”   Either/or. We chose the book, not the sword.

One day, I came home from P.S. 89 with blood on my shirt.  My mother took one look at the bloody shirt and scolded me. “But Mama, it' s not my blood. The blood is from the other guy, the bully who attacked me on the school grounds, and I put my hand out and he ran into it.”

Mama did not celebrate my victory. She said, “Ayid,shlogt zich nisht.”  A Jew does not fight. Jews don' t fight, and Jews don' t hunt. And Samson was not a great hero in Jewish life.

Deep in my heart, I felt she was wrong.  Jews need muscles as well as brains.  And I remember at that time when Max Baer, who carried a Star of David on his boxing trunks, devastated the six-foot-five Primo Canera, my heart sung with pride and there was joy among all the Jewish kids at my school. And after that, I didn't hide my Hebrew books beneath my English texts. 

I was an incipient Zionist. A new Jewish persona was born in me.

In high school, I was assigned to read Shakespeare' s Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare caught the rage of impotence in Shylock, and my own. Here he speaks to Antonio:

“...Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gabardine...
Well then, it now appears you need my help
'Shylock, we would have moneys'...
What should I say to you? Should I not say
'Hath a dog money?'“

My tears welled up in me. I related to Shylock' s humiliation.  

“He hath disgraced me, and injured me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargain, cooled my friends, heeded my enemies, and for what his reason?  I am a Jew.  Hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs,  dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  Fed with  the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject  to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?  And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

That Jewish cry of the heart Shakespeare understood. I am a human being. I am not an insect crawling in the grass. I will not kiss the dust of your feet or smile at your whip.

I knew very little about Theodore Herzl  or Chayim Weizman or Zionism, but I felt its soul. For me, Zionism was a revolution, but not only a political revolution, but a revolution in Jewish character.   I repudiated the image of the hapless, hopeless, homeless Jew. I rejected the terrible dependence upon supernatural intervention.  I thought it a procrastination of responsibility to wait. It was my internal revolution. I would be a different kind of Jew.   It was not a matter of orthodoxy. It was a was a matter of temperament, of character. 

Zionism is a Copernican revolution of the Jewish character.  History does not revolve around a supernatural deity.  History revolves around the decision of a people — a human Jewish spirit.  A live, feeling, pulsating people.   

It is a rejection of religious subservience. 

After the pogrom of Kishinev in 1903, the writer Chayim Nachman Bialik was sent to Kisinev.  There, he watched the unwatchable.  It was not the butchery of Jewish lives alone that ate into his soul, but the cowering of Jewish husbands, hiding in the cellars while their wives were raped, and then coming to the rabbi and asking, “ My wife has been raped and I am a Kohen, a priest.  Is she, rabbi, permitted to me?”   Is that what piety asks?  Should the Kisinev victims not instead ask, “Rabbi, why do we Jews succumb to impotence? Why are we Jews so defenseless?”

The Zionist revolution is more than geographical.  It is the cry of a new kind of Jew. The new Jew was not to wait, was not to depend upon a deity who controls history.  To be a Jew was not just to study history, but to be in history, to shape history, not to be lived by others but to live.   We are not to be resigned to one option — the sword or the book.   Choose the book in one hand and the sword in the other, open the book and gird yourself with armor, defend the innocent, and hit back at the persecutors.   And to refuse to be Isaac' s scapegoat upon whom all sins are placed.  It was a heroic view of Judaism.  With that Zionist temperament, I read the Bible with different eyes.

At yeshiva, we studied the Bible, but now certain verses were more pronounced in me and in my teachers.  For me, certain psalms spoke to my inner soul.  I was elevated by the Psalmist' s spiritual audacity. He addresses God in reverence, but in accusation:

“You let them devour us like sheep, You made us the laughing stock amongst the people.  Do not say, God, that we have sinned, that we have forgotten you.  We have kept our loyalty.  It is for Your sake that we are slain all day long, that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered . . . Awake!  Why do you sleep, oh Lord?  Why do you hide Your face?”

For me it meant that the Zionist Psalmist was no longer addressing God, he was addressing his people.  Why do we sleep?  Why are our hands tied, why is our voice muted?  Why are we deaf to the cries of our children? The spirit of Zionism repudiated the role of scapegoat victim. 

The loss of Zion was not punishment for our sins. We are the shuttlecock of history in the game of badminton.

We are simultaneously called capitalists and communists; we are called deracinated, rootless cosmopolitans and parochial, provincial, tribal people.  We are condemned for allowing ourselves to go passively like sheep to the slaughter, and today — when we respond to kidnapping and missiles — as “aggressive.”   We are caught in a perennial crossfire.  There is no escape. 

Story is told that in the battles between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, a Jew was once arrested by a soldier and asked, “On whose side are you?  Protestant or Catholic?”

The Jew answered, “I am neither.  I am a Jew.”  

“Yes, yes, of course, “ the soldier answered, “ but are you a Protestant Jew, or a Catholic Jew?”   There is no way to please or to appease a hater. If Israel retreats from Lebanon, Israel is called “weak.”   And if we remain in Lebanon, Israel is called “occupier.”  

If we destroy the infrastructure of Hezbollah, Israel is called “ruthless,” and if we don' t destroy the infrastructure of Hezbollah, we are judged “ losers” and “cowards.”

If we throw leaflets from airplanes, telling those people of Lebanon who are hiding Hezbollah killers, to leave their homes, we foolishly tip off the enemy and tell them where and when we will strike. But if we do not drop leaflets we are callous killers.

If, as in Jenin, we send Israeli soldiers in house-to-house battle, we place them in danger of being booby-trapped.  But if, instead, we bomb their hidden places, we are condemned as indiscriminate murderers. 

Why do they hate us?   Envy, xenophobia, New Testament stereotypes, Fagin, Shylock, elders of the protocol of Zion. It is an old question, which is unanswerable.  Because hate is insane, causeless contempt.  The anti-Semites ask: “Who  began the war?”  “Which war?”   “Any war?” “The answer: “The Jews and the bicycles. “Why the bicycles?” “Why the Jews?”

For me, the Zionist revolution was personal — not only about the formation of the state.  It was the formation of a new self-reliant Jewish character.  I remember its melody in my youth quite well.  Zionism brought a new song into my life, and a new lyric. 

It was no longer  “My God, my God, why did You forsake me?”    But it was:  ”We have come to the land to build it, and be rebuilt through it.”

A new song entered my life:  “We have plowed and we have seeded, but we have not yet harvested.” 

A new energy entered my life:  I and you will change the world. 

A new realism entered my life.  We live with honey and with the sting. With the bitter and with the sweet. An old verse in the Torah put a new spirit into our dry bones.   When Moses was pursued by the Egyptians before the Red Sea, he prayed long and bitterly, and God answered:   “Why do you cry unto Me?  Speak to the people of Israel, and go forth.”

Sheik Nasrallah of Hezbollah: “If we had known how Israel would react to the murder of their citizens with kidnapping of two soldiers, we would not have attacked. “What did Nasrallah think?  That we would react as pre-Zionist Jews:  Acquiescent, subservient, passive? 

The struggle in the Middle East today is not between Israel and the Hezbollah.  It is a struggle not only for our physical life, but for our spiritual and moral life.

 In every generation, the enemies rose to destroy us, but we triumphed over them.  This is our generation, yours and mine.  Our time, our war.  We shall prevail again.  Zionism expressed our will to live. Not to despair and not to be afraid. Our brothers and sisters have demonstrated with their lives how Jews respond to tragic assaults.  

“Lo nafsik lirkod. Lo nafsik lashir. Lo nafski litzcok.”   We will not stop dancing. We will not stop singing.  We will not stop laughing.  We will not stop hoping.  We are Jews.  We are Zionists.  We are children of God.  And by God, we will triumph. 

But it is wrong to end this way.  There is an anger in me and in you.  And our Jewish ethic mandates us not to give anger the last word.   You can' t close the sidrah or parshah on a note of despair. 

Even the Mourner' s Kaddish ends with hope for tomorrow. “Oseh shalom bim romav, hu ya' aseh shalom aleynu v' al kol Yisrael” —   You can' t end a service on a depressing note.

The “Adon Olam “ends with “Adonai li v' lo eerah”—  God is with me, I will not fear.  The Yom Kippur fast ends with a Tekiah Gedolah — the long, piercing sound of hope. 

We must search to meet causeless hate with causeless love. We must be wary of anti-Semitism. But we must not allow anti-Semitism to dominate our lives. 

I am a Zionist.  I am a Jew. I am not an anti-anti-Semite.

How shall it end?

In September 2002, a suicide bomber on a Tel Aviv bus murdered 6 Israeli passengers, including Yoni Jesner, a 19-year-old religious youngster from B' nai Akiba.  His parents donated one of Yoni' s kidney' s to Yasmin Abu Ramilah, a 17-year-old Palestinian child from East Jerusalem, who had been waiting 2 years for a compatible kidney.  Yoni' s parents explained, “The important principle is that life was given to another human being.”

2005 – Israel, through a mistake, killed Ahmed Al Katib, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was playing with his toy gun. Ahmed' s father, Ismael Al Katib, had Ahmed' s organs transplanted into the bodies of 5 Jewish Israeli children, ranging from 7 months to 14 years.   The father explained:  “I have taken this decision because I have a message to the world: “We want, we need we must have peace.” Let it be all that we ask, let it be!

My zayde removed the pin of Zion from my lapel. Had he lived, he would have put the pin on me, and he would have kissed me.

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