This is a prayer of Rebbe Nahman, adapted by Jules Harlow, first printed in a 1972 edition of the Rosh Hashanah prayerbook.
May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when
a great peace will embrace the whole world.
Then nation will not threaten nation and mankind will
not again know war.
For all who live on earth shall realise we have not
come into being to hate or destroy. We have come into being to praise, to
labour and to love.
Compassionate God, bless the leaders of all nations
with the power of compassion.
Fulfill the promise conveyed in scripture: I will
bring peace to the land and you shall lie down and no one shall terrify you.
I will rid the land of vicious beasts and it shall not
be ravaged by way.
Let love and justice flow like a might stream. Let
peace fill the earth and waters fill the sea.
And let us say Amen.
I’m on my third complete redraft of this sermon. The
first was written when the concern at the
heart of how I would address you all, my dear friends, today, was merely the
border between Israel and Gaza, and the hostages, the raw memories of that day
just under a year ago and the destruction that’s happened since. The second was
written during the recent escalation on the borders between Israel and Lebanon.
And yesterday I was writing again, in the aftermath of over 180 missiles being
sent into Israel from Iran.
Like all of us, I’m
reeling.
And on this day when we
should be trying to act like angels, I’m feeling like a fool attempting to rush
in. Having the temerity to say, really anything beyond ‘ow.’ Because everything
every word – every line of our Machzor and every word I might share from his
holy Bimah - feels both overloaded and oversimplified.
How awful it is that
there are still over 100 hostages held in Gaza, held for an entire year, and
this is only one, maybe not even the heaviest weight with which I enter this
Rosh Hashanah Year.
How ridiculous it is that
I, stood here in my diasporic splendour so far from the reach of Hamas tunnels
and Hezbollah missiles, but also, let it be admitted so far from the devastation
wrecked on Gaza and Lebanon, complain about how hard it is to write a sermon.
I want to make suggest
two things, with humility and with the request for gentle hearing from you, my
dear friends, the treasured members of this community.
The first is about responsibility.
Rosh Hashanah is a good
day to talk about responsibility. We sing of the sins for which we are responsible
- She’Anu Hayavim Lifnecha.
Rabbi Sharon Brous put the case for the responsibility
for the 7th October well, Hamas are she said recently a, “deranged
enemy that manipulates a just
cause, the need for a just future for the Palestinian people, into a perverse
sadistic death cult that abducts and rapes and massacres innocents and then
hides and executes in tunnels beneath day care centres.” And then there is that
other clear responsibility in all this; the responsibility that emerges from
the Supreme Leadership of Iran, a responsibility for building a nuclear threat
and emboldening proxies and, in the last days, firing missiles. Bravo to those
marshalling Israel’s air defenses and the allied countries of the civilized world
who have stood up to affirm Israel’s right to defend itself.
The fact that Israel,
even in the very first days after the attack, found herself blamed for
provoking supposedly decent peace-loving people into a fit of murderous attack
is more than stupidity. It reveals the ways some people who profess decency,
strip from Israel, and Jews more generally, the same security and the same
right to determination any group of humans deserves. You can spot a racist and
you can spot an antisemite by how they allocate responsibility.
But allocating responsibility
in one direction doesn’t mean other responsibilities don’t co-exist.
There’s a passage of
Torah we read just a couple of weeks ago about the aftermath of murder in
Biblical times. When there’s been a murder, the elders of the settlement local to
the place where the body was found stand over the body and say this.
“Our
hands did not shed this blood, nor were we witnesses to it, but, dear God, forgive
us – the word is Kaper, as in Yom Kippur - forgive us our responsibility. Do not let
guilt of innocent blood remain in our midst.”
It’s a remarkable command
– that we accept guilt and plea for forgiveness for a blood which our hands did
not shed.
What exactly did
the elders do so wrong? The Talmud tells us the people of the village closed
their eyes to a stranger passing through, missed the opportunity to provide a safe
escort. Other responsibilities still pertain, even having taken account of the
responsibility of the murderer.
And the complex
part of all of this is not in allocating clear, primary and appalling responsibility
on the leadership of Hamas and Hizbollah and the Iranian Supreme Leadership.
That piece is utterly straightforward. The complex part of all of this is that
there are other responsibilities that fall on, for want of a better term, us.
She’Anu Chayavim
Alehem.
For the sin of
failing to keep safe the residents of the Gaza envelope and those happy hippy
trippy ravers of the Nova Dance Festival, there is a weighty responsibility.
And then it gets
harder, and as a Rabbi in the Diaspora I watch and read and care and feel tremendous
pain and also feel a humility and a sense of trepidation and I hate it when
inside I feel a call to criticize the State and its leaders. But I can’t get to
today, understanding what I understand about why the Gaza envelope was left so
little protected, and understanding what I understand about the prioritization of
releasing the captives and understanding what I understand about the destruction
wrecked on Gaza and feel there is nothing to be accountable for.
I’m no expert in
military geo-strategy, I don’t understand how much responsibility vests
precisely on whom, but I do know that none of these responsibilities disappears
just because we hate the actions of Hamas so deeply.
There was an
extraordinary lesson in the bearing responsibility provided by the President of
the State of Israel, Itzhak Herzog just a few weeks ago. President Herzog, spoke
at the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the captives found murdered at
the end of August. He said this;
“I
stand here today as the President of the State of Israel, asking for your
forgiveness, from you and Carmel and Eden and Alex and Almog and Ori and from
all of your loved ones, I apologise on behalf of the State of Israel, because
we failed to protect you in the terrible disaster of October 7th and
we failed to bring you home safely.”[1]
That’s a kind of
Teshuvah, a bearing of responsibility that, I think, helps and mends and builds
towards a different and a better tomorrow. I think it helps to think and talk
about responsibilities – rather than a singular responsibility - even if
it’s painful. To get to that place, the place, “where war and bloodshed
cease, and a great peace will embrace the whole world,” we’ll need a level of
honesty and acceptance of plural responsibilities. And, despite the way in
which our world today threatens to welcome only simplicity, we each need to
play our part in welcoming complexity even if it is painful.
I don’t have a single English word for the next thing.
It’s got something to do with hope, with faith and with belief. The Hebrew word
is Emunah, connected, of course to the Hebrew word, Amen. It’s the same
etymology as a Hebrew word for pillars, Omnot – things you can lean on
when you need something to prop you up.
At the heart of my belief lies the notion of the
sacred nature of humanity. In religious terms, that we each contain Tzelem
Elohim–the image of the Divine.
It’s the thing that makes what has happened to the
hostages so horrendous. There’s a photo of a table outside one of the homes on
Kibbutz Nir Oz of Eli and Yifar sitting alone at a table set for 6. Across from
them are four empty chairs for Yarden, Shiri, Ariel and little Kfir. Yossi and Margit, Shiri's parents, were
murdered on that terrible Saturday. Eli, Yarden’s father, and Yifat, Shiri's
cousin, sit alone, waiting. Each one a distillation of divinity in human form.
As we said on 9th Av – Al Eleh Ani Bochiach – for this I weep.
And then comes the
hard part – that I have to look for the Image of God, even in those who hate
me. And that means, I think, two things.
One is I need to
desperately careful with all life, even the life of my enemies, and certainly the
life of those who have the misfortunate to be too adjacent to enemies. There is
no doctrine of acceptable collateral damage in Judaism, just a dreadful warning
that taking the life of an innocent person results in a blood cry that destroys
an entire world - ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י. I know that makes it incredibly hard to defend a nation
surrounded by enemies. So be it. It is indeed hard. There is no good easy
option, not even when I or the ones I love are attacked or displaced or taken
captive. There is no good easy option.
The second thing
is; I need to treat, even my enemies with the desire to get to a place where
our commonality – as fellow human beings – can be of power. I know we are not
there today. But the prayer, in Rebbe Nachman’s language, is to get to the
place where all who live realise we have not come into being to
hate or destroy.
Here’s a verse from Exodus, and it’s worth reminding
ourselves that the Bible is not wishy-washy, it can be brutal and tough, but
here’s the verse in Exodus
כִּֽי־תִרְאֶ֞ה
חֲמ֣וֹר שֹׂנַאֲךָ֗ רֹבֵץ֙ תַּ֣חַת מַשָּׂא֔וֹ וְחָדַלְתָּ֖ מֵעֲזֹ֣ב ל֑וֹ עָזֹ֥ב
תַּעֲזֹ֖ב עִמּֽוֹ׃
When you
see the donkey of your enemy fallen under its burden, and you are tempted to
refrain from helping him, help him, help him.
It’s an amazing image, the
Torah verse knows what is going through my mind as I see the beast of my enemy
struggling, the Torah knows that I want to walk away and it pulls me back and
forces me to assist.
So what is this? Is this a
sort of wishy-washy Kumbaya empathy? You can find classic Rabbinic commentators
who suggest the verse only applies when it’s a Jewish enemy’s donkey and the
verse doesn’t apply to those non-Jews. But this is Rabeinu Bachya, the great
Spanish Biblical commentator.
The promise
contained in our verse is that if you assist your enemy with their falling
donkey, they will eventually appreciate you and become אחיך, “your brother.” When you assist them,
they will forget the “hatred” between you and only remember the bond of love
that unites brothers. (on Deut 22.4)
I know it sounds so very, very far away. But Od Lo
Avdah Tikvateinu – I still haven’t lost hope, certainly not on the day of
Rosh Hashanah where hope and hope for something new and different is at the
very heart of our prayers.
Again, I don’t make the claim this is easy, or even
that I know how I would approach any of the complex geo-political military-strategic
challenges that face those in positions more complex than being a congregational
rabbi in London. But Steven Covey has to be right to suggest we need, always,
keep the end in mind.
We must train ourselves to be more comfortable talking
of plural responsibilities and we must sustain an Emunah and always be orientated
towards the end we have in mind.
The end must be, it cannot be anything other than the
great prayer of Rebbe Nachman
May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when
a great peace will embrace the whole world.
Then nation will not threaten nation and mankind will
not again know war.
Fulfill the promise conveyed in scripture: I will
bring peace to the land and you shall lie down and no one shall terrify you.
Let love and justice flow like a might stream. Let
peace fill the earth and waters fill the sea.
And let us say Amen.
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