On Yom HaAtzmaut - Israel's 77th Independence Day - Timidity and Complexity

New London Synagogue was founded on the basis of a refusal to be timid and a willingness to communicate a complex idea rather than retreat into a self-willed blindness.

It was a technical issue, a theological question about how the Torah came to be.

On the one side the claim was made that the Torah was dictated by God to Moses in a 40-day spurt and done, rendered perfectly divine and immutable.

On the other side the claim was that the Torah was made up by humans, adding or subtracting based on their own values from one day to the next.

Into that polarity stepped Rabbi Louis Jacobs seizing, well, neither pole. Neither is it the case that the Torah has no history, and no humanity involved in its composition. But neither is it simply the product of human vicissitudes, devoid of any holiness.

And there were those, back then, who criticised Rabbi Jacobs for making public what many felt should have been kept private, for advocating for the complexity, rather the simple and obviously wrong. Rabbi Louis  Jacobs, the greatest Rabbi of the 350-year history of Anglo-Jewry, was excommunicated.

He used to say, I can still hear him say it, “that the advantage of being in hot water is that it keeps you clean.” I also have in mind a wonderful paragraph from Chaim Bermant, “One is always accused of 'washing dirty linen in public' and of 'giving ammunition to our enemies. … But if linen isn't washed in public, it isn't washed in private either and is generally allowed to accumulate until it stinks to heaven."

And so to Israel.

I mean the very name itself – the Biblical explanation for the origin of the Biblical name given to our ancestor Jacob - suggests wrestling – complexity and struggle.

But I mean the modern state.

In this week in which Israel has celebrated the Anniversary of Independence, I listened to a podcast which decoded the scrawled handwritten diaries of David Ben-Gurion – the man who declared Israel’s independence on the 5^th Iyyar some 77 years ago. David Ben-Gurion wrote of his conflict as he announced independence.

 “I mourn amidst the rejoicing,” he wrote, acknowledging that none of his Chiefs of Staff agreed with his decision. Complex. Nowadays, of course, the Day of Memory – Yom HaZikaron is the day that leads into the Day of Independence, it’s a Jewish trop, of course, that our tears and our celebrations go hand-in-hand.

But even then, back in 1948, there were divisions and complexities, not even just from the Arab League. Even within the nascent State, Socialist factions and Herut factions fought one another, I mean that quite literally. Following the lead of the two principal political factions of the day, Mapai and Herut, the pre-State militia of Mapai – the Haganah - fought the pre-State militia of Herut - Etzel. It resulted in disaster. 19 people died in a Jew vs Jew fight when a ship called the the Altalena was shelled in the very midst of the War of Independence.

This came against the backdrop of military invasion from beyond the newly created State, and also attacks from Arabs inside of Israel.

I don’t know if this is sounding familiar.

There was an invasion across a border – check.

There was politicisation of Israel’s defence establishment – check

And there was Arab on Jew, and Jew on Arab violence within Israel – check.

And there was even Jew on Jew violence within Israel – check.

Let me just do that last of these in a touch more detail.

This week, just as every Yom HaZikaron for the past 20 years, the Bereaved Families Forum and Combatants for Peace have held a joint Memorial service where all the losses of these past decades, of both Jews and Palestinians can be acknowledged.

 It’s a remarkable event. Hundreds of people gather in person, thousands more on-line in both Palestinian and Jewish homes, and brave, brave Jews and Palestinians speak of their awful loss and their refusal to see in the face of the other inhumanity. Brave, brave people speak of their insistence that there has to be a better way. My heart was broken, this year, particularly by Liat Atsili a survivor from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a woman taken hostage and subsequently freed, whose partner, the father of her three children, was murdered on the 7^th October.

Atsili, citing Levinas, said this “we don’t get to chose the others we face, we must accept the others we receive and the test lies in the extent to which I accept my responsibility.” That’s her response to the awful invasion of her home, her life and her loved ones – to acknowledge, as she put it, “This responsibility is the very embodiment of freedom.” Astounding.

And while that ceremony was going on, a group of Jewish thugs, encouraged by a Likud-affiliated mayor in Ranana, attempted to invade and break into a Synagogue – Jews breaking into a Synagogue – which was trying to screen the ceremony.

The photos are terrifying – Rabbi Gilad Kariv MK called it a "pogrom." Jew launched against Jew.

For the sin of what exactly, refusing to see every Palestinian as evil. For insisting that, as another speaker put it, “pain is pain, pain doesn’t discriminate.”

There are those who look at what is going on today, what has been going on for the past 77 Years of the life of the Israeli State through a lens of polarity and simplicity – Israel is either simply right, or simply wrong.

And those who refuse to clutch wholeheartedly to one pole or another can be pilloried, excommunicated in the language of the Jacobs Affair, or, perhaps better in today’s parlance, cancelled. And here we are.

It’s not great. It’s not going to get better. And it’s certainly not going to get better by pretending there are simple truths to this complexity. It’s not going to get better by being timid.

The only way to get better is to keep insisting that different truths can be true at the same time.

It can be true and it is true that an awful attack was waged against Israel, not just on 7^th October, but time and time and time again.

It can also be true and it is also true that Israel has caused great pain to innocent Palestinians.

It can also be true that Israel is a victim of malicious falsehood and held to standard above what could ever be expected to be just. It can be true that the Palestinian leadership has failed, again and again, to seize the opportunities to build towards peace.

But it can also be true that terrible things have been done in the name of Israel, particularly by far-right nationalists who have been allowed to get away with criminality by supposedly more mainstream political leaders. And it can be true that Israel has also sought to block pathways towards rapprochement and Palestinian self-determination.

It can be true that Israel has a right to exist in safety. It can also be true that Israel can never find safety without all the people inside and across her borders believing that they should also be invested in that peace.

I’m not suggesting that’s easy. In fact that’s precisely the point. If it was easy, it would already be wrong.

So where to go? What is our role, as British citizens, living so far away from the awful harsh realities of terrorist attacks and existential threat.

In March, Rabbi Natasha and I were in Israel. We travelled to the Gaza Envelope and met with hostage families, indeed we welcomed to this very Bimah last Shabbat Itay Shabi who survived the attack on Kibbutz Beeri.

And we also met with Rabbi Tamar Elad Applebaum. Rabbi Tamar is a native Yerushalmite, whose fallen brother is remembered every year on Yom Hazikaron. And she shared with our group a famous verse from Psalms, recited, of course, at Jewish weddings.

 אם אשכחך ירושלים תשכח ימיני

 תִּדְבַּק-לְשׁוֹנִי, לְחִכִּי--    אִם-לֹא אֶזְכְּרֵכִי:

אִם-לֹא אַעֲלֶה, אֶת-יְרוּשָׁלִַם--    עַל, רֹאשׁ שִׂמְחָתִי.

Citing a 17^th C Turkish Rabbi I had never heard of she shared that the verse couldn’t, Ha’as V’Shalom, be about picking on right-handed people above left-handed ones, rather it had to be about the two principle seats of the psychological self in Jewish thought – rigour – Gevurah – understood to be archetypally connected to our left hand side, and love – Chesed - on the right.

To forget about Jerusalem, therefore becomes to lose the side of ourselves which is about love. To forget about Jerusalem is to walk away from the mess, to cease to care and to become an uncaring person.

תִּדְבַּק-לְשׁוֹנִי, לְחִכִּי

Our tongue becomes cleaved to our palate, we lose the ability to speak.

Our role can’t be to forget, or to lose the ability to speak.

We have to lean in.

Show we care, we count.

We have to – she was speaking to a bunch of Rabbis – but I’ll share the responsibility with you all today – we have to lean into the possibility of care, of kindness. We see these things all the time, in Israel, amongst Jews, amongst Palestinians, even in Gaza. People who love and care, even despite all the pain and fear. People who see the pathway of violence, and refuse to be seduced by the surface attractiveness of a false belief – the belief that there is a wall high enough, or a military response terrifyingly violent enough to bring peace and security to the region.

I’m not suggesting that’s easy. In fact that’s precisely the point. If it was easy, it would already be wrong.

I’m not  -  in case you have entirely misunderstood everything I’m trying to say today, I’m not an apologist for Hamas or anything like that. I’m trying to say something entirely different. I’m trying make a case for the necessity of admitting multiple truths in order to allow for the co-existence of multiple peoples.

I’m tired of trying to hold a middle ground where alternate claims can both be true – and indeed can both be false. I’m sacred of being pilloried or cancelled or excommunicated for speaking out on this issue. And I’m thousands of miles away from where the pain of this situation is felt most bitterly.

But we can’t forget Jerusalem.

In fact, I think it’s our responsibility, humbly and aware of our distance and privileged Western existence, to speak up and out into this nasty atmosphere where difference is weaponized and epithets and worse are hurled, to try and make the case that there are innocent, decent, brave, non-violent actors on all sides.

They need us to magnify their voices. They need us to seek to lower the polarised narratives. They need us to say that their bravery is heard. It’s going to be on us to speak a with a cooler voice from outside the crucible that is the Middle East. Not because we are naïve but because distance affords and obliges us to see multiple things can be true at the same time. We, in this country, are not needed to be one-eyed when facing the desperate complexity of what it means to believe in and pray for and work for the safety of all of those living in Israel, Jew and Arab alike.

If you feel the need to steel yourselves to understand more to do this work – I recommend watching the Joint Memorial Service –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIW-9Xakca4 

Or look for the web sites of organisations such as Standing Together, or A Land for All.

https://www.standing-together.org/en

https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr

Israel’s survival for 77 years is a remarkable achievement in the face of so much aggression and violence. Just think what she could achieve if a path out of violence could be found.

Shabbat Shalom