It wasn’t just the shaving
foam.
It’s that I get a little
uneasy with mob displays of uniformity. There’s still a place in my soul that
feels uneasy at the sight of too many people all singing the same song in the
same way in the same political direction. No matter what that direction.
I was listening to Alison
Kaplan Sommers speaking on The Promised Podcast this week, the week of Israel’s 75th
Yom Haatzmaut. She spoke about
the time when, as a young reporter in her first year as the Jerusalem Post’s
Tel Aviv correspondent she reported on a pro-peace demonstration in what is now
called Rabin Square. She caught the main speeches and headed home to type up
her notes only to receive frantic calls to get back and cover the assassination
of Yitzhak Rabin. The thing she shared, counter-intuitively, is that it was in
that experience of loss and pain that she felt closer than ever to feeling a
part of the narrative of the Israeli State whose independence we celebrated
this week.
A closeness born in pain.
I think we have the whole
thing backwards.
There used to be a cartoon
in the papers called ‘love is’ and it featured a couple of lovebirds
illustrated in the middle of a heart, with the words ‘love is’ at the top, and
some cute aphorism underneath. I remember the illustration ‘Love is never
having to say you’re sorry,’ years ago now. And I distrusted that supposed
wisdom then and feel it’s worse than useless now. Love is always having to say
you are sorry.
Love is always having to
say you are sorry. Love is being so aware of the prospect of hurting the one
you love that you tread with absolute trepidation over the aspirations and
hopes of that which you love, unsure if you are somehow, supplanting their best
interests with your own selfishness.
Reish Lakish in Bereishit
Rabba articulates a mirroring idea even more astoundingly when he taught, ‘All
love that is not accompanied with critique is not love.’ Of course he has to be
right, there is a Mitzvah, a Biblical verse obliging the criticism of one’s
fellow and another Mitzvah, another Biblical verse obliging the loving of one’s
fellow. These two apparent opposites have to come together in a call towards
living well. Surely just as love without criticism isn’t love, so too love
without criticism isn’t love.
The political philosopher
Mijael Bitton recently wrote about Ne’emanut – it’s a Hebrew word that has no
good translation. The root, Amen, we recognise. It has something to do with the
Hebrew word for a pillar or to lean.
There’s something of
Newton in all this – every action needs an opposite and equal action.
Or something of the
creation of the first partner in human love – the Ezer Kenegdo – the help
against Adam.
As I wrote earlier in the
week, there is something heart-breaking in the notion that Israel, the one
absolute certain base tenant of Jewish post holocaust identity has now seems to
have entered the same realm of Brexit here, or Trump there, a touchstone for
determining whether one person or other is ‘my kind of person’ – by which I
mean the kind of person I should open up to, or the kind of person I must oppose and discount.
It’s not that those
tensions didn’t precede these most recent elections, of course, maybe it was
always due to happen, like a young child growing up and turning into a spiky
teenager. Maybe part of what gets us here are the experiences of so many groups
who, rightly or wrongly, felt that their grievances were ignored, or their
aspirations discounted by some notional uniformed block identity that existed
precisely in order to ignore grievance or discount aspiration of various
groups. Maybe we all need to go through a stage where we get the chance to air
our anger and indignation at the way we’ve been ignored before we can come out
the other side. Here’s to coming out the other side.
The problem might be a misunderstanding of the true meaning of sovereignty. The seventeenth-century
French philosopher, Blaise Pascal suggested that there is a problem with
claiming that something is ‘mine.’ “That is my place in the sun,” he wrote, “is
the beginning and the image of the usurpation – the wrongful exercise of authority
in the world.”
For the great Jewish
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, to have a place in the sun was to be concerned
that it was taken from the other, or would drive out the other.
I’m not anti-nationalism.
It’s that I see nationalism as a responsibility and a caution, not a right.
In the very opening
comment on the entire Torah, Rashi explains why the Torah begins with the tale
of the creation of the world and nothing more specific to our Jewish interests
and Jewish concerns. It’s to remind us that this whole planet is God’s
dominion. And God can take it from one group of people and give it to another,
and from the second to a third. We are not to confuse our current experience of
dominion – whether we have it or we don’t – with durable certainty. It all, Rashi
suggests, depends on how well we behave.
In every discussion of the
vision of a Jewish nation-state in the Torah comes the warning to ensure the
widow, the orphan, unlanded, the Ger – the un-stated – is protected and loved
and not made subject to oppression. We’re looking in the wrong direction when
we think about the existence of our own nation-State from the perspective of our own desires
and wishes. We need to learn how to look at our own nation-States from the
perspective of the excluded, the unlanded, the unvoiced and the vulnerable.
Masua Sagiv,[1]
writing in the journal Sources, told a story of two members of Israel’s previous government:
Matan Kahana, Minister of Religious Affairs, and Mansour Abbas, chair of the
Special Committee on Arab Society Affairs. Kahana is a conservative,
right-wing, religious Zionist, and Abbas is the leader of the United Arab List
and defines himself as a religious Muslim Palestinian Arab.
While
speaking with students in a school in Efrat about his choice to cooperate
within the government with the United Arab List, Minister Kahana remarked:
If there were a button you could press that would make all
the Arabs disappear, that would send them on an express train to
Switzerland—may they live amazing lives there, I wish them all the best in the
world—I would press that button. There is no such button. Apparently, we were
destined to exist here [together] on this land in some form.
Abbas
responded
That’s not genuine tolerance; that’s out of constraint. We
need to change our way of thinking and live together in the Holy Land out of
choice. I want everyone to reach the conclusion that we need to live together
even if we had a button [to send other groups away]. Even if we have a button,
we’re choosing not to push it out of choice and acceptance of the other side. In
my hand there is a button I have been pressing since I joined the coalition:
one of partnership and tolerance, for all parts of society to arrive at a
better place of acceptance to promote the common good.
Can we find the space in
our hearts to wish away the wish for a button?
It’s a religious
challenge and a challenge that despite the selfish and obnoxious behaviour of
so many self-describing religious people, I think religious people are best
placed to meet.
The story is told of Rav Aryeh Levin, the saintly
Tzaddik of Jerusalem. He lived in the quaint area of Nachlaot, right behind the
shuk in Machaneh Yehudah. There was a young man who grew up in the neighbourhood
whom R’ Aryeh knew well but he felt the boy was avoiding him. One day, they
bumped into each other in the narrow alleys of Nachlaot and Rav Aryeh
confronted him and said, “I can’t help but feel you are avoiding me, tell me
how are you?” The young man sheepishly replied that it was true, he was
avoiding the great rabbi as he had grown up observant but had chosen to walk
away from observant life altogether.
He said, “Rebbe, I was so
embarrassed to meet you since I have taken off my kippa and am no longer
observant.” Rav Aryeh took the young man’s hand into his own and said the
following. “My dear Moshe. Don’t worry. I am a very short man. I can only see
what is in your heart, I cannot see what is on your head.”
We read today VeAhavta
LeReicha Camocha – Akiva called it the greatest principle of the Torah. By
this he has to mean, we are called to love people who are not like us, as if
they were like us. What, after all, could be the big deal about loving people
who are already the same as us? That’s the love of what we create - idolatry,
not what is created by otherness.
It is in our treatment of
difference that we demonstrate love. It is in our leaving of people who are different
to us in their difference to us, that we can build peace.
The solution to the
challenges facing Israel does not lie in the parties with the most electoral
power imposing power their will on those who voted for other parties, or didn’t
vote all.
There is a place in this
world for difference and debate and hard-fought argument. There is even a place
in this world for national pride and nationalist delight, but only if we learn
to debate and fight with love and learn to take national pride with care do we in this
country, and our brothers in sisters in Israel ever have the chance to build a
society of true peace and blessing for all.
That was the vision of the
signatories of the Declaration of Independence signed by left and right-wingers, religious and secular, 75 years ago. Back then the founders of Isarel wrote of their commitment to develop
the country for the benefit
of all its inhabitants; ... based on freedom, justice and peace as
envisaged by the prophets of Israel; [ensuring] complete equality of social
and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or
sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and
culture;
Kein
Yehi Ratzon, may it come to pass over there, and over here too.
Shabbat
Shalom
[1] https://www.sourcesjournal.org/articles/reclaiming-mamlakhtiyut-the-road-to-an-inclusive-israeli-identity#_edn8.
I’m partic grateful to Professor Sagiv’s article for helping me think through
many of the ideas in this sermon.
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