50 Years Since the Munich Olympic Massacre - And the Pursuit of Jusitce

This is a real story, a dark and bloody story, that happened 50 years ago Monday.

At the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, a group of Palestinian Terrorists broke into the Athletes Village, took members of the Israeli Olympic delegation hostage and killed them. Well, two were killed immediately and the other nine were killed having been marched from the village to waiting helicopters as part of a supposed negotiation for the release of over 200 Palestinian terrorists.

It now looks as though the Germans had a tip-off that an attack was planned, failed to protect the athletes in the village, and bungled a rescue attempt by failing to have anyone with experience in hostage negotiation or extraction involved. Mossad’s head of interrogation at the time, Victor Cohen, discovered later on that ‘some of the policemen who were supposed to take part in the rescue operation made a decision before it started that they were not ready to risk their lives for the sake of the Israelis.’[1]

And what about the Palestinians? On the one hand the murder was by a splinter group – which called itself Black September, on the other hand, there was delight across the Palestinian political spectrum. The bodies of the terrorists who died received hero’s funerals

And the Palestinian newspaper, Al-Sayyid, wrote, in pride,

[Nothing] could have had greater resonance with every person in the world than that caused by the Black September operation in Munich.[2]

So today, I want to do two things. I want to honour the lives of those murdered by those terrorists, then.

And I want to ask the question – what does it mean to say ‘Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof’ – justice justice pursue in the aftermath of an appalling act of murderous terrorism?

The response of the Israeli government is well known.

On September 11 1972, the cabinet authorized prime minister, Golda Meir, to approve the assassination of targets even in friendly countries, without notifying local authorities. “Retaliation or no retaliation,” Meir told the Knesset on September 12, “at any place where a plot is being laid, where they are preparing people to murder Jews, Israelis—Jews anywhere—it is there that we are committed to striking them.”[3]

 

And so it began. You may have seen the movie, or read the book, a systematic attempt to assassinate those responsible for the attack.

First up – Wael Zwaiter who was shot in the stairwell of his Rome apartment. Next Mahmoud Hamshari was blown up by a telephone bomb, and so operation Wrath of God continued.

I’ve been re-reading the remarkable Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman which tells the story with astounding precision and insight. Bergman writes,

Whenever [Zvi Zamir, Mossad Chief], asked [Prime Minister Meir] to sign a “Red Page,” as the kill order was called because of the color of the paper it was typed on, she would convene a select group of her cabinet ministers to deliberate with her—including her minister for religious affairs, Zerach Warhaftig, who would anoint each mission with a religious stamp of approval.

A religious seal of approval. I looked up the biography of the minister for religious affairs, Rabbi Warhaftig – one of the signatories of Israel’s declaration of Independence. He was a holocaust survivor who came to fame having negotiated thousands of visas from Japan and Holland to allow Polish Jews to escape the Nazis. I wonder what was on his mind as, in Bergman’s phrase, he ‘anointed each mission with a religious seal of approval.’

It's not that Judaism is pacifistic. There are plenty of death sentences meted out in the Torah. One that I often think about is

Leviticus 20:9 – anyone who curses his father and mother should be put to death.

Parents here, you can thank me later for sharing that one.

There’s also a Biblical command to defend oneself from criminal threats. In Exodus the Bible says that if you discover a thief breaking into your house in the middle of the night, you are not to be considered guilty for killing them – the understanding of the Rabbis is that if a thief is breaking in at night they have to expect someone is in, which means they can be assumed to strike you if you disturb them.

But there are Biblical verses that lean in a different direction – in a number of places the Torah instructs the construction of Cities of Refuge. If one person kills another, and it was an accident, and the person – in the lang of the Torah ‘didn’t hate the person from their past,’ they can run to one of these cities and stay there safe from retribution. Not that the doctrine of the Cities of Refuge applies to the terrorists behind the attacks in Munich.

And hovering over all the legal back and forth is this most stunning Biblical idea – that every human being, even the cruelest and wicked, is created in the image of the Divine, and any life taken destroys that spark of divinity and worlds of possibility. And while, of course, that applies to the descendants and the descendants of the descendants of those murdered so cruelly, it also, radically applies to terrorists and murderers. All life is quite literally sacred.

But when it came to the killers of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich what do you do? Turn politely to the Libyans and ask for them to be extradited, or put on trial in a foreign jurisdiction.

I don’t want to suggest that these are easy decisions, particularly for those who are placed in positions of great national responsibility, particularly for a country like Israel, up against so much, with memories of Nazi genocide so alive.

But the problems of a violent response to violence are many.

The most quoted verse in this week’s reading reads ‘Justice, Justice you shall pursue.’ My favourite explanation of the importance of repeating the word ‘justice’ comes from Martin Buber. The only way to pursue just ends, Buber argues in Ten Rungs, is to pursue just means. Creeping up in the middle of the night, and shooting a man to death in the stairwell of their building isn’t a just means.

And maybe, that particular killing is problematic for another reason. The man shot in his stairwell might just have been a Palestinian with no direct connection to the Munich atrocities. One former Israeli agent told Bergman,

“Zwaiter had nothing to do with the killing of the athletes.’ Another called the assassination of Zwaiter “a terrible mistake.”[4]

Back in the days of the Sanhedrin 70 judges would be called to decide on any capital case, and if only one felt there was a shadow of a doubt, judicial killing would be out of the question. And in the end, the entire apparatus of judicial killing fell away. Rabbi Akiva famously said that any Court that sentenced one person to death every 70 years should be considered a Bloody Court.

To add to the danger of mistakes comes this powerful truth about violence. Violence doesn’t build peace. If the goal is a world in which Israeli athletes, none of us, has to worry about terror and violence, how do we get from here, or then, to where we want to be? If they kill eleven of ours, we can, perhaps, strike back and kill 22 of theirs, but … Gandhi wasn’t wrong when he argued ‘an eye of an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.’

Bergman’s book – Rise and Kill First is more than a telling of the Munich story, it’s the story of a very Israeli attitude to the appalling violence, terror and threat the country has experienced in its short life – from British officers in the mid-40s, to Iranian nuclear scientists in this century, Israel has held firm to a line that you mess with us, we will come for you with a greater force than you came for us.

So many of the great political leaders of Israel are men – largely men – for whom this has been their life. Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister, was one of the crack assassins sent into Beirut to take out four of those Israel believed were responsible for the Munich murders, as was Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of another former Prime Minister, Bibi. Being tough, and uncompromising in the hard line that promises death will come to anyone messing with Israel has long been a vital strategy for anyone who wanted political power in Israel.

But Bergman’s book contains another voice. Time and time again, leaders of Mossad and similar crack teams – the Caesarea Operatives, Shin Bet, Sayeret Matkal, at the end of their careers and, in some cases, at the end of their lives, have come to argue again this policy.

Most dramatically there is the case of the former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, a man who authorised any number of targeted killings, who at the end of his career, turned against then Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for misapplying the tactic of targeted killing, for not doing enough to find other tactics – pathways towards building peace. What, Dagan wonders, if all the energy, the bravery, the courage and the incredible resources that Israel has invested in the targeted killing of her enemies, what if all that had been invested in changing hearts, not stilling hearts.

That’s not the view of a wishy-washy liberal armchair liberal that’s the view of a Mossad Director, a man who had, in Bergman’s line, ‘a knife between their teeth.’

Justice, justice you shall pursue, tricky.

Justice, especially in the threat of terror is tremendously difficult, only a fool looks at a complex situation and sees simple solutions.

Meeting violence with violence will always tempt us, especially if we feel we are physically stronger, but violence cannot build towards peace, and somehow we need to keep a space for our dreams for peace, we need to pursue peace and build toward it, even if other avenues tempt.

And maybe that’s the greatest lesson for us all – for those of us who have the fortune not to be at the very sharp end of these impossible decisions – when someone or something does something bad to us, there will always be a temptation to respond with a simple response, perhaps a forceful or an aggressive response. It might even be fair to so do, but it will always behove us to check those temptations – how are we building for a better future? How can we respond to the bad done to us in such a way as to lessen the chance that someone else will even want to do bad to us again?

It was the great 1^st Century Rabbi, Hillel, who called on us all

הֱוֵי מִתַּלְמִידָיו שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן, אוֹהֵב שָׁלוֹם וְרוֹדֵף שָׁלוֹם, אוֹהֵב אֶת הַבְּרִיּוֹת וּמְקָרְבָן לַתּוֹרָה:

be like the students of Aharon, brother of Moses, who love peace and pursued peace, who loved creation and drew them closer to the correct instruction.

Shabbat Shalom

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[1] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 151). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 152). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

 

[3] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (pp. 152-153). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 161). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

In the Aftermath of the Attacks on the Al-Noor and Linwood Mosques

I’ve just left Regents Park Mosque where I had the honour of representing New London and Masorti Judaism at a remarkable commemoration in the aftermath of the appalling attacks in Christchurch last Friday.

Present were politicians including Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, Communities Secretary, James Brokenshire, Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, religious leaders including Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, Senior Rabbi of the Reform Movement, Laura Janner-Klausner, and representatives of other faith groups and organisations committed to the furtherance of civic society. The leadership of Rabbi Mirvis was especially noted. He had been the first faith leader to confirm his attendance which was acknowledged as proving pivotal in allowing such a high-level gathering to take place.

All shared their horror at the attacks, clearly motivated by Islamophobia, and their particular horror that these attacks targeted religious centres – sanctuaries. Prayers for the comfort of the mourners and the safe rest of the souls of the departed were shared and calls were made for all, faith leaders and politicians included, to take particular care in using language which could inflame false dichotomies in our society.

I found it a particularly moving gathering. It was moving to hear the Mosque’s director, Dr Ahmad Al-Dubayan, draw connections between the dangers of antisemitism and Islamophobia. The thread of hatred that connects the attacks on Finsbury Park Mosque, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Al Noor and Linwood Mosques was sketched out by several. I was touched by the pride, anger and pain a younger speaker took in her identity as a British Muslim, ‘how much more integrated could I be?’ – as asked she retold an experience of being told she ought to remove her headscarf if she wanted to be seen as British.

It was inspiring, in such a room of diversity, to be reminded of the strengths that diversity brings; indeed to hear this from a Muslim Mayor and a Muslim Secretary of State.

We are stronger when we stand together in our difference. We are stronger because we care. We demonstrate that strength by refusing to turn our society into a battlefield between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ We are stronger when we chose to love our neighbour, no matter who our neighbour is.

On Squirrel Hill and Kristallnacht - Memory and Plurality

Shabbat Shalom

Partic warm welcome to guests; family and friends of Felix in particular.

Usually, if there is a BM, I like to give a sermon that is a little warm and fuzzy and can have everyone going on their way with a spring in their step.

But this isn’t a normal weekend.

And I’m too angry, and too sacred and too in pain to give a warm and fuzzy sermon.

I’m still angry and scared and in pain from the news now two weeks old about the attack on the Synagogue in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh - no longer the most recent atrocity perpetrated in the United States.
And, frankly, I’m still angry and scared and in pain on this Shabbat marking the 80^th Anniversary of Kristallnacht - a night of destruction of Jewish life and property from the darkest ages of our people - 1938 Germany.

I think I would be less angry and less scared about the attacks from two weeks ago and 80 years ago if I didn’t feel what I do about the world of politics.

There would still be pain. Of course, there would still be pain, about the lives lost, and the simple barbarity of destruction.

But I can deal with pain. The pain thing is somehow assimilatable.

It’s the fact that the destruction of 80 years ago and the destruction of two weeks ago resonate off one another, like some wave of energy bouncing between the past and present and threatening to bounce off again into the future.

That’s the thing that makes me so scared, and so angry.

How come we are here?

How come 80 years after we thought we would never again slide into a world of fascist intolerance, a fascism that stirs up and explicitly or implicitly gives a Heter to racist violence and offence, how come we seem to be back here?

How come instead of having reasoned debate and disagreement about the facts that before us we have - country after country - society after society - adopted as argumentative strategies personal abuse and humiliation, dehumanisation and deceit.

How come it’s acceptable to attack a person for their very existence when the thing they say makes us feel uncomfortable.

Yes, of course, I’m talking about President Trump, and Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary and ah this list is too long.

And, forgive me, but somewhere on this list of political leaders who are prepared to inflame or permit societal hate to secure their own approval and treat opposition as something to be crushed, not something with which to engage, belongs politicians in this country also. And even politicians in the State of Israel.

And here’s the really bad news - imagine you are a political consultant looking to advise someone on how to get power in these febrile times what advice are you going to give? Actually, these wannabe-politicians don’t need consultants to tell them which way to go. They’ve got the message already.

And if it looked, in those hopeful days of the aftermath of Holocaust as if the UN with it Human Rights’ convention and the whole apparatus of international commitments to “never again” were going to work. It doesn’t feel that way today.

And if it looked, in those 8 years in which Obama served as President of the United States, and I don’t care if you are Democrat or a Republican, if it looked for those eight years as though the most powerful country the world has ever seen, had embraced Hope not Hate, it doesn’t feel that way now.

This week I’ve been reading and listening to Sarah Churchwell, author of a new book, Behold America. She points out how triumphalist nationalism, don’t mess with us patriotism and a racism that lurks only just below the surface has never really gone away in America.
American has always thought of itself as the land of the free and home of the brave, and it’s always behaved as a bully taking the lives and the land of whoever came in the way of those who had the might to enforce their sense of right.

I did warn that this was going to be a political sermon.

But the thing that really struck me about America - and America is Ground Zero for this international horror - is how surprised it gets at the same thing happening again. I lived in New York for the five years surrounding 9/11. I saw the stunned amazement of Americans at 9/11. They couldn’t believe they would be attacked. But what was Pearl Harbour? They couldn’t believe it would be so hard to destroy what George Bush called the Axis of Evil. But what was Vietnam?

And the same thing goes for my dear friends in the Jewish community. They couldn’t believe that a Synagogue could be the target of a raging wicked act of antisemitic murder. American Jews feel so at home in America, they can’t imagine themselves as victims of anti-Jewish hatred. They’ve forgotten that General Grant expelled the Jews from the States in 1862. They’ve forgotten the Klu Klux Klan’s invidious Jew-hatred - they should go and watch Spike Lee’s new movie - BlackkKlansman, we all should. I warmly recommend Philip Roth’s Plot Against the Jews. It’s a fiction only a hairs breath away from an entirely plausible past. And today it feels less like some apocalyptic horror show and more like reportage.

Back when I was at Seminary, in New York, we had a class on Mediaeval Jewish History, and the first class of semester was the expulsion of the Jews from England, and the second was the expulsion of the Jews from France, and the third was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and one of my nice Americal fellow students said something witty about how great it was to be American. And the professor, Dr Benjy Gampel, with the withering scorn of someone who actually knows about history looked down on my colleague and said, ‘If you really think you are so safe in America, you have no understanding of the nature of history.’   

But it’s not just the Americans and not just the Jews.

Anyone else here remembers Gordon Brown announcing the end of the boom-bust cycle?

There is, in us all, a kind of willful amnesia. We don’t want to live in a world where hatred exists, so we imagine we don’t. We don’t want to imagine that it could get worse, so we suppress the knowledge that it ever did.

So what to do?

I want to share two things, two thing I commit myself to, and two things I need your assistance with.

The first thing is we must never forget, we must always memorialise, even as the names are too many and the eyewitnesses too few.

Last week I recited the 11 names of those murdered in the Tree of Life Synagogue. This week I want to recite the names of the 2,000 who were murdered, and the 1,000 synagogues destroyed.

I want to count aloud every Mark’s worth of damage that Nazi acolytes caused and Jews had to pay for, on that awful night 80 years ago.

I want to hold up and hand around photos of this destruction from 80 years ago this very weekend,

Together with photos of what German Jewry used to look like, back in the days when German Jews couldn’t imagine anyone othering them - so at home did they feel as full and equal members of German society.

I want to that term, ‘Never Again’ to sound like a question, a fearful and un-easy gnawing in the gut. Because for the term ‘never again’ to sound confident and secure shows, in that phrase of my Jewish history professor, no understanding of the nature of history.

That’s the first thing.

We need to remember and recount and retell so we don’t fall into selective amnesia.

The second thing we all need to do is make the case for the principle of decent society most under threat in this unstable world.

We need to make a much better case for the principle of plurality; the plurality of people and the plurality of ideas.

Too much of the proto-facism of contemporary society is based on an erroneous idea that there are proper members of society and then there are others. And the others don’t really count as full human beings and we would do well to make their life as tough as possible.

And that idea turns my stomach.

It should turn all our stomachs even if we aren’t Jewish ourselves, even if we can trace our ancestry on these isles back to the days of Angles and Saxons and Celts, because if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t respect otherness - the plurality of people,  if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t recognise that all human beings are equally made in the image of God, and all human beings deserve the same opportunities and chance for a decent life they will eventually come for us.

Eventually, we will all fall foul of being too dark-haired, or too blond or too tall or too short, or too fat or too thin, for we are all too much one thing or not enough another.

Pastor Niemoller wrote in the 1930s

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s that time already.

If we allow ourselves to slide into a society where difference is not celebrated and protected and promoted, they’ll come for us all.

That’s we plurality of people is so important.

The same thing goes for how we talk, how we debate, how we disagree. Debate, disagreement is good.

It’s how we learn, it’s how we discover things we don’t know. Disagreement isn’t to be disparaged. We need a plurality of ideas. People who take positions that are outside the mainstream are the people who most deserve our respect - they are the most important people in society. They aren’t to be threatened, abused, locked up. They certainly aren’t to be strangled, chopped up and boiled in acid in an Embassy in some foreign land. In what kind of world are we living?

So, do something to promote difference. Give some money to our Drop In Centre for Asylum Seekers, talk to me about getting involved in Citizens UK. Do something.

Promote disagreement, listen harder to those who disagree with you in the hope of learning something you don’t already know. Tell others also to see debate as a good thing.

A belief in plurality isn’t just being nice. It isn’t just a belief in human rights, it’s self-interest - it’s the thing that might, just, save us.

Just don’t forget, and don’t just watch on as decency slides away.

Here’s another thing we learnt 80 years ago.

It’s the bystanders who were, in the end, the people who made the difference.

Don’t be a victim, wrote the great Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, Don’t be a perpetrator, but, above all, Don’t be a bystander.” — Yehuda Bauer

For as Simon Wiesenthal, camp survivor and Nazi hunter put it

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

Shabbat Shalom

9/11 One Year On & Ten Years On

Nine years ago I was asked by the UJIA to speak at the one year anniversary of 9/11.

Re-reading this talk, given to end precisely as the minute's silence in NY commemorated the fallen, I'm struck by its heat and some of the turns of phrase I no longer stand by. But I'm also how my own sense of un-ease around 9/11 has changed little this past decade.

May the memory of those killed be a blessing.

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I’m a Rabbinical Student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. I’m also a Chaplain (both of these studies have been and continue to be generously supported by the UJIA), so when I found myself in New York on September 11^th 2001 I volunteered with the Red Cross, offering support to rescue workers and later families who lost loved ones.

 

I was there, on the morning of September the 11^th, in Manhattan, on the morning when it felt like the world was coming to an end.

I was there, on the evening of September the 11^th, standing at Ground Zero smelling the acrid smells and, treading in the white ash of two hundred stories of crumpled and crumbled masonry. I stood there and listened to the pain of the firefighters who lost perhaps half their company in the attack.

I was there in the weeks and months after the attack, at the family assistance centre, where family members of those who had lost loved ones wandered aimlessly around a vast sprawl of stalls offering food stamps, death certificates, shiatsu massage and a place to sit and talk and feel like you were not alone in the horror of survival.

 

And now I feel queasy.

I feel queasy about my own hunger to be near the pain, why did I feel the need to go down there, to volunteer, to spend hours upon hours listening to the pain of those who had suffered?

Why in NY does it sometimes feel like a competition - who was closest to the horror, who saw the towers fall from their window, who knew someone who was killed, who, were it not for the intervention of some mysterious fate, would have been in a meeting on the 98^th floor at just that time?

I feel queasy looking at the TV footage and reading the papers. Why the need for ‘new, never before seen photographs’ why the need for ‘footage from inside the towers’ shot by a camera crew who may, or may not have been filming at the expense of assisting with the rescue.

Even Yahoo!, the internet search engine has been transmogrified into a tomb for the day, the usual bright colours replaced by a swathe of grey.

But none of this moves me. It all seems vaguely fatuous.

 

There is an urge to get close to this tragedy, and I fell for it, as hard as anyone.

It is as if the attack of September 11^th represents something ‘authentic,’ something real in our fabricated and insulated lives. As if the sight and the memory of people jumping from the upper floors of the Towers will in some way help us be more real. As if their death will give our lives more meaning.

 

Ernest Becker in his master-work - Denial of Death suggests that we are so scared of our own demise that we seek to hero-ise lives, our lives and the lives of others as a way of escaping our fear of our own fragility. The problem being that we forget that our lives are indeed fragile and our posturing counts for little.

We are now in the ten days of teshuva, a time for feeling and acknowledging our fragility, in the words of the Rosh Hashanah Machzor -

we are dust and our end is dust. Like a clay vessel easily broken, like withering grass, a passing shadow, a fleeting breeze, a vanishing dream.

 

But these days seem to be passing with the war cry of the seemingly immanent invasion of Iraq. Here come the cavalry, we are off to seek our own immortality, heroes one and all.

 

Sadly our pursuit of the heroic may be even worse than merely futile. This comes from the preface to Denial of Death,

‘Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.’

We transfer our own fear of death, our own fear of futility onto others, any others, niggers, homos, A-Rabs and of course the yid.

We transfer our dark side onto them and then we strike against them. Maybe it is our desire to pursue our own heroic agenda that causes, what Becker calls, a surplus of evil in the world.

 

So what is the purpose of standing here remembering September 11^th 2001, I’m not sure we can rely on the vacuous notion of remembering in order not to let the errors of the past re-occur. In the last year I have seen precious few attempts to build bridges between different worlds and different world views.

Rightly or wrongly, the Arab world seems as angry with the West today as it was a year ago, if not more angry.

Who among us thinks there are less young men and women willing to give up their lives in a suicide attack this September 11^th than there were last year?

 

We have responded to Sept 11^th not with a introspective systemic attempt to understand and heal.

We have responded with fake bravado and name calling. I remember, perhaps worst of all, standing as one of 100,000 Jews outside the White House hearing Bibi Netanyahu plead for the world not to adopt a stance of ‘moral equivalence’ in comparing the actions of the Israeli government to that of the suicide bombers. And then in the next sentence he compared Yasser Arafat to ‘Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, the Ayatollahs and Osama Ben Laden.’ And the crowd cheered wildly.

 

We have responded to our fear of death by bolstering our own sense of righteous indignation. Frankly we are being foolish, we are learning the wrong lessons.

So what are the right lessons?

 

I want to offer three texts and three commentaries for our battered time,

One

kol yisrael aravim ze le ze - all Israel acts as a surety for one another- Sadly this text is not enough, not even close to being enough. In this global village we can no longer afford parochialism, even if our parish is as large as our entire people.

Each of us serves as a surety for the entire world whether we like it or not. My life is intricately wrapped up with that of a cocoa farmer in Ghana, a Buddhist monk in Daramasala and, much as I hate to admit it, a suicide bomber in the Gaza Strip.

 

Two

Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof - Justice, justice shall you pursue.

We must reject the possibly of reading this verse from Vayikra as calling for the pursuit of justice by any means necessary.

Rather, as Martin Buber demands  in Ten Rungs, we must understand the seemingly redundant repetition of the word tzedek to insist that Justice must be pursued by Just means only. The unjust means, employed to what we might dearly hope to be a just end, is and must be an anathema. If we act immorally or unfairly in our pursuit of what we perceive to be justice we give the lie to our actions. We give the lie to our proud and haughty claims to be the true guardians of peace and justice in the world. We become fundamentalists, blind to anything other than our goal.

Worse still, it is surely inevitable that our unjust means will cripple the vision of the just end we pursue. Acting unjustly will cause us to misunderstand and, even if we succeed in imposing our ends on the world, they will be surely be flawed and unjust, just like everyone else.

 

Finally

We must take seriously the notion of the fragility of the world and act, act honestly and humbly, but act anyway. In Hilchot Teshuva 3:8 Rambam states the following

 

Every person must see themselves as half worthy and half guilty.

And so too all the world, as if it were half worthy and half guilty.

A person sins one sin, behold they tip themselves, and tip the whole world, onto the scale of guilt.

A person performs one good deed, behold they tip themselves, and tip the whole world, onto the scale of merit.

 

Our actions, our futile, fragile actions, are capable of tipping the entire world to the scale of merit. While we cannot complete the work of redemption, we are not free to desist from trying.

 

One: kol yisrael aravim ze le ze is not enough.

Two: Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof means we must pursue justice justly.

Three: Our actions are capable of tipping the entire world, either for merit or for guilt.

 

We are shortly to stand in silence, after which I will offer a prayer for peace. It seems almost foolish to offer such a blessing in this time, almost a brahca l’vatalah – a futile blessing, but I refuse to believe that peace is not possible. This is a statement of faith, ani ma’amin even though there has been delay – I believe that those things that bring us together will triumph over those things that tear us apart. I believe in the perfect possibility of humanity – we are all created in the image of God. And I believe, to lift a liturgical note from the Passover Seder, that in the end the Holy Blessed One will triumph over the angel of death.

 

But for the next few minutes we shall stand in solidarity with those who lost their lives, those who mourn, those who are yet to lose their lives, and those who are yet to know the pain of that mourning.

Memories of 9/11, and other things

 

 

As many members will know I spent the night of 9/11 2001 at Ground Zero as a Chaplain. I have written up some of my memories of that night for the Jewish Chronicle this week.

 

For those of you who don’t receive the printed edition, you will be able to read the article on-line at www.thejc.com from Thursday evening. I will also be sharing some of what I consider to be the important Torah lessons from that horrendous time this Shabbat during the sermon.

 

Memory – the Hebrew root is ‘zachor’ – is a vital component of what it means to be a Jew. We remember creation, we remember Exodus, we remember Zion as we sit by the ‘Rivers of Babylon,’ we remember, of course, the Holocaust. Perhaps the focus on memory is at its most sharp in the context of the upcoming Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur season. As well as the call to remember our sins and failings in the past year we also engage in the Zichronot – as series of verses recited in the Rosh Hashanah Musaf service – and the Yizkor – Memorial service on Yom Kippur.

 

This Monday, 12^th and the next I will be sharing something thoughts on the nature of Jewish memory in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. As the great Jewish historian Y H Yerushalmi, most famous for his work ‘Zakhor,’ wrote, ‘memory is always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous.’ As we prepare to give account of our year and indeed our very lives, I hope you will join me to consider, in the company of our Mahzor and great sages, quite what this journey into memory really entails. 8pm at the Synagogue. All welcome.

 

Shabbat shalom

 

 

On Jews and Physical Prowess - Part One

It's a quiet couple of weeks in terms of Torah narrative,

We are held between the steady advancing of the rituals of 9^th of Av and, in the world out there, the Olympics are starting.

 

I thought I would take the opportunity over this Shabbat and next to do something a little different, less a sermon, more a look at the relationship of Jews and sport, or more specifically the question of the physical vitality, the strength and the power of the Jewish male, particularly in the face of the sorts of destructions we commemorate in these three weeks.

It's a chance for me to unpack an element of Jewish culture, through some 3000 years.

I hope you will enjoy coming on the journey with me.

 

In the red corner –

A little overweight from all the fatty food, a little puny from all the sitting and studying Talmud sits the stereotype of Jew as weakling. Emasculated, lacking in vigour, soft, pallid.

 

Like any powerful stereotype it has mah lismoch alav – that on which to rely.

We are in the midst of the Three Weeks where we commemorate the destruction of our Temple.

The big, tough Babylonians and then the big tough Romans came and kicked down our house and the prime liturgical response to this act of physical aggression perpetrated against us is to sit on the floor and read poems of lament.

 

Blayl zeh -  On this night weep and wail my children, for on this night my Holy Dwelling

Eli Zion varreyha – Wail O Zion and her cities.

 

Our prime theological, liturgical, halachic response to this archetypal moment of violence is to sit and weep, like a small child who has had too much sand kicked in their face.

 

But I want to go back even further, into the myths of our foundation. I want to suggest that the emasculated stereotype of the Jewish male has powerful Biblical roots.

 

Howard Eilberg Schwartz suggests the root of the problem is none other than God – a God we imagine most often in the role of male, indeed that is the true meaning of the preferred Rabbinic name of God – hakadosh baruch hu – the holy blessed one blessed be He.

There are of course other names, most equally, or even more obviously macho-male, in the Song of the Sea we cheer on – adonai ish milchamah – God, Man of war.

 

And the problem with this very male, testosterone bursting macho God, Says Eilberg-Schwartz, is that 'when a man confronts a male God, he is put into the female position, so as to be intimate with [him]... The defining traits of what it meant to be a man were called into question.'^[1]

 

This is perhaps most clear with God's greatest partner, Moses.

Moses who sees God 'face to face,' (Num 14:13)

who God speaks to 'mouth to mouth' (Num 12:8)

It's an intimate relationship. But what is Moses' role, or more precisely, what is the role Moses thins he is playing.

At one point the Children of Israel complain to their leader and Moses turns to God who seems to expect him to sort out the problems of the disgruntled children of Israel.

אָנֹכִי יְלִדְתִּיהוּ  כִּי-תֹאמַר אֵלַי שָׂאֵהוּ בְחֵיקֶךָ כַּאֲשֶׁר יִשָּׂא הָאֹמֵן אֶת-הַיֹּנֵק

Did I give birth to this people that you should tell me 'carry them in your breast' like a nursemaid carries a suckling child. (Num 11:14) says Moses employing one of the more startling images in Biblical literature.

Moses sees himself as a wetnurse.

No prizes for guessing who wears the trousers.

 

And what of Abraham – Abraham who God commands to self-circumcise – self-emasculate perhaps, the Freudians amongst us are already having a field day, but listen to the language of the Midrash.

Listen to how the Rabbis, one Rabbi in particular, understands God's relationship with Abraham.

 

There is a problem in the verse where God calls to Abraham and demands

הִתְהַלֵּךְ לְפָנַי וֶהְיֵה תָמִים

Walk before me and be whole.

How, wonder the Rabbis, can the Bible say such a thing when God is just about to order the mitzvah of circumcision.

How, wonder the Rabbis, can circumcision, be seen as making a person tamim – whole.

 

Amar Rabbi Levi

Rabi Levi said, this is like a noble lady who the King comands, 'Walk before me.' She walked before him and her face went pale, for, thought maybe there is some defect in me?

The King said, 'You have no defect, but the nail of your little finger is slightly too long; pare it and the defect will be gone.'

Similarly, God said to Abraham, 'Thou hast no other defect but this foreskin: remove it and the defect will be gone.^[2]

 

In this Midrash from Genesis Rabba Abraham becomes the female, the matrona, the noble lady to God's virile and slightly Svengali-esque male.

 

Indeed this pattern of reading men who wish to be in relationship with God as women is at the heart of what is probably the most single-minded Rabbinic read in all Midarshic literature – the treatment of the Song of Songs.

 

The Song of Songs is a love poem, a conversation between a male lover and his female beloved.

There are damsels without number, but only one is my dove, my perfect one, the only one of her mother, the delight of her who bore her. Maidens see and acclaim her, queens and concubines praise her.  (Song 6:8-9)

But in an extraordinarily systematic hermeneutic engagement the Rabbis turn this erotic poetry into a paean about the love between a masculine God and, yes, a female people of Israel.

only one is my dove, my perfect one

This, say the Rabbis, is Abraham

 the only one of her mother,

This, say the Rabbis is Isaac who was his mother's only son^[3]

the delight of her who bore her.

This, say the Rabbis, is Jacob who was choice to his mother

Maidens see and acclaim her, queens and concubines praise her.

The tribal ancestors and the children of Jacob.^[4]

 

In one fabulous moment of failure of nerve the ultra-pious translators of the Artscroll edition of the Song of Songs actually go as far as to translate

שְׁנֵי שָׁדַיִךְ כִּשְׁנֵי עֳפָרִים

Your breasts are like two fawns

As 'Moses and Aron are like two fawns.'

The good translators are admittedly relying on a fine Midrash^[5]

But it would no doubt rather crush any masculine pretentions of Moses and Aron to know they have been compared to breasts.

 

The Rabbis just don't seem to prize physical vigour – certainly they don't pride themselves on masculine physical vigour.

The great scholars are all applauded.

The great men of might less so.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an important passage in Baba Metzia where Rabbi Yochanan is seen bathing in the Jordan river by Reish Lakish.^[6]

Reish Lakish is mighty man, we have a story of him selling his soul to the a school of gladiator trainers^[7], only to then kill his masters with a makeshift knuckle-duster and make an escape – Russell Crowe eat your heart out.

But through his encounter with Rabbi Yochanan he is weakened.

He tries to pole-vault his way across the Jordan River using his lance, and can't.

Again, the Freudians amongst us don't have to stretch too far to see what might be being suggested.

Reish Lakish becomes a great scholar, a mighty warrior in the arguments of the Bet Midrash, no longer a man capable of wreaking havoc with a knuckle duster.

 

Daniel Boyarin, in his extraordinary contemporary work, Unheroic Conduct, suggests there is something deliberate in all this emasculation.

The Rabbis, seeing the destruction of their physical property and the physical Commonwealth of the Jewish Nation State by the Romans decided not to fight the Romans at their own game, but instead to invent a different – non-violent, non-sporty, non-physical game – the game of Talmud Torah, intellectual sophistry.

We Jews might not be able to beat the Romans of the Hellenists at war, or wrestling, or javelin tossing, or whatever the Romans or Hellenists are getting up to in their Olympian dreams, but we can run rings around them whenever there is an intellectual argument to be had.

 

This is the Talmud in 'funny mode' perhaps you had to be there.

 

"Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania went to Athens to dispute with the philosophers. 'Where is the centre of the earth?' they ask him. He points at a spot and says, 'Here.' 'How can you prove it?' they ask. 'Bring ropes and measure it yourself'" (Bechorot 8b).
'There is a pit in the field, can you bring it to town.'  - make some ropes from bran flour and I'll do it, the Rabbi responds.

 

As I say, it was probably funnier back in the days, but the intention is clear.

The Jew is the smart witted one, able to triumph as long as the contest is conversational.

 

Indeed that model of smart Jew running intellectual rings around the non-Jews is a motif of Jewish tales right through into the modern period.

One of the great classic Jewish jokes of the early 1900s tells of an old man travelling on the Trans-Siberian Express. The train stops and an officer in the czar's army gets on. He and the jew travel for a while in silence.
Suddenly the officer grabs the jew by the lapels and demands. 'Tell me, why are Jews so clever.'

The Jew is silent for a while and eventually responds, 'It is because of the herring we eat.'

The carriage goes silent again until, ten minutes later the Jews takes out a piece of herring, makes a bracha and starts to munch.

The office grabs the Jew by the lapels again – How many pieces of herring do you have?

'A dozen'

'How much do you want for them?'

'Twenty Rubles' – it's a small fortune. The office hands over the money, takes a bite from the herring and starts to chew.

Suddenly he stops, 'Twenty rubles, that's ridiculous, I could have bought all this herring for five kopecs.'

'You see,' said the Jew, 'it's working already.'^[8]

 

It's working already.

And for sure something worked.

Somehow between the impositions of the Babylonians and the Romans, and this lot of Jew-haters and that lot of Crusaders, something worked.

We survived and we got on as Jews, valuing what we value, turning our back on the values of baron Pierre de Coubertin – no "Citius, Altius, Fortius," 'no faster, higher, stronger' for us.

 

But there has been another voice.

A voice which railed against all this prizing of the intellectual at the expense of the physical,

There has been a voice which has decried the emasculated response to the physicality of the world, especially at times when the physicality of the world tipped over into violence against the Jews.

Who are we kidding as we sit here and weep, getting our skulls crushed and our children hacked in pieces.

 

I want to share from probably the greatest work of probably the greatest of all Hebrew poets, Chaim Nahum Bialik.

It is a disturbing response, suitable only for sharing in these three weeks.

He is writing in the aftermath of the destruction of Kishinev.

In a tremendous act of bravery Bialik writes this poem as God, criticising the people for their standard, non-physical response to the violence of the anti-semite.

Of course Bialik has no sympathy for the perpetrators of violence against the Jews, but his most sharpened critique is directed against his own people.

 

Look in their hearts – behold a dreary waste

Where even vengeance can revive no growth

And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction

Rises, no blasphemous oath.

Are they not real, their bruises?

Why is their prayer false?

Whu, in the day of their trials

Approach me with pious ruses,

Afflict me with denials?

Regard them now in their woes:

Ululating lachrymose

Crying from their throes

Ashamnu Bagadnu

Their hearts however do not believe their lips…

Speak to them, bid them rage!

Let them against me raise the outraged hand –

Let them demand!

Demand the retribution for the shamed

Of all centuries and every age!

Let fists be flung like stone

Against the heavens and heavenly Throne.

And thou, too, son of man, be part of these.^[9]

 

By the time of the darkest days of Jewish history sitting and weeping in the face of physical aggression was no longer the only accepted Jewish response.

By the time of Holocaust, Zionism was already in full flight – Jews, at least some Jews, were embracing the physical, the corporeal, Mr Tough Guy.

And not just in the Land of Israel, and not just because of threats of violence as brutal as the pogroms of Kishinev and the Holocaust. We have Daniel Mendoza, Mendoza the Jew as he was known – greatest pugilist of his day, in the late eighteenth century.

But the turn to the physical, the embrace of the body, of might and corporeal strength is new – its modern.

 

Indeed, turning the clock right up to date there is a Jewish state.
A Jewish army and Jews are called upon to deal with the challenges of their own strength.

And next week, we'll look at these challenges a little more closely.

 

Shabbat shalom,

---

^[1] God's Phallus p. 137-8

^[2] Gen Rabba 64:4

^[3] Clearly a reference to Gen

^[4] Gen Rabba 94:1

^[5] Shir Rabba 5:5,1

^[6] BM 84a

^[7] See Jastrow, Dictionary,  695, see also Boyarin loc cit p.128 f3 where Rabbi Bun's remark in Talmud Yerushalmi Kilayim 27a, 'and here Rav Kahana spread his net over Reish Lakish and caught him' is understood to refer to the fighting style of the rearius.

^[8] This version is based on Telushkin, Jewish Humour p. 44

^[9] Trans Roskies, From Literature of Destruction p165 pp. lines 227-251