A Memorable Sermon on Israel

"Rabbi Gerson's Latest Sermon on Israel"

Sermon – Kee Tetze 5762

Sir Ernest Shackleton was a great explorer who found himself and his crew in a life or death crisis when they had to abandon ship in the icy waters around Antarctica.

It was 1914, and Shackleton's expedition had planned an unprecedented land crossing of the frozen continent. When the ship got stuck in the ice and sank, the crew began an unscheduled 18 month survival test. They stayed alive as they moved among the drifting ice floes until they eventually found an island, where they established a camp. When their provision began to run low, Shackleton and several crewmembers boarded one of their salvaged lifeboats and made a daring 800-mile voyage to a whaling station. They later returned with a ship, and all the 27 men survived the ordeal.

There are two types of people during a crisis - those who freeze and those who focus. Shackleton might have been stranded in one of the coldest places on the planet, but he and his team never froze.

The Jewish calendar compels us to become a bit more reflective than usual, as the days of summer and the month of Elul wane into the past. Our task as penitents, who hope to seek and secure some real estate in the Book of Life, is to occupy ourselves with heshbon ha-nefesh – a full inventory of our souls and inner lives.

It is a time to be honest with ourselves – about what is realistic and what is folly, about what is communicated through our actions and our discretions, about how we have fulfilled and fallen short of our own expectations and those placed upon us by our community.

It is also a time to review and to attempt to make sense of all that has invaded our world during the past year. I dare say that the task is exponentially more daunting this year, given the revelation of terrorism that was unfurled last September 11.

The haunting nature of our present situation is magnified by the prospect of the notion that individuals in high places of leadership were in a position of awareness, based upon empirical evidence, to do something that would stop or curtail the events of 9/11, but they either denied or ignored the red flags.

Furthermore, there were leaders, operatives, and even governments that lent wholesale support to the strategies of evil. Many of these entities were presumably our allies or, at the very worst, non-combatants on the plane of ideological and geopolitical strife.

Our crisis as a people this Erev Rosh Hashanah is by no means a one-dimensional one.

The great medieval thinker, Rabbi Moses Nachmanides, taught that prayer in situations of national crisis is obligatory because it has the educative function of making the community realize that its survival in history depends exclusively on God's providential guidance. Rabbi Moses Maimonides, however, ascribes a completely different function to crisis prayer. For him, crisis is not an occasion that highlights dependency on God, but exclusively an occasion for teshuvah (repentance and return to God). The community should always react to times of trouble by examining its own past moral failures so as to rectify them. (Hartman p. 243)

Tis the season to be honest about where we wore sunglasses in the midst of the night, and were summarily caught blinded by the light of day!

Prof. Ruth Wisse, the Martin Peretz professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard University touches upon our omission as Jews and as Americans in a stirring op-ed piece published recently in the Jerusalem Post, entitled "From Oslo to Ground Zero".

She writes:

As a non-citizen, I could do nothing to stop the leaders of Israel from carrying out this plan (the Oslo Accords, the pact signed in 1993 after an intensive series of negotiations between members of the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization).

The physical threat to the country was then uppermost in the minds of many other American opponents of the Oslo Accords. Norman Podhoretz, Frank Gaffney and others predicted that hostilities against Israel would likely increase if Arafat were installed as head of a proto-Palestinian state. For the same reason, the voters of Israel had elected Rabin on a platform that explicitly rejected overtures to the PLO.

Military experts in Israel pointed out that the overhasty agreement had not taken account of security needs or developed a set of fall-back procedures should Arafat fail to keep his side of the bargain.

Arab dictators and monarchs, none of whom rules democratically, had refused to accept the reality of a sovereign Jewish people in its historic homeland.

Israel had been defending itself on the axiomatic premise that peace could only come if the Arabs stopped their aggression against it. It was now about to reverse that sensible policy by rewarding its most virulent enemy.

Arafat was before Osama bin Laden the world's leading terrorist. As confounder of Al-Fatah in the late 1950s and head of the PLO since 1969, Arafat had spearheaded an "armed Palestinian revolution" against Israel. The PLO's targets were always civilians: The murder of the Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972 was but the most notorious example of its methods.

Israel was now prepared to recognize the PLO terrorist network as the representative of the Palestinian people, entrusting its 20,000 armed "policemen" with the protection of Israel from terrorists.

The PLO "Covenant" a term that parodied the sanctity of God's brit (convenant) with Abraham was not a summons to national self-liberation, such as Zionists or other modern national leaders issued in their time. The PLO denied Jews their history and peoplehood in order to claim national legitimacy in their stead. It did not simply oppose the Jews as occupiers of part of the land it claimed for its own, but rejected the historical reality of a millennial-old Jewish people.

Consider, then, what it meant for Israel to give the PLO responsibility for governing the Palestinian Arabs on the basis of a letter that promised to inaugurate "a new epoch of peaceful coexistence."

First, Israel was capitulating to Arafat because it felt it could no longer tolerate the toll of terrorism, yet asking the terrorists to renounce the methods that had handed them this major triumph. Surely, the evidence entitled Arafat to believe that terrorism had vindicated his professional calling.

Second, all that Israel extracted from him in return was a promise that "those articles of the PLO Covenant which deny Israel's right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and longer valid."

Arafat would submit (note the future conditional tense) the necessary changes to the Palestinian National Council for approval. But if the PLO covenant was predicated on Jewish illegitimacy, what possible import could Arafat have ascribed to an agreement with the people he intended to supplant?

Third, the precipitous deal with Arafat, based on secret negotiations conducted by non-elected Israelis, had the hallmarks of a revolutionary act rather than a considered democratic process. Declaring Arafat an ally over the objections of many patriotic citizens and overseas supporters had the absurd effect of repudiating friends with the expectation of gaining security from enemies. The self-styled "fixers" who thought they were reforming Arafat actually furthered his agenda.

But since Israel could no more impose peace on the Arabs through concessions than it had by winning wars, this charade only meant that Israel would be blamed more relentlessly when it turned out that the conflict had never ended at all. The painful truth of the so-called "Arab-Israeli conflict" is that only the Arabs have the power to stop it. Oslo did great damage inside Israel by encouraging the false hopes of an anxious society. Tenfold greater was its damage in the international arena by conveying the misimpression that Israel could put an end to Arab belligerence if only it were more forthcoming. When the Arabs resumed their vilification of Israel, Europe joined in with a vengeance. Once Israel had fostered the impression that its concessions could bring peace to the Middle East, Europeans could blame Israel on the pretext that it had not made enough concessions.

In truth, the resurgence of European anti-Semitism has been the most shocking outcome of the Oslo accords. Israelis feel that they should be respected for having given such obvious proof of their good will. Instead, the country has been increasingly slandered as the obstacle to peace.