Rabbi's Blog

The tale is told of an old man who groaned from his heart. The doctors were sent for, and they advised him to drink goat’s milk. He went out and bought a she-goat and brought her into his home. Not many days passed before the goat disappeared. They went out to search for her but did not find her. She was not in the yard and not in the garden, not on the roof of the study-house and not by the spring, not in the hills and not in the fields. She tarried several days and then returned by herself; and when she returned, her udder was full of a great deal of milk whose taste was as the taste of Eden. Not just once, but many times she disappeared from the house. They would go out in search for her and would not find her until she returned by herself with her udder full of milk that was sweeter than honey and whose taste was the taste of Eden.

One time the old man said to his son, “My son, I desire to know where she goes and whence she brings this milk which is sweet to my palate and a balm to all my bones.”

His son said to him, “Father, I have a plan.”

He said to him, “What is it?”

The son got up and brought a length of cord. He tied it to the goat’s tail.

His father said to him, “What are you doing, my son?”

He said to him, “I am tying a cord to the goat’s tail, so that when I feel a pull on it I will know that she has decided to leave, and I can catch the end of the cord and follow her on her way.” The old man nodded his head and said to him, “My son, if your heart is wise, my heart too will rejoice.” 

The youth tied the cord to the goat’s tail and minded it carefully. When the goat set off, he held the cord in his hand and did not let it slacken until the goat was well on her way and he was following her. He was dragged along behind her until he came to a cave. The goat went into the cave, and the youth followed her, holding the cord. They walked thus for an hour or two, or maybe even a day or two. The goat wagged her tail and bleated, and the cave came to an end.

When they emerged from the cave, the youth saw lofty mountains, and hills full of the choicest fruit, and a fountain of living waters that flowed down from the mountains; and the wind wafted all manner of perfumes. The goat climbed up a tree by clutching at the ribbed leaves. Carob fruits full of honey dropped from the tree, and she ate of the carobs and drank of the garden’s fountain.

The youth stood and called to the wayfarers: “I adjure you, good people, tell me where I am, and what is the name of this place?” They answered him, “You are in the Land of Israel, and you are close by Safed.”

The youth lifted up his eyes to the heavens and said, “Blessed be the Omnipresent, blessed be He who has brought me to the Land of Israel.” He kissed the soil and sat down under the tree.

He said, “Until the day breathe and the shadows flee away, I shall sit on the hill under this tree. Then I shall go home and bring my father and mother to the Land of Israel.” As he was sitting thus and feasting his eyes on the holiness of the Land of Israel, he heard a voice proclaiming:

Come, let us go out to greet the Sabbath Queen!

And he saw men like angels, wrapped in white shawls, with boughs of myrtle in their hands, and all the houses were lit with a great many candles. He perceived that the eve of Sabbath would arrive with the darkening, and that he would not be able to return. He uprooted a reed and dipped it in gallnuts, from which the ink for the writing of Torah scrolls is made. He took a piece of paper and wrote a letter to his father:

“From the ends of the earth I lift up my voice in song to tell you that I have come in peace to the Land of Israel. Here I sit, close by Safed, the holy city, and I imbibe its sanctity. Do not inquire how I arrived here but hold onto this cord which is tied to the goat’s tail and follow the footsteps of the goat; then your journey will be secure, and you will enter the Land of Israel.”

The youth rolled up the note and placed it in the goat’s ear. He said to himself, when she arrives at Father’s house, Father will pat her on the head, and she will flick her ears. The note will fall out, Father will pick it up and read what is written on it. Then he will take up the cord and follow the goat to the Land of Israel.

The goat returned to the old man, but she did not flick her ears, and the note did not fall. When the old man saw that the goat had returned without his son, he clapped his hands to his head and began to cry and weep and wail, “My son, my son, where are you? My son, would that I might die in your stead, my son, my son!”

So he went, weeping and mourning over his son, for he said, “An evil beast has devoured him, my son is assuredly rent in pieces!”

And he refused to be comforted, saying, “I will go down to my grave in mourning for my son.”

And whenever he saw the goat, he would say, “Woe to the father who banished his son, and woe to her who drove him from the world!”

The old man’s mind would not be at peace until he sent for the butcher to slaughter the goat. The butcher came and slaughtered the goat. As they were skinning her, the note fell out of her ear. The old man picked up the note and said, “My son’s handwriting!”

When he had read all that his son had written, he clapped his hands to his head and cried, “Vay! Vay! Woe to the man who robs himself of his own good fortune, and woe to the man who requites good with evil!”

He mourned over the goat many days and refused to be comforted, saying, “Woe to me, for I could have gone up to the Land of Israel in one bound, and now I must suffer out my days in this exile!”

Since that time the mouth of the cave has been hidden from the eye, and there is no longer a short way. And that youth, if he has not died, shall bear fruit in his old age, full of sap and richness, calm and peaceful in the country of life.

This well-known fable by S.Y Agnon from early in the 20^th century before the Zionist dream of the modern state of Israel was established, expresses the mythical longing and pain of continued exile and the intense yearning and alienation.  Israel is more of a mythological place than a real one.

In 1984 an eighteen year old boy was sitting on a plane on his way to Israel for the first time.  He was not really feeling that excited as there were reasons why he did not want to leave home at this time.  He was not brought up in a particularly Zionist home and was not really sure why he was going to this place or what he was going to do there.  On the plane, he even wrote in a journal of his ambivalence to be going.  And then the wheels of the plane touched down at Ben Gurion airport and inexplicably and surprisingly, tears rolled down his face and he felt that he had come home.  Back then, passengers walked down metal steps from the plane to the ground and some people got down and kissed that ground, before boarding the buses that took them to the terminal building.  Greeted by an old friend at arrivals, the young man began a journey that was originally supposed to be three weeks and became three months.  The feeling of being home never left him and the trip transformed him.  He was me.  Since then I have been to Israel so many times that I have lost count, I lived in Jerusalem for two years, I have ridden three times in a 300 mile bike ride from Jerusalem to Eilat, I have seen so much of that beautiful country and I love it.  My story is so different to the Agnon story, as we have a state and that plane ride form London was just four hours, not a whole life’s dream.  Israel is not a mythical place, it is a real place and it is a very complex place and full of pain, as well as joy.

Two very significant books came out this year that each told the story of Israel in brilliant and challenging ways and were both published initially just in English even though they were written in Israel.  Even though they are set entirely within Israel and barely mention America, they seem to want to challenge us to redefine our relationship as Jews in the diaspora, from a mythical one to a real one.  Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land” covers almost every aspect of modern Israeli society, including the hedonism of Tel Aviv’s club scene, the Sephardi community, settlers, peace activists and so much more.  He asks the uncomfortable questions about what the early Zionists and founders saw when they looked across the valley at Arab villages.  “Like Dreamers” by Yossi Klein HaLevi, a book I have read much more recently, tells the story of Israel by telling the individual and national stories of seven paratroopers in the Israel Defense Forces, all from the 55^th Brigade that liberated Jerusalem’s old city in the Six Day War of 1967.   Within this one group of comrades in arms, celebrating the fulfillment of a 2000 year old dream at the Western Wall, is the whole political and social story of Israel to this day.

The ideologically driven religious Zionists and founders of Gush Emunim, the Jewish settlement movement, like Yoel Bin- Nun and Yisrael Harel, were in active service with Marxist Kibbutniks.  On one extreme, the book describes religious zealots implicated in the plot to blow up the Al Aqsa Mosque and liberate the Temple Mount and on the other side, Udi Aviv, a radical communist who was arrested in Damascus for his collaboration with an anti-Zionist underground and served twelve years in an Israeli prison.  Yossi Klein HaLevi expresses their divisions like this:

“The founders of the kibbutz movement in the early years of the twentieth century envisioned the future Jewish state as a laboratory for democratic egalitarianism.  Many religious Zionists believed that the creation of a Jewish state would be the catalyst for the Messianic era…” and yet, he continues later, “there remained a closeness between them because of what they’d been through together.”

In spite of these profound differences, the author states, within the paratroopers “there was no unease…no sense of “us” and “them.” Regardless of what they wore or didn’t wear on their heads now, they had all worn the same helmets a few weeks earlier…But there was another, unspoken gap between them.  Religious Zionists who proclaimed their belief in chosenness were, in effect, insisting on the right of the Jews to behave as any other nation, while secular Zionists who rejected chosenness were insisting that Jews be held to a higher standard.”

It’s moving in a way that people with utterly different ideologies could continue to be friends and allies, against impossible odds.  As history moved on, the sense of unity and pride from 1967 dissipated in 1982, during the Lebanon war and, in Klein HaLevi’s words:

“For the first time there were antigovernment demonstrations, even as soldiers were fighting at the front.  The euphoria of the summer of ’67, the delusion of a happy ending to Jewish history, had been replaced by an awareness of the agonizing complexity of Israel’s dilemmas.”  This small country was already developing an impossible landscape of competing ideologies and political perspectives, which continue to this day.  Of course, there have been moments in this history where there have been a profound sense of unity, including largely this summer when 1000s of rockets were being launched on Israel by Hamas. There was a very moving Rosh haShanah message from Rachelle Fraenkel, the mother of one of the three murdered teens Naftali, with a profound sense of the unity of Jewish people all over the world, a true family.  However, it is certainly not true that there is consent and agreement in Israel all of the time.  I once heard a political scientist at Hebrew University, Isaiah Gafni, who said that politically Israel was “a junkyard of broken utopias.”  The emotional fabric of Israeli society, punctuated by wars and internal conflicts means, according to HaLevi

“no trauma was ever really forgotten, only displaced by new trauma, so that the country’s emotional life resembled one of its archeological sites, an accumulation of disrupted layers.”  And then, there is the outside world.

World opinion has so often demonized Israel in unbelievable ways, none more so than the UN resolution in 1975, described movingly in Like Dreamers.

“On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly voted, 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, to declare Zionism a form of racism.  The resolution, initiated by Arab nations and endorsed by Soviet and Muslim blocs, was the culminating moment of the Arab success, impelled by the oil boycott, to isolate Israel.  Sitting in solemn assembly, the UN in effect declared that, of all the world’s national movements, only Zionism – whose factions ranged from Marxist to capitalist, expansionist to conciliatory, clericalist to ultrasecular – was by its very nature evil…Addressing the General Assembly, Israel’s UN ambassador, Chaim Herzog, noted that the resolution had been passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the Nazi program that in effect began the Holocaust.  The attempt to destroy the Jews, said Herzog, was always preceded by the attempt to delegitimize them.  Then he ripped up a copy of the resolution…Zionism had been turned against itself: the very means for freeing Jews from the ghetto had become the pretext for their renewed ghettoization.”

And today, of course, we have the BDS movement growing in its campaign to boycott, divest and sanction Israel until the occupation of the West Bank ends. We even had our very own protestor for a while outside our shul. There is a huge surge in anti-Semitism throughout Europe.  Thousands of French Jews left France this summer, feeling it no longer a safe place for Jews and incidents of anti-Semitism are on the rise in my native London. Sheik Yussef Hardawi, an important Sunni theologian in Qatar, doesn’t deny the holocaust and says he would welcome another one! It feels like there are crazy trends in the world again.  Even though the UN resolution was revoked in 1991, it still feels like the world hates Israel.  The painful question is whether among those of us in America and elsewhere in the diaspora who love Israel, as I do, there is room for criticism and debate, like there most certainly is within Israel.

Two articles came out this week; one in the New York Times called “Talk in Synagogue of Israel and Gaza goes from Debate to Wrath to Rage,” and one in a blog called Religion Dispatches with the title “Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis seek healthy Israel Dialogue after Gaza.”

The articles talk about the fact that so many pulpit rabbis are afraid to talk about Israel because they are getting chastised and threatened. Whatever they say.  One rabbi spoke very strongly in defense of Israel’s military action against Gaza this summer and had people resigned their membership because “there was no room to criticize Israel” and a rabbi in New York had a board member resign from her shul, followed by a vicious social media against her, after she read the names of Palestinian children killed in the conflict.  Oy.  So, is it safe for me to say anything about Israel?

I want to apologize especially to the Israelis in our community who felt very abandoned during the terrible war this summer.  Rockets were falling in huge numbers daily, everyone was running for shelter with sometimes just 15 seconds to get there, relatives and loved ones were serving in the IDF and one Israeli member sadly shared that not one person from the community asked how she was doing, how her family was coping.

So, is our relationship one of fiction and fantasy and perpetuation of dreams?  Or is it based on something real and deep; a love and connection that cannot be broken even if it is questioned, even if we wrestle?  If our brothers and sisters over there can disagree so radically and so passionately, then can’t we disagree and be civil about it?  There must be room for different opinions on Israel, even while we are supporting her.  So many American Jews take radical positions, either to the left or the right, without having a real relationship with the place.  In some cases, they have never stepped foot on Israeli soil and yet they have such strong opinions! I am thrilled, by the way, that through our social action committee, there have been opportunities for facilitated dialogues on the Israel Palestine conflict that allow deep listening. A new series is beginning on September 30^th for which you can pre-register.

The hardest part of all of this for me as a humanitarian is the reality of the Palestinians.  Yes, Hamas have made it clear that they want to destroy Israel, and their rockets and tunnels had to be stopped and Israel has every right to defend her citizens. That is clear to me.  It is also very clear that there are many, many Palestinians who are innocent victims caught up in the violence and who are suffering.  I will not accept that all Palestinians, all Muslims want to harm us. There are Palestinians who are working for peace and there are Muslims, even here in Boulder, who want friendship.  Many of us had the chance to meet an amazing activist last Saturday night at our selichot program. Ali Abu Awaad and his partner in peace Rabbi Hanan Shlesinger, an Orthodox Jewish settler rabbi are radically challenging the known paradigms, daring to build bridges that others on both sides are determined to destroy.  Ali’s passion and vision and commitment to non-violent activism are so inspiring and hearing both of these courageous men speak a few nights ago about their transformations gave us hope that grassroots movements like their Roots/Judur/Shorashim initiative, can make a difference. Ali went from a political prisoner in an Israeli prison, with revenge bubbling in his blood, to reaching out in brotherhood to Jewish settlers and other Israelis in the West Bank and beyond and he created a peace center there. Hanan’s whole world as a right wing settler was turned upside down when he met Ali for the first time.  Who knows if there can ever be a one state solution, two state solution, eleven state solution?  What seems more important is the capacity to build relationships with the other, to hear narratives so different to our own.  If these two men can become friends and embrace each other’s story, who knows what might be possible? A rabbinic text called Avot d’Rabbi Natan says that the mighty one is the one who makes his enemy his friend.

I am no prophet.  I don’t know what will happen in the Middle East and there are some very scary possibilities.  I do know that I will never stop loving and supporting Israel and I know that we have to be able to have a big tent in our community that allows civil discourse that reflects the diverse feelings and opinions that we have, grounded in a loving relationship with a real place, rather than a fantasy.  Today’s Torah reading sees Avraham making an agonizing choice, to sacrifice his son or disobey his God.  An entirely unexpected outcome presents itself, something he could never have predicted.  We have to open our imaginations on Israel to a third way, something we do not yet know, rather than our discussions becoming a third rail.  Ali and Hanan and other individuals and many other grassroots organizations working towards peace and coexistence give me hope, and it is with that hope, along with my hope for Israel’s continued security and prosperity, beyond a myth and dream, that I want to enter this New Year.