June/July
2008 It's
late June and you are reading these words in early August. Such is the lead time
needed to put together The Voice. I receive a number of synagogue newsletters
and I have to say, hometown pride notwithstanding, The Voice does well in representing
our community. Thanks to Judy Hershberg, Barbara Hammond, and now Naomi Barell
for all their work in production, writing and editing. Here
at the synagogue we are in our brief summer lull. Week after week in the spring,
our youngsters were called to the Torah for their b'nai mitzvah. Those of us fortunate
enough to have been present know how powerful was their chanting of Torah and
Haftarah; and how well thought out and from the heart were their speeches. Y'shar
koh'khem, righteousness is their strength, and mazal tov to their families. B?nai
mitzvah will resume in August. It's always great when a lot of members of the
congregation attend, whether or not they know the family or child. Also
in August, we are privileged that the Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education
(CAJE) has chosen Burlington for its annual meeting. This is a major event in
the life of the North American Jewish community. If you meet any of the participants
around town, welcome them. For a week, they will substantially augment the Jewish
population of Burlington. On
a different subject, you may recall the tzuris last September that was generated
around the South End Art Hop. At the request of the Israel Center of Vermont,
the leadership of SEABA (the South End Arts and Business Association) which sponsors
the Art Hop, has established policies to ensure that there be no repetition of
what happened. Through active participation of many of us in the Jewish community,
the process worked out well, and I hope many of us will attend the Art Hop this
year. Some of you know
that, during this past year, I've taken up sculpting found pieces of wood (roots,
dead tree limbs, etc.), and I've decided to put some of my work on display at
the Art Hop. At this point, two of my pieces will be submitted for the juried
selection and a number of others on display at one of the Art Hop sites, Kelliher
Samets and Volk, 212 Battery Street. It begins early in September. I
hope you are getting some rest this summer. I look forward to seeing many of you
in the fall, and not a few around town as we all get outside when we can! June/July
2008 Just
back from Israel in early May, I found myself buoyed by the sense of family afforded
by minyan each evening at Ohavi Zedek. I attended minyanim at a variety of synagogues
in Israel, often at the Kotel, the Western Wall which is near where I stayed.
These were wonderful moments, yet not quite the warmth of home. After
a little more than a week in Israel, I sat for about an hour in a coffee shop
within sight of the Old City, a few yards from the armistice line of 1948. I began
to reflect on my experiences of the previous days during which I visited the very
charged sacred spaces of Jews, Christians and Moslems, as well as the equally
charged territory claimed by both Jews and Arabs. With
fellow members of the Board of Directors of Kids4Peace—USA, an organization
which sponsors interfaith experiences for 10 to 12-year-old children from Jerusalem
and the United States, Moslems, Christians and Jews, there were times that I was
overwhelmed by the intensity of experiences at the holy sites of the three faiths: - in
the Christian Quarter as Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians celebrated Orthodox Easter;
- with
Jews at the Kotel, joining in the celebration of b'nai mitzvah on Monday morning,
including a group of about twenty boys from Bersheva, many of whom were descendants
of immigrants from Ethiopia;
- at
Yad Vashem shortly before Yom Ha'Shoah, walking through the new exhibit with Israelis,
Americans, Asians; sitting side by side with Hasidim, women and men, as the pictures
and sounds and exhibits made us forget momentarily our differences as we became
one witness together of the Sho'ah;
- with
Moslems at prayer, a rare opportunity these days to wander inside the Al Aksa
Mosque and the Dome of the Rock;
-
in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, at a community center whose educators encourage
Palestinian children to hold onto the hope of returning to their ancestors' homes
inside Israel proper;
- in
a home in the settlement of Efrat, with the father of six who moved from Chicago
to the West Bank twenty some years ago, and who now is as settled in as any of
us here in Vermont;
- in
the home of one of the Moslem advisors of the Kids4Peace camps, where a deep sense
of friendship was challenged by a beautiful needlepoint on the living room wall,
depicting a Palestine whose boundaries eliminate the State of Israel.
These
and any number of other experiences left me, sipping tea in a coffee shop garden
under a beautiful Jerusalem blue sky, with a mixture of intense wonder and despair.
Earlier that day, at precisely
10 am, Yom Ha’Shoah, I stood on King George Street, a few blocks up from
Meah Shearim, amidst about forty or fifty people, truly a mixed multitude of humanity
which happened to be walking or in buses or cars at that moment. As the tempered
wail of the siren caught our ears, each of us stopped. Those in cabs and other
cars got out and stood by their open doors. Everyone in the buses stood. For
a moment, all was still. Truly still, as our sages say everything was still when
God revealed the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai. Way beyond thought, it was a visceral
experience. Tears of the heart welled up, and some on faces. I cannot imagine
how it felt at that moment for the survivor with whom I had exchanged greetings
a few days before as we walked by each other on Shabbat in a poorer neighborhood
of Jerusalem, the numbers on his arm exposed by short sleeves on a day when the
temperature rose to above 100 degrees. When
the wailing of the siren ended, everyone just moved on. Car doors closed slowly,
the buses began to roll, the pedestrians went back to walking and talking and
shopping. Ahm yisrael chai. The people of Israel live. The people of Israel lives.
In Jerusalem, the name
Caligula is reduced to the name of a shoe store. Zohar is a dry cleaners. But
the most intense memories sit right beneath the surface. As they do for us as
well, as we remember—as we are called by Torah each week to remember—that
ahm yisrael, we people of Israel are called to be a holy people. It
is tough to be called to holiness. Holiness requires that we raise the bar of
human behavior in times when the bar is set very low. It is tough to be called
to holiness because we know—or at least it would be good for us to know—that
we Jews are inherently no better than any other people. There is no special sanctity
to the souls of Jews. Every human soul is unique and equal. And yet, is it not
true that the soul of the people of Israel—not just Israelis but all of us
Jews—the soul of the people of spiritual Israel always was and continues
to be called to the highest standards of sanctity?
Such sanctity is founded
on attaining, personally and socially, the balance of justice. Is this not ultimately
the banner of the spiritual people of Israel? Over the past century, we have come
to learn that our very physical survival depends upon the State of Israel. The
State has its own flag. Yet, like the flag of the United States of America, the
sanctity of this piece of cloth depends upon the moral standards of the citizens
of the State. In early
May, we celebrated with great joy the 60th anniversary of the founding of the
State of Israel. As we continue to reflect on our people’s rebirth following
the Shoah, may we take to heart words that Orthodox Rabbi Henry Siegman wrote
about twenty years ago. May we take to heart a Zionism “that is inclusive,
that unites and does not divide; that reflects the optimism, confidence and openness
of a truly free people.” This was the kind of Zionism that we celebrated,
together as a community, so wonderfully here in Burlington this year. “Without
justice”—this Arthur Miller speaking when he received the Israel Prize—
“without justice at its center, no state can endure as a representative of
the Jewish nature. “The
Jewish obsession with justice goes back to the beginnings, of course. Job, after
all, is not complaining merely that he has lost everything; he is not some bourgeois
caught in an economic depression. His bewilderment derives of a horrendous vision
of a world without justice, which means a world collapsed into chaos and brute
force. And if he is called upon to have faith in god anyway, it is a god who in
some mysterious manner does indeed still stand for justice, however inscrutable
his design may be. “It
is time for Jewish leadership to reclaim its own history and to restore its immortal
light.” Arthur Miller. To
be sure, he was not talking about letting other people walk all over us. This
past week, I saw at great length the separation barrier, the fence, the wall,
that now divides Israelis and Palestinians. At some places, it impinges on Palestinians
with meanness. Just the same, let us say clearly, it saves lives. When
I was in Israel, I had occasion to stand on the Palestinian side of a checkpoint,
waiting to return to Jerusalem from Bethany, which is on the Palestinian side
of the separation barrier. Right before us on line was a Palestinian mother with
two children, one 12 and the other 2. We had been speaking with them before the
12-year-old went through the gate and tried to communicate with the Israeli soldier
inside the guard house. It was difficult because the only Arabic he knew was the
bit of classical Arabic he had learned in school. Meanwhile, we discovered that
the 2-year-old had slipped through the gate with his older sister. The soldier
started yelling at her and she couldn’t find her way back to her mother. To
be sure, no one was physically bleeding. Just as certainly, two children were
terrified. And like the separation barrier as a whole, the check points save lives. Rabbi
Henry Siegman and Arthur Miller do not call us to commit suicide. They simply
remind us of Torah’s call, never to cease from the effort to strive to raise
the bar on human behavior; never to cease from experiencing the demand of compassion,
of conscience. The State
of Israel turned 60 and its existence continued to be questioned by millions of
people in its neighborhood and now around the world, including here in Burlington,
Vermont. Yet we are threatened from within as well as from without, for it is
tempting to lower our own standards as we experience the miserable standards of
our enemies who brag about choosing death over life. It
is important for us to consider the idea (here presented in Rabbi Siegman’s
words) that “the issue of ethics is joined precisely at the point where self-interest
impinges on the interest of others. A morality that so narrowly calculates self-interest
as to leave no compassion for others does not deserve the name ‘morality.’” We
people of Israel live, we survive because we have remained faithful to the commands
of our God. Ahm Yisrael chai! The people of Israel live to encourage the nations
of the world to be true to the values of a Jerusalem on high: the sovereignty
of justice, the peace of reconciliation that may enable humanity to abide. ~Rabbi
Joshua Chasan |
