The recurrent theme of Yom Kippur is a declaration—literally, a litany–of our sins. We proclaim publicly, and repeatedly, “We have sinned, we have been treacherous.” We enumerate, in great detail, the sins for which we seek forgiveness, “the sins committed willingly and unwillingly, the sins committed without thinking,” and so forth.
We repeat these confessionals all throughout the day, because it really takes a lot of work to take these statements to heart. If it were easy to take care of our shortcomings, we would have done it already. Fact is, we have trouble recognizing them, much less correcting them. So we have to be reminded again and again, hoping the message somehow will get through.
And when you look carefully at the list, you notice something interesting. The list doesn’t really deal in specifics: “For the sin of murdering, for the sin of cheating on our taxes, for the sin of driving too slowly in the left lane, for the sin of rooting for Dallas, …”
Instead, the lists of sins deals with attitudes, mental postures that are conducive to sin. Haughtiness, for example, or deceit. And an overarching concern seems to be perversity—perversity not in terms of sexual perversity, although I suppose that would fit, but rather perversity as something grotesque, something contrary to reason or sense, something that is nearly impossible to deal with because it’s so outside the contours of our normal consciousness. It’s almost like dealing with severe mental illness, where words and concepts don’t mean what they normally mean. Doing teshuvah, repentance, for perversity is difficult indeed.
Rav Kuk, the great Israeli authority, pointed out that the first form of teshuvah is for a person to return to himself. And, in our perversity, we have strayed far from ourselves, especially our Jewish selves; and we desperately need to return to ourselves. Tonight, I wish to focus on one manifestation of this perversity, and offer some guidelines for working our way back to where we should be, back to ourselves, and, ultimately, back to G-d.
For we have drifted away from ourselves, as surely as our ancestors, in biblical times, drifted away from the worship of the one true G-d, to worship idols instead. Why was the temptation so fierce? Why did some of us suggest going back to the idolatrous world of Egypt, even at the cost of slavery, rather than moving forward through the desert to a promised land? After all that we had been through, after all the direct contact our people had had with G-d, who rescued us from the depths of subjugation, why would we leave G-d and turn to other, obviously inferior, divinities? Then, as now, the reasons are the same. When faced with a confused, emotionally wrought, and conflict-filled situation, we seek simplicity, a way to alleviate our tensions, a conformity which allows us to avoid conflict with those around us—an unchallenging easy way out, rather than taking a stand for something complex, completely different, and anything but simple.
That is what we did in the past. I would argue that many in the Jewish community are doing exactly the same today, and doing it, perversely, in the context of historical realities that in the absence of perversity would otherwise be perfectly clear.
To my mind, the worst perversity we face in the Jewish community today is this: we attribute to others greater powers of moral insight than we ourselves possess. We make an idol of “world opinion,” and the various people and institutions that purport to speak on its behalf. We attribute to it a moral accuracy and depth which is entirely undeserved. We fail to accept that our new idols of “world opinion” are exactly parallel to the idols of old, those of whom it is said, “They have eyes, but they see not, they have ears but they hear not.”
And I fear that today, as was the case 3000 years ago, only a minority of us are prepared to stand alone and say, “No.”
All the nations of the world are prepared to respect the United Nations Human Rights Council. Why shouldn’t we? Why? Because it puts countries like Syria on the council, and lets people like Ahmadinejad be its president. And that means they have nothing to say to us. Nothing. Full stop.
It is perverse to imagine otherwise, no matter what “world opinion” says.
The European Union speaks with great condescension about Israel’s human rights record. Why shouldn’t we take their comments to heart? Because this is the same Europe where right wing parties zoom into leadership positions the second Middle Eastern immigrants are seen as an expensive and socially divisive force. Oh, and I almost forgot: Europe doesn’t exactly have a sterling record when it comes to respecting the human rights of Jews, not then and not now. Even today, there are anti-Semitic parties on the rise in countries where for all intents and purposes there are no Jews, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, just to mention a few. And they lecture us on human values? And we’re supposed to care what they think? We’re supposed to trust their moral judgment more than our own? That would be perverse indeed.
Everyone else trusts and admires nongovernmental organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Why don’t we? Because they provide a profoundly distorted picture of reality, even falsifying materials in order to paint Israel in as dark a way as possible, magnifying Israel’s transgressions, real and imagined, while virtually ignoring the madness happening all around Israel, particularly the Palestinian terrorism with which Israel is grappling. Just to mention one example, Amnesty released a video. It purported to disprove Israel’s claim that it offered warnings before attacks in Gaza, in order to prevent civilian deaths. They even had a stopwatch, recording how long it took between Israel’s warning shot and the full attack on a particular building. It was about a minute. But now it has been conclusively demonstrated, and Amnesty admitted, that a full five minutes were cut from the recording of the incident.
Meanwhile Hamas rockets are never referred to as “reckless or disproportionate use of force,” even though every single one of them is a war crime. Amnesty and similar organizations rationalize the actions of terrorists, while passionately criticizing those who fight terrorists. Meanwhile they recently refused even to study, much less condemn, the increase in anti-Semitism in Britain, which is at its highest point in over 30 years, In Syria there are 300,000 dead, and millions of refugees, but they can only focus on Israel? Seriously? For decades so-called “human rights activists” have been claiming that Israel—not medieval barbarians, not religious fanatics, not brutal dictators, but Israel—is the source of all the problems in the Middle East. The fact of the matter—which no one will admit—is that they have the blood of those Syrians on their hands. And we should listen to them? Utterly perverse.
How about the State Department? ? They’re always willing to volunteer their thoughts about how “unhelpful” Israel has been in the peace process. Well, considering the fine job they’ve done everywhere else in the Middle East—think Iraq, Syria, Libya—it’s easy to understand why someone would want to rely on their judgment rather than, say, the judgment of 6 million Jews who actually live there. Just for the fun of it, here’s a quiz: name the one country in the Middle East that’s stronger today than it was 10 years ago.
Iran. What does that tell you? To be perfectly clear, I don’t really condemn the current administration for the Iran nuclear deal. I think that it was a diplomatic triumph. The problem is, the assumption that diplomacy means the same thing to the Iranians as it means to us is utterly ludicrous. Functionally, that treaty is as useful as powdered water.
Of course, we aren’t supposed to be concerned about Iran because, in the words of former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter [formerly of Princeton], Israel is its own worst enemy—which is pretty remarkable considering how stiff the competition is.
And I suppose we should ignore the fact that thanks to the State Department, the United States does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Not even West Jerusalem, where the Knesset and the home of the President are located, is considered the capital of Israel. Jerusalem which, I remind you, we Jews are to hold higher than our very highest joy.
And we’re supposed to let them be our moral compass? How perverse!
To those who suggest we should idolize the mature and balanced wisdom of the State Department, we should respond the way Harry Truman did. He once had a conversation with Israel’s Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion said, “Mr. President, I am the Prime Minster of a small country, you are the President of the United States of America. What advice can you give me?” And Truman said, and I’m quoting, “never trust those S.O.B.’s in the State Department.” That’s what Harry Truman said. That’s the President of the United States talking. And we’re supposed to know better than him? And rely on the State Department to protect Jew’s interests, and Jewish lives, better than Jews do?
Perverse thinking.
And then there are those—including the new head of the British Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn and, once again, Amnesty International, and all the usual world-saving suspects—who want to impose an arms embargo on Israel. ISIS is literally next door, on Israel’s border, and they want to make Israel weaker. Think about it. Take 30 seconds now and just imagine what would happen if ISIS ever got its hands on Jews. One border incursion, just one Israeli village. Imagine what would happen to the men. Imagine what would happen to the women. Imagine what would happen to the children.
And now get clarity: There is a word for people who want to disarm Jews when confronted with an enemy like that. They’re called anti-Semites.
And there’s a word for Jews who support them. They are called perverse.
And there is a word for the outcome of this perversity: Betrayal.
For 2000 years, 2000 years facing persecution, expulsion, even extermination, we have begged for a return to our Land, the Land of Israel. Jews dreamt of returning to Israel—not just as a matter of geography, but rather, “liyot am chofshi bartzeinu,” “To be a free people in our land.” Sovereignty, that’s what it was all about.
Every day, three times a day, we recited the Amidah, asking for our people’s redemption, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, a return to national independence, an opportunity to be in control of our own destiny. In our time, we have been privileged to witness the miracle of the return to the Land, the rebirth of the State, the return of Jerusalem to our control.
And here we are, hardly a generation later, and some Jews, some of us, are begging for someone, anyone, to take our sovereignty away, to save us from ourselves—we, who after a few decades living in the most inhospitable neighborhood in the world, under constant pressure, outnumbered 100 to 1– have supposedly shown ourselves incapable of managing our lives in a responsible and moral way.
The contention that we must be saved from ourselves demonstrates an arrogance that is absolutely breathtaking. If someone were to assert that blacks, or women, or virtually anyone else, didn’t know what’s in their own best interest, they would be hooted off the stage, or worse, as condescending bigots, or worse. But about Jews, its okay. And the corollary of this is just as perverse: that the people who make the decisions about life and death shouldn’t be the Israelis who either will see their children going into those horrible tunnels to flush out the terrorists; or will find themselves running to shelters with babies in their arms when the sirens go off. No, we can’t rely on them. We have to leave it up to some professor from Berkeley, or some casino magnate from Vegas.
Let me be perfectly clear. Any attempt to use outside force—particularly American power, economic, military, political—any attempt to override the wishes of the democratically elected government of Israel is illicit. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the left or the right. There is a world of difference between saying, for example, “I think we should withdraw from the territories,” and saying, “I want to use the power of the American government to force Israel to withdraw from the territories, regardless of the position of the Israeli government, because that’s my opinion.” And I hasten to add that of course the same principle would go for those who argue we should stay in the territories. It is my firm conviction that such attempts at strong-arming the government of Israel will not be supported here at Bnai Tikvah.
This is why I strongly reject the position of J Street—not because I agree or disagree with the idea of a two state solution, or wishing the Israeli government negotiated more actively, or similar J Street positions, because those are perfectly legitimate topics for discussion and disagreement—but because J Street has been explicit about its desire to use the American government to get Israel to conform to its—that is, J Street’s, will—because they are convinced they have “the answer.” That is beyond the pale, not to mention incredibly dangerous.
We can assume that there are today left wing factions in Israel that would love to see the American government help them counteract a right wing Israeli government, and would applaud the effort of American Jews to support their position. Surely that is so, and the temptation to do so is high indeed. But we must be aware of the Pandora’s box that such intervention opens. For I can guarantee you, with emunah shelemah, with complete faith, that someday there will be a left wing government in Israel, and there will surely be right wing groups in Israel who would sincerely love it if like-minded American Jews worked to undercut that Israeli government.
And all the while, from the right and from the left, we would be enlisting forces that in the long run would not necessarily have Israel’s best interests in mind. If—or rather, when—we turn to those forces some time in the future and say, “Thanks for your help, but please don’t meddle in our affairs,” they will turn to us and say, “What are you talking about? You’ve been asking us to meddle in your affairs for years. What makes you think we’re going to stop now?”
And in a heartbeat, our sovereignty is lost.
What a truly perverse outcome.
Before moving on, I would like to say a little bit more about our discourse on Israel here at Bnai Tikvah. Settlements or no settlements, borders here or borders there, more negotiations or less negotiations: all of these and more are perfectly legitimate topics for discussion. A good case could be made for settlements being the very salvation of Israel. A good case could be made for settlements preventing a positive solution to the conflict. We should hear people making those cases here at Bnai Tikvah, and it is my intention to make sure it happens.
There have been a lot of discussions recently about keeping our Israel programming balanced. And my short response is that yes, of course, we have to keep it balanced. But my longer answer is that it is a misunderstanding to think that in our discussions, we need to listen to “the other side,” quote unquote. There is no “other side.” There is no opposition. When we are discussing the efficacy and impact of settlements, or the policies of this or that government, or any other issue involving Israel, we may have differing views, but we are not on different sides, we are not opponents, much less enemies. We are simply Jews trying to get at the truth, trying to understand a complex situation, and we’ve got a couple thousand pages of Talmud to teach us that we have to be able to accept, and respect, multiple points of view at the same time.
In that context, I would like to point out that, contrary to what some people believe, I am not a right-wing supporter of Netanyahu. If I were living in Israel, it is unlikely, perhaps even extremely unlikely, that I would vote for the man. But that’s not the issue here. We aren’t participating in Israel’s elections. We are trying to do what we can in order to help Israel carry out the policies determined by its government. So I am not a fan of Netanyahu. I’m a fan of the Prime Minister of Israel. And in a few years, I will be a fan of a different Prime Minister of Israel.
So the opposition is not those who prefer a candidate from a different party. The opposition is not those who want Israel’s borders to be here and not there. The opposition is those who want Israel’s borders to be nowhere, because Israel simply should not exist. The opposition are the enemies of the Jewish people, and if they are Jews who think this, they are indeed their own worst enemy.
In passing I note that those who maintain this view rarely extend the same logic to Palestinians. That is to say, they have no problem with a Palestinian state, as brutal and militaristic as it surely will be. After all, this is the culture whose major accomplishment in the annals of civilization is training their children to blow themselves up. As usual, their sins will be minimized, and entirely detached from the question of the legitimacy of their state, while any Jewish sin (or even, any concession to reality that may seem harsh) will be used to question Israel’s right to exist.
Here’s a subtle point, perhaps a little difficult to understand, but crucial. The establishment of the State of Israel is a return to history. It is a return of Jews to an international stage where we are not merely the powerless victims of the outside world but empowered state actors who make decisions, who must make decisions and can make decisions, and who must live with the consequences of those decisions.
And those consequences are not always pretty. Because returning to history means engaging in the rough and tumble of real life. It means power, and armies, and death. Somebody’s death. Somebody else’s death. Somebody else’s death instead of our own. And that is no small thing.
Israel sets unbelievably high standards when it comes to protecting human life, even enemy human life. Contrary to the picture painted in the media, world experts in these areas, military and legal, have suggested that Israel’s standards for preventing deaths are actually too exacting, setting a bar so high that other nations, like the U.S., Great Britain, and France, would not be able to reach it.
But for some, the moral price that Israel has to pay in order to survive is a price that is intolerably high to bear. The perspective of those who are revolted by Israel is that even one death is unacceptable, the unavoidable consequence of a return to history. Better there should be no state at all, than to create a state where people are actually going to have to die as a result of it.
To them, if Israel cannot be perfect, then it cannot be.
To me, a statement like that after Auschwitz verges on the incomprehensible. And, needless to say, such comments are made about no other country on the planet. Only Israel is held to such an absurd standard. But this view is at the core of the BDS movement, that is, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement.
I assert: after Auschwitz, to promote Jewish weakness is a crime against humanity. That is why people like Judith Butler, perhaps the leading intellectual anti-Zionist, argues that we should “unlink” the Holocaust and Israel, because weaker minds like ours might think that in a world that wants the Jews dead, a state of our own sounds like a pretty compelling idea. The anti-Zionists claim that they merely want a Judaism purged of any chance of state violence. Well, that’s very nice, but whatever they are talking about, it isn’t Judaism. Because Judaism wants to build a real moral society in a real imperfect world.
It goes with out saying that having power carries with it responsibility. But the operative part of that sentence is, “It goes without saying.” Of course we recognize that responsibility. It’s the most obvious thing in the world that we recognize that responsibility. Show me another people on the planet more self critical than we are!
Have we succeeded? No, not yet. It is most certainly true that Israel is morally flawed. All historical states are flawed, that’s the price of admission to history, which is imperfect to say the least. And, needless to say, those flaws must be addressed. But once again, the operative words in that sentence are precisely “needless to say.” Of course Israel is going to grapple with those flaws. They’re discussed in every single newspaper every single day. But when ISIS is at the gates—and they are at the gates—obsessing over Israel’s internal issues while ignoring the threat from the outside is like rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic. Putting West Bank checkpoints on a par with ISIS child rapists is morally perverse in the extreme.
But, again, I want to be perfectly clear. Horrible things sometimes do happen in Israel. But when horrible things happen in Israel, among Jews in and outside of Israel there is a nearly unanimous reaction, an instinctive heartfelt anguish. What is remarkable, though, and thoroughly perverse, is the fantasy that there is a similar ritual pattern in the world of our enemies when they do horrible things.
What happens instead is that some politician goes through some heavily scripted P.R. exercise (remember Arafat donating blood after 9/11? [He just didn’t donate enough]), and with the help of media spinmeisters we are left to imagine that everyone shares his opinion.
To believe that requires us to ignore the dancing in the streets after the massacres, and the naming of those streets after terrorist murderers. It also requires us to ignore the statistics. Dozens of statistical surveys, in countries around the world, indicate that about a quarter of Muslims worldwide support terrorist attacks on civilians. The number doubles when it comes to terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. So what we’re talking about is somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion people wanting us dead, or subjugated.
To ignore that takes a lot of ignoring. Or ignorance. Or the substitution of a perverse delusional fantasy—aren’t all people alike?—for a painful reality—no, they are not.
Perversity takes many forms. One is to imagine that it’s those primitive, militaristic, violent Israelis who are the problem. If only they wouldn’t be so….Israeli….then everything would be all right, and the world would love us again just as they have all along when we didn’t have power.
That was a joke.
A variant on the theme says that we need to do more for peace—as if our doing more will invariably lead to more cooperation, as opposed to more intransigence.
The enemies of the Israelis—which is to say, the enemies of the Jews, have made it perfectly clear that they are genocidal. Israel must be wiped from the map, or driven into the sea. They are not fighting for territories, unless you mean all of the territory. They are not fighting against settlements, unless you include Tel Aviv and Haifa as settlements. They want it all, they want to destroy us more than they want to build their own nation, and—and this is the crucial point—they have made all this perfectly clear to anyone who would listen.
But many of us don’t listen. Why? Just like they know what’s really good for the Israelis, better than the Israelis do, they also know what our Palestinian or Arab or Muslim opponents really want, better than they do. And in the perverse thinking of our modern day idolaters, our enemies don’t really want us dead, even though they say they do, and try their damndest to make it so. All too many of us, like our idols, “have ears, but we hear not.”
Instead of listening, all too many of us perversely imagine that it is somehow Jewish behavior—rather than Jewish national existence—that causes the problem. If only we wouldn’t build fences to stop homicide bombers, there wouldn’t be any homicide bombers.
Oh but wait, there were homicide bombers before there was a fence. In fact, that’s why there is a fence. But we mustn’t let a few facts get in the way of a good self-hating prejudice. It must somehow be our fault because, after all, we are Jews.
Perversity.
I’m reminded of the old joke about two Jews, Moshe and Shmuel, about to be executed by a firing squad. When asked if they wanted blindfolds, Moshe said no. To which Shmuel said, “Moshe, don’t make trouble.”
But today, we make trouble. Proudly. We do not go quietly. And that makes some of us very uncomfortable.
One of Israel’s greatest thinkers, Aharon Megged, wrote: “Since the 6 Day War, and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation,” an intelligentsia that had come “to regard religious, cultural, and emotional affinity to the land…with sheer contempt.”
Here’s a concrete—if unbelievable—example. The current Israeli government has instituted a new policy. When foreign diplomats first come to Israel, they have always been taken to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. Now, a second destination has been added: the Kotel, the Western Wall.
There are two things to note about this. The first is that the policy had to be changed at all. You mean to tell me that the Temple Mount, the holiest spot in our Jewish cosmos, has been in our hands almost 50 years, and only now are they telling foreign diplomats that this is an essential part of our character? Could you imagine an American official saying “the Statue of Liberty? Oh, that….”
And to add to the perversity: amazingly the change in policy has triggered howls of protest—from secular Israelis. Making diplomats visit the Kotel, they say, introduces a primitive, religious, even tribal aspect to what some would like to think is a purely secular, political conflict. But of course, when it comes to absurd and ahistorical Arab claims concerning the Al Aksa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, their sensitivities must be respected in every political forum, and on the ground, even to the point where some would say that it is forbidden to say the worlds “Temple Mount” while standing on the Temple Mount, for fear of infuriating the Arabs who insist that it be called Haram al Sharif, the name that was given to it roughly 25 centuries after it first became the Temple Mount.
You can’t make this stuff up. Perversity!
Edward Alexander, a wonderfully incisive thinker and defender of Israel, recently wrote, “The creation of the State of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations by a martyred people of the will to live. …What, I wonder, must it be like for a Jew to be blind to this?”
To which I can only add, what must it be like for a Jew to be willfully blind to this?
Such is the cost of perversity.
I have spoken long, and hard, about Israel tonight, and the perverse rejection of it that has such terrible consequences for our people. But this sermon is not only about Israel. It is about our relationship to our Jewish identity altogether. For when all is said and done, one cannot truly reject the legitimacy of Israel without, as a preliminary phase, rejecting the legitimacy of Judaism itself. And this, I fear, is a reality for a huge, and perhaps, increasing percentage of Jews.
Living as a committed and searching Jew, it is hard to look at any aspect of Jewish life without feelings of awe and appreciation. The wonderful tranquility and equilibrium of Shabbat. The mindfulness that governs even something so basic as consuming food in a holy fashion. The sanctification of sexuality, the elevation of speech, the triumph of character, and on and on.
But we have been seduced, as our ancestors were, by the false assumption that our values and principles are inferior when compared to the society around us. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We have to return to ourselves.
A story is told of a rabbi in the old country, speaking to a downtrodden and fearful congregation, battered both by the changes of modernity and the imminent threat of attack from the so-called “enlightened.” And the rabbi stood up and said, “Gevalt, yidden: Never forget: you are the children of royalty.” Without that memory, we are led into perversity. But with that memory, we can do teshuvah and return to ourselves. Because of that memory, we can stand as we are supposed to stand: a free and independent and powerful people in the world, a people with a unique voice, a unique destiny, and a unique vision.
Ken yehi ratzon. Amen.