Rabbi Yair Robinson
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787
Letting Love Rule
When I got to Beth Emeth 17 years ago, I was told in various ways—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—that I should plan to preach every year about Israel. A colleague would ask, “so what are you saying about Israel this year?” AIPAC or J-Street or a half-dozen other organizations would invite me to this or that webinar or in-person program to talk about the appropriate messaging. And one or two folks even lightly chastised me for not planning a sermon about Haaretz, reminding me of how important it was, as if I might forget thee, O Jerusalem.
And I always chafed at the suggestion, for several reasons. One, which is probably something I should work out with my therapist someday, is my personal inclination to reject that which I’m told to do. The punk in me is still there ready and eager to throw down. Aside from that, however, I always had a sense that I wasn’t just being invited to speak about Israel, but to speak a specific way about Israel: organizations who were all too happy to tell me what the ‘right’ message on Israel was; the sense that people wanted a mirror reflecting back their own ideas and beliefs, and not to be challenged too much when it came to the Jewish state. Mostly, I didn’t want to always have my hands tied talking about Israel as an issue. My job, as I believe it to this day, is to teach Torah, and the High Holy Days are among the greatest opportunities to do so to the largest audience. The job of a rabbi, above all, is to teach Torah.
So let me teach some Torah. Specifically, from the Talmud, Tractate Yoma, daf 9b if you’re curious. Why was the First Temple destroyed? It was destroyed due to three matters: idolatry, moral depravity and bloodshed. But when the Second Temple stood, people were engaged in Torah study, practiced the mitzvot, and engaged in acts of lovingkindness. Why was it then destroyed? Due to wanton hatred. Which means, the Talmud teaches, that wanton hatred is the equivalent of idolatry, immodesty and bloodshed.
My friends, in this moment, I increasingly believe that our people—here and around the world, including and especially in our Homeland—are experiencing that which destroyed both temples at the same time. We are experiencing idolatry, moral depravity, bloodshed, and especially wanton hatred. And I am afraid for our future as a result.
Does that sound extreme? I don’t think so. We have as a society succumbed to idolatry. Not the religious school variety of bowing to idols, or cartoon characters of Haman, but the real version, as the rabbis understand it, is any kind of objectification of anything or person, or even an idea. Think of the various political leaders whose followers treat them like messianic figures, who hang on every word, and then contort those words when they turn out to be odious. Think of all the ways we have become divided and even hostile to one another, substituting partisan politics for critical thinking, moral leadership, or even having a personality, when it should be your favorite sports team, musical, or Star Wars film, as God intended. Political disagreement, we have been told, is no longer an opportunity for learning or changing minds, but is an existential threat; not only a critique of our world view, but a personal attack. We can have a spirited debate over which side started it, the left or the right, but I don’t know that it matters any more. What I do know is that it is tearing us apart. And it has been tearing us apart for some time. And every time we think it is finally reaching a crescendo, finally the fever will break, somehow the fever goes on, as political choices, even when they are the ‘right’ choices, decide whether you or I are to be trusted or shunned, or even hated. To make a pop culture reference, today everyone is a Sith lord from Star Wars: either you are with me, or you are my enemy.
And while we may understand where it comes from: sleepwalking into a Forever War after 9/11, commemorated today, the hostility toward President Obama, at least in part due to his race, the shock of the 2016 election with all its ugliness, and the aftermath, the pandemic of 2020, and of course, the anti-democratic riots of January 6th, and the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7th. But understanding neither justifies nor affirms. Recently I saw a t-shirt with a guillotine on it recently that said, “impeachment isn’t enough.” I get the anger, I really do. But do we really want to live in a world that condones this level of political violence? Or do we choose to hide behind the bully’s justification: it’s just a joke.
This idolatry of partisan politics goes hand-in-glove with both a kind of moral depravity and wanton hatred, both of which put us as Jews in danger. We know, better perhaps than any other minority on earth, how the weakening of democratic institutions and norms leads to political violence, with the Jewish community and Jewish individuals often the first victims. We have seen this as political candidates of both the extreme right and left jockey for attention using language around Israel as both a kind of shibboleth and purity test. I saw a humor site online post a fake headline to the effect of: “candidate for county dogcatcher declares he won’t take money from AIPAC.” Funny, if it weren’t an increasingly familiar dog-whistle employed by political candidates of all levels and all stripes. What does Israel have to do with being a city counsellor, or mayor, or dogcatcher? Nothing, but it’s a kind of ‘virtue signaling’ that we as Jews had hoped had finally been relegated to the dustbin of history, rearing its head again in campaigns from city counsellor to senate. Even when the candidate is clearly odious in language and behavior, as was the case with Graham Plantner, who the Jewish community was shrying gavalt over from the moment his tattoo was revealed, never mind his history of sexual violence, because he was on the ‘right’ side, it was excused. Meanwhile, a Jewish progressive politician was chased out and harassed out of a pride march, even despite agreeing with the left on Israel. I wonder what the difference is? To us as Jews, it’s very clear what the difference is.
But before we can lay all blame at the feet of our neighbors, we should be clear about our own failures at this moment. For one, Israel became a partisan issue, in part through Israel’s own actions. Our Reform Movement, as Rabbi Jonah Pesner likes to say, is right in the middle of the bell curve of American Jewish relationship to Israel. We want a safe and secure Jewish and democratic state, one that affirms human rights for all its residents, and embrace Palestinian national aspirations that lead to two states in peace. That is what most Americans want as well, no matter what the extreme voices might say. And too often in the last decade, we as American Jews and subsequent Israeli governments have failed to live up to that vision. That vision has been a guiding star, a dream for so many of us, just as described in Psalm 126, which we recite at Birkat Hamazon after meals. Our return to Zion has been like a dream. The existence of Israel, now nearly 80 years old, the revival of Hebrew as our national language for literature, poetry, music, but also ordering at the café and arguing politics and sports at the corner store; seeing the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and survivors of the Farhud and anti-Jewish pogroms in the Arab world now serving in a primarily Jewish army, is to many of us, a dream. But in the process of dreaming, we have neglected to pay attention to reality. The lack of integration of Mizrachi and Ethiopian Jews. The various Netanyahu governments, especially the current one, have seen fit to put into place racist laws and support bigoted voices. The laws and practices that allow ultra-Orthodox policy makers to create gender-segregated public sidewalks, despite the rulings of Israel’s supreme court, and the full abandonment of any kind of peace process, not only preventing a Palestinian State, but actively thwarting it, allowing West Bank Settlers to run roughshod over civilians trying to harvest their olive trees or simply live peaceably. The bipartisan consensus has been replaced by an Israeli leadership that thought the right would give them a blank check and has embraced cynicism and the anti-democratic tendencies of the Victor Orbans of the world, too often using war against Israel’s neighbors as political stunts instead of deterrence and protection of vulnerable communities. And for what? The right increasingly lifts up voices like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor-Green, who see Jewish conspiratorial actions everywhere, while Democrats believe Israel has become wholly Republican, with even Moderate Democrats harassed by a left that believes Jewish nationhood is everything wrong with the world.
And increasingly, we have done it to ourselves. Questioning right-wing Israeli governments and their treatment of its citizens, never mind the behavior of the Settler Right, was often too much for many Jewish leaders and organizations, and could make you persona non grata, even when Israeli society itself was fighting against the anti-democratic tendencies of its political leadership! Rabbi Rolando Matalon, one of the most transformative rabbis and civil rights activists of the last forty years, who helped lead B’nai Jeshurun from a dying congregation to the place to be in New York City, once told a room full of rabbis—including me—that he could speak about any topic in his congregation, except Israel. And I complemented a Hillel director at a small liberal arts college because she had just after October 7th started speaking with the folks at J-Street, an organization that was often blacklisted by “real” Zionist organizations. Are we then surprised when our children, now adults, who grew up embracing racial justice and civil rights, the tikkun olam we preached, found, instead of a nuanced and thoughtful approach to Israeli government actions, a hostility to questions and an insistence on embracing a dream, an imagined Israel, ignoring the behavior of the real one, found themselves increasingly looking for alternative voices, and finding them in organizations that were beyond the pale, the same organizations rallying the mob on college campuses and at Pride Marches, the same organizations whose rhetoric has led to more violence against Jewish and Jewish institutions? And by the time we tried to win them back, if we didn’t stiffen our backs at their questions and statements, we found our nuance and thoughtfulness drowned out by the sea of idolatrous ‘right think’ that has overwhelmed the rest of our discourse.
So now here we are. We spend more money on security than ever and watch the violence increase. We who are still reeling from October 7th watch with horror as our synagogues are firebombed and attacked, try to hold it together as we see footage of nursery school children evacuated, find ourselves fighting with our adult children over what we’re seeing, and increasingly see all the tools in the toolbox inadequate to serve this moment. What do we do now?
I said I was afraid, and I am, but I also believe there is a way we can move forward, but it’s going to be messy, and require a great deal from us, and we’re going to have to resist our natural and understandable instinct to hunker down and hide from an increasingly hostile world.
Let us start with our children. When Yehuda Kurtzner of The Hartman Institute was asked about what to do with an adult child who had grown hostile to Israel and the pain it was causing the parent, Rabbi Kurtzer responded with the words of our tradition of what to do when we have a child unresponsive to Torah: love them more. We need to listen. We need to agree where we can—again, we as Reform Jews are nuanced in our approach, are we not?—and when we disagree, we need to be clear about that, but that our disagreement is not disownment. I know. I know how painful so many of these conversations have been. I know how quickly so many adult children have been cutting off parents over political disagreement. I know how many adult children believe that their values have been betrayed and abandoned by those who love them. While I am lucky to have not had that experience in my family, I have certainly had that experience with former students. Please, I beg you, hold the door open anyway. Do whatever it takes to lower the temperature. Set ground rules for conversations during the holidays if you must, pick a safe word, but love them more.
Honestly, it’s no different with our conversations about Israel, but sometimes love can include correction and even rebuke. Critique is not hostility, and wanting Israel to live up to the dream—its own dreams, not just ours—is entirely appropriate. We cannot rely on the tools of the 1990s anymore when talking about the Zionist ideal or the fight against Anti-Jew hatred, and anyone continuing to deploy those tools—including the silencing of serious questions—must be politely and lovingly challenged. Not excommunicated, not cut off, but challenged appropriately. There are people—in our country, in Israel, even in the West Bank—working to achieve the kind of society we and so many Israelis aspire to become. We must support those who are doing that work. Yes, there is an election coming up in Israel, and we can work with our partners in the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism and ARZA, our own Zionist organization, as well as the Israel Religious Action Center, to support candidates and parties that will lead our beloved Israel toward those goals. And not just that work, but the work of coexistence. It would be easy to allow that dream to die in the wake of October 7th, to give into the cynicism that there are no partners. To be sure the work is harder. That was the point. That doesn’t make it any less urgent or important. And there are so many who are working toward these goals, not just our own movement. Standing Together continues to fight for human dignity for all people in the Levant. This fall we will welcome members of Shorashim/Roots, an organization fighting for coexistence and peace in the West Bank itself. We cannot leave it to others, or just write a check, or ignore it and settle back into a dream state. We need to get into the fight.
Finally, our work at home. As Rabbi Rick Jacobs reminded us this past summer, as much as we need more security and protective measures, we need more allies. We need more of our neighbors and friends, people who know us, with whom we work, send our kids to school together, serve our community together, to remember who we are. We have been a part of this country since before it was a country, always, in communities large and small, affirming American values of fairness, civic engagement, civil rights, and holding our leadership accountable. As much as we want to recede out of view for our own safety, an understandable view, we must take our place in the public square again and affirm those values with all our might. A lot of this work is small: it’s talking with our neighbors and friends, challenging their assumptions, having difficult conversations, reminding them that they know us, and of how difficult this moment is for our people. Not as a harangue, nor a guilt trip, and certainly not to score some kind of points. But real, honest conversation about what it’s like to have to spend thirty thousand dollars a year on having the police at the door. What it means to watch your child go to religious school or to bring your family to services past police and all kinds of security measures, while they can walk into their church any time unimpeded.
It also means bigger work as well. The Jewish task in America has always been to hold it accountable to the democratic norms and values we as a nation claim to uphold. There is much work to be done to get us back to that place. Our Religious Action Center is doing that work through its “Every Voice: Every Vote” campaign, and I’m pleased that we as a congregation are participating, not only to encourage voting, but to work to protect it, helping recruit and train poll observers, lawyers, and others to make sure all legal votes count. And we must demand of our elected officials and public leadership to reel in the rhetoric, to hold them accountable. No more shibboleths. No more dog whistles. No more politics as a substitute for morality, or partisanship as a replacement for personality. No more declaring those with different political stances our enemy.
Yeah, I know. It’s corny. It’s cringey. What, we’re gonna let love rule, rabbi? We’re gonna let them walk all over us? Not at all, but we are going to respond from a place of love: even and especially when it’s difficult. Loving an idol is easy: whether it’s an object or a manifesto. It demands nothing, can be morphed into whatever you want, and changes nothing. Love the person that demands something of us. Love the mitzvah that holds us accountable. Love the work that makes the desert bloom—in our hearts, if not in the Land of our hearts.
The First Temple was destroyed by idolatry, wantonness and bloodshed, the Second by baseless hatred. Will we succumb to those sins? Will we allow ourselves to perish in spirit, if not in flesh? Just as Rosh Hashanah reminds us that it is not too late to change our ways before Yom Kippur, it is not too late to change the course of our country and our People before we are overwhelmed. Then, may we make the dream a reality, our mouths filled with laughter. May it be so. Amen.