Sermon: RH 1st Day –

“Israel is Our New Testament”

Metuchen 2010/5771

Rabbi Gerald L. Zelizer

This was also one of my hardest sermons – that is hard for me to write. It is one of my most important sermons, because I want to speak to you about the New Testament. I am not referring to the New Testament that you have in mind. I mean the New Testament of Medinat Yisrael – the State of Israel. What do we mean by a New Testament? A New Testament improves the Old Testament. The State of Israel is a chance to improve the Old Testament – literally. The modern State of Israel is a chance to improve upon the Torah and the rest of the Bible. That is why the State of Israel is a New Testament. Back to Israel as the New Testament a little while later. Please keep that image in mind.

It was hard for me to write this sermon because I know how fatigued many of us are with Israel. A Jewish student at John Hopkins University said to his professor “Why can’t we just cancel Israel?” What he meant was with all of the problems of Israel in the world and its seeming incompatibility with the rest of the Mid-east, why can’t we get along with the Jewish religion but without Israel? And of course that question does not come just from students widely read columnists. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post suggested that we Jews may have made a well intentioned mistake trying to affect our national homeland in the Mid-east. Helen Thomas may have said it, but a lot of people are thinking it, even Jews. There is a growing feeling that Israel is simply not worth the trouble. After all, the Jewish religion existed two-thousand years without Israel until 1948. Why can’t the Jewish religion exist two-thousand years after 2010 without the Jewish religion? “Why can’t we just cancel Israel?”

I prefer not to speak about Israel this morning in ways that you already know. You know what I would say – double standards; hypocritical critics; anti-Semitism; Jewish self-haters; the threat of Iran. I don’t want to speak in those code words because that is the easy sermon to give. All those themes are accurate but you’ve heard it before. I want to go beyond that. The question I want to address is: Can you and I think of Israel with a vision which is different than that to which we are accustomed? Can we come up with a new vision of the State of Israel which inspires us in our kishkes so that we can disseminate it to our children, our grandchildren, our co-workers and beyond? I think we can. Putting aside the remarkable technological and business achievements – the start up Nation, I think that we can come up with a vision which grows out of our religious tradition. It is this - the State of Israel gives the Torah the

second chance to get it right. We Jews failed to live the social justice blueprint of the Torah. That is why the ancient prophets of Israel say were exiled – in the first place. Now that we have a second opportunity (actually a third opportunity) for Jewish sovereignty and Jewish space and Jewish power we have a historic moment in which to correct former failures.

Let’s understand what I am saying by thinking about the central figure in the Torah reading of both days of Rosh Hashanah. The central figure is usually thought of as Abraham, the first Jew. But I want to suggest that the central figure is really his son Isaac. Isaac’s role though is opposite in each of these two readings. This morning the Torah told of his relationship to his brother Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arab nations, through their common father but different mothers, and a conflict between Yithak and Yishmael. The conflict is happily resolved when the Almighty tells Abraham “Ki Bytzhak Yikari Lecha Zera” – “Through Isaac will the Jewish nation survive.” God guarantees Jewish perpetuity through Isaac. Then tomorrow, the Torah reading again concerns Isaac this time at Mt. Moriah. But the narrative is very different, very ominous. God tells Abraham to take Isaac to Mt. Moriah, which is considered to be the center of the ancient temple, and “V’haalehu Sham L’Olah” – “Make of him a burnt offering.” Those two competing descriptions of Isaac in the Torah readings of today and tomorrow, reflect in their imagery two competing narratives of the seed of Isaac, the Jewish people and the State of Israel. The first narrative says: “Ki Bytzhak Yikar,I Lecha Zera” – “For in Isaac the Jewish people will be assured. The first narrative proclaims the invincibility of the people of Israel and the State of Israel.” The second narrative is: “V’Haalehu Sham L’Olah” – “bring him up as a burnt offering” forecasts the sure demise of the people of Israel and the land of Israel.

Rabbi Daniel Gordis, a colleague of mine, suggests, that how two photographs that we know so well convey those two opposite images – the demise of Israel and the invincibility of Israel. Remember the pictures from the Warsaw Ghetto which showed a young boy dressed in his finery with his hands up in front of Nazis pointing their guns at him? Remember the opposite picture in the post 1967 war, where Israeli soldiers with Tallit and Tefillin sit on top of an Israeli tank? In the first picture the guns were pointed at the Jewish boy “V’Haalehu Sham L’Olah” – “make of him a burnt offering” – the demise of the seed of Isaac. In the second, Jewish guns were pointed away and the Israeli soldiers in Tallit and Tefillin sat on top of the tank “Ki Byitzhak Yikare Lecha Zera” – “for through Isaac the seed of Israel shall be assured.”

Can we be nurtured by a different picture? Can we think of Isaac’s seed – the people of Israel and the State of Israel – in ways other than it’s imminent demise or eternal invincibility? How about this? The Jewish people on its land in Biblical times failed to live the social justice vision of the Bible. Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah castigate the Jewish people and attribute their exile to their sins of exploiting the poor, and the powerless, cheating one another, and establishing hypocritical religious practices. For that reason, we lost land and sovereignty. Now however, we have a second chance to implement the Torahs plan for social justice. Now we have for a second time land and sovereignty. The State of Israel gives the Jewish religion another chance to get it right. The State of Israel is our New Testament to correct our Old Testament.

Let me give you two examples of the social justice blueprint in the Torah. This was pointed out to me this summer as I studied with a Professor Micha Goodman at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where I studied for two weeks. Professor Goodman is an animated and energetic man in his mid thirties. He is one of the rising thinkers in Israel on meshing Jewish religious values with political realities. He talks about that subject on a popular weekly television program. See if his vision inspires you as it did me. Professor Goodman said that Israel is more than a nation of start up companies. Israel is a nation of start up ideas. Let’s think together of two examples, about two of the grand social ideas of the Bible as possible in the modern State of Israel.

The first social idea which comes from the Bible are the laws of Peah. The rules of Peah – corners – require that the corners of agricultural fields are left for the poor to collect. The owner of the field was prohibited from harvesting the corners of his own field. Sort of like in a commercial economy the owner of a cash account being required to leave the last 10% of the account for the poor to take. We might call that notion Tzedekah. But leaving the corners of the field for the poor is not called tzedakah. In the classic texts when an owner takes from his corners it is called gezal aniyim, robbing from the poor something which already belongs to them. So the Torah requirement that an owner of a field must leave the corners of his field for the poor is not an issue of generosity or charity. It is a matter of not owning all the field in the first place! In the Jewish social justice blueprint the notion is that ownership of any kind is limited in the first place because we are temporary residents on this earth. In the Jewish vision of Peah, of property the distinction between those who own the field and the poor who own the corners, blurs. Did ancient Israel actually implement Peah? Maybe. Maybe not. But our rabbis say that these laws are in the Torah “Derash Lkabal Sechar Chazal” not literal but to help us to change our overall attitude to those who are the have not’s in our society.

A second illustration of a social vision through something that you know – Shabbat. There are two versions of Shabbat in the Torah. The most familiar is in Shmot - Exodus and it speaks about observing Shabbat because God created the Heaven and the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. The second order of Shabbat though is in the Book of Devarim, the fifth book of the Torah. That version does not connect the Shabbat to creation, but emphasizes something very different. In v. 5:14 of Deuteronomy it says: “But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God in it you shall do no kind of work, you, your son, your daughter, nor your man servant nor your maid servant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of the cattle, nor any stranger within thy gates, that your man servant or your maid servant may rest as well as you.” This version of Shabbat collapses the spatial distance between one person and another. It recognizes the need for everyone including those who have less than us and who work for us resting and replenishing themselves on Shabbat. This is not communism socialism. The rich are still rich. The poor are still poor. But on Shabbat at least this social Hierarchy of time and space collapses. Both in the case of the Peah (fields) and in the case of Shabbat we who are most powerful and most in control, relinquish some of our power and relinquish some of our control.

So here you have two examples. There are many others of the Jewish social justice blueprint when Jews are in their own land. The paradox is that sovereignty and power and Statehood are necessary to provide the Jewish nation with Jewish space – fields - and with Jewish public time on Shabbat in order to test this out to relinquish that very space and time – in the requirements of Peah; in the requirements of Shabbat. Sovereignty and power and Statehood are messy – surely power does corrupt - but Jewish power and Statehood are necessary to test out the Torah and give it this new chance to be applied properly. The State of Israel is our New Testament.

I hear some of you saying to yourselves “Rabbi, that such a utopian vision but not reality.” That is not what we see in Israel. Between 2000 and 2007 Israel produced more millionaires per capita than any other country, which means it also produced the opposite more poor in relationship to the rich. I hear you saying that the Arab minorities in Israel get less tax money for services in their towns than do Jewish towns. I hear you saying that the occupation of the West Bank is brutal when pregnant woman can not pass through check points to get to the hospital. I hear you saying that the poor immigrant labor in Tel Aviv live in squalor when rich Jews in Natanya live in luxury. I say the same things to myself as I think about my sermon this morning!

Did I say that this new vision of Israel that I have suggested of its being a New Testament to the Old is talking of Israel today? We all sing the words in Hatikvah, “Od Lo Avdah Tikvatenu” – “our hope has not been lost.” We are talking not about what “is”, but what “ought’ to be! After all, Israel is only sixty-two years old. How much was the vision of this country realized after sixty years? We know the dismal record of our own country with its indigenous populations after its first sixty years! And how about an even younger – post-industrial democracy. How about Canada, which itself interned Japanese Canadians in WWII, and even after the defeat of Japan, interned Japanese were given the choice of deportation or transfer to other parts of Canada! How about another young modern democracy, Australia? White settlement in Australia assured that the land was “terra annulus” – ownerless and could be settled without attention to the indigenous population. Sound familiar?

Now a brief detour from New Testament to news; from Utopia to reality. Two items from two conference calls that I had this week – one with Ambassador Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, and a second call from President Obama to America’s rabbis. The Ambassador stressed that we should all keep in mind that Israel’s democracy is older than half the democracies in the world. As importantly, Israel is one of the few democracies that has never been interrupted by any military coup or dictatorship. The implication of that for you me is that we must allow Israel’s democratically elected government, to make decisions which serve Israel’s needs, even if Israel’s needs sometimes diverge from our own preferences. Both Ambassador Oren and President Obama told us that there is guarded optimism that a two state solution can be achieved within a year. After all the failures, what is that optimism based on? A.) This is the first time in history that is the principal adversary of the Arab Nations is Iran and not Israel. President Obama added that a high priority of his administration will continue to be that Iran will not have nuclear weapons. The President said sanctions will intensify. B.) The West Bank Palestinian economy, largely based on Israel’s encouragement, is booming, so that most Palestinians there, said the Ambassador, want peace in order to continue their prosperity. C.) Thirdly, President Abas himself is committed to a two state solution, even if Hamas remains outside the pale of reasonable negotiation. Again, cautious optimism, with surely moments during the next year when we will throw our hands up in dismay – but optimism nevertheless.

So, returning to my theme, I ask you to go home with this new vision of Zionism and Eretz Yisrael. And when people ask you what did your rabbi speak about? Say he spoke about the New Testament. Tell them though this understanding of Israel and see if it inspires you and them. And from us it can go to others, other Jews old and young, those who are tired of the place of Israel in Jewish religion, to Jew and non-Jew. We should not “cancel the State of Israel” because Zionism and Israel are more than a refuge for persecuted Jews. Israel is our New Testament to properly realize what we failed to do in the old.  When we are finally successful, that achievement in a Jewish State can be a blueprint for social justice in other nations too.