Thursday, November 27, 2014

Love and Justice: A Drash for Parashat Veyetze, Friday 28 November 2014

Love.  It makes the world go around.  It makes the pain of life worthwhile.  It is so sublimely important, that it inspires much of the world’s art, literature, and music.  And religion.  Remember the movement, G-d is Love?  Remember love-ins in the park, where clergy would flit around, telling revelers, G-d loves you?
          We Jews never got caught up in that.  Or perhaps I should say, our religion never got caught up in that.  Chances are, there were plenty of Jews at those love-ins.  But chances are, you never saw rabbis at one.
          And we’ve paid a price for that!  Because official Judaism never joined the G-d is Love movement, we’ve been accused of seeing G-d only in terms of stern Judgment.  Vengeance.  The G-d of war.  The G-d of punishment.  All this, in contrast to the G-d of Love.  Imagine if we could have recruited a corps of rabbis who would have flitted around the park on Sundays, blowing bubbles, strumming ukuleles, handing out flowers, telling people that G-d loves them.  Perhaps there would be 200,000 Jews in Australia today instead of 100,000?
          But G-d is a G-d of love even in Jewish thought.  Ever heard of the Torah?  You know, that funny book we read now-and-then when we simply can’t avoid it?  Well, that book describes a G-d for whom love is supremely important.  Let’s look at some examples.
          G-d wants us to love Him.  In Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, we’re told that, if we love G-d, then G-d will love 1,000 generations of our offspring.
          In Leviticus 19, we’re told to love our fellow Jew as ourselves.  A little later in the chapter, and in Deuteronomy 10, we’re told to love the non-Jew.
          In Deuteronomy 6, we’re told to love the Lord our G-d with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our being.
          In Deuteronomy 7, we’re told that G-d particularly loves the people Israel.  And it’s not because they are the most numerous or powerful nation on the earth.  And since G-d loves the people Israel so much, Israel is obligated to love G-d.  And we’re promised that, because G-d loves us, He will particularly bless us in a number of substantial ways.
          In Deuteronomy 10, we’re told again to love G-d.  And we’re told that, when we love G-d, He takes delight in that.
          In Deuteronomy 11, we’re told repeatedly to love G-d.  And we’re told explicitly that, out of our love for G-d, we must keep His commandments.
          In Deuteronomy 13, we’re told to love G-d and out of that love, we’re to resist the efforts of false prophets to get us to love other gods.
          In Deuteronomy 19, we’re promised that, if we love G-d, we will see more cities of refuge established to us.
          In Deuteronomy 30 we’re promised that, if we love G-d, He will let us live and will curse our enemies.  If out of love for G-d we obey His laws and commandments, He will bring all sorts of success to the works of our hands.
          All this is just in the Five Books of Moses.  The other books of the Tanach abound in references to the importance that G-d attaches to love.  The G-d of Israel, the G-d of the Torah, is most definitely a G-d of love.
          Ah, but not a G-d of unconditional love!  In most of the citations above, we’re told that G-d loves us because of this or that.  Or that we should love G-d because of this or that.  Or that we should love one another, or the non-Jew because of this or that.  The Torah’s message is not a G-d who practices, or who demands, unconditional love.
          So the Torah’s message is that love is supremely important.  But not unconditional love.  Or, as Rabbi Sacks put it this week, Love is not enough.  Love must evoke a response of justice, fairness and concern.  Proclamations of love not accompanied by actions confirming it, are empty words.  Feelings of love that are not accompanied by acts of devotion, are just feelings.  Those feelings – the emotions connected with love – are important.  But if they do not inspire us to acts of kindness, justice, and of willing sacrifice, then who cares?
          The protagonist of this week’s Torah portion, Jacob, has a love problem.  Oh, it’s not that he doesn’t love; he loves in a big way!  He loves Rachel and works seven years for his father-in-law for her hand.  When he tricks him into marrying Leah instead, Jacob works another seven years for the bride whom he thought he’d already earned.  Laban tricks him, just like Jacob tricks his brother Esau, and his father Isaac.  Later on, we’ll see how Jacob loves his sons, but loves one son more than the others, and that causes strife in the family.
          Jacob is a man of love, but he is not always a man of justice.  He does love Leah, the wife he didn’t choose.  But because he loves her less than he loves Rachel, Leah doesn’t feel loved.  She feels hated.  Perhaps she deserves it to some degree.  Maybe she should not have allowed her father to put her in Jacob’s bed in place of her younger sister.  The Torah omits these lacunae.  But it does not omit that G-d loves Leah, and sees her suffering.  As a way of trying to alleviate that suffering, G-d opens her womb and gives her numerous sons to present to Jacob, in hopes that Jacob would love her more.
          Jacob is a man of love, but he is a man sometimes challenged to act ethically.  And that sometimes makes his love almost meaningless.  Because, if love is not accompanied by ethics, then love is empty.  Love the emotion, without love the devotion, does not impress us.  We should therefore focus less on the emotion, and more on the devotion.  We should outgrow the childish notion that love should be unconditional.  We should love one another, and out of that love, we should strive to act toward one another in a supremely rational, predictable, ethical way.  So why don’t we?
          Because it’s hard work!  Love the emotion is giddy, and exciting, and fun.  Love the devotion is hard work.  Drudgery.  Sacrifice.  Boring.  Everything that’s calculated to take our inner child, our ADHD,  and frustrate it.
          Jacob never quite outgrows the child-like quality of his love.  He never quite manages to always accompany his love with devotion, fairness, and justice.  He does get better over time.  But he never quite gets there, to the goal.  In that way, Jacob is exactly like you and me.
          We’ll never perfect this stuff.  But we must nevertheless keep working at it.  As individuals.  As families.  As a community.  Because even love accompanied by an imperfect devotion is better than love that ignores that dimension entirely.  We can’t be perfect.  But that does not free us from working.  And working.  And working.  And working some more.
          There’s something to be said for carrying child-like qualities into adulthood.  But when an adult acts only like a child, we don’t find that endearing at all.  For example, when an adult acts explosive repeatedly and doesn’t learn from the experience.  We reserve our greatest scorn for adults who won’t grow up.  And we should.  Because an adult who acts like a child all the time, or much of the time, is nothing more than…pathetic.
          So Jacob must grow up.  He must struggle to temper his love with justice.  And he does get better over time.  In the same way, we must work on this and get better over time.  Even if we despair of never quite being able to get there.

          ‘Tis the season, right?  Back home in the USA, yesterday was Thanksgiving, which is the official opening of the Christmas holiday season.  We don’t have Thanksgiving here in Australia, but I noticed last night from the commercials on TV that we are definitely in the throes of Christmastime greed.  The holiday itself does not resonate for us Jews – why would it?  But as the summer comes to our austral world, it is a good time to take stock of everything we are, and everything we aren’t.  It’s a good time to ask ourselves:  Are we accompanying our love, with justice?  With fairness?  With devotion?  With kindness?  If not, let’s rededicate ourselves to doing just that.  Rededication is definitely something that should resonate for us.  In just over a fortnight, we will celebrate a festival whose name means ‘rededication.’  Let’s let our light shine for all the world.  But let’s let our love – and the devotion it inspires – shine for one another.  Shabbat shalom.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

A False Equivalence: A Drash for Friday 21 November 2014

Over time, I avoid speaking from the pulpit about Israel.  And the reason is that I cannot match the professionalism of the commentators who follow world events and understand them in all their nuance.  But sometimes I feel compelled to speak, because you can find yourselves in the position of defending Israel to friends, associates, and family.  Or, letting an outrageous statement go unchallenged.  Whilst I do not see myself as being a commentator on current events, sometimes I do have clarity on an issue that might help you.
          As you probably know, in recent weeks there has been a troubling series of deadly attacks on Jews in Israel.  First it was ‘enraged’ Palestinians driving vehicles into crowds of Israelis waiting for a bus or tram.  Then it escalated to different types of attacks.  Just this week on Tuesday, two Palestinian men wielding knives, meat cleavers and handguns entered a synagogue during weekday morning prayers.  They killed five and injured a number more.
          This week, in the wake of a day of intense reporting of events in Israel, one of our members told me that a friend had declared the anger over the attacks misplaced.  Actually, the member’s friend had declared her ‘brainwashed’ to care about a ‘couple of rabbis’ killed in a synagogue.  And why is that?  Because Israel killed some 2,000 Palestinians in the recent Gaza conflict.  So, to complain about a handful of Jews killed by Palestinians, if we’re silent on the latter, is disingenuous at best.
          This person had just used a tactic that is popular among those who delegitimize Israel.  Specifically, he used the argument of False Equivalence.  Israel kills Palestinians.  Palestinians kill Israelis.  Tit-for-tat.  Why criticize the Palestinians?  But let’s examine the nature of these killings.
          Yes, a couple thousand Gazans died in the recent 50-day war.  And it was far in excess of the numbers of Israelis killed – 71 in the latter case.  And some of the 2,000 were civilians, but not as overwhelmingly so as Israel’s detractors want you to believe.
          On the surface, it matters how many of the dead were civilians.  A lot.  Because, if a large proportion were civilians, at the very least it shows that the Israelis were applying force either indiscriminately, or even cynically, specifically to terrorise civilian populations.  It’s for this reason that a couple of Gazan NGO’s, and the UN Relief and Works Agency, were busy all during the recent hostilities, number-crunching the death toll.  The two NGO’s estimated civilians made up over 80% of the casualties, whilst UNRWA estimated 72%.
          But you should know that those figures are doctored.  If you break them down by gender and age group, you’ll find that over half are of military-age males.  To suggest that males of fighting age are overwhelmingly not fighting is absurd.  Especially when you consider the following.  The same agencies discount almost any Israeli casualties as being civilian.  The reason?  Because Israeli men – and in some cases women – serve in the reserve forces until their 40’s and even 50’s.  So even if they are killed when a missile rains down on them in their home, they are combatants.  At the same time, a Gazan cut down in his home, even though he is an active fighter, is a civilian casualty.  All I’m saying is that you can’t have it both ways.  But the Palestinians try, and largely succeed.  And why they succeed, I’ll get into in a moment.
          But let me back up for a second.  I’m not saying that a high death toll – either your own or your enemy’s – is something to dismiss.  Even in war, where death is inevitable, it’s a tragedy.  But to take a number such as those killed on either side of a war, and attach either an equivalence, or even a strong condemnation or one side specifically because of the imbalance, is intellectually dishonest.  And here’s why.
          The actions of Hamas are calculated specifically to draw an Israeli response that will result in high casualties.  Because Hamas knows it cannot win a military conflict with Israel.  Instead, it tries to orchestrate conflict in order to defeat Israel in a propaganda war.  It knows that much of the world is predisposed to consider Israel a brutal occupying power, and it is willing to sacrifice thousands of its citizens in order to continue to feed that predisposition.  That’s why they position rocket launchers and mortars amidst civilian areas where, if they are hit with return fire, great carnage will follow.  Hospitals.  Schools.  Mosques.  Apartment blocks.  They use these places to shoot off their projectiles, knowing that the Israelis have the ‘eyes’ to see where the incoming rounds came from.  They use the same places for storage of munitions, so that when the Israelis hit them, the damage can be spectacular.
          And of course, that puts the Israelis between the proverbial rock and a hard place.  Can they not respond against the launchers that fire missiles and shells into their cities?  Or course not; they must respond.  How can a sovereign country tolerate its citizens living under missile fire?  So they respond, hoping to kill the launcher and its crew.  And, in the process, civilians are killed.
          But even then, the Israelis try to minimize the ‘collateral damage.’  They’ve been known to drop leaflets from aircraft and drones before a bombing raid.  And now they’ve embraced newer technologies; they send out mass text messages to Gazan mobiles, warning of which neighbourhoods they’re going to hit.  But Hamas’ police force prevents civilians from evacuating the targeted areas, even shooting their own citizens if they try to force their way out.  Such atrocities have been reported by news organisations, such as the BBC and the NY Times, that could not possibly be seen as friends of Israel given their overall reporting.  But such reporting is often ignored.  It’s too rational and measured.  It exposes a flaw in an entity that one could not expect to act ethically, given the asymmetry of its conflict and the power of its opponent.  So even when such things are reported, the World has a way off dismissing them.
          So, given the specific circumstances of the generation of casualties, the condemnation of Israel, and the drawing of equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian casualties is a false equivalence.  It happens, because the different successor Palestinian power centres – of which Hamas in Gaza is just the latest iteration – cynically create their own civilian casualties for no reason other than to exploit them in winning the propaganda war with Israel, since they can’t win on the battlefield.  If the World were paying attention to the totality of reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict, slanted against Israel though it often is, they would see a much different picture.  So that begs the question:  why isn’t the world paying attention to the totality, by and large?
          I wish there was a simple answer; if there were, and if I knew it, I would gladly share it with you.  But I do have a sense as to what it is.  And it is that Judaism’s successor faiths – including Christianity and Islam – need to see Israel, and that’s a code word for ‘the Jews,’ as being an oppressor.  That way they can excuse themselves for centuries of persecution of Jews by their peoples.  If the Jews, once they have power, use it to oppress others, then by golly we don’t have to feel so guilty about oppressing the Jews!  I acknowledge that this may sound like an oversimplification, but I have dealt with others’ perceptions of the Jews for so many years that I can’t help but believe it.  This, despite how terrible it is if true!

          So how do you respond when someone responds to your concern about Israeli casualties by questioning whether you care about Palestinian casualties which are, after all, so much greater?  You point out the falseness of the equivalence.  They may be simply ignorant.  You know the old saw; repeat a lie enough times and it begins to sound true.  But if the person is not speaking out of ignorance, there’s a much more sinister possibility.  And that possibility cannot be overlooked.  And that is, that a few Jewish deaths simply don’t trouble him.  Given the history of the last 20 centuries, it is hard to deny that the world is full of people, who are not especially troubled by Jewish deaths.  That’s not a pleasant thought, but to deny it is to deny reality,  So we repeat it.  Even on Shabbat.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

To Know One’s Destiny: A Drash for Chayei Sara, Friday 14 November 2014

I’ve told a number of you in this room tonight about how Clara and I met and came to be married.  We were both working at a youth camp in Texas, and the director sent me with the car to pick her up at the Austin Airport.  Although the sidewalk in front of the arrivals terminal was crowded with weary travelers, I somehow instinctively picked her out from the crowd.
          One day soon after we were kidding around with the camp rabbi, who told a funny story about spending Rosh Hashanah with the Sephardim.  I turned to Clara and asked her: “Are you Sephardi?” knowing that the answer was ‘yes.’  When she confirmed it, I told her: “Okay, I’m coming to your house for Rosh Hashanah.”  And she said: “Welcome.”
          After we left camp, I was home in Florida at my parents’ home waiting for my day to fly to Israel.  Clara rang me to make sure that I was indeed planning to come to her house.  And then, when I was staying with her, I left the apartment on an errand whilst she was cleaning house, and she made a joke about ‘the man going out while the wife cleans.’  It was only a joke, but when she said it, I suddenly and inexplicably had a clear vision:  This is the woman I’m supposed to marry.  And the rest, as they say, is history.
          Why do I tell you this tonight?  Only because this week’s Torah portion includes the narrative of how Isaac, the son of Abraham came to marry Rebecca, Abraham’s grand-niece through his brother, Nahor.  There are some common elements that weave through his narrative and mine.
Abraham does not want Isaac to marry one of the local Canaanite girls.  So he sends his trusted servant Eliezer, back to Haran, the place where Abraham’s family had been living when he received his calling from G-d.  The servant, when entering the city prays to G-d for success in his mission.  And how will he know the girl who is fated to marry his master’s son?  Eliezer’s prayer is that he will approach the communal well, and the girl who offers him to drink and to water his camels as well, will be the one.
          The Torah describes what Eliezer seeks as an act of chesed, extreme kindness.  It is what one would expect a kind soul to offer, if a traveler obviously arriving from a long journey would approach a communal well for water.  It is therefore easy to put Eliezer’s decision in context.  He is not trying to second-guess G-d.  He is only interested in identifying a girl given to kindness, as he sees his master, Abraham as being a kind man.
          So Rebecca, daughter of Bethuel, offers kindness to Eliezer.  He gives the girl a valuable gift and asks to meet her family.  He proposes the marriage and the girl’s parents agree, subject to the girl’s acceptance.  They ask her:  “Will you go with this man?” And Rebecca responds:  “I will go.”
          Rebecca has clarity that this proposed marriage is what she’s supposed to do.  That it is her fate, her destiny.  She doesn’t get to meet, much less see Isaac before making her decision.  No more than Isaac is able to lay eyes on Rebecca.  And as we learn if we read ahead a few verses in the text, when Eliezer and Rebecca arrive back in Canaan Isaac is pleased with his bride.
          It would be easy to use this narrative to make an argument for the benefits of leaving marriage decisions, except for the final ‘yea’ or ‘nae,’ to one’s parents.  Of course, to do so would make one sound as if protesting against our age, where it is accepted orthodoxy that young adults are left alone to make their own marriage choices.  I think a strong protest against the current age would not be a bad thing.  Many of you in this room (or reading this) have been disappointed by your children’s marriage choices.  Or lack thereof, by their putting off marriage until very late or altogether.  Most of you who withheld counsel did so because it’s not  done today.  But that’s not this evening’s lesson.
          Rather, I want to talk about how each of us has someone who is our beshert, our fated partner.  Most of us are familiar with the concept of beshert.  It’s difficult to judge whether someone has found, and accepted his beshert.  After all, so many factors internal and external contribute to our marital happiness, or lack thereof.  On the other hand, it is not our place to judge whether someone else has married his beshert.  It is our responsibility to find and accept our own beshert.  If a trusted friend or relative consults us, then we can help them to the extent possible to make a good choice.
          It isn’t our place to judge others’ choices, but it is all too easy to do so.  If a person has achieved what could objectively be called ‘happiness’ in marriage then the odds are that they have not found their beshert, or chosen to ignore the evidence.  If that describes someone you know, it is not your job to criticize.  It is your job to encourage them to reach for the happiness that eludes them.
          The Torah, through its lacunae, tells us that Isaac and Rebecca achieved happiness.  Later events in the narrative of their intersected lives, show us that even when they disagreed, they accepted the outcome of each other’s actions with equanimity.  Their marriage started with the decisions of emissaries.  And they, the principals, being open to what their emissaries had discerned.  It didn’t start with their filling out a comprehensive personality profile.  Or going to one of the places where singles meet and greet.  Or trusting others who, whilst being well-meaning, were not using the right measures to advise them.
          Once they were married, Isaac and Rebecca knew they had acted according to G-d’s will.  So when the aforementioned conflicts came up, their marriage was not held hostage to the false, but popular notion that marriage is supposed to be conflict-free.  Instead, they approached their shared lives in a spirit of acceptance of one another.  How important is that??!  How many of us know of someone who, facing a conflict with their life partner, reacted by cutting and running?  And did that bring them happiness?  I’m guessing not.

          It’s hard to bring this message without sounding judgmental, and I’m guessing that someone is hearing (or reading) judgment in my words.  But my purpose is not to judge at all, or to second guess you or your decisions – whether you are single, married, or divorced.  Rather it is to convey the lesson that we are not dependent upon our own limited vision, clouded as it often is by the desires of our eyes, for making difficult life decisions.  If we but accept that G-d indeed has a partner in store for each one of us, and if we work to open ourselves to whom that partner might be, we will have gone a long way towards finding the best perspective for making our life’s decisions.  In our Torah reading this week, we are given an example of success in the latter that offers an important illustration of this principle.  Shabbat shalom.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Whose Children Are They? A Drash for Vayera, 7 November 2014

Kate Nelligan as Eleni
In 1985 the film Eleni, a screen adaptation of New York Times Athens Bureau Chief Nicholas Gage’s memoir about his mother, came out.  It was essentially a dud, getting poor reviews and not producing much box office revenue.  It quickly faded into the scrap heap of unsuccessful films.  But it was memorable to me, because I saw it whilst living in Greece.
          The film presents a true story about the Greek Civil War that followed the Second World War.  Gage, born Nikolaos Gatzuyiannis, was originally from a mountain village called Lia, in Western Greece near the border with Albania.  In 1948 Gage’s mother, Eleni, was executed by communist guerillas who controlled the village.  This, after four of her five children had been sent away from the village, eventually joining their father who had emigrated to America years earlier.  Gage spent some of his time during his Athens posting, working to get to the bottom of why his mother had been killed.
          The film came out almost 40 years after the events surrounding Eleni’s death.  Even so, in Greece it opened wounds that were barely scabbed over after all that time.  When I saw it in Athens, the audience walked out in a hush.  Most Greek villages have been depopulated, their younger inhabitants having moved to Athens in search of opportunities.  Therefore, it follows that for the much of the audience on the night I saw the film, it was their story.  The film was a dud to audiences and critics in the rest of the world, but for Greeks it was powerful.
          For me, a particularly powerful line in the movie was when Eleni stood up to a communist tribunal, which wanted to send the village’s children away to Czechoslovakia to be raised in a communist state.  The tribunal was trying to get the village’s mothers to voluntarily send their children.  Eleni faced the communists and declared:  They’re not the party’s children, not the Internationale’s children.  They’re my children!  Soon afterward, she managed to spirit four of her five children out of the village.  About to be executed by a firing squad for this act of sedition, she threw up her hands in triumph and shouted:  My children!
          When I saw Eleni, I had no children of my own.  But I knew enough about communism to find it distasteful.  And enough about family life to exult in Eleni’s triumph of the will.  When Hillary Clinton published, ten years after I saw Eleni, her book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, I found myself as did many conservatives, repelled by the assertion.  I felt far more drawn to the triumph of Nicholas Gage’s mother, exulting even as she faced death because she had saved her children from the tyranny of the village.
          Eleni’s assertion that she alone was competent to decide her children’s fate, represents the best side of parents’ ‘ownership’ of children.  Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks teaches us in his drash on this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, that in the ancient world there was a sinister side to this mindset.  Up to the time of Abraham, Sacks asserts, fathers thought of their children as their own possessions, to be exploited for whatever end desired.  Rabbi Sacks argues that the lesson of the Binding of Isaac, contained in this week’s Torah reading, is that our children are not our possessions, but G-d’s.  And the G-d of Israel, in contrast to the pagan gods of the ancient world, declines the sacrifice of an innocent child for the benefit of its parents.  If we understand the pagan practices of the ancient world, and why they resonated for ancient man, then we can easily understand this principle.
          Or can we?  Many parents, even today, are unable to break away from the mindset of their children as their personal possessions.  And that mindset often produces behaviors that lack the nobility of Eleni’s defying the communists in her village, and accepting a death sentence, for daring to send her children to a better life in America.  An appalling example:  many countries including Australia know the phenomenon of Welfare Mothers.  These are women who keep producing child after child with any man who will provide the service, in order to increase their share of The Dole.  The good of the children is an afterthought at best.  Many such children grow up to be dysfunctional citizens, clogging the justice system and living a lifetime on The Dole themselves.
Another appalling example:  in the various wars against Israel including Hamas’ recent war in Gaza, the Palestinians have repeatedly used their children as shields to cover their aggressive moves against the Israelis.  This, 57 years after Golda Meir asserted:  Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.  Given the history of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict since 1957, Golda’s words still resonate powerfully with us.
But other examples of the results of the mindset that our children are our possessions, examples that are less appalling than the above yet result in dysfunctional individuals and families, come to mind in great numbers.  It is painfully common for parents to unthinkingly push their children to make life decisions in line with the parents’ values and priorities.  This, regardless of the children’s own values and goals.  It is hard to argue that the sense of ownership of children by parents, can and does produce bad result where the parents use their influence without reference to the child’s desires. 
The slogan that it takes a village can seem laughable.  And I tend to deride the Nanny State as much as the next guy.  But the truth is that there are no exams that one must pass before becoming a parent.  One need only figure out how to make a child.  And as you know, that’s not too hard to figure out.  This reality does unfortunately lead to a profusion of incompetent parents raising future dysfunctional citizens.

Given all this, the lesson that our children belong to G-d and not to us, is a powerful, and necessary lesson.  The narrative in the 22nd chapter of Genesis, the narrative of the binding of Isaac, comes to teach us that our children are not ours to sacrifice for our benefit.  Given his acculturation in the ancient world, Abraham would have needed to be taught this lesson.  Given the scope of human history since then, we clearly need the lesson as well.  Shabbat shalom.