A Time for Wailing, A Time for Dancing

(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

On one level, the response to this sacred text from the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, is “why?” Why is there a time for… half of the experiences on this list? Why is there a time for tearing down? A time for weeping? A time for war?

On another level, this text is not about the world for which we yearn; it’s about the recognition of what is, or at least what has been — the rhythms of existence, the cycles that pervade our lives — the recognition that, like waves, crashing and receding, crashing and receding, we find ourselves invited to form a relationship to the alternating realities that we experience.

I write this on what appears to be the eve of a deal between Israel and Hamas to release hostages and initiate the process of a ceasefire.

These verses from Ecclesiastes come to me in this moment that feels like both “a time for wailing and a time for dancing.”

       A time for dancing because, after 15 months of war, hostages will be reunited with their families, rockets — at least between Israel and Hamas — will stop firing, families will return to their hometowns. Peace, albeit limited, tentative, and fragile, will reign.

Wailing because it gives us a moment to pause and reflect and take in how much destruction has been wrought, how many families torn apart, how many lives snuffed out.

War is horrific. I say that from the safe perches of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, having never known it myself. We have seen for months on end the suffering that has unfolded.

As we know, this began on October 7, 2023, when, after over 100 years of modern-day conflict between Jews and Arabs in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza, targeting civilians, murdering approximately 1,200 people, and abducting an additional 251 people, taking them as hostages in the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

In solidarity with Hamas, Iranian proxies from points all across the compass — Hezbollah in the north, militias in Syria and Iraq to the northeast and east, the Houthis to the southeast — launched further attacks at Israel.

Israel responded, launching a devastating counterattack into Gaza, with the goals of eliminating the military and governing capacities of Hamas, while returning the hostages, alongside launching attacks at Hezbollah and the other proxies, aimed at deterring future aggression against Israel, while enabling Israelis in the north of Israel, who had been displaced from their homes following attacks from Hezbollah, to return.

As stated, the ensuing battles have been devastating to all involved. In addition to the trauma of October 7, hundreds more Israeli soldiers have been killed. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says more than 46,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far.

Individual stories rend the hearts far more than statistics. Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost multiple children, siblings, parents, infants. Too many horrors to recount.

Peace is always the goal.

Regular readers of this column may recall that I have not always advocated for peace at all costs, because, unfortunate and heartbreaking as it is, Israel’s sheer existence causes some parties to declare war against it.

The stated goal and modus operandi of forces in the region — Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran — is the eventual destruction of Israel. Israel simply does not have the luxury of dispensing with war as part of its moral tableau. It is sometimes easy to imagine from the safe perches of Philadelphia that it does, but it’s my belief that that is simply not true. Attacks against Israel post-October 7, 2023 have not wrought as much destruction as they otherwise might have because of the investment Israel has made, with the support of the United States, in its defense: missile systems, intelligence, the Iron Dome.

It could be argued that a détente has finally been reached in the north with Hezbollah because of the significant military victories Israel has achieved, including, discomfiting as these moments may have been, the deadly pager strike, the assassination of Hezollah’s leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah, and the blows Israel has inflicted on Hezbollah’s massive armament. These appear to have led Hezbollah to say, effectively, enough is enough, and to reach a ceasefire agreement, allowing residents of both Israel and Lebanon to return to the border region.

As I’ve written many times, growing up as I did, with Holocaust education as a significant part of my learning, with the memories of Hitler and the Axis Powers in our not-too-distant collective past, it was seared into me that, much as we might pray and yearn for perpetual peace, sometimes in our people’s — and the world’s — history, we have a war of no-choice. For whatever reasons that a people might determine to oppress another people, there are some times when a people has no choice but to respond with the force that they can muster to defeat a threat that they face.

But that does not give a country carte blanche to do whatever it wants in the arena of war. Legal regimes exist to ensure that, paradoxical as it sounds, countries wage war with a degree of morality, taking into account, for example, preventing as much civilian death and suffering as possible as a country prosecutes its legitimate war aims.

Israel will be wrestling with whether, in the aftermath of all of the trauma that it experienced, it was able to live up to these standards. Again, the level of suffering for Israelis and Palestinians alike over the course of this war has been hard to fathom, and I don’t envy the positions of anybody entrusted with the safety of their people.

A challenge for Israel has been, as author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi stated on a recent podcast, that it is facing three levels of criticism, and it can be hard to hold space for legitimate criticisms when you are (a) in the middle of a war, but perhaps more importantly (b) facing them amidst a series of what I see as illegitimate criticisms.

The three criticisms, as Halevi put it, are as follows (paraphrased): (1) You (Israel) haven’t fought this war as justly as you should have; you have at times fought it unjustly with terrible consequences; (2) This war is an unjust war because Hamas was justified in pursuing an act of resistance against Israel’s pre-October 7 treatment of Gaza; (3) You, Israel, are unjust. Your existence is unjust; the creation of the state was unjust; all forms of resistance against it are just; and therefore your response was unjust.

In response to this onslaught of criticism, I sympathize with Israelis’, and many American Jews’, resistance to tackling criticism number 1 when many critics — not all but many — are also leveling criticisms 2 and 3.

Throughout this war, there have been two parties — on some fronts more than two, but in the case of Gaza, two. Two parties who could have ended the fighting. This is not to excuse any actor for the level of destruction that has been wrought. But it is to inquire, on an international scale, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently shared in a widely circulated interview, “why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender… Israel, on various occasions, has offered safe passage to Hamas’ leadership and fighters out of Gaza… I do,” Blinken said, “have to question how it is that we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.”

Sure, part of the reason for that is simply, power. Israel is the more powerful actor of the two, and so there is a natural tendency to focus on the more powerful actor in any dynamic to reduce the tension.

But it’s also fair to raise antisemitism as a factor in the way this war has been discussed and the pressure the international community has brought to bear. It’s true that, as the site of the battlefield, Palestinians have suffered immensely in Gaza over the last 15 months. It’s true that settlers in the West Bank have committed acts of vigilante violence against Palestinians there. But Israelis are surrounded by forces wishing for, and acting toward, the destruction of Israel, and have been the victims of devastating acts of terrorism, before, on, and since October 7. And yet the language we often see in demonstrations around the world is one that treats Zionism (in other words, Israel) as a “cancer” (see this image from a recent demonstration in New York, which caught my eye).

A time for wailing and a time for dancing.

I’m feeling both of those experiences right now, and more.

A time for anger, and a time for heartbreak.
A time for exhaustion, and a time for confusion.
A time for remorse, and a time for devastation.
A time for relief, and a time for elation.

In this community, I’ve encountered all of these experiences and more in response to different moments of this war in different ways under the tent of what makes for a diverse Jewish community, with people from across the political and ideological spectrum, whose passions and beliefs bring them to different places — from me, from one another — and yet who nonetheless have love for the Jewish people, and all of humanity, recognizing each of us as created in the image of the Divine.

Today is a moment of relief at a prospective pause in the fighting, trepidation for families yearning to be reunited with their loved ones, and prayers of hope for a lasting peace.

Next, I’d like to share the D’var Torah I delivered this past Friday night, after the horrific fires in the Los Angeles area began last week:

The Jewish people have an ambivalent relationship to a central feature of life: home. On the one hand, Arami Oved Avi, we study each year at the Passover Seder. My father was a wandering Aramean. This phrase represents the seemingly endless peregrinations our ancestors engaged in, their perpetual wanderings: Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Abraham, across the fertile crescent from Ur Casdim to Canaan, Jacob fled from his brother Esau and then again from his uncle Lavan, Joseph descended into Egypt, the Israelites than wandered for 40 years, and so on. You could argue that there is not even a biblical word in Hebrew for home.

On the other hand — there is always another hand in Jewish life — during this week fell a little known day of commemoration on the Jewish calendar known as Asarah B’Tevet, the tenth day of the month of Tevet — which memorializes a date from approximately 2,500 years ago on which we began to lose, you guessed it, our home. The tenth of Tevet marks the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem that led to our exile from the land, one of four dates in the Jewish calendar that mark different stages of this event, culminating with Tishah B’Av, the date commemorating the destruction of the Temple. We’re still — 2,500 years later — actively mourning this loss. And what is the singular word that is used to describe this ancient structure that served as the heart of our religious, and really, human experience? Bayit — temple, but also: home.

So there it is: on the one hand, who knows dislocation, homelessness, exile, wandering, and migration more than we do, the Jewish people? — it’s one of the central facts of our history and our spiritual understanding of ourselves.

On the other hand, there has perhaps been no more central focus of our yearning, our collective prayers, our longing, than to return — lashuv/t’shuvah, return — home: to the promised land, to God, to one another.

In a sense, these twin poles work hand-in-hand: The past experiences of our ancestors having known a sense of homelessness, displacement, wandering, can give us a sense of comfort that our own experiences of uprootedness are not without precedent. And the relationship to an ultimate home to which we might return, that home is what we yearn for, that which gives us a sense of hope.

Still, it’s hard to feel that hope based on what we bore witness to this week. We know there is tragedy all around the globe, week-in and week out, and so in that sense, what we’re actively bearing witness to this week is not unprecedented, but it bowls us over to witness communities — homes — to which many of us have connections, being utterly decimated.

Here’s just one personal connection. Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist synagogue in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, is the synagogue whose founding rabbi was Rabbi Abraham Winokur, our Rabbi Avi Winokur’s father. This was the synagogue, the Jewish home, of our beloved Rabbi Emeritus for his entire upbringing.

Miraculously, as of today, the synagogue still stands. The homes of all three of its rabbis, plus its cantor, plus the homes of 300 of its member households — a third of its community — do not.

I witnessed a news report featuring the clergy of the community encountering the standing synagogue for the first time, its senior rabbi weeping uncontrollably. It wasn’t clear to me whether her sobs were of relief that this deeply meaningful structure still stood, devastation for all that had been lost, or both. Surely both.

There is being dislocated, and there is being dislocated. The Palisades community will be reeling for years.

I’m aware, as I learned from Rabbi Josh Waxman, that one should be deeply suspicious of any theology that brings us comfort for another’s suffering — if we find ourselves beginning words of comfort to someone grieving with the words “at least,” we probably aren’t going down the right track; comforting someone who’s grieving is about affirming where they are, not rushing to where we want them to be.

Still, what I thought I witnessed, from afar, in that sanctuary in Pacific Palisades by its clergy gathering together for the first time was the tiniest spark of light — of purpose, of a sense of responsibility for one another, with all of us responsible for their well being as well. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la’zeh, all of the people of Israel, Kehillat Israel, are responsible for one another, the Talmud teaches. I thought I sensed among the clergy in that sanctuary, even if it was just a glimmer of light sneaking in through the heartbreak, the realization of the strength they would draw from one another in rebuilding their community out of the literal ashes.

I am probably a microcosm of my people; I, too, have always had an ambivalent relationship to home. I’ve lost count now, but by the time I was 18, I had already lived in something like 13 or 14 different homes. I was born to my parents during a transient stage of their lives, my father on something of a Jewish scholarly quest, my mother willing, maybe even eager, to go along for the ride. And after my father’s death, even more moves were in store. So I certainly developed a relationship to the transient nature of life. The holiday of Sukkot very much makes sense to me as a holiday symbolizing the fact that all of our lives are migratory, impermanent.

And yet my life today looks more rooted — is more rooted — than it’s ever been. Caroline and I have immersed ourselves in this community; we live a block away. I have come to love our home over the two and half years we’ve lived there, perhaps more than any house I’ve lived in. As a matter of fact, we purchased it from members of Society Hill Synagogue who, like us, had two daughters, raising them there, living in it for 40 years. It is an old house with gorgeous wood and brick, which Caroline, who, even with another full-time professional job, is a home-maker in the finest sense of a term, transformed into our home, adorning its mantles with whatever Jewish holiday decor is ripe for the moment.

So on the one hand, I have a highly unsentimental relationship to stuff. The migratory nature of my early years taught me to let go of physical attachments. When Caroline asked me if there was anything I wanted to carefully set aside for ease of access in the hypothetical scenario of a fire raging through our town, embarrassingly the first thing that came to my mind was my laptop, my highly replaceable portal to the outside world.

On the other hand, if we were to lose our house, our home, I would be truly and utterly devastated.

There is no comfort in these moments, per se. There is the part of our people’s story which reminds us of our experience of exile, which perhaps teaches that all of life on this plane of existence — post-Garden of Eden, pre-messianic redemption — is a form of exile; and there is the yearning for an ultimate return home, of the sense that there is indeed an experience of home. That we have felt it before and will feel it again.

As a Jewish spiritual teacher once taught: in life, we’re all just walking each other home.

Praying for everyone’s homes. Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi K.