Dear Friends,
I’m sometimes reminded of the adage about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that it has the capacity to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. That is, some of us go through life and are so hard on ourselves; day in, day out we find ourselves filled with self-recrimination and regret, focusing on our shortcomings. Others of us find ourselves focusing on the ways in which we are aggrieved by the outside world. We take pride in our accomplishments, don’t often reflect on where we could be doing more to contribute to the world. Most of us (all of us?) are somewhere in the middle, or vacillating between these different instincts at different times in our lives.
And then there comes Yom Kippur, inviting us to pivot. If we’re in need of it Yom Kippur reminds us of, traditionally speaking, God’s inclination towards love and compassion. As the famed Unetaneh Tokef prayer states, “Our praise of You accords with your essential nature, slow to anger, easily finding favor… You wait until the day of death, and if one returns you accept that person back immediately.” On Yom Kippur, those of us who are so hard on ourselves are invited to feel solace, acceptance, and grace.
Those of us who are rarely introspective are, at least at first, invited to feel something of the opposite: we are invited to scour ourselves. We read the Vidui, the communal confession, and are called upon to sit up in our seat and say, wait a minute, perhaps I have done some of these things. Perhaps I have too readily gossiped or talked poorly about others. Perhaps I’ve been callous to those around me. Perhaps there have been many missed opportunities for me to make contributions to the world that would help it heal, and I’m not doing enough to hold up my end of the bargain.
Again, most of us are due for different doses of this medicine at different points in our lives, and can be worthy of either message.
This comes to me in this moment because I think that, analogously, a lot of us could use something similar when it comes to our relationship to Israel.
Some of us were raised on the notion that Israel could do absolutely no wrong. That the history of the State of Israel is grounded in perfect, uncomplicated morality. To the extent there have been misdeeds over the 100-plus years of the modern history of the conflict, they haven’t been carried out by Jews, or, to the extent they have, they are always justifiable.
Others focus on the reverse: at each moment, decrying the Israeli misdeed, looking for—and easily finding—corroborating evidence that Israel falls well short of the Jewish values on which we were raised. Feeling that it is broken and beyond repair.
Sometimes—I’ve seen this many times—there’s a vacillation between those two extremes: we were raised on a notion that Israel can do no wrong, and then, when we’re confronted with evidence that it can and has, we swing the other way: everything I was raised on was a fantasy, and it must be that the opposite is true—that in fact Israel is the bad guy, and the Palestinians must be totally in the right. (To oversimplify, and to offer something of a critique, this is sometimes the journey for anti-Zionist Jews; they went to Jewish Day School, raised on a sometimes overly-sanitized version of the Israeli story, and end up moving to an extreme version of opposition to Israel.)
I would invite us to use the model of Yom Kippur as the day to offer comfort to the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable as a paradigm for how we might relate to Israel.
If we’re convinced that Israel can do no wrong, I would invite us to consider that Israel, like all nations made up of fallible human beings — that is, all of us — needs to regularly make Teshuvah, just like we human beings do. That it, like all of us, is sometimes in the wrong. That there are specific moments of the past and present that we can point to and say, Israel got that wrong. That is not the Palestinians’, or someone else’s, fault.
At the same time, it may be that our sensibility is the opposite. We are always finding fault with Israel. Always disappointed by, or angry with, its shortcomings. Perhaps convinced it is irredeemable. That’s the time to question our framing — to have a sense of compassion about its journey and the people who comprise it. In the same way Israel is made up of fallible people, it is made up of people worthy of compassion.
This is a heartbreaking moment in this war. Children on all sides have suffered in different, unimaginable ways. It is hard to know the pathway forward. I have shared my analysis many times that I both think it can feel simplistic to say war is never the answer and that we should all simply lay down our weapons. That doing so doesn’t make Hamas any less desirous to destroy Israel and kill as many Israelis as they can when they get the chance, and that history has shown that sometimes you do need to respond forcefully to an aggressor.
And I’ve also said that I understand those who say that whatever the answer is, the current approach feels like it is too heavy a cost to bear — to civilians and to innocents.
I believe that this heartbreaking cost doesn’t go away just because Israel lays down its arms; that in fact, if it does, Hamas very well may reinitiate the conflict months down the road in a manner that will make it more difficult to defeat, and make the conflict more protracted. However, I do understand those who say, yes but let’s at least see where pausing the fighting can get us.
I still would encourage each of us to be constantly reassessing our perspectives, but not to divorce ourselves from our underlying principles. I believe profoundly that Israel is a worthy cause, with just bases, struggling and striving to navigate a hostile environment. However, I also wouldn’t deny that it has, at times, like all other countries, gone out of bounds in its efforts. Doing so doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of compassion, in the same way Palestinians are worthy of compassion. We all are.
Praying for a just, stable, and peaceful future,
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi K
