Erev Rosh Hashanah 5762 (9/17/01) U’vchen:

And Therefore Sanctify Life

On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die… who shall die by water and who by fire… who by violence and who by wild beast; …who shall be tranquil, and who shall live in fear."  According to tradition, in the Middle Ages, when the fanatic violence of warring Christians and Muslims made life precarious, the Rabbis of Europe added this prayer in the Rosh Hashanah service. It is powerful religious poetry, meant to express our feelings of vulnerability to unpredictable calamity. These words are especially haunting, as we think tonight of horrific images of the past week. Seared into our minds are twin towering infernos collapsing upon screaming victims, as fanatical terrorists made commercial airplanes into giant murderous bombs. As we gather tonight, our nation is under attack from the forces of a twenty first century Jihad, a Radical Islamic holy war against us. We come in shock, in pain, in grief, in anger, in fear and apprehension of war. We feel intensely the precariousness of life. Ruthless, calculated carnage of thousands of innocent civilians has made us feel vulnerable and afraid--afraid for ourselves and loved ones, our fellow citizens, and the world. We have lost precious lives, and our precious sense of our own security. How shall we respond? 

We turn, as have countless generations, to our prayer book. In it we find a holiday prayer that speaks to us especially this year. We just prayed it tonight, privately, in the Amida. It is found in the Kedusha extolling the sanctity of life. Each of its three sections begins with U'vchen; meaning, "And therefore." We have witnessed the violent desecration of life. “And therefore,” this prayer provides us three paths to sanctify it as we begin the New Year. 

U'vchen ten pachdecha Adonai Eloheynu al kol maasecha. And therefore, let all of the world together; be appropriately fearful of radical evil. We have seen the face of evil and we have felt the horror of what it has wrought. For over twenty years, Osama Bin Laden has been developing his worldwide terror network known as Al-Qaeda. For two decades they and their many allied groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have steadily been growing with the help of many supportive countries. These especially include Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.  Certainly, we as a nation need to help more with the poverty in the third world that leads to great frustration. Shimon Peres in a phone conversation with other Reform Rabbis and myself a few weeks ago said that we can not turn away from the suffering of the Palestinians or their need for a state. He added that Israel has in turn, been frustrated by the inability of the Palestinian leadership to renounce terror and actively suppress it so that negotiations could go forward.  But neither the frustrations of the poor in the world or the frustration of the Palestinians can provide an excuse for terrorism. More importantly, this terrorism is not about world hunger or Israeli settlements. Bin Laden has himself stated the goal: the destruction of American, the destruction of Israel, the destruction of modern western civilization. The goal is replacing Western Democracy with an Islamic Caliphate in which radical Islamic fundamentalists would rule from the Middle East to the farthest reaches of the West. As Ronald Steele wrote last week, this is a battle not about issues but of beliefs. As Karen Armstrong has described in her recent book by the same title, it is a “Battle for God.” It is a battle between the modern world and the radical fundamentalist zealots who believe our civilization corrupts theirs. It is a worldview built upon hate, religious fanaticism, envy, and the glory of terrorizing violence. They hate and feel threatened by our individual liberties, equality of women, religious freedom, personal expression, and democratic values and institutions. In their zealous eyes, these are an affront to traditional society and to God. What has created the fertile ground for this violent religious fundamentalism?  It is the failed policies and leadership of every Arab nation in the Middle East.  They have brought their people only poverty, hopelessness, anger and frustration.  Unable to partake of the benefits of the modern world, they find demonizing it an attractive alternative.  Fundamentalist Islam provides America, Israel, and the West as an easy place to displace blame from the failures of their own leaders.  With the encouragement of many of their leaders, their anger is turned away from the root causes for their misery in their own societies, to anger at us.  Radical Islam enables them to find divine warrant for displacing their frustration on the modern countries of the world, that are generally non-Muslim western nations.  In making us the infidel enemies of God, radical Islam provides a divine cachet for acting out their displaced anger in terrorist violence against us.  Knowing this, we shutter to realize that surely this is not the last of their diabolical deeds. Ultimately their goal is not just to strike terror in our hearts with weapons of mass disruption. If they can, they will strive to complete the job with weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological or nuclear—radical evil. There is no simple response, no easy target or even a way to end this threat once and for all. We will be sorely pressed to find the ways to fight it without touching off a war with the Muslim world that Bin Laden would like to provoke. We fear being baited into a punishing land war in Afghanistan or being pulled into military responses aimed at terrorists that result in a lot of collateral civilian casualties. We will be taxed to deal with those nations who harbor and support terrorism from within those nation states.

However, U'vechen ten pachdecha Adonai Eloheynu, al kol hamaasecha—Let us begin our response to the tragedy of September 11th with the appropriate fear of the true evil that is plotted against us. May that awareness make us determined to put into place the security measures we now need within our nation. May it give us the courage and strength to pursue the forces of terror in the multiple ways necessary, throughout the world for quite a long time. May we bring all of the world into a coalition against terrorism. May this help us achieve the best and most effective economic, political, spiritual and military response possible to this true evil that we face.

Uvechen ten Kavod Adonai le Amecha- begins the next part of this special holiday prayer. And therefore may Israel and the Jewish People be respected and not derided or vilified by the peoples of the world. Though in shock from the terror that has hit our shores this past week, we still remember the circus of anti-Semitic hate that spewed out of the U.N. Conference against Racism the week before. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, was so horrified by the anti-Semitic nature of the Anti-Zionism coming from the Palestinians and their allies that she symbolically proclaimed, "I am a Jew."  Thirty-three years before her, one of the greatest Civil Rights leaders in America decried the racism endemic in anti-Zionism. "You declare my friend that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely, 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountaintops. Let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth…When people criticize Zionism they mean Jews...Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land.  And what is anti-Zionism?  It is the denial to the Jew of the fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord to all other nations of the globe.  It is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews. It is in short, anti-Semitism."    Martin Luther King Jr.

Already we hear on radio talk shows and in letters to the editor, voices blaming Israel and the Jews for the terrorism that has come to America. There were letters like this in yesterday's Sentinel. We must all know the true history of the Middle-East conflict and we must battle these false accusations in our community in whatever forum they arise. We have to go back to the facts and speak them over and over again. From Abraham's purchase of the right of settlement until the Roman defeat of the Jewish state in 136 CE, there was a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel for 18 centuries. From the second

century to the middle of the twentieth century, the land of Israel was ruled by foreign empires. Even during those centuries, Jews still lived in Eretz Yisrael. Jews have lived in the land of Israel continuously for 3800 years. Some of us never left and many of those who were exiled returned at every opportunity. The United Nations recognized this historic right when it issued the Mandate in 1947. Zionism is neither racism nor colonialism. It is the rebirth of sovereignty of an indigenous people, the Jewish people, in the Land of Israel. It is the authenticity of the name Palestine that is to be questioned. That name was imposed on the Land of Israel by the Roman conquers in 136 CE to punish the tenacious armed Jewish resistance there. The Romans called it Palestine after the ancient Philistines (Amos Elon: Jerusalem-City of Mirrors). Contemporary propagandists, like the Romans of old, have tried to use this name, Palestine, to wipe out the long history of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

We must also name the lie that the problem of the Palestinians was created and maintained by Israel, "Israeli colonialism." It is a fact that Israel was the only state in the region that recognized the 1947 U.N. Mandated Palestinian State. Palestinian leaders didn't even recognize the U.N. proclamation of their own state. Instead, they and the surrounding Arab states launched a war to destroy the new Jewish State. The statements of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem calling on his people to join a holy war to destroy the Jewish State are a matter of public record. It is a fact that more than 90% of all the area that the Palestinians officially say they want for a state was taken from them by Jordan, Egypt and Syria in 1948 at the conclusion of this war. Jordan occupied the West Bank and Jerusalem, Egypt the Gaza Strip and Syria the Golan Heights. In the 19 years these Arab states occupied these Palestinian areas, not once did they try to establish a Palestinian State there. It is a fact that Israel came into possession of these territories in 1967 in fighting the defensive Six Day War. It is a fact that Israel offered to negotiate to give them back shortly after the end of that war: but received the three no’s of the Arab world meeting in Khartoum (August 1967): No negotiation, no recognition of the right of Israel to exist, and no taking back of these lands by the Arabs in exchange for peace. The rest is a sad history of the Palestinians who have been cursed by an inability to make compromises and a dream of destroying Israel. This is right up to Arafat's refusal to accept a very generous offer by Prime Minister Barak at Camp David. President Clinton placed the failure to conclude peace squarely on Yassar Arafat’s rejection of the Israeli proposal, which included a capital in Jerusalem; some shared religious sovereignty over the Temple Mount, return of the strategic Jordan Valley, and 93 % of the Palestinian territories. The next month at Taba, Israel offered 95% in order to try to bring the peace negotiations to a successful conclusion as Arafat was urging his people to take to violence in the streets. Barak was elected by the people of Israel with a clear mandate to trade land for peace and to recognize a Palestinian State. Over 70% of the people in Israel stated in public opinion polls when they elected him that they favored the creation of a Palestinian State. We must help the world respect Israel by naming the lie that Israel is the source of the problems of the Palestinians.

Respect for Israel will come when we speak the truth that Israel has compromised many times to have a State and the Palestinians very little. The original area known as Palestine was 44,000 square miles. After World War I, the British sliced off three- quarters of it and formed the state of Trans-Jordan. That state has a majority Palestinian population and sits on three-quarters of the history area of Palestine. In 1947, the U.N. Mandate in 1947 gave Israel half or the remaining area which was one eighth of the original territory of Palestine.  In truth, it is already a large Palestinian state.  The remaining quarter of the lands of Palestine were divided by the U.N. in 1947 into the Jewish and Palestinian States. In that mandate, the Palestinians were granted 70% of the inhabitable land at the time, and Israel received only 30% of the inhabitable land. Many Zionist leaders argued that the mandate was unfair. Israel was entitled to half of the historic lands of Palestine. But Israel's leaders compromised, took what they could get, and set about building a state on that very desolate eighth of the historic lands of Palestine. The tragedy of the Palestinians is they have never been willing to settle for even half a loaf. This includes the normal resolution of the exchange of a half million Jews thrown out of Arab lands after 1948 who fled to Israel, with the half million Palestinians that fled to surrounding Arab territories during the 1948 war. In every other similar case, such as with India and Pakistan, the peoples have accepted these realities and moved on. There has been no mass return of refugee Hindus to Pakistan and Moslems to India when their war was concluded.  Only the Palestinians still hold out for the absolute exception that all those refugees will be allowed to return to within the 1948 borders of Israel.  This was one of the main reasons Arafat rejected Barak’s peace proposal at Camp David. Most importantly, the leaders of the Palestinians and the Arab world still bring their people's primitive pre-modern hatred towards Jews to the perpetuation of the conflict in the Middle East. It is at the core, Israel's very being that affronts their religious sensibilities. Recently, a Hamas cleric, (Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya in the Zayed bin Sultan Aal Nahyan Mosque in Gaza) spoke this plainly in his Friday afternoon Sabbath sermons. "Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are.  Wherever you met them kill them. Wherever you are, kill the Jews and those Americans who are like them and stand by them, they are all one trench, against the Arabs and Moslem, because they established Israel here, in the beating heart of the Arab world, in Palestine.” For Bin Laden, for radical fundamentalist Moslems, it's not even the existence of Israel, but the United States itself that is the problem. Israel is called by the Iranian fundamentalists “Little Satan.” It is only a small manifestation to them of what they call the “Big Satan”, America. On September 11th, when Yassar Arafat was telling the English press that the news footage of Palestinians rejoicing in the West Bank over the World Trade Center tragedy was not the position of the Palestinian Authority, the Official Palestinian Authority daily Arabic newspaper, Al Hayat Al Jadida proclaimed, “The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of their noble-predecessors...the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the US Marines a tough lesson…these suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history…they are the most honorable (people) among us….”  According to former U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk, during the entire Oslo negotiations over many years, Arafat has been saying one thing to the English speaking press and the opposite in his Arabic addresses to his people and the Arab world. In those, as in the words of Al Hayat Al Jadida on September 11th, he has continually called for a war of destruction against Israel and America. We must speak these truths when terrorism against Israel is being justified, when Israel is falsely accused of responsibility for terrorist coming to America.

We pray also that Americans respect the lessons and benefit from learning the lessons Israel has learned and the ways it has responded to terrorism.  In the face of relentless terrorism Israel has preserved a free democratic society, including a free press, extensive civil liberties, and the rights even of critical organizations like Rabbis For Human Rights. Israelis have learned patience, and to readily bear the cost and hard work that security in the face terrorism requires. Israel has demonstrated the importance of shared communal vigilance in maintaining civilian security. In the face of terrifying suicide bombers Israelis continue to go to work, send their kids to school, laugh, celebrate weddings and birthdays, and embrace life.  Israel has had the courage to pursue terrorists beyond their borders while trying to limit the collateral damage where terrorists hide. They have felt the pain of all the victims of terror and taken care of them and their surviving families. We pray that a respect may arise for Israel among all Americans that will help us better face the evil of terrorism that has come to American soil.

The last section of the special High Holiday Kedusha proclaims, Uvechen tzadikkim yiru v'yismechu.  May the righteous rejoice and be glad. Sometimes, something good and true and worthwhile comes out of suffering and destruction. Sometimes we can claim something of great worth out of terrible misfortune. We, as a society, are speaking up to stand up to hate, and not just the hate coming towards us in terrorist acts. We are speaking up against the hate that has provoked attacks on innocent Muslims and people of Arab descent here in America. We must proclaim there is nothing in the Koran or Islam that prescribes or justifies this terrorism except when distorted by the bend of radical fundamentalist fanaticism. Every religion is prey to this desecration, even our own. It was the Jewish form of radical fundamentalism that led Yigal Amir to assassinate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Our President and Attorney General have spoken clearly and forcefully, to condemn hate and hate motivated attacks against Muslims or Arabs of any religion here in America.  They have stated our enemies are not the Arab or Moslem world, but specific dangerous terrorists and those who aid them. Last week I stopped by the Texaco station on the corner owned and run by some Pakistan-Americans. I told them if they had any trouble they could call us to come or seek shelter in our synagogue, we were just down the street.  They said that they knew it was just a few people who were acting out prejudice. Also, if we needed help from them, they were ready to stand by us as well. We must all reach out in each of our own lives to do the same. We must write the letters, call into the talk shows whenever we hear hateful prejudice against Americans of the Moslem faith or Arab Americans of any religion.  Jews must be especially outspoken on this issue for we know the way in which a people or a religious group can be persecuted in treacherous times because they are in some way different.

We have learned again the meaning of heroism. It may be proved in the battlefield soon, but we have quickly come to realize once again the heroism of the righteous common citizen.  We have rejoiced to see the goodness of welders who drove from Chicago to Manhattan to try to rescue people from the rubble. We rejoiced that two people carried wheelchair bound person down 60 flights of stairs to safety in smoke and fire.  Our hearts have been uplifted when we discovered the courage and sacrifice of hundreds of firefighter. When everyone was running down the steps of the World Trade Center trying to get to safety, firefighters gave their lives, running up the steps to try to save others and put out the fire. We have rejoiced in the bravery of the people on board flight # 77 who stood up to their hijackers and crashed their plane, preventing another terrorist act. We have learned that no building, no possession is even close to a human life in worth. We have learned the priceless value of a caring community and the uplift of generosity in the face of death and destruction. Already, we at the beginning of this Jewish New Year, begun as a nation to rejoice in righteousness and in the outpouring of goodness to the victims and families of those who were hurt or killed in New York. Let us be a part of those efforts of goodness, and let our synagogue, as a community, be involved because so much will be needed by so many in the days to come. 

How shall we respond to what has happened, to the events that will change our nation, to this fearful hour? Our prayers lead us. U'vechen: And therefore now we pray that we and all the world together may grasp the true danger of the evil that faces us. Understanding its complexity, may we use our power in concert with other nations of the world to destroy it. We pray that we will have the knowledge and will to speak up on behalf of Israel, when the Jewish State is falsely blamed for plight of the Palestinians or for terrorism coming to America’s soil. May all Americans thereby gain a new respect for Israel and the lessons Israel can teach us about how to embrace life and preserve democracy in the face of terrorism. May we rejoice in the goodness we have seen exhibited in the wake of this carnage. May we add our righteousness and caring to it. U'vchen: And therefore in this way, may we affirm the holiness of human life and sanctify it in the face of evil, in this New Year. Amen.

I recommend for reading this year the following books:

Walking the Bible-A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses by Bruce Feileer

Oh Jerusalem-by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre-From the U.N. Partition in 1947 through Israel’s War of Independence, a first hand account.

Back to Rabbi Rick's sermons list