People, Place, Promise: Why We Must Reject Extremes - Lekh Lekha 5786
Assessing the state of the Jewish people, thirty years after Rabin's assassination.
The day I bought my first car, a used Toyota, was November 4, 1995, thirty years ago this week. Long before I was a rabbi or a cantor, I was working as an engineer in Manchester, New Hampshire at the time.
I would not have remembered that specific date, if not for the fact that, when I was living in Israel four years later, I would see it on bumper stickers all the time: 4.11.1995, usually accompanied by the Hebrew slogan, שלום, חבר / Shalom ḥaver, meaning “Farewell, friend.” The ḥaver implied was Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzḥak Rabin, zikhrono livrakhah / may his memory be for a blessing.
When I returned home from the Boston car dealership that day, the news was nonstop coverage of Rabin’s assassination at the hands of a Jewish extremist.
Rabin was, along with Shimon Peres, the most visible Jewish figure associated with the two-state solution. He had signed the Oslo peace accords and famously shaken the hand of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
While much of the world and much of Israel applauded this move toward peace, a fraction of Israeli society was aghast. How could this giant among Israeli military leaders and politicians, a man who had fought as a commander in the Palmaḥ and later in the IDF, who had led troops in fighting for Israel’s independence, how could this man have betrayed the Jewish people by grasping the hand of a career terrorist, one who had so much Jewish blood on his hands? How could Rabin initiate a process that would ultimately (they thought) lead to an Arab state on territory that he had personally given so much and worked so hard to defend? To some, the whole idea was unthinkable, a betrayal of everything that Rabin had stood for up to that point.
Rabin’s Jewish assassin, Yigal Amir, a law student who was motivated by an extremist philosophy, still held by some, that any territorial concession in Israel is tantamount to murder. At his trial in Israel, he was unrepentant, and he is still serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison.
For many of us in the Jewish world, it was a shattering moment. How could a Jew have murdered a fellow Jew, especially one dedicated to making peace? Does not our great sage Hillel in Pirqei Avot (1:12) command us to be an “ohev shalom verodef shalom” / a lover of peace and pursuer of peace? Rabin’s assassination was also unthinkable. It was the end of innocence for many of us; we had been assaulted by reality.
Jewish peoplehood is complicated. We do not all agree on everything. On the contrary, we have the principle of מחלוקת לשם שמים, maḥloqet leshem shamayim, disagreement for the sake of Heaven, which is that there are certain items in our tradition about which we will forever have wholesome and fervent debate (see Pirqei Avot 5:17). This idea is actually baked into our very nature as a people.
But what is also essential to Jewish peoplehood is the idea of Israel as a homeland and spiritual base for the Jewish people.
Consider the opening lines of Parashat Lekh Lekha, which we read today (Bereshit / Genesis 12:1-3):
(א) וַיֹּ֤אמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָ֔ם לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ׃ (ב) וְאֶֽעֶשְׂךָ֙ לְג֣וֹי גָּד֔וֹל וַאֲבָ֣רֶכְךָ֔ וַאֲגַדְּלָ֖ה שְׁמֶ֑ךָ וֶהְיֵ֖ה בְּרָכָֽה׃ (ג) וַאֲבָֽרְכָה֙ מְבָ֣רְכֶ֔יךָ וּמְקַלֶּלְךָ֖ אָאֹ֑ר וְנִבְרְכ֣וּ בְךָ֔ כֹּ֖ל מִשְׁפְּחֹ֥ת הָאֲדָמָֽה׃
(1) God said to Avram, “Go forth from your land, the land of your birth, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (2) I will make of you a great nation, And I will bless you; I will make your name great, And you shall be a blessing. (3) I will bless those who bless you And curse the one who curses you; And all the families of the earth Shall bless themselves by you.”
As I discussed with my dear friend Rev. Canon Natalie Hall of the Church of the Redeemer during the shi’ur last Shabbat, these verses reflect, as she put it, “People, place, and promise.” That is, (א) peoplehood (in this case, the word is goi, which to many of us sounds like a gentile, but is actually the ancient Hebrew word for a people associated with a certain geographical region), (ב) a particular land, this place of mystery to which Avram is commanded to move, and (ג) promise, meaning the great future which awaits Avram and Sarai and their descendants. It is Avram’s moving to the new place which creates the people and enables the fulfillment of this promise.
Indeed, the 19th century German R. Ya’aqov Tzvi Mecklenburg observes that God’s commandment to pick up and leave is the opposite of what you might think. The text says, מֵאַרְצְךָ֥ וּמִמּֽוֹלַדְתְּךָ֖ וּמִבֵּ֣ית אָבִ֑יךָ, “Go forth from your land, the land of your birth, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” suggesting that this is more of a spiritual journey than a physical journey. Avram is leaving first his country, then his homeland, then his father’s home. The order seems reversed, says R. Mecklenburg: if you are physically traveling, you leave your house first, then your native area, then your country. As Neḥama Leibovich puts it, this journey is “a spiritual rather than a physical withdrawal, beginning with the periphery and ending with the inner core.” It is an undoing of himself, which must therefore lead to a sort of rebuilding in his new locale.
And the very command, לֶךְ־לְךָ֛ / lekh lekha, reinforces this. The Torah could have said simply, “lekh,” “go.” But lekh lekha suggests, “go unto you,” meaning go to fulfill yourself and your destiny.
Aviva Zornberg, in her masterful work Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, describes this journey as fundamentally different from all those which came before in Bereshit: “For the first time, a journey is undertaken not as an act of exile and diminution (Adam, Cain, and the dispersed generation of Babel), but as a response to a divine imperative that articulates and emphasizes displacement as its crucial experience.”
In other words, our patriarch Avraham is known as Avraham ha’Ivri, Abraham the Hebrew, the one who moved from the place of his birth to Israel, because that idea is built into our identity as Hebrews, as ‘ivrim. The very establishment of our people is based on his relocating to that specific place with his wife Sarah.
Our tradition depends heavily on the idea of peoplehood, and particularly peoplehood attached to a land. ‘Am Yisrael ḥai, we sing with gusto, although we could just as easily sing Goi Yisrael ḥai. (It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) But peoplehood necessitates that we respond to our fellow Jews with a sense of shared destiny; that we see ourselves as connected even when we disagree; that when one of us is attacked, all are attacked, and when one of us is honored, all are honored.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the inspiring leader of American Modern Orthodoxy for much of the 20th century, used the term “Kenesset Yisrael,” the collective of Israel, to describe this sense of connection. He wrote the following:
Judaism has stressed the wholeness and unity of Knesset Israel, the Jewish community. This is… an autonomous entity endowed with a life of its own. We, for instance, lay claim to Eretz Yisrael. God granted the land to us as a gift. To whom did He pledge the land? Neither to an individual, nor to a partnership consisting of millions of people. He gave it to the Knesset Israel, to the community as an independent unity... He did not promise the land to me, to you, to them; nor did He promise the land to all of us together. Abraham did not receive the land as an individual but as the father of a future nation. The Owner of the Promised Land is the Knesset Israel, which is a community persona.
Rabbi Soloveitchik’s take is that this community persona exists within and without us as individuals. And I would extend his reasoning to suggest that this community persona is limiting: extremism of any kind is bad for the Jewish people; it is harmful to Kenesset Yisrael. Rabbi David Hartman, in speaking of the Four Children of the Passover seder, the Rasha, the wicked son, is rasha not because he is a criminal or because he does not follow the mitzvot of Jewish life. Rather, he is a rasha because he takes himself out of the community.
On the one hand, making peace is among our highest values. And on the other, Israel as a home for the Jews is also a fundamental plank of ancient and modern Judaism. Anybody who cannot abide by both those values takes themselves out of Kenesset Yisrael, of the collective Jewish persona.
I visited Rabin Square when I was in Israel in July, and spent a few minutes standing silently in front of the rocky memorial that is just off the sidewalk along Ibn Gevirol St. And I reflected on not just the last two years, and everything that has unfolded since, but also the last thirty years, and the last 2,000.
And then I bought myself a pair of Naot sandals, ate hummus and pita from a nearby kiosk, and boarded a bus to cross Tel Aviv, the first modern Jewish city. And I quietly marveled not only at the tenacity of the Jewish people, but also the essential nature of who in fact we are. Our strength as a people, and the success of the State of Israel as the fulfillment of ancient Jewish yearning, requires that the collective Jewish persona rejects extremism in all its forms.