The Rabbi's Library
by Rabbi Joshua
Hammerman |
"Two Jews, One
Opinion"
(The Stamford
Advocate
04/03/2002)
A story is told of a Jewish
congregation where half the people stood up for that seminal
prayer known as the Shema, while the other half sat. The two sides
bickered endlessly about what was the proper practice, until the
rabbi finally appointed a committee to investigate the matter. The
committee went to a nearby nursing home to interview a 98-year-old
resident, the oldest surviving member of the congregation. Each
side made its claim to liturgical correctness, but in each case
the old man said "No, that's not the original tradition." Then the
rabbi lost patience and exclaimed, "I don't care what the original
tradition was. Do you know what goes on in services every week?
The people who are standing yell at the people who are sitting and
the people who are sitting yell at the people who are standing."
"That was the tradition," the old
man said.
In the wake of the Passover
massacre and other acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians, it
is time for Jews around the world to express an unprecedented
degree of unity. Jews have long taken pride in their cultural
proclivity for argumentation. Since Talmudic times, it seems, the
standard quip has been, "Two Jews, three opinions." But the
current crisis requires a falling-into-line that will seem to many
dangerous and unnatural.
Awkwardly, with not a little
trepidation but with an even greater fear of the alternative, I
raise the new banner: Two Jews, One Opinion.
I say this as long-time dove and
critic of Ariel Sharon. I cheered the Handshake on the South Lawn
and bristled at the folly that was the War in Lebanon. I've
labored effortlessly for equality for Israeli Arabs and I cried
when Yasser Arafat paid a condolence call to Leah Rabin. But now I
see the need to set aside parochial concerns and the dreams of
yesteryear. I am ready to throw unquestioning support to Israel's
unity government and await my marching orders.
I am not proposing that all Jews
become mindless automata. Fat chance of that happening anyway.
Jews are innately too wary of absolutism to place unlimited trust
in human beings. Even the ultra-Orthodox do not follow their sages
as blindly as one might think. Just before Passover, a story was
circulating in Israel among religious Israelis that in the
ultra-Orthodox enclave of B'nai Brak, at the home of a revered
rabbi, a toilet seat broke. When the rabbi's wife was seen at the
local hardware store purchasing a new seat, large numbers of his
disciples assumed that their mentor was promoting a new, stricter
way of removing all traces of leaven from the home. Instantly,
toilet seat sales boomed in B'nai Brak.
Whether this actually happened is
secondary to the idea that religious Israelis were joking about
it. For while traditional Judaism does advocate unyielding
obedience to the Torah, it never promotes blind submission to the
will of another human being. For Jews, the mind is an impossible
thing to waste.
In fact, Judaism and Jews are at
a severe disadvantage in this war. A faith that espouses reason
and reveres the sanctity of life must confront a cult of suicide
that glorifies martyrdom. A tradition that encourages
conscientious objectors to flee the battlefield must deal with
those who are bringing the
battlefield to every cafe in Tel
Aviv and pizzeria in Jerusalem. A people that has spent decades
ripping apart its own leaders, most especially the one
currently occupying the Prime
Minister's office, must face a nation that has blindly followed
its larger-than-life patriarch into this most foolish cataclysm.
I am not a tribal Jew. I am a Jew
with a universal vision of peace, with a desire to share with the
world the highest values of my faith. I long to have my passport
stamped in a neighborly Palestinian state and to sip Turkish
coffee with Arab friends in Jericho and Ramallah. But right now, I
recognize that Judaism's message will be rendered irrelevant if I
am incapable of first responding to the blood of my brother
screaming from the earth. For this is what Jewish tradition would
call an Obligatory War, a war of survival, the one exception to
the rule that encourages conscientious objectors. For the Jew
right now, there is no alternative but to become completely
engaged on behalf of Israel.
In the book of Numbers, two and a
half of the twelve tribes were given the right to settle outside
the land of Israel, under the condition that they extend complete
support to the fledging nation. I am from among that privileged
group, living in prosperity far from the carnage. But last week as
my family in Connecticut comfortably prepared to reenact the
departure from Egypt, innocent Jewish blood was being spattered
all over the collapsing door posts of a Netanya hotel. God may
have passed over that atrocity, but I will not. Neither will I
allow the Jewish people again to become the world's paschal lamb.
I am now a foot soldier in this needless war that Arafat has
wrought, and I will voluntarily exercise my God-given right to
shut up. There is a time to argue and debate and a time to simply
do what needs to be done.
And so, Mr. Sharon, tell me what
I must do.
Joshua Hammerman is rabbi of Temple Beth El of Stamford, CT,
a columnist for the New York Jewish Week and author of "thelordismyshepherd.com:
Seeking God in Cyberspace."
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