This has been a hard summer for Lovers of Zion.
At the beginning of the summer, right here in Chicago, at an event associated with the gay-pride weekend, a flag decorated with a Jewish star was maligned as a symbol of oppression.
One week later, the government of Israel indefinitely postponed the implementation of the so-called Kotel Compromise. This January 2016 agreement was to have expanded a small-plaza that already exists and is designed to be a location for access to the kotel that is not legally designated as an Orthodox synagogue under the aegis of the kotel’s official government-rabbi. More significantly, official representatives of the Reform and Conservative Movements would have been given an official role in administering this site, something which those movements celebrated as a toehold towards official recognition by the government as legitimate forms of Judaism. Their detractors saw the compromise in a similar way and successfully organized against the plan. Minster Litzman, who actually has a decent reputation as Israel’s Health Minister said as much, “Reform Judaism do not and will not have access or recognition at the Western Wall.”
Predictably in response, Jewish leaders in the United States deliberated an unprecedented forceful response to this decision.
That very same week, legislation advanced in the Knesset to ban and legally disenfranchise any conversions to Judaism taking place outside the official government-run conversion courts. This time, the targets of Israeli policy were not the Liberal Jewish denominations in America, (whose converts are currently welcomed to Israel by the Law of Return) but rather independent Orthodox batei-din within Israel that operate outside of the government’s own system. This includes the Haredi conversion court of Bene Berak and the Gi’ur K’Halakhah court operated by Rabbi Nahum Rabinovitch that is motivated, in part, by a desire to integrate the hundreds of thousands of non-Jews who came to Israel with the mass-aliyah from the Former Soviet Union.
One week later, in response to a claim made under the Israeli version of the Freedom of Information Act, a bureaucrat at the Israeli state rabbinate released a list of American rabbis whose letters attesting to Jewish status had been rejected by the rabbinate. This list, which includes distinguished rabbis, disgraced rabbis, and even deceased rabbis either demonstrates malice of the rabbinate towards American Jewry. Or it indicates incompetence at understanding, evaluating, and interacting with American Jewry. I believe, there is a degree of malice that is implicit whenever incompetence is empowered in a sphere where sensitivity, wisdom, and discretion is required.
One week later, two Israeli police officers were murdered while guarding Har HaBayit, a scenario that is both horrifically contemporary, and also resonant with this season in Jewish memory and Jewish historical consciousness. Har HaBayit, the place where Heaven and Earth touch, the location from where God’s message of justice, and the sacred status of human life is meant to go forth to illuminate the entire world, had again been sullied by innocent blood. Over the course of this past week, the crises has continued to unfold with demonstrations, riots, and more casualties. Eruv Shabbat afternoon we heard of three Israeli civilians, members of one family, murdered as they sat down to celebrate Shabbat dinner. Once again, we have been faced with the all-too familiar experience of heading into Shabbat with unsettling news from Israel. We’ve prayed for the best and feared the worst, and I dread turning on my computer after Shabbat and learning the latest news.
This week we begin the Month of Av and our annual summer weeks of mourning and commemoration for the destruction of the beit hamikdash intensifies. We are so far from where we are supposed to be. I have mentioned in the past that some communities have the custom of storing their kinot, the booklets used on Tisha b’Av, with the sheimot, religious items that are being prepared to be discarded and buried. Since we hope and pray that each Tisha b’Av will be the last one to be mourned without a beit hamidash, in an unredeemed world, and exiled and alienated from the values that are meant to guide our lives. This summer who can hope that we will turn things around in time for Tisha b’Av? Does anyone have a realistic program?
The religious message of Tisha B’Av is that all bad things that happen are just iterations of one bad thing. We are estranged from God. We are estranged from the lives we are meant to live. And, in an unredeemed world that is distant from God and from God’s guidance, terrible suffering occurs. That is why on Tisha b’Av we commemorate events in Jewish history that took place on that precise date in history…but we also commemorate events that didn’t exactly take place on the 9th day of the month of Av. The history is not as important as the story we tell. The calendar is not as important as the meaning we find in our calendar. This time of year, the meaning we find in our calendar is tragic.
The Talmud wondered how our exile could endure for so many centuries. The first temple, destroyed in the aftermath of widespread idol-worship, lead to an exile of only 70 years. Whereas the second temple, destroyed at a time of relative Jewish piety, remains un-repaired. “Baseless hatred” or “sinat chinam” is the Talmud’s answer to this question. The disunity and infighting and unjustified hatred and distrust among the Jewish people at the end of the Second Temple period was blamed by Jewish tradition for the destruction.
Famously, in the early twentieth century, Rav Avraham Kook called for “baseless love” or “ahavaat chinam” to combat the baseless hatred that keeps redemption away. My teacher Rav Yehuda Amital, whose yahrzeit was observed this week, rejected this particular teaching. Why should my love for those who are different than I am be baseless? Why can’t I succeed in cultivating love for others that is not at all baseless, but is rather based upon their admirable qualities? Do me and my own specific ideological camp have a monopoly on admirable qualities? Of course not! The path to redemption is not paved by loving others for no good reason, but it is rather paved by finding good reasons to love those who are different.
I do not personally excel at cultivating baseless-love. That concept is a bit too fluffy for my personality. But I can augment baseless love with love that is not baseless. Those who are different from me, those who are my opponents, or even adversaries, can still be the objects of my love, and they can still be the objects of my love for who they are and not without merit.
The litany of bad things that have happened this summer can be an agenda for our response that is based on love and justice.
If there are spaces where our gay brothers and sisters are not welcomed because they love Israel, let’s make sure that our shul, and every shul, is a place where all are welcome to study, pray, and to enjoy the warm support of community. Shame on any “progressive” organization that doesn’t make room for Jews, and shame on us if any Jew doesn’t feel that she has a community where she can celebrate Shabbat with tefilah and good food and friendship and feels instead the need to look elsewhere for her community.
If our non-Orthodox brothers and sisters feel estranged from the government of Israel and its official rabbinic authority, let’s make sure that they know how much we appreciate their contributions to the Jewish people. Those who would blame the Reform or Conservative movements for all of the failings and weaknesses of American Jewry are distorting history and maligning good people based on a false and misleading historical narrative. I will never paper over my profound and comprehensive disagreements on almost every subcategory of Avodat Hashem. But I will freely acknowledge that we are on the same side, supporting many of the same goals.
If our adversaries murder in cold blood on the most sacred spot on earth, or at the most sacred time of the week, let us respond by recommitting ourselves to the sanctity of human life and the alleviation of the suffering of every innocent person; including Israeli civilians no matter where they live, and including the nearly one million children of Gaza, hovering on the precipice of a horrific humanitarian crisis that could end, quite literally, with the flip of a switch.
We read this morning a litany of Maasa’ot, steps in the journey from Egypt to Eretz Yisrael. The journey was often challenging and sometimes tragic. One only has to think back to the episodes recounted in Sefer Bamidbar to know that this was not a simple or an easy journey. No journey worthwhile is ever simple or easy.
The Torah records each stop along the way because at the end of a journey, when we finally reach our goal, we sometimes see how each stage along the way brought us closer to that destination. And even when we don’t see how each stage along the way brought us closer to our destination. Something still happened there and the events that transpired become part of our history.
We are living through challenging times. This summer is hard for those of us who love Zion. This Tisha b’Av season confronts us with new tragedies to mourn and new divisions to overcome. May we be blessed to one day look back at the events of this summer as masa’ot, stops along the way, to our ultimate destination.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 