LECH LECHA 5771: CALL ME ISHMAEL

“Call me Ishmael.”

When Herman Melville wrote the most famous first sentence in American literature, he was riffing on this week’s Torah portion, Lech-Lecha.

Who is Ishmael? In Moby-Dick he is an itinerant seafarer, an outcast of his own making. He sounds like a real downer, a dour and restless man with a tendency for unprovoked violence.

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately knocking people’s hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball” (Moby-Dick, p. 2).

That is the Ishmael of Moby-Dick. Now meet the Ishmael of Lech-Lecha. Sarai, you will recall, had borne no children and now is old. In desperation for an heir she permits her husband Abram to conjugate with Hagar, their Egyptian maidservant, who quickly conceives. An angel announces that Hagar will bear a son--Yishma-El, meaning “God listens.” The angel also prophesies: “He will be a wild ass of a man / his hand against everyone / and everyone’s hand against him” (Gen. 16:12).

Ishmael grows up in this uncomfortable blended family and, as we know, Sarai, now called Sarah, eventually conceives and gives birth to Yitzhak, Isaac. When Isaac enters the family Sarah turns on Hagar and Ishmael. Fearful that Ishmael will steal from Isaac’s inheritance, Sarah throws mother and son out of the tent, into the desert. The Torah describes the boy crying at the top of his lungs, abandoned in the wilderness. We will not meet Ishmael again until he shows up at Abraham’s grave.

Here we see the seeds of strife between Ishmael and Isaac, estranged brothers of a common father.

Islam and Judaism are Abrahamic faiths. Muslims claim lineage through Ishmael and Jews through Isaac. How prophetic the Torah seems, setting the stage for two great peoples, two great faith traditions, whose hands for far too long have been upraised each against the other, who rather than standing side-by-side have turned their backs each on the other.

Just look at our backyard. All of us have gotten caught up in the fracas over Park 51, the proposed building of Cordoba House, an Islamic Cultural Center in Lower Manhattan.

The rupture in Jewish-Muslim affairs is hardly new; we have all grown up in a time of ever-increasing discord between Ishmael and Isaac. We have lived through Muslim nations time and again mustering their planes and tanks and missiles to destroy the fledgling Jewish State. We have seen the Palestinian national cause take up the most vile and undignified ways of making known its demands--through kidnapping, hijacking, violence, and propaganda, and systematic rejection of a negotiated peace.

We have seen the rise of Islamic terrorist networks, of which Al Qaeda represents only the latest, if most notorious. We have seen demagogues turn a blind eye and allow anti-Semitism to escalate unchecked within their borders, or, worse, to engage outright in Holocaust-denial and other crimes against our people.

I am no cockeyed optimist. As a rabbinical student living in Jerusalem fifteen years ago, I remember being awakened from a sound sleep on three separate occasions when Palestinian suicide bombers blew up buses crowded with Israelis on everyday routes to work and school and grocery shopping. I walked on streets stained with their blood and witnessed the anguish of Israelis who somehow summoned the will to respond with dignity and restraint amid bottomless grief. I harbor no illusions about Islamic terrorists and no limit to the prayers of sympathy I would give to the victims’ loved ones if I thought they would bring any comfort.

“There’s good news and there’s bad news,” says my teacher, Professor Paul Liptz. “The good news is that extremists probably represent, at most, ten percent of the world’s Muslim population. The bad news is that there are 1.57 billion Muslims, which means that there may be more than 100 million who subscribe to the most dangerous expressions of an otherwise noble and beautiful monotheistic faith tradition.”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, last month delivered a powerful speech about Jewish-Muslim relations that you can read online.

“I am not one who says that the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity were men who happened to be Muslims. This is too simple,” Yoffie said. “They were adherents of a radical Muslim group; their ideas were shaped and their actions motivated by their understanding of Islam. We oppose their ideas, just as we oppose religious extremism in all forms, and we are committed to combating them.”

“But the point is that we do not tar all Muslims with the brush of extremism because extremist strands of Islam exist in their midst. To do so is to engage in the kind of stereotyping that has plagued us as Jews throughout our history, and that we reject, categorically and unequivocally.”

Friends, I could spend all evening sermonizing about the existential threat posed by Islamic extremism. A number of my colleagues apparently did just that during the High Holidays, including a rabbi named Shalom Lewis, who serves a Conservative synagogue in Atlanta. Lewis’ sermon has been spreading like wildfire on the Internet; perhaps someone you know sent you a copy. It has been called “extraordinary..." "...a beacon of moral clarity.” In it, Rabbi Lewis likens the threat of extremist Islam to Naziism and exhorts his listeners:

“We are at war… yet too many stubbornly and foolishly don’t put the pieces together and refuse to identify the evil doers. We are circumspect and disgracefully politically correct. Let me mince no words in saying that from Fort Hood to Bali, from Times Square to London, from Madrid to Mumbai, from 9/11 to Gaza, the murderers, the barbarians are radical Islamists. To camouflage their identity is sedition. To excuse their deeds is contemptible. To mask their intentions is unconscionable.”

As you can tell, Rabbi Lewis is a gifted writer and a powerful preacher and I understand why his message has resonated. Further, I admit that little he says in his sermon strikes me as factually incorrect or baseless or paranoid. He makes some excellent points, and he makes them well.

But I have two problems with his remarks. One, the lesser problem: I dispute Rabbi Lewis’ claim that “too many … stubbornly … refuse to identify the evil doers.” No, we know who the bad guys are in the war between jihadist Islam and the West and we have not held our tongues in mealy-mouthed politically correctness. This accusation strikes me as glib at best, false at worst.

Two, the greater problem: It is very easy to stand up in front of a Jewish audience and preach a sermon denouncing extremist Islam. But a rabbi’s responsibility is not only to speak with moral clarity, but also to help his congregants become better people and better Jews and I do not see how Rabbi Lewis’ message does that. Does the Jewish community need another sermon about the evils of Islam, right now? Maybe… maybe... but certainly not that message alone and nothing more.

A rabbi has a responsibility to address unchecked malevolence, all the more so when it poses a threat to our people. Extremist Islam certainly provides one example. But a rabbi also has a responsibility--yes, even a higher responsibility--to address evils and failings within the Jewish community.

And I am standing here tonight to say that with regard to our fellow Muslim-American citizens, with regard to Muslims worldwide, with regard to the respect due the people of Ishmael, we--the American Jewish community--we have gone astray.

We have gone astray by allowing the bigots to set the tone of the debate in the controversy over Park 51. I am not saying that everyone who opposes the project is a bigot; many are reasonable, sensitive and tolerant and I respect that there exist opposing points-of-view within Reform Jewish congregations including our own. But we have allowed the most unreasonable, insensitive, intolerant voices to lead the way.

We have gone astray by rushing to judgment about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project’s chief exponent. About him, Yoffie said something that everyone in the Jewish community needs to hear:

“He is a ... moderate by any definition. What is happening now is that many are searching through his 30-year activist history to find things he has said that could discredit him. And let me say clearly: he has said things that I oppose and find offensive. But if he is not a fitting partner for dialogue then there are no such partners. And I am distressed by those in the Jewish community who continue to believe that we should only talk to and approve for dialogue those who agree with us on every point and who have never made a problematic statement about Judaism or Israel. We don’t need dialogue with those people. We need it with people like Imam Rauf, who are reasonable, sensible, and courageous - even though, to be sure, we often don’t agree.”

We have gone astray by misappropriating the Holocaust to justify opposition to the Park 51 project. Many of you have heard the argument that when Carmelite nuns set up a convent at Auschwitz--literally on the camp itself, inside a building used to store canisters of the Zyklon-B gas used in the showers--Pope John Paul II understood that a convent on the site of a death camp, a mass grave, would be offensive to Jews, and instructed them to move off-grounds.

Many in the Jewish community have analogized the convent to Park 51. But the lesson we should take away, as Yoffie says, “is exactly the opposite.” Ground Zero is a mass grave, hallowed ground for Americans of all faiths. But the whole point of the Carmelite controversy is that the nuns originally had decamped on the grounds itself, and then were told to move off-site ... but nearby. In fact, their new convent was built just across the road from Auschwitz--less than the 2 ½ blocks separating Ground Zero from Park 51, and within plain view of Auschwitz (unlike 2 ½ crowded New York city blocks separating one building from another).

Please understand, this is not bleeding-heart liberal Blake taking down the conservatives. Far from it. This is a plea for reason and respect no matter your political allegiances. Listen again to Yoffie who makes so much sense:

“It is obviously true that more liberals than conservatives support Cordoba House, but that is far from the whole story. Mayor Bloomberg supports the mosque and he is an independent. Governor Christie of New Jersey supports the mosque and he is a conservative Republican.... Josh Barro, writing in the on-line edition of the conservative magazine National Review, argues the conservative case for the mosque. Conservatives, he said, believe that private property should be used as the owners see fit; they also believe that using arcane land use laws to oppose construction for private purposes is a misuse of government prerogatives. According to Barro, for conservatives ‘the proper question is not “Why here?” but “Why not here?”’”

We have gone astray every time we have forwarded an e-mail filled with blanket accusations about Muslims, Islam, mosques, or the Qur’an without fact-checking first, without responding to the sender for clarification about the original author’s identity and motives, and in this I include the persistent, unsubstantiated allegations about President Obama’s religious leanings. In fact, we have gone astray every time we have received any such e-mail without challenging the sender to stop forwarding it and to renounce it to the people from whom he or she received it.

We have gone astray every time we have spoken about Muslims, Islam, mosques, or the Qur’an if we have never had personal associations or friendships with Muslims, have never studied Islam, have never set foot in a mosque, and have never read the Qur’an, not even in part. It is easy to denounce what we do not understand, and especially easy to cherry-pick the most inflammatory passages from another faith tradition’s holy scriptures from a position of ignorance. The Qur’an, to refine my point, is replete with beautiful and uplifting teachings that we Jews embrace as our own, like “honor your mother and father”; it also contains passages that, read literally, can be used to justify xenophobia and violence.

I shudder to think of what an ill-intentioned ignoramus would make of our own Torah, which on the one hand is replete with the most beautiful and uplifting ethical wisdom, and the other hand, also mandates death by stoning for homosexuals and wayward children, and genocide for Canaanite infidels. Every time we speak about Islam, Muslims, mosques, or the Qur’an out of ignorance we diminish hope for any real interreligious dialogue. We alienate our would-be partners, exiling them into the wilderness.

Please don’t cast out Ishmael howling into the desert. For there, the Torah teaches, a boy abandoned grows up to become a wild ass of a man, prone to his most violent impulses, capable only of lashing out with his hands against everyone and everything.

Should you wish to share this sermon with people in your e-mail contact list, it will be online in the next few days. Get the word out, and add your own plea for dialogue in place of demonization. Together we can change the tenor of the conversation.

For the voices of intolerance grow louder. But we are Reform Jews and we can do better.