NASO 5771

NASO 5771

We are the stories we tell about ourselves. The stories that African-American communities tell about the nature of our great country differ, at least in emphasis if not in major talking points, from the stories that White Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities tell.

Because communities evolve over time to resemble their stories, the oldest stories exert the most powerful influence. This is why the Bible is so important. For almost 2,500 years we have turned to our Master Story in order to understand not only who we were long ago, but also who we are right now.

In the next few minutes I want to share with you two stories from our Master Story. Each depicts one of the most insidious conflicts in Jewish history, the clash between the Israelites and the Philistines.

The first story comes from the Bible’s Book of First Samuel. The Philistine warrior Goliath, “six cubits and a span,” about ten feet tall, emerges from the Philistine camp. “He had a helmet of bronze on his head, and was armed with a coat of mail weighing five thousand shekels of bronze,” about twelve pounds. “He wore bronze armor on his legs, with a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders. The shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam, and his spear’s head alone weighed six hundred shekels [almost a pound and a half] of iron” (I Sam. 17:4-7). Goliath challenges King Saul to nix the armies, and instead present one worthy adversary whom Goliath would fight man-to-man, hand-to-hand. We remember what happens next: the boy David approaches and taunts the giant: “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (Ibid, v. 26). David suits up and runs to the line of combat, carrying a sling and a pouch. “Putting his hand in his bag, David removed a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine.... The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground” (Ibid, v. 48).

This is the Bible story that we tell most often about the modern State of Israel, the story that Israel tells to encapsulate her brief and turbulent history: that she is little David while Goliath personifies the entire Arab Middle East: the mighty sea of nations hostile to Israel’s existence, who time and time again have risen up to challenge her, and have been struck down, thanks to Israel’s determination, courage, and surgical precision in battle, not unlike a stone slung square to the enemy’s forehead. We tell the story of David and Goliath especially in light of the ’67 war, the miraculous six-day siege that drove back enemies on every side and dramatically enlarged Israel’s territory to approach, irony intended here, its boundaries under King David.

It is with a further appreciation for irony that I note here that today’s Palestinians derive their name from the Biblical Philistines (by way of the Roman name for the Holy Land, Palestina). The Palestinian cause, a nationalist movement emerging in the mid-1960’s under the banner of the pointedly named “Palestine Liberation Organization,” exhibited remarkable savvy, and chutzpah, by choosing to identify their fledgling “nation” with ancient Israel’s arch-enemies.

There is another famous Biblical story about Israelites and Philistines and therefore, by extension, about Israelis and Palestinians: the story of Samson and Delilah. Samson, the Bible’s great strongman, is a Nazirite, a person dedicated to God through certain oaths: foremost, that no razor shall touch the Nazirite’s consecrated hair. The law of the Nazirite comes from this week’s Torah portion Naso and with this in mind, the Haftarah for this Shabbat tells the story of the most famous Nazirite.

You know this story, too: Samson--he of the rippling muscles and Rapunzel tresses--comes of age during a fever pitch in the Israeli-Palestinian, I mean, Israelite-Philistine, conflict. (You see how it easy it is to conflate the two.) As a young man Samson roams into enemy territory, falls in love with a Philistine woman (not Delilah), and marries her despite his parents’ objections. Given access to the enemy, he promptly ditches the wife and begins to aggravate the Philistines, burning their crops, engaging in lopsided skirmishes in which he kills up to a thousand of them single-handedly, and foiling a Philistine ambush.

He falls in love again, this time with Delilah, whom the Philistines bribe to discover the secret of Samson’s strength. After a few aborted attempts, her feminine wiles overcome him and he confesses. While Samson sleeps, the Philistines sneak in and cut off his hair, rendering him impotent as Superman in the grip of Kryptonite. The Philistines capture him, torture him, put him to forced labor.

While in captivity his hair slowly grows back. At a festival in the temple of the Philistine god Dagon, where the enemy has displayed Samson for the amusement of a jeering public, Samson grips the pillars, pulling them to the ground, destroying the temple, decapitating the Philistine elite, and martyring himself.

Many people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have embraced this Bible story as the definitive narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, depicting Israel as bloodthirsty brute, unmatchable in military strength but more easily tripped up through plots and schemes that make it easy to accuse Israel of deploying disproportionate force, answering sticks and stones with tanks and gunships. In these circles, Israel is portrayed as Samson, responding to the slightest of provocations by slaying a thousand at once.

We, of course, bristle at the comparison. We know that Israel trains its soldiers rigorously in the ethics of combat. I do believe that Israel agonizes over how to respond to rockets fired from Gaza into Sderot, how to preserve the dignity of Palestinian laborers trying to get through a West Bank checkpoint while remaining vigilant against the one rogue terrorist who could obliterate dozens of innocent civilians in the blink of an eye.

We can say to ourselves, Israel is not savage Samson, the muscleman with the itchy trigger finger; no, Israel is little David! Israel is the boy warrior with his slingshot, facing down all these other hostile countries, especially the giant Iran.

But the point is that we are the stories we tell.

And if we resent the appropriation of the Samson story to serve the Palestinian cause, we had better approach with equal caution before adopting the David story as our own master narrative.

For while both stories have much to say about Israelites and Philistines, about Israelis and Palestinians, in the final analysis all stories prove ill-equipped to address real-world complexities, nuances, and ambiguities.

In this week’s Sunday Times Review of Books, Adam Kirsch summarized some trends in recent books about World War II. In concluding his essay, he wrote: “… [T]he present is always lived in ambiguity…. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth — because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a ‘good war,’ and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat.”

Simply put, the stories we tell, particularly about great and brutal conflicts, tend to oversimplify: to speak of heroes and villains, aggressors and victims. We populate our stories with literally outsize characters like Goliath and Samson.

When it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, we need to stop with the stories. We need a major reality check. Israelis and Palestinians are enemies, no less antagonistic than the Israelites and the Philistines before them. But, as Moshe Dayan said: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” It’s a saying I wish both Netanyahu and Abbas would take more to heart; their overarching “strategy” seems to be the indefinite preservation of the status quo: the same old story.

Real peace will require that that we put our entrenched narratives aside for a moment, our parables with their accusations and recriminations, and start talking to our enemies about the real world, about borders and water rights and settlements and security and Jerusalem.

The Arabs are not Goliath. Israel is not David. Israel is not Samson. The Palestinians are not Delilah. For that matter, speak not of Israelites and Philistines but of Israelis and Palestinians: two peoples forged in the crucible of modern-day nationalist movements.

We are what we are: real-life enemies who have a lot of work to do in order to live side by side without violence, without the shroud of occupation casting a shadow upon the Middle East’s greatest democracy.

We are what we are: two peoples, with two irreconcilably different stories to tell, but only one destiny to fulfill.