Below please find this week's d'var Torah by our congregant Vic Goldberg.
Matot and
Ma'sei, this week's portions, deal
with the end of the years in the wilderness, and the things that God tells Moses to instruct the Israelite
people, including "you shall take possession of the Promised Land and
settle in it;" "how to
apportion it among yourselves", and the warning that "if you do not dispossess
the inhabitants of the land, those who you allow to remain will be stings in
the eyes and thorns in the sides, and they shall harass you in the land in
which you live." Pretty powerful narrative, with painful relevance today. But one wonders what the Moabite
narrative might have been; they
who were to be on the receiving end of this settlement.
Conflicting
narratives about Israel came to the forefront of my life about nine years ago. I was completing 13 years as vice chairman of the
Institute of International Education...best known for administering the
Fulbright scholarships and 250 other international exchange programs,
....and I wanted to do something
in gratitude for how that opportunity had enriched my life. The CEO there asked me what was
important in my life, and Israel immediately came to mind.
As a young
American Jew in 1948, (I was 15 years old), I lived in Chicago next door to
immigrants with numbers on their forearms, near a parochial school whose
students thought I killed Christ, and I was totally drawn to this new nation, a safe place for Jews which
embodied the cultural and moral values with which I was raised.
Now here I
was in 2004, having watched nothing but strife in the Middle East for all my
adult life, wondering what if anything could bring peace to this Jewish
Homeland I had cherished all my life.
Clearly political leadership
had failed, ..... and maybe only work at the grassroots level could form
the basis of lasting peace down the road.
And so, I
envisioned a Middle East Peace Prize.
To win it you had to have two people, one Jewish Israeli and one Arab
Muslim, working together at the grass roots. I joked that we should have called it the Don Quixote
IIE Prize for Peace in the Middle East, since there was a serious possibility
that we would be unable to find a Jewish Israeli and an Arab Muslim working
together for peace….one of whom had had a connection to an international
exchange program in which IIE was involved. But we have done so, with no shortage of candidates, for 8
years running.
The
winners of the first prize in 2005 dealt directly with this issue of
conflicting narratives. Dan Bar On and Sami Adwan
were both college professors, Dan at Ben Gurion University and Sami at
Bethlehem University. They had
constructed a middle school history textbook for four historical periods: the
Balfour declaration, the 1948 war, the Yom Kippur War and the first
Intifada. On the left hand side of
each page was the Israeli narrative, on the right was the Arab narrative, and
the middle was composed of the blank lines of a workbook. To develop the textbook they sometimes
had to meet across checkpoints;
and to train 10 Israeli and 10 Palestinian teachers, they eventually had to fly
them to Crete for joint sessions.
To this day, neither the Israeli Ministry of Education nor the
Palestinian Ministry of Education have approved this textbook. But with the book's intervening
historical periods now complete,
it is being used at the University level, and so the work is not in
vain.
The 2006
Prize went to an all Israeli team, one Jewish, one Muslim, that established an
Arab Israeli Community Center In Jaffa.
The 2007
Prize to a team that established the first intregrated school in Israel, with
student enrollment and faculty, each balanced 50/50 and with Jewish and Muslim Co-Directors. They have since
expanded to three schools.
2008 to
founders of a bereavement group called Parents Circle: a Jew who lost his
daughter to a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and a Palestinian whose brother was
released from an Israeli prison... beaten so badly that he died shortly
thereafter.
2009 to the
founders of a Young Professionals Alliance between Israeli Jews and
Palestinians.
2010 to a
former member of an elite IDF army unit and a self described Palestinian
intifada fighter who formed a group called Combatants for Peace.
2011 to two
women working in Be'er Sheva for the civil rights of Bedouins.
and 2012 to
two Israelis, one Jewish, one Muslim each heading an organization devoted to
civil rights within Israel, who file joint briefs to the Israeli Supreme Court
on civil rights issues involving women, Muslims, gays, ...and Jews striving to
live their lives unrestricted by Haredeem and other Orthodox forces.
My wife Pat
and I go to Israel each year to present the prize and each year are in awe of
what the winners have done. These
absolutely heroic people have internalized scripture which is quite different
from this week's portion:
Leviticus 19:18, "love thy neighbor as thyself." More to the point, from Rabbi Hillel:
"What is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow man. That is the whole
Torah. All the rest is commentary:
go and learn it."
In some
years, the winning teams have been composed of one Palestinian and one
Israeli. In other years, both
winners have been Israeli citizens.
Where both have been Israeli citizens, the work has been focused on
civil rights, and it strongly evokes the civil rights struggles in the United
States in the last half of the 20th century.
I remember
as a boy on a trip to the American South seeing the water fountains and
bathrooms with signs designating “white only.” I remember the tumultuous years in which African Americans
fought to get the legal right to vote; and the continuing battle for
equal educational and economic opportunity.
I also
remember the active role many American Jews played in those historical
efforts. And well we should
have! Having for centuries
been the victim of discrimination, it was, and is, only proper that we
help others to be freed from it.
That lesson sometimes seems lost in the Israel of today, but I think
that same positive progress can happen there. And it will require very similar effort. It will require action ....by citizens
who are conscious of the disconnnect between their moral heritage and the
realities of their society,… and who are willing to get out of their comfort
zone and use all the tools at their disposal to pressure their government and
their society for change. All in
all, however, In this area of Israeli civil rights, I am somewhat
optimistic.
In the
area of finding peace with the Palestinians, however, my optimism has pretty much vanished. In past years, the necessity and
inevitability of a two-state solution seemed to be a given. But on our trip last month, the secular
Israeli liberals seemed dispirited, an increasingly powerless portion of
society, ....with Mr. Netanyahu focusing on disputes with the religious parties
over military service. And a
week ago, the report of a Netanyahu-appointed commission recommending that all
the illegal settlements should be declared legal, could presage a disastrous
turn away from the two-state solution, .....which has been the cornerstone of
hope for those who seek long term peace in the Middle East.....the only
solution that will allow a state that is both Jewish and democratic.
I believe
that failure to establish a separate Palestinian state will still leave us with
a Jewish state, ....but given birth rates of the Palestinians and the Orthodox
Jews, not one that is democratic.
We cringe at the term "apartheid," but that is pretty
descriptive of what will be, and what will happen.
I don't
think the Israeli government has really digested the lessons of the Arab
Spring, or the ramifications of Palestinians adopting, ....not arms which the
IDF could crush, ....but massive Martin Luther King-type peaceful
protests. Nor the kind of
international sanctions that forced well-intentioned employers like Ford and
IBM, who were hiring and promoting blacks and coloreds,.... to leave South
Africa, when major pension funds threatened divestiture of their stock. Failure to achieve a two-state solution
will be very bad for Israel, for the United States, and for Jews in general.
Living
alongside others has been a challenge from even before biblical times. And sometimes whole societies have
vanished. Things don't necessarily
work out okay in the end. We're
still in a wilderness, and narratives remain to be written. But it's the Middle East; and it's full of tribal lunatics; and
the Israelis and the Palestinians continue to take turns missing opportunities
for peace. I still believe that
grass roots efforts between Arabs and Jews are the best chance to one day force
rational change. I just fear that
time is running out. I hope and
pray Israeli's are up to the task of peace, for it means their survival. It will break my heart if they aren’t.
