"READING THE WRITINGS"
Part Two


"LIVING IN WAR AND PEACE"


A Sermon for Rosh HaShanah Day 5763
September 7, 2002





Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana





Poor old Abraham! After so much wandering and uncertainty, he thought his life was at last settled. There was a Covenant with this newly-met God, and there was to be a Promised Land, and, of course, a precious son to carry on the family line.

And now look! Here he was on Mt. Moriah, knife in hand, and ready to fulfill God's latest command. As Sarah's husband looked into their precious Isaac's tearful and terrified face, we can be sure that Abraham bitterly cursed his ill-fortune. Full of self-reproach, Abraham had to agonize-"How could it ever have come to this?"

My dear friends, the Covenant. The Promised Land. And the agony of concern over their continuance-some things haven't changed in nearly 40 centuries! No one I know would ever claim that this past year was one of the best for our world. It certainly wasn't a good year for us Jews.

As we have here in America come to a new understanding of what it means to live with domestic terrorism, so we have witnessed a bloody, tragic year in our people's spiritual homeland. Mind you, not one day of treaty peace in its 54-year history, the Israelis have in recent months sustained losses due to this latest Intifada with its suicide bombers-proportionately, the equivalent of 23,000 American deaths. Think of that! Imagine America's anguish and the rage had those losses of 9/11 been multiplied by over 10 fold.

As Jews, our hearts go out to our Israeli brothers and sisters whose unwavering courage and determination in the face of such outrageous and overwhelming loss and suffering are a testimony to both their decency and to their loyalty to old Abraham's dream of that Promised Land.

With each terrorist bombing, as the news has reached our homes of more and more deaths of innocent civilians-often tender children and idealistic students-the level of our sorrow and grief has only moved us to turn to the Source of Comfort, to once again  Read the Writings which have sustained Jewish hope through centuries of exile and determined longing:   The Psalms.

Sha-aloo Shalom Y'rushalyim

Yeesh-lah-yoo Ohavyich-


Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:

"May they prosper who love you.

Peace be within your walls. . . ." (122:6-7)


These beloved words from the Book of Psalms, contained in the final portion of our Scripture which we call the Writings-K'tuvim-were written in response to cruel and heartless Babylonians who once taunted our people, now in exile, with requests that they sing the songs which once they sang in their own land before their defeat and before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

"How can we sing a song of the Lord in an alien land?" these Jewish exiles responded.

But then they summoned that sacred oath which has since become an inseparable and inviolable heartstring of every committed Jew:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

Let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

If I do not remember you,

If I do not set Jerusalem above my chiefest joy. (137:2-3)


What I want to say to you, dear friends, on this holy day is that (first) no one I know has all of the answers to the Middle East crisis, and certainly not this rabbi.

Second, I do not believe that all of the righteous high ground belongs to either side of this perplexing equation; for neither Palestinian nor Israeli has a monopoly upon either virtue or vice. There are no saints to be found in this hellish war.

But let me make my position clear on this holy day. Between the Israeli government--its army and the Israeli people --- and the PLO with Arafat and its record of lies and bloodthirsty terror, I think we all know which side is more trustworthy, which side sincerely seeks peace, and whose legitimate claim to Statehood is validated by nearly 4,000 years of recorded history.

This is not to say that concessions on territory, negotiation on borders, and any manner of accommodations will not be needed to break the current and deadly standoff. The Palestinians say it is the "occupation." The Israelis say it is the "violence and terrorism." And each blames and wants the other to be the first to stop.

As American Jews who view all of this from afar and are at times quick to secondguess the Israeli leadership, we need to stay as realistically informed as possible.  Repeat: No one has the magic answer!

Last June, Bar-Ilan University presented its coveted "Guardian of Zion" Award to a fellow named Dr. Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer calls himself a "psychiatrist in remission," pointing out that for the past twenty years since he left the practice of medicine, he has been a legal observer of governments and politicians in Washington, D.C.

Reading the lengthy address he delivered that night, I came to open my eyes to several facts about both America's and Israel's plight. Said Krauthammer,

In the 1990s, America slept and Israel dreamed. The United States awoke in September 2001. Israel awoke in September 2000. . . .

Why were we Americans sleeping, and of what was Israel dreaming? Says Krauthammer, we in the United States assumed that technological progress had changed history from one based on military and political conflict to one in which the ground rules were set by the globalization of markets which served as the great leveler and the abolisher of things like politics, war, and international conflict.

Israel, on the other hand, dreamt of a Middle Eastern version of the European Union as the model for peace. And when I read that, I remembered how, when I visited Jordan with the first group of rabbis to cross the border peacefully into Jordan some years ago, Jordanian professors from their universities excitedly shared their vision of a joint Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Jordanian common market, with open borders, friendship, and cooperation.

Says Dr. Krauthammer, it was nothing but a mirage. Because the reality is a Middle East which is a white-hot cauldron of religious fanaticism, economic regression, and political tyranny.

Israel woke to that reality, said Dr. Krauthammer,  "in the summer of 2000 at Camp David, when Barak's astonishingly conciliatory peace offer elicited a Palestinian counteroffer of terrorism and suicide bombing."  Says Krauthammer, the dream of Oslo was actually counter to the world view of Zionism which understood that the building of Zion would depend upon Jewish action, Jewish initiative, Jewish courage.

The doctor concludes his helpful analysis, underscoring how Oslo relied instead on an almost quasi-religious change of heart among Israel's enemies.

It expected a renunciation of terrorism by people who practice, support, fund, and glorify it, and who had been doing that for
twenty. . . thirty years. . .  One cannot contract out the safety of the Zionist experiment to others, most especially Arafat and the P.L.O.

Well, I found that speech (and there was a lot more to it) especially helpful in understanding what was. But where are we now? And here's where it gets even more worrisome.

I continue to think of Daniel Pearl, that kidnapped 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who met his cruel and gruesome fate at the hands of his radical Islam captors upon affirming with his last words:


I am a Jew, my father is a Jew, and my grandfather was an Israeli.


Much has been said, and rightly so, of the anti-Israel media bias. I have no intention of branding any particular network or journal or journalist as the worst offender, but certainly I do believe that it is infuriating to watch, time and time again, as the media fall over themselves to uncover every instance (or imagined instance) of Palestinian death and loss-often allowing themselves to be used and made fools of by sources adept in misleading and exaggerating. Remember the so-called "massacre" at Jenin?

And what of the other side? Were not Israeli civilians earmarked from the start for terrorist destruction? But what gives? I mean, for a people that knows a thing or two about public relations and has a fair record of Madison Avenue success, we Jews seem so inarticulate and bashful, distracted and ambivalent in our efforts to tell the facts to the world. But would they believe us anyway, I wonder? I seriously doubt it.

What especially alarms me is the promulgation of the old Medieval, anti-Semitic lies by the Arab broadcasters and press, aided and abetted by European and British newspapers, giving new credence to (can you believe it?) the charge of ritual murder and blood libel. This ages-old slander holds that Judaism requires us to torture and murder non-Jewish children in order to use their blood in Jewish ceremonies or for the baking of matzah.

A few months ago, a TV station in Abu Dhabi, one of the most popular in the Arab world, showed a cartoon of Israel's prime minister dressed as a vampire drinking blood.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," another European anti-Semitic favorite of the early and mid-20th century, a forgery produced by the czar's secret police in late 19th century, postulates a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to conquer the planet. Incidentally,  it finds itself as Article 32 of the founding covenant of Hamas.

The Arab haters of today have appropriated the worst of Christendom's shameful and tragic lies against our people and are recycling it to increase hatred of Jews.

What I'd like to know is where are the outraged voices of the churchmen coming to Israeli and Jewish defense as these acts of anti-Jewish violence and anti-Israeli hatred spread now through 21st century Europe? As David Kertzer points out in a recent New York Times column:

Given the historical role of Christianity in promulgating such hatred, it is not unreasonable to hope that church leaders will face their own past with clear eyes. They should be among the first to call attention to these lies, and they should be among the loudest in their condemnation of them.

The Christian Church has no moral credibility to comment on Jewish ethical behavior. It hasn't yet come to terms with its own guilt and role in the extermination of 6 million Jews decades ago.

Remember, at the outset, we admitted that mistakes have been made on both sides. But we see today how large lies can be constructed out of smaller truths. And people sometimes ask me,  "Rabbi Cohn, do we really need a Holocaust Memorial in New Orleans, for which we'll be breaking ground next month?"  You bet we do need a Holocaust Memorial in New Orleans,  as long as the big lie continues to be bought here and across the world.

Says Jonathan Rosen in a recent New York Times Magazine article in which he surveyed the current rise of anti-Jewish violence.

I had somehow believed that the Jewish Question, which so obsessed both Jews and anti-Semites in the 19th and 20th centuries, had been solved-most horribly by Hitler's "final solution," most hopefully by Zionism. But more and more I feel Jews being turned into a question mark once again. How is it, the world still asks-about Israel, about Jews, about me-that you are still here?

. . . What happened on September 11 is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil intend evil.


This year an Israeli, Ariel Ben Attar, sat down and wrote the world a timely and powerful letter. Let me share it.

Dear World,

I understand that you are upset by us, here in Israel. . . . Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians," yesterday it was Lebanon; . . .

It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore live, upset you most extraordinarily. Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we the Jewish people upset you.

. . . [I]t is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you in a manner of speaking and establish a Jewish state. . . . And so we decided to come home to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and the Holocaust. . . we continue to upset you.

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who, when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state, attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea.

. . . Dear world, you stood by during the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war. . . . You would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.

. . . We will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. And if that bothers you, dear world, well, think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.


My dear friends, let's take this fellow's message with us into the New Year!


We treasure the many families of this Congregation who are of intermarried faiths, and we are proud of Temple Sinai's welcoming and inclusive tradition. That tradition will only continue and enlarge as we are honored to become a spiritual meeting ground and a special, loving home for all who enter Temple Sinai's doors.

Yes, I would be ingenuine were I to say that there are not worrisome clouds on the world and Jewish horizons. But my dear friends, "Living in War and Peace," above all others, our vocation as Jews is to hope.   We hope, even at times and in places which defy all hope.

Words like "hopelessness" and "doom" are not even in our vocabulary!

And what if reason dictates otherwise? Then reason must be transcended.

For when the philosopher postulates, "I think, therefore I am,"   the Jew within us emphatically replies-

We believe, therefore we live!

And so may it ever be!

Amen.