Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Shalom in Israel and the World (Rosh Hashanah 5777)

David and Goliath might be one of the more famous Biblical stories in our cultural repertoire. You might remember it as a wonderful story of the little shepherd defeating the mighty warrior. We read it in I Samuel 17. Israel and the Philistines are each camped on either side of a valley, which is set to be the scene of a great battle. Before it begins, Goliath comes out. He is described as being six cubits and a span tall: a little over nine feet. He is decked out in a bronze helmet, a coat of armor weighing over 400 pounds, bronze greaves on his legs, carrying a spear with a 50-pound tip. This guy is a monster. He taunts the Israelites, saying that if any can kill him, the Philistines will surrender.

David comes in to the battle as an accident. Three of his older brothers are serving in Saul’s army, and their father Jesse sends David into the field with some food. Upon David’s arrival, he hears Goliath’s taunting, and he makes fun of him to his brothers. Word gets to Saul about this little boy taunting the giant, and he sends for him. David explains to Saul that he has killed a lion and a bear, and he is confident that God will save him from this Philistine monster.

Saul equips David with a suit of armor and helmet, but David takes them off and goes to face Goliath with only his staff, his sling, and five stones. David and Goliath square off, insult one another, and David runs toward the Philistine, reaches into his bag to grab a stone, and slings it, scoring a perfect bullseye on Goliath’s forehead. After one shot, Goliath falls down dead. David then takes Goliath’s sword and cuts off his head. The Philistine army runs away, defeated, and Saul takes David in as his new general, beloved by all of Israel and Judah.

It’s a classic. The unlikely hero faces insurmountable odds and prevails. We read this story all the time. So many characters in pop culture remind us of our very own King David: Arthur Pendragon, Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, Ender, Katniss Everdeen. And of course, the State of Israel.

So often the story of Israel is compared to that of David. An Austrian journalist named Theodor Herzl dreams up a homeland for the Jews. Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State,” as he calls it in 1896. 50 years from then, a ragtag band of fighters known as the Hagannah help defend what was then Palestine, while inspired settlers work the land and ready themselves for statehood.

In 1948, Israel declares its independence. A tiny nation smaller than New Jersey, surrounded on three sides by nations that want to destroy it and that deny its right to exist. A country attacked the day after its founding, at war for 68 years, and surviving again and again. Israel is often seen as the David in a land populated by Goliaths.

There is a relatively famous story about a Jewish cadet at West Point in a class about the history of military strategy. As the semester is drawing to a close, he asks his teacher about the curriculum. “We have looked at major and minor battles all over the world to analyze their strategies, but we haven’t looked at Israel at all. Why is that?” His teacher tells him to see him in his office later that day. When the cadet shows up, his teacher has spread out a map of the Middle East with figurines of different colors all over it.

He shows the cadet the formations for the War of Independence in 1948; the Six-Day War in 1967; the Yom Kippur War in 1973; all of Israel’s wars laid out on a map. Every war was ended with an Israeli victory or with a ceasefire. After going through all of these wars, the teacher asks the cadet, “So let me ask you: Why didn’t I teach any of Israel’s military strategies?” The cadet stares at the map for a few moments, and then in a stunned whisper he says, “Because they never should have won.”

Like the young shepherd David, Israel’s strategy is not what has made it a success. It is Israel’s faith in God, and perhaps even Divine protection.

But it is not only militarily that Israel has had success that belies its size. Israel has been home to 12 Nobel Prize winners (including Shimon Peres z”l, who sadly died last week). Israel is a global leader in environmental science with its irrigation and water-saving technologies that have brought water to every corner of a country that is 2/3 desert. Israeli companies supply irrigation, water conservation and greenhouse technologies to other countries. A team of 50 Israeli scientists work full time at CERN, the organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Israel’s technological innovations are too numerous to list, but I will mention that the flash drive was invented there, and The Weizmann Institute of Science and the Technion are counted among the top 20 in the world. Innovations in Medicine, Aeronautics, Engineering, and so many more come out of Israel what seems like daily.

All of this from a tiny, 68-year-old country whose population is barely double that of the city of Los Angeles.

But perhaps we have thought of them as David for too long.

Many in the press have tried to flip the David and Goliath narrative, showing the Palestinians as David and Israel as Goliath. And Israel's actions have helped them do it.

In 2008, Operation Cast Lead began. As a response to the rockets fired from Gaza, Israel launched a coordinated air, sea, and ground effort against Hamas. Hamas losses totaled around 1300, while the Israeli death toll was 13. The three-week offensive did cause a decline in rockets fired from Gaza, and even though the UN’s Goldstone Report suggested war crimes on the part of Israel, Goldstone himself later withdrew his baseless accusations. Nevertheless, Israel flexed its military muscles in an unprecedented display of power then.

Israel has long been a nuclear power in the Middle East, and with last year’s Iran deal on the table, Israel’s worst-kept secret moved into the realm of common knowledge. Israel’s nuclear reactor was built in the late 50’s with the help of France, and remains outside of Dimona, where only one test was ever seen by anyone outside of Israel’s nuclear agency. With somewhere around 400 nuclear warheads presumed under Israel’s control, Israel is certainly a giant in the region as far as being a nuclear threat. All of this is assumed, of course, and Israel’s reaction is to never confirm nor deny that they have nuclear weapons.

This July, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved an increase in settlement building in the West Bank, allowing construction on 800 new housing units behind the green line. This expansion comes despite advice to the contrary from Israel’s strongest allies, including the United States. Israel’s continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank could be one of the biggest deterrents to the peace process.

So is Israel David or Goliath?

The biggest problem in discussing what we know as hamatzav, the situation in Israel, is that we try to classify Israel as either David or Goliath. This creates what Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in his TED talk this year calls “political moral asymmetry.” This is the notion that we believe what we are doing is for the sake of goodness and love, and what our opponents are doing is out of evil and hate. In Brook’s words, “You can’t progress as a society when you have this kind of asymmetry.”

For peace to be achieved, we must understand that this kind of David vs. Goliath rhetoric does not help. Instead of looking to mythological stories of shepherds and giants, we need to look at what it means to make peace.

Peace in Hebrew is shalom, which I hope you knew already, but it means much more than that. In the Torah, the first appearance of the word shalom is in Genesis 29 when Jacob finds a group of people by a well, and he asks if they know Laban, his mother’s brother. They say they do and he asks, hashalom lo? “Is he well?” They answer shalom, “He is well.” So in the early parts of our Bible, shalom is not peace, it is the condition of another human being.

This concept is not antiquated. We still use it in Hebrew today. Think of how we might greet someone in Hebrew: Mah shlomchah? Mah shlomchah is translated as “How are you?” probably because that is more common in English than the literal “What is your state of being?” or “What is your shalom?”

This means that if we are to have any sense of shalom, we must have a sense of the well-being of other human beings. Our first step toward peace, then, is our understanding of the one with whom we would make peace. We need to know their shalom.

Later in the Bible, the last verse of the 29th Psalm flips the meaning of shalom on its head. This verse might ring familiar, certainly if you attended Jewish camp and ever sang Birkat Hamazon: Adonai oz le’amo yitein, Adonai yivareich et amo vashalom, usually translated as, “Adonai will give strength to our people. Adonai will bless our people with peace” (Psalm 29:11). Taken out of context, that’s lovely and wonderful. Looking at the rest of Psalm 29, however, we get a totally different image.

The other verses in Psalm 29 speak of God’s great power and strength. It says God’s voice thunders across the waters; it breaks giant cedar trees; divides flames; shakes the wilderness; and strips forests bare. This is how God blesses our people with shalom. By a great show of force and strength. By giving strength to us, we will be blessed with shalom. Adonai oz le’amo yitein, Adonai yivareich et amo vashalom.

Shalom here does not mean peace in the way we think about it, it means totality, in the sense of total victory. Here, shalom is the dominance of God. So sometimes shalom does not mean holding hands and singing hinei mah tov with our enemies. Sometimes it means being strong.

This is evident in the Talmud when teaches us to do things we normally would not do in order to pursue peace. It is very clear according to Jewish tradition that if someone is pursuing you to kill you, or even if they are breaking into your home and there is a likelihood they will hurt you, it is ok to use lethal force to stop them. We can use lethal force to maintain our own shalom, our own well-being.

If this is true, the same might be said for war. If we can use force to protect ourselves and the people we love, how do we think about protecting our own nation that we love? In Deuteronomy 20, we read instructions about when we go out to battle against another nation. The general is commanded to tell all those who have built a home but not dedicated it to go home. Then all those who have planted a vineyard but not eaten from it are commanded to go home. Same goes for anyone who had been betrothed but not yet married. War may seem like the opposite of peace, but in our sacred texts war is designed to maintain the things that our society values. War maintains domestic tranquility. War maintains the possibility of planting and tending a vineyard. War maintains the possibility of keeping a family. Defending ourselves is not about violence, it is about maintaining that which is important to our society.

The text also commands the soldiers to try to make peace before going to war. If there is any opportunity to keep peace and not fight, we should take it, but if not, then we are permitted to go to war.

Sounds kind of like the last 68 years for the Jewish people, doesn’t it?

Let’s go back to I Samuel 17. If you recall, I mentioned that Israel and the Philistines were camped on either side of a valley. That valley is called the Valley of Elah. Just southwest of Jerusalem near Neve Michael, it is a gorgeous, lush area full of wheat fields and vineyards, and dotted with terebinths and oak trees. The Israelite army camped on a mountain on one side of the valley, and the Philistines camped on a mountain on the other. Militarily, they were at a stalemate. If either side were to charge the other, they would first have to go into the valley, and then make their way up to the other side’s encampment. There was no way to attack successfully.

This is where we find ourselves today. We are on one side of a beautiful land. Israel, to me, is the most beautiful place in the world. It is so much more than gorgeous valleys and pretty things to see. It is a place where we can stand in 4000 years of history. It is a land where we are free to be whoever we are, especially as Jews. It’s not perfect, but its splendor defies description. It is a place for which we must seek shalom, peace.

The Talmud (B. Berachot 64a) teaches, “The disciples of the wise increase peace in the world, as it says, ‘And all your children shall be taught of Adonai, and great shall be the peace of your children’ (Isa. 54).” If we are wise enough to see beyond rhetoric and asymmetry, we can begin to build peace for future generations.

At its core, shalom is also related to the word shleimut, which means wholeness. There is no shalom, no peace, without creating a sense of wholeness.

In Likutei Etzot, a collection of speeches by Rabbi Nachman of Batslav, he says: “The essence of peace is to bring together two opposites. Don’t be alarmed when you meet someone whose opinions are diametrically opposed to yours, causing you to believe that it is absolutely impossible to live with him or her in peace. Similarly, when you see two people of extremely contrasting natures, do not say that it is impossible to make peace between them. On the contrary, the very essence of peace is to strive for harmony between opposites.”

As we enter a new year, we pray for shalom in Israel. We pray for the wellbeing of all her people. We pray for wholeness, for the coming together of both sides of the conflict. We pray continually for peace.

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