In his brilliant memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, the Israeli writer Amos Oz describes his life as a child growing up in Jerusalem in the waning years of the British Mandate. One particularly colourful scene encapsulates some of the dilemmas of Jewish life then, and in many ways now as well. As we welcome a new year, the conflict Oz describes may help us to articulate some of the challenges we face in our own time:
"We had an iron rule," he writes, "that one should never buy anything imported, anything foreign, if it was possible to buy a locally made equivalent. Still, when we went to Mr. Auster's grocery shop on the corner of Ovadiah and Amos streets, we had to choose between kibbutz cheese, made by the Jewish cooperative Tnuva, and Arab cheese: did Arab cheese from the nearby village Lifta count as homemade, or imported produce? Tricky. True, the Arab cheese was just a little cheaper. But if you bought some Arab cheese, weren't you being a traitor to Zionism? Somewhere, in some kibbutz or moshav in the Jezreel Valley or the hills of Galilee, an overworked pioneer girl was sitting, with tears in her eyes perhaps, packing this Hebrew cheese for us - how could we turn our backs on her and buy alien cheese? Did we have the heart?
On the other hand, if we boycotted the produce of our Arab neighbours, we would be deepening and perpetuating the hatred between our peoples. And we would be partly responsible for any blood that was shed, heaven forbid. Surely, the humble Arab fellah, a simple, honest tiller of the soil, whose soul was still undefiled by the miasma of town life, was nothing more or less than the dusky brother of the simple, noble-hearted muzhik in the stories of Tolstoy! Could we be so heartless as to turn our backs on his rustic cheese? Could we be so cruel as to punish him? What for?...
A little argument used to break out among the customers in Mr. Auster's grocery shop: to buy or not to buy Arab cheese? On the one hand, charity begins at home, so it was our duty to buy Tnuva cheese only; on the other hand, Torah ahat yiyhe la'ezrach velager "one law shall there be for you and for the stranger in your midst," (Ex.12:49) so we should sometimes buy the cheese of our Arab neighbours, ki gerim heyitem b'eretz mitzrayim "for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt" (Ex.22:20). And anyway, imagine the contempt with which Tolstoy would regard anyone who would buy one kind of cheese and not another simply because of a difference of religion, nationality, or race! What of universal values? Humanism? The brotherhood of man? And yet, how pathetic, how weak, how petty-minded, to buy Arab cheese simply because it cost a bit less, instead of cheese made by the pioneers who worked their backs off for our benefit! Shame! Shame and disgrace! Either way, shame and disgrace! The whole of life was full of such shame and disgrace."[1]
This scene is at the same time comic and serious. Comic, in that with war raging in Europe and the Yishuv poverty stricken and threatened from all sides, why should anyone make such a big deal over some cheese? Serious, in that the debate raging in Mr. Auster's grocery shop reflects some of the deepest dilemmas Judaism has had to face in its long history. Universalism vs. Particularism. Idealism vs. pragmatism. If I am not for myself, who will be for me vs. if I am only for myself what am I. The way we respond to our enemies. The ways we express support for and solidarity with each other. The Chosen People. Klal Yisrael. Light to the Nations. It's all encapsulated in that debate over Mr. Auster's cheese. And as the young Amos Klausner discovered, either way you turn - shame and disgrace, shame and disgrace. In the terminology of our time, you're either a self-hating Jew, or a hopelessly narrow-minded or even racist, one. Either way, shame and disgrace.
Shame and disgrace are of course not inappropriate themes to reflect on during our Yamim Noraim - the days of awe. Our ancestors bequeathed these days to us at the turn of a new year as a time to think about, and attempt to make repentance for, all those times when we've fallen short in the year gone by - all those moments of shame and disgrace. Some of those moments entailed choices we made between good and evil, and we opted for something that was clearly wrong. For most of us, more of those moments involved choices between competing values which are all good. When we are forced to choose one, and necessarily compromise another value we believe in, we again find ourselves boxed into that place where we feel nothing but shame and disgrace, shame and disgrace.
Israel faced such a difficult choice this year as it debated and ultimately implemented the Hitnatkut, Prime Minister Sharon's disengagement from Gaza. Clearly, ruling over a million Palestinians was not good for them, and not good for us. Occupation brutalizes both the occupied and the occupier, and it costs lives. But what about the security argument? What if, as many have predicted, Hamas takes over the Strip, and the arms smuggling from Egypt accelerates? What if the Qassams and the Katyushas start flying into Israeli population centers, and more suicide bombers get through from a territory now unmonitored by Israeli troops and Israeli intelligence? How would we evaluate the disengagement account then? Net profit or net loss? Is it a government's mission to do the right thing morally towards its neighbours, or is it to defend the safety and security of its own citizens? Obviously both would be nice. But what if the implementation of these goals brings them into conflict with each other? And what about the rights of the settlers themselves, encouraged to move to Gaza by successive Israeli governments of both major parties? Staying in Gaza as occupiers and not taking chances for peace - shame and disgrace. Evacuating Jews from their homes and putting Israel's already vulnerable citizens at potentially greater risk - also shame and disgrace. Sharon and the Knesset made their choice, and it's one I support. But it makes me nervous, and even more anxious than usual about the unknowns which the new year will inevitably bring.
The very same dilemma plagues us about the security barrier still going up on the West Bank. Talk about shame and disgrace. Cutting off farmers from their fields, their olive trees, their livelihood. Making it hard or impossible for children to get to school, the sick to get to hospitals, families to see each other. There's nothing good about it - except that it seems to be awfully effective at deterring suicide bombers who target our cafes, buses, pizzerias, university cafeterias. How could any government not employ every means at its disposal to stop such horrific attacks on innocent civilians? What a disgrace it would be to have the ability to stop or at least deter a great deal of the terror, and yet refrain from doing so!
If anybody knew about hard choices, it was Abraham. In the Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, he has to decide between his love and affection for Hagar and Ishmael on the one hand, and the demands of his wife Sarah (backed up by God) to expel them from his home. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we read the Akedah, and Abraham must decide between the shame of disobeying the God in whom he fervently believed, and the shame of sacrificing his beloved son, for whom he had waited so long. In both cases, he makes his choice, and lives with the consequences for the rest of his life.
In the generations since Abraham, his descendants have faced some tough calls as well. For example, what is a Jew anyway? Some say we're a people, our identity based in a shared descent from common ancestors. This ethnic approach has a certain appeal in that it can be quite affirming of Jewish diversity. If you've got the right pedigree, you're in - whether you're Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, traditional-egalitarian, cultural, assimilationist, even a Jew for Jesus. But then we start running into problems - places where most of us feel the ethnic definition doesn't quite suffice. And what about converts? Where do they fit in? The medieval philosopher Yehuda Halevi takes this position to its extreme and claims that converts are really not quite as good as born Jews, and we see in his attitude toward Jewish identity and status the seeds of xenophobia and racism. His view is rejected by later Jewish law and tradition, which explicitly affirm that those who join our people by choice are spiritual descendants of the patriarchs and matriarchs, and that Jewish identity is not just about genealogy.
But if we are not a people, then are we a faith? That approach has a certain appeal too because it identifies being Jewish with certain things we believe in common, rather than basing it on a seeming accident of birth. The problem is, what are those things exactly which we believe in common? Maimonides would say that, for someone to be considered a real Jew, he or she must accept his Thirteen Principles of Faith- including ideas such as the existence of God, the superiority of Moses' prophecy, the infallibility of the Torah text, the notion that God rewards and punishes people for their acts, and the resurrection of the dead. These 13 Principles became very well-known across the Jewish world, and have been popularized in the Yigdal hymn which appears in most siddurim. But they're more than just a song. For the Rambam, a born Jew who doesn't accept one of these principles is not a real Jew and certainly doesn't merit a place in the World to Come. One's adherence to the faith determines whether one is in, or out.
This attitude toward Jewish identity has its own very obvious problems as well. As Menahem Kellner[2] points out , it's a short step from this approach to heresy-hunting, and very few of us would meet the Rambam's criteria. Certainly the non-Orthodox movements would be out. But even among the Orthodox - anyone who even wonders about tehiyat hametim, anyone who sees their Hasidic master as an intermediary between themselves and God, they don't make Maimonides' cut either. Professor Marc B. Shapiro has catalogued every one of the 13 Principles, and demonstrates how each one has been disputed by major Jewish scholars in Maimonides' time and since[3]. So these principles of faith may have been well-known, but not necessarily universally accepted. As Kellner points out, the Rambam didn't expect to meet too many rabbis in the World to Come, and I think it would be pretty sparsely populated altogether according to his vision.
To follow the Rambam's faith-based approach to its logical conclusion, we'd have faith tests for kids becoming Bar/Bat Mitzvah, and faith tests for conversion, and faith tests for membership in the synagogue. What would be the point of joining a synagogue if one didn't share the faith espoused in it?
It's not such a wild idea - a neighbour of ours in North Carolina was a deacon at his church, and he was one of the people who would interview folks who wanted to join the church in order to make sure that their beliefs about the Bible and about Christ were consistent with the ideology of the church. This is a relatively benign type of faith test in that the only consequence is that if you fail, you can't be a member of that church. But most of us are all too aware that such faith tests have had much more negative consequences in the history of Christianity and Islam, and I daresay that most of us are relieved that Judaism - despite Maimonides - has shied away from the hunt for heretics and infidels. But if affirming that we're a people leads us to chauvinism or even racism, and affirming that we're a faith leads us to catechisms and heresy hunting, then what's left? Either way, as with Amos Oz's cheese, Abraham and his conflicting loyalties, Israel's security and human rights dilemmas -- shame and disgrace. Our decision about how to define ourselves is not just theoretical. It may not be life and death, but it impacts on real people and it impacts on the decisions made by communities like our own. Our continual challenge is, how can we be maximally inclusive, without diluting the essence of who we are? But it's hard to answer that question if we don't know what the essence is.
At the turn of a new year, I know it's not terribly upbeat to call to mind all these difficult dilemmas. Our instincts of psychic self-protection will often help us ignore or deny the negative consequences of the choices we must make. And some of that is necessary, because we must make these choices and it's sometimes too hard to live with the constant guilt that accompanies them. But the Yamim Noraim is not a time for such self-protection. You can buy guilt free cookies at the supermarket, but at this time of year there is no such thing as a guilt-free Jew. We are not today like Alfred E. Newman. We come here to worry, and to feel the anxiety of responsibility in the atmosphere and in our souls. [4]
However, if anxiety is in the Rosh Hashanah air, then surely comfort is as well. What can be the source of our comfort, when the world places before us such insoluble dilemmas? Three things, as I see it:
The first is -- each other. We are not alone, as we go about making the judgment calls that we must make. Arguing over cheese in Mr. Auster's shop didn't solve the problem, but it did create a community of people who shared the same dilemma, and thus inevitably eased it somewhat. We so often in argument find our corner, and argue our position from there, afraid to admit the legitimacy of other points of view for fear that they will weaken us. But Rosh Hashanah is not a time for such posturing and defensiveness. Our dilemmas are real, and they are shared. We're not making policy here in shul today, or casting votes; we're striving to honestly confront our mistakes, our errors of judgment, our weaknesses, our fears. We're also here to atone for the negative consequences of the choices we felt we had to make during this last year - the consequences on friends, on family members, on coworkers, on our Jewish community, even on God. Not to justify, but to acknowledge and to repent. Doing so together can give us the strength necessary for such a difficult process.
The second source of comfort in the room today is our confidence that God loves us. This is a conviction that comes through in the Tanakh clearly, and in rabbinic literature as well. Yes, early in the history of humanity, God brought the mabul in the hopes that starting over with a new bunch would somehow make humanity better. It didn't work. We went back to our sinning ways almost immediately, and yet God has made the commitment to eschew such total solutions to the problem of our sins. No matter how angry God was with us following our various rebellions in the desert, God never followed through on the threat to wipe us out. God instead reinforced the notion that we are part of a covenant, and sometimes parties to a covenant mess up, and that fact can't be ignored or swept under the rug, but it also doesn't mean the end of the covenant. Most of us haven't done us as much for our community, or our people, or the needy this past year as we could have. We didn't grow as much in our Jewish learning or observance, or in our kindness and generosity and forgiveness to others as we could have. As every year, we balanced out the various claims on us and made choices with consequences. This time of year, we submit to God's judgment but we do so with the confidence that God's love for us will be stronger than our failings, and we will be granted another year. This season of judgment is also a season of joy because -- this judge is in our pocket, if we but honestly acknowledge our failings. The shame and disgrace that we spend most of our time trying to suppress belongs here in this room, where it can be forgiven and healed.
The third bit of comfort as we face the new year so aware of the difficult choices we face is that sometimes there is a third way. In Amos Oz's cheese narrative, there were only two possibilities: Jewish cheese or Arab cheese, each choice shameful in its own way. We often frame our dilemmas in that way and in so doing we feel boxed in, with no way out except through one of two unpalatable doorways. But another Israeli writer reminds us that the world does not always need to be set up in terms of binary choices. In the final poetry collection he published before his death in the year 2000, Yehuda Amichai imagines that the Torah doesn't give us a full accounting of the family of Abraham:
Shlosha banim hayu l'avraham v'lo rak shnayim, he writes. Three sons had Abraham, not just two. Three sons had Abraham:
Yishmael, Yitzhak and Yivkeh.
First came Yishmael "God will hear."
Next came Yitzhak "God will laugh",
and the last was Yivkeh "God will cry."
No one has ever heard of Yivkeh, for he was the youngest,
The son the father loved best,
The son who was offered up on Mt. Moriah.
Yishmael was saved by his mother Hagar
Yitzhak was saved by the angel
But Yivkeh, nobody saved.
When he was just a little boy, his father would call him tenderly, Yivkeh, Yivkeleh, my sweet little Yivkie - but he sacrificed him all the same.
The Torah says the ram, but it was Yivkeh.
Yishmael never heard from God again,
Yitzhak never laughed again
Sarah laughed only once, then laughed no more.
Three sons had Abraham
Yishma "will hear"; Yitzhak "will laugh"; Yivkeh "will cry."
Yishma-El, Yitzhak-El, Yivkeh-El
God will hear, God will laugh, God will cry.
What could be the consolation in such a sad poem? This is what I hear in Amichai's poem: that the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives and our choices are never really complete. If we but use our imaginations, we can expand our narratives to include possibilities we never thought of before. In his midrash, Amichai gives us another son of Abraham about whom we had never heard before. And that son, through his name, opens up extraordinary new possibilities in our relationship with God. For if God cries, that is a very different God than the one most of us were raised with. It's a God who cares for us deeply, and suffers when we suffer, and holds our hands through tough times. God doesn't only hear our pleas from on high, sitting up there as a stern judge (although God does that too). God also laughs and cries with us, meaning that God is very close.
If our relationship with God can be understood in this more expansive way, then maybe our dilemmas can be experienced in a more expansive way as well. Perhaps the choice doesn't have to be a stark one between Jewish and Arab cheese, one reflecting our group loyalties and the other our humanitarianism and desire for peace.
Maybe we can find ways to support our own fellow Jews, and do our part for humanity as well - perhaps not in the single-minded way some might like, but in a way that reflects the complexity of our multiple identities. Maybe we can find a way to raise our voices for the people suffering genocide in Darfur for example, and still energetically support our brothers and sisters in Israel. Perhaps some of the tzedakah we send for hurricane relief can be devoted to helping the Jewish community down south, and some to the wider community who are suffering.
Perhaps, we pray, Israel won't have to choose between security for its citizens on the one hand, and human rights or peace prospects on the other, looking at the choice as a zero sum game. Perhaps it can navigate a path which acknowledges the importance of both - sometimes bending a bit this way, sometimes bending a bit that way - but never giving up on either imperative.
Perhaps as we reflect on our Jewish identity at this dawn of a new Jewish year, we won't have to choose between Judaism as a people or Judaism as a faith. Maybe there are creative ways we can honour both these facets of who we are, without falling into the traps of racism or heresy hunting.
Perhaps as we reflect on the dilemmas and conflicts that have confounded us in our personal lives - in our families, in our workplaces, in our friendships and in our community - we can discern ways in the year just beginning to imagine a different narrative, as Amichai did, that will help us transcend some of the difficulties of the year just past. It would surely be worth a few honestly shed tears if they help us to find a way to move past that trapped feeling and discover new possibilities and new choices in the year to come.
I know we can't do it all. There are only so many hours in the day. We only have so much koach and our financial resources are limited. We can't buy all the cheese in the shop, and solve the problem that way - it would be nice if we could, but we can't. But maybe, even with our limited resources, we can find small ways to acknowledge the various things we believe in. That is not the way of a fanatic, who demands total commitment to one cause, one person, one idea - to the exclusion of all others. But most of us don't aspire to be fanatics - passionate yes, but not fanatic.
So this is my blessing for the new year: I wish you and your families a sweet new year, filled with new ways of thinking and new possibilities for resolving the dilemmas that will surely confront us.
I wish our brothers and sisters in the Land of Israel a year of respite from violence and hatred, a respite that will allow them to continue to make the hard, life and death, decisions they will inevitably confront as a society. And I wish a better, more peaceful and prosperous life for our neighbours the Palestinians as well.
I wish us all a year of greater engagement with our Judaism -- however we define it. More learning. More observance of mitzvot. More participation in the life of the community. A deeper faith. More opportunities to express our support for Israel. Greater generosity in helping others.
Above all, at the turn of this new year I wish us a year filled with honesty and humility and forgiveness. These will go a long way toward helping us mitigate whatever shame and disgrace we may feel. As the young Amos Oz found out, tough choices are part of who we are as human beings. But if - no matter what the new year brings - we face these choices, and grow a little in 5766, then we will be entitled to feel some pride as well.
Shanah Tovah.
notes
1. A Time of Love and Darkness, pp.18-19
2. Must A Jew Believe Anything? ch.6
3. The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides Thirteen Principles Reappraised.
4. Rabbi Sandy Ragins Kol Nidre sermon Oct.8, 2000