Note to Jonathan in Jerusalem: I can't find your email address. Please write to me at laman100@yahoo.com

Todah!

Yom Shilishi, Tuesday, the Day After Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur was an amazing experience; serving as the student rabbi for the congregation in Bremerton was just wonderful, as was the feedback that I received. Even though the feedback was very moving and highly complimentary, I refuse to let it go to my head; I take it in and will use it to further the work that I'm trying to do. It is nice, however, to know that you've spiritually impacted someone in such a meaningful way.

Israel was the theme throughout Yom Kippur. I started a bulletin-board wall with information about Israel and ways people can help the people of Israel during this tough time. Here, without further adieu, is the Kol Nidre sermon (with thanks to Yuval for helping shape the ideas):

Dancing at Weddings

Travel with me, if you will, to Jerusalem.
A year ago tonight I experienced, for the first time, Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. For a city that slows down on Shabbat but never stops completely, here was a change.

In a city of crazy drivers, the city turned off the traffic lights.

There were no vehicles on the road, except for a few security vehicles.

Instead, hundreds of children were riding their bicycles in the street.

People walked down the middle of streets, streets that normally you take your life in your hand just to cross.

It was quiet, except for the shrieks of delight from the kids on their bikes and the quiet conversations of people greeting each other in the street, checking in to see how the past year had been, k’velling over the children while also gingerly asking if everyone was alright.

Jerusalem, ir ha shalom, city of peace, was peaceful.

Jerusalem becomes one Jewish stream on Yom Kippur. Most Israelis fast—90% according to one survey. It is a day of contemplation and repentance: religious Jews spend most of the day in synagogue, while non-religious Jews spend time quietly at home. No sounds from television or radio interrupt the tranquility as broadcasting takes a one-day break—something unfathomable in the United States.

This break from the noise allows the mind to quiet and to think back on the year past; the simchas and the pain, the births and the losses.

In Israel, all too often, people reflect back on men, women and children lost too soon, too violently, too often. Thinking about these people animates lives that were real, not just victim counts that make it on CNN for one news cycle.

Thus, for a few moments, I’d like to share some names.

In July 2002, a good friend of mine, David, a rabbinical student at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles who was studying in Israel, was taking a break at Hebrew University from his ulpan. He went into the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria and saw a number of his friends sitting together, but there wasn’t room for him so he sat nearby.

Moments later, an explosion destroyed the cafeteria, including ten lives.

David escaped the thunderous blast and went through a window. Physically unhurt, he was seen in the hospital for ringing in his ears and shock. He survived, but his friends at the table, the table he would have sat it would that had been room, did not.

Marla Bennet, from San Diego, was only 24, studying to be a Jewish educator at both the Pardes Institute and Hebrew University; she was about to become engaged—and she left behind Michael, an inconsolable life partner to be, as well as a future that would have been dedicated to the education of Jewish children.

Ben Blutstein, also studying in the same program, was also killed. He was a serious student of Torah who spent his evenings (when it wasn’t Shabbos) going around to various clubs and spinning disks. His life bridged the two worlds that are modern Israel: religious and secular. I discovered that Ben danced at my friend Yisrael’s wedding just months before he died; Yisrael showed me the joyous video of Ben holding up the chairs of bride and groom.

Janis Coulter was visiting from New York City where she worked for Hebrew University. I found out that Janis, too, had danced at another friend’s wedding two months prior in Michigan.

Dancing at weddings that were and weddings not to be.

Last spring, a wonderful new café opened in the Emek Rafaim German Colony neighborhood. Café Hillel was bright, sunny, open. It was always packed, inside and out. You could order not only coffee, but salads and sandwiches. It was a wonderful place to meet, to study, to hang out—again where secular and religious crossed paths, an island of sanity.

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. David Applebaum, who was the head of Emergency Medicine at the Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem was in New York sharing his first-hand knowledge of responding to terror attacks. Unfortunately, he had become an expert.

He flew home to Israel after his presentation and that night took his daughter out for a father-daughter talk, for his 20 year old daughter, Nava, was to marry the next morning.

At 11:30, a terrorist blew himself up, killing Dr. Applebaum and his daughter, as well as killing and injuring many others.

The next morning at ten, relatives from Israel and around the world gathered to bury father and daughter instead of dancing at her wedding.

Not only was he father of the bride, but in his job as director of emergency medicine at Shaarei Tzedek he was always one of the first at the hospital after a terror attack. When he didn’t arrive, his colleagues knew something had gone terribly wrong. He was identified by one of the paramedics that regularly responded to terrorist scenes in Jerusalem.

The next day, the headline in the New York Times read: A Healer of Terror Victims Becomes One.

///

This is just a few of the people who were taken from us, the Jewish community. People who we don’t know personally, but who touched us without even knowing it.

We are one Jewish community, and each loss is a loss of opportunity, of dreams unfulfilled, of futures unrealized, of hope dashed. It is a link ripped out of the chain of tradition, from one generation to another that reverberates over time.

BUT:

We are strong. The Jewish People are strong. Through a history of tragedy, we, the Jewish People, have lived to see Israel reborn in our ancient homeland.

We are a people who learn from our history and remember it. Which is why ancient cultures: the Romans, the Greeks, the Persian, the Babylonians, the Egyptians: they are gone and we are here.

We are here because we are a people of hope. You need to look no further than the name gracing our congregation: Beth HaTikvah, house of hope. Our name is our aspiration: that we are a house of hope to all who enter.

The NAME of Israel’s national anthem is HaTikva, the hope:

As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
And forward to the East
To Zion, an eye looks
Our hope will not be lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

You cannot leave people without hope.

Israel is founded on hope…even in the tragedy and the trauma of the terrorist’s war against the Jewish people, today Jewish children are being born in Israel and are being given names by their parents that reflect the fervent desire that this generation will be the one that knows peace in the land.

Their names are about hope.

Dor: Generation.

Shachar: Dawn.

Ofeck: Horizon.

Nofiya: View of God.

Orya: Light of God.


What’s in a name? The great Israeli poet Zelda wrote:


Unto every person there is a name
Bestowed on him by God
And given to him by his parents.
Unto every person there is a name
Accorded him by his stature and type of smile And style of dress.
Unto every person there is a name
Conferred by the mountains
And the walls which surround him.
Unto every person there is a name
Granted him by Fortune's Wheel,
Or that which neighbors call him.
Unto every person there is a name
Assigned him by his failings
Or contributed by his yearnings.
Unto every person there is a name
Given to him by his enemies
Or by his love.
Unto every person there is a name
Derived from his celebrations
And his occupation.
Yom Kippur: a time to remember and a time to hope.

The Jewish people throughout history has always been confronted with tragic circumstances, painful, unbearable loss. Jews have paid in with their lives just to be a Jew. But hope has sustained them.

We, living today, on the shoulders of our ancestors, should support Israel in this profoundly difficult time, by providing rays of hope to our brothers and sisters in Israel. Every person in this holy community should choose how best to support Israel and do it. Make your name known to our brothers and sisters in Israel, that you care, that you stand with them, and most importantly they are not alone. For out of Beth Hatikvah will come hope for the People Israel.

Yom Re-ve-ee, Wednesday

Hey, hey, hey: Let's give it up for Mr. William Safire, Israel's best friend at the New York Times:

October 1, 2003

The Arafat Barrier

By WILLIAM SAFIRE


WASHINGTON — By unleashing and sustaining suicide bombers against Israeli civilians, Yasir Arafat outfoxed himself: the Palestinian boss has given substance to the Israeli dream and U.N. promise of "defensible borders."

Two-fifths of the barrier against terrorist infiltration is already built. Its purpose is to remove the extremist Palestinians' threat of suicide attacks from what was once called the peace process.

Having driven the Israelis to build a protective fence, Arafat now wants it built along the Green Line that made Israel's cities so vulnerable in the past. That won't happen; the barrier — 6 percent of which is a wall to stop sniper fire at passing school buses — can be seen outside the suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where many of the 200,000 West Bank Jews live. A "double fence" will also protect the high ground around Ben-Gurion Airport.

But what about the Jewish families in the thriving Ariel salient, with its 7,000-student college, which juts into hotly disputed territory? Arafat wants those residents left exposed to his "martyr's brigades."

The Bush White House, in deference to European and U.N. diplomacy, has asked Israel's government to think twice about the fencing needed there. Bush aides even hint darkly of limiting that small part of our $9 billion loan guarantee that goes toward building controversial portions of the fence. Sounds menacing, but the U.S. guarantee, which costs us nothing, saves Israel about 1 percent on its borrowing costs; on 30 miles or so of fence, I figure that holdback would penalize Israel a few million dollars.

Ariel Sharon's cabinet meets today to consider "the battle of Ariel." (The Hebrew name of both the town of 20,000 and the current prime minister can be interpreted as "a lion of God" or as the poet Milton's rebel angel.) Hard-liners will argue for building the fence "east of Ariel," incorporating it into the protected zone.

Sharon is no more likely to give up Ariel, now or post-Arafat, than he is to change his first name. He once proudly showed the hilltop town to then-Governor Bush from the air, and has an affinity for its courageous townspeople. Long before that, when Sharon seemed washed up in politics, he choppered me into Ariel, where voters received him with cheers. They trust him.

He also remembers how Arafat, when presented with almost all the West Bank by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton, interpreted that huge concession as weakness and launched the second intifada. Dennis Ross, who was at Clinton's side, says that not even the deal offered the Palestinians in 2000 of 97 percent of the West Bank included the give-up of Ariel.

Now here is where the current fencemanship gets interesting. A pretty good source in Jerusalem tells me that in today's cabinet meeting, Sharon is going to count on the continued trust of his friends in Ariel. Rather than play to the Israeli grandstand by rejecting the U.S. concern, Sharon is likely to urge his cabinet to respect the Bush advice.

That does not mean to abandon Ariel; far from it. It means to postpone the inclusion of the five-village salient inside the main Arafat barrier until the last stage of the fence's construction. Meanwhile, fencing can encircle each of the villages, defending them as islands, or perhaps a horseshoe-shaped barrier not attached to the main line with Israeli troops stationed in the gap.

That would show the world that Israel respects America's intercession, and would demonstrate that only Bush — not the Europeans or U.N. — can influence Sharon. Meanwhile, the fence-building elsewhere goes on, and the decision to build "east of Ariel" need not be made for months.

Israelis are bracing for another attack by Arafat's commanding faction. In its aftermath, Israel's decision to extend the fence to defensible positions will be made.

All along, Sharon will insist that the fence is a security device, not a political border. That gives future Israeli governments opportunity to improve territorial defenses if a Palestinian partner does not soon emerge.

When that peacemaker does emerge, he or she will find the defensible-border issue already settled — thanks to Yasir Arafat. 


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