RISE UP, O GOD, AND SCATTER OUR ENEMIES

SERMON - Shabbat after Hamas Massacre  October 20, 2023

This Shabbat I want to take my text from the prophet Madonna, from her album, Bedtime Stories from the first verse of the title track:

Today is the last day
That I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore

And then:

Words are useless
Especially sentences
They don't stand for anything
How could they explain how I feel?

How can words explain how we feel this week, when organization after organization refuses to condemn Hamas, or if they do they immediately blame Israel, which is to say they blame Jews, for being massacred?

In Judaism, words matter. Words created the entire universe, and our words create the world in which we live. Words have divine power in our tradition, which is why it is so disorienting to see so many people using words simply to manipulate, simply to make false equivalencies.

Words like “apartheid” and “genocide” and “resistance” and “liberation” and “colonization” and “settler” have been so stretched, so broadened that they have lost their meaning and don’t function anymore.

It has been almost unbearably disorienting this week to see progressive and leftist organizations that some of us have supported for years turn on us so fully and so quickly.

The Democratic Socialists of America sponsored the pro-Hamas rallies the day after the heinous massacre of Israelis, before any bombing started.

Black Lives Matter in Chicago put out statements supporting Hamas’ actions and showing a Hamas terrorist parasailing into Israel with a Palestinian Flag with the 2 caption, “I Stand with Palestine.” Rather than apologize, the national organization doubled down, posting "Black Lives Matter Grassroots stands in solidarity with our Palestinian family who are currently resisting 57 years of settler colonialism and apartheid. As Black people continue the fight to end militarism and mass incarcerations in our own communities, let us understand the resistance in Palestine as an attempt to tear down the gates of the world's biggest open air prison," the statement said.

The problem is, they fail to mention Hamas that is actually keeping Gaza a prison because of its openly stated genocidal policies. Hamas’ stated goal is not to end 57 years of occupation of the West Bank, but 75 years of Israel’s existence.

Black Lives Matter also fails to mention that Israel occupies those territories because of Arab wars launched to destroy Israel, not to give Palestinian’s a state. Remember, Jordan controlled the West Bank for 19 years and rather than give Palestinians a state, Jordan annexed the land into Jordan. But Black Lives Matter says none of this, can say none of it because that would hold Palestinian leaders accountable for their horrific failures to improve Palestinian lives at every turn. They fail to mention that Israel’s need for boundaries with Palestinians is not motivated by racism, through there are certainly Jewish racists who speak loudly, but because of ongoing, ceaseless Palestinian attacks on civilian Jews at bus stations, cafes, kindergartens and schools. They claim to oppose militarism, but then speak out in support of a group that would steal food, water, and medical supplies from its own people in order to build bombs and make rockets and tunnels to launch them.

It is disorienting. It is disorienting to see LGBT organizations speak out in support of Hamas, a group that kills people found to be gay or lesbian or trans.

Of course, none of this should be a surprise. It has been coming for years and it has taken the Jewish left a long time to wake up to it.

When the original Black Lives Matter 2014 platform sloppily equated the situation there with racial politics here, we should have known, but many of us let it slide out of solidarity with African Americans.

When the Dyke March in Chicago in 2017 wouldn’t let Jewish groups participate because Stars of David were judged to be violence against Palestinians, we should have known, but many of us let is slide out of solidarity with the Queer community.

When Linda Sarsour, a leader of the Womens’ March said one could not be Zionist and Feminist, we should have known, and many did start to realize something was wrong. Many others simply hid their stars of David and let it slide out of solidarity with women.

When a college campus right here in Vermont said that Zionists can’t be part of a Sexual Assault Survivors group because Zionist was Sexual Assault, we couldn’t miss it, but many of us simply wrote it off to being in college and the idealism of youth. We have solidarity with the idealism of youth.

When I asked about antisemitism from the left here a few years ago, many of you said there was no such thing.

Of course, those here that are not progressive have been warning us for years, but sadly, many of your conservative movements have tolerated and even welcomed anti-Semitism from white supremacists like Richard Spenser, like Nick Fuentes, like Proud Boys far too easily, so you also have been part of the problem.

About a decade ago, a group of liberal Zionist rabbis and Jewish leaders began warning about this. Feeling that liberal Jewish movement like ours had reduced Judaism to Tikkun Olam, or social justice, they complained about a generation of what we called “Tikkunistas” who seemed to have missed the parts about peoplehood, about community, about prayer and Talmud and Torah. Their entire Judaism was boiled down to bumper stickers, and as a movement, we celebrated their commitment to justice, as we should have, but we should also have pointed out more clearly and pervasively where that sort of Judaism fell short.

When a group of 90 Rabbinical Students including many from HUC, but also from Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbinical schools, signed a letter accusing Israel of being Apartheid and weeping for the Palestinian victims, but showing no solidarity with the Israeli victims of terror, a shock wave went through the movement, but it should not have taken us by surprise.

When two days ago, when a large group of Jews from organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now, occupy the capital demanding a ceasefire and blaming Israel for the massacre, we knew we had fallen through the looking glass. We should not be surprised. We have been falling for a while, and now, like when falling in a dream, we are trying to wake up.

We, rabbis and educators, did this. We took our focus off of Jewish texts and Jewish learning because kids complained it was boring and parents wanted us to focus on universalist values. We felt safe, so our schools began to teach social justice more than Hebrew, and focus on universal values more than peoplehood.

We began to remove from our schools and from our prayer books anything that didn’t seem positive, or peace-oriented, and removed any lines that asked God defeat those who would attack us. That was deemed too violent and not appropriate for prayer.

Here's one they took out. Before we read the Torah, when we take the Torah out of the Ark, there is a line the Reform Movement took out:

Kuma Adonai v’Yafutzu Oivecha v’yanusu m’sanecha m’paneicha.
Rise up, Adonai! Scatter your enemies and put those who hate You to flight.

It comes just before “Ki Mitzion Tetze Torah.”

I am not a war-monger, as I’ve been accused of, but I am not a pacifist. There are such things as necessary and just wars. Turning the other cheek is NOT a Jewish Value. Defending ourselves and choosing to live as Jews – that is a Jewish value and a requirement of our law.

We have too readily given up the complex, realistic wisdom of Jewish tradition, a tradition that lived through war after war, attack after attack, a tradition that taught us to seek peace and pursue peace but also taught us that wars in response to an attack are just and that preventing another such attack is the ethical priority. We have given it up for a facile pacifism that is rooted in the tremendous privilege of not having lived through attacks like this.

I am not arguing for militarism, or for vengeance, or for tribalism. I am arguing for peoplehood, for loyalty, for a sense of duty to one’s own people as a primary ethic. I am arguing that we need a more complex ethic in order to navigate the times we are living in, to make meaning in the Orwellian world of language social media and 24-hour news has created.

We all want peace, and we all want innocent lives spared. But when people call for an immediate ceasefire, is that what they are calling for? It seems to me they are saying that the butchering of 1400 Israelis is ok, because a ceasefire will only ensure that something like this happens again, and again, and again. Why should Israelis sacrifice themselves on the altar of a ceasefire? So that the world doesn’t hate us as Jews? Newsflash – many in the world hate us no matter what we do, and we should have learned that by now.

I worry that our profound desire for acceptance, that our clinging to the fantasy that antisemitism ended with the Holocaust has led many of us to forget what our ancestors knew generation after generation. We forgot that “Never Again” doesn’t just mean other groups; it still means us, too.

We forget about groups like the Association of German National Jews, founded in 1921, supported Hitler, and his nationalism because what mattered most to them was to be seen as German. Every time there has been a threat to Jews, there have been groups of “Jews for Hitler” that let their need to acceptance in the mainstream blind them to Jewish history. They were there supporting the Greeks during the Maccabean uprising. They were there speaking out in support of Rome as Rome destroyed Jerusalem. They were there during the Inquisition and Expulsion, arguing that Jews deserved it because they refused to assimilate to Christianity. They are here right now, desperately needing to be seen as “the good Jews”, and by extension, not like those evil Jews that make up over 90% of the community.

But we can push back. We can attend rallies, and thank you. That is a start, but only a start.

We can educate ourselves more deeply on Jewish history and Jewish ethics. I’ll be doing a teach-in on the history of Israel for our teens next Sunday.

We can refuse to abandon our political spaces and instead to speak up loudly against the antisemitism that has taken root there. Too often, we - I – abandon those spaces, ceding them to those who are spouting antisemitic tropes in the name of universal progressive values.

We can start new organizations. For example, when civil rights attorney Amanda Berman began to feel pushed out of progressive spaces, particularly progressive 6 feminist spaces, she formed ZIONESS . ZIONESS is a grass-roots organization whose slogan is “Unabashedly Progressive. Unapologetically Zionist. “ We could start a chapter here. We need to start a chapter here. We could demand to be part of the Peace and Justice Center. If you are interested, let me know.

It is easy to be afraid, or shut down, or get angry, but it is much harder to make a plan to address this stolen narrative, and the first step is right here among Reform Jews, the largest movement of Jews in the US. We must not let those voices intimidate us, or cause us to hide. We must show up and we must be clear that Jewish lives also matter, and as an endangered species, they matter a great deal. We must insist that we have a right, an obligation to survive, to persist, and to flourish as we have always done in the face of hate and those who would like us to just disappear.

We won’t disappear. Try as they might, we’re still here. Am Yisrael Chai.