dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman) (03/21/88)
From: alu@erc3ba.UUCP (Alan Lustiger)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Dvar Torah: Vayikra: Rabbi Riskin
Message-ID: <401@erc3ba.UUCP>
Date: 15 Mar 88 15:36:59 GMT
SHABBAT SHALOM: Vayikra -- From Stones to Visions: Peace in the
Middle East?
by Shlomo Riskin
EFRAT, Israel -- The rocks and the violence and the
accusations continue to dominate the headlines here in Israel.
Yesterday a newspaper mentioned that in addition to the usual
assortment of rocks, Molotov cocktails and metal objects being
hurled at Israeli soldiers and vehicles, something new has joined
the ranks of the homemade weapons: potatoes with nails inside.
Ingenious, and very deadly.
The headline-hungry media, the nations of the world, and now
even Amnesty International all want nothing better than to cast
this nation, my country, into the role of sinners -- we should,
like the Jews in the opening pages of the Book of Leviticus who
are commanded to bring sacrifices and confess their sins, also
bring sacrifices in the form of sacrificing all of Judea,
Samaria, Gaza, and then confess our sins.
But what should we confess to? That we're afraid of violence
-- theirs and ours? We are! That we have not always treated the
Arabs with the dignity they deserve? The fact is that we don't
always treat our own fellow Jews with dignity either. Just read
the Letters to the Editor column in any of the Israeli papers.
Should we confess that we are the government in power? We are!
But go to any hospital in Jerusalem or Petach Tikva or Kfar Saba
and see how many Arab patients are under the care of Jewish
doctors? Power is also the power to heal.
Have we sinned because my country occupies their cities and
towns? The truth is that 'occupation' is just another way of
saying that for the last twenty years no Palestinian with
authority to negotiate a peace with us would recognize our
existence. Their charter vows our destruction. Today they speak
about Judea and Samaria, but it is no secret that many dream of
Acre and Nazareth and Lod, and perhaps that little suburb north
of Jaffa. Why not? Isn't 1948 the year they want to eradicate
completely from their history?
Have we sinned because we punish, and sometimes deport,
those who act violently towards us, making them pay for their
criminal acts, which some might call revolutionary, but which to
us is cold-blooded terror.
Have we sinned by living in Judea and Samaria? How many
Bethlehemites or Hebronites were forced to leave? The land on
which Efrat sits were uninhabited hills before we arrived. Below
are Arab vineyards, but has a child from our town every picked a
grape without permission? Do we not have historical links here?
Are not our forefathers buried in Hebron? Why do the Arabs
forget, or choose to ignore, where the name Ibrahim comes from?
The 35 Jews who were massacred in 1948 on their way to bring
supplies to the kibbutzim in the Gush Etzion region have made
this range of hills very much part of our history, contemporary
as well as ancient.
Have we sinned by coming to Israel altogether? One of the
most common rhetorical devices used by Arabs is to say they will
grant citizenship only to those Jewish families who lived here
before 1948; the others can return to their land of origin.
Has no one ever told them that more than half of Israel's
population come from Arab countries, and a good number of the
rest walked away from Hitler's gas chambers. Are Damascus and
Bagdad and Tripoli ready to welcome back their former Jewish
citizens? And should the rest of the country buy plane tickets
back to Hungary and Russia and Poland?
Who's kidding whom? Probably more than 95% of the Jews in
Israel have nowhere else to go. In the wake of WW2, which nation
in the world opened its borders to Jews, teaching us the most
important lesson of the century -- without a land of our own, we
remain beggars at the mercy of strangers.
I too have a vision of peace but first let me share a story.
When I was a rabbi in New York, a period of bitter of racial
disturbances erupted all over America; and in New York City,
where many of the whites are Jews, the feuding took on a distinct
Black vs. Jewish character. For decades, the relationship between
the two minorities, had been constructive. But a change
threatened as accusations flared up.
To help clear the air, the police captain from the local
precint came to speak one Friday night during the Oneg Shabbat at
our synagogue. His job, we soon realized, was to calm us down,
and he made the point that when a Black man says, I'll kill you,
he doesn't mean it. It's just a means of expression.
Moshe Chaim Teffenbrunn, a sexton in the synagogue who now
lives in Efrat, a man who lost his first family to Hitler, got up
and asked the speaker how dare he tell us to ignore the threats.
When the Nazis came to power, there were many who tried to defuse
the Nazis' cry calling for the death of Jews. It's just a way of
talking. They didn't mean it! "Well, Captain I ask you, did they
mean or did they not mean it? If a man says he's going to kill
you, take him very seriously."
My vision of peace between Palestinians and Jews is linked
to the messianic one of Isaiah in which all nations "...shall
beat their swords into plowshares..." It's a complicated
dream. I don't even know if all the details are even practical,
but it's based on the idea of both peoples sharing the hills of
Judea and Samaria, and creating a 'national cooperative'.
Why don't we just walk away for good? Because to do that
would be like listening to the police captain! As a Jew I cannot
blind myself to history and simply pretend that twenty years of
threats of extinction and acts of atrocities against innocents,
from school children to worshippers in a Turkish synagogue, are
to be ignored and forgotten. Closing my eyes will not make it go
away.
Here is my dream. We, the Jews and the Palestinians of Judea
and Samaria, shall become a new nation, different from any other
nation in the world. We will share these hills together, like our
ancestors the Ishmaelites and the Judeans or Benjamites. Wherever
the Arabs live, their villages and cities and hills, will fall
under their rule, their country, their language, their schools,
their police; and where we live will be our land.
If a Palestinian will want to live in an all-Moslem state,
he has 22 choices. If a Jew will want to live in an all-Jewish
state, he has only one.
Can one land share two masters? If we, Arab and Jew, learn
how to live together, not merging our identities into one nation,
but leaving it distinct and separate, two nations on one land,
and yet manage to live in peace, who knows where this venture
will lead? If we succeed, we may even become a model for the end
of wars for all time for all people.
Shabbat Shalom
Copyright Ohr Torah 1988.
This essay is distributed by Kesher --the Jewish Network. For information
regarding its use, contact the Kesher BBS at 312-940-1686.
For more information, call (212)496-1618.
--
Alan Lustiger
|_ | | AT&T Engineering Research Center
/ |( Princeton, NJ
{AT&T Machines}!pruxc!alu
(copied fom s.c.j. by David Sherman)
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