Claiming Zionism

Transcript Rabbi Buchdahl invites us to continue wrestling with the questions raised in this sermon. E xplore resources and opportunities for further learning . Click here to access formatted version of this sermon . CLAIMING ZIONISM Yom Kippur 5787 Rabbi Angela Buchdahl Do you remember on Rosh Hashanah I spoke about my predecessor Rabbi Alexander Kohut? He was the renowned European scholar who gave his first sermon here in 1885, and began with the Gomel prayer, thanking God for bringing him safely to America, to this Promised Land. I need to tell you how the rest of that sermon went down. Our new German-speaking rabbi proceeded to warn our congregation about the changes he saw happening in American Judaism that threatened our connection to the Jewish people as a whole. Two years earlier, when Hebrew Union College ordained its first class of American-trained Reform rabbis, its celebratory dinner included soft-shell crabs and shrimp salad — the infamous Treyfa Banquet. It was a provocative declaration that American Jews were no longer bound by archaic laws that separated us from our neighbors. Kohut cautioned that discarding tradition would leave Judaism a skeleton — "without spirit and heart." If every Jew could simply pick and choose which rules to follow, what would hold us together as a people? Kohut illustrated his point with a famous midrashic parable: A group of people are traveling together on a ship when one passenger begins drilling a hole beneath his seat. The others cry out, "What are you doing?" He replies, "Why do you care? I'm only drilling under my seat." Kohut’s sermon sent shockwaves through the Jewish community. The next Shabbat, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the leading voice of radical Reform, answered from his own pulpit, just eight blocks uptown, arguing: “Judaism is a living faith, not a religion confined to dead letters.” For weeks, the two rabbis traded sermons before packed pews. The Kohut-Kohler debates even made the front page of The New York Times. Later that year, Kohler helped author the Pittsburgh Platform, defining the principles of a new American Reform Judaism. Its most consequential statement was not about kashrut or ritual garb, but Peoplehood , declaring: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community." America had offered Jews a radical promise: you could be fully Jewish and fully American. With America — gratefully — as our new nation, Judaism could just be our religion — like our Protestant neighbor, down the street. It was liberating. But it also amputated a part of Jewish identity that had been essential for thousands of years. Of course Judaism is a religious practice, but for centuries it was also our law and calendar, our language and literature. Jewish identity runs through how we speak — and argue, the jokes we tell. And in that inexplicable pull that when something happens to a Jew we have never met, in a place far away, we somehow feel it happened to us . The 20th century philosopher Martin Buber understood why. Most religions, he noted, begin with an individual revelation: a prophet or spiritual teacher, has an encounter and shares it with others. But Judaism's defining religious encounter is different. At Sinai, revelation happens to an entire people. Buber wrote: “In the hour of faith , the group becomes a nation. Only as a nation can it hear what it is destined to hear.” Jewish faith and peoplehood cannot be pulled apart. But we kept trying. Modernity asked us to check a box: Religion? Race? Nationality? What are we? The author Dara Horn gives the best answer I’ve heard: She says: "It's not complicated, it's just old. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland and culture. That’s a whole sentence in English. But in Hebrew, it’s just two letters: Am . We are Am Yisrael . The people Israel.” And around the turn of the 20th century, just as Reform Jews were loosening their claim on Jewish nationhood, Europe told our Jewish brethren: Not so fast. Pogroms swept the Russian Empire. Political movements in Germany demanded the rollback of Jewish rights. Vienna, the glittering capital of European culture, elected an openly antisemitic mayor. And in France, Alfred Dreyfus — a Frenchman by birth, language and military service — discovered that to his accusers, he was simply a Jew. Europe kept asking what was called: “the Jewish question.” What to do with the Jews? Could they assimilate enough to belong? Or would they always remain strangers in the countries they called home? Jewish leaders began asking a different question: How can we take our future into our own hands? Different Jews gave radically different answers. Their answers came to be called Zionism . The political Zionist, Theodor Herzl, asked: How do we save the Jews? His answer was sovereignty: Jews could no longer depend on the tolerance of other nations for our safety. The cultural Zionist, Ahad Ha'am, pushed back: What good is saving the Jews if we fail to save Judaism? His answer was cultural renewal: a Hebrew spiritual and cultural center that could renew Jewish life everywhere. The labor Zionist, A.D. Gordon, pushed the question further: But what kind of Jews are we trying to become? His answer was through labor: Jews would become rooted again by working the soil, remaking not only a homeland, but ourselves. The religious Zionist, Rav Kook, asked: How can this national rebirth also be a spiritual rebirth? His answer was redemption: by rebuilding Jewish national life, even secular pioneers could participate in a sacred process larger than they understood. There was never just one Zionism . And there still isn’t today. Early Zionists disagreed about every aspect of the state they hoped to build. Zionism was a family argument about how an ancient people takes responsibility for our own future. Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has defined Zionism as a “rescue project.” Because underlying all of those competing visions, was one urgent conviction: There has to be somewhere in the world here we do not need another nation’s permission to live as Jews. The Holocaust made that need undeniable. Even after the world witnessed the Nazis’ machinery of extermination, hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced-persons camps because most nations still refused to take us in. Later, more than 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries such as Iraq, Libya and Iran, erasing Jewish communities that had endured for thousands of years. And in the 1990s, Israel took in over a million Jews fleeing persecution in the former Soviet Union, and tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews escaping famine and civil war. After the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish survival never again had to depend on whether someone else opened the door. And that brings me to a rescue project for our generation. I want to rescue the word ‘Zionism.’ A Jewish Federation survey earlier this year grabbed my attention: Nine out of ten American Jews believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. 9 out of 10. But only a third of us would call ourselves Zionists. Why does that matter? Because when a majority of Jews reject the name “Zionist,” it obscures just how mainstream support for a Jewish state and attachment to Jewish peoplehood is for Jews. Zionism, simply put, is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. If you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state you are already standing inside the Zionist argument. Let me tell you why I am a Zionist. To me – Zionism is what becomes possible when the Jewish people can fully shape our own lives: In Israel, Jews live not only from January to December, but from Nisan to Adar, from Rosh Hashanah to Tisha B’Av. Children order ice cream in the language of our prophets. Jews have built amazing universities and hospitals, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens study side by side, and save lives together. Engineers make the desert bloom, one drip at a time. And we live again in the land where Jews in exile have directed our prayers for two thousand years. With that return comes responsibility: to build a society worthy of our deepest Jewish values, always striving for peace. And because I know how essential safety and self-determination are for my people, my Zionism cannot deny those same fundamental rights to another. Palestinians, too, must live with dignity, security, and freedom in their land.That is also my Zionism. Today, I’m not addressing the one in ten Jews who reject the very idea of a Jewish state. Although my door, and this synagogue, remain open to you.I’m speaking to the majority of Jews who believe in the Jewish state — but refuse the Zionist name. And you’ve told me why. You’ve said: I don’t want to call myself a Zionist because I can’t support the Israeli government and military’s treatment of the Palestinians. But Zionism is older and larger than any government. Dissent — even contempt — for an Israeli leader or policy does not place you outside Zionism it puts you alongside Israelis who have filled the streets for years , protesting their own government because of their Zionism. You’ve said: I am ashamed of Israeli extremists who commit crimes in the name of religious Zionism. But all of us should be appalled by extremist settler violence. No one should stand in the same camp with racist ministers who excuse or enable this hillul Hashem – this desecration. Hundreds of prominent Zionists — former prime ministers, IDF generals and heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet — have condemned "Jewish terrorism" and demanded an end to the violence and displacement in the West Bank. You’ve said: ‘Zionism’ has been turned into a slur — “She’s a ‘ Zionist.’ ” A shorthand for colonialism, racism, apartheid, even genocide. But these words have a history. In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda deliberately recast the Jewish national liberation movement as a colonialist and imperialist project, while using antizionism to oppress Soviet Jews. Even sponsoring a 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism as racism. The label, “Zionist” has been weaponized against Jews for more than a half century. We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment. As British writer Howard Jacobson says: “Zionism is not a country or a system of government. Zionism is the expression of a people's soul: It is a longing and a necessity, a Utopian fantasy, an understanding of history, a solution, an act of reasoning, an act of despair, a prayer, a poem, and a song.” Since when do we Jews let other people do our naming for us? If we refuse the Zionist name because others have smeared it, or because some have stained it with their violence, we hand the word to its most fanatical followers, and its most hostile opponents. We abandon the Zionists working every day for a more just, safe and peaceful Israel for all its inhabitants. And we surrender a word that has carried the dreams, sacrifices and hopes of Am Yisrael for generations. One of our young Central members spent the last year in Israel. He said his time there increased both his love for the Israeli people and his disgust for the current government. He’s not the type to join protests. But on Fridays he traveled into the West Bank to accompany Palestinian shepherds and farmers so they could work with less fear of harassment or violence from settlers. Israeli groups called this “protective presence.” This young man called it his Zionism. I especially want the next generation to know that claiming Zionism means believing in Jewish sovereignty and insisting that it’s not exempt from our tradition's moral demands. It means seeing clearly where Israel has been a beacon and a blessing. And where it has failed to live up to its values — stated in its own Declaration of Independence: “freedom, justice and peace,” and equal rights for all its citizens. When we fall short of our promise — as every person, and every nation does — the Jewish response is not abandonment. It is teshuvah. A return to who we are meant to be. That is what Yom Kippur asks of us. Teshuvah requires honest accounting, and change. But the goal of teshuvah is not shaming. Teshuvah is fundamentally an act of hope — the hope of return. When the Israelites first returned to Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE, after their exile, they sang: Shir Hama’alot b’shuv Adonai et shivat Tzion, hayinu k’cholmim — ‘When God returned us to Zion, we were like dreamers .’ They couldn’t believe it. They were living inside what once seemed impossible. Zionism has always required that kind of imagination. Theodor Herzl looked at a scattered, vulnerable people and imagined us sovereign again in our ancestral homeland, saying: Im tirtzu, ein zo aggadah. “If you will it, it is no dream.” Less than half a century later, the State of Israel was born. Impossible. Until it happened. And after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israelis regarded Egypt as their most formidable enemy, and the vast majority of Israelis didn’t believe peace was possible. But soon thereafter, Israel’s mightiest adversary became the first Arab state to make peace. Impossible. Until it happened. And in recent memory, after 738 days of despair and fear that we would never see every hostage out of Gaza, on Simchat Torah — 2 years after their kidnapping — every last living hostage came home. A miracle made possible by the relentless work of so many, and the prayers of Am Yisrael around the world. Impossible. Until it happened. Im tirtzu, ein zo aggadah. If you will it, it is no dream. There is still so much that feels impossible in Israel right now. But if our history teaches us anything it is not to underestimate what is yet to come — or our responsibility to help shape it. _________________ Rabbi Kohut served this congregation around the birth of the modern Zionist movement. His message to us in 1885 is no less true today: We Jews are in the same boat. Half the world’s Jews live in the State of Israel. No Jew should ever say: “Why should I care? The hole is only under their seat.” We cannot walk away from the most important sovereign project of the Jewish people. We must proudly claim the name ‘Zionist’ — and take our place in the unfolding story of Am Yisrael.