Rabbi Dollin's Rosh Hashanah Sermon
Well, it’s me again. Thanks to Rabbi Shulman for inviting me back up here. If you don’t like this sermon, remember that I am a retiree so have some rachmanes.
Ok. Let me tell you what I want to talk about. Cheshbon hanefesh, internal spiritual work, teshuvah, and prayer. That’s what I want to talk about but let me tell you what I have to talk about: Monday is October 7, 2024. One year ago, October 7th, during the morning of Simchat Torah, Israelis who live in the Gaza envelope were overrun by Hamas terrorists: raping, murdering, burning alive and kidnapping. And we saw with sickening detail, the atrocities as many of the terrorists wore GoPros to video their actions. And we heard a telephone call from one of the murderers who called his mother and said how proud she must be, as he had just killed 10 Jews in cold blood. You all know this story. I don’t have to tell you. The misery of the surviving families one can only imagine. And the hundred or so hostages that remain in Gaza, and the families of 7 hostages recently executed in tunnels: ... just unimaginable.
One of the first Hebrew poems I learned, year one of Rabbinical School is called, “B’Ir HaHarega,” “The City of Slaughter” by Hayim Bialik, the once Poet Laureate of the State of Israel. The poem imagines the scene of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 that precipitated a mass exodus of Jews out of Eastern Europe. This is explicit and hard to hear, but one of the most important and impactful Hebrew poems ever:
“ARISE and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way…
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead…..
Its cry will not be heard…
And all things will be as they ever were….
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled;
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled;
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother's cold and milkless breast;…
In that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from
the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath
The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!
Watching from the darkness and its mesh
The lecherous rabble portioning for booty
Their kindred and their flesh!...
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; They did not stir nor move; …
How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?
They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord,
They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word.
The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi's house they flitted:
Tell me, O Rabbi, tell, is my own [defiled] wife [still] permitted [to me]?
The matter ends; and nothing more. And all is as it was before.”
This is Bialik’s description of the horror of Kishinev but even more so an indictment of Jewish men who hid behind the wine barrels in the basement and did nothing to stop the carnage: “and all is as it was before.” Jews who were passive. Jews who did not fight back. A ceasefire, if you will, before the fighting could even begin. Here is a vision of a world where Jewish self-defense, according to the Jews and the world, is an outrage, an abomination. Jews must pray to God for redemption and as they do, the world prays with them because for the world, the Jews are a precious and holy people, as long as they are dying. It’s Jews who are alive that seem to upset the world so much.
In talking with Rabbi Shulman, I said I might like to talk about Zionism in one sermon and antisemitism in another. She said, Bruce, this year, that is just one sermon. And as I wrote this, I saw that she was right.
Last spring, a Columbia student, Khymani James, a student leader, presumably among the elite Ivy League, at a school that boasts an acceptance rate of only 3.9% because their students are so spectacular, said the following recorded online during the pro-Palestinian rallies on campus. He said, “Zionists don’t deserve to live, …Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He was later heard shouting from within the protest encampment on the quad: “There is a Zionist in the camp!” and organized a human chain to push the Zionist out. He later apologized. I don’t accept his apology. But the school did because he is still a student at Columbia.
Student Zionists at one university were disallowed from being on the student council. Zionists had a hard time getting to class last spring as protesters were blocking their path. Zionists were harassed as a mob banged on the glass of the library where the Zionists were standing. The Zionists inside the building were advised by the police to go out the back door. Zionists were attacked in L.A. as they tried to enter a synagogue to pray, I gather, Zionist prayers to a Zionist God. The police told them to go around the back door to get in the synagogue. They said that they couldn’t protect Zionists going in and out of a front door. On a New York subway train, last spring, there is a recording of a rider yelling, “Raise your hand if you are a Zionist. This is your chance to get off the train.” And there was cheering on the train. Campus police advised Zionists not to wear Zionist clothing and jewelry, like a kippah or a star of David. Zionists aren’t welcome in some classes on campus; many professors do not like Zionists and say so. So if you are a Zionist, well, here is your chance to leave the campus, the trains, the streets, the buildings, and front doors everywhere. No Zionists allowed!
So, let’s talk about Zionism because I don’t remember a time in my life that I wasn’t a Zionist. I suspect if I were to ask for a show of hands in here today, who among you are Zionists, most hands would go up and stay up with pride.
So, what is Zionism?
I guess you can say that Zionism is the proposition that the Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. That they have a right for a state of their own called Israel. But I suspect that this may be too advanced a concept for the elite Columbia student, Mr. Khymani James and his friends in the encampment on the quad, so I will try to break it down further and make it simple for them.
3024 years ago, the King of Israel by the name of David conquered what was then a hill, he called Zion, in the center of what is now called Jerusalem. Zion, Tzsiyon, was probably a Canaanite name. David conquered it from a Canaanite tribe called the Jebusites. And who knows who the Jebusites conquered it from and the Jebusites died out in antiquity.
So we can say that David was the first Zionist.
David’s son Solomon built a Jewish Temple on the Mount of Zion: Har Tzion. It centered Jewish religious life around a place. After Solomon, the Tribes split, but the Temple remained and operated for most of the next 1000 years! The Romans destroyed it in 70 CE. And the Jews were expelled from Israel and although some Jews remained in the land, most Jews went from country to country for the next two millennia, first abused by Romans and then by Christians. In fact, the early Catholic Church defined itself as post-Jewish, portraying Jews as the once chosen of God, but since Jesus, now the rejected of God. And it just got worse for Jews, from there.
But Jews were still Zionists wherever they were as indicated even in their prayers from the time of the Book of Daniel in the Bible, 2nd century BCE who prayed from Babylon towards Jerusalem, three times each day. We see it in the Amidah: “Blessed are You, Lord, Who returns God's Divine Presence to Zion.” You have it in your Machzor, right now, the same prayer.
And in an often-recited Psalm, 137 written even earlier than Daniel:
By the rivers of Babylon—
There we sat down and there we wept
When we remembered Zion.
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
Let my right hand also forget!
My tongue cling to my mouth,
If I do not remember you,
If I do not set Jerusalem
Above my highest joy...
Jews were all over the world after the Temple was destroyed but Zion was never forgotten. Judah Halevi, a poet and philosopher in Muslim Spain, who died in 1141 wrote:
“My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west--How can I find savour in food? How shall it be sweet to me? … while yet Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains? A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain --Seeing how precious in mine eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.”
My point here is that Zion, Israel, was not just a place for the Jews, it was the center of the Jewish spiritual universe from the time of David to the present day. 3000 years of Zionism.
Jews lived all over the world and were expelled from many of the lands they lived in, like from England in 1290, France, 1306, Spain, 1492, Lithuania, 1495, Russia, 1600, Prague, 1744 and there was several hundred years of Inquisition, Pogroms, and a Holocaust. For 2000 years, Jews didn’t have a home; they were strangers in strange lands, except for the one home they held in their hearts for all that time, yearning for a return to Zion.
Zion, in the meantime, was conquered over and over again by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Christian crusaders, and the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans controlled the territory we now call Israel and considered it a territory of limited interest for 500 years until they lost their empire to the British in World War I and the British took it on as a League of Nations mandate. There was no country there, no nation, no state. It was imperial Ottoman until it was a British mandate. So, the claim that Palestinian Arabs are the only indigenous to a country called Palestine is absurd on its face: there was no country called Palestine. There were Arab communities in the territory as there were Jewish communities. Both can claim indigeneity, the Jews back to the time of King David.
Theodore Herzl was a journalist who covered the Dreyfus Trial in France in 1894. Dreyfus was an officer in the French army accused of treason and it was patently obvious to everyone that he was railroaded to conviction because he was a Jew. Herzl saw this and understood that there was no future for the Jews in Europe. They had to get out. What a prophet, right? 50 some years later, 6 million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis. I understand that it's hard for Kymani James and some of his antizionists on the quad to imagine so far back, to the Holocaust, 80 years ago, but it’s not hard for me at all. I was born in 1958, but I grew up with Holocaust survivors in my home shul, and we had hundreds in this community, many of whom told their stories, firsthand, on this bema where I stand!
Herzl and others organized and began expanding the settlement of Jews through land purchases in Israel. Jews cultivated the land. They formed a nascent Jewish government. They engaged world Jewry who gave of their resources. They created a defense organization and a labor union. The work of building a nation was hard and it succeeded through grit and chutzpah. The Arabs in the region were threatened and instead of building their own state, they tried to tear down the one being created by the Jews and it turned violent, and the British had had enough by 1947 and so the United Nations proposed dividing the land between Jew and Arab and the Jews said yes and the Arabs said no. And there was a war, and the Zionists won, and the Jewish State was declared in 1948. Many Arabs were displaced as a result of this war. Peoples have been displaced in every war for all of human history. It can be an ugly thing to create a state. But the Jews created one that is now a powerful, advanced, sovereign, democratic, first world country. Here to stay.
The UN proposed a two-state solution in 1947: the Arabs rejected it. Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 2000. Rejected. And in 2007. Rejected. After the 2000 offer, the Second Intifada commenced and Hamas sent suicide bombers into pizzerias, buses, a nightclub for teenagers, a Passover Seder at a Hotel in Tel Aviv. Over a thousand Jews died and over a thousand injured until Israel put up a defense barrier that outraged the whole world, and Hamas suicide terror essentially stopped overnight. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Complete withdrawal: civilians, and military. Gaza was Yudenrein, no Jews. They gave it all to the Palestinians to do with it what they wanted. Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 and the rockets began to fly. As we now know, hundreds of millions of dollars given by other countries for the benefit of the Palestinian people in Gaza, for schools and mosques, for food and medicine was used to build tunnels and stockpile weapons to kill Israelis. And then there was October 7th a year ago and that changed everything again and here we are. Bialik’s description of the “City of Slaughter” could have been a description of October 7 in K’far Aza and Beeri and Nir Oz and Alumin and the Nova Music Festival. But unlike Kishinev, this time, it happened in Israel. And much to the consternation and outrage of much of the world, Israel fought back! Of course, nothing is right with the world, say the elite on the quad, when Jews fight back. How dare the Jews fight back instead of what they should be doing and that is dying.
I had Israeli teachers in religious school. My parents made several trips to Israel, and they told me and my sisters about them with pride and excitement in their voices and tears in their eyes. I was 15 on Yom Kippur, 1973, in shul when the rabbi came on the bema and said there was a surprise attack on Israel from Egypt and Syria and that it was bad, existentially bad. We all came to a rally at the synagogue that night. It was terrifying. Israel with America’s help prevailed in that war. I first went to Israel in college. Rabbinical School for a year. 4 years of frequent trips studying in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute. Synagogue trips Tammy and I led which were transformative for all of us. Our kids have been several times, including through the Jewish Day School. I cannot imagine a world with Israel not in it. I cannot imagine a Jewish community without the support and inspiration of the Jewish State. I cannot imagine a Judaism that does not see Jerusalem, Zion, as the center of our hearts and hopes and dreams. I do not understand myself nor my Judaism without Israel in my life.
So, yeah, I am a Zionist.
October 8, 2023. Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, together with some other organizations, wrote: “We, the undersigned student organizations, unequivocally hold the Israeli government entirely responsible for the events of October 7, 2023.” When this statement was released, there were still terrorists in southern Israel. There was still more killing. There were more kidnappings happening while they wrote. Israel had not retaliated yet and still, according to them, Israel was entirely responsible for the violence. No mention of Hamas. Let’s get closer to home. This is what the faculty of the Ethnic Studies Department at CU Boulder, wrote:
“Unfortunately, starting October 7, 2023, … we witness another unprecedented genocidal attack on the Palestinian people, an intentional collective punishment and forced displacement with unprecedented levels of air bombings on civilians.” Really? Is that what they witnessed on Oct 7? No mention of Hamas.
They wrote: “We stand with our Palestinian students, faculty, staff, and broader community to demand an immediate ceasefire, as we continue to support complete liberation, de-occupation, decarceration, and decolonization of Palestine… We also reject the language of “terrorism” used by the US and Israel to justify the Israeli state killing machine.”
Jewish Colorado and I wrote to the administration at C.U. about this perplexing letter. The administration, to their credit, made Ethnic Studies take the letter down from their website. Here is what the Professors put up instead: “Because the Department of Ethnic Studies and our faculty, staff, and students find ourselves under attack for the statement we had previously shared on our website, we are removing the statement…”. Good for them.
October 15, 2023. Professor Russel Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University caught on video said this:
“What has Hamas done? Hamas has shifted the balance of power. Hamas has punctured the illusion of [Israeli] invincibility. That's what they've done…Hamas has changed the terms of debate.” …. “It was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing!... I was exhilarated!”
Kymani James, one could say, is just a dumb kid. But Rickford is presumably a fully formed adult! He found it exhilarating and energizing, this mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of innocents, the holding of civilian hostages, including babies, children, women, and elderly, in tunnels underground. Wait, he also apologized for his remarks. I don’t accept his apology. But Cornell did as he is teaching 3 classes this semester.
Journalist Bari Weiss says that we Jews shouldn’t be surprised at what has happened at our universities. Because since the 60s, a once radical ideology has taken hold in much of these departments: Ethnic Studies, History, Political Science, the Social Sciences, and Minority Studies. It is an ideology that is now mainstream. It sees the world as a struggle between the powerful and those marginalized. The powerful in Western civilization are mostly white male Europeans and their descendants, and the oppressed are women, LGBTQ, and People of color, including Native Americans and other indigenous, colonized peoples. There are some good arguments here and I am not criticizing it. It is not my focus or my expertise. But what I do not accept are claims that emerged in 70’s from Columbia scholar Edward Said and others that places Israel squarely in the oppressor/colonial category and the Palestinians in the category of the oppressed. For them, Israel is a brutal foreign European white male supremacist colonizer and the Palestinians are indigenous victims of Israeli-perpetrated, apartheid and genocide. And there is no arguing these claims on campus without being shouted down. The claims are false. There has been no genocide. The Arab population in the region has grown tenfold since 1948. There is no apartheid. Israeli Arabs vote and have representation in the Knesset and the Supreme Court. The early Zionists were not colonizers. They bought land and built communities in their ancestral homeland. And most Israelis came to Israel as refugees or are descendants of refugees and they are not white: Yemenites, Moroccans, Egyptians, Iraqis and Ethiopians. And the entire citizenry in Israel has equal rights, including women, LGBTQ, Israelis of color and Arab and other non-Jewish Israelis. And there is the rule of law, free press, strong judiciary, none of which exists in any other country in the Middle East. Nor would they exist in a Palestinian state if it were ever to come about. But nevertheless, for the ideologues on campus, the Jewish State of Israel is illegitimate in every way. For the purists in the departments, there is no possibility of a two-state solution; there is no possibility for two people living side by side. There is no possibility and no place for the Jews anywhere in the region. And if the Jews do not leave of their own accord, then they should be removed, or killed through the violence of liberation. And I am not making this up. They are the ones holding the signs and chanting the slogans. Here is one “By any means necessary,” which means, including violence like on October 7. Another, “There is only one solution, Intifada revolution.” Again, violence against the Jews. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That means free of Jews. It means Israel is no more.
And in the meantime, the message goes forth from our esteemed, elite, institutions of higher learning: “can’t we at least get these damn Zionists (Jews) off our campus?”
Here is U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi in a judgment in a lawsuit brought by three Jewish students against UCLA. He writes: “In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Marc Scarsi’s middle name is Christopher. He is not Jewish. He is not an overly excitable rabbi like me. He is a federal judge. This has happened at universities all over the country. It really is that bad. And even as things may have calmed down on campus in the last weeks, as universities have clamped down on the encampments, the ideology is still there. The same teachers are still in front of yet another generation of students who will graduate and go into business, law, the press, government jobs, and elected office with a well-developed and enduring hostility to the State of Israel and the Jews that support it.
All right. I have gone on way too long. Here are some to-do items you might consider if we are to confront this antisemitism head-on. First, put on your bracelets that say, “So Yeah, I am a Zionist,” and keep them on through Monday, maybe longer. Bring them to the commemoration at Temple Emanuel on Monday 7 pm and bring them to the coming lectures and classes about Israel in the community. Second, read the IHRA definition of antisemitism you have in your hands or can get in the lobby. It is accepted by over 31 countries including the United States and you will see clearly that the so-called anti-Zionism of today is just a new brew for an age-old hatred of the Jews. Third, join AIPAC. It is the organization that helps elect pro-Israel congresspeople so aid to Israel is not threatened and the American/Israel relationship remains strong. It costs a lot of money to do their work. I know that some Jewish leaders have said that putting Jewish money towards defeating an anti-Israel candidate in Congress makes us Jews look bad. Won’t our enemies accuse us of throwing around our money and power? My response to them is this joke: two Jews are standing in front of a firing squad and the captain says to the Jews, do you have any last requests? And the one Jew says, maybe I could bother you for a blindfold? And the other Jew snaps at him: Sam, don’t cause trouble!” Well, our job is to cause lots of trouble: legal, peaceful, civil, thoughtful, focused, trouble, on behalf of our People. Fourth, sSponsor a Shabbat dinner at the DU or CU Hillel or Chabad. As much as we want to help Jewish college students, the best way to help them is getting them together so they can support each other. They love their parents, but they need their Jewish friends when they are on campus. Fifth, reach out to your university, the one you went to or the one you sent your kids (and a small fortune) to. Write the presidents and tell them that you are paying attention to the safety of our Jewish students and how Israel is portrayed on campus, in class, among the faculty and in the administration. We pay tuition and we pay taxes that support both public and private colleges and they know this. We have skin in this game. We need to stay in this arena.
All right. I am saying this at the end of my sermon, so all those who I have just irritated might feel better. I hold all of these things as true. There are seven and a half million Jews in Israel and there are around the same number of Palestinians in the region. The Jews are not going anywhere, and neither are the Palestinians. We must figure something out. October 7th set the cause of peace, for whatever it was on Oct 6, back a whole generation. Violence begets violence. One innocent death in any conflict is an immense tragedy. The People of Israel and world Jewry want peace.
There will be no more of Bialik’s “Cities of Slaughter” where we cower behind the wine casks in terror doing nothing. That may have been then; that will never again, be now. We will always fight back to defend ourselves from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran or from any enemy that rises up to destroy us. Maybe by the next High Holidays, we can get back to the inner spiritual work, teshuvah and the like. But in this new year, 5785, we will have to continue a fight we did not start and a fight we did not want. Because, yeah, we’re all Zionists and here-we-stand.