Hope in a Time of Trauma

Sermon Shabbat Mishpatim 5784: Israel Report, Rabbi Sam Cohon

I learned a Hebrew poem last week, written by a new friend, Rabbi Amnon Riback, whose Passover poem I have used in my own sedarim on Pesach each year for the past ten years or so.  It was filled with the dream of hope, and he sang it for our rabbinic group at a center for Jewish-Arab cooperation in Haifa.  After it was done, our guide told the group, “Since October 7th, that is the first time I have heard the word hope expressed so often.”

My friends, I returned a week ago or so from a rabbinic solidarity mission to Israel, and it was a powerful and valuable experience, if not exactly a pleasure trip.  For context, I’ve been to Israel 17 or 18 times, led four congregational trips to Israel, co-led an interfaith pilgrimage trip to Israel, lived in Jerusalem for a year and for a summer in the north of Israel long before that, and have found every Israel experience I’ve ever had to be unique and typically quite wonderful.  This was a different kind of journey, going to Israel during wartime to offer support and to see what I could learn that I didn’t already know from obsessively following the news and talking to friends, relatives, colleagues, and professionals in Israel every week since the October 7th atrocities took place. 

To begin with, this was the first time I’ve gone to Israel when I didn’t anticipate it with a sense of great personal excitement.  I knew beforehand that being in Israel during wartime would be different.  I was in Israel during some of the worst days of the 2nd Intifada in the early 2000s, and I can tell you that it was rough back then.  But at no point during that run of terrorist bombings and suicide/homicide attacks by Palestinians did it feel like a threat to Israel’s very existence. 

This time, the perception throughout the country is very much that what Hamas perpetrated on October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust combined with torture and rape and the brutal mass kidnapping of hostages into the hellish tunnels of Gaza, made it explicit that Hamas must be destroyed now, or it will remain an existential threat to Israel and its civilian population.  And, in fact, the sense in Israel when I was there was clearly that this was different from anything that had preceded it since the war of independence in 1948; different from the 1980s war in Lebanon had been, different from the several wars with Hezbollah in the north that saw rocket attacks as far as Haifa, different from the First or Second Intifadas, different even from the Yom Kippur War, for those old enough to remember 1973.  Those wars—and really, you can’t simply call them conflicts—each impacted Israel greatly.  But they had not changed the overall mentality of the nation in the ways that this horrific attack had.

Israel on October 6th, just before this atrocity was perpetrated by Hamas’ Palestinian terrorists, was a divided nation.  The judicial coup that the government of Bibi Netanyahu was attempting led to massive protests for ten months, and created a level of social disruption and tension that was unprecedented.  But when the awful events of October 7th exploded all of that was essentially forgotten.  The entire nation came together in unity, with the knowledge of a common threat.  The horrors of October 7th brought people of extremely different political perspectives and quite different Jewish observance identities together.  That unity has seen tremendous voluntarism across all aspects of Israeli society, and that was evident throughout my time in Israel. 

The examples of this unity and voluntarism are legion: city people from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, including my retired computer programmer cousin Ken, who is Modern Orthodox, take busses weekly down to the south of Israel to harvest crops, replacing the farmworkers from Asia who returned home on October 8th, replacing the many Palestinian Arab workers from Gaza who no longer are able—or are likely ever to be permitted again—to enter Israel to work.  Fancy hotel chains, like the Dan group, have opened their doors free of charge to evacuated families from the south of Israel near Gaza and from the north of Israel near Lebanon, without knowing whether the government will reimburse them for the rooms and food they are providing to so many Israelis.  Individuals, families and non-governmental agencies of all kinds have rushed forward to help the displaced Israelis, many of whom had to evacuate without any supplies, and to offer support services for the many traumatized victims.  Our rabbinic solidarity even visited an innovative center for PTSD treatment in Tel Aviv that uses giant decompression chambers to successfully treat the large number of soldiers and civilians who are trying to recover from the trauma of the terror attacks.

So there is exceptional unity in Israel now.  No one expects that to continue much past the end of this war, whenever that takes place.  But it is true for the present.

Notably, on this trip put together by the Central Conference of American Rabbis I was meeting with many progressive and left-wing Israelis. In the week that I was in Israel, traveling from Tel Aviv to Haifa to Jerusalem to Kibbutzim to small towns north and south and, well, all over, I never heard anyone, with one upsetting exception, express a strong desire for an immediate cease-fire with Hamas.  These progressive and very liberal people with whom we met are the same Israelis who employed Palestinian workers, who drove Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals, who had friends in Gaza, who believed that they had forged bonds of respect and cooperation.  Their trust in the good-will of ordinary Palestinians, and their compassion for the fate of Palestinian Gaza civilians, has been not only undermined by the vicious atrocities of October 7th.  It has essentially been destroyed. It will be a long time before Israelis, who have been attending funerals, memorials and the hospital beds of their relatives and friends for four months now, can feel compassion or, certainly, trust for Palestinians.  Some told me that they felt badly that they couldn’t summon any sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza; some said that they simply had no room in their hearts because of the enormous pain all Israelis are feeling now.  Others on the left expressed more explicitly the betrayal that they felt because Palestinians from Gaza who had had coffee in their homes were likely the same ones who drew maps for the Hamas terrorists of their kibbutzim, and who knew enough to tell them which houses the heads of kibbutz defense lived in and where the weapons were stored so that the Hamas Palestinian terrorists could shoot rpg’s at those buildings first.

In addition—and this is incredibly important—the profound faith that nearly every Israeli feels for the military, the IDF, has been shaken.  Look, trust in the government is never particularly strong in most countries, and certainly not in a vibrant democracy like Israel.  I mean, how much do you trust our government to do the right thing and to be efficient about it?  So it is in Israel.  And certainly now virtually no one supports Prime Minister Netanyahu, widely blamed for this horrifying disaster and the appeasement of Hamas that led to it. 

But in Israel, where nearly every non-ultra-Orthodox man serves in the Israel Defense Force for almost three years, and where most women do as well, and where reserve duty continues for an additional 15 and more years, a belief in the military and its effectiveness and good judgment is central.  The fact that the IDF was unprepared for the severity of the horrifically brutal Hamas attack on October 7th, that the army took 6 to 8 hours to reach the scene of the massacres, and in some cases took 20 hours to relieve embattled and trapped civilians, shocked all Israelis.  While the IDF has conducted the Gaza campaign with remarkable effectiveness overall, and has taken serious losses nonetheless, the Israeli public’s faith in the military is still shaken.     

I was told by many people “This entire country has PTSD.”  That is not wrong.  There are family members who know that there are relatives have been held under Gaza, in tunnels as prisoners of brutal Palestinian terrorists, for 120 days now.  There are families that don’t feel they can ever return to their homes because they were locked in their safe rooms, terrified, for 12 hours and more.  There are families who have no homes to return to, whose neighbors and relatives were murdered.  And there are families whose husbands, sons, and fathers have died fighting in Gaza, or whose daughters, mothers or wives were murdered on October 7th.  It will be a long time indeed before these people recover.

And yet: in many ways, Israeli life goes on. Cafes were busy.  Stores are open.  In wartime, businesses are managing, even with many important employees out on reserve duty in Gaza and the north.  Everyone knows that this war is necessary for Israel’s survival, and the sense of normality is still there.

An example or two: I stopped at a bookshop to get a couple of Israeli kids’ books for Ayelet.  I was about to buy two of them when the owner—or perhaps simply the manager—told me, “Don’t get those; look in the back, there’s better, cheaper ones on the kids table there.”  It was such a totally Israeli thing to do… I thanked her, and found two much better books—one features a little red-headed girl named Ayelet, by the way; it’s a charming and wonderful series—for half the price.  I also stopped at a Judaica store in Tel Aviv run by an elderly Iranian Jew who had come over from Teheran forty years ago.  He told me his life story, lowered the prices continually since business now is terrible, I spoke to him in Hebrew, my own father is older than he is, and he found out I was a rabbi, and then he convinced me to buy two things I did not need.  His grandson is fighting in Gaza now, while his own brother has never left Teheran, which he finds baffling.  Only in Israel.  I found a lovely necklace in Jerusalem for Sophie at a jewelry shop run by a Moroccan Jewish woman whose husband made it and whose three children are all fighting in Gaza now, and who told me that part of the problem was that too many Israelis are not Orthodox.  I did not argue with anyone, which is, I suppose, not very Israeli.

And of course, the synagogues I attended for Shabbat services were full, active, energetic, positive.   

Israel is surviving, and in spite of the hundreds of posters and installations about the hostages everywhere, in spite of the obvious pain that its people feel, in spite of the challenges of a nation at war, it remains an amazing country deeply dedicated to its Jewish and democratic identity.  It may not have been fun being there this time, but it was powerful and meaningful.

One more thought, when I suppose I could continue for a great deal longer. The greatest impression I have had since returning exactly a week ago is the profound disconnect between the perception of the situation in Israel and here in the United States.  Israelis across the entire political spectrum, from extremely progressive to extremely conservative, are under no illusions about the necessity for this war in Gaza, and the need to carry it forward to its completion.  There is no ambiguity about the need to destroy Hamas’ capacity to perpetrate more such atrocities, which these Palestinian terrorists have sworn to try to do.  There is surely controversy over just how committed to saving the surviving hostages the current government of Israel is, and how this can best be accomplished in the context of a terrible war.  But there are no doubts about the necessity of the war being conducted now. 

Here in America, where we are all at least 5,000 miles from Gaza—nearly 8,000 miles here in Arizona—that moral clarity is clouded by distance and propaganda.  Virtually from the moment Israeli citizens were brutally attacked on October 7th—murdered, raped, tortured, stolen from their lives and carried off into imprisonment as hostages in the gigantic tunnel network that Hamas Palestinian terrorists built under Gaza—world opinion turned against Israel.  Israelis don’t understand how anyone can glorify brutal Islamist terrorists who burn people alive and celebrate their atrocities on social media.  They don’t understand why there are such vigorous calls for cease fire when their children, women and men, civilian captives of these Palestinian terrorists, are being held hostage against all international law, and when there was a cease fire in place on October 6th that Hamas chose to destroy.  They certainly don’t understand why they are accused of genocide when they have taken nearly obsessive care to warn civilians to leave areas where they are planning to attack Hamas terrorists—something nearly unprecedented in wartime in human history—by all means possible, including dropping flyers, sending texts and emails and using audible warnings in Arabic.

Gaza is urban warfare, initiated by an intrenched enemy that has constructed military-grade tunnel systems with electricity, communications, rations, water, full electronics in underground chambers that are half the size of the New York City subway system.  There are 2.3 million people in Gaza, crammed into an area about twice the size of Manhattan, with about the same population density as Boston.  The current belief is that about 27,000 Gaza Palestinians have died.  The IDF, the Israeli military, says that about 9,000 of them were armed terrorists.  If that’s the case, then 18,000 civilians have died in the fighting. 

That is tragic, incredibly sad and painful, and the humanitarian crisis in this war begun by Hamas is certainly real and terrible.  For that it’s worth, and to put it into perspective, in the Gulf War in Iraq estimates put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of the US, its foreign allies and Iraqi allies at somewhere around 300,000.  In Afghanistan the number of civilian deaths at the hands of the US military are calculated at over 70,000.  The total number of civilians killed in the post 9/11 wars as the direct result of US military action is about 432,000.

In Gaza the civilian deaths are calculated now at 18,000.  I spoke extensively to a rabbi who witnessed the three-part verification system Israeli units use now before eliminating terrorists.  I’m sure that it is imperfect; but it is a remarkable exercise in restraint in a brutal war against a vicious opponent.

To state what should be obvious: It is extremely difficult to fight a determined enemy that hides behind its own civilians, using them for human shields, and which has failed to construct a single bomb shelter for any Gaza Palestinians, while simultaneously building an underground network of extraordinary sophistication to protect its own leadership and its terrorist army.  In these circumstances, when humanitarian aid is very likely to be stolen by the same Hamas terrorists who have squirreled away so much aid already, civilians are going to suffer no matter how careful the Israeli military is.  And remember: the Israeli soldiers are fighting a war, trying to limit their own casualties while they strive to liberate hostages taken and cruelly held by Hamas.     

No one truly knows when this war will end.  The Hamas Palestinian terorrists have now been forced into the southern end of Gaza almost completely.  The elaborate network of tunnels will not be easily destroyed, or perhaps cannot be completely destroyed at all, depending on which engineers you listen to.  Israel will not go back to normal any time soon.

But, ultimately, in every crisis there is opportunity.  While Hamas remains in control of Gaza nothing good can be accomplished.  Frankly, so long as Netanyahu remains Prime Minister nothing much can be accomplished towards a durable solution.  I believe both realities will change soon, perhaps within two months.  Then we will see if a new day will indeed dawn in the Middle East, in which a Palestinian people can turn from reactive hate to embrace a more positive reality, and in which Israelis will be able to live in a secure peace.

A final, hopeful thought: Our daughter Ayelet is just a year old.  When I was her age, Israel was a tiny country, poor, hanging onto its security by the skin of its teeth.  So much has changed, and will continue to change.  But the hope that is built into the national anthem, Hatikvah, is at the heart of the Zionist enterprise.  A hope for a country that is strong, healthy, and at peace.  A final note of hope: That dream will come; and may it come sooner than any of us now expect.  Ken Yehi Ratson.  May this be God’s will, and ours.