Loss and Power
Sermon, Shabbat Va’Etchanan/Nachamu 5784, Shabbat of Consolations
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
By Jewish tradition, this Shabbat is subtitled “Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of Consolation.” It marks the first in a series of Sabbaths that follow Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. Each Saturday until Rosh HaShanah we will have a Haftarah, a prophetic reading on Shabbat morning taken from the works of Second Isaiah, the great prophet of comfort, designed to bring us hope in the aftermath of great national loss.
Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, is the day dedicated to the remembrance of great tragedies in our people's long history. Last Monday night we recalled the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE by the Babylonian Empire, and of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Roman Empire, the catastrophic annihilation of our nation and our great city of Jerusalem that ultimately ended 1000 years of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. On Tisha B’Av too we remembered the fall of Beitar in 135 CE on Tisha B'Av, bringing a disastrous end to the Bar Cochba revolt, the final great, failed effort to recover Jewish freedom and independence.
Other tragedies befell our people on that dark day: the Jews of England were expelled in a royal writ issued on Tisha B'Av 1290, and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, destroyed a great Jewish civilization that had flourished for hundreds of years and was timed to coincide with Tisha B'Av in order to add misery to misery. The First World War, which ultimately led directly to the Second World War and the Holocaust, began on that day in August 1914, the “Guns of August” that destroyed the old world of Europe.
In the aftermath of the Shoah in the 20th century, the rabbis initially recommended remembering the dead of the terrible Holocaust on Tisha B'Av. But the Jewish people demanded a unique day of remembrance, which became Yom HaShoah, now additionally reflected in International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the context of Tisha B'Av, I'm reminded of Rabbi Emil Fackenheim's 614th Commandment, in multiple parts: “We are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted."
In this 5784 year of tragedy for the Jewish people, when October 7th brought so much horror and suffering, this is a fitting reminder. On Tisha B’Av this year, as we have every week since October 7th, we remembered the 1200 Israelis, Americans, and the dead of so many other nations slaughtered by an enemy no less merciless or brutal than our previous tormentors.
So, what is different about the tragedy of October 7th and the many previous disasters in Jewish history, inflicted by enemies that despise us because we are Jews? Only this: the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, Israel, with its own army. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg formulated an ethic of Jewish power, an unequivocal statement that in the aftermath of the Holocaust it is a profound moral obligation for Jews to accept the necessity of having the ability to defend ourselves.
As Greenberg puts it, "After two millennia of passivity, of living by sufferance on the margins of the host society, Jewry opted to take power to shape its own fate by creating the State of Israel.
"Taking power required a 180-degree turn in Jewish ethics. Jewish morality had high standards, but it was the ethical code of the powerless. We were totally innocent because we had no army and there were no people under our control.
"The choice to take power was challenging because it meant giving up moral purity. Having an army and waging wars meant that, inescapably, there would be innocent civilian casualties. The heartbreaking truth is that in the real world, the definition of a moral army is that it kills as few innocent civilians as possible."
As you may know, I started teaching a three-part class in the history of Zionism a couple of days ago. A close friend said to me, “You really like trying to tame the tiger, don’t you?”, meaning I embrace the challenge of tackling a difficult and suddenly controversial subject. I do, actually; but I must share that I began this class by explaining that the word Zionism means, simply, that we Jews, like every other people on earth, have the right to our own country, in the land we come from and in the place where we had full sovereignty for over a thousand years. That’s it. It’s not a racist idea, nor is it a colonial one. Zionism is simply a statement that we Jews have the right to our own country, the place where we always had that country and where we dreamed and prayed about returning to it as our own nation for nearly two thousand years. Jews have a right for Israel to exist.
To be an anti-Zionist is to believe that alone among all the nations on earth we Jews do not have the right to have our own, sovereign state. To be a non-Zionist is pretty close to the same thing; it means you don’t believe that Israel should exist, which is a way of advocating for its annihilation, and the forcible exiling of over 7 million Jews from a nation we have had for more than 75 years. To be an anti-Zionist is, by definition, to be a racist. It is a statement that only we Jews don’t deserve to have our own country.
Now since we Jews have had a state in Israel for over 75 years now, longer than most people on the planet have been alive, being an anti-Zionist, or saying you don’t believe in Zionism, means that you think Israel should be destroyed and that the Jews living there, most of whom were born in Israel as Israelis, should be forcibly exiled to other countries they don’t live in. I must add that the State of Israel was the first nation ever created by the vote of the United Nations—a UN that is no friend to Israel these days, but actually voted to establish the state in 1948.
It's rather simple, really. If take an Anti-Zionist position you essentially are defining yourself as an Antisemite, and perhaps an advocate for genocide.
I was on a Zoom call last week with Jonathan Conricus, who became quite famous after October 7th for his extensive appearances representing Israel on CNN, BBC World News, Fox News, Sky News, and more or less every media outlet there is. Conricus is a retired Israeli Lt. Colonel with extensive military and diplomatic experience who was called back to be a spokesperson for the IDF and became the most evident official voice of Israel abroad in the months of the Gaza War. After giving hundreds of interviews in the months after October 7th, Conricus left the official IDF service, and is now at an organization called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Conricus is notable because he is both strongly pro-Israel, open about aspects of the situation that are usually not discussed, and willing to criticize the strategic mistakes his own country has made. Ostensibly, the rabbinic meeting with him last week was to discuss Israel’s strategy of, perhaps, killing the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, but Conricus did not feel this was particularly significant; sort of, “What’s the difference in exchanging one murderous terrorist, who kills his own people with his own hands, for another who does the same?”
In a discussion with the Zionist Rabbinic Network, the points he made that were most notable were that he said clearly that Israel’s strategy of trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons and to resist Iran’s strategic efforts to build what he calls a “ring of fire” around Israel are failing.
First, he stated that Iran is now nearly nuclear, has already enriched enough uranium for multiple nuclear bombs, and lacks only an effective delivery system. And secondly, he notes that Iran has funded, armed and organized effective anti-Israel terrorist militias in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, and, as he puts it, their greatest evil accomplishment, Hezbollah in Lebanon, all of which are causing severe problems for Israel and killing Israelis. In addition, he notes that Iran is working to create, fund and arm terrorist militias in Jordan and northern Somalia next. These Iranian proxies are bleeding Israel in many ways.
Israel’s military responses to these attacks, while tactically effective and even brilliant in many ways, always lead to harsh international criticism and damage Israel abroad—and damage Israel’s economy and society.
Conricus, who has always represented the IDF rather than the Israeli government, strongly criticized Israeli strategy in these areas, as well as Israel’s struggles to create a successful media and social media strategy to counteract Iran’s manipulations. For Conricus, Israel needs a new way to fight Iran that is more than simply seeking quiet or a limited level of hostility with these ultra-violent Arab proxies that are the tools of its greatest enemy.
Noting the “tremendous failure of October 7th,” he did highlight the tactical achievements of the Israeli military on the extremely challenging urban battlefields in Gaza. Conricus also noted that just after October 7th he immediately recommended that Israel needed to present a plan for what was to happen to the Gaza civilians to answer the question for the international community, and that Israel simply did not. In addition, he highlighted the total absence in the Israeli government, and in the IDF, of a contemporary and modern public affairs and information system. Israel has been losing the information war, but it doesn’t have to lose it. It hasn’t prioritized this nearly sufficiently, and there is a high price to pay for that mistake.
There are seven fronts, at least, in the current war that Israel is engaged in, according to Israeli military strategists, perhaps not even including the worldwide rise in antisemitism that has been provoked by October 7th and the Gaza War. Most of these threats to Israel are sponsored by and curated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Therefore, the greatest goal for Israel, according to Conricus, should be regime change in Iran. The oppressive Islamic Republic regime needs to be challenged in every way that it can be, which includes economic, technological and military efforts. Conricus even noted that Israel has the capability to put a serious economic price on Iran’s actions, including stopping Iran’s petrochemical exports that it uses to fund the terrorist ring it has created around Israel.
It was quite striking to hear Conricus state that Israel should dramatically change its regional strategy, to note that it is failing and that it is also losing the information war—and then to hear him make concrete recommendations about what Israel should be doing instead. This came not from someone anti-Israel, but profoundly pro-Israel. His analysis—which seemed to me both accurate and cogent, and was certainly stated factually, without referencing personalities, like, say the current Prime Minister of Israel—hit home.
It's not clear if Israel will follow Conricus’s advice, and instead of attacking the Arab symptoms of the Iranian problem, actually bring the mullahs in Iran to understand that there will be a real price to pay for attacking Israel through proxies, and directly with missiles. If you haven’t heard Conricus before, look him up on YouTube or online anywhere. He makes a lot of sense. And his English—he is Swedish/Israeli—is impeccable.
Unfortunately, none of this, so far, is terribly consoling on this Shabbat Nachamu, this Sabbath of Consolation. I am encouraged by the joint statement from the United States, Egypt and Qatar released today stating that the time has come to release the hostages and establish a cease fire in Gaza. They are clearing pressuring everyone to get the deal completed by next week. We shall see, of course; the hostages have now been captivity for more than 10 months, those who are still alive. We perhaps should also be encouraged that the wider regional war that seemed to be imminent just a week or two ago may have been averted.
As the nechemta, the consolation conclusion of this view of the situation, we return to Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s ethic of Jewish power: we are not in the position we were in for two thousand years. Israel is militarily powerful, a strong liberal democracy with incredible resilience. We will not have another epic disaster to commemorate on Tisha B’Av, for as brutal as the Palestinian terrorist atrocities inflicted on October 7th were, Israel has responded with strength and resolve.
May we take consolation in our support for Israel, a support that can include criticism where it is appropriate. May we give thanks on this Shabbat Nachamu that we have a Jewish nation in 2024, a powerful nation that is made up of and accepts all kinds of Jews from everywhere in the world. And may we soon see it experience the freeing of its hostages, our brothers and sisters, and a return to peace.