Resilience

Sermon Shabbat Breisheet 5787, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Two days ago, I participated in the third anniversary community commemoration of the October 7th, 2023, Palestinian terrorist war-crimes attacks on Israel. It was a moving ceremony, with memorial prayers, songs, and a touching story told by an Israeli, Uri Sharon, a young soldier from a farm in the south of Israel quite near Gaza.  He responded to the emergency on October 7th and joined his unit, serving in Gaza, fighting there.  After the war he chose to return and teach young children from the region—many of whom had lost parents, friends, and relatives murdered by the Palestinian terrorists—and paint their pictures.  He also took photos during his time in Gaza, capturing the quiet times when the Israeli soldiers were waiting—which is most of the time in war—and resting and eating.  His story was told matter-of-factly, and he was quite eloquent in what he says is his third or fourth language, English.  That he is a grandson of past Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was an afterthought, but interesting.

In case we need reminding—in fact, we do need to be reminded—the Simchat Torah atrocities committed by the Palestinians murdered 1198 people—Israelis, Americans, and of many other nationalities—in Southern Israel in a demonstration of complete inhumanity and concentrated total evil.  As we should all know—but many people somehow find a way to lie about and deny—the Palestinians murdered, raped, tortured, and burned alive children, women, men, and the elderly. They filmed many of their atrocities while they were committing them, livestreaming arson, rape and murder using GoPro cameras.  The perpetrators of these horrific war crimes were not only the Hamas Palestinian terrorists who organized this barbarism, but also Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Palestinian criminal gangs, as well as some ordinary Palestinians who came along for the pleasure of torturing and murdering human beings in acts of incalculable savagery. 

Those same Palestinians kidnapped 251 people—including infants, the elderly, wounded Israelis, women and girls who had been raped, and the dead bodies of some of their victims—into Gaza, and held them hostage, some for well over two years.  The last living hostages were finally liberated last October.  The final body of an Israeli hostage only returned home in January of this year.  The hostages who returned alive continue to deal with an extreme level of PTSD, as do many of the soldiers who served in Gaza.  You can make a case that the entire nation has post-traumatic stress disorder, made more intense by the subsequent need to shelter from Iranian and Hezbollah missiles, rockets and drones over the past three years.

It is challenging to put into context the awful consequences of this evil Palestinian invasion of southern Israel, and three years may prove to be inadequate to judge what the ultimate implications will be for Israel and for Jews around the world. In spite of the extraordinary Israeli capacity for resilience, the human toll and impact on Israel's national sense of self and well-being is nearly incalculable. Certainly, the results of October 7th have proven disastrous for Gaza and Palestinians in many ways, not least of which is the annihilation of support in Israel for a two-state solution.  While much has changed dramatically in three years—war in Iran and Lebanon, US and Arab states in a destructive regional war against Iran and Yemen with global implications, regime change in Syria, settler aggression and even Jewish terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank, an impending election in Israel—the mere facts of the horrific disaster of October 7th remain painful, powerful reminders of the dangers of failing to protect Jews.  We can only hope that the upcoming Israeli elections will finally free the nation to investigate the governmental and leadership failures that allowed this to occur.

There is also no doubt that the coordinated international campaign to vilify Israel, and Jews, comes from profoundly antisemitic motivations.  Tellingly the sympathy extended to the displaced people of Gaza is not extended to black Africans in Sudan, to Uighurs in China, both of whom are experiencing actual genocide right now, nor to Ukrainians in Europe, who are being bombed and attacked with missiles and drones in their homes by a conscious-less enemy that certainly doesn’t warn civilians in advance of their intentions, as Israel consistently did during the Gaza War.  Somehow, only Jews are worthy of the demand to surrender their ancestral homeland to terrorists because they are too “white”—which, of course, most Israelis are not.  And only Israel, which has been as scrupulous as any nation can be when its military is involved in an urban war against terrorists who use civilians and hostages as human shields and who put their weapons and terrorist headquarters in hospitals and schools, is falsely accused of “genocide” when it seeks to destroy war criminals who perpetrate atrocities and launch rockets and missiles against civilians, schools, and homes whenever they have the capacity to do so.

So, three years after October 7th, what can we expect going forward?  Ah, that would require prophecy not punditry, divination not deduction.  Without the skills to predict the future, we can only look at what is and make some educated guesses.  So here goes.

I believe that the Israeli election in a couple of weeks will change the leadership of the Jewish State, finally, and allow for a reckoning with the failures that led to the October 7th disaster and begin a healing process for Israeli society.  I don’t believe that the two-state solution is on the table now for most Israelis, even if that will ultimately prove to be the only real way for a more durable peace to exist between Israelis and Palestinians.  Israel is in a strong position militarily, but the new drone-and-missile technology of contemporary warfare puts its citizenry in range of all the many Islamist terrorists afoot in the Middle East.  It is an uncomfortable new reality of this war, to say the least.

With the US elections in November likely to change the majority in the House and perhaps the Senate, the unpopular American war with Iran will come under the microscope, and it is a probable target of a new Democratic majority in the Congress.  That war, mostly waged now between Iranian proxies and US bases around the region, as well as by Iran against the Gulf Arab states and other Arab national entities, will be constrained not only by the military and economic realities that are evident to everyone now—just check out the price of gasoline, and especially diesel fuel around the nation and the world—but also by the changing American political environment.  The enormous financial and human cost of this war have been mostly hidden from the American public until now.  That will change, and in an economic environment of increasing prices and rising unemployment, that won’t be popular, or easy to continue to hide.

Somehow or other, I expect the US government extract our military from the Iran war, whether or not the Iranians concede on any of the key points in a meaningful way, including stopping their nuclear weaponry program.

What will happen to the latest international wave of antisemitism?  I expect that it will continue to be normalized, as it has been, on the far left and the far right all around the world.  This is not the first time this has happened in Jewish history—it’s happened regularly throughout the last two thousand years—and it has metastasized in so many troubling ways that it seems quite unlikely it will reverse any time soon.  One thing is clear: when we Jews have no country of our own we are vulnerable to annihilation by our antisemitic enemies, as has occurred repeatedly, most horribly during the Shoah, the actual genocide that murdered half the Jews alive in the entire world.  And now that we have a country, Israel, that can defend itself, we are told that all we need to do is give up that nation—preferably by having all the current residents, including 8 million Jews, either die or become refugees—and all antisemitic hatred of Jews will end. 

Sigh.  It’s a strange time, in the wake of October 7th, three years afterwards, that most of us never believed we would see in our lifetimes.  Among the shocking experiences of the contemporary world is watching young Jews who find it hip to hate Israel. 

The best news is that Judaism is incredibly resilient as a religion, and that we have the capacity to survive and thrive in all kinds of environments—including this one. 

There is precedent in these first stories in the Book of Genesis, that is, of resilience and the ability to face disaster and rise above it.  After all, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden.  Cain will murder Abel.  Noah will witness his whole world flooded from existence.  The Tower of Babel will fail, and fall.  Out of each of these unexpected calamities, a new birth is possible, even necessary.  That theme remains throughout the Torah, and really, through all of Jewish existence.  When things go wrong, when we are knocked down, we get back up, work with renewed vigor and commitment, grow and move on to try again to make the world better.

I’m reminded as well of the resilience of our own congregation.  This coming Tuesday we close escrow on our new building. It is, by some calculations, the eighth property we have either called home or tried valiantly to purchase.  After eight years—eight years!—we are finally coming home to our own temple. 

I realize that much of what we have talked about tonight, and much of what we see in our news feeds, is troubling.  But the truth is that with dedication, commitment, energy and creativity, with persistence and love, we will overcome these challenges, too.  We can, and will, flourish in our new temple home, as the Jewish people will continue to flourish in Israel, and all around the world.

So may it be; Kein Yehi Ratson.