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EARTH: ADAMA V’ARETZ
Today’s sermon is dedicated to Sid Shaeffer. The central theme is the element of earth, and no one was more salt of the earth than Sid Shaffer, Man of the People, Life Insurance Salesman, Past President, Minyanaire Extraordinaire, Volunteer Par Excellence, a man who lived by this motto, in his own words.
When somebody does something for me, I try to do 10 times more for them to show how much I appreciate what they have done.
For those of you who were not here last night, I mentioned that I will be dedicating each of my sermons this year to a prominent individual member of our community who died in the past year. In addition, l will once again be utilizing a central theme to connect all my High Holiday sermons. Last year it was Hineni, Here I am, being there for people, and this year we will be going back to basics, to the four primal elements of spirituality (and originally science as well), that of earth, wind, fire, and water. The hope is that each of these elements will connect us to our traditions spiritually as well as teach us something important about Judaism, God, and, God-willing, ourselves in the process.
I will be using two different Hebrew terms for this element of earth, adama and aretz, one universal, the other particular. I will use the word Adama, means ground and is the word that Adam, the first human is derived from, and I will use this term to talk about the earth and the environment. Aretz, which means land, is the word I will use to talk about the particularistic, the promised land, the land of Eretz Yisrael. Yes, I’m going to jump right into talking about Israel this year. Given all that has happened there in the past six months, I felt like it couldn’t wait until Yom Kippur. Eretz and Adama, land and earth. Both are critical concepts in Judaism, and both are, potentially, in critical danger. Both are deserving of our attention, and both are deserving of our passion.
Speaking of passion, a brief digression. I want to recall a conversation I had with my 14 year old son Micah while in Israel this summer. Micah, who at 14, has become one of my greatest and, in all seriousness, most helpful critics, told me as we were listening to sermons in Israel by various rabbis, said to me: “Dad, I know how passionate you are about Israel, but that passion doesn’t always come through like the ones we’ve heard here. I thought about it and know he’s right. Maybe it’s because I am in customer service as a rabbi, maybe it’s because I consider myself to be more of a teacher than a preacher, but if I’m honest, I know it’s also because I am afraid to offend people. So I express my point-of-view, but I equivocate and preface and apologize. Today, I am going to try not to do that as I talk about Israel. If I offend people, so be it. It doesn’t mean that I don’t respect your potentially very different opinion or that you are not welcome you here, and it certainly doesn’t mean I care about you any less as a member. But today, from the pulpit, I’m going to express my views without equivocation. The only apology I am going to offer is for the fact that I’m sure it will be too darn long!
In a sense, all things earth and land-related begin at Mount Moriah, which is the focal point of the earth according to the Abrahamic traditions, and which we will read about in tomorrow’s Torah portion. MountMoriah is the very place where Isaac is nearly sacrificed, and it is MountMoriah which eventually becomes the sight of the TempleMount and the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. It is sacred to Christianity because Jesus taught and died near there. And it is sacred to Islam, because that same rock where Isaac was bound up on the altar and is housed in the Dome of the Rock today, is said to be the rock where Muhammed ascends and steps off into Heaven during his Night Journey. It is also, then, the jumping off point for our discussion of Aretz and Adama—the land so important to our tradition, and the place from which we are supposed to spread out and fill the earth since our descendants will be “as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore.”
So we are to spread out and fill it, but we are also supposed to shepherd the earth, guard it, take care of it. Psalm 24:1 says: “The earth is the Lord’s and its fullness thereof.” In Hebrew it’s even more dramatic. “La’Adonai ha’aretz um’loah, to God the earth and its fullness belong.” Not to humanity, but to God. In Deuteronomy; 20:19, when discussing the rules of war, the Torah is still concerned with the environment. “When you go out to war with another nation you shall not destroy it’s trees, nor take an axe to them:”In the Talmud, in the Avot d’Rabbi Nathan, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakka used to say: “If you have a sapling in your hand and someone should say to you the Messiah has come, stay and finish planting the tree, and then go welcome the Messiah.” Yes, Jewish texts are replete with admonitions and warnings to take care of our earth, our adama. There are two separate mitzvoth that deal with how to do that, one called Bal Tashchit, which means don’t waste and the other called Shomrei Adaman, which means to guard the earth. That is our sacred task.
There’s a wonderful story about the importance of the environment in the Jewish tradition involviingRebbe Nachman of Bratslav. Rebbe Nachman was once traveling with his Hasidim by carriage, and as it grew dark they came to an inn, where they spent the night. During the night Reb Nachman began to cry out loudly in his sleep, waking everyone up in the inn, all of whom came running to see what happened. When he awoke, the first thing Reb Nachman did was to take out a book he had brought with him. Then he closed his eyes and opened the book and pointed to a passage. And there it was written "Cutting down a tree before its time is like killing a soul." Then Reb Nachman asked the innkeeper if the walls of that inn had been built out of saplings cut down before their time. The innkeeper admitted that this was true, but how did the rabbi know?Reb Nachman said: "All night I dreamed I was surrounded by the bodies of those who had been murdered. I was very frightened. Now I know that it was the souls of the trees that cried out to me."
This is the environmental legacy of our tradition, and we must take it seriously. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Conserve electricity. Preserve water. Be environmentally conscious in everything to do. You are Northern Californians. I don’t really need to tell you this. You know it. You do it. You live it. But, as we enter a new year, 5775, can we ask ourselves if we can do even more this year? Can you observe, preserve, and conserve our resources even more effectively? Can we think big and small when it comes to being a shomer adama, a guardian of the earth?
This is the adama, the universal aspect of the element of earth. While we all know we are not where we need to be yet as a planet, connecting this community, the Northern California community, to this universal idea is not difficult. But as we move from the universal to the particular, our task gets more complex. We move now from adama to aretz, to the land, to our land, to Eretz Yisrael.
Connection to Eretz Yisrael, to the land, is every bit as important a mitzvah in the Jewish tradition as shomrei Adama, taking care of the earth. It can be argued that the entire text of the Torah is essentially about inhabiting the land of Israel and what to do when we get there. Rashi’s commenting on Genesis 1, writing in the 11th Century in France, 1000 years after our people were forced from the land by the Romans and nearly 1000 years before we would get back there as a nation, says that the entire creation story is prelude to the Jewish people’s connection to the Eretz Yisrael. Dwelling in the land of Israel is so important, says the Talmud, that when mitzvoth conflict and you have to choose between honoring your parents and moving to the land of Israel, dwelling in the land of Israel takes precedence. But just because our tradition says we are supposed to be connected to it, certainly doesn’t make it so.
For me, for the rest of my family, and for many other people in this room that connection is there, even though we do not live there. It was forged through our own visits and stuck. But this can be difficult to explain to others. As a long-time friend of mine from San Francisco named Sam Lauter, who is both an Israel activist and an activist for the Democratic party, put it after he visited Israel this past summer, “It's difficult to describe to someone who doesn't have the connection why she digs so deeply into our souls, why she is part of our consciousness, why we are at a loss for words to describe the depth of our love, and why we fight so vigorously for her.” The land is wonderful, beautiful, mysterious, exciting, but it is the people we have met and what they have done with the land that forges the connections: the taxi driver, the tour guide, the guy we met at the falafel stand, the young soldier who helped give us directions, the high tech entrepreneur we talked to in the airport. These people have brought this land to life, they have planted vineyards in the desert, made forests bloom where none existed, opened fashionable restaurants on fashionable boulevards, discovered medical technologies that are helping the world, and fought to bring Jews from every corner of the world out of danger and to their promised land. And they just want to live in peace.
I have to confess that the rest of this talk may not be so coherent, but after the year Israel has had, there are some things that I feel need to be said about this sacred land of Israel, so I have for your five concepts and four suggestions.
A. Difficult Questions. Amos Oz, the great Israeli author and left-wing critic of the Israeli government, a man often called the “Godfather” of the Israeli Peace Movement, was interviewed in July in the middle of the conflict Operation Protective Edge by a German radio station. Before they could ask him any questions, Oz said the following:
I would like to begin the interview in a very unusual way: by presenting one or two questions to your readers and listeners. May I do that?
DEUTSCHE WELLE:Go ahead!
QUESTION 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap, and starts shooting machine-gun fire into your nursery?
QUESTION 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?
With these two questions, I pass the interview on to you.
And I want to add a third question via David Wolpe, Rabbi of Temple Sinai in Los Angeeles. Imagine if the situation in this asymmetrical war called Protective Edge was reversed. If Hamas had the Iron Dome and the weaponry that Israel has and Israel had none of that. How many Jewish civilians do you think would be left at the end of the conflict?
These are tragic questions, but I think any discussion of the conflict with Gaza and Hamas must take these three questions into account.
B. Compromise. There was a political cartoon penned by A.F. Branco this past summer which depicted negotiations between Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu. The American negotiator says: “Could you at least meet him halfway?” And on Hamas’ demand sheet it says: “Death to all Jews.” This is not an exaggeration. Death to all Jews is part of the Hamas charter. Read it. And even the more “moderate” Palestinians chant “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” That’s not a 2 state solution; that’s the end of Israel. Our willingness to compromise with Hamas rests on us the premise that Hamas doesn’t mean what they say or that they are incapable of carrying out what they say they want to do. Even if there is any truth to that, do we really y want to bank on the idea that people who threaten to kill Jews don’t mean it? Which brings us to #3.
C. Never Again. We’ve run that tape before. People telling us they wanted to kill us and being led, at least in most cases, like “lambs to the slaughter.” Even for those who fought back in Warsaw and Kovno and in the forests as partisans, we didn’t have the power to fight back effectively. So we swore to ourselves as a people that we would never let that happen again. And now that another enemy tells us they want to kill us, at least as a nation and sometimes even as individuals and we do have the power to fight back, this is what it looks like. It is its own kind of tragedy, to be sure, this is what “never again” means in realpolitik terms. Which brings me to #4.
D. Anti-Semitism. It’s alive and well and flourishing in all its putrid and horrific glory. It’s always been there, but now it has been revealed in the open. Just the fact that the United Nations and the world seems to condemn only Israel’s human rights violations without saying a word about human rights violations in China or Africa or Syria with over 200,000 civilians dead. But people argued that in and of itself is not anti-Semitism, since it’s simply against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But the “special treatment” certainly should have been a strong hint. But now the old-fashioned kind of Jew hatred is back. it’s in the fire bombing of a synagogue in Germany. It’s in the destruction of the Jewish Museum in Brussels. It’s in a mob trapping Jews inside a synagogue in Paris. It’s in a couple being beaten up on the streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan while the assailant shouted Zionist pig, and the shooting of a rabbi in Miami, and in the beating up of a Temple University Jewish student by someone in front of the Students for Justice in Palestine and being laughed at and called Zionist pig and baby killer as he lost consciousness. It’s in physical violence at rallies in Boston, Los Angeles, and nearly in San Francisco. It’s on the signs at these same rallies that on one sign compare Israel to the Nazis which swaztikas in place of stars of David on the Israeli flag, and on another sign right next to it which glorifies the Nazi techniques, as it reads “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” And you can say “these are extremists and there are extremists on all sides. And most of these people are not against Jews, only Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,” but I say I’m not sure that matters any more at all. When the incitement occurs, no one asks “what are your nuanced views on the Palestinian conflict” or “are you a regular Jew or a Zionist Jew?”
E. Simultaneous Truths. But, number 5, and this may sound like lip service but I assure you it is not, we also have to realize that there are innocent Palestinians who are not only suffering, but dying and living in a kind of fear that we can’t really even comprehend. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Israel’s fault or Hamas’ fault or the United Nations’ fault. Too many Palestinians are still dying, or they are living in fear and trauma that we can’t really even imagine. And it is OK, it is good even, if your heart is divided, divided between what I would call the sympathizer and the shomer (guardian), the one who sympathizes with the plight of innocent Palestinians while simultaneously understanding the need for Israel to vigorously defend its citizens. It’s only when more people in the world understand both these truths at the same time that peace will become a real possibility. Do you know who really does understand this? Rachel Fraenkel, the Mother of Naftali Fraenkel, who was one of the three Israeli teens murdered at the instruction of Hamas. After the death of her own son, she paid a shiva call to the Mother of Muhammad Al Khedeiri, the Muslim teen who was murdered by Israelis just afterward. What an incredible human being. Ha
So now that I have thoroughly depressed you by sharing my views on the Israel Hamas conflict which most of you already knew anyway, you might be asking yourselves what good is this sermon, then? We learned about the rabbi’s views on Israel, which most of us already knew anyway. Am I just circling the wagons here? A sermon should also have some sort of action plan, and if a sermon doesn’t propose something that brings us closer to peace, why bother? Well, I hope that I can give the “what we can do to bring peace which is just around the corner sermon” next year, but for this year, I have four specific suggestions for helping Israel in the immediate future. Because she needs you—now more than ever!