Israel is Still a Good Worth Fighting For — Yom Kippur 5787
Israel is one of those subjects about which few of us have mere opinions. We bring loyalties and convictions, griefs and hopes, histories and family stories — all of which shape not only what we think and how we feel about Israel, but also what we hear when someone else speaks about it.
Israel is personal to me, too. I can’t speak about Israel only as an idea, or simply as another country in the headlines. Adira and I met and fell in love in Jerusalem. The time I’ve spent there has deepened my understanding of Jewish history and Jewish values, of the promise and potential of Jewish life in our homeland and in the Diaspora, and of what it means to belong to a covenantal people — sharing an ancient story and responsible for carrying the torch of tradition forward in a changing world.
And even as Israel has brought me immense pride and joy and uplift, it has also caused me great pain and grief. I have at times been deeply troubled by particular policies and actions of Israeli governments, and by political currents within Israeli society that seem to me at odds with Jewish values as I understand them. My love and my heartache are both real, both deeply rooted in the same personal connection and conviction.
They say “preach from your scars, and not from your wounds.” That’s why I tend not to preach about Israel from the pulpit. Because Israel is so close to my heart, it’s hard to speak about it with the same settled sense and sensibility I try to bring to this platform. And because it’s so close to many of our hearts, it can be hard for any of us to hear someone else speak about it with enough spaciousness to really listen — especially when we fear that what we’re about to hear may challenge something deeply important to us.”
Speaking of which, did y’all see that New Yorker cartoon depicting Moses leading the Israelites through the Red Sea? It’s so good. Moses is lifting his arms dramatically, staff in hand, and the people are following behind him on dry ground between walls of water. One of the Israelites standing behind Moses turns to his neighbor and says, “He’s all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel.”
But this year, I feel I have to set those concerns aside in the hope that we can listen to one another with some of the graciousness I spoke about last night – resist reducing one another to our positions, and remain in relationship even when we disagree.
After all, Yom Kippur is a day for examining the commitments that shape our lives, even, perhaps especially, when they are difficult. It asks us to look honestly at what is, without surrendering the possibility of what might yet be.
In recent years, the Jewish people has endured a lot of trauma, and we continue to live in an era of overlapping, overwhelming crises: the horrors of October 7 and the long war in Gaza; ongoing danger to Israelis and devastating suffering for Palestinians; rising extremism and authoritarianism; growing concern about Israel’s place in the world; and a resurgence of antisemitism at home and around the globe. Under the weight of all this, questions that once centered primarily on certain policies or actions have become, for some, questions about the relationship itself.
Against this backdrop, some American Jews have increasingly found themselves struggling with how to support Israel while also feeling deeply at odds with certain actions and policies of Israeli governments. Others of us hear that question and fear that Israel is being abandoned precisely when it is increasingly isolated and its people remain vulnerable. These concerns are not always mutually exclusive, and I’ve heard a great deal of both of these concerns expressed right here in our own congregation. I myself understand and share both.
In some measure, then, I am giving this sermon today because it’s one I also need to hear. It is addressed especially to those of us who need to know that wrestling does not require walking away from what we love — that we can look honestly at Israel as it is without losing sight of the marvel of what it has been, the whole of what it is, and the potential of what it might yet become. Some of you may not share that struggle yourselves, but you may recognize it in a child, a grandchild, a sibling, or a friend. I hope what follows can help you hear their wrestling as something that may arise from commitment, not from its absence.
If these are questions you’re carrying, or if these are questions someone you love is carrying, or if perhaps you just need a reminder or reassurance, what I hope to articulate this afternoon, for myself as much as for you, is a commitment to Israel that makes room for gratitude and anguish, love and honest reckoning — a commitment that neither looks away nor walks away.
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Your sight, Infinite One, our Rock and our Redeemer.
Today, I want to explain why I still believe Israel is a good worth fighting for and what that commitment asks of us now. I’ll offer three distinct and interconnected reasons that are most compelling to me — beginning with what I think is the most fundamental promise of the Jewish state: refuge.
After centuries of expulsions, pogroms, forced conversions, discriminatory laws, and massacres — culminating in the murder of six million Jews while much of the world barred its doors or looked away — the need for a place of safety seemed painfully obvious.
Writing in 1944, while European Jewry was being destroyed, Albert Einstein – yes, that Albert Einstein, who, fun fact, was once even asked to be president of Israel – and the literary scholar Erich Kahler argued that Jews needed “a place of refuge where persecuted human beings may find security and peace” and the right to live under laws of their own making. Centuries of Jewish experience, they argued, had shown that this could be secured only through home rule rather than dependence upon a foreign administration.
True, Jewish life in the Diaspora has not been one unbroken story of persecution. To offer but the most obvious counter example Jews have flourished in the United States, a flourishing that I think will continue for a long time to come — provided we strengthen the democratic norms and institutions on which it depends.
But in many ways America has been the exception that proves the rule, and even America’s “golden door” was never open to every Jew who needed it, just as it remains closed to many immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers today.
Israel’s promise was not that Jews cannot flourish elsewhere, but rather that Jews in danger would no longer find every possible safe haven controlled by someone else. It would be a door Jews themselves possessed the power to open for one another.
There is a line in today’s haftarah that has been on my mind as I think about this history. The people ask Isaiah why God has not noticed their fasting. The prophet’s answer is sobering: What good is a fast if the hungry still have no bread and the homeless still have nowhere to sleep? So Isaiah calls on his community to share bread with the hungry, take the homeless into their homes, and not look away from others’ physical needs. This, he says, is “the fast God desires” – God is not impressed with our absorption in matters of the spirit so long as matters of the body are neglected. It’s not enough to pray for redemption. We have to help bring it about by caring for the vulnerable.
Isaiah’s challenge helps us understand why refuge matters: no matter how important our spiritual concerns may be – and trust me, as a rabbi, I believe they are very important – they are irrelevant if we’re dead.
And in important respects, Israel has fulfilled Isaiah’s challenge beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.
During the state’s earliest years, nearly 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, including Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa. I am old enough to remember the airlifts of Ethiopian Jews and the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union. To me, those were proof that Israel would marshal enormous resources to bring endangered Jews to safety.
True, Israel’s record of absorbing immigrants is not uncomplicated. And, as we know all too well, the existence of a Jewish state has not solved the problem of Jewish existential vulnerability.
But it has radically altered its terms. The existence of Israel means that Jews in danger have somewhere they possess the right to go; we can open our own borders to one another, organize rescue, mobilize resources, and mount a defense of our own vulnerable kin, to borrow Isaiah’s phrasing. Jewish survival no longer depends entirely upon someone else deciding that our lives are worth the trouble and expense of saving.
Yet Jewish existence has never only been about staying alive, and the Zionist dream was never exclusively about creating a well-defended emergency shelter. As the Tunisian Jewish writer Albert Memmi once argued, true Jewish liberation has always required not only safety, but also the ability to fully and freely “express [our] originality as a people.”
This is the second reason why I believe Israel is a good worth fighting for: not just that it’s a place of Jewish refuge, but that it provides the fertile soil necessary for Jewish renaissance.
A number of years ago, I spent a Friday night at Kehillat Tziyon, a congregation in Jerusalem founded by Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum. Rabbi Tamar’s vision was to create a spiritual community that was uniquely, authentically, and intrinsically Israeli.
The worship fused ancient liturgy and contemporary Israeli song; Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi traditions; Israeli and Arab musical forms. It was egalitarian, led by a rabbi fluent in both classical Jewish tradition and the language of contemporary Israeli life.
The room was packed. Lilah, then very young, sat on my lap, for once in her short life quiet and utterly absorbed. Around us was what I can only describe as a contemporary erev rav — a mixed multitude: sabras and olim; Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Ethiopians; people who thought of themselves as religious, traditional, secular, or none of the above. They sang together in Hebrew — the ancient language of our prayers and now also the living language of the street, the language of the Torah and the grocery store, of ancestral longing and the jokes of children on the playground.
As I sat at the heart of that crowded room and let the majesty of this unique worship wash over me, I burst into tears. This is the kind of Jewish cultural renaissance that Israel has made and continues to make possible.
And one need not attend Kehillat Tziyon to relish this reality of modern Israel. You can experience it when contestants on MasterChef Israel take foods their grandparents brought from Morocco, Iraq, Poland, Yemen, Russia, and Ethiopia and make them modern and gourmet. You can feel it in the rhythm of the week bending toward and away from Shabbat, and in the public calendar punctuated by Jewish festivals. And you can hear it when the language of the Torah and the Mishnah, with all its intertextual meanings, becomes the vocabulary of novels and poetry, text messages and traffic signs, hip hop music and streaming TV series; world class scholarship and endless, boisterous, political arguments.
To be sure, Jewish culture has thrived throughout the Diaspora, and I would never diminish two thousand years of extraordinary Jewish creativity or the vibrant Jewish life we continue to build outside of Israel. But Israel has created a particular scale and texture of Jewish life found nowhere else. And I submit to you that Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland helped create the unique conditions in which this incredible creativity could take root and thrive.
Refuge and renaissance are in and of themselves powerful reasons to continue caring about Israel. But if what troubles you is how Jewish power is sometimes used, I recognize that they may not be enough.
That brings me to a third reason, at once inspiring and demanding: Israel gives the Jewish people the opportunity — and therefore the responsibility — to take the ethical obligations we read about in Torah and make them real in the laws, institutions, and daily life of an actual society.
Recently, I came across a beautiful passage in “Politics After!,” a 1979 essay by the 20th-century French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas observed that for two millennia the Jewish people had been “only the object of history.” Victimhood had conferred a certain political innocence, he wrote, but victimhood was not enough to fulfill the Jewish vocation. Sovereignty, he believed, created “the concrete conditions for political invention”: the opportunity — and therefore the responsibility — to discover whether the Jewish people, exercising political power, could “incarnate the prophetic moral code and the idea of its peace.”
Levinas was not promising that a Jewish state would always live up to those prophetic ideals. No nation that has ever existed has met that standard, and I doubt that one ever will. But he was pointing out something important – that it is one thing to debate what justice requires and another to make decisions with the power to affect real lives. Sovereignty asks us to put our commitments to the test, and to answer for what we do with that power.
About ten years ago, I had the unique opportunity to go behind the scenes at Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat. There, I saw Israeli doctors treating victims of the Syrian civil war, despite Syria’s long history of hostility toward Israel. The physicians didn’t see in these patients enemies or threats – rather, they simply saw human beings in pain, and they used the resources and expertise of a sovereign Jewish society to save their lives.
Standing there, I remember thinking: This is what it looks like when a Jewish society acts upon the Jewish conviction that every human being is created in God’s image.
And this is the significance of the responsibility that is part and parcel of Jewish sovereignty. A sovereign people must decide how it will distribute funds, care for the vulnerable, and use or restrain force. Those choices impact laws, budgets, and decisions of war and peace.
It is one thing to affirm our tradition’s high values in a study hall. It is quite another to put those principles into practice by building hospitals, training physicians, mobilizing assets, and using collective power to alleviate suffering.
And it is another thing still to continue practicing those principles in the context of existential conflict, when the pressure to hoard resources, reinforce borders, and crush enemies pushes back against them.
True, the same power that can heal and protect can also seize and destroy. A Jewish army can defend innocent life or take it; a Jewish majority can create space for diverse forms of Judaism to flourish or marginalize Jews whose version of Judaism it rejects; a Jewish state can govern with equal justice for all, or deny some people freedom and dignity. To possess sovereignty is therefore to assume responsibility not only for what is done to us, but also for what is done by us and in our name — for discovering what Jewish values mean when translated into collective power.
The test is harder in times of danger or crisis. It is easier for me to speak about Jewish values from an American pulpit, or university campus, or newspaper op-ed section, than for Israeli leaders to make decisions about war and peace while their people face enemies who openly seek their destruction. They carry responsibilities I do not, under pressures I cannot fully grasp. That requires me to be humble in my judgments.
Yet that humility does not relieve me or any of us of the responsibility of asking what Jewish power is and ought to be used for. At Ziv I saw it used to save lives. When I see Israel using its strength and resources to help the vulnerable, pursue peace, and advance a more loving and just world, I feel a deep sense of ownership over those achievements and am justifiably proud. So too, when I believe Israel’s leaders make choices that harm innocent people or deny them dignity, I cannot treat those choices as someone else’s concern. My gratitude and my distress come from the same commitments.
Indeed, the unique responsibility that is both the burden and the blessing of the modern state of Israel extends also to those of us who live in the Diaspora. Israelis must decide how their society is governed, and they bear risks and responsibilities we do not. That should make us humble about our role, but not indifferent.
We must remember that our people’s foundational story, the Exodus, does not end with the people leaving Egypt, or even with the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. Rather, the people go on to stand at Sinai and receive the vision and blueprint for a new society, one rooted in human dignity and secured through justice, that God is calling them to build together. As the great contemporary Jewish-American scholar Michael Walzer points out in his book, Exodus and Revolution, the Israelites are not “magically transported to the promised land…ultimately there is no way to get…there except by joining together and marching.”
For those of us who live outside Israel, joining that march does not mean pretending that we bear the same responsibilities as Israelis, or claiming the same right to dictate choices whose consequences we don’t have to live with. But neither can it mean merely cheering or jeering from the sidelines. We are all of us, wherever we may live, bound up in the burden and the blessing of Jewish sovereignty, and in the long, unfinished work of helping Israel become a secure and flourishing, inclusive and just society.
There is indeed much to celebrate about Israel, and we have every right to say so. But caring about Israel also means learning about and reckoning with its whole history — fully and honestly. It means listening to and learning from the lived experiences and perspectives of both Israelis and Palestinians, in all of both peoples’ diversity and complexity. It means sustaining what is beautiful, naming and helping repair what is broken, and staying engaged when that work becomes difficult. We can and should support people and organizations working for pluralistic democracy, justice, and peace; teach our children to love Israel without insisting that they defend every decision made by its leaders or in its name; and make room in our communities for serious and sacred disagreement without putting one another’s belonging on trial.
That last obligation matters. If someone we love brings us questions or concerns or criticisms about Israel – if they express anguish or disappointment or even despair – I hope we can meet them first with curiosity rather than suspicion: to ask what they are seeing, what they fear, and what they still love and long for. We cannot nurture enduring commitment by insisting that people keep their questions to themselves.
That’s one reason Adira and I are excited to be leading our congregational journey to Israel this March. It’ll be an extraordinary opportunity to encounter a living society no election result or single leader could fully represent. We designed this trip to take us beneath the surface, to hear multiple perspectives, and to meet people working to shape Israel’s future. Please take a look at the flyer in your seat pocket for details, and mark your calendars for an informational meeting about the trip on Monday evening, September 28th. I hope many of you will join us.
That night at Kehillat Tziyon remains vivid to me: Lilah on my lap, Jews from so many backgrounds singing together, and tears in my eyes. I felt in that moment I had encountered a taste of ultimate redemption – because to me, that room, filled with so many whose families had been the beneficiaries of the refuge Israel has provided, alive with the creative vitality of the Jewish cultural renaissance Israel has enabled, giving lived expression to Jewish values in a way inseparable from the responsibilities of Jewish sovereignty, evoked for me the words of the traditional Prayer for the State of Israel, which calls Israel reishit tzmichat geulateinu — the beginning of the flowering of our redemption, an expression that the modern state of Israel represents a crucial step toward fulfilling God's promise of ultimate and universal redemption.
Yet in recent years, I have found myself drawn to a version of the prayer that adds a single Hebrew phrase: sh’tehei, that it may be. "Bless the state of Israel, that it may be the beginning of the flowering of our redemption." It’s a subtle shift, from declaration to aspiration, from "this is what it is" to "may this be what it becomes."
When I add the word sh’tehei, I am giving thanks for the lives Israel has sheltered and the Jewish culture it has renewed. And I am also asking that its future live up to its deepest promises, including justice and dignity for everyone who calls the land home. And if I truly mean that prayer, I must ask what I can do to help bring it about.
That aspiration is especially fitting to lift up on Yom Kippur. The very meaning of this holy day is that the future is not fixed; that we can become something different than what we have been. As Maimonides puts it in his Laws of Repentance: “Free will is granted to all people. If one desires to turn themselves to the path of good and be righteous, the choice is theirs. Should they desire to turn to the path of evil and be wicked, the choice is theirs.”
The essence of teshuvah is that our past and our present need not determine our future. In age after age our people have borne witness to many radical, previously unthinkable, transformations – including the very establishment of an imperfect but striving and thriving and powerful Jewish state in our ancestral homeland from the ashes of the Shoah. True, a better future is not inevitable. But on this day we insist it can be – especially when people like you and me commit ourselves to the hard and necessary work of building it.
You may say I’m a dreamer. But I know that hope is not detached from reality. I think of the doctors I met in Tzfat treating Syrians in the midst of war, and of the Israelis and Palestinians my friend Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Hermann describes, who “show up every day to fight for civil rights, democracy, and equality” because they know that both peoples call this land home and neither is going anywhere.” No outcomes are ever guaranteed, but as John Connor says in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, “the future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Let us therefore commit ourselves to platforming, amplifying, and joining with those building that better future, refusing to surrender to those who tell us that what is is what must be, that what has been is all that ever will be, that tomorrow might as well be yesterday.
Because if this holy day and our people’s history mean anything it is that if we will it, it is not a dream; that the future is open and full of possibilities – and it always and only belongs to those who are willing to build it.
So my friends, let us hold fast to Israel’s promise of refuge — until every Jew in danger finds an open door, and all who live under Israel’s authority are treated as people who bear the image of God.
Let us hold fast to Israel’s promise of renaissance — until the fullness of vibrant and vital Jewish life flourishes in a society enlarged, rather than diminished, by the freedom and dignity of all who share it.
And let us hold fast to Israel promise of responsibility — until Jewish power is measured not only by our capacity to defeat enemies, but also by our courage to protect the vulnerable, pursue justice, and seek peace.
May the One who gathers the dispersed,
releases the bound,
protects the stranger,
loves justice,
and makes peace
strengthen us for this work, helping us bring nearer the day when Israel becomes reishit tzmichat geulateinu — the beginning of the full flowering of our people’s and the world’s ultimate redemption.
So may it be God’s will. Amen.
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