Throughout history human beings marked their lives by public events. This is one reason pilgrimage festivals such as Rosh ha-Shana remain so operative, as do anniversaries, birthdays, and other annual commemorations. In some way the cyclical nature of human commemoration is particularly endemic to our community. We see one another for a few months, sometimes a few days, and then disappear into our lives until the next moments of reunion. We notice changes, how our children and grandchildren have grown, how we age, and of course we invariably notice how some never return.
In the early 1970s then editor of Commentary Normon Podhoretz wrote the following: “Today we are all Zionists.” In some very real way he was right. After the Six-Day War, the progressive American Jewish community, at least some of whom were ambivalent about Zionism because it potentiality challenged the on-going project of Americanization, raising the old canard of dual-allegiance, replaced its apathy about Zionism with a triumphant and proud commitment to Israel. From that point onward Zionism has become the mainstream position of American Jewry from Orthodoxy to Reform. What interests me today is not the use of the term “Zionist” to define the American Jew, but what that term actually means to the large majority of American Jews who know little about Israel, its history, and the fabric of its society. The American Jewish support is largely in the geo-political realm: we support Israel against its enemies and anyone we see as threatening its legitimacy, its sovereignty, and its autonomy. On another level, and perhaps this is more operative than we think, Israel functions as an important source of American Jewish identity. Here I bring two examples.
Yom Kippur Day – 2011
Why God should be Banished from Religion
This is a confusing time for American Jews. The world around us is changing, and not in consistent ways. After World War II we emerged from the darkness as a deeply wounded people. We faced the true manifestation of hell on earth. As survivors or more likely as their progeny we are the lucky ones but with that comes the responsibility of digging through the rubble of broken dreams and the soldering ashes of a civilization built over 1000 years snuffed out in merely six. Rebuilding was arduous and painful. The only consolation, if indeed there was one, was that the enemy was clear and unequivocal. Some much needed relief came in the establishment of the State of Israel. Not a consolation for the death of six million souls but a historical reality that made us believe we can survive as a people, and that perhaps the world has not given up on us.
“The Truth is a Lie”
graffiti on Broadway and 122nd Street
Are we liars? Most of us will say we are not. We aspire to be truth tellers. But aspirations are different than behaviors. There is an old Hungarian Jewish saying that defines Antisemites: “Antisemites are those that hate Jews more than usual.” Can we say similarly about liars? Liars are those who lie more than usual, those who lie habitually or perhaps do so without remorse. While we aspire to tell the truth, there are all kinds of reasons why we don’t. And all sorts of excuses we make in order for those reasons to seem plausible. That doesn’t make us liars. It makes us aspiring truth tellers who periodically lie. While a truth teller who sometimes lies may not be a liar, she is still someone who lies. Below I examine what happens to the lies of the truth teller, the lies that haunt the truth we aspire to uphold. The lies we tell may be lies of the truth teller, but those lies do not disappear. The fact that they are viewed as truth, by us and those we tell them to, make them even more precarious and, perhaps, more damaging.
Continue reading “On Lying” – Yom Kippur Eve – Kol Nidre – 2011 – Fire Island Synagogue →
