THE YOM KIPPUR WAR AND THE WAR TODAY
SERMON FOR YOM KIPPUR 5784 September 25, 2023
Today, on Yom Kippur 50 years ago today by the Jewish calendar, at 2:00 in the afternoon, the air raid sirens began to howl, starting low and rising to that piercing clashing scream that flips your stomach. In synagogues across Israel, men started to get up and walk out of the synagogue, a few at first, then almost everyone. They were being called up for war. The armies of Egypt and Syria, armed with up-to-date weapons by Russia, simultaneously launched a surprise attack on Israel that came very close to destroying the country. The goal of those armies? To undo the humiliation of their losses in the Six Day War in 1967, and to undo the creation of Israel in 1948.
They came very close to achieving that goal, wiping out Israel’s unprepared defenses and inflicting mass casualties, four times the per capita losses of the US in the Vietnam conflict. Golda Meir, a woman born in Ukraine who had grown up in Milwaukee, was Israel’s Prime Minister.
Francine Klagsbrun’s monumental biography of Golda “LIONESS“ recounts: I knew I would happen,” Golda said after a moment’s silence. “Yisrael, what do we do now?” …She had been profoundly disturbed by Russia’s evacuation of its civilian families from Egypt. Why had she not acted on the glaring realities? And the reserves. At the government meeting the previous day she had felt in her gut that the reserve forces should be mobilized, yet she allowed herself to be persuaded by the military men that they would have time in that became necessary.
Why had she, who had always relied on her intuition, not done so in this most crucial time? Why had she not trusted her own judgment? She would never forgive herself for those blunders. “I will never again be the person I was before the Yom Kippur War,” she was to say. (pp 619-20)
But if it had not been for Golda Meir’s clear hands-on leadership during that war, and her close personal relationship with Henry Kissinger, it is quite possible there would not be an Israel today as we sit here.
In the middle of the Watergate hearings, and the same day his vice-president Spiro Agnew resigned due to criminal charges, Kissinger and Nixon decided to send arms even knowing the certainty of an Oil Embargo by oil-producing Arab nations. The war established the alliance between the US and Israel, for all its complications, and also led directly to the Camp David Peace Agreement between Israel and Egypt.
Perhaps the greatest impact, though, was on Israel’s collective psyche. High on the heady victory of 1967, Israelis had developed a misguided sense of invulnerability. It even had a name: hakonseptzia. But very quickly, this nation of trauma survivors was retraumatized. Israelis realized that toughness won’t always protect you, and that they might lose the country into which they had put all their hopes and sense of meaning after the Holocaust. Who by fire? Who by water? The words of Un’taneh Tokef became frighteningly real.
In Israel today, that traumatic sense of vulnerability, the fear of a surprise attack that destroys the nation is still palpable. It suffuses the entire political landscape of the country; the trauma creates suspicion, hypervigilance, and it creates a renewed commitment to the words, “never again.” Israel still sees itself as very vulnerable to attack and each act of terrorism triggers that trauma, while Israel’s reactions trigger the trauma of the Palestinians.
For American Jews at that time, the Yom Kippur War brought back the traumas of World War II. The reaction of American Jews to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 dwarfed their enormous response to the SixDay War. American Jews were particularly angered by the fact that Egypt and her allies chose Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the year, to launch a surprise attack. This time over 30,000 American Jews volunteered to work in Israel. $107 million was pledged to the UJA during the first week of the war, and a total of $675 million was pledged during the war. This is today close to five million dollars.
The War came on the heels of the massacre of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics by gunmen from a splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It was followed by oil embargoes and a terrible recession. There were lines at filling stations across the US because the US had aided Israel. Then, at the UN in 1975 the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism a form of racism, a push organized by the Soviet Union who had funded the weaponry used to attack Israel in the war and whose oppressive treatment of their Jewish population was roiling the Jewish world.
American Jews understandably began to feel deeply protective of Israel and recognized the antisemitism underlying the attacks on it. Jews who were of age in 1973 live with a deep-rooted fear that they will wake up one morning to the news that Israel has been destroyed. As Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, “we are all the 1973 generation.”
But we are not all that generation, are we? In fact if you are under 60, you probably don’t have a clear memory of that war. That’s about two-thirds of North American Jews today, so it is understandable that there is an age divide when it comes to solidarity of support for Israel.
Those born after the Yom Kippur War have never known Israel to be seriously threatened. Quite the contrary, Israel is known as the most powerful military in the region, with nuclear capability, and often seems the aggressor, or at least uses excessive force in minor border conflicts, and is ruled by people whose beliefs are reprehensible.
In the Yom Kippur War, foreign armies and powers almost destroyed the country, but today, the greatest threat to Israel is not from the outside, but from the inside. It is coming from Jewish extremism, factionalism, Jewish supremacism, religious bigotry, and the failure to have ever agreed upon a constitution that defines the rights of minorities, the limits on the majority, and role of religion and ethnicity in Israel society.
The current government in its extremism has inflamed long-simmering fault lines in Israeli society. It has inflamed the tensions between the ultra-Orthodox and secular society; it has inflamed tensions between Mizrachi Jews from Arab nations and Ashkenazi Jews who are seen as elitist and holding too much power. It has inflamed tensions with the women’s community, the gay community, the Christian community, and has reignited the profound divisions between those who support Palestinian rights to self-determination, and those who want the Palestinians out of the Land of Israel.
With this government, Israel is at risk of turning into the kind of country that the far left has been falsely accusing it of being for decades.
The current administration under Bibi Netanyahu includes as ministers some of the most extreme and hateful in Israel’s political spectrum.
As the minister overseeing the police – the police- we have Itamar Ben Gvir, a devotee of Rabbi Meir Kahane who was banned from military service and from running for office because his views are so extreme and racist. He is an admirer of Baruch Levine, a fellow devotee of Kahane, who opened fire on the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 people and wounding 125. He visits his grave and had a poster of him up in his home until become a minister. The Finance Minister is Betzalel Smotrich, among the most extreme of the settler movement who has said Jewish freedom of movement is more valuable than Palestinian lives.
It also includes ministers from the ultra-Orthodox parties, who actively oppose women’s equality and rights, LGBT rights, and who have said that Reform Jews are worse than Nazis.
As you know, I have been an advocate for Israel my entire adult life, first as Hillel president, then working as the Information Officer for the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta, then working in Jerusalem training college leaders from around the English speaking world to combat antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda on campuses. I find that many of the criticisms of Israel are full of disinformation, lack historical context, fail to see Palestinian leadership as responsible for their intransigence and corruption over decades, and far too glibly deny Jewish indigenousness to that land, and deliberately play on antisemitic tropes like blood libel,
But what is happening in Israel today is different. What the current government is willing to do in the name of the Jewish people is deeply disturbing and counter to our values as Reform Jews. They are willing to sacrifice the promise of the Israeli Declaration of Independence that Israel would be a Jewish and Democratic state that would protect the rights of all its citizens.
The Israel Supreme Court has been the main protection for Palestinian and Bedouin rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and religious minorities rights including Reform Jews. Many from the center of Israel’s political spectrum, including former high court justices, call it a judicial coup. This government seeks to make the court systems a tool of the ruling party, as they have become in authoritarian states like Hungary, Poland and Russia.
But the sky is not yet falling. Not on Empire Kosher Chicken Little. The sky is not falling because millions of Israelis who are devoted to liberal democracy have been holding it up through massive protests.
Since Jan 7, every week masses of Israelis have gone to these protests. The police estimate that in total there have been 4400 protests across the country, and the number at these total about seven million people. A quarter of the population has attended at least one protest. Can you imagine that here? 165 million people participating in protests?
And these protests are organized not by major parties but by ad hoc grassroots councils of various organizations and civil society groups, and differ greatly from city to city, but all share a devotion to Israel being a Jewish and democratic state with robust minority rights and protections.
These protests are among the most profound inspiring outpourings of democratic passion and commitment I can imagine. I have been so inspired at the Israeli commitment, week after week, month after month, in all weather. The protests bring together a wide range of Israelis who all agree on the importance of democracy and of check and balances on the government. These protests remind me of what I so deeply love about the people of Israel and I have hopes that out of this movement a new center will arise that can hold power through consensus and peace instead of division and incitement.
I’m proud that the Reform movement in Israel and the URJ here in North America has been outspoken in support of the protests. Israeli Reform rabbis have been key speakers and lead the Havdalah before every protest.
When the CCAR was there in February, we went en masse to three protests, and the president of the URJ, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, spoke to over 150,000 protesters in Tel Aviv. It was the only time I heard the crowd go quiet to listen. They wanted to hear what the leader of the largest movement of North American Jews would say. They wanted to know we were with them.
When our group from Temple Sinai arrives in Israel in October, Tim and I will take a group of us to go to the protests that night to show our solidarity. I’m packing our banner.
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On Yom Kippur, we come together to confess not only as individuals, but as a people. Our tradition understands that our fate is connected and that we are responsible as a people for our actions as a people.
The rabbis teach us that the temple was destroyed not because the Romans were evil, but because the Jews descended into factionalism, zealotry, and sinat chinam, baseless political hatred that prevented them from coming together against a common enemy.
Al Chet Sinat Chinam: Let us pray this Yom Kippur that we can overcome our factionalism and polarization to preserve not just democratic government, but democratic values like civility, mutual respect between citizens, and protections for minorities.
Avinu Malkeinu, do not let us be the generation that both lived to see the State of Israel created and to see it destroyed again - either from the outside or the inside.
Avinu Avinu, let us Choose Life and Blessing, as it is written in the torah: Choose life—if you and your offspring would live— by loving Adonai your God, heeding God’s mitzvot, and holding fast, that you might live and long endure upon the land that God swore to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Avinu Avinu, the Blessing for the State of Israel, sung on page 288.