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Can
a Country be Born in a Day?
Sermon by British Chief Rabbi Professor Jonathan
Sacks
Delivered in London on Shabbes Tazria - Metzora,
Rosh Chodesh Iyar, 5762, (13 April 2002)
Contributed by Darche Noam/Shapell's alumnus Andrew
White
"Who has ever heard of such a thing?
Who has seen anything like it?
Can a country be born in a day?
Or a nation be brought forth in a moment?
Yet Zion laboured and gave birth to her children
immediately.
Shall I bring to labour and not give delivery? says
God.
Shall I bring to birth and then close the womb?
Says your God . . .
As a mother comforts her son,
So will I comfort you,
and in Jerusalem you will find comfort."
(Isaiah 66: 8-9, 13)
Isaiah's words, which we read this morning as the
haftorah for Shabbat Rosh Chodesh, are more than
a simple vision. They tell us what it is to be a
prophet.
No one was more severe in his criticisms of Israel
than Isaiah. The first chapter of the book that
bears his name is one of the greatest acts of social
criticism in the religious history of mankind. To
this day we read it on the Shabbat before Tisha
b'Av.
Yet when Israel was in crisis, Isaiah didn't say,
'I told you so.' He didn't say, 'You are to blame.'
He brought his people comfort. He gave them strength.
More than strength, he gave them hope.
False prophets are with their people when times
are good, and desert their people when things are
bad. True prophets are the exact opposite. When
times are good, they argue against complacency in
the name of high ideals. But when things are bad,
they lift the spirits of their people, by being
with them in their distress, and giving them the
courage to fight on.
Isaiah foresaw that the return to Zion would be
difficult. Israel would face enemies from without
and divisions from within. And at that moment Isaiah
turns to his people and gives them comfort.
'Can a country be born in a day? Or a nation be
brought forth in a moment?' The return to Zion,
he says, will be like no other event in history.
It will seem as if almost overnight a nation was
reborn: something that never happened before or
since. A people would return from exile; from slavery
they would rediscover freedom and come back to their
ancient home.
And then the prophet says the crucial words. 'Shall
I bring to labour and not give delivery? Shall I
bring to birth and then close the womb?' Rashi explains:
Having begun the process of redemption, I will not
stop halfway. Whatever difficulties you face, whatever
battles you have to fight, do not despair. For G-d
has not brought you back to the land only to desert
you, G-d forbid. Just as He was with you at the
beginning, so He will be with you on the way. And
in words that, to this day, we still say to give
strength to the bereaved, the prophet adds, "As
a mother comforts her son, So will I comfort you,
and in Jerusalem you will find comfort." Just as
G-d has brought His people back to Jerusalem, so
He will give them the comfort and courage to survive
their terrible losses and afflictions.
Those words, thousands of years old, might have
been written for today.
We stand between two days of the Jewish year, Yom
Hashoa last Tuesday, Yom Ha'Atzmaut this coming
Wednesday, the days on which we remember the Holocaust
and the birth of the State of Israel. Between them,
they remind us why Israel exists: not just because
of the murder of one third of our people; not just
because, had Hitler succeeded, we would not be here
today; but because, when the nations of the world
gathered in Evian, France, in 1938, in full knowledge
of the danger Jews in Europe faced, one country
after another said: we have no room for the Jews.
On this whole vast planet, there was not an inch
Jews could call home.
The return to Zion didn't begin in 1938. It is as
old as the words of Isaiah. Jews did not voluntarily
leave Israel. They were driven out by other powers:
first Babylon, then Rome, then by the Crusaders.
Whenever they could, they returned, even in the
dangerous days of the Middle Ages, as did Judah
Halevi, as did Nachmanides, as did the family of
Maimonides until they were forced to leave for Egypt.
Jews never renounced their right to the land, and
never once, in all the centuries, stopped praying
for the day they would return. Long before the Holocaust,
the Balfour Declaration in 1917 gave expression
to that right. And yet there can be no doubt that
what led the United Nations, in 1947, to vote for
a Jewish state, was the knowledge that after the
greatest crime of man against mankind, Jews needed
a home in the sense defined by the poet Robert Frost
as the place where, 'when you have to go there,
they have to let you in.'
It was a simple acknowledgement, tragically overdue,
that Jews, too, have rights, among them the most
basic right of all: to live, to exist, to be able
to walk the streets, go on a bus, have a meal in
a restaurant, go into a shop, without the fear that
someone will attack you, injure you, murder you,
because you are what and who you are. No people
was denied that right for longer than the Jewish
people. And without that right, there are no others.
And after the Holocaust, the nations of the world
finally recognised that this meant that the Jewish
people needed a home, a place where they could defend
themselves, and not rely on the goodwill of others;
because when they needed it, in 1938, it was not
there.
Today the state and people of Israel is fighting
for its life in the most elemental sense. The right
to life presupposes the right to self-defence, and
what applies to individuals applies also to nations.
That is why nations were created in the first place,
to secure the safety of their citizens. That, according
to every political philosophy, religious or secular,
is the very basis of the social contract, without
which, said Hobbes, life is 'nasty, brutish and
short.' Deny a nation the right to defend itself
against violence and terror and you deny its very
right to exist. And yet that is what Israel's enemies
and critics are doing and saying today, a mere 54
years after its birth, a mere 57 years after the
Holocaust.
For the past 18 months, and increasingly over the
past few weeks, a war has been waged against Israel
on two fronts: the first on the streets and shops
and buses of Jerusalem and Haifa and Tel Aviv, a
war of terror pure and simple, directed against
the innocent, against young and old, men, women
and children, terror blind in its hate and suicidal
in its effects. It would be hard to find, in the
entire annals of human bloodshed, a more perverse
campaign than this. Those who have committed it,
or condoned it, or encouraged it, have claimed to
be fighting a jihad, a holy war. Never has there
been a more unholy war, a desecration of everything
genuinely holy. To turn human beings into bombs,
to turn the murder of innocent citizens into an
act of martyrdom, to try and destroy the very people
with whom you claim to share an ancestry - this
is not holy war. It is a blasphemy against the very
Creator of life who taught us to cherish and sanctify
life. And yet there is no protest: not from the
spiritual leaders of Islam; not even from the spiritual
leaders of Christianity; and certainly not from
the United Nations. Was this holy - to organise
a suicide bombing of innocent people in Netanya
as they gathered on one of the holiest nights of
the year, seder night, to tell the sacred story
of freedom? The Nazis planned the extermination
of the Warsaw ghetto to take place on Pesach, because
they wanted to show, G-d forbid, that there is no
G-d. Until now, we never thought that there could
be a greater evil than this. But there is. To do
the same thing, and then claim that there is a G-d
who condones such things - this is a new low in
the story of mankind.
Israel is a courageous people. It had to be, in
order to survive. And yet over Pesach, for the first
time in history, ordinary Israelis were traumatised
by fear, not knowing whether a trip to the local
supermarket would turn into a tragedy, not knowing
whether their children would come back alive from
a simple night out drinking coffee with friends.
No nation can live like this. No nation should be
expected to live like this. Not all the attacks
are reported in the news; only the most serious.
So most people have no idea that Israel, in the
space of twelve months, has suffered 7,732 acts
of terror - more than 20 a day, almost one every
hour of every day for 365 days. If terror is to
be defeated anywhere, it must be defeated in Israel,
because Israel has suffered more, this past year,
than any other of the nations of the world. How
can the West claim, as it does, the right to fight
terror and then deny that right to Israel? How can
it bomb the Taleban in Afghanistan and then protest
when Israel, with far greater care, attempts to
root out the suicide bombers who threaten its own
citizens, not once or twice but daily? Such double
standards cannot exist if humanity is to survive.
But that is only the first front of the war being
waged against Israel. The second is more dangerous
still. There is physical evil; but there is also
moral evil, and no one defined it better than the
prophet Isaiah himself. "Woe," he said, "to those
who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness
for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5: 20).
For the past eighteen months a vicious campaign
has been mounted against Israel in the press, the
television, international forums and public opinion.
It consists in redefining acts of terror as legitimate
expressions of anger; and redefining Israel's self-defence
as an act of terror. As if Israel wanted any of
this to happen. As if it sought bloodshed, when
it hates it. As if it wanted war, when it has spent
seven years pursuing peace. What madness is it when
Israel is branded the aggressor, having offered
the Palestinians, at Camp David and Taba, a state
of their own, with East Jerusalem as its capital,
in the whole of Gaza and 97 per cent of the West
bank, with a further 3 per cent of land from within
Israel itself? If terror is legitimate and self-defence
is not, then crime is legitimate and the rule of
law is not. If the search for peace is called aggression,
and the breaking by Yasser Arafat of every undertaking
he has ever given is called leadership, then we
have reached the stage where evil is called good,
and darkness hailed as light.
What then must we do? We must do what the prophet
Isaiah taught us to do - to bring comfort to a troubled
people, and hope at the brink of despair. We must
remember that a mere week in the Jewish calendar,
a mere three years in history, separate Yom Hashoa
from Yom Ha-Atzmaut. A people who had come face
to face with the angel of death, within three years
was reborn as a free and sovereign people in the
land of our beginnings. In Isaiah's words: "Who
has ever heard of such a thing? Who has seen anything
like it? Can a country be born in a day? Or a nation
be brought forth in a moment?"
Not only did Israel become a city of refuge for
Jews facing persecution throughout the world. But
more than any other country of its age and size,
it has sought to be a blessing to others, giving
medical aid, technological aid, agricultural advice,
and humanitarian relief to any and every country
that turned to it for help. If there were any justice
in the world, Israel today, far from being condemned,
should be hailed as a model for every new country,
every developing region, in how to sustain democracy,
create economic growth, revive an ancient language,
rebuild ancient ruins, and provide a home for refugees.
Israel is a living tutorial in hope; and if it is
not allowed to defend itself, then the world is
condemning hope itself.
But there is something more. At the very heart of
Judaism is the word emunah. Emunah is often translated
as faith, but that is not what it means. It means
faithfulness, loyalty, being there for someone else
when they need you and not walking away when times
are hard. That is what Israel needs of us, the Jews
of the Diaspora, at this time. It does not ask us
to support this government, that Prime Minister,
this party, that policy. About these things we are
entitled to disagree. What Israel needs of us right
now is loyalty. That is what Isaiah taught us in
today's haftorah. Yes, there are times when we can
be critics, as Isaiah himself was. But not when
Israel is in distress. Then we must show support.
"As a mother comforts her son, so will I comfort
you and in Jerusalem you will find comfort."
There are many ways to bring comfort: by defending
Israel's case, by writing to the press or to the
local MP, by phoning friends and relatives in Israel
to let them know we are with them, or simply by
prayer, our oldest and greatest source of strength.
There will be Yom Ha-atzmaut services throughout
the country on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning,
and a solidarity rally in Wembley Conference Centre
on Wednesday. Let us show the people of Israel that
they are not alone; that we are with them. And let
us remember Isaiah's faith that G-d, who brought
His people home, would one day give them peace.
No people need it more. No people have earned it
more. Hashem oz le-amo yiten, May G-d give strength
to His people in this hour of trial. Hashem yevarech
et amo vashalom. And may He give them the one blessing
they cherished more than any other. Peace, speedily
in our days, Amen.
Chief Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks |
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