Sermon for First Morning of Rosh Hashanah 5784
September 16, 2023
There has always been within Judaism a dynamic relationship between universalism and particularism. Our religion is a world religion, but our religion is also the religion of a particular people. The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, speaks of this dynamic in many of his writings but here’s a quote from him that I think expresses the concept well:
In his 1992 book “Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust”
He writes:
“Judaism embodies a unique paradox that has distinguished it from polytheism on the one hand and the great universal monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, on the other. Its God is universal: the creator of the universe, author and sovereign of all human life. But its covenant is particular: one people set among the nations, whose vocation is not to convert the world to its cause, but to be true to itself and to God. That juxtaposition of universality and particularity was to cause a tension between Israel and others, and within Israel itself, that has lasted to this day.”[1]
We also see that dynamic, that paradox, of universal vs. particular in the nature of this holiday that we are observing today, Rosh Hashanah…..
One of the themes of Rosh Hashanah is that it marks the birthday of the world – as it says in the High Holiday machzor – “Hayom Harat Olam”. Today the world is born.
But the traditional Torah readings for Rosh Hashanah are not about the creation of the world. Instead, as was expressed in the reading that Don Ross shared at the start of the Torah service this morning, the Torah readings for Rosh Hashanah tell of the early experiences of Abraham and Sarah’s family who would ultimately become “Am Yisrael”/ The Jewish People.
The Torah itself also exhibits this juxtaposition of universal and particular. The first 11 chapters of Genesis tell the story (or maybe a couple of stories) about the creation of the world at large and of humanity at large.
And, in particular, the story of Noah and the Flood culminates with God’s “rainbow covenant” with Noah and his descendants – in other words a covenant with the entirety of humanity:
וְלֹֽא־יִהְיֶ֥ה ע֛וֹד מַבּ֖וּל לְשַׁחֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
“[that] never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[2]
But from Genesis chapter 12 through the end of the Torah the focus is on one people, our people, the Jewish people.
And still, threaded throughout those accounts, and increasingly prominent in the remaining books of the Hebrew bible, we also find a concern for society in general.
And a concern for human dignity – a concern for the idea that each person is created btzelem Elohim/ in the image of God.
But the western ideas of Democracy that we inherited from the culture of the Ancient Greeks are not explicitly native to Judaism. Ancient Israelite religion gave authority to judges and priests and kings and queens as representatives of God. Democracy, on the other hand, is an ideal that enters Jewish civilization at a much later time.
Fast forward three thousand years ---
The State of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence includes language that envisions a melding of the universalistic ideas of democracy with the particularistic ideas of Judaism. One hears echoes of both in passages such as these:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; (that’s a particularist idea) it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; (that’s a universalist idea) it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; (maybe that phrase reflects both universalism and particularism?) it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. (that all sounds pretty universalistic!)
And a few paragraphs later:
WE EXTEND our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people (particularist) settled in its own land (particularist) […]
And in the next paragraph it strikes an especially particularistic note:
WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel.
------------------------------------------------
If the State of Israel had a formal Constitution, such a document might be counted upon to spell out more fully the relationship between the universal idea of Democracy and the particular ideal of the Jewish character of the State.
However, to this day, the State of Israel has no formal Constitution.
Instead, the Israeli Knesset has from time to time enacted so-called “Basic Laws” which could someday form the building blocks of a Constitution. As the official website of the Israeli Knesset explicitly states:
Since the Constituent Assembly and the First Knesset were unable to put a constitution together, the Knesset started to legislate basic laws on various subjects. After all the basic laws will be enacted, they will constitute together, with an appropriate introduction and several general rulings, the constitution of the State of Israel.[3]
In particular, in 1992, the Knesset enactedחוק יסוד: כבוד האדם וחירותו the "Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.”
That Basic Law states in its opening paragraph:
חוק יסוד זה, מטרתו להגן על כבוד האדם וחירותו, כדי לעגן בחוק יסוד את ערכיה של מדינת ישראל כמדינה יהודית ודמוקרטית
“The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to embed in a basic law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
And so, this paradoxical idea is embedded in Israeli law --- the goal that the State of Israel should be MEDINAH YEHUDIT VE-DEMOCRATIT --- A JEWISH AND DEMOCRATIC STATE.
The present civil upheavals in Israel stem from a conflict over how to reconcile these basic values of JEWISH and DEMOCRATIC. It’s a struggle that has existed in Israel ever since its independence, but it has reached a fever pitch in recent months.
Judaism and Democracy are certainly compatible --- and indeed I doubt that anyone sitting here today would deny that they are both essential.
The question, however, remains --- how does one value interact with the other?
Today the State of Israel is in a state of crisis, with hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens engaged in mass protests against the government. This has been going on now for over six months.
The rallying cry of the masses in the streets is DEMOCRATIYA --- Democracy.
But the supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition counter that it is they who are defending Democracy through their proposals for what they describe as “Judicial Reform” but what their opponents describe as a “Judicial Coup”.
It’s a complicated situation because the governing coalition headed by Binyamin Netanyahu is made up of several distinct factions with distinct policy goals.
The governing coalition includes greater-Israel nationalists who want to annex the West Bank. It includes Center-right elements like Netanyahu’s own Likud party who are mainly concerned about security and free market economics. And it includes ultra-Orthodox parties who want to impose their interpretations of halachic norms on the general population -- including imposing them on those who are personally secular or who identify with non-Orthodox Jewish denominations.
The fact that we are spending Rosh Hashanah here, this morning, gathered together as a Jewish congregation affiliated with the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, puts us squarely in the middle of that struggle.
This past February, the prominent Israeli journalists and writers Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis, all of whom made aliyah decades ago from North America, and all of whom could generally be described as politically centrist, published an impassioned plea in the Times of Israel entitled “An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America”[4]
In the concluding paragraphs of that open letter they wrote:
The North American Jewish community has steadfastly come to the aid of Israel at moments of crisis. Israel belongs first of all to its citizens, and they have the final word. But Israel also matters to the entire Jewish people. When an Israeli government strays beyond what your commitments to liberal democracy can abide, you have both the right and the responsibility to speak up.
Israeli leaders need to hear where you stand. North American Jews and their leaders must make clear to this government that if it continues on the path to transforming Israel into a country of which Diaspora Jews can no longer be proud, there will be no business as usual.
We and our families, along with many tens of thousands of other Israelis, are in the streets every week demanding the government end its war against our democratic values and institutions. We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.
SO, WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF ALL THIS?
Let me try to give you a brief summary of what’s going on:
First off, the current governing coalition is the most right-wing in Israel’s history. But the country is almost evenly politically divided. Netanyahu’s coalition has 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Those 64 seats represent 48% of the total votes cast in the last election. Why only 48%? Because one of the left-of-center parties, Meretz, failed to secure enough votes to reach the 3.25% minimum vote threshold for being seated in the Knesset. Had Meretz run on a joint-ticket with the Israeli Labor Party – a move that many had recommended --- the combined ticket would have gained them several more seats in the Knesset. But the decision of the leaders of the Meretz and Labor parties to run separately meant that, in the end, thousands of votes for Meretz were “wasted”. In contrast, at Netanyahu’s suggestion, three of the furthest right-wing parties (not including Netanyahu’s own Likud party) ran as a joint-ticket and so two of those parties, who would otherwise have failed to meet the 3.25% threshhold, this time were able to get into the Knesset.
Past Likud-led coalitions have included centrist parties to the left of Likud but this time around, those Centrist parties have refused to be in coalition with Likud because Netanyahu is on trial for corruption and refuses to step down from leadership of his party. So now, for the first time, we have a Likud-led government in which Likud represents the farthest left element of the governing coalition.
In any event, even if the coalition of governing parties represented the majority of the country’s voters, they did not campaign on the issue of overhauling the judiciary.
This has led to hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting week after week against the judicial proposals.
These protests intensified after the Knesset passed the first of these proposals: An amendment to one of its so-called “Basic Laws” --- an amendment which stated that the Court could no longer overrule governmental actions on the grounds that the justices found such actions to be “unreasonable.”
Mind you, there had never been any legislation that gave the Court the power to impose a “reasonableness” standard on actions that did not violate any explicit provisions of law. This was a power that the Court had claimed for itself.
The political opposition protests that the reasonableness standard is necessary because otherwise there are no checks and balances built into the Israeli political system: No upper legislative house to approve governmental appointments; no separation of legislative and executive powers; no formal constitution.
And yet – one person’s “checks and balances” is another person’s “gridlock.”
The plot thickens:
Just this past Tuesday, the Court heard a case brought by opponents of the governing coalition. That lawsuit asks the court to overrule the amendment to the basic law that abolished the “reasonableness standard”. And some in Netanyahu’s coalition – including the Speaker of the Knesset – have stated that the government would not recognize any Supreme Court decision to invalidate the newly-enacted amendment whose very purpose had been to limit the Court’s own power. They argue that the Basic Laws, including newly enacted amendments to any of the Basic Laws, are equivalent to Constitutional provisions so a court should have no power to strike them down.
But the opposition says that just slapping the designation “Basic Law” on a piece of legislation doesn’t make it any more immune to judicial review than a regular law, since Basic Laws don’t require any supermajority to be enacted in the first place.
From my own perspective, I have no hesitation in saying that if I were an Israeli citizen, I would be one of the myriads protesting in the streets against the current government’s recent and proposed actions.
However, one person’s “checks and balances” is another person’s “gridlock.”
And no one has argued that the Knesset elections were conducted in a corrupt manner.
No one has argued that the members of the current Knesset weren’t duly elected.
And if government actions were to violate specific provisions of any existing legislation, no one is arguing that the Supreme Court doesn’t still have the power to overrule them.
The “reasonableness” standard, on the other hand, had been invented by the Supreme Court itself without any legislative authority to do so. It’s disingenuous to argue that there isn’t anything potentially “anti-democratic” about such a doctrine.
To be sure, there were other, potentially more far-reaching judicial proposals that the government had announced --- proposals involving procedures for selecting judges, proposals for officially exempting ultra-Orthodox men studying in Yeshivas from being drafted into the army, and proposals for imposing Orthodox religious practices on a secular or religious liberal public.
However, those have been put on hold for the foreseeable future. And, if as a result the far-right parties end up bolting from the governing coalition and bringing down the government – then maybe the next round of elections will bring back a more mainstream centrist coalition that can bring progressive ideas more to the forefront. There is nothing currently enacted or proposed that would prevent such a future, perhaps inevitable, pendulum swing.
Compromise and good faith are needed to get over the current impasse. And while I applaud the Israelis who are marching in the streets, I nevertheless fear that Americans similarly marching in the streets to protest against Israel would likely have the result of giving aid and comfort to those who oppose Israel’s very existence. I for one don’t want to give visceral Israel-haters any such ammunition.
In short, I think the Israeli political gridlock will get untangled soon enough. And I don’t think that that country has turned into or will turn into an autocratic place like current day Hungary or, God forbid, current day Russia.
And I don’t believe that we are witnessing a crisis anywhere near equivalent to the destruction of the Second Temple – a comparison that has been made of late. What’s happening in Israel is not a new Tisha B’Av – nor, from an American perspective is it a new “January 6th” either.
Regarding the famous phrase “Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof” (“Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue”), the Talmud in Tractate Sanhedrin explains the reason for the repetition of the word Tzedek in the following way:
צדק צדק תרדף אחד לדין ואחד לפשרה
One [mention of “justice”] for judgment and one [mention of “justice”] for compromise.[5]
The last two aliyot of this morning’s Torah portion provided an instructive example of compromise as Abraham negotiated a peaceful settlement with his Philistine neighbors. Near the end of the passage that we read from Genesis 21 this morning, the Torah teaches:
וַיִּטַּע אֶשֶׁל, בִּבְאֵר שָׁבַע; וַיִּקְרָא-שָׁם--בְּשֵׁם ה', אֵל עוֹלָם
Abraham planted a tamarisk-tree in Beer-Sheva, and invoked there the name of Adonai, the Everlasting God[6]
According to a classic midrash, the ESHEL or tamarisk tree that Abraham plants at Beer-Sheva symbolizes the value of hospitality. That’s because the word for tamarisk in Hebrew is Eshel – spelled with the three Hebrew letters Aleph, Shin and Lamed. The midrash teaches that the word Eshel is an acronym for three things a conscientious host or hostess should provide to his or her guests: “achilah”/food, “shtiyah”/drink and “levayah”/accompaniment – meaning making sure that one’s guests arrive and depart safely.[7] (Though others say the lamed stands for “linah”/ “lodging).
Let us hope that that spirit of fellowship and hospitality, like the tamarisk tree of our Torah portion, can be cultivated in Israel today, not to mention here in our American home as well, and with God’s help, ideally, among all humanity.
Shanah Tovah and Shabbat Shalom.
(c) Rabbi David Steinberg (September 2023/ Tishri 5784)
[1] Crisis and Covenant, p. 250
[2] Gen. 9:11
[3] https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/activity/pages/basiclaws.aspx
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-israels-friends-in-north-america/
[5] Sanhedrin 32b
[6] Genesis 21:33
[7] Rashi on Sotah 10a -- ולשון אש"ל נוטריקון הוא אכילה שתיה לויה שהיה מאכילן ומשקן ואח"כ מלווה אותן
