Dear Friends,
This past Yom Kippur morning, I spoke about my remembrances of being in Synagogue as a child fifty years ago when my rabbi began services by announcing that Israel had just been invaded in a sneak attack.
At the time, I said,
“When Israel was attacked fifty years ago, there was a consensus among the Jewish community that our family was under assault. Regardless of people’s connection to Israel, that day’s visceral response emerged from a deep sense of connection and communal responsibility.
Today, however, that connection and commitment have weakened. And I honestly wonder… had I walked out here this morning and, God forbid, had to share with all of you what my childhood rabbi shared that day, would the response have been the same?“
As we all know, less than two weeks later, Israel was rocked by another surprise attack. Yet another two weeks later, Israel is at war with Hamas, and many in the Jewish world are struggling with the response of our neighbors, schools, and colleagues.
When I spoke on Yom Kippur, I wondered how our community would react to the Yom Kippur War were it to happen today. “Thanks” to Hamas, I now have an answer, and I must apologize to you all. One month ago, I feared that our communal commitment to Israel specifically and threats to the Jewish community in general would be met with less passion, solidarity, and commitment than we showed fifty years ago.
I was wrong.
And I have never been happier to be wrong.
The commitment to Israel, the understanding that the threat of Hamas must be addressed, and the care and support community members have shown toward one another as this crisis increasingly impacts many of our local and workplace relationships reflect a depth of commitment and solidarity that I feared had been lost. It hasn’t. And I am grateful that that is so.
But this will be a long road, and I fear the need to continue supporting Israel and one another will only grow in the coming weeks.
Public opinion has already begun to shift. The precipitating cause of the current conflict—Hamas terrorists massacring over 1400 Israelis and kidnapping over 200 innocent people—is already being glossed over, and their tactic of placing missile launchers and weapons caches in civilian locations to draw Israeli fire is causing untold suffering to Palestinian civilians.
Each of the last four or five days has seen an increase in calls and emails from community members encountering increasingly hostile workplaces and feeling a growing sense of isolation from friends and neighbors who have remained silent.
And as one might expect, ADL is reporting an unprecedented spike in online antisemitism and bias incidents.
The next weeks or months will be difficult. But the solidarity I have seen in Israel, in America, and our local community gives me faith that we will get through this.
As always, our community’s perspective is not monolithic. Members of our community hold diverse views regarding Israeli policy and their response to Hamas’ atrocities. But as we have seen over the past two weeks, those differences need not divide us; we cannot allow them to do so. If the last two weeks have revealed anything, it is the degree to which we all need one another.
A reading in our Mishkan Tefilah prayerbook speaks to one of our current tasks with more resonance now than ever. It states,
STANDING on the parted shores of history
we still believe what we were taught
before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot;
that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt
that there is a better place, a promised land;
that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness.
That there is no way to get from here to there
except by joining hands marching together.
May we continue to join hands, stand together, and work to support our community here and in Israel.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Daniel Cohen