ROSH HASHANAH, 5779 / SEPTEMBER 10-11, 2018
Rabbi Perry Raphael Rank
It is great to see
everybody and I want to wish you all a Shanah Tovah—a good year of health, of
personal wealth, of emotional wellbeing and above all peace, both within our
nation that seems so deeply divided and throughout the world, especially in
Israel.
Ervin Birnbaum is a man with a story. Ervin survived
the Shoah in Hungary, and after the war, led a youth group to Palestine on that
famed ship, the Exodus. Once he got there, he soon left to join his parents in
America, enrolled in the Jewish Theological Seminary and became a Conservative rabbi
in 1958. In the early 70’s, he and his wife Hadassah made aliyah with their
three sons and Ervin did important work in a program for youth from the United
States, and later with Russian immigrants. One of his sons, Daniel, went to
Harvard for an MBA, got a job with Pillsbury, and then became the CEO of
Pillsbury Israel. He moved on to Nike Israel and transformed its product into
one of the most popular sporting goods brands in the holy land. Then in 2007, a
unique opportunity presented itself to him. He became the CEO of a lackluster
company known as SodaStream. SodaStream was a company that put the fiz into a
bottle of two cents plain. Danny was intent on reinventing SodaStream into
something big, and this he did. SodaStream became a publicly traded company on
the NASDAQ in November of 2010. In less than a year’s time, its market
capitalization went from $367 million to $1.46 billion. Last month, PepsiCo
purchased SodaStream for $3.2 billion dollars.
What makes this story even more compelling is that
SodaStream has been the target of the BDS Movement. BDS, you know, stands for
“Boycott, Divest and Sanction” and is the movement to undercut Israel
financially because of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of which
Israel is viewed as the principal, if not the sole culprit. One of BDS’s
charges against SodaStream was that it was exploiting Palestinians as one of
its plants was located on the West Bank. It was a curious argument since the
West Bank sports an unemployment rate of close to 30%. So depending on one’s
point of view, one could either argue that a factory on the West Bank is
exploiting a territory for its cheap labor, or conversely, providing jobs for
people who would otherwise be unemployed. However one chooses to read what SodaStream
has done, the fact is that the PepsiCo purchase is a dramatic setback for the
BDS movement. BDS does not want multi-billion dollar companies to see Israel as
a land of promise, but a land of poison, and Pepsico didn’t buy it.
Benji Lovitt is a nice Jewish boy from Texas who now
makes his living in stand-up comedy. He talks about how unique Israelis are. Go
on a tour of Israel and after a few days, an Israeli will say to you, “Nu, how do you like our land?” You’ll
say something like “It’s beautiful,” after which the Israeli will say—“So why
don’t you move here!” This doesn’t happen in Italy or Argentina. You don’t
visit Ireland, tell one of the locals that you think the country is beautiful
only to have an Irish citizen say—"So why don’t you move here!” In Israel,
that’s what you get. So Benji Lovitt moved to Israel, he decided to make
aliyah, he meets the same Israelis with whom he met while a tourist, they hear
he’s made aliyah and say—“You moved to Israel? Are you kidding?” Lovitt says,
“You told me to move here—the beaches, the people, we are family,” to which
they respond, “We were joking!” Lovitt says—I don’t want to speak to you
anymore. Where’s your friend who also told me to move to Israel? The Israeli
says—Shmulik? He moved to Teaneck.
If you want to make aliyah, and you want to access
the Hok HaShevut, the Law of Return, the law that permits you to become a
citizen within short order as you are a Jew returning to your homeland, you
need some Jewish authority to vouch for your Jewishness. I do these letters of
confirmation from time to time but not very often, maybe one every two or three
years. Yet in the past year, maybe during the past 13 or 14 months, I have
composed three letters of confirmation vouching for someone’s Jewishness. These
were all young people in their 20’s, and all became Bar or Bat Mitzvah at
Midway. They were not going to Israel because they were die-hard Zionists who
were realizing their greatest dream. One was going to medical school and the
other two were going for employment in start-up companies in Tel Aviv. They
were going to Israel essentially for professional reasons. It’s a place where
you can get a world-class education and make a living.
I was
sitting with a young couple recently, soon to be married, somehow we got on the
topic of Israel and it turned out the groom had never been to Israel. I said,
O—you have to go. He said—I am, next week. I said, O great—what tour? He said,
Not a tour. It’s business.
I want to tell you these stories because these are
the stories that are not necessarily featured in the papers. The stories that we
hear are stories of young Americans, many who are Jewish, who are disaffected
with Israel. They are sick of Israel’s alleged guilt in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, they are angered by the belligerence and conservatism of the
Netanyahu government, and they may also be disheartened with the government’s
dismissiveness toward North American Jewry. These people, whether young or
older, are not necessarily without legitimate complaints. Within the past few
years, North American Jewry dealt with an Israeli government that at first
promised and then reneged on that promise to build a plaza next to the Western
Wall where liberal Jews could gather in prayer, men and women together. Then in
July of this year, the Haifa police arrested a Conservative /Masorti rabbi,
Rabbi Dov Haiyun—a good, decent man—claiming he officiated at the wedding of a
mamzeret or a woman born of an illegitimate relationship. And then the Knesset
passed a “Nation-State Bill” that on the face of it, seemed to trumpet Jewish
values at the expense of democratic values. The bill prompted Ron Lauder, the
cosmetics billionaire, president of the World Jewish Congress to write: “This is not who we are, and this is not
who we wish to be. This is not the face we want to show our children,
grandchildren and the family of nations,” (August 13, 2018, The New York Times,
Ronald S Lauder).
What’s going on? I think what’s going on is that as
the euphoria over the founding of Israel diminishes—Israel after all is growing
up, it’s 70 years old, ken ainehora—we are beginning to grapple with the
reality of nationhood, and we are finding that Israel, the nation, is imperfect.
And it is this fact that I find peculiarly comforting, because it is stating
the obvious. Israel is imperfect because all nations are imperfect. There is no
perfect nation, there is no perfect economy, there is no perfect governance. And
when we, in the past, described Israel in utopian terms, we were just dreaming.
And that’s what we were supposed to do. In fact, Psalm 126 claims:
B’shuv
Adonai et shivat Tziyon
When God
brings back the exiles of Zion
Hayinu
k’holmim
We will be
like dreamers (Psalm 126:1)
We’ve
been dreaming and it has been a very sweet dream. The early Zionists wanted to
reclaim Jewish nationhood and become, as they put it, k’khol hagoyim,
like all the other nations in the world. And today, Israel is
like all the other nations of the world in one blatant feature: like all the
other nations of the world, it’s got a lot of problems. If we never wanted to
encounter these problems, we should never have worked as hard as we did for a
Jewish state, and that was a position taken by a prophet with whom we make a
special acquaintance over Rosh Hashanah.
Today’s/Yesterday’s haftarah tells the tale of Hannah
and circumstances surrounding the birth of her only child, Samuel. Samuel grew
up to be one of the great prophets of Israel and he served as a transitional
figure between an Israelite nation ruled by temporary chieftains who gained
currency as the need arose, and a more stable governmental structure, namely a
monarchy. Samuel was anti-monarchy. He figured God is ruler enough and there is
no need for a king of flesh and blood. So he sets himself the task of
convincing the people to forget this crazy idea. He lists all the reasons they
shouldn’t have a king: the king will draft your kids into a military; he will
demand that you plow, seed and harvest his fields; he will co-opt your
vineyards and olive groves and give them to whom he pleases; he will take your
daughters as perfumers, cooks and bakers, etc. The description of what a king
does was pretty damning, but the people responded, “We must have a king over us
that we may be [k’khol hagoyim], like all the other nations,” (I
Samuel 8:19-20). And when Samuel consulted with God on the matter, God agrees
with the people. Give them a king. And that is how the first king of Israel,
Saul, ascends the throne of power, amid a maelstrom of negative expectations. As
it turned out, Saul proved to be an unstable figure in Israelite history. And
when we study the Bible and examine the history of all the other kings of
Israel and Judah, what we find is that more disappointed than delighted their
subjects. Government was a very challenging enterprise back then, and it
remains so even today.
The liberal Jewish world was deeply offended when the
government of Israel reneged on its promise to build that wonderful plaza where
egalitarian Jews like you and me could gather and pray as we wish. But if you
talk to the average Izzy or Malkah on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, they’re
going to say something like, “Who cares about the Kotel! What are you getting
yourselves crazy about!” If you want to pray, go to a nice shul in Jerusalem,
Tel Aviv, forget about the Wall! In other
words, this is not their issue. It’s ours and we are not Israelis who pay taxes
and vote for representation in the Knesset. If it seems as if Israel in general
is dismissive of liberal Jews and liberal Judaism, the fact is that the news
coming out of North America about our success here is none too flattering. And
as for our successes in Israel, those too have been somewhat tepid. It’s easy
to blame Israel as the impediment to our success, but we have not done a good
job or promoting who we are and what we stand for. Until we reconsider both our
product and our marketing, I don’t think things are going to improve much. And
as far as I can see, there is little effort in reconsidering the product or the
marketing.
I tend not to blame Israel about these issues because
they have bigger fish to fry than catering to our religious sensitivities. As
we are screaming about davening, they are trying to maintain the security of
their citizens in a hostile neighborhood. And to make matters worse,
demonstrators and whole nations regard these security measures as immoral or
unethical. The Israelis are portrayed as
the oppressors, the overlords, the bad guys in a story that has been reduced to
the good guys versus the bad guys. Look—I too wish for a day when the
Palestinians can enjoy full autonomy in their own land, living peacefully side
by side with Israel. All these military actions, on both sides, are a waste of
time, a waste of resources, and in its most egregious incarnation, a tragic
waste of human life. Wouldn’t it be better to have a nation at your side with
whom you can trade, address common challenges, and share in academic,
technological and cultural collaborations? On the other hand, there is the
other hand.
You
may not have been paying attention over the past 30 or 40 years, but our nation
has become a nation of thousands of laws and cultural expectations, all
designed to protect and promote human life. Many of us grew up at a time when
wearing a seat belt was an option—not any more. You could buy a bottle of wine without
the surgeon general warning you about alcohol’s link to birth defects, so
pregnant women beware. Don’t smoke,
don’t inhale secondary smoke, don’t build a building without a sprinkler system,
don’t talk on the cell phone while driving, don’t eat too much red meat, be
sure the baby’s clothing is fire-retardant, throw out the crib you slept in and
played in because it no longer meets industry safety standards, and don’t carry
any liquid in your carry-on greater than 3.4 ounces. Our pre-school, certified
by the State of New York, follows hundreds of rules in order to maintain
certification. We had a tortoise in the school. It was a cute little tortoise. I
thought it was great for the kids to have a living animal in the classroom. The
state said the tortoise had to go—the risk of salmonella violated state
standards. As we learn what it takes to live long, in good health, and in
safety, the rules stack up like a pile of leaves in autumn. Contrast all this
with American demonstrators, Jewish and non-Jewish, demanding that Israel
unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank. Then what? Allow for a Palestinian nation
to evolve under the control of Hamas that explicitly and without shame calls for the
total destruction of the Jewish state and Jews as well? For Israeli politicians
to turn a blind eye to what the Palestinian leadership stands for would be either
naïve or crazy. All it would take is one terrorist action—one blown up bus, one
murdered child—before the Israeli body politic would be at the government’s
throat. Western governments, Israel no
less than America, are held accountable for their misdeeds, miscalculations,
and misjudgments. Americans who have created for themselves a super safe
society telling Israelis to loosen up with an enemy sworn to its destruction is
an irony of extraordinary magnitude and profound hypocrisy.
There was an old joke, more popular during Israel’s
early days, about Moses’ bad sense of direction. It had something to do with
Moses leading the people of Israel up from Egypt to the Promised land, and when
he eventually got to the Jordan River, if he had only turned right instead of
left, we would have gotten the oil and everyone else could have dealt with the
barren Judean desert and the hot and dusty Negev, where little if anything
grows. It turns out, Moses just may have known what he was doing. One of the
ways to measure a country’s economic health is by taking the total domestic
product of a nation—all of the goods and services that it produces in a single
fiscal year—and then divide it by the number of people in the country. You may
know this formula as per capita (meaning per person) GDP or Gross Domestic
Product. It’s a useful tool for comparing the wealth of nations. (Using
statistics by the International Monetary Fund for 2017), The United State has a
per capita GDP of $60,000. We don’t have the highest per capita GDP in the
world. We might be better off in Switzerland where the per capita GDP is
$81,000. How about Israel’s per capita GDP. It’s not as high as the United
States. Per capita GDP is $40,000. Now here’s the clincher. Israel has this per
capita GDP without a drop of oil. But what about the oil rich nations like Kuwait--$27,000
per capita GDP. Saudi Arabia per capita GDP--$21,000. Iran and Iraq per capita
GDP: $5000 each. Israel has outstripped its neighbors and continues to grow
precisely because it could not depend on oil but had to come up with other ways
of thriving, and they did so with one of their greatest national resources: their
brains.
Consider the following Israeli innovations:
In robotics, ReWalk, a
device that allows paraplegics to stand upright, walk, and climb stairs;
In optics, Pillcam, a
capsule swallowed by a patient which transmits photos of the digestive tract;
In computer hardware,
the USB drive that allows us to put gigabytes of data on a two-inch device;
In agriculture, disease
resistant seeds for the growing of cucumbers and melons;
In computer software,
OrCam, a device that orally describes objects and texts for the
visually-impaired;
In computer software,
WAZE, an app on your smart phones guiding you to your final destination;
In agriculture, drip
technology which uses a minimum of water by targeting the plants that need to
be irrigated—very valuable in desert climates and saves millions of dollars in
water costs;
In computer hardware,
BabySense, offering auditory and visual alarms if a baby stops breathing thus
preventing Crib Death;
In innovation
technology, solar panels that float on water thus freeing up valuable land
space;
You may remember that
old joke about God deciding to end this world by bringing on another devastating
world-wide flood. What happens? The Italians go out to have their last drinks
of the best wines to be found in Rome. The French go out for their last dinners
in the best restaurants in Paris. The Israelis try to figure out how to live
under water. Like-A-Fish is an Israeli company that has created a unique system
for extracting oxygen from water in order to free professional and leisure
scuba divers from wearing air tanks.
I have just enumerated a woefully incomplete list of
the innovations that have taken place in Israel in recent years. In 2012,
Israel had 60 companies listed on NASDAQ, more than any other country outside
of the US or China. It’s incredible. But more importantly, it’s a blessing. These
Israeli companies are coming up with solutions for people who cannot see,
cannot walk, do not have electrical energy, or enough food. These are companies
that are helping the impoverished enjoy the riches that they have been denied. And
it’s a blessing that God predicted thousands of years ago, when God rewarded
Abraham for his obedience, for his willingness to give up his child, his
favored child Isaac. God stopped the offering from taking place because Abraham
had already passed the test and then God said to Abraham:
Ya’an
asher asi’ta et hadavar hazeh
Because you
have done this
V’lo
hasahta et binkha et yehidekha
and not
withheld you son…
V’hitbarekhu
v’zarakha, kol goyei ha’aretz
All the
nations of the earth shall be blessed
Because of
your descendants (Genesis 22:16/18)
And though I do not
usually point to the Bible and say—Ya see, ya see…--It’s all true what is
written here. The fact of the matter is that the descendants of Abraham are
bringing blessings to the world. The only people who would dare to cripple an
enterprise so innovative and so transformative in people’s lives, would have to
be short-sighted, anti-humanitarian, and misanthropic.
When Pepsico decided to purchase SodaStream for 3.2
billion dollars, there was a news conference. Danny Birnbaum, as Soda Stream’s
CEO, was naturally there. So what should an Israeli CEO do at such a news
conference? Naturally, you introduce your parents, and you tell their story, a
Conservative Jewish story, which begins in the Shoah of Hungary and whose
latest chapter finds them standing next to their son, one of the most
successful businessmen in Israel. I found it very moving that this was the
course Danny decided to take because it was a little morality lecture on how no
one should be blinded by their history. Even at the point of death, once can
rise from the ashes of the Shoah and eventually become CEO of an international,
multi-billion dollar business.
When the Palestinians stop blaming the Israelis for
their failures, when The United Nations and the European Union and Iran stop
funding the Palestinians, which is akin to keeping a dead political, military and economic agenda on a ventilator,
real change will take place. So Hagar is wandering with her baby in the
wilderness, and the water gives out, and she places the baby below a bush to
die, and she sits at a distance to watch this tragedy unfold,
Vayifkah
Elohim et einehah
And God opened her
eyes
Vateire b’er
mayim
And there was a well
of water (Genesis 21:19)
I don’t think God
created the well. The well was there, but Hagar has to open her eyes to see
that life was not over. And now someone from the Palestinian side has got to
realize that a gold mine has dropped into their neighborhood. Its called
Israel. You don’t try to destroy a gold mine. You make peace with the owners and
do business with them—with Israel. The potential for a wealthy, secure, and
peaceful Palestine are tremendous if only someone from the Palestinian side is
courageous enough to open their eyes, to see this situation for what it could
be and move others to see the same vision!
With all the tzuris, with all the norishkeit
(arresting a Conservative rabbi?), with all the violence, in spite of it all, this
little country is doing great things. I am optimistic about the future of
Israel. And what Israelis are going to increasingly find, contrary to what you
may be reading in the papers, is that when they go up to a young tourist in
Jerusalem and say, “Nu—what do you think of our country?” And the young tourist
says, as they invariably do, “I think it’s wonderful.” And then the Israeli
says, “So why don’t you move here!” They just might find these young people
saying—I’m going to. In fact, my firm is establishing a branch in Tel Aviv.
Rabbi Levenson is taking the congregation on a trip
to Israel this December. You should really look into it. If you go, I hope you
come back, but if you don’t, I couldn’t blame you.
Shanah Tovah, everyone.
