Yom Kippur 5768
Get Your Feet on The Ground
Rabbi Vered L. Harris

I would like to tell you a personal family story, a piece of the story my great-uncle, George Feher, recounted during his interview for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. You may know that one of the goals of the Shoah Foundation is to record interviews with survivors of the Holocaust. In this story my great-uncle speaks about his father, my great-grandfather, whose name was Ferdinand Feher. I called him Saba Feher, his wife was my Savta Sylvia.

“When [George’s father] was 16 his father gave him a gulden, as the story goes, and sent him off to Vienna saying that he cannot support so many children. At that time he spoke no German but in Vienna he learnt it and apprenticed himself to a relative who had a textile business… he went to evening school to study Business Administration. He was an opera buff – which he stayed the rest of his life. He could sing all the arias of the main operas… Then the 1st World War broke out…

“[He went to war for] the Austro-Hungarian army…[He] was… physically very strong. Furthermore, he was a person that did not know fear. I have never encountered a person like this before – devoid of physical fear or any other kind of fear. The First World War was very brutal. They fought in the trenches, with bayonets face to face. You either had to kill or be killed.

“…He fought in the trenches against the Russians and being very strong, survived all the skirmishes. But once when he gored a Russian soldier, who was dying, he heard him say: ‘Shma Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.’ He killed a fellow Jew. He could never forget this incident and he was sad about it all his life. Thereafter, he didn’t want to fight in the trenches.”

Why does this story matter? Why, as Jews, do we hear this story and find ourselves speechless?

Because we feel a part of the Jewish People. Because it is simultaneously obvious and unfathomable that a Jew could kill another Jew. Because we are family. Because we, like God, are one.

Years later, Saba Feher and Safta Sylvia survived the Shoah living for six months in a large, dark hole dug under a cow shed. Within two years after the WWII Saba Feher rebuilt his business into a flourishing enterprise. In 1948 the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia and he was arrested for being a capitalist and put into prison. That was the last straw and he decided to finally leave his native country. A cousin was able to arrange for him to get out of jail and obtain a regular emigration visa. They arrived in Israel in 1950, joining their daughter, my grandmother, and her young children. In Israel they spent the rest of their lives.

I am a part of the Jewish people; hearing someone say “Sh’ma Israel” upon his death strikes an immediate chord in my heart. I am a part of the Jewish State, for without it my parents meeting and my very existence would be unimaginable.

You, too, are connected to the Jewish People and the Jewish Land. The question is: how?

Yonatan Ariel, the Executive Director of Makom: the Israel Engagement Network, discusses four types of “proofs” that each of us confronts when identifying with our People.

The first is “the shock of recognition.” This happens when suddenly you realize that a People being threatened is YOUR People. In 1975 the United Nations asserted that Zionism is Racism. Overnight New York Jews became outspoken Zionists. Where were they the day before? Oblivious to their connections with each other. Then their People was threatened and they were on the streets, united.

The second proof Ariel calls “Family Resemblance.” Upon learning someone is Jewish you look to connect with them. “You’re from Chicago? My mom went to Roosevelt High School…” After all, we’re family. We are one People.

The third proof according to Ariel, is what Peter Berger calls the “Plausibility Structure.” We have common customs that distinguish us as members of the People. “Ok, I know this is the right house because I see a mezuzah on the door.” Or: it is Yom Kippur and we are in synagogue.

The fourth and highest level of identification with our People is living under certain obligations that we must or must not do because we are Jews.

In some circles these obligations might be clear: “Judaism obligates me to love my neighbor as myself.” The first defining characteristic of North American Liberal Jews is our commitment to ethics. But where is the uniquely Jewish feature of ethics, the aspect that proves: “this is solely because I am a Jew”?

Is it our obligation to Social Justice: because Judaism obligates me to gemilut chasadim? Or… we do good deeds because we are good people?

Is it lifelong Jewish learning: I learn because Judaism obligates me? Or… I learn because it’s interesting?

You might participate in Social Justice and Lifelong Learning because you believe Judaism demands them of you. You may participate because it makes you feel good or gratifies your ego. In any event, the world gets better through your actions regardless of your motivation.

Your motivating reasons, however, do measure the level of your identification with our People. What do we do because we feel obligated as Jews?

Israel is approached in North American Liberal Jewry as are social action and lifelong learning. You should care, but if you don’t, and if it’s not a part of your self-identity as a Jew… do something else. We are autonomous individuals in a world of choice.

But if our highest level of identity with the Jewish People is confirmed through an obligation that is unique to us because we are Jews, let me suggest that we adopt the obligation of joining ourselves to Israel.

Israel belongs uniquely to the Jewish people. Other peoples have homelands, and there are even other peoples who connect to Israel as their homeland, but Israel was founded in 1948 as the Jewish State. Torah teaches that the covenant between Jews and God is distinctly marked by our relationship to the Holy Land. The worldwide Jewish community has no other central place we call home. For the sake of our Peoplehood and Oneness, we will do well to recognize our relationship with Israel as a spiritual, moral, and historical obligation unique to us because we are the Jewish People.

I am not suggesting we move there, that we blindly support the policies of the Israeli government, that we forego our obligation to living ethical lives of value, nor that the religious practices, or non-practices, of Israeli citizens serve as our model for Jewish observance.

I am suggesting that our commitment to the Land of Israel offers measurable proofs of our commitment to our People and our covenant with God.

This morning we read from Deuteronomy: “You are standing today, all of you, before the Eternal One your God.” Midrash Tanhuma asks: “When are you described as ‘standing’? As on this day when ‘all of you’ will be together in one cluster. It is written: ‘When God’s cluster is one, God will establish it upon the land’ (Amos 9:6).When a man picks up a cluster of reeds, can he possibly break them at on time? But if picked up one by one, even a child can break them. Thus you find that Israel cannot be redeemed until they are one cluster.”

Around what shall we cluster? Not just us, but all of the Jewish people, those in Australia and South America, those in Europe and Africa. Of all the potential rallying points for the Jewish People, it is the Land of Israel that can unite and bind us all.

We are bound together by the words of liturgy: Shema Yisrael. My great-grandfather was in the trenches far from the Holy Land when he was shocked into the reality of having killed one of us his own people. Those words bind. Imagine those words’ power when your feet are on our ancestral ground, where millions of people and hundreds of generations have directed their prayers and focused their hearts. Wherever we are in the world, the centralizing power of the Land of Israel unites us as one People.

Our earliest ancestors obligated themselves to the Land. Two Israelite tribes, the Reubenites and the Gadites, and half the tribe of Menashe, recognized that east of the Jordan the land was fabulously suited for raising their cattle and building their homes. While the rest of the tribes prepared to enter the Land and fight to possess it, the tribal leaders of Reuben and Gad went to Moses and asked that they receive land east of the Jordan.

Since 1948 Moses’ response has been echoed in the voices of staunch Zionists who believed that all Jews should live in the Land of Israel. “Should your brothers go to war while you stay here [outside of the Land]?” By establishing a successful life outside of the Land “you will turn the minds of the Israelites [away] from…the land that the Eternal has given them.”

But the Reubenites and the Gadites stepped forward saying: “Our children, our wives, our flocks, and all our other livestock will stay behind…while all [of us] recruited for war cross over, at the instance of the Lord, to engage in battle.”

Ours are not the political wars of the State of Israel. Ours is the fight of a meaningful peoplehood, a connected international body of Jewish community. We can achieve the highest level of identification with our people, sharing a common obligation because we are Jews.

From the Reubenites and Gadites to us here today, Jews do live outside of the Land of Israel. Elie Wiesel wrote in 1998:

“How can it be explained that a Jew like myself, attached to the destiny of Israel with all the fiber of his being, has chosen to write, teach, work, found a family, and to live far away in a social and cultural environment that is far too generalized for that of our ancestors? Israelis put this question to me, as they do other Jews in the Diaspora… Is there a satisfactory response? If there is, I don’t know it… For the moment, this is all I can say: as a Jew, I need Israel. More precisely: I can live as a Jew outside Israel but not without Israel.”

What does Wiesel see, and other Israel-lovers who live outside of the Land, that is unclear to other North American Jews? Why do some Jews assert that we cannot live without Israel?

Professor Hanan Alexander, chairman of the Department of Education at the University of Haifa, describes a game of marbles. What happens if you don’t define your parameters? There is no game; the marbles roll all over the place. What happens if you mark your parameters, but you have no marbles? Nothing.

21st century liberal Judaism, as we know it here, is the marbles. Our beliefs and practices are the content of what it means to be Jewish. Zionism, an attachment to the Land, is the ultimate circumference that keeps the marbles centralized and prevents Judaism from rolling all over the place in a disjointed, untrackable fashion.

Today’s Zionism is empty without Judaism. Israelis who call themselves “secular” are judging their religiosity according to Orthodox Judaism. Too many of these “secular” Israelis do not understand that there is another way to be Jewish. And we too often mistakenly think of our North American experience as the “center” of Jewish life. Liberal Judaism is the marbles that give meaning to the game. Israel and Zionism are the parameters that allow the game to be played. Israel needs us, and we need it.

We send tzedakah to Israel. We educate ourselves about Israel. Why not travel to Israel?

For many, the first response is: it’s so expensive.

A modest ten-day trip to Israel from Kansas City during the off-season, like this December’s congregational trip, costs about $3,000 per person. Perhaps one day we will develop scholarships for congregants who need financial assistance to travel to Israel for their first time. If it is the obligation of a Jew to join him- or herself with Israel, and the obligation of the synagogue to assist members in fulfilling religious obligations, then hopefully one day we will offer such scholarships.

But even without financial assistance, a trip to Israel need not be thought of as “ten weeks from now…” We can begin to change our expectations so that we think of a trip to Israel as “ten years from now.” This is not an “if,” it is a “when.”

Others’ the first response is: isn’t it dangerous?

Israel travelers often ask each other: how many times have you been to Israel? It’s some sort of a convoluted status thing. I learned early on just to shrug my shoulders. For the purpose of talking to you today I tried to count how many times I have been to Israel. I came up with 17 times in 35 years, including two separate years of living there, one of those years explicitly during a war. Have I been there when buses or cafés have exploded, when rockets have been launched and people carry guns? Yes, I have.

There is no logical response that I can give to people who are afraid to travel to Israel. In most cases debilitating fear is not rational. As fear of traveling to Israel is not rational and cannot be quelled by experts’ statistics or others’ first hand experiences, so my deep love of the Land is not rational and cannot be transferred by my words. When you are afraid to jump off a diving board you ultimately either climb down the ladder in defeat, or you step over your fears and jump off the board. No amount of statistics, cajoling, or persuasive speaking will rid you of your fear. Your fear is ultimately eradicated only by taking faith that you will survive, and then jumping off the edge to the cool waters below.

Another common response is: why? I’d rather go to Europe, or on an African Safari. If I’m going to travel, why Israel? In his book Getting Our Groove Back, author Scott Shay answers to ambivalence about Jewish identity challenges by asserting: “Complacency means defeat.” If you do not feel connected to Israel, do not be complacent about pursuing its meaning. It is a core, critical component of our people’s unity. Take a class, talk to others, go ahead and travel there. Russian born poet David Shimoni wrote in 1923: “From each Jewish heart an invisible path leads to the Land of Israel.”

Our challenge is to recognize the invisible path, and why it must lead to the central gathering place of our People. Through a trip to Israel the invisible path of North American Liberal Jews is strengthened, clarified, and even for some revealed.

After my great-grandfather left the trenches he transferred into the ski patrol. My great-uncle retells: “There were not many skiers at the time, most of them were peasants who used skiing as a mode of transportation between villages. One day the commanding officer of the ski patrol asked for ten volunteers to ski over the hill and see whether there are Russians there. And my father not being afraid, of course, immediately volunteered. Whereupon the officer called him aside and said: ‘Feri Feher, I don’t want to have this on my conscience. You are Jewish and I am Jewish… This is my way of finding out whether there are Russians. If they don’t return, then there are Russians. I do not allow you to go.’ The rest of them went. Nobody returned; they were presumably all killed.”

Saba Feher killed another Jew in the trenches. On the ski patrol another Jew saved his life. In both cases the pain and the sadness, the relief and the moral conflict – the power comes from recognizing that as Jews we are one People, and our fates are tied together in some strange way that we cannot know. We are on this journey of Peoplehood together, and as David Shimoni wrote, the path includes our hearts’ connection to the Land of Israel.

What is, then, a successful journey with the Jewish People and in relation to the Jewish Land?

Israeli writer Meir Shalev explains it in his poem “A Successful Journey,” Masa Mutzlach:

The successful journey never ends –
Kilometers do.
But time remains engraved in you
And becomes a part of you.
At the end of the journey you do not feel a winner,
But rather thankful –
As though the road went through you,
And not you through it.

May your next trip to Israel be a successful journey.

May it unite you with the Jewish People.

May it be for you, and for all of the Jewish People, a blessing.

Kein y’hi ratzon.