Post-Annapolis Sermon by Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater, National Secretary, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom

November 2007

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, declares the wisdom of the Proverbs (13:12).  And isn’t it true?  When we hope, when we pray, when we put our faith in a future that looks different from the present, and then those hopes and prayers are dashed, delayed or ignored, our hearts are sick, our bodies tire, our souls begin to decay under the heat of pessimism and fear.  Isn’t it too true that when our hope is left wanting, waiting for too long, we turn to other means to achieve our desired ends?

Yet, Aristotle said that “hope is a waking dream,” and this is what we need today, every day.  We need hope, the feeling that our dreams can become reality, that what we talk about in the secret corners of our lives, in the secret corners of our hearts, can burst forth into broad daylight, in the reality of our existence and march with us into a new tomorrow.  This is hope, this is tikvah, and this is what we must come away with in the wake of Annapolis this week, a gathering of leaders unprecedented in the history of the Middle East, as the Arabs and Israelis sat in the same room, no matter how coldly it was portrayed, and pledged to work tirelessly for a final status, negotiated two-state solution, with a safe and secure Israel living alongside a free and sovereign Palestine.  We heard words from both leaders, Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas that committed themselves, their people, their destiny to a future of mutual recognition, peaceful co-existence, ending the occupation, ending terrorism, ending the darkness that has blanketed the Jewish people, the Palestinian people, and our world, for the past century.  Hope is what I heard in the voices of both Olmert and Abbas; a hope that is not without fear, concern, doubt and the knowledge that the road ahead is a long and rocky path, but hope nonetheless and that is incredible.  These two leaders, personally, have gone further than any two previous leaders, in their trust, intimacy and desire to work together.  These two leaders, weak as they are, stood up and declared that now is the time, now is the moment, now is the today of our dreams.  Is it possible?  Why should we believe these words more than the words of Rabin, Barak or Arafat?  More than Carter, Bush I or Clinton?  For sure, there are those who say that we shouldn’t, that all words of hope, peace and reconciliation are doomed to die, meaningless in the face of hate, war and destruction.  For those who wish to walk with the words of Hamas or the extremists in Israel and America, for those who wish to continue the path of mutual destruction and hate, they are welcome to do so.  I am choosing to walk, however fearful, however skeptical, with the words of shalom, the words of peace and a future of hope.  John F. Kennedy taught us that “we should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes.”  I am choosing to walk with these words, for they offer me a tomorrow for my children, a tomorrow of light, not continued yesterdays of darkness.

Since living in Israel during the 1995-6 year, one that saw Rabin murdered, suicide bombings introduced, one of which took the lives of one of my rabbinical school classmates and his girlfriend, and the downturn of relations, I have dedicated a great deal of my life and rabbinate to the cause of Middle East peace.  Like all of us, I desire peace, I dream of the day when Israel can finally live a more normal and healthy existence, focusing on the myriad social and economic issues that face a modern nation-state, issues which have been neglected due to the ever-present and always imminent security threats.  And, the soul and psyche of the Israeli populous, while not often talked about in the open, has been damaged and hurt by the decades of war, and the past forty years of military rule in the Palestinian territories.  We need healing.  I dream of the day when Israel and her neighbors can live with normalized relations, do business together, travel to each other’s lands and live with the knowledge that each recognizes the other, regardless of whether they are friends or not.  Is this possible?  Is this a naïve dream of a Joseph-like dreamer?  It may be called that by some, or folly by others, or at the worst, called dangerous and traitorous by those who oppose the cause of peace at any level, for that will mean compromise and acknowledgment of wrongdoing.  I believe that Israel and the Palestinians can make peace if each is willing to actually do the hard work necessary to lay the foundation, each side showing the other in good faith that a new way is possible. 

The details of how to get there are laid out in a number of plans, so that is not the hardest part.  The hardest part comes with mustering the political will to implement the plans, start the process forward.  Olmert will need to keep his coalition in tact to be able to do this, which means he will need to stand up to the right-wing nationalists and the powerful settler movement.  Abbas will need to prevent Hamas and other terrorist groups from launching attacks against Israel, while trying to keep himself and his government afloat and in power.  Are these easy tasks?  For sure not.  But, what choice do we have?  Another 60 years of war and destruction?  Another 60 years of status quo?  This will not abide, so without peace, we will enter into another phase, most likely, of deeper and more protracted war, catastrophic from the standpoint of nuclear weapons and regional attacks, destabilizing an already unstable and fragile region.  Is this what we want?  If the answer is yes, then hope for these talks to fail.  If the answer is no, then hope for these talks to lead us to serious negotiations in the direction of ending the conflict.  If we believe in shalom, meaning not only peace but wholeness and completeness, then let us hope and pray for the latter to be our road. 

In the Torah, we are in the midst of the Jacob and Joseph stories, both characters that help us understand that deception, lying and running from the truth only come back to pain us later in life.  Jacob deceives his father over the birthright and is later deceived by his children in the matter of Joseph being sold to Egypt.  Jacob runs away from Esau, only to return after twenty years and find a brother willing to reconcile.  Joseph, after learning his lessons of arrogance by sharing his dreams with his brothers, develops into a truth-telling and cycle-breaking figure in our Torah, one of the greatest turnarounds in our Genesis family.  Jacob becomes Israel through wrestling with an angel, which the Midrash alternatively explains as either Esau’s guardian angel, Jacob’s own psyche and conscience or even as God.  Joseph grows to become a leader in the Egyptian world through his honesty and truth in interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, not sugar-coating them, but speaking a truth to power that brings himself into great power. 

What can we learn from these figures in regard to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking?  We must all be wrestlers for peace, facing our own demons, fighting back urges to be overcome with fear and continue the status quo.  Things will not change overnight, as Jacob continues to wrestle and suffer throughout his life, but the path is before us to truly wrestle and overcome fear.  Prime Minister Olmert is doing just that and we should support him.  And like Joseph, there needs to be honesty and truth-telling.  President Abbas must tell his people that Israel is here to stay, that they will live side-by-side in the land that will be their state, not in Israel, but in Palestine.  And the Arab world, like their ancestors Ishmael and Esau, who reconcile with their respective brothers, Isaac and Jacob, in the text of the Torah, must come forward and accept Israel as a neighbor, if not a friend.  We must not let the extremist tendencies of both peoples, those who refuse to lay down their arms and embrace the future of peace, which will require compromise, to hijack this new hope.  The road will not be easy, the road will not be without bumps, but the roadmaps are before us, maps that have the solutions worked out; we can either follow the GPS to peace or we can turn it off and walk blindly again.  Light or darkness?  Hope or despair?  Peace or war?  As Prime Minister Olmert said over and over on Tuesday, “now is the time, achshav ha’zman.”

Shakespeare says that “the miserable have no other medicine, but only hope.”  (Measure for Measure)  We have lived with enough misery; now it is time to live with hope.  Hope is the energy in our lives, in our world that leads us to believe in the impossible, to overcome obstacles and move forward.  Hope is active, palpable.  It is deep hope that we must maintain in our quest for peace.  In our tradition, peace is something that we both need to desire and pursue.  This combination of action and feeling, inner and outer expressions of hope, must be remembered as we go forward, cautiously, into these new rounds of negotiations.  In desiring peace, we find the will to pursue it.  And in pursuing it, we discover the desire to make it.  And throughout, we need hope grounding us and propelling us forward.  The forces of failure and fear will muster all their strength, and so must the forces of hope.  Together, with desire and pursuit, these characteristics create the fullness, the wholeness, that is true shalom.  We must seek peace and pursue it, the psalmist says, and so we will.  With the hope of a new day, with the hope of a new dawn, let us go forward.  Od yavo shalom aleinu, soon may peace be upon us.  Amen.