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Rosh Hashana Day 2 Sermon from B'nai Jacob on Vimeo.

Before I begin to speak about this year’s Big Read, I want to step back and take a wider view of my High Holiday sermons this year. Yesterday I spoke about the importance of community, specifically Jewish community and synagogue community as a source of resilience. On Kol Nidre night I will speak about community as a lynchpin of democracy. My sermons today and on Yom Kippur day are about Israel, but also our connection to the greater Jewish community. What are the implications for us, as American Jews, of being part of this people and linked to Israel and its people as brothers and sisters? We share its triumphs and its pain on an intimate level, and increasingly we are blamed for its real and perceived shortcomings. What does it mean to be part of this larger people, to be connected in these intimate and sometimes painful ways to another place, another country?

I fully realize that it is risky to wade into Israeli politics at this moment. In fact, as I said yesterday, I won’t speak about American politics at all — it’s too hot and unlikely to be helpful. But Israel is different. Israel is our shared homeland. We all have a stake in her future. We can disagree with one another, even vehemently, but Israel and Zionism are integral to Judaism and to most of us personally. We need to continue to have this conversation together because it is too important to who we are to allow our differences to silence us.

Choosing a book for the Big Read is always difficult. This year it was extraordinarily difficult. On the one hand, it seemed obvious — choose something about Israel. But as I read book after book, about ten in all — they either seemed dated — everything became dated after the earthquake of October 7 —or they were biased — too left, too right, too sympathetic or insufficiently sympathetic to Palestinians.

I can imagine that some of you might be angry at me right now for choosing this book. How can I expect you to read about peace when Israel has been brutally attacked by its neighbors? How can I expect you to have sympathy for Palestinians given their brutality toward Israel and their seeming unwillingness even to take the first steps toward peaceful coexistence?

Some of you may even have heard that Yossi himself no longer stands by this book. Concerned about such rumors, I reached out directly to Yossi himself. This is what he wrote to me, and I quote: "So glad to hear that you'll be group-reading 'Letters.' I don't think I'd have the emotional stamina at this moment to write that book -- my patience for the Palestinian narrative has been exhausted. But I certainly still agree with what I wrote there, even if I couldn't write it again now…." Yossi’s book makes the case for the modern state of Israel — little has changed in that essential argument.

I chose Yossi’s book for many reasons. First and foremost Yossi’s voice is a moral voice, neither triumphant nor apologetic. It is also a deeply emotional voice, filled with Yossi’s pain about the current situation and his empathy for everyone involved. Yossi is also uniquely qualified to write this book. He began his political trajectory as a radical Kahanist, a group which advocated violence against perceived Jewish enemies here and in Israel and advocated limiting democratic rights in Israel to Jews alone. The fact that Yossi has moved squarely to the political center makes him a powerful and credible chronicler of this story.

“Letter to My Palestinian Neighbor,” is written, as the title suggests, as ten letters to Yossi’s imagined Palestinian neighbor, whom he addresses simply, “Dear Neighbor.” Yossi lives in French Hill, a neighborhood in Jerusalem, technically East Jerusalem, one hill over and less than a mile from the Hebrew University on Mt Scopus. A visitor to French Hill would have no idea she is in so-called occupied territory. French Hill feels like any neighborhood in Jerusalem with its terraced landscapes, apartments, playgrounds, shops, synagogues, and cafes. And yet, in one of the many contradictions in Israeli life, it sits on land Israel captured in 1967 which Israel immediately annexed as part of Jerusalem.

French Hill directly borders the Palestinian neighborhood Shuafat and the so-called refugee camp, more like an apartment complex, Anata. Although the security wall separates Yossi’s home from his Palestinian neighbor, his terrace is the last on the hillside. He looks out toward his neighbor, imagines his joys and fears, notes his celebrations, hears his call to worship from the muezzin, smells the acrid scent of burning tires during times of protest and rage. As Yossi notes, the two are so geographically close they practically breathe together; and yet they are strangers. Yossi writes to this imagined neighbor, hoping, even yearning that someday they could meet, that they might ultimately be able to understand one another. He sees his letters as openings to dialogue and invites, and in fact receives, Palestinian letters in response.

Yossi’s letters are, I think, a tremendous act of empathy, a reach, if only imagined, across a divide, where many others simply choose to live their lives on this side of the fence, consciously unaware of life on the other side. Yossi writes, “peace without at least some attempt at mutual understanding cannot endure.”

At the core of Yossi’s argument is the idea of peoplehood, that Judaism is not fundamentally a religion, although it is also that, nor is it a race or ethnicity, but rather a people. He writes, “The Jews began as a family. Four thousand years ago, Abraham and Sarah founded a dynasty that became a people and a faith. But family — a basic sense of belonging to a community of fate, regardless of your religious or political beliefs — has remained at the core of Jewish identity ever since.” Others have defined us differently: throughout much of history and in the United States, Jews have been defined as a religion because that has been the easiest category in which to slot us. Hitler defined us as a race, but a short walk down any street in Israel will quickly confirm that we are not of one race. Being part of a people, a large family, if you will, is how most of us experience being Jewish. For Christians and Muslims, it makes no sense to say you are Christian or Muslim unless you believe in and abide by the principles of their respective faiths. But all of us would agree that anyone born a Jew, or anyone who converts to Judaism, regardless of their religious practice or their beliefs, is a Jew. The most trayf-eating Jew, one perhaps who doesn’t even know that today is Rosh Hashanah, someone like my brother who only sets foot in a synagogue for command appearances, is still by his own definition and in the eyes of the world, a Jew. That is why many of us have had the experience of traveling across the world and being warmly welcomed into someone else’s home for no other reason than our shared Jewishness. We are, for better or worse, a large, raucous, diverse, sometimes contentious family — a people.

Admittedly, Judaism has an important spiritual project. “If, as Yossi writes, “Jews were just a family bound only by shared fate,” then it is doubtful we would have survived through thousands of years of adversity and homelessness. “What strengthened the Jewish family was its sense of destiny — that the Jewish people had an urgent spiritual role to play in the evolution of humanity. Destiny gave meaning to fate.” Whereas other faiths like Christianity and Islam, are universal faiths, intended in principle for all humans, Judaism is, by contrast, a faith intended for a specific people. “For Judaism…peoplehood and faith are inseparable. There is no Judaism without a Jewish people.”

The frequently heard Muslim and Palestinian claim then, that we are not a people but rather a religion, flies in the face of our own experience, of thousands of years of history, and of our inherent right to define ourselves. It is, in the end, a convenient form of antisemitism. If Jews are only a religion, then surely they have no right to a nation state.

Just as some Palestinians claim that Jewish national identity is fictional, some Jews believe that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, an identity that emerged only in the mid-60’s. In reality, “all national identities are, by definition, contrived,” ours as well. Yossi writes, “My definition for the Jews is this: We are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are.” To be a Jew is to tell our story.

“The land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” So begins Israel’s Declaration of Independence. For two thousand years of exile, Jews dreamed of returning to the land — in thrice daily prayer, at the seder, at the end of Neila on Yom Kippur. Even our prayers for rain and our celebration of holidays revolve around the agricultural year in Israel, not the locale in which we find ourselves. It is as if we are always living according to the rhythm of that place, not this one, turning toward Jerusalem in prayer, praying for rain there, not here, according to the rhythm of their seasons, not ours, building a sukkah at the end of Israel’s harvest season, even though it is often practically winter here. If by Zionism we mean Jewish attachment to the land of Israel and the dream of restoring Jewish sovereignty there, then there is no Judaism without Zionism. All modern movements, as Yossi notes, that excised the love of the land and the dream of return, ultimately failed. In other words, our claim to the land follows directly from our sense of peoplehood. We did not need the UN or Great Britain to “give” us the land. Jews, in the first half of the 20th century, returned to the land, built the infrastructure of the emerging state, and fought an underground war to expel its occupiers. For Jews, the return to the land of

 Israel, far from being a colonial project, is nothing less than the return of an indigenous, uprooted people. The rebirth of the Jewish state is an act of historic justice, reparation.

Jews often hold Palestinians responsible for their failure to accept the 1947 UN Partition which would have created two states 77 years ago, and for their rejection of a two-state solution. Palestinians retort — why would we give up half our land? Would you agree to divide your home in two with a squatter who moved in?

That is not an entirely unreasonable claim. This is, I think, another place where Yossi’s perspective is so important. He, like many Jews, feels deeply attached to all of the land of Israel, including Judaea and Samaria. He argues, I think correctly, that the negotiators at Oslo and thereafter, often failed to take into account both people’s deep historic and religious attachments to the land. For him, parting with any of the land is an amputation. Nonetheless, he is willing to do it for the sake of peace and he asks Palestinians to make a comparable sacrifice. When Palestinians chant, “No justice, no peace,” they seem to be repudiating compromise. In reality, the demand for absolute justice will ensure that both peoples remain locked in eternal war. Judaism values peace more highly than justice. For the sake of peace, we have to make compromises, even painful ones.

I think about the well-known mishna from Baba Metzia: two people are holding on to a garment. Each says all of it belongs to me, it is mine alone, and takes an oath to that effect. Neither party acknowledges the claim of the other, even in part; they both believe the garment is entirely theirs. The Talmud says that the court divides the garment — each gets half.

From a talmudic perspective, Palestinians and Jews are each claiming that all of the land is theirs. The only just solution, painful though it may be, is to divide it. No one’s claim for absolute justice can be satisfied.

So perhaps a one-state solution — sharing the garment — is a better idea? The idea of a one-state solution has gained some traction recently, especially on the left, but it is nothing less than a chimera, or more properly, a nightmare in the making. From a purely practical level, it is unimaginable that two people who have been at war with one another for over 75 years, would suddenly smoke the peace pipe and sing kumbaya. The Arab population would soon overwhelm the Jewish population and Jews would be pushed into the sea, or worse. Israel, as we know it, would cease to exist.

But on a visceral level a one-state solution fails to satisfy the longing of either peoples — that is the right to self-determination, to be a free people in its own sovereign land. As Yossi eloquently writes, “I need a Jewish state…a state where the public space is defined by Jewish culture and values and needs, where Jews from East and West can reunite and together create a new era of Jewish civilization. One corner of the planet where the holiday cycle begins on the Jewish new year and the radio sings in modern Hebrew and the history taught in schools is framed by the Jewish experience.” We have not come home after 2000 years for anything less.

As long as Palestinians or college students chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” or “globalize the intifada,” they are saying that a Jewish state, and it seems, the Jewish people, cannot exist, not as part of one state, nor two states, nor anywhere. When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, The Catastrophe, on our Independence Day and not on the anniversary of the 6-day war, when Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, they are effectively saying that all of Israel is occupied territory, not just the West Bank. When Palestinians continue to press for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to both sides of the Jordan River, they are effectively demanding a Palestinian state on both sides of the Jordan — ipso facto, no Jewish state. As long as Palestinians refute any Jewish connection to the land and insist that no Temple stood here, they are erasing us along with our history. Such rhetoric taps into our darkest moments and deepest fears just as the ongoing expansion of the settlements taps into Palestinian fears of colonization, a painful reality of their lives over centuries.

How can this land be holy to two people? How can Jews relinquish land that many perceive as having been given by God to us in its entirety? Toward the end of the book, Yossi offers an intriguing theological response. “Holy land,” he writes, “doesn’t belong to us but to God. …The sacred can never be fully owned by mortal beings.” We are, then, custodians, not owners. “Being faithful to the land means being prepared to relinquish our exclusive hold on it.”

Reading the letters from Palestinians to Yossi in response to his book, I felt overwhelmed by the contradictions in our stories. We are reading from two vastly different histories. They understand 1967 as a land grab; we see it as a preemptive strike to prevent our total destruction. They believe that we have failed to take peace offers seriously, continuing to expand settlements; we believe that they walked away from every good faith peace offer. They believe that Zionism, by definition, dehumanizes Palestinians; we believe that Palestinians, in denying our history, negate our right to exist. We celebrate Yom Ha’atzma’ut as our Day of Independence; they commemorate it as the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Although I might be able to refute them point for point, in the end it doesn’t matter. I say that hesitantly because I would never say that truth doesn’t matter. But I strongly believe that we will not make peace by adjudicating history. That is an endless and doomed proposition. And if we do not find a way to make peace, we will condemn future generations to endless war, which we have already long endured. We will only be able to make peace if we start from the present, from two peoples, each seeking to exercise the right to self-determination, each with a long list of grievances, each longing for a place they can call home.

October 7 makes it almost impossible to believe that there is a Palestinian people longing for peace. October 7 pushes the possibility of a negotiated settlement so much further into the future. October 7 makes clear that as long as Iran seeks Israel’s total destruction, the Palestinians will be pawns in a much larger story. October 7 destroys hope and trust, which cannot magically be restored overnight, or even any time soon.

But, in the end, if we cannot see one another, if we cannot accept that despite our different and contradictory stories we remain two peoples on one land in need of a more peaceful solution, if we insist only on our own truth, then our children and our children’s children will remain embroiled in this war forever. It is hard, almost impossible, to have a heart big enough to hold Palestinian pain at this moment. But I think that if we don’t, if we only build more walls and more settlements and harden our hearts, we will be doomed to endless war. I think that even in our pain and in our grief, it is possible to begin to write another story, to find a way to create a lasting and just peace where two peoples can thrive, each under their own vine and their own fig tree, where no one shall make them afraid. We owe it to our grandchildren. And maybe, just maybe, Yossi’s Palestinian neighbor will one day join him as a guest in his sukkah in a land where borders can be safely crossed and everyone can celebrate their holidays in peace and friendship. B’ezrat Hashem! Inshallah!