Sermon: Ekev: Jewish Values in a Crisis

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 18 August 2014

Its holiday season in Britain.  Our young people who enjoyed the Shemesh Summer Camp and the RSY-Netzer Israel Tour in extraordinary circumstances have come back exhilarated, though little rested and many have begun to return from family summer holidays.  For our family one of our daughters, Alice was leading on the Shemesh summer camp and loved it.  Miriam was with Nicola and I for a week in France.

 

We were staying in a gite an hour or so North of Paris by car.  The gite was attached to a chateau whose absentee owners rented out two barn conversions in their lovely grounds.  There was plenty of time to sit and read in the gardens and I had with me the book which was my primary source for this morning’s Shiur.   It included the First World War Diary of Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck. [Peter Applebaum – Loyalty Betrayed: Jewish Chaplains in the German Army]

 

Leo Baeck became the first President of this Synagogue when, after the Second World War, he was freed from the Terezin Concentration Camp. Having come to live in London he joined the Synagogue ministered to by his pupil Rabbi Werner Van der Zyl.  He is buried in the cemetery behind our Synagogue having died here in London in 1956.   Leo Baeck’s prominence is because he was the spiritual leader of German Jewry in the period before and during the Second World War and because the books that he wrote defined German Liberale Judaism and its values.  For the duration of the First World War he was one of thirty chaplains to the German Army, posted to the Western Front from the outbreak of the war until 1916 and then to the Eastern Front, near the Crimea until the war ended.

His diary gives a deep insight into his feelings and ideas from the time and the change that he saw around him.  It records the devastation that he saw in France and retains his faith at that time in Germany.  He writes of services held in abandoned houses, of field hospitals in French village churches, of Shabbat morning services held against the noise of mortars and bombardment, of men coming from the trenches for a little time together with their Jewish comrades then melting back into the night to fight in the morning.

 

As I read the diary the town names were so striking to me – Noyon, Chauny, Albert, Carlepont.  I realised as I read in our gite near Compiegne that I was just a few kilometres from the exact area where Leo Baeck had been posted.   That quiet French countryside had been the place of the devastation.  The manager of the gite showed us a photo of the chateau we were attached to right after the First World War. This handsome building we now realised was a substantial restoration – the chateau had been pounded to bits during the war –  in the photo it was little more than a pile of bricks.

To me the most moving part of the diary is the section at the end where Rabbi Leo Beack is in Russia as the war on the Eastern Front ends.  Then he looks around him and he feels hope and a sense of mission for the future which we have to assume carried him through the disaster of post War Germany and the concentration camp.  He wrote as the war ended:

 

“Those who now walk here have one thought: how much it would mean in a spiritual sense to acquire the view of the other side, to see our world from the situation of the other…Every returning soldier can tell of this – how he experienced goodness and helpfulness from people of other countries. Humanity penetrated through everything that separated us.  The will to live will have to become the will to live together.”

 

Leo Baeck’s First World War experience enabled him to see the future positively.  Can we?  This week the ceasefire between Israel and Gaza has so far held since ten in the morning on Thursday.  Please God it will continue to hold and our people in Israel will be spared the terror of rockets fired indiscriminately at the Israeli civilian population, and the people of Gaza will be spared the horror of being in the line of fire when Israel tries to staunch the Hamas sources of the violence.   Here in London, in our almost banal difficulties in comparison with the level of suffered by Israel and Gaza, the Tricycle theatre has at last understood the error of its boycott and will no longer require the Jewish Film Festival to disavow Israel as if the Embassy of Israel were some kind of terror source.   Is this enough for us to be positive?

 

Our sessions before the Friday night services here at Alyth ask deep and searching questions of the future.   Where will the desire for peace and coexistence with Israel come from when the population of Gaza has experienced such devastation.  Even though it was their Hamas leaders who put them in that position, they know that the violence came from Israel.  Where will the conviction that peace and the will to live together must be found with the Palestinians come from in Israel when our young generation of Israelis has been sent time and again to the bomb shelters as thousands of rockets have tried to kill them, fired from Palestinian territory?

 

It’s awful but undeniable that one of the results of this latest Hamas violence has been an increase in general anti-Arab racism in Israel, and at its worst an utter failure to see the humanity in the people we have had to defend ourselves from, demonstrated by a T-shirt seen in Jerusalem which had upon it the shameful slogan – Gaza 2014, deployed, destroyed, enjoyed.

 

Alyth members returning from Israel have spoken about how difficult it is to speak there with friends and family about conciliation and the possibility of two state co-existence.  How difficult it is to speak of the devastation in Gaza as a disaster.  Even the Jewish Chronicle here in London suffered from some of this inability to see the suffering of the other.  Yesterday’s Jewish Chronicle ran an advertisement from the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for funds to be given to various charities to help with humanitarian relief in Gaza.  The result was the offices of the JC being picketed by Jews who felt that this advert should not have been run.

 

There is huge work to do after a disastrous time, and let us hope that this is after.  The work is to restore the basic humanity that Leo Baeck saw is possible even in the worst of times.  The work is to get back to the values that can enable us to live and not find ways to destroy.

 

These values well up from our Torah portion and our Haftarah portion today.  Our Torah portion says [Deuteronomy 10]:  “And now, Israel, what does the Eternal your God require of you, but to fear the Eternal your God, to walk in all his ways, and to love God, and to serve the Eternal your God with all your heart and with all your soul, to keep the commandments of the Eternal, and his statutes, which I command you this day for your good.”

 

It means whatever the circumstances do not give up on the values which you know our Jewish religion requires of us – to love the stranger as much as we love ourselves – to see that those who are not us have as much a right to life and liberty as we do.  To aim always for peace finding this way and that way and never giving up on the hope.  To love our Land of Israel, but to aim for it to be a light to nations though its values and to back those groups in Israel which will never give up on this aim.

 

Isaiah told us that even when we think that we are the last ones left who can uphold the values of life, love and peace yet [Isaiah 51] “Behold, all you who kindle a fire, who surround yourselves with sparks; walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that you have kindled.”  To me this means do not give up on the ideals that your Judaism gives you – let those values light our path so that when we are told that the practicalities mean that values are dead we yet assert the meaning of decent Judaism and Israel that we dream of helping to be.

 

The contribution of religion to the world should be keeping the flame of better burning and tending that flame.  We are going to spend decades, I am sure, struggling against the extremism and perversion of religion and power which brings violence to the Middle East, which kills Yazidis, slaughters, as Assad has done, thousands of Palestinians in Syrian refugee camps, aims rockets and plots kidnaps against Israel.  We must never lose our values in doing so.