April 15, 2023
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Shemini
April 15, 2023 — 24 Nissan 5783
Two Questions That Heal
Israel’s 75th Anniversary
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
For some reason–I don’t know why it happens, I just know that it happens–tensions seem to rise in a family before a big milestone or family simcha. People tend to argue. To bicker. To get into negative energy patterns. The classic example of weird negative energy preceding what should be a happy family time is a wedding. If you have ever planned a wedding, you know this. As the day draws near, anxiety rises. Lists proliferate. Who is going to go to Costco to get the bottled water and the small bags of Cape Cod potato chips? Who is going to the hotels to drop off the gifts baskets? We just had a Covid cancellation. We need to redo table 11.
Simcha anxiety is such a well-known phenomenon that I tell every couple that I have ever worked with for their wedding to get out of the wedding business a week before their wedding—no more wedding details, no more wedding to do lists—so that they can spend that last week focusing on what matters: their love for one another.
We the Jewish people are now having a case of simcha anxiety on steroids. Just 10 days from now—today is April 15, on the evening of April 25—we will mark what should be the most joyful milestone imaginable for our people: Israel’s 75th anniversary. This should be the happiest, or among the happiest, moments in Jewish history, but it is not. Three years after the Holocaust, three years after one-third of our people perished in the flames, three years after our lowest low, the State of Israel was founded, and we were recreated as a people. It is not just that there was a new Jewish state, but a new Jew: a Jew who was strong and vigorous, who had a home, who was not subject to pogroms and massacres. The State of Israel would provide not only a safe home, a sanctuary, for the Jewish people, but also a place of Jewish thriving, a renaissance of Jewish culture and letters and music and language. It would be a place where the finest Jewish values of our prophets and rabbis could be actually fulfilled in a sovereign state. Against all odds, what a miracle, Israel was created, and it is here 75 years later.
And yet, like the joyful family milestone where the joy is not felt, but the bickering, the worrying, the quarreling, the joy of Israel is largely not being felt in this season of its 75th anniversary. What is felt is worry, anxiety, concern. Both in Israel and here. When I was in Israel in February for our father’s shiva, and would speak with the members of his Jerusalem shul, and I would ask them: what are your thoughts on Israel’s 75th anniversary, they would say: I hope we get there. I hope we make it to 75. And similarly here, I have received emails from members of our shul who suggest that perhaps we should not go to Israel on Spark—many of us are leaving tomorrow or early this week—we should not go as a protest, to let this government know that we support a Jewish and democratic state, and not a Jewish version of Hungary.
Simcha anxiety is real. Today I want to tell you a story, and a coda to the story, that is a helpful response to simcha anxiety—and a healing response to the legitimate and very real anxiety that Israelis and American Jews feel about Israel now.
The story takes place in the early 1950s, but a few years after both the Shoah and the founding of Israel. A fierce debate raged in Israel on the question of whether Israel should accept reparations from Germany.
On one side of the debate was Menachem Begin, who would become Israel’s sixth prime minister in 1977, but in the 1950s he was in the opposition. His mother, father, and brother had all been murdered by the Nazis. He argued that accepting reparations would be immoral. How could Germany, which but a few years ago murdered six million of our people, try to atone for this mass murder by giving us money? That would be blood money. As Begin would put it, how many marks is my father’s life worth?
On the other side of the debate was David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founder and first prime minister. His argument was simple and to the point. We need the cash. In the early 1950s Israel was absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, North Africa, and Israel was very poor. Israel was rationing food. It needed cash to feed its people. It needed cash to build housing. It needed cash to build the economy and create jobs. It needed cash to create a medical system. As Danny Gordis pointed out, there were no tall buildings in the early 1950s because Israel did not have the money to buy cranes. It needed cash to buy cranes to build buildings.
So there was this deep tension between principle—one cannot put a price tag on any of the Six Million—and pragmatism—Israel needed the cash.
In the end, the Knesset voted 60 to 51 to negotiate with Germany for reparations, and Begin was banned from the Knesset for three months due to his inflammatory rhetoric.
That is the main story. In some ways it feels hauntingly familiar, if not also depressing: a collision of Jewish Israeli principles, personalities and policies that are irreconcilably at odds with one another.
But there is a coda. Danny Gordis wrote a book about Menachem Begin and sent a copy to his children. He was warned that Begin’s adult children build a wall between Begin their father and Begin the Prime Minister, that they do not get involved in a political discussion about their father’s public leadership. And yet, when Danny Gordis sent Benny Begin, Menachem’s son, a copy of the biography, Benny Begin wanted to meet with Danny Gordis in person right away. They sit down together, and Benny Begin says: I didn’t think you were fair to Ben Gurion. It seemed like you were taking my father’s side. To which Danny admitted: Yes, I was sympathetic to your father. To which Benny Begin responded: Yes, but at that time my father did not have to run anything. He was in the opposition. He could afford to take a position based solely on principle without having to worry about the practical effects of his position. But Ben Gurion was responsible for running a country. He did not have the luxury of worrying only about principle. He had to worry about how to get the money to build a nation. And you did not make that point clearly enough.
Benny Begin’s critique, shared by Danny Gordis in a recent podcast, contains two wise questions that are also incredibly healing.
The first is what is right and fair and good about my antagonist? Ben Gurion and Begin loathed one another. Ben Gurion literally gave the order to the IDF to shoot Menachem Begin on the Altalena. And yet Benny Begin somehow summons the humanity to try to understand the world from Ben Gurion’s point of view.
Benny Begin’s move here reminds me of a teaching that Shai Held shared at Temple Emanuel 13 years ago. He presented a teaching of the Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, which was, when you are dealing with somebody you find challenging, even unlikeable, even intolerable, start with the question: what is good about this person?
These are the words of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav:
Even the person you think is completely rotten—
How is it possible that at some time in his life
He has not done some good deed, some mitzvah?
Your job is just to help him look for it, to seek it out,
And then to judge him that way.
That is what Benny Begin did to Ben Gurion. Yes, he was a historic antagonist of my father. But he was building a country. You have to give him credit for building a country and see his debate with my father through that lens.
Whatever our politics, whatever we happen to believe about Israel, and America too for that matter, can we pull a Benny Begin? Can we start with the good? What would it look like if we could? How would it impact how we feel about the world, how we feel about Israel, if we could?
But Benny Begin critique embodied a second question as well. Is the person I love off a bit? Is my side off a bit? I love my father, totally. I am loyal to my father, totally. But I have to admit that in the early 1950s, my father did not have the responsibility of running anything. My father had the luxury of worrying only about principle, not practicality.
Can we do that? Can we look at the person, at the side, that we love, and see where they might be off, and we love them anyway?
Benny Begin’s two questions are helpful and healing as we think about Israel now. The side we don’t agree with, what are they right about? The side that we feel drawn to, where might they be off? But his two questions are helpful and healing not only for Israel ten days before its big anniversary. They are helpful and healing whenever we encounter friction. Channel your inner Benny Begin. For the person you disagree with, start with the good. For the person in your echo chamber, evaluate them honestly. Benny Begin’s two wise questions can heal our soul, and the soul of the lands we love. Shabbat shalom.