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October 14, 2023
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Bereshit
Our Golda Moment
October 14, 2023 — 29 Tishrei 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
How many of you have seen the play or the movie Golda’s Balcony? If you have, you know about that powerful moment, early in her career for Israel, she is Golda Meyerson at the time, it is January, 1948, it is three years after the Shoah, it is five months before Israel’s independence would be declared and the war for independence would start, and Golda is with American Jews, at the General Assembly of Jewish Federations, held in Chicago on January 21. Her mission was to inspire American Jews to support the incipient Jewish state and the Jewish army in the war for its very existence. She was supposed to raise $25 million. She ended up raising $50 million.
Make no mistake. This is our Golda moment. Golda’s secret sauce contained three ingredients. They apply to us with equal force.
First, American Jews in 1948 learned of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews of Europe. Slaughter. It made American Jews angry, sick to their stomach, nauseous, worried, grief-stricken, and determined to fight back.
Check. American Jews in 2023 woke up last Shabbat morning, and every day and every sleepless night, through our insomnia, through the pits in our stomachs, we read stories that claim us, stories of horrors and atrocities, murder and death, that befell innocent Jews in the towns and villages near Gaza. By the way, none of these areas were settlements. None of these areas could in any remote way be called occupied lands. None of these areas carry moral complexity. These were indisputably and properly Jewish communities whose Jews, celebrating Simchat Torah, celebrating a peaceful music festival were slaughtered precisely because they are Jews living in Israel.
There was a second secret sauce to Golda’s success: American Jews in 1948 knew that if Jews were to make good on their promise of Never Again, we would have to create, sustain, and defend the State of Israel. Europe was a killing field for Jews.
Part of the infinite tragedy of the Simchat Torah massacre was that Israel also became a killing field for Jews; and that peaceful Kibbutzim and villages were soaked through with Jewish blood. The Kishinev pogrom came to Israel. It was not supposed to be that way.
Hatred of the Jewish people continues in these shores. Elias and Lorena are in New York, with Mikey at Columbia for a freshmen parents’ weekend. But in our Talmud conversation yesterday, Elias shared that on Thursday night Mikey called him and Lorena and was very rattled. New York, and Columbia, have a significant Jewish population. You would think in the week that Hamas had committed these atrocities, Columbia would be a safe space where Jewish students could protest. Two hundred Jewish students showed up. But there was a counter protest of 700 Palestinian students and sympathizers. Campus police were so concerned about the safety of Jewish students at Columbia that they were whisked away to the Kraft Hillel Building, where the 200 students could continue their protest, in private, behind locked doors.
What?
How could it be?
How could it be that 700 people at Columbia University, or the Harvard students that signed that odious statement, would walk with Hamas?
The American Jews to whom Golda spoke knew what we now must also know: that evil is real, hatred is real, and if never again was to be real, it would take a partnership between Israeli Jews and American Jews. Israeli Jews, then and now, are on the front lines. What do we do to help?
Which leads to the third ingredient of Golda’s secret sauce: we are not helpless and we are not hopeless. We have agency and we have power. That’s what those American Jews on January 21, 1948 understood when Golda raised 50 million dollars. That money made a real difference. No less an authority than David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, called Golda Meir the “Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.”
Golda’s generation in America helped create the state. Our generation in America now can help sustain the state. Two familiar names have something important to say here.
Micah Goodman pointed out in his Times of Israel podcast this week that Israel’s fight is not against a local militia. It’s not the Goliath of Israel vs. the David of Hamas. Rather, Israel is being attacked by the Persian Empire, by Iran, which is funding and educating and training and equipping Hamas in the south, and Hezbollah in the north. Israel is at risk of a multi-front war, with serious and trained and lethal enemies, that want to destroy the Jewish state and the Jewish people, all at the behest of Iran.
And Danny Gordis pointed out something that perhaps many of us feared but should be said out loud. Israel is fighting for its life.
The good news is that Israelis are coming together for this fight. There was worry that reservists would not show up. The opposite is the case. In his recent podcast, Micah observed:
How many reservists are going to show up? 70%? 80? Mathematically, it’s impossible, I know: 150% of people showed up. People who are now in Thailand, people who are now in India, people who are now in London are doing everything they can to cut—you know how Israelis don’t know how to stand in line. Well, we’re not standing in line. We’re doing everything we can to cut lines, to get on a plane, to come back, to fight for this country, for this nation.
The fighters are getting ready to fight, and everybody else is doing their part. Altruism is surging.
He observed:
Altruism is the new Israeli norm now in the streets of every community in Israel.
My girls yesterday, they asked, what can they do? So they got this What’s App that there
is a family that the husband went to miluim, to the reserves, and they need some help.
So my girls made them some cakes, and they go over to the apartment to help, and…
the apartment is filled with cakes
Israelis are serving. And Israeli altruism is surging. Because Israelis know that Israel is fighting for its life.
What about us? What can we do? We can do what Jews in Golda’s generation did: give Israel a lot of money. That brings us to Tuesday night at 7 right here where we will be doing a concert fundraiser for Israel. Come. Donate. And if you are not in a place to give financially, give the gift of your time to CJP and Temple Emanuel initiatives to support Israel now.
We know what a world without Israel looks like. We saw last week what hatred against the Jewish people without Jewish resistance looks like. It looks the way it always looked: the spilled blood of innocent Jewish men, women and children.
But now we have Israel. And yet we cannot take Israel’s existence for granted. Hamas and Hezbollah have Iran. Israel has us.
This is our Golda moment. Will we meet it? Never Again starts now. Shabbat shalom.