Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
Rosh Hashana 5767

Amos Oz, in his extraordinary novel and self portrait A Tale of Love and Darkness, describes a rare occasion when he just knew he stood at the crossroads of destiny.  He was a child in Jerusalem during the UN General Assembly’s vote on the partition plan which would create two states on the territory of the British Mandate, one Jewish and one Arab.    Oz recalls the scene standing with his father along with the thousands on the streets of Jerusalem that night, silently, listening to the American presenter on the radio.  One after another, he read the names, countries voting in favor and against, US – Yes, Uruguay- Yes, Yemen – No, UK - Abstains.  There was an otherworldly silence of people holding their breath until the thick radio voice summed up, Thirty three “for,” thirteen “against,” ten abstentions and one absent.  The resolution was approved. From the silence an eruption of celebrations broke out in the streets. Oz tells of the shouts of joy and roar of jubilation and hugs and the unabashed crying and dancing and revelry which seized Jerusalem that night when the General assembly voted the right of Israel to be established. And in the midst of all the revelry, Oz writes as follows:

“But my father said to me as we wandered there, on the night of November 29, 1947, me riding on his shoulders, among the rings of dancers and merrymakers, not as though he was asking me but as though he knew and was hammering in what he knew with nails: Just you look, my boy take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won’t forget this night to your dying day and you’ll tell your children, your grand-children, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we’re long gone.”

For Oz, for his father, the moment of destiny was clear and present.   Anyone with a glancing knowledge of Israel’s history knows how high the stakes were that night, just how portentous that moment was for our people.  There are some dates and events which are emblazoned in the national historical consciousness of our people.  The Balfour Declaration, the war of independence, the Six Day war, the hand shake on the White House front lawn. I remember being in Jewish day school and all of us being brought into a classroom to watch Begin, Sadat and Carter sign a peace accord at Camp David.  I don’t remember really much about it, really I just remember the back of Mrs. Shaked as she shifted the antennae back and forth, yelling at us to be quiet, and telling us to stare at a screen which wasn’t getting any reception.  But I do remember the feeling, the feeling that she wanted us to know that history was taking place. I will always remember where I was the night of Rabin’s assassination. A Saturday night in Jerusalem at the beginning of Rabbinical school. There are some moments when you just feel the wheels of Jewish history turning, when you know you are living in an axial age, on the cusp of propitious events forever changing the destiny of our people.

How would you know if you were living through a moment of historic destiny?  Philosophers and poets have long written the manifold ways by which destiny is felt. Our lives, it would seem, operate on two sorts of time. Aristotle calls the first chronos, this is regular time, past, preset and future, the steady progress of days, weeks, months and years.  The second, is called Kairos.  Kairos means the time of opportunity, a moment of decision or fulfillment, a critical pivot or turning point in your life.  A moment of destiny, be it personal, national or even romantic is found in the juxtaposition of the two kinds of time. Chronological time we can see in a calendar, we can count in wrinkles and grey hairs. Moments of opportunity are much trickier, then come and go without warning, it is up to us to size them up and seize them. 
   
Today is Rosh Hashanah and each one of us pauses to reflect on how our lives are calibrated according to both kinds of time.  One year, 5766 has passed, and we usher in a new year – 5767.  The unavoidable turn of the calendar marks the steady progress of time. A little older, hopefully a bit wiser. Our children, our parents, we ourselves have changed, some welcoming new life, some mourning the loss of loved ones no longer with us. 

But perhaps more so, Rosh Hashanah is a day which alerts us to the second kind of time, Kairos.  The wake up call of the shofar which Maimonidies explains is meant to awaken us from our slumber and inertia. The thrice recited passage Hayom Harat Olam, - Today is the creation of the world, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. Perhaps most famously, the single word Hineni “Here I am.” Occurring three times in our Torah readings, the name of the central prayer of the day, Hineni signals for Abraham, for Isaac, for us, the ability to be present, to respond to the demands of the moment.  To say Hineni is to say that you are awake, responsive and ready to act upon the needs of the hour.  You are not willing to let this moment of opportunity pass you by.

No matter who you are, no matter what your station in life, for all of us, the power of the high holidays is wrapped up into an awareness of the two kinds of time.  As a people, as individuals, we have progressed one year and for that we are grateful.  But the passing of time is only significant insofar as we ourselves are aware of the pressing demands of the moment.  From our jobs, to our relationships, the central question of Rosh Hashana is as simple to ask as it is difficult to answer.  Namely: Given the inevitable and inexorable passage of time, are we awake to the world of possibility and potential which sits presently at our doorstep?

And while we could apply this to any aspect of our lives, and I encourage you to do so, this year, as we sit together as a community, I want to apply the question rather squarely as it pertains to Israel. When someone looks back to characterize our national historical moment as a Jewish people, what will they say?  I think we are all aware of the growing sense that we are living in a momentous time, a flashpoint where long held assumptions are being reshuffled.  Tectonic shifts are taking place, old wars have ended, new wars are being fought.  In Israel, we are especially attuned to the war in the north, the pullouts in the south, the political turmoil throughout.  Iran is calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, and Israel has never been more alone on the world stage. How will people look back at this moment?  How will they say we responded?

Because the problem of course is, that most of the time, we don’t know when we are in the midst of a moment of destiny.  Usually, we need a wake up call. Usually we can’t hear the knock of destiny, or we think it is knocking for someone else.   We all know the story of Max and Sadie Goldstein.  Max was worried that Sadie’s hearing was going and he confided to his doctor friend for advice on how to handle his wife’s condition.  The doctor said, “I’ll tell you what to do, wait until Sadie’s back is to you, stand about five yards behind her and ask her a question.  If she doesn’t respond, take a step closer and ask again.  If she still doesn’t respond, again.  That way, you’ll get an idea of how bad things are, and come back to me and we’ll figure out how to proceed.  And so Max goes home that night and Sadie is at the sink.  And he says: “Sadie, what’s for dinner.” No answer.  He walks a few steps forward, “Sadie, what’s for dinner.”  Still, no answer.  Finally, he goes right up close, right behind her, “Sadie, what’s for dinner.”  Sadie says, “Chicken for the third time!”

Would you be able to hear your moment or would you misdiagnose it?  Only rarely do we have the shofar blast, the Mrs. Shaked’s telling us what we are living through. Historians, eulogizers and Monday morning quarterbacks always weigh in after the fact, but usually, sadly, we sleep right through it.

For example, on Yom Haatzmaut 1956, just over a decade following the Holocaust and a few short years after the establishment of the State of Israel, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the great leaders of 20th century Jewry, called the religious community of his generation to task.  Reeling from the physical and spiritual trauma of Auschwitz, Soloveitchik told North American Jews that they were frozen to the theological and practical implications of a modern Jewish State. 

Rabbi Soloveitchik used the poetic imagery of the Song of Songs to shed light onto the condition of our people.   It is gorgeous language and worth sharing.  Chapter five describes the female lover, roaming the mountains and valleys searching for her beloved without success, falling asleep exhausted at the end of the day.  Ironically, it was that night that her lover appears at the door, knocking, asking to be let in. He pleads: “Open to me, my darling, my dove; for my head is filled with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”  And, though she had longed for this moment, the combination of her slumber and weariness prevent her from rising to let him in.  The lover knocks and knocks, more intensely now. But the weight of her inertia is too great. “I am asleep, but my heart is awake, the voice of my beloved knocks.”  Finally, she pulls herself out of her nocturnal lethargy and opens the door.  But it is too late, her beloved has vanished into the night. The moment has been lost.  The quest, the wandering continues.

In Soloveitchik’s mind Diaspora Jewry was akin to a slumbering lover.  We slept; our lover, our destiny, was knocking and Diaspora Jewry couldn’t or wouldn’t hear it, and we were missing the moment of opportunity. Soloveitchik’s address, titled in Hebrew “Kol Dodi Dofek” – “The voice of my lover knocks”, is often referred to in English as “Fate and Destiny.”  To be a people of fate, is to be a people who resign themselves to a condition, a set of circumstances, to be passive participants in the unfolding of chronological time.  To be a people of destiny signifies a people able to seize an opportunity, a people who have chosen to chart out a deliberate and conscious existence.  It is an extraordinary address, for it signaled modern orthodoxy’s full acceptance of Zionism with its most articulate spokesperson leading the charge.  From that point onward it became treif in the modern orthodox world not to support Israel.

Today, fifty years after Soloveitchik’s speech, I do believe we are in the midst of moment of destiny for our people. And on this Rosh Hashanah day which lacks the wake up blast of the shofar, I fear we may sleep through it.  Long after our lives have ended, I do think people will look back at this juncture in history and ask whether we missed our moment.  I believe this, not because I am a political scientist, I have no special training.  I believe this not as a historian, here too, I have access to the same books and articles that you do. I don’t say this as an Israeli, I am deeply aware than my comments today come from the diaspora, not from within Israel.

I believe that our moment is a decisive one, a moment of destiny, because I am a Jew.  And to be Jewish in 2006 means that you lead your life, each day, believing that it is a moment of destiny, that the demands of today are insistent and particular and pressing in a way they weren’t yesterday and won’t be tomorrow.  It was Abraham Joshua Heschel who wrote that “Every age, every epoch constitutes a turning point.”   To be Jewish in 2006 means to be part of a nervous, unsettling, and angst ridden condition that also inspires, motivates and stirs us to activity at every age. Yes, we revere the past, and yes, we carry an unshakeable faith in the future, but the core message of today, the core message of our people is “Im Lo Achshav, Ematai”  “if not now – then when?”

For thousands of years, we were dreamers.  A people of fate, not by any fault of our own, but we weren’t in any position to be a people of destiny.  Next year in Jerusalem, to be a free people in our land, we said it, but the knock of destiny was not ours to answer.  We sat and wept at the rivers of Babylon, dreaming of Zion, listening to the taunts of our tormenters.  But in 1880, in reaction to the Russian pogroms, BILU was founded an acronym for Beit Yaakov Lecu Uenelkha (O House of Jacob get up and go). BILU called on Jews, to go to Israel, to financially support the efforts of the pioneers, and for Diaspora Jewry to advocate for the creation of a Jewish state in the Ottoman empire.  Just listen to their manifesto “Sleepest thou O our nation? What has though been doing till 1882?  Sleeping and Dreaming.”  BILU and the first waves of Aliyah signaled that Israel was more than a dream.  It was more than a political reality.  Israel has transformed what it means to be Jewish.  The beginnings of Modern Zionism meant that Israel wasn’t just as an aspiration, but a distinct physical reality.  Israel meant, that for the first time in thousands of years, we became a people capable of full expression.  Never again would we allow ourselves to be a people of fate – we became a people of destiny

Amos Oz, in that same book, goes on to tell how his evening ended that night of November 1947. After all the parties, he and his father made it back home.  And he writes: 

‘…very late, at a time when this child had never been allowed not to be fast asleep in bed…I crawled under my blanket in the dark fully dressed.  And after a while father’s hand lifted my blanket in the dark, not to be angry with me because I’d got into bed with my clothes on but to get in and lie down next to me, and he was in his clothes too, which were drenched in sweat form the crush of the crowds, just like mine.

Then he told me in a whisper…what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some Gentile boys to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down onto the paved stones in the middle of the playground and removed his trousers too, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying the Jews were all so-and–sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too. 

And still in a voice of darkness … my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of November 30, 1947, ‘Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school someday.  The may do it precisely because you are a bit like me.  But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos.  Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. Forever.’

I reached out sleepily to touch his face, just below his high forehead, and all of sudden instead of his glasses my fingers met tears.  Never in my life, before or after that night, not even when my mother died, did I see my father cry.  And in fact I didn’t see him cry that night either; it was too dark.  Only my left hand saw.”

To be Jew in 1947, in 1956, in 2006 means the playing field has changed forever - and for the better.   It means you understand yourself to be a people capable of embracing a destiny, that you refuse to be bullied or taunted.  To be Jewish in 2006 means that the State of Israel is a reality, a state that doesn’t have to explain why it is or isn’t allowed to defend its sovereign territory.  The torah has always taught us that a person is permitted, if not obligated to defend himself.  If a thief breaks into your home with the intent or ability to take your life, the householder is permitted to rise up and take a life in defense of his own.  How dare we allow Israel to be scolded and told to exercise restraint against enemies which will not even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist?! Don’t let Israel’s detractors derail us from the most important advantage we have – the advantage of moral clarity.

For two thousand years Jews have dreamt of a having a homeland.  We in this room, through no merit of our own have been born into a propitious moment of destiny, a time when Israel is a reality.  So I ask you, what have you done? What are you doing?  To be Jewish in 2006 is to believe that you have a rendezvous and responsibility with your people’s destiny and that you dare not be late.  I think of Queen Esther from the Purim story, up late at night, when the fate of the Jews hung in the balance, with Mordecai pressing her not to be silent in this predicament.  Mordecai confronts her telling her that perhaps she has attained such a position for such a crisis.   Never before and perhaps never again will the Jewish people have such an opportunity to secure Israel’s future. 

So what can you do: [Cards]

1) Go: Every one in this room should go to Israel. If you don’t have a trip planned, then book one.  Are you going to ignore the weight of thousands of years of Jewish longing, be the first generation of Jews who have the opportunity to go to the modern state of Israel and have passed it up?  Go on birthright, organize a mission, plan a synagogue trip. 

2) Give:  Give to JUF’s Israel Emergency Campaign. Physical Presence is one thing, but this war has cost Israel Billions.  You express your commitment when you stand with Israel by giving and giving generously.

3) Join:  The events of the past summer made it clear that the North American Jewish community is absolutely critical to Israel’s continued strength.  We should be deeply involved in efforts like AIPAC to organize, mobilize and strengthen America’s commitment to Israel.  It is nothing short of a moral imperative for North American Jews to be at the front line of Israel Advocacy.

4) Learn:  Learn about our people, study Hebrew, be conversant in the news, make the Jerusalem post or Haaretz your web page.  Read the novel I have mentioned (now twice).   Have an Israel book club, make the culture of Israel a regular part of your life.

5) Speak:  Speak proudly of your commitment to Israel, in the community, on the streets and in your home, especially in your home.  Israel needs us as much as we need them.  Under Rabbi Siegel’s leadership, this year the clergy of Anshe Emet will speak throughout the wider community on behalf of Israel, in churches, in schools and beyond.   Most of all, speak of your love for Israel to your children, to your grandchildren.  Tell them, that what Israel means to Jews, what Israel means to you.
   
Rabbi Israel Salanter once overheard two people speaking.  One moaned to the other, “das leben is a Chalom,” (Life is but a dream).  The great rabbi interrupted their conversation, saying “Pardon me, but that is true only if you are asleep.”  The Jonahs of the world, who would dare sleep in the bulk of the ship while the storm rages above have no place in a Judaism of 2006.  We are a proud people, we are a strong people and, I believe, I believe from with every fiber of my being, that we are capable of standing up to the challenge of the day. But to do so we need to be awake.  If you want to know when your moment of destiny is, it is right now, this second.  The drama and promise of being Jewish today is that every single moment we need to be ready to answer the knock on the door.  Our lover, our destiny, is knocking. I ask you, will you be there with me to embrace it.  Shanah Tovah.