On Tuesday morning, November 18,
2014, two Palestinian terrorists from East Jerusalem, armed with a gun and meat
cleavers, burst into Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood
of Jerusalem at 7:00 am; they brutally killed four worshippers and a police
officer and injured another seven people before security forces shot them dead
and ended their murderous rampage.
President Obama issued a statement
that said, in part, “there
is and can be no justification for such attacks against innocent civilians.” Secretary
of State John Kerry also condemned the
attack, saying, "People who had come to worship God in the sanctuary of a
synagogue were hatched and hacked and murdered in that holy place in an act of
pure terror and senseless brutality and murder… To
have this kind of act, which a pure result of incitement is unacceptable… The Palestinian leaders must condemn
this and they must begin to take serious steps to restrain any kind of
incitement that comes from their language, other people’s
language and exhibit
the kind of leadership that is necessary to put this region on a different
path.” Perhaps the most telling word is “begin”—Palestinian
leaders have yet to take a single serious step toward peace, nor even
countering the rampant hatred that is taught, reinforced, and nurtured among
their people. It comes at no surprise that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad
immediately praised the attack and a Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri called for “more
operations like [this one].”
But operations like Tuesdays
terrorist attack are not attacks on military targets: this was an attack on
worshippers in a synagogue. This was not an attack on Israel as a political
entity: this was an anti-Semitic attack against Jews. Those who have shielded
themselves from the accusation that their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist stance
was anything other than anti-Semitism no longer have a screen to hide behind.
This week
we read Parshat Toldot, which begins with the story of the progeny of Isaac,
who like those of Abraham, his father, are locked in conflict. In this
generation, conflict begins quite literally in utero:
This is the
story of Isaac, son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac. Isaac was forty years old
when he took to wife Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddam-aram,
sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac pleaded with the Lord on behalf of his wife,
because she was barren; and the Lord responded to his plea, and his wife
Rebekah conceived. But the children struggled in her womb, and she said, “If
so, why do I exist?” She went to inquire of the Lord, and the Lord
answered her, ‘Two nations are in your womb; two separate
peoples shall issue from one body; one people shall be mightier than the other;
and the older shall serve the younger.” (Genesis 25:18-23)
The twins in Rebekah’s womb are
Jacob and Esau. Esau, the progenitor of the Edomites, emerges first and is
therefore the “elder.” Many centuries later, the Rabbis
identified Esau with the Romans, whose oppressive and destructive policies
culminated in the Destruction of the Second Temple and the decimation of the
Jewish commonwealth in the first century of the Common Era. Traditionally,
Ishmael, the half-brother of Isaac, is identified as the father of the Arab
nations. In both cases, Torah suggests that the animus is eternal and derives
from the very propinquity of brothers born to the same mother (in the case of
Ishmael and Isaac) or who gestated together in the womb (in the case of Esau
and Jacob). And indeed, the Jewish people and the Palestinian people “gestated” in the womb of the Middle East;
Israel claims her small section of the womb and unfortunately, the Arabs claim
the entire womb. In the case of both Jews and Arabs, claims to the land rest on
a mixture of history and religious myth. It is being reported that the
terrorists who murdered worshippers at prayer Tuesday were motivated by an
exclusive Muslim claim to Har ha-Bayit, the hilltop in the Old City where the
Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located; it was here that the First
and Second Temples stood long ago.
I have heard many people naively and
simplistically say something along the lines of, “Why can’t they just sit down and make peace”—as if the
situation called for the skills of a teacher sitting down with two
kindergarteners who have been fighting on the playground and instructs them, “Shake
hands and make up.” Would that
it were so easy. But when has it ever been that way?
The Book of Daniel, which we seldom
encounter because it is not part of the cycle of Haftarah or Festival megillah
readings, has a fascinating and illuminating passage in which Daniel is brought
before King Nebuchadnezzar to interpret his dreams (following the motif of
Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s
dreams in Genesis). Daniel boldly says
that no wise man, astrologer necromancer, or demonist can interpret the king’s dream,
but he, Daniel, can tell the king what God in Heaven is revealing through them,
and it is none other than the secret of when the End of Days will arrive.
Daniel describes a giant statue that appeared in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream:
You, O king,
were watching and behold! a huge statue; this statue, which was immense, and whose
brightness was extraordinary, stood opposite you, and its appearance was
fearsome. This statue: its head of fine gold; its breast and arms of silver;
its belly and thighs of copper; its legs of iron; and its feet, partly of iron
and partly of earthenware. As you watched, a stone was hewn without hands and
struck the statue on its feet of iron and earthenware, and crumbled them. Then
they crumbled together: the iron, the earthenware, the copper, the silver and
the gold. They became like chaff from summer threshing floors, and the wind
carried them away and no trace was found of them. And the stone that struck the
statue became a great mountain and filled the entire earth. (Daniel 2:31-35)
Daniel proceeds to interpret for the
king the meaning of the statue; I’ve interpolated several explanations
to make it easier to follow:
You, O king—to
whom the King of kings, Who is the God of Heaven, has given a strong kingdom,
power, and honor, and wherever people, beasts of the field and birds of the sky
dwell, He has given them into your hand and made you ruler over them all—you
are the head of gold. And after you will arise another kingdom inferior to you
[the Persians], and then another, a third kingdom, of copper [the
Hellenistic empire of Alexander the Great], which will rule the
whole earth. The fourth kingdom [Rome] will be as
strong as iron: Just as iron crumbles and flattens everything, and as iron
shatters all these, it will crumble and shatter. The feet and the toes that you
saw, partly of potter’s earthenware and partly of iron: It will be
a divided kingdom and will have some of the firmness of iron just as you saw
iron mixed with lay-like earthenware. As for the toes, partly of iron and
partly of earthenware: Part of the kingdom will be powerful and part of it will
be broken. That you saw iron mixed with clay-like earthenware: They will mix
with the offspring of men, but they will not cling to one another, just as iron
does not mix with earthenware. Then, in the days of these kingdoms, the God of
Heaven will establish a kingdom that will never be destroyed nor will its
sovereignty be left to another people; it will crumble and consume all these
kings, and will stand forever [the End Time kingdom of God].
(Daniel 31:37-44)
Abarbanelidentifies
the feet with Christianity and Islam, but given that the Book of Daniel was
likely composed in the mid-2nd century BCE, his interpretation is clearly
anachronistic. Yet his point is well taken in the sense that it is the nature
of history that one kingdom passes and another takes its place. The Land of
Israel, once the land of Canaan, saw the first and second Jewish commonwealths,
and was ruled by the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans all
before the Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Since that time, although
it has been under the control of many entities, most recently the British
(under the Mandate) no other
sovereign country has existed in the land until the State of Israel was
established in 1948. Yet it still ignites hearts and minds—and sadly
inspires violence. Is there no end in sight?
Chipotle, under the stewardship of
writer Jonathan Safran Foer, adorns it cups and bags with words aimed at “Cultivating
Thought.” One
contribution is this short piece by Steven Pinker,
It’s easy to get discouraged by the ceaseless
news of violence, poverty, and disease. But the news presents a distorted view
of the world. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. You never see a TV crew reporting
that a country isn’t at war, or
that a city hasn’t had a mass
shooting that day, or that millions of 80-year-olds are alive and well.
The only way to
appreciate that state of the world is to count. How many incidents of violence,
or starvation, or disease are there as a proportion of the number of people in
the world? And the only way to know whether things are getting better or worse
is to compare those numbers at different times: over the centuries and decades,
do the trend lines go up or down?
As it happens,
the numbers tell a surprisingly happy story. Violent crime has fallen by half
since 1992, and fiftyfold since the Middle Ages. Over the past 60 years the
number of wars and number of people killed in wars have plummeted. Worldwide,
fewer babies die, more children go to school, more people live in democracies,
more can afford simple luxuries, fewer get sick, and more live to old age.
“Better” does
not mean “perfect.” Too many people still live in misery and die
prematurely, and new challenges, such as climate change, confront us. But
measuring the progress we’ve
made in the past emboldens us to strive for more in the future. Problems that
look hopeless may not be; human ingenuity can chip away at them. We will never
have a perfect world, but it’s
not romantic or naïve to work
toward a better one.
Pinker’s view is positive and hopeful. Even
amidst violence and tragedy, such as we saw Tuesday, there is still reason to
be hopeful and to believe that “better” is
possible. Perhaps that is enough to sustain us at times like this.
© Rabbi
Amy Scheinerman
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