Births and Many Beginnings

Rosh HaShanah First Day
September 18th, 2001

On September 10th I began writing this sermon. Too many eulogies and other sermons had interrupted my intentions of writing earlier. I thought to finish it the next day. I resumed writing on Friday morning the 14th. As I sat at the computer I didn’t know when I would finish and unsure what to write. I poured my heart and soul into the sermons for the past two weeks, on anti-Israel UN conference in Durban and on the national tragedy. As I looked at the monitor, I’m wasn’t sure what else to say. What I first wrote is still appropriate. It had two different beginnings. Maybe I can just writing beginnings. I will let God guide me. I finished this on Sunday morning the 16 th, and prayed that it wouldn’t need further revision.

First Beginning:

Part 1

Utopias aren’t always what they appear to be. The story is told that back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, a Jewish man once visited the great zoo of Moscow. To his amazement he found a lion and a lamb sleeping together in a cage. The man went to the zookeeper, a fellow Jew and a landsman, and said, “Comrade, this is amazing! The Messiah has come! How else can you get a lion and a lamb to lie down together in one cage, much like the prophecy of Isaiah?!”

“It’s easy,” said the zookeeper. “We put a new lamb in the cage every day.”

Part 2

Rabbi Steven Riskin is phenomenal Rabbi who rejuvenated the Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York City and founded the city of Efrat, outside of Hebron. He came to America this summer to raise money to buy bullet proof buses, so that their children could go to school in safety. He came to raise money for the most important thing his community needed: bullet proof vests, children’s sizes.

Second Beginning:

This morning Torah’s reading opens with the birth of Isaac, to Abraham at the age of one hundred and Sarah at the age of ninety. It sounds fantastic and incredible that in such advanced years they could create life. It is no less incredible at any age, to think that from the inanimate parts of our bodies we can create a living being. Almost everyone in this sanctuary has held a new born, tender, tiny baby in their arms. We have seen its innate beauty and its vulnerability. I wish the Torah and Midrashim would have described in detail how Abraham and Sarah felt after Isaac’s birth, how they held him, what they said. The Torah does describe Sarah’s radical amazement of what she had brought forth from her body. Abraham is silent. Abraham circumcises his son in silence. I will come back to that. Sarah’s laughter is not that this is a joke, but that this birth is a miracle. And she says: “Who could have suggested to Abraham, who could have made him imagine, that Sarah (me) would nurse children, that I would birth a child in his old age.” These verses are laden, pregnant with meaning, for them and for us.

We all read about peak times for women’s fertility and men’s sterility in conjunction with the delaying of conception by younger couples seeking to establish their careers. Abraham and Sarah didn’t have careers. For whatever reasons, Sarah didn’t conceive. I wonder what Abraham thought? Did he just accept it as “that’s the way it will be?” Did he pray to God as a quiet petitioner or as an angry solicitor? Maybe he just accepted that Yishmael born from Hagar, for whom the promise of a great nation was not given, but being his only son, worthy or not, Yishmael would inherit Abraham’s mantle? And now that he had a son, why was he silent? When Ruby became pregnant with Menachem, as well as with Yonina and Tzeira, we couldn’t wait to tell the family. Already in the pulpit, I couldn’t wait to tell the congregations. I was ecstatic. I was also younger and inured by my youth from the risks of pregnancy and risks of life. Now I am older, though not as old as Abraham, but sometimes after what I live through as a Rabbi with others, it feels that way. Perhaps after what we have all just experienced and are living through, I, we, understand Abraham’s silence. It is born of apprehension and of fear. He has to take a knife to his own son and enter him into the covenant, the very covenant that will connect him to God and also put him at further risk. Life itself is a risk, even as God has given us life and commanded us to live it. Maybe Abraham intuitively understood all this, thus his silence. We take birth, growth, that we will see our children mature into adulthood for granted. Maybe these times also call for some silence.

Third Beginning:

We take the existence of the United States of America for granted. Even living here in Richmond, Virginia, capitol of the Confederacy, home to the struggle to disassociate from it, we take the existence of this country for granted. Its birth and its struggles seem like ancient history. Its founders, even the Virginians, are far away from us. In Psalm 90 King David wrote: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” If we but listen quietly, we can still hear the birthing cry of America, even in the ruins of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Like an infant, its existence is challenged. The doctors and nurses check a newborn, to clear its passages, clean its body, check its vital signs and assess its color. We parents take the infant home, swaddle it, cradle it, sing to it, feed it, cleanse it, make sure that it is secure. And we nurture its growth. We see in the tiny infant miraculous reflections of ourselves. Who does it look like? What color hair? What color eyes? Whose characteristics will it take on – scholarly, sports, artistic ability? With silent bravado we assume with assurity that it will grow, develop, fulfill its destiny, and we will see it come to pass. In the microcosm of life, when a death befalls our family, we protect our young and shield it with our bodies and our souls. Yet bit by bit the child must grow, shed layers of naivete and innocence and know the real world, even its cruelty.

America is still a baby in God’s eyes. Its founders could only protect it for so long. And bit by bit layers of innocence and naivete are peeled away. Revealed is a battered and bruised soul. The child of our country has endured wars to secure its own existence: the war for its life in 1776, to insure its life in 1812, to maintain its life in 1861. The teenager of our country fought wars to secure the world so it could live: WW I, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam. Revealed, for the world to see, for God to see, is a core of goodness, despite imperfections, that rises to sacrifice life and limb for freedom. Lady Liberty in Manhattan Bay shines its light as an eternal light, as a ner tamid, as a shiva candle, as a yarzheit lamp upon lower Manhattan. It is a light that will never go out. It is the light of our youth suddenly aged, bowed but never beaten. The White House stands despite the perfidious attempt to destroy it. Despite the origin of its color, it is the singular beacon for the purity of our nation’s soul; its pillars are columns for morality and righteousness, charity and justice. Our home has been hurt. But our home stands. The child grows into a teenager who leaves for college and turns towards an unknown future. Dormitory addresses will change almost every year. What courses to take? Will they succeed? But there is one unchanging constant to which they can always return, one surety that is the rock of their existence: home. In these teenage years of our country, we turn our eyes to home. Home stands. Home gleams white. The flag waves proudly before it. The baby lives. The child will live. This country lives through all of us.

Fourth Beginning:

And if its true that America is still so young, and we must not take its existence for granted, how much more so, al achat kamah va-kamah, is it true about Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel. While we might celebrate that the State is fifty-three years old, it is only a newborn. Its life is as frail and fragile as the tiny newborns we all brought home. In our bravado or chutzpah we assume its reality. We grievously err. We sin against our people, before our God, to our destiny. Medinat Yisrael, the Third Commonwealth of the Jewish people, with all its military capability, is as a delicate newborn in the face of time and the daily violence upon its people.

The intifadas, the effort at the UN conference in Durban have one intention, to destroy Medinat Yisrael, physically, which begins with the attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel, politically. The language of the resolutions makes it clear the desire to roll back the hands of time, roll back the clock to 1947, when the UN was going to vote on the two-state resolution, creating Israel and Palestine, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected! And this time, that resolution would fail. There would be no Israel. The purpose of all this is to declare that the State of Israel is illegal, and thus, legally, should not exist. No other reality matters. History may be perverted. Israel was supposed to lose any or all of the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, War of Attrition, intifadas and die. And now it is supposed to roll over and die, to commit suicide. Only that would appease the attendees at Durban. But Israel doesn’t comply. Israel won’t commit suicide. Am Yisrael Chai, despite all attempts throughout history, we live. We will always live. It is our sacred oath of this season to stand as one as the Jewish people and with our homeland. “Shaynit M’tzadah lo tipol”: Masada will not fall again. The Mitzvah of the Hour, for all those able, is to visit Israel and redeem the pledge: “L’shanah habah beyerushalayim – Next Year- make it ‘this year’ in Jerusalem.” The child that was born not far from Jerusalem, to whose rock Abraham would bring him, that child, will live.

Fifth Beginning, and last:

Here is a true story that sets the lie to an accusation of Israel as a racist state. Perhaps we may imagine that instead of Hagar and Sarah giving birth on separate days to Yishmael and Isaac, can we dream that this is how the story was told. Maybe this story contains the seed of our future redemption.

An Israeli Jew brings his pregnant wife to the hospital because she has a virus and is dehydrating. It was Shaaray Tzedek hospital in Jerusalem – a place frequented particularly by ultra-religious Jews. While in the hospital, he saw an elderly Arab man being wheeled into emergency room having suffered a heart attack. All doctors on call ran to his aid. It did not matter what color, race or religion he was, or whether his son, brother, cousin or grandson was or in the future might be a suicide bomber. Everyone ran to the aid of a suffering human life. While waiting in the maternity ward he saw an Arab far into the hall, leave a gym bag on the floor and then run out. He was about to call security when the Arab re-entered the room with his wife who was in labor and an elderly woman - apparently the mother-in-law. The nurse helped the pregnant Arab woman into a room to check her condition. A few minutes later the nurse came out to ask the husband a few questions and this Jewish nurse spoke Arabic with him so he could feel a bit calmer. The about to be Arab father was pacing the halls parallel near a Chassidic Jew about to be father. It was an incredible scene. The Chassidic man had just concluded a phone conversation. He saw the Arab man looking at his phone. “Do you need to make a call?” asked the Chassid. “Yes, I do,” answered the Arab in very passable Hebrew. “Here, use mine,” said the Chassidic Jew. Meanwhile the elderly Arab woman - soon to be grandmother - was quite anxious and tried to get some coffee from the vending machine. She was a little bit confused as to how to use it, so a young to-be father wearing a knitted kippah and a gun on his belt - a sign that he lived in either Samaria or Yehudah - the so-called occupied territories where Jews are shot at and killed almost every day of the week - this Jew went over and showed the Arab woman how to get the coffee from the machine. Maybe on that day the Messiah was born . I hope that they will tell this story too.

Conclusion:

Maybe Father Abraham was wise in his silence. Life is too fragile. This country is too fragile. Medinat Yisrael is too fragile. Five thousand seven hundred and sixty two years are as nothing compared to God’s time.

God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Yishmael, too:

I pray for the lamb and lion to dwell together in true peace.

I pray that little children will wear coveralls and sneakers and not bulletproof vests.

I pray that Mother Rachel, portrayed by the prophet Jeremiah lamenting for the destruction of Jerusalem and exile of the Jewish people may be comforted and no more mourn for her children.

I pray that our nation finds comfort in the faith of God’s love and in the compassion we show to each other.

I pray that our flag will always fly high “o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The shofar blowing begins with a tekiyah, a promise of hope. The second note, shevarim, is broken, as has been our hearts. The third note of teruah stirs us to rise in hope, as does our faith, and to action, which an outpouring of blood, money and items in this hour of national tragedy. It concludes with a tekiyah gedolah, an unbroken and seemingly unending single note, lifting our eyes beyond the shofar to heaven itself. From heaven on high, may God send down healing balm to sorrowing hearts, and upon this nation, blessings of strength and tranquility, courage and serenity, bravery and peace.

May the tekiyah gedolah of humanity’s redemption from horror, from tragedy, and from evil, be heard throughout the world, and come soon, in our time.

Amen.