Three Voices Resound Throughout
the World
Rosh HaShanah – First Day – 5763
September 7th, 2002
-Intro-
I stand here acutely aware that by the secular calendar a year
ago I was in ignorant bliss of an impending catastrophe. By the
Jewish calendar I was already groping for words to express our
horror and pain and somehow lift you and me from the depths to
which we had plunged. It is now a year later by both countings.
Since then the Pentagon has been repaired, the debris of the World
Trade Center has been completely removed, as has the plane wreckage
in Pennsylvania. Since then Ruby and I traveled to Israel with
a mission from our Federation for a very special program for our
community called Project 2K. After the other members returned home,
we stayed in Israel for another two and a half weeks driving from
the Golan in the north to Eilat in the south. Today I want to share
my heart with you about both subjects. The essence of my message:
While there is certainly great evil in the world,
From which we are not immune,
While we most certainly live with certain fears and apprehensions,
And do not have a crystal ball that will reveal the future,
Our faith teaches us: We must live with hope.
Our faith teaches us: We must visit the State of Israel.
There have been so many junctures in our history that caused doubt
and despair: the destruction of the Northern Israelite kingdom
and the ten lost tribes; destruction of two Temples and a failed
second revolt against Rome with resultant exiles; expulsion from
Spain and many other countries; and, the Holocaust. If we ever
had yielded to gloom and doom, we would have been destroyed
and perished from the face of the earth.
For us, as Americans, as Jews, America, our safe haven,
And for many of us, the land of our birth, shall never
be destroyed!
For us, as Jews, as Americans, the State of Israel shall not
perish!
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I
A Rabbi in his sermon, delivered on September 22, 1941, cited
the Talmudic tractate of Yoma 20b. His text was shared among Rabbis
in preparation for our sermons this season. Unfortunately his name
was omitted from the xerox. Its appropriateness struck me deeply.
His Talmudic text is my vehicle for this sermon.
The Talmudic text:
Shalosh kolot holkin misof
ha-olam v’ad sofo;
There are three voices or sounds that resound throughout
the whole world
From one end to the other;
The sound of Galgal Chamah,
the revolution of the sun;
The sound of Hamonah Shel Romi,
the tumultuous hosts of Rome;
And
the sound of Neshamah b’sha-ah she-yotzah min
ha-guf,
The soul departing from the body of man.
II
The rabbinic authors wrote this text in poetic and mystic language
to describe the plight of their world. They lived during the day
of the Roman Empire, which had been begun to conquer and strangle
the Mediterranean world. Its legions destroyed the land of Israel
and the Temple, ransacked Jerusalem and carried away the Jews in
chains as slaves. But Israel was not the end of Rome’s road
of plunder. It wanted to conquer the whole world and crush all
peoples. The Rabbis described their abject dilemma by referring
to these three sounds that reverberate throughout the world.
1) Kol Galgal Chamah: Ordinarily
when the sun sets upon one part of the earth, it shines on another.
But now the Rabbis beheld a complete Galgal
Chamah – a
universal setting of the sun. They articulated the terror
of their world as the sound of the sun disappearing from all humanity, as
a blackout of the world. The Rabbis understood that the
threat and destruction by Rome was not just
for Israel. It was a threat for the whole world.
The author of the 1941 sermon referenced his remarks to the Nazi
regime. And we understand the ancient text in reference to terrorism
and radical Islam today. In all three situations the superficial
and blind could say that all they wanted was the Jews. “Let
the sun set on the Jews and it will continue to shine on us.” And
all three are wrong! We know from history that the rapacious
Roman Empire did not stop with Eretz Yisrael. Their thirst went
far beyond. The voices of appeasement before and in the early years
of World War II had no trouble in joining Hitler in saying “give
him the Jews, be done with them, and all will be well with us.” Nazism
was truly a blackout of humanity, blackness in destruction and
murder, blackness in heartlessness. If unchecked it would have
been the worst barbarism to conquer the whole world – misof
ha-olam v’ad sof ha-olam. And the world today is wrong to
think that September 11 th was aimed only at the United States
and because of Israel. I remember the woman from Chesterfield County
who called me late that morning and said, pleadingly, “If
we give them back Israel, will they stop bombing us?” No!
No! A thousand times “No!” The blackness of
Galgal Chamah is beyond the United States and Israel. Europe, the
United Nations, and the rest of the world have not read history,
have not read our history.
The sound of Galgal Chamah, the revolution of the sun,
holack misof ha-olam v’ad sofo, threatens from one end
of the world to the other.
2) Kol Hamonah Shel Romi: The
Jews of Eretz Yisrael experienced first hand the brutality and
inhumanity of the Roman legions. The details of the Midrashim and
laments composed in the Rabbinic period tear one’s heart,
how the mighty and ferocious Roman hordes destroyed people and
land. Some of them became the heart of our Yom Kippur Martyrology
service. The English lexicon is bereft of words to adequately portray
both the horror of Roman barbarity, viciousness and savagery and
that of the Nazis. And from the Holocaust we have pictures, too.
I confess to having absolutely no understanding of how human beings
can do these things. I have no understanding how they could fly
the jets directly into buildings filled with thousands of men,
women and children. I have no understanding how people can strap
explosives around their bodies that will also tear them to shreds,
and walk into a market place, a pizza shop and detonate. Ruby and
I ate in Sbarro pizza shop twice and walked the Ben Yehuda Pedestrian
Mall numerous times. Yet this is not contained to Israel and America.
Hatred and inhumanity by the terrorists knows neither boundaries
nor borders. Today hate the Jews and Americans. Tomorrow hate the
world.
Kol Hamonah shel Romi stretches misof ha-olam v’ad sofo,
from one end of the world to the other. No one is spared. No one
is immune.
3) Kol Neshamah b’sha-ah
she-yotzah min ha-guf,
The soul departing from the body of man. The Rabbis of this Talmudic
piece did not only hear the cries of our people slain and butchered
as they defended the Temple, the Land and our people as they died.
They heard the sound of the soul departing the universe.
The avalanche of ruination and devastation was aimed at the destruction
of the soul of humanity, not just of the Jewish
people. The Talmud refers to the soul of our people dying for our
land. The author of the WWII sermon referred to the souls of all
peoples dying in a world war, from Bataan to Normandy, on every
ocean and continent. I do not permit myself to think of what it
must have been like to be on the planes, in the Pentagon or in
the Towers. It is too terrifying. It is too horrible. Could I ever
get it out of my mind? Would we not go mad from even the thought,
even without experiencing it? The crumbling of the towers was more
than of concrete and metal. The deafening, incomparable noise which
no one of us will ever forget, never purge from our memory, was
the sound of the neshamah, of the souls of the nearly three thousand
people, k’she’yotzin min ha-guf, as they left the bodies.
This sound is not contained to these places. It is the sound of
those killed by suicide murders on buses, markets, at Hebrew University.
The sounds of the murdered also resounds, holkin misof ha-olam
v’ad sofo, throughout the world.
Left to their devices, the doers of evil, the radical fundamentalists
that only tolerate a world in their image, evil of any and every
stripe will return this world to primordial chaos. And the Rabbis
understood that potential.
**************************************
4)
But there is one more word in this Talmudic piece. V’yesh
omrim, there are other rabbis who say, Af Ledah – there
is another voice heard from one end of the world to another, the
sound of birth. My first reaction to that statement
was: “Are they crazy? How can they say that? How
can anyone say such a thing?” Then we stop and
think about our history. The Rabbis were right. After the first
Temple we built the Second. After the second we built the Rabbinic
Talmudic tradition. After Eretz Yisrael we built the Jewish communities
of Babylonia, and so forth. All that was said about Galgal Chamah,
Hamonai Romi and the Neshamah are true.
And yet, and yet, we give birth again. We build again.
From every darkness comes forth light.
Who would have thought of the rebirth of European Jewry, of Russian
Jewry, after its destruction?
Who would have thought that people who survived the camps would
ever make children to see the world?
Who would have thought that the Pentagon would be whole, the Pennsylvania
field be planted, and someday in some design, there will be buildings
standing on the World Trade Center plaza?
And who could have thought that there would ever be Medinat Yisrael,
the State of Israel?
V’yesh omrim, there are other rabbis who say, Af
Ledah, the sound of birth.
III
In the Torah God commands Abraham to stand up on the mountain
and look north, south, east and west at the land of Canaan, for
this would be the home of Abraham’s children. Ruby and I
did what God told Abraham to do and beginning with the mission
which picked a region, Emek Chefer, to develop a deep personal
relationship with the Richmond Jewish community, we looked at the
land and its people.
We saw continual acts of birth.
We saw highways, buildings, museums, homes built during an ongoing
war which has never stopped.
We saw the places that had been destroyed, and then the blood
was cleaned from the stones, the broken glass swept up, and then
rebuilt.
We saw many babies, many young children and many pregnant women.
Despite all that they live under, the sound of birth is heard from
one end of Israel to the other.
And we looked into our people’s
eyes and saw resoluteness, determination, and loneliness. They
can and will deal with everything else. They will continue to build
the country and populate it. But
they can’t imagine not having us.
Let me tell you a story.
The curator of Mt. Zion, traditional burial place of King David,
located just outside the Old City Walls, instituted the custom
of presenting a pressed flower to every pilgrim
who ascended the mountain. When asked why he does not give
a fresh flower, he related a story that goes
back to the period when the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem.
When the Prince of Coucy was about to join the Crusaders on their
way to wrest the Holy Land from the Moslems, he went to bid farewell
to his friend, the Rabbi of Coucy. The Prince asked the Rabbi what
he would like him to bring back from Jerusalem. “My friend,” said
the Rabbi, “please bring me some sign of life to
comfort me in the knowledge that Jerusalem has not been left barren;
a sign of vitality that will bolster my faith
in the eventual regeneration of the Holy City and return of my
people now dispersed throughout the world.” The Prince promised
to fulfill the Rabbi’s request and departed.
Several years went by. Finally the Prince of Coucy returned home.
He called on the Rabbi and handed him the promised gift. It was
a wilted flower. “In all of Jerusalem I
could not find anything with any life in it,” explained the
Prince. “The city has been plowed up; it is completely desolate
and in ruins. On Mt. Zion I found this wilted flower. I tried to
revive it with water, but to no avail. I brought it because it
had at least a spark of life.”
As the Rabbi took the withered flower into his trembling hands
and pressed it to his lips, tears rolled down his cheeks. As soon
as the tears touched the flower, miraculously the petals opened
and flower blossomed forth. Amazed, the eyes of the Rabbi and the
Prince widened. After a moment, the significance of this startling
phenomenon dawned on the Prince. “You have brought
the flower back to life.”
I don’t know which is the exact parallel to the flower in
the story.
Is it is us? So many of American Jewry have traveled
the world and never set foot in Jerusalem.
Is it the Israelis? Who yearn – not for
our money – but to be touched and hugged and kissed by us!
Is it the Land? It is has been touched by blood
but not by our feet and not by our lips!
Are we only supposed to put a drop of soil of eretz Yisrael in
our caskets in our death, and not see it in our lifetime?
Use the metaphor, as you will.
Every one of us here needs to touch a flower
of Israel to our lips -- in Israel.
Each of us needs to participate in the miracle
of birth, not just of our children and grandchildren, but of Israel.
Each of us needs to walk the streets of Jerusalem,
hold hands with Israelis, draw into our lungs its air, and participate
in the eternity of the Jewish people.
Each of us needs to water a flower in Israel
with our tears.
We need to do it for them, if not for us.
We need to do it for ourselves, if not for them.
To this purpose I announce that I will be leading a tour
to Israel for our congregation next July. It will be
a first for you and a first for me. I have already been long
at work, even while I was in Israel. I am not blind or unenlightened
about dangers. Ruby and I understood that very well. Like our
ancestors throughout the generations we would be undaunted in
our determination to see the miracle of creation and be present
with our people. At the end of Yom Kippur and at the end of next
Pesach’s seder we will say: “L’shanah
ha-bahah beYerushalayim. – Next year in Jerusalem.”
That year is now.
**************************************
-Conclusion-
I pray many prayers day and night.
I pray for the peace of our country, peace from war and peace
from fear.
I pray for peace for the world, that no people, no child shall
dread the dawn or the night.
I pray for all people who live in the Middle East, not just for
our own. That would betray the essence of what the Rabbis taught
us and is our Jewish faith.
I pray that the situation will be better, much better very soon.
Who knows?
I pray that there is one more voice to be heard
misof ha-olam v’ad sofo,
from one end of the earth to the other:”
Od Yavo Shalom Aleynu v’al kulam.
Yet will peace come upon us and everyone.
“L’shanah ha-bahah beYerushalayim. – This
year in Jerusalem.”
Amen.
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