Tisha B'av & the Gaza War: Comments by Rabbi Kertesz

Tisha b'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, begins this evening. Traditionally it is a day of mourning and a full fast day.

We do not observe Tisha b'Av in Reform Judaism and it seems strange to commemorate the end of Jewish sovereignty in Judea in 70 CE when we have a Jewish state today. But it does seem like an appropriate time to think about the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. I have attached some of my thoughts on this topic that I shared with the congregation last Shabbat during services.

Tisha b'Av remembers the destruction of the two Temples. It is the lowest point, the saddest moment of the Jewish year. We cannot know how it must have felt to see God's house destroyed and Judean independence crushed - the first time in 586 B.C.E by the Babylonians and again, and for good, for the second time by the Roman Empire in 70 C.E. But we can have a sense of it, because we have experienced something very close - the Shoah - which was not the destruction of God's house but the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people. Seventy years later we are still profoundly traumatized and one could argue that many of the decisions we make, the emotions we feel, and the reactions we have to events as Jews are influenced by the Shoah more than any other factor.

Of course, one result was the partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The conclusion many Jews drew from 2,000 years of exile and the industrialized slaughter of the Jews of Europe was that the Jewish people could not survive in the modern world without their own nation-state. There are many people today who disagree with that conclusion, including much of the Arab world, many in the European and American left and some Jews. But I disagree. If self-determination means anything, if it is valid for anyone, than the Jewish people has the same right of self-determination as any other people. This is in-fact the first cause of this round of fighting. The Jewish people established their state in our ancestral homeland and the Palestinian leadership (at least part of it) have not yet accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Thus they have chosen armed resistance, since 1947, to undo this fact.

Why was the Second Temple destroyed? Our rabbis teach it was because of Sinat Hinam - boundless hatred, hatred without limit, of Jew against Jew. This leads me to my second point, the difference between self-defense, which is legitimate, and hatred and revenge, which is unacceptable, a violation of Jewish values and a desecration of God's name. In the midst of all the fighting, all the name-calling and all the blame being passed around, some moral clarity may be of value.

Lets talk about self-defense first and let’s begin by defining Hamas. We shouldn't call it a terrorist organization. Terrorism is a tactic. It does not define the organization. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement by a Muslim state ruled by shariah law. Further, it is not ultimately interested in creating an independent Palestine, but rather a new caliphate that would include what is today Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Egypt. In that sense it is not dedicated to Palestinian liberation at all. So it should come as no surprise that Hamas dedicates its financial resources and ingenuity to acquiring more and more advanced rockets to disrupt Israeli civilian life and ultimately kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. Nor that they have built a sophisticated series of tunnels to infiltrate into Israel and kill or capture as many Israeli civilians or soldiers as they can. This is their strategy to achieve their goal, which is the eradication of the State of Israel. While they lack the means, they do not lack the will. Had they the means to do so I think Hamas would kill every Jewish man, women and child in Israel... without hesitation. You may disagree with me. But this is what is written in their charter. Its available in English on the Web at Yale Law School's website. I tend to take people at their word, particularly when they say they want to wipe out the Jewish people. I think to believe otherwise is irresponsible. That is what Jewish history has taught me. I don't say this with a sense of moral outrage. This is what Hamas believes. They are entitled to believe whatever they wish. They are not required to love us or accept us. But, on the other hand, Israel has the absolute, unequivocal moral right to defend itself. This is right is enshrined in international law and in Torah - milhemet reshut. Thus I believe this round of fighting is justified.

By the way, Hamas is a rational actor. It began this war for a number of very clear reasons. 1) With the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt it lost one of its biggest patrons. The new military government ruling Egypt sees Hamas as a threat to their own government and society and is dedicated to destroying it. 2) Its refusal to support the Assad government in Syria led Iran to cut off financial aid to Hamas and the expulsion of their political leadership from Damascus. They are now in Doha, Qatar. 3) Gaza residents have grown tired of Hamas' failure to change the facts on the ground, to advance the political process through "armed struggle," or to improve the quality of life in Gaza. So Hamas chose to go to war with Israel to change this political calculus and make them selves relevant again.

Lets also be clear, Hamas has violated or refused to accept every ceasefire that has been proposed so far. Just as they did the one yesterday. Just as they chose to go to war for rational reasons, they have rational reasons for not yet wanting to end the fighting. I don't know what they are, but to think otherwise is to misunderstand and mischaracterize Hamas.

And now we come to the painful reality of power. How do you defend yourself? How do you so in the most decent way possible? Are the Israelis trying as well as they can? I don't know. I hope so, but they may not have tried to minimize civilian casualties. This is the nature of war. This is reality of the armed struggle that is the chosen strategy of Hamas. We won't know until the shooting has stopped. But lets be clear. Israel has the right to defend itself against an organization that is dedicated to its destruction and that is imbedded among the civilian population. But lets also be clear, Israel is held to a higher standard. Not just by the world, but by us, we Jews. It may be comforting to say the Russians are worse, the Syrians are worse, the Chinese are worse, but so what? We are not Russians or Syrians or the Chinese. We are Jews, we have a certain moral stance in the world and we cannot abandon it, even when we have power. The hard calculus for us now, as Jews with power, is how to exercise that power in as moral a way as possible without committing national suicide. And I trust, that in our hearts, none of us would want to have it any other way.

I have spoken of the higher standard to which we are held and to which we hold ourselves, but its almost Tisha b'Av so lets talk about sinat hinam. There is a dark streak in the Israeli populace of anti-Arab racism. You can hear it among the fans of the Betar Yerushalyim football team who taunt Arabs playing on other soccer teams. We witnessed it in the kidnapping, torture and murder of the Arab teenager, Mohammed Abu Khader. We saw it again in anti-Arab riots in Jerusalem where two Arabs were severely beaten. I don't know how many people hold these views and how many are willing to act on them, but it is there and it is a violation of Jewish values. There are rabbis who teach this hatred in their yeshivot. In my opinion they desecrate God's name and Jewish values. It is in our Torah. The ancient Israelites were commanded to kill every Amalekite, every man, woman and child. To wipe them off the face of the earth. So this impulse toward violence is also part of who we are. While we lived in exile and were powerless we did not have to worry about our racism and our anger because we could not act on it. We developed an ethic of powerlessness. Now we have power and we must develop an ethic of power. We have our own state and we can choose the people we will be. A political conflict is one thing, a racial one is another type of conflict all together. Jewish racism is sinat hinam, boundless hatred. We cannot control what the Palestinian people will think or how they will act. But we can control what we believe, what we think, and how we act.

Tisha b'Av is a difficult holiday because we celebrate a tragedy that occurred long ago and we have now returned to the place from which we driven into exile so long ago. It seems to have no relevance. But perhaps it does. Leon Wieseltier in the current issue of the New Republic put it better than I could, "The Israeli campaign in Gaza is not an act of revenge for the slaying of three Jewish boys; it is an act of retaliation against the Gazan barrage of rockets at Israeli towns and cities. What is the difference between revenge and retaliation? It is a fair question. The difference lies in the legitimacy of self-defense. Revenge protects nothing, except the maddened psyches of those who commit it. It is not an act of self-defense, it is an act of self-expression. It is certainly not a “response” in any rational sense. The Israelis who slaughtered the Palestinian boy were not provoked; they were pre-provoked. Yet in the matter of the rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel was provoked. The security of its citizens was at risk; and security is assessed empirically, not ideologically; and security is no less fundamental, morally speaking, than peace."

So on this Shabbat before Tisha b'Av, before we remember this central trauma in our history and through it all the other traumas down through the ages, we are commanded by our tradition to open our hearts and our minds to the suffering of others. This is our moral imperative. To be open to and to try to minimize the suffering of the Palestinians - even as they remain stateless because of us, even as we fight against them, even as we wound and kill them. For to close our hearts to them, to turn against them and wish for and celebrate their deaths does not just mark the beginning of the end of Israel but of Jewish values as a whole. This is the reality of power, the reality of modern life, and the reality of Jewish existence in the modern world. It is never easy to be a Jew, but if Judaism is to mean anything real then we are obligated to live in the world, to take a moral stance in the world and to live by our values in the world.