We’ve been here before
July 11, 2014
We’ve been here before. That’s the whole point of the Jewish calendar. None of this is new.
We’ve been here before. That’s what Shiva Asar Be-Tammuz, the 17th
day of Tammuz, which we will commemorate on Tuesday, seeks to remind
us. The Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:6) lists five calamities that are said to
have befallen us on this date. Among them, the Mishnah says, the walls
of the city were breached and an idol was placed in the Temple.
Can anyone doubt that we’ve been here before?
Thanks to extraordinary Israeli ingenuity,
we’ve built a wall in the sky. Missiles come streaking towards us, and
usually, the “wall” stops them; the remnants of what had been a deathly
threat seem to float slowly, harmlessly, down towards the earth. But not
all the time, as we saw first in Ashdod. Our “wall” can be breached,
and one can only assume that the breaches to follow will be much worse
than what’s come thus far. The Babylonians breached the walls. So, too,
did the Romans. So did the Syrians and the Egyptians in October 1973. So
did Hezbollah in the Lebanon wars. So, too, can Hamas.
We’ve been here before.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, the Zionist
narrative tells us. The story we tell about this country is one of
utter triumph. It’s a story the early pioneers with their towers and
stockades as they steadfastly spread across the land, of the desert
being brought to bloom, of Tel Aviv rising out of the vacant sands just
north of Jaffa, that of paratroopers firing their way into the Lions
Gate, leaving the centuries-old stone pock-marked with bullets and
radioing back, not long later, har ha-bayit be-yadeinu – “The Temple Mount is in our Hands.”
But that’s never been the entire story. Some
of those beachheads established with towers and stockades were over-run.
We lost part of Jerusalem in 1948. The Fedayeen crossed the border with
impunity during the 1950’s and killed many Israelis. The war of
2000-2004 turned our restaurants and nightclubs, bus-stops and cafes
into life-consuming infernos. Hezbollah made the northern third of the
country uninhabitable. Never, ever have we been able to turn this place
into an impregnable fortress.
To live here means to accept that our walls
can be breached. To live here means to live with periods of fear, with
loss, with the knowledge that as soon as it is over, the clock will
start ticking until the next round. That is the way that things have
always been, and it is the way that they will always be. Periodically,
we or our children, or theirs, will retreat to safe-rooms, reinforced
with steel and cement, hear the siren, hear the boom, wait the requisite
time and exit, only to do it again down the road.
To live here means trying to make the walls as
secure as we can, but knowing that whether they are walls of stone or
domes of iron, they will never be impregnable. If we are to live here,
it has to be not because we are safe, but because we believe it matters.
Thus, if we are to live here, we have to make it matter.
Perhaps that is why the Mishnah notes both the
breaching of the walls and the idol in the Temple, too. Perhaps the
point is now, as our walls are being breached, we are meant to ask
ourselves whether something central to us hasn’t also been defiled.
We know that it has. There is an idol in the Temple. We commuted the sentences of Jewish terrorists a quarter of a century ago, not twice, not three times, but four times.
We watched as “Price Tag” operatives spray-painted “Death to Arabs,”
but we said it was “just graffiti.” We watched as they uprooted olive
trees, but we refused to acknowledge that they were really uprooting the
very essence of who we are supposed to be. Had we forgotten that the
Torah says “Even if you are at war with a city … you must not destroy
its trees” (Deut. 20:19)? Or did we just not care?
We’ve been here before, but we, unlike our
tradition, have been silent. We watched as they burned mosques, but
never admitted that those who start by burning mosques will one day burn
a child. A year ago, Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon spoke out against Jewish terror, but we ignored him, or protested his “misguided” use of the word “terror.”
And then we burned a child. Yes, we.
Of course Bibi is right that we abhor the
horror and they celebrate their murderers. Of course he’s right that we
arrest the perpetrators and they name streets and city squares after
them. Of course he’s right that we’re surrounded by an evil the world
simply refuses to understand. Yes, that’s all true. But it’s also
utterly irrelevant.
Moral equivalency makes a mockery of truth, but moral superiority makes a mockery of responsibility.
Being better than them is not good enough.
“Not being revolting” is not a standard that will get our children to
believe in this place. Either we build something that reflects the very
best of what our tradition has stood for since those first walls were
breached long ago, or we will exile ourselves – not because the walls
were penetrated, but because the shame was simply too great to bear.
As I stood in the mourning tent of Mohammed
Abu Khdair’s family, took his father’s hand in mine and looked straight
into his father’s eyes, all I saw was horror. Emptiness. Hollowness. The
devastating eyes of a man whose son had just been burned alive.
Overcome with shame, sensing the chasm of his loss, horrified by what is
becoming of some of us, I felt, at that moment, that Rabbi Elyakim
Levanon, the Rosh Yeshiva in Elon Moreh, was right when he said that the perpetrators ought to be put to death, for we must “burn out the evil from amidst us” (Deut. 17:7).
For we have been here before, and we dare not go back.
Our walls are not impenetrable; we will
forever have to go to war, we will forever endure periods of fear. So
first, we must win this war (whatever that might actually mean). But
then, when the dust settles and the clock begins to count down to the
next conflagration, we must ask ourselves what has happened to us. And
we must fix it – to its very core.
Our walls have been breached, but so, too, has
our heart. Something about us has been defiled and polluted. So first
we must prevail, and then we must be better.
