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Rabbi Fred Morgan AM 2024 RH sermon

Rabbi Fred Morgan AM

Temple Beth Israel

I’d like to welcome you here at LBC, both those present in the synagogue and those online, for this Rosh Hashana.  After the traumatising year that we’ve experienced, it’s very significant that you’re here to join with the rest of the community in welcoming the new year.  Each of you has made a choice to be here.  Rosh Hashana is declared by our sages to be the birthday of the world, more specifically, the day when the origins of Adam, humankind, is celebrated.   So, by our presence here we mark our common humanity, the humanity that we share with all peoples.  Yet our presence also marks our special relationship to a particular people, the Jewish people.  While the rest of the world gets on with its business, we Jews deliberately, self-consciously declare our allegiance to our nation, Am Yisrael, even as we say, “Am Yisrael chai”, the people of Israel endures.

This day, then, represents our twofold character: we are each a part of the universal sum of humanity; and we are each of us a member of this particular people, Am Yisrael.  We are not alone in this dual identity.  I’d guess virtually every person who walks the earth carries the same kind of duality within them.  Bearing multiple identities is all the rage these days, it’s called “intersectionality”.  But for us Jews, it presents certain challenges.  That’s because Torah takes each aspect of our identity, the particular and the universal, very seriously, in a way that I fear others don’t always appreciate or credit.

Nowhere is the challenge of our dual identity more starkly presented, or with a stronger sense of the dilemma we experience because of it, than in the Torah reading that Susan, Sue and Miriam just leyned so beautifully for us.  We read this story every year on Rosh Hashana.  It tells of the birth of Isaac, the tensions this creates within Abraham’s mixed family, and finally the banishment of Sara’s surrogate, the Egyptian slave-girl Hagar, and her son Ishmael.  This is literally a case of Abraham “othering” Hagar and Ishmael by sending them into the wilderness.

However, Abraham is not happy with Sara’s demand that they be banished.  The content of his protest isn’t recorded as it is in the case of the cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, but we know that Abraham does confront God because God responds and insists that he go through with the exile of Hagar and Ishmael.

Why is this so important to God, or to God’s plan?  Because Abraham’s family have a mission that is theirs, and theirs in particular, to carry out.  Having this mission doesn’t make them better or superior to anyone else but it does make them different.  Isaac will inherit this covenantal promise; Ishmael will not.  Ishmael has his own destiny – we heard a bit about that at the conclusion of our reading – yet his destiny is different from Isaac’s.  For this reason, Ishmael is “othered” virtually by definition.  This is crucial to the story of Ishmael in Torah.

But Abraham’s disquiet over Ishmael’s othering is also central to our story.  Abraham feels uneasy, he even challenges God over this, because, in a way appropriate to his time, he is a universalist.  His sense of justice is not selective, it applies to everyone.  Yet, here’s the rub.  The very people who will carry Abraham’s message of universal justice and give it to the world must themselves stand distinct from others.  They are, as the non-Jewish prophet Bilaam will later describe them, am l’vadad yishkon, a people that dwells apart, themselves “othered” from all the other peoples on the globe.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks identified this dilemma and made it the centrepiece of his most original work, The Dignity of Difference.   He argued that the Jewish people are not only different, but difference is at the heart of the human experience, and the Jewish people are here for the very purpose to teach the dignity of difference.  Precisely because we are each of us different, because each of us unique and precious in God’s eyes, we should respect one another.   As the French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas argued, we don’t have to do anything to earn that dignity, it is ours simply and directly by reason of our humanity.  And the Jewish people’s mission, by being “a people that dwells apart,” a people that is always and everywhere identified as different, is to role-model to the world the importance of dignifying different.  Acknowledging and respecting difference: that is the heart of justice.

Our understanding of difference comes through the human expression of empathy.  There may be psychological limits to how well we can really know or understand the stranger, the alien, the other, but we can always feel empathy towards them in their suffering.  The Torah famously tells us to love the stranger, because we know the feelings of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt.  Entering into their feelings is the basis for empathy.  In order to do that, we have to practice what the kabbalists call tzimtzum, withdrawing our ego or, as we might say, adopting an approach of humility, so that the feelings of the other person can enter into our hearts.

Empathy is, in turn, the basis for human rights.  The idea of “human rights” is an odd one.  Indeed, many would argue that there is nothing in nature that underwrites or endorses the idea of human rights.  On the contrary, for many people the world of nature is, in Thomas Hobbes’ famous words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  The idea of human beings having inalienable rights comes from our recognition that other people share our own feelings of self-worth and of suffering in the face of the human condition.  In other words, it comes in the first place from empathy, withdrawing our egos so that we can open ourselves up to the feelings of others.  This is what Abraham does.  Acting out of empathy is what our Jewish tradition requires of us.  It is the humility referenced by the prophet Micah when he says that God expects us “to act justly, love mercy, and walk in humility before God” (Micah 6:8).

It is entirely appropriate, then, that the modern origins of the notion of universal human rights are intimately bound up with the Jewish experience.  In a recent essay,[1] Hillel Neuer, one of the world’s foremost human rights activists, the Executive Director of UN Watch and a keen pursuer of human rights violations from Darfur and Zimbabwe to Cuba and the Former Soviet Union to the Middle East, shows that “much of the global human rights movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century can be traced to the work of heroic Jewish lawyer-activists who were proud of their [Jewish] heritage.”   People like Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, who inspired the Frenchman Rene Cassin in his work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Raphael Lemkin, who initiated the UN Genocide Convention and coined the term “genocide”; Morris Abrams, an American lawyer from Georgia who won landmark cases for the equal rights of African Americans and was also the founder of UN Watch.

Each of these individuals acted on behalf of humanity at large, but, like so many others, they did so as proud, committed Jews.  Their commitment to human rights was an expression of their Jewish “difference” and the dignity they placed on difference.  As evidence of this they also played prominent roles in the Jewish community and in leading Zionist organisations in Europe and America.  Love of the Jewish people and love of Israel were the ground springs for their understanding of social justice.

Telling their stories puts me in mind of Ron Castan, the great Australian human rights lawyer who headed the team that won the Eddie Mabo case and exposed the fallacy of terra nullius in the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islands peoples and their relationship to Country.  Not long after the Mabo decision was delivered, Castan gave a talk about his work on behalf of Aboriginal land rights.  He explained that it was Judaism that provided him with two impulses to justice.  The first was historical, the experience of his parents in Europe and the impact of the Shoah on his self-understanding and his sensitivity to the suffering of others.  The second was more philosophical, the role of Jewish values in his life, including the values of justice and benevolence, what we might today sum up under the term tikkun olam.  Castan managed not only to balance his Jewish particularism and his human universalism but to draw on the former to give substance to the latter.
Hillel Feuer wrote his essay about the oversized role of Jews in human rights activism before the terror attacks of 7 October.  Even then, he saw Jewish human rights activism being undermined by the anti-Zionism of so many on the liberal far-left, alongside the more traditionally parochial, anti-human rights views of those on the far-right (which includes, by the way, those on the far-right in Israeli politics).  He found it hard to fathom how there could be such a groundswell of anti-Zionist rhetoric on what appeared to be primarily dogmatic or ideological grounds, especially given that so many Zionists had contributed so much over decades to raising our awareness of human rights.
In the light of our common experience of the traumatic events of 7 October and the year of horrors that has followed those events, the weight of our twofold character as Jews has never been heavier.  Many of us carry lifelong liberal (with a lowercase “l”) outlooks.  We see these attitudes as an expression of our deepest Jewish loyalties, including our loyalty to Israel, the land and the people, and we have been shocked by the polarisations and exclusions that have taken place.  We’ve been told in no uncertain terms that we cannot be both humanitarians and Zionists.   This attack on our identity has been disabling and distressing.

I have rejected this claim publicly and will continue to do so.  My human rights efforts mean nothing if they do not include the right of my people to enjoy the “dignity of our difference;” the right of us Jews to live peacefully in our own land where we can pursue our dreams and our prophetically inspired visions without persistent threats to our survival.  Conversely, I cannot be coerced to give up my empathy and concede my compassion for those who are suffering, whichever side of the border they live on.

This situation brings heartache but also hope.  The struggle to hold tenaciously onto our Jewish identity and at the same time to take our place in the strivings of humanity is worth it.  Indeed, in my view it’s our purpose in being here: here in this synagogue on Rosh Hashana, and here in this nation of Australia, where the issue of social cohesion looms so large at present.  Without minority communities such as ours, “social cohesion” is easy.  The challenge is exactly where we as a nation find ourselves right now.  I’m pretty sure this is what Bob Hawke meant when he famously said, referring to the poet John Donne, “If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel.  It will toll for all mankind.”  Jonathan Sacks said something similar when he described Jews as the canary in humanity’s coal mine; antisemitism, he said, begins with Jews but it never ends with Jews.

But this means we Jews have an important role to play in promoting social well-being for everyone and, as we put it, mending the brokenness in the world.  Ron Castan knew that, so did the other human rights activists I named earlier.  This is captured beautifully in a poem by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, with which I’ll end.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin wrote this achingly moving poem, “A Tiny Seed,” about her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was one of the hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October.   Hersh lost an arm in the attack.  Rachel recited her poem before the United Nations General Assembly in December 2023, several months before the bodies of six hostages, including Hersh’s, were recovered by the IDF in Gaza.

There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a
thousand tears before you grow to be a man.
I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days.
We all have.
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.

All those tears, a sea of tears
they all taste the same.
Can we take them
gather them up,
remove the salt
and pour them over our desert of despair
and plant one tiny seed.
A seed wrapped in fear,
trauma, pain,
war and hope
and see what grows?

Could it be
that this woman
so very like me
that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years
laughing without teeth
because we have drunk so much sweet tea together
and now we are so very old
and our faces are creased
like worn-out brown paper bags.

And our sons
have their own grandchildren
and our sons have long lives
One of them without an arm
But who needs two arms anyway?
Is it all a dream?
A fantasy? A prophecy?
One tiny seed.

Ken yehi ratzon.
L’shana tova tikateivu

[1] David Hazony, ed, Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People (2023)

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