Israel in the eyes of the world.

Before Erev Shabbat services on July 10th, more than thirty people came for a cookout followed by a presentation by Cincinnati Shaliach Amir Yarchi. Amir, his wife Moran and their twin sons joined us for dinner. Amir and his family will be staying another year in Cincinnati to continue serving as the official representative from the State of Israel.

Amir's presentation was very though provoking, at least for me. He suggested that we have made a significant error in the way we talk about Israel. He points out that usually when American Jews talk about Israel, it is in regards to security threats. The fear of those threats is great. In the aftermath of the Holocaust era, we look back and see that the American Jewish community was not prepared to do all that it might have done. We live with the motto, "never again."

We have done an admirable job here in the U.S. Public support for Israel is high. US leaders continually stress the strong support for Israel even when it conflicts with economic and foreign policy interests. However, there have been times when that relationship seemed strained, yet politicians have never swerved from voicing their support. Even Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress expresses his strong support.

The truth is, however, we do Israel a disservice. In his column, Al Miller highlighted some of Israel's achievements. We need to do this more often. Amir brought with him the first ingestible video camera (it is the size of a large capsule and it is swallowed) developed by Given Imaging Once swallowed, the camera produces digital images of the small intestine (some BIS members and probably some of your friends have already benefited from it). An Israeli company developed and installed the first large scale solar powered electric generating plant in California's Mojave Desert. Last year, an Israeli company announced plans to create 1/4 million charging stations in Israel for electric cars that are to be built within three years.

These and many other technological achievements are the result of the fact that Israel leads the world in the number of scientists and technicians per capita in the work force. While Israel is tiny, on a per capita basis, it leads the world in many things, including the number of museums.

More than 100 years ago, Theodore Herzl's vision was of a Jewish State that was a leader in sciences and the arts. We would do well to remember his vision and let the world know about Israel's contributions to all of humanity.

Presiendt Obama's Cairo Speech

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SPEECH IN CAIRO

I was asked to write an article for the internet about President Obama’s speech. It was printed in the Journal news as an opinion piece. Many Jews have difficulty answering questions about why Israel does not make peace with the Palestinians, so here is a brief summary of some of the points.

Arabs say that for the last two hundred years, Western countries have interfered with their region, causing all their current problems. This is their excuse for everything that is wrong in the Middle East. They blame Israel for the problem of the Palestinian refugees, without mentioning that they are responsible as well. Here are four reasons the Arabs responsible for the problem of the Palestinians refugees.

1) Arabs reject UN plan for a Jewish and an Arab State.
The UN plan in 1947 was for two countries, an Arab country and a Jewish country.

2) Five Arab armies invade Israel in 1948.
The armies of Egypt, Jordan Iraq, Syria and Lebanon invaded Israel as soon as the British left. Israel was a tiny country with 600,000 Jews. It had no real army and very few weapons. It was a terribly dangerous situation and President Truman was worried there would be a slaughter. The Arabs certainly believed there would be. There were radio warnings from Arab countries to the Palestinians living in Israel to leave so they would not be in the way After a truce ended, Israel forces slowly managed to push back the Arab armies. It was a costly war for Israel, 6,000 Jewish soldiers died in that war.

If the Arabs had not started the war in 1948, no Jews or Arabs would have had to flee their homes and the Palestinians would now have had their own country for 61 years.

3) After the war, Egypt and Jordan do not let the Palestinians form a country.
Even after losing the war, Jordan and Egypt could have let the Palestinians have a country. Instead, they took those areas their armies captured and made them part of their own countries.

4) Arabs force Palestinian refugees to remain refugees.
Since the end of World War Two, tens of millions of refugees have been successfully resettled. 850,000 Jewish refugees fled from Arab countries and came to Israel. These Jewish refugees were welcomed and settled in Israel.

The Palestinian refugees were forced to remain from the rest of the population, they are not allowed to become citizens nor they cannot get jobs outside their areas. There is a special UN organization that deal only with the Palestinians, UNRWA, which does not try to help he Palestinians become citizens of the countries in which they live or find new homes.

The Arabs themselves are responsible for creating the Palestinian refugee problem. Yet Arabs blame Israel for the Palestinian refugee problem. Arabs believe that it is a huge concession on their part that they consider recognizing Israel’s right to exist. They think that Israel should go back to the pre-1967 borders, which would mean giving the Arabs the old city of Jerusalem. There are other concessions they must make if there is to be peace. Israel has been trying to reach a peace agreement, but insists that all terrorism against Israel must stop. Until that happens, the refugee problem will not end.

Abandoned Jewish Cemeteries

Question: According to family records, some of my mother's ancestors were buried in Uckermark, Germany. They came from Metz, France with Napoleon's army, around 1812. I just learned that the Nazis used the gravestones from Jewish cemeteries to build prisons for a concentration camp in the district of Uckermark, Germany. I suppose their stones were used. Has the German government made any attempts to restore the old Jewish cemeteries desecrated by the Nazis? What is the Jewish obligation, religiously? Neither of my parents WHO ESCAPED FROM GERMANY IN 1938 wanted to go back after the war.

Answer: It is a religious commandment, a mitzvah to care for the graves of the deceased. Events of the last 70 years make this very complicated. Today may communities in which large numbers of Jews once lived are empty or nearly empty of Jews. The largest number are those communities decimated by the Holocaust, but also a large number of communities, especially in the Arab world, have been abandoned by Jews who fled persecution in the 1940 & 50s. The cemetery of the Jewish community of Shanghai, relatively small except for a brief period during the Holocaust when it was a place of refuge for 40,000 Jews who abandoned it after the war, is also in need of attention. In Toledo Spain, work to expand a local school on to the Jewish cemetery (abandoned by the Jews who fled in 1492) stopped and the government agreed to talk with interested parties.

The Jewish community has focused on helping the survivors and supporting the tiny remnants of European Jewry. The problem of who will care for Jewish cemeteries is a complicated one. In Germany alone, there are an estimated 2,000 cemeteries and 600,000 individual graves. More work seems to be done by some local communities or even private individuals than by national governments. The Lo Tishkach Foundation (Do Not Forget) has created a website to help collect information about European cemeteries, and to advocate for laws that protect the sites.

Specifically, Uckermark is a district region in northeastern Germany and is the largest district in Germany. It was the site of a satellite of the Ravensbrook Concentration camp, which was near the city of Furstenberg. Originally, Uckermark was established for housing girls. Towards the end of the war, it was turned into a killing center and was liberated by the Soviets in April 1945. Substantial efforts have been made to preserve Ravensbrook itself, but not for Uckermark or the two-dozen or so sub-camps. Without knowing where your family was buried it is hard to know if their gravestones were used or not, and even more difficult, are any of the gravestones used still intact.

In the traditional Hagaddah, we recount the ten plagues with which the Eternal strikes the people of Egypt. Then we read about the parting of sea so that the Israelites can escape Pharaoh. Following that, there is a curious section that begins with a quote from Rabbi Yose the Galilean. How does one derive that, after the ten plagues in Egypt, the Egyptians suffered fifty plagues at the Sea? Rabbi Yose proves this using a principle of Biblical interpretation, but the question is why would he want to do so? Why did the Egyptians suffer more at the parting of the sea greater than during the plagues of darkness or the turning of the Nile into blood?

Rabbi Yose does not give an answer, but there is a hint in a Rabbinic story about what happened immediately before the parting of the sea. According to this Midrash, when Moses cries out to the Eternal to save the people, God's response is, "What are you waiting for, start moving!" So the people begin walking into the sea. Nothing happens. When the water reaches their waists, nothing happens, their shoulders, still nothing. The water reaches their mouths and the people begin to swallow water, at that moment the waters part.

Rabbi Yose may have been alluding to the fact that unlike the 10 plagues, the miracle until the people do something first. In fact, the waters do not part until the Israelites had done everything humanly possible. The ten plagues were to teach the Egyptians a lesson about the cruelty they had imposed on Israel. This Rabbinic Midrash teaches that the sea was to test the faith of the Israelites. The miracle came in response to their faith. It is one thing for the Egyptians to suffer due to Divine power. There is no shame in being beaten by the power of the Universe. It is quite something else to suffer because of the faith of former slaves, the very people over whom they had exalted themselves.

The point of the Midrash is to teach us something important about ourselves. When faced with challenges, waiting is not an option. This is true about national challenges as well. We cannot wait for salvation to come from somewhere else, but each one of us must do all that is in our power to overcome the challenge. The real miracle is that we have the power to change destiny.

Kim, Evan, Seth Micah and I wish you a healthy and joyous Pesach.

Young Israeli woman speaks about kassam missiles

Why are people not speaker out about the terror hundreds of thousands of Israelis must live with on a daily basis.

February 2009

I was at a Rabbinical Study Retreat this week. On the first full day, one of my colleagues died. His name was Rabbi Alan Lew. He had recently retired as a pulpit Rabbi in San Francisco and had opened a Jewish meditation center. Earlier in his life, Rabbi Lew had studied to become a Zen Buddhist monk, yet something inside pushed him to explore his Jewish roots and eventually he became a Conservative Rabbi. He was an outspoken voice for social justice. Part of the reason that the life of a monk may not have been right for Rabbi Lew, was that he felt the call to live life fully, rather than to withdraw into the solitary life of contemplation and meditation.

On the first morning of our retreat, he had led a meditation session before Shacharit, the morning service. He had gone for a walk and suffered a heart attack. That afternoon, we gathered in the Synagogue and were told he had died. We were all in shock. He was our colleague, teacher and friend.

Rabbi Lew had just published a book called, “This is Real and Your Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation.” The book is a collection of his ideas, developed in sermons, about how the High Holidays are rituals for transforming our lives. A number of colleagues had read it and were deeply impressed. After our meeting I grabbed a copy of his book, opened it to the chapter, Death and Yom Kippur Atone and read: we are born and we die, and nothing that happens in between is nearly as important as these two fundamental facts of life. I do not know if Rabbi Lew had thought these words would apply to him so soon, but it certainly has made many of his colleagues think about it. We have little say over how close the two fundamental facts of life will be. We do, however, get to choose what happens in between. Hopefully we can make an impact on the world, as did my teacher and colleague, Rabbi Alan Lew. Zichrono livracha, may his memory be a blessing.

Does Jewish law permit he State of Israel to attack Gaza, even if civilians are killed?

1) Jewish Law Requires the Use of Force to Stop those Attacking Jews.

In Exodus 22:1 the Torah states if a "thief is discovered tunneling [into a house in order to break in) and is beaten and dies, there is no bloodguilt in his case" The Talmud explains the thief knows the homeowner will try to fight off the attack and is prepared to kill the homeowner. The owner is acting in self-defense. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 72a) derives the principle, "if someone comes to kill you, you must kill him/her first," from this case.

One of the greatest Jewish thinkers, Moses Maimonides, called the Rambam, differentiates between a permitted war and a required war. He writes, a war is required (a mitzvah) when its purpose is "to help Israel against an enemy who attacks them".

There is no doubt that Israel must stop Hamas, which has launched thousands of rockets against Israeli civilians. Indeed, many suggest that Israel made a terrible mistake in not responding more forcefully when the rocket attacks began.

2) Jewish Law requires avoiding the deliberate killing of non-combatants.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Jewish authority Philo of Alexandria (Egypt), wrote, "Jews do not deliberately kill non-combatants" (The Special Laws 4:224-225).

Israel has gone to unprecedented lengths to avoid killing civilians, including dropping leaflets and calling Gazans on cell phones and warning them of an attack. Israel ceases firing for three hours each day to give the civilians a chance to go outside, safe from danger.

3) Hamas is responsible for all deaths, both Israeli and Palestinian.

Although Israel is condemned for the death of Palestinian civilians, it is Hamas that violates international law. First, Hamas deliberately targets Israeli citizens. Hamas has fired nearly 10,000 missiles at Israel. Casualties have been low because Israel tries to protect its civilians. It has created an early warning system. Public buildings have shelters, as do many homes. What this means is that nearly three quarter of a million Israelis live with the threat of missile attacks. Their lives are in jeopardy and they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. No country in the world would allow its citizens to be similarly terrorized.

Second, Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields, it deliberately places military targets in civilian areas. This means that when Israel retaliates, Palestinians are injured or killed. Here too, Hamas is responsible for their deaths. Alan Dershowitz, a well-known lawyer and professor at Harvard law school makes the analogy between Hamas and a bank robber. If a robber takes a hostage and the police, while trying to stop the criminal, accidentally kill the hostage, the robber is guilty of murder. The reason is that the robber endangered the hostage by placing the hostage in the line of fire.

Hamas is guilty for the deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians. Yet, Hamas is seen as heroes in the Arab world. International condemnations mean nothing to Hamas. Hamas is an evil force, willing to kill civilians or cause to be killed. As long as the Palestinian people permit them to continue, they will suffer the consequences.

Israel has the obligation to defend its citizens. Sixty years ago, the world refused to defend Jews from genocide. Today, the world seems unwilling to allow Jews to defend ourselves.