Rosh Hashana 5786 – Day One
ConTEXTUALIZING Israel
Today’s Torah portion for the First Day of Rosh Hashana, introduces us to Hagar’s suffering as she watches her son wasting away from thirst. In Genesis 21:17, it is God who hears the cries of the child, Ishmael, and takes pity on him, and saves him. What an ancient story with a modern message for us today as we struggle with the moral challenges faced by Israel, and by us, as we take in reports of Palestinian suffering in Gaza.
And it is not as if our sacred texts are silent on the matter. From laws of warfare found in the 20th chapter of Deuteronomy, including siege and destruction, to the Babylonian’s heartless destruction of Jerusalem in the Book of Lamentations, our tradition offers so much to consider on the subject of warfare, morality and suffering. These texts include the one we just read about the suffering of Hagar and Ishmael.
If you feel that the Netanyahu government is waging this war at this point unnecessarily, cruelly, or carelessly without a clear endpoint, you may have a point. In fact, perhaps half of Israelis might openly agree with you, which is one of the beautiful aspects of Israel seldom stated in the media.
 
And although these subjects are all worthy of multiple Shabbat sermons, I find it impossible to talk about them today, when Israel’s very legitimacy is under attack in the court of world opinion. It would be morally irresponsible for me, as your rabbi, to abandon Israel in its time of need. And believe you me, Israel needs us today as never before.
Let’s start with a little context:
October 6, 2023: A ceasefire exits, established after Hamas had broken the last four ceasefires, stretching all the way back to 2005, when Israel first left the Gaza Strip in the hope of peace with the Palestinians.
October 7, 2023: Terrorists from Hamas attack Israelis indiscriminately, many of them peace activists, raping women, murdering 1,200 civilians, including children and the aged, including Holocaust survivors, taking 251 hostages, and sending out videos documenting their cruelty with pride.
October 8, 2023: An initial 34 Harvard student groups co-sign a published letter ascribing sole responsibility to Israel for the October 7th Hamas attack.
 
It almost seemed as if October 7th reminded those inclined to vilify and hate Jews and Israel, that it was okay. And for those currently calling for a ceasefire – what about the Hamas ceasefire in effect as of October 6th?
Perhaps remembering something as long ago as two years is too taxing on our memory. How about something which occurred earlier THIS month?
On September 8th, six Israeli civilians were killed at a bus stop at the Ramot Junction in Jerusalem, by two Palestinian terrorists from a West Bank village just outside of Ramallah. You may have missed the story.
Beyond one short news cycle, the Western media barely gave these murders any notice and certainly did not provide any context. It is precisely this dangerous lack of context which makes it so easy to vilify Israel, especially in the eyes of our neighbors, and perhaps even people within our own synagogue family – perhaps even within our own families.
On this First Day of Rosh Hashana, I want to focus not only on TEXT, but on CONtext when it comes to Israel. And I want to start with this past September 8th. First, let’s move beyond reducing these murdered people to a mere number.
 
Afterall, reducing people to numbers was something the Nazis did to our people during the Shoah. Let us give these most recent Jewish victims, at least a minimum of respect by providing you with their names, their ages, and something of a backstory. In the coverage of the devastation in the Gaza Strip, I have found the time and effort Western media has expended to humanize Palestinian victims to be particularly moving and painful. By a show of hands, have stories of those Palestinian victims suffering in the Gaza Strip impacted you, too?
Therefore, here's a little bit more about each of the Israeli victims which Palestinian terrorists snuffed out during the holy month of Elul:
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Yaakov Pinto, 25: A new immigrant to Israel from Spain who was married three months prior.
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Yisrael Matzner, 28: A father of three and a Jerusalem resident who studied Torah.
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Levi Yitzchak Pash, 57: A maintenance worker and Torah scholar from the central West Bank.
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Sarah Mendelson, 60: A mother of four, grandmother, and active member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement.
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Rabbi Yosef David, 43: A Jerusalem resident and Torah scholar.
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Rabbi Mordechai Steintzag, 79: A certified cardiologist and baker who had immigrated from New York.
 
Let me provide even a little more context. The Palestinian terrorists who killed these six Israelis lived in a village only nine miles from that Jerusalem bus stop – nine miles. Nine miles is the width of the State of Israel at its narrowest, from the Mediterranean Sea to the beginning of the West Bank. Nine miles. If you were at Temple Beth El and you only had nine miles of gas left in your tank, you could get to the Children’s Museum at the Wilmington Riverfront, President Biden’s home in Greenville, Historic New Castle, or the entrance to Lum’s Pond State Park. Context – when it comes to reporting or thinking about Israel, we are lacking context.
Since we are talking about size, at its maximum length, Israel is just 263 miles long. From Temple Beth El, if you were traveling south in an electric car with a 263-mile range, you’d easily make it to Charlottsville, or Richmond, Virgina, before running out of juice. To the northwest you might almost make it to Pittsburgh, and to the northeast perhaps to just outside of Syracuse New York.
But if you look at the oversized coverage the media gives to Israel, almost to the exclusion of other conflict zones, why you’d think Israel was as big as the State of Texas!
 
And when pondering a two-state solution with the Palestinians, you may not have realized that the amount of land Israel has to negotiate with is painfully small.
And in terms of other possible homelands for the Jewish people, let’s make sure we understand the alternatives.
There are a total of 53 majority Muslim countries in the world, a population of 1.9 billion adherents worldwide, or roughly 25.6 % of the world’s population. Many of these Muslim-majority countries neighboring Israel have chosen to keep Palestinians wasting away in crowded refugee camps, rather than resettling them safely and with dignity, within their spacious borders.
When I think of those neighboring Muslim countries, I think of “ethnic cleaning.” Oh, not Palestinian ethnic cleansing, but rather, under-reported Jewish ethnic cleansing.
 
Imagine a map of the Middle East. Prior to 1948, major Jewish populations in Arab countries included Morocco (approx. 250,000), Iraq (approx. 135,000), Egypt (approx. 80,000-100,000), Algeria (approx. 130,000), Tunisia (approx. 105,000), Libya (approx. 35,000), Syria (approx. 30,000), Yemen/Aden (approx. 63,000), Lebanon (approx. 5,000), and North African countries as a whole accounting for over 65% of the total.
After 1948, these numbers drastically declined, with most populations disappearing or dwindling to a few hundred, or even none, due to expulsion and forced emigration. For example, Yemen saw its population drop from 63,000 to 500, while Libya and Iraq’s community ceased to exist. By 1978, the total Jewish population in Arab countries had fallen to under 32,000, a stark contrast to the nearly 800,000 to 880,000 who lived there just prior to 1948.
Many of those communities has existed for almost 2,500 years, dating back to the first expulsion of the Jews from Judea by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Imagine how much wealth was accumulated in more than 2,000 years all to be lost as Jewish communities were forced to leave their homes? This, my friends, is ethnic cleansing.
 
Let’s look at the charge of Israeli ethnic cleaning of Palestinians in comparison. Prior to the Creation of the State of Israel in 1948, approximately 950,000 Palestinians lived in the territory designated to be an Arab State. Today, more than 2.3 million Palestinian Arabs live in Israel, more than 21% of Israel’s overall population. There’s still a lot of work which needs to be done to integrate Palestinian Israelis. But one IS a Supreme Court Justice. And since 1949, 100 Palestinian Israelis have served or currently serve in the Israeli Knesset, the equivalent of our United States Congress.
Just to make sure we are being fair, let’s look at the population of Palestinians living only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Prior to 1967, just before the Six-Day War, the estimated Palestinian population was approximately 900,000 in the West Bank and 385,000–450,000 in the Gaza Strip. As of this month, September 2025, 3.3 million Palestinians currently live in the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem. Estimates indicate that the Gazan population is approximately 2.1 to 2.2 million.
 
In the face of these population numbers, it is only with the most malicious intent that anyone can accuse Israel of Palestinian ethnic cleansing or genocide. I am so sorry to report that it is Jews who have experienced ethnic cleaning at the hands of their Muslim neighbors in Arab lands, and actual genocide in Christian Europe.
Today, Jews make up only 15.8 million, or 0.2%, that’s 0.2%, of the world’s population. That’s down from 16.6 million prior to 1939. We lost six million of them in the Holocaust.
There are 120 majority Christian countries, 53 majority Muslim countries, 15 majority Hindu countries, four majority Buddhist countries, and only one, count “them” carefully, only ONE majority Jewish country –the State of Israel.
Alison Taub, our TBE Education Director and I are deeply worried about how we are educating our students about Israel in our Religious School. We feel that our students are in no position to face the anti-Zionist and often antisemitic environment they will face when they get to university.
 
So, we looked around for better alternatives and chose to work with IsraelLink to provide our students with the context sorely missing in Jewish religious school education. Some of the basic information I just shared with you about the size and population of Israel are part of the IsraelLink curriculum. In the upper grades, our students learn how to discuss controversial information which can create division between Jewish students and their peers.
IsraelLink’s mission, aside from developing excellence in Israel education is to create high-quality educational resources, training teachers, and providing ongoing support to inspire 21st-century learners.
IsraelLink Executive Director, Mina Rush, “In our vulnerability, it is often hard to put aside our feelings and respond only with facts, especially if their questions are laced with harsh words that trigger a reaction. I recommend applying this method: responding with "Tell me more"—even repeatedly—encourages your students to dig down to the ikar, the essence of what they are genuinely asking, and enables you to hear the real question behind their words.”
 
Obviously, one of those harsh words which might trigger a reaction is the word “genocide,” as applied to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Here, again, there is a terrible lack of context. Allow me to provide you with some. Let’s start with the 1988 Founding Hamas Charter itself. Regarding, not just the State of Israel, but every Jew in this sanctuary, Hamas states: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Reading like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the blueprint for Jewish genocide, the Hamas Charter states: “With their money, they took control of the world media,” reads Article 22, “news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” This statement could have easily been lifted from that antisemitic treatise, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
 
The 9000-word Hamas Charter blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World War I and II, and for the Rotary Club and the United Nations, “to enable the Jews to rule the world through them.”
“There is no war going on anywhere,” the Charter reads, “without (Jews) having their finger in it.”
When Hamas terrorists penetrated the south-west border of Israel, killing more than 1,200 Jews and taking more than 250 hostage, it triggered the worst memories of the Nazi’s genocidal extermination of our people.
Many of us in the congregation find the Gaza Strip war effort of the current Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, morally painful. The huge Palestinian death toll provided exclusively by Hamas, “Health Officials in the Gaza Strip,” and presented as factual by the media, cannot be accurate. Afterall, Hamas is in the business of morally delegitimizing Israel, not expressing nuance. Differences between fighters and non-combatants are fudged. But still, the suffering of Palestinian civilians runs headlong into our own value system as Jews living in Diaspora. We need to at least contextualize this coverage in a way that the Western media, and sources that our kids are exposed to, like TikTok, simply refuse to do.
 
I have often compared the relationship of American Jews to Israel to the relationship we might share with our mothers. I have a tough, 91-year old mother, may God watch over her for many years to come. I have often joked to her face and even behind her back, (something which I intend to atone for at Yom Kippur), stating that: “if my mom was an aquarium all the fish would be dead because Mom has no filter.” It is one thing for me to make this joke, but God-help you if YOU make that joke. You might respond that I am being unfair, even hypocritical, to be upset when someone else disparages my mom.
But don’t you understand? She is MY mom. I feel duty bound to protect her. She is part of who I am. Many Jews, and I suspect many of you gathered here this morning, feel the same way protectiveness toward Israel as you feel about your mom.
Israel has become a terribly divisive topic among the Jewish diaspora. Let’s examine the traditional-egalitarian independent miyanim in Brooklyn. There are actually anti-Zionist and pro-Zionist minyanim, and based on how these post-movement synagogues relate to Israel, adherents choose either to belong to them or separate from them.
 
Jews should be able to discuss their differences about Israel without dividing into warring camps. First and foremost, Jews need to learn to engage with one another.
If ONLY our community division was limited to traditional-egalitarian independent minyanim in Brooklyn! The current leadership of the Reconstructionist Movement, headquartered near Philadelphia, has been perceived as being particularly anti-Zionist. So much so, that the flagship Reconstructionist synagogue, Kehillat Israel, in the Pacific Palisades of Los Angeles, home to such Hollywood celebrities as Steven Speilberg, Adam Sandler and Billy Crystal, has officially broken off from the Movement over their Rabbinical School’s stance on Israel. And there are considerations within our own synagogue’s leadership and members to follow suit, in part, for the same reason.
Perhaps this Reconstructionist anti-Zionism is based on a worry that rising anti-Semitic incidents, up over 360% in the aftermath of October 7th according to the ADL, is connected to Israeli policy in Gaza.
 
I’ll be delivering a sermon at Kol Nidrei titled “Let Them.” In it, I claim that you really cannot control what other people think of you. All you can really control is how you choose to let other people’s opinions impact you. There are those who are going to hate us because we are Jews, and blame us for what Netanyahu’s government does in the Gaza Strip. But throwing Israel under the bus is not going to win us any friends. And the damage we do to, not only Israel, but to our own community’s unity will do untold damage.
I think when it comes to discussing Israel, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the word “Zionism.” Zionist does not exemplify a colonialist ideal as some critics claim. Had Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, successfully adopted the British proposal for the Uganda Plan, with a Jewish homeland in East Africa, Zionism would have been colonialist. But Zionism rooted in ancient Israel is the only story in world history of a dispersed people successfully returning to its ancient Homeland.
Nor does Zionism imply that one agrees with every action taken by the current Israeli government. In fact, by its very democratic nature, Zionists can be some of the staunchest critics of Israeli politics.
 
These criticisms come from a place of love, desiring Israel to be the best version of itself. At its core, all Zionism is, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to exist and exercise self-determination in our ancestral homeland.
The best way to exercise that self-determination remains hotly debated, but it is a debate that holds one central premise to be true: Israel has a legitimate right to exist, as ensconced in the United Nation’s Partition Plan of November 29, 1947. Afterall, no one debates the right of The Islamic Republic of Iran to exist! Or of Russia to exist, even though many of us find both countries’ behavior reprehensible. Only Israel is singled out for existential questioning by those who disagree with its behavior.
I remain a proud American on the eve of our 250th birthday. This pride is independent of the current politics of the day. It is based on a much larger context of America’s amazing successes and its obvious failures in its treatment of minorities. I can offer criticism of actions taken by the United States with the understanding that it comes from a place of deep love of my country. That love was shaped through the eyes of my own father of blessed memory.
 
Alan Beals was an immigrant to these shores who was proud to become an American citizen. He proudly served in the United States Air Force to protect his country during war time. From a love of country, I hope for a better future in which we more fully live up to the principles first articulated by America’s 18th century Founding Generation.
So too, should our pride of Israel, and the pride of Hebrew School students, be based on all Israel has accomplished within the context of its brief 77+ years of existence, as well as all that Israel could become in the future. We also have a responsibility to consider the brief 80 years since the end of World War Two and the revelation of a staggering six million of our brethren who perished in the Holocaust.
Within that context we must understand that Israel, in particular, and Jews as a whole, remain traumatized by the genocide of our people by Hitler’s Germany. I find it reprehensible that the United Nations, just two weeks ago, declared that Israel is practicing Genocide against the Palestinian People. This is the same UN, who once passed, and later recanted, a resolution which declared Zionism as Racism.
 
We also remember, when it comes to Genocide, that the rest of the world remained painfully silent about the fate of the Jews just prior to World War II. Through their silence they were painfully complicit in the extermination of our people. This accusation of genocidal complicity was manifested at the Evian Conference of 1938. It was there that the world’s Democratic nations met and refused to rescue Europe’s Jewish population.
Hitler’s goal was to rid Europe of its Jewish population. He did not care how. But when the Democracies failed to exercise moral charity towards the Jews of their time, refusing to take them in, Hitler interpreted it as a sign that no one cared if the Jews lived or died. For Hitler, it was a green light to move forward with a Final Solution, so he strove to completely eradicate Europe’s Jews once and for all…and he just about succeeded.
It is this historical context which makes current moralizing against the excesses of the Jewish State ring hollow in the ears of Israel’s current leadership. I do not suggest for one moment, that we remain hard-hearted like Pharaoh, ignoring the hunger and suffering of Palestinians living in Gaza, or those subject to settler violence and territorial expansion in the West Bank.
 
But I also think it is irresponsible of us not to understand both how small and vulnerable Israel is, and how its leadership and citizens still remain scarred by the genocide waged against our people a mere 80 years ago.
In that context, how can we NOT see the charge of “genocide” against Israel as an anathema, and as a historical insult against the memories of the six million of our brothers and sisters who were truly subjected to genocide?! We may disagree with the means, but one thing is obvious: Hamas attacked Israel and professes the murder of Jews, not just in Israel but throughout the world. At its core, Hamas is dedicated to the delegitimization and ultimate destruction of Israel. That said, it is fair to insist that much more should be done to preserve and protect the lives of Palestinian civilians. But it is simply untrue to state that Israel is at war with and striving to annihilate ALL Palestinians. THAT goal would INDEED be “genocide.” That WAS Hitler’s goal against Jews during the Holocaust – our TOTAL annihilation. That is NOT Israel’s goal.
We must teach our children, and ourselves, that Israel is so much more than the just the current conflict with Hamas.
 
Israel is so much more than just a lack of resolution to the Palestinian goal of nationhood in a land of their own, what Israel calls “ha metzav.”
Israel is a wonderful place for promoting scientific discoveries.
Israel is a homeland for the world’s displaced Jews.
Israel is the fulfillment of the dream of returning to our ancestral home, from which we were forcibly removed two 2000 years ago.
Israel is the heart and soul of Jewish thought, prayer and yearning.
Israel is physically beautiful, socially complex, and like American Democracy, an ongoing experiment, an ongoing Zionist experiment in Jewish self-government and sovereignty, still in the making.
Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom, aleynu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’al ko yoshevi teyvel, v’imru, amen.
May we never stop praying for the peace of Israel, the peace of her neighbors, and the peace of all who dwell on earth, v’imru, and let us say, amen.