Destiny Knocking
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And were it the case that Soloveitchik accomplished only that with this lecture, we could say – as the song goes – dayenu, that would have been enough. In my mind, however, it is a theological distinction that Soloveitchik makes towards the beginning of the lecture that is the key to it all. In confronting the horrors of Holocaust, Soloveitchik asks the question of why suffering exists; how is it possible that God could have allowed such trauma to befall the Jewish people? But unlike so many other theologians, Soloveitchik concedes that the answer to the question of suffering lies beyond human comprehension. Nevertheless, despite the lack of answers, we cannot be immobilized. We cannot be what he calls a people of fate – passive participants in the unfolding of history – much in the same way that Aaron, despite the senseless loss of his two sons in this morning’s parashah, must move forward. The Jewish people, he explains, must move forward from their pain and understand themselves to be a people of destiny – deliberately and consciously charting out a future. We will, in all likelihood, never understand the reason for our afflictions, be they personal or national. But we can, if we so choose, recognize the blessings, the hesed, in our lives and in doing so, leverage those blessings towards strengthening the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and the world in which we live. Israel is neither a byproduct of the Holocaust, nor for that matter does her existence mitigate the trauma suffered by the Jewish people. Rather Israel embodies the unprecedented opportunity for the Jewish people to author their own narrative and become – as Professor Ken Stein teaches – the subject of our own sentence and not the object of someone else’s.
Just days ago, our community observed Yom HaShoah and in just a few short days we will gather to celebrate Yom HaAtzma’ut. While loose parallels exist, we must be careful about drawing too close a correspondence between our moment and that of 1956. As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” And yet, I am in agreement with my teacher Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter who observed that none of Soloveitchik’s fundamental positions are in need of being reworked, “only more fully understood.” (Tradition 39:3, p. 55) Could it not be said that our age, our moment of American Jewry, is also in desperate need of a forceful, coherent, and actionable stance when it comes to Israel’s security? Are we ourselves not in danger of the emergence of – if we are not already experiencing – a chasm growing between American foreign policy interests and the interests and needs of the State of Israel? Are we not bearing witness in our day, as Soloveitchik did in his, to a widening gap between the Diaspora and Israeli Jewry? Are we ourselves not guilty of letting the internal divisions of the Jewish people spill out into the open and thus undercut not only any semblance of Jewish unity, but our very ability to defend Israel effectively in her hour of need? Friends, we too are living through a turning point. Not decades from now, not years from now, but much, much sooner than any of us think, history will judge us and it will be the declarations, decisions, and deeds to which we here in this room commit that will determine not just the judgments of history, but the very future of our people.
So let us resolve here today not to be a people of fate, but to be a people of destiny. When it comes to Israel, the most strident voices are not necessarily the sane ones. Let’s model a community that is capable of standing with Israel, in thick and thin, left and right, Democrat and Republican. There are those in the community, filling my inbox and yours, who would have you believe that one cannot support the New Israel Fund and AIPAC in one breath and with one checkbook, as if seeding Jewish-Arab coexistence and advocating on behalf of Israel are somehow at odds with each other. There are those who would choose to turn New York’s annual Celebrate Israel parade into a circus of dissent rather than a display of Jewish unity. We here at Park Avenue Synagogue have the opportunity and, quite frankly, the heft, to demonstrate to the world that one can defend Israel in the public sphere, advocate for a two-state solution, and work towards a pluralistic vision of global Jewish peoplehood and see these goals as interdependent, not contradictory. After all, what is it we are all seeking, if not a safe, secure, Israel, peaceably co-existing with her neighbors, central to the identity of world Jewry, a world Jewry who are assured that their Jewishness is recognized and at home in the Jewish homeland? Is that vision a distant one? Undoubtedly. Are there differences in tactics and outcomes? You bet. But it would be a shanda of generational proportions if we in this room sat out this round of Jewish history because we were worried about those who would seek to divide us even further. It is a strange thing to advocate for, but when it comes to Israel, ours is an era in desperate need of the emergence of a sane center, a center with enough elasticity to house dissent, a center that is always able to work together in spite of our differences. This is what it means to be a people of destiny, to step up to the needs of the hour, to know that what we share far outweighs what we don’t, and to fulfill our obligation to direct the blessings, the hesed, of our lives towards strengthening the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
The final paragraph of Soloveitchik’s essay states the following: “Judaism has always believed . . . that a person has the ability to take his fate into his hands to mold it into destiny, into a life of freedom, meaning and joy, that he has the power to transform isolation into solitude, a sense of inferiority into a feeling of worth.” (p. 73) At the crossing of the Red Sea, at the base of Mount Sinai, at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv in 1948, in the crisis of 1956, at every juncture of Israel’s history, our people’s finest hours have occurred when we have declared na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will listen, we will mold our destiny, we will live purposefully, we will author our narrative, and we will leverage the blessings of our lives for the greater good of our people. So, too, may it be in our day. May this be our prayer, may this be our mission, and may this be our continued and shared destiny.