The next time you are in Israel, I want you to look at the portraits on every shekel bill. Unlike American currency, which features presidents and statesmen – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton – the banknotes of Israel bear the faces of the nation’s greatest poets and literary giants. Rachel Bluwstein, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Leah Goldberg, and on the largest, the 200-shekel bill, our poetic guide for today, Natan Alterman. Their words are woven into the story of the nation and its land, literally and figuratively, the currency in which Israel’s soul is accounted.
Born in Warsaw in 1910, Natan Alterman immigrated with his family to the young city of Tel Aviv in 1925. In the Mandate period, some of Alterman’s poems were banned by British censors yet eagerly copied and passed hand to hand by the public. Translator, journalist, playwright, and songwriter – over his lifetime, Alterman received nearly every literary prize Israel has to offer, including, just before his passing in 1970, the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement in literature. While many of his works are lyrical in nature, it was through his political verse, printed every Friday in his newspaper column Ha-tur Ha-shevi·i, (“The Seventh Column”) – that Alterman became the nation’s poetic conscience. Two of his poems, written one year apart in the heat of Israel’s 1947–48 founding struggle, spoke with searing urgency at that time and speak just as urgently to us today.
The first poem is perhaps his most famous of all: Magash Ha-kesef, “The Silver Platter.” The poem portrays a young man and woman at moonlight, exhausted from battle, dressed in army gear, bone-weary from days and nights on the battlefield. I won’t read it all, but the poem concludes:
When the nation asks in tears,
mi atem? (Who are you?) The young partisans quietly
answer: Anachnu magash ha-kesef
asher alav nitnah lakhem medinat ha-yehudim.
(We are the silver platter upon which the Jewish state was presented.)
The key to understanding the poem lies in its date of publication: December 19, 1947. Just three weeks earlier, on November 29, the UN Partition Plan was announced. In the days that followed, one hundred and twenty Jews were killed, a catastrophic toll at any time, all the more so in those vulnerable pre-state days. On a very bloody December 9, six Jews were murdered near the village of Shuat in the Negev, among them two teenagers – Miriam Shachor and Assaf Shachnai – murdered in cold blood, chased down, and left in a ditch. Their funeral was attended by thousands in Tel Aviv, including Alterman himself.
Chaim Weizmann, soon to be Israel’s first president, was in America that December, raising funds for the nascent state. Hearing of the trauma back home, he declared to an audience in Atlantic City on December 13, as reported in the New York Times, “No state has been handed to us on a silver platter.” The turn of phrase reached Israel and was translated into Hebrew in the Israeli press, becoming, ironically, the English seed for Israel’s most famous national poem.
The poem transformed Alterman into Israel’s comforter-in-chief. The young man and woman rising from the mist are Miriam and Assaf and every other soul felled in defense of the Jewish homeland. Jewish self-determination would come, promised Alterman, but not with pomp and ceremony, but by way of the lives of its youth – the sacrificial “silver platter.” Set to music, engraved on Israeli postage stamps, recited every Memorial Day, there is hardly a national commemoration without Magash Ha-kesef being sung or read. Israel’s poetic monument to the sacrifice of Israel’s brave young men and women.
The second poem is less well known for reasons which will become self-evident. It is called Al Zot, “For This,” classic biblical language when Israel is summoned to account. Al Zot was published nearly one year after Magash Ha-kesef, on November 19, 1948 – six months after Ben Gurion had declared Israel’s independence This was a new chapter of war. On the one hand, Israel had found its footing; on the other hand, the harsh and bloody cycles of wartime violence were tragically present on both sides. The displacements of Palestinian Arabs in October’s Operation Yoav and the killing of Palestinian Arabs in Al-Dawayima confronted the dream of Jewish sovereignty with the nightmare of what war can make one become. Scholarly consensus holds that Yitzhak Sadeh, then Chief of Staff of the Haganah, the man who invented the IDF’s doctrine of purity of arms, having learned of the dark deeds committed by Jewish soldiers, reported the terrible events to Alterman, who then wrote a poem that brought them to light.
Al Zot is a searing indictment of the moral costs, blind spots, and overreaches that accompanied the war. Alterman describes an Israeli soldier:
Mounted on a jeep, he had crossed the conquered city . . .
an old man and a woman were pressed to the wall . . .
And the lad smiled with baby teeth,
”I will try the machine gun” . . . and he tried.
The old man just covered his face with his hands,
and his blood covered the wall. . . .
Friends, this is a snapshot of the battle for freedom…
Milchamteinu tova·at bitui v’shirim . . .
Tov! Yushar lah, im ken, gam al zot.
Our war demands to be expressed in song –
Fine, then sing of it! But if so, sing also for this!
Alterman had become Israel’s mirror of conscience. The power of the poem, of which I have only offered the smallest fragment, lies not just in the horrific truths it names but in its leveraging of classical prophetic language onto Israel itself.
The seismic impact of Al Zot went deeper and wider than its publication that Friday afternoon. Among those who read it that Shabbat was Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. How would Ben-Gurion respond to such a public accounting during wartime? Would he suppress it? Dismiss Alterman from his post? That Sunday morning, November 21, 1948, Ben Gurion wrote the following letter to Alterman:
Dear Alterman,
Yashar koach for the moral authority and strength of expression in your last column in “Davar.” You became the mouthpiece – a pure and true mouthpiece to human conscience. If this conscience will not act and beat in our hearts in these days, we shall not be worthy of the great things we have achieved so far.
I ask your permission to print this “column.” No armored column in our arsenal can surpass it for fighting might – to be published by the Ministry of Defense in one hundred thousand copies and distributed to every military man in Israel.
With gratitude and appreciation,
D. Ben Gurion
And Ben-Gurion did exactly that: 100,000 copies of Alterman’s poem and Ben Gurion’s letter, a copy distributed to every IDF soldier, the poem and Ben-Gurion’s response serving as a reminder that a people’s true strength lies not only in its columns of tanks, but in its columns of conscience. To this day, that is the litmus test of Israel’s ability to uphold the ethical dimensions of securing it safety without losing its soul.
Alterman’s poems are the spiritual index of Israel’s patriotic repertoire. These two poems reflect not only two distinct chapters of Israel’s War of Independence but also two starkly different realities of war. Magash Ha-kesef, Israel’s de facto national poem of sacrifice. Al Zot, the heshbon hanefesh, the moral accounting, that war demands. Alterman himself would come to see them as companion pieces. Years later, when his collected poems were published in a single volume, he insisted that Magash Ha-kesef and Al Zot appear not in chronological order but side by side, thus compelling the reader to confront the multiple truths that come with war.
When we arrive in this room on Yom Kippur, the language of prayer provides us the index to our existence. Depending on the prayer book, either Mi-yom kippurim she-avar, ad yom kippurim ha-zeh; or mi-yom kippurim zeh, ad yom kippurim ha-ba . . . “From last Yom Kippur until this Yom Kippur; from this Yom Kippur until next Yom Kippur.” In our own lives, our families, and our people, where were we this time last year? Where are we this year? And then, what steps do we need to take to get to the place where we want to be next year? Like two poems written a year apart but printed side by side, so too us, the rhythms, rituals, and prayers of the day alerting us to the passage of time and the changed realities in which we live.
Imperfect as the analogy may be, no matter your personal politic, as a community invested in the people and State of Israel, it is hard to miss the parallels between Alterman’s book-ended year and our own. In the words of Prime Minister Netanyahu: “This is our second War of Independence.” In the aftermath of the horrific October 7th attacks, all Israelis rallied to Israel’s defense. Even the government’s fiercest critics understood that it was a time to set differences aside, to comfort the bereaved, to secure the defense of the Jewish state, and to fight for the release of the hostages. There is a Hebrew expression, ten gav, literally, “give your back,” meaning to lend your strength. Every Israeli was called upon to ten gav to a son, daughter, grandchild, or sibling heading to the front. Those murdered that day, those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the days that followed, the displaced, the plight of the hostages – they are, in Alterman’s words, the new silver platter upon which the Jewish state is secured and sustained.
And this Yom Kippur, the oaths, vows, affirmations, pleas, and protests rising out of Israel are different than they were a year ago. There have been, to be sure, stunning battlefield achievements – against Hamas, against Hezbollah, in Syria, against Iran, and beyond. When I was in Israel this past summer on a UJA solidarity mission, sobering as it was to witness the damage inflicted on Israel, I was even more struck by how catastrophic it would have been were it not for the strength of Israel’s military made possible by American support. Since October 7th, Israel has done yeoman’s work towards securing its short-term and long-term security.
And while all may agree on these achievements, within Israel itself there is anything but consensus on a host of other issues. With forty-eight hostages still in captivity, shall Israel prioritize their release or seek total victory over Hamas, if such a victory is even attainable? Many Israelis view the use of military pressure as an impediment to, not an instrument toward their release, with some hostage parents accusing the government of “Jews sending Jews to kill Jews.” On Israeli news the other day, I saw the story of one combat mother, Shiri Kenner, who drove down to her son’s tank base to physically prevent him from returning to combat. The incalculable psychological toll a two-year war takes not only on the soldiers themselves but on their families, their young men and women sent into battle by a government shaped by its most extreme elements, a government that has long since abandoned the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence.
As for Gaza, given the combination of an insulated Israeli media and a self-insulated Israeli society, it is unclear how much Israelis know –or want to know – about the impact of IDF operations on Palestinian lives. And while I am disinclined to accept the numbers, narrative, and nomenclature offered by the New York Times, NPR, and other sources, I also know that one need not be an expert in international law to recognize that there are serious and seriously bad things happening in Gaza: death, displacement and devastation of Palestinian life and living. Based on what I hear from my own family and friends with children serving in the IDF, the prevailing posture seems to be: hug your child tightly, give thanks that they are alive, ask them no questions, attend a rally reflecting one’s politics, and defer moral reckoning to a future day. I do not know what Alterman’s Al Zot would say if it were written today. I only know that if he were to write, he would urge Israel to take a hard look at itself in the mirror. He would insist that such soul-searching, the quintessential activity of today, not be mistaken for weakness or fodder for our enemies or internal divisions, but as an essential act of renewal, the path by which Israel restores both its moral compass and its national strength.
This is, best as I can make out, the divided soul of Israel. Not the Israel of last Yom Kippur, nor for that matter the Israel portrayed in the media, in which the Prime Minister is some kind of dictator without strong grassroots support. The Israeli consensus remains in lockstep[MH4] that Hamas must never again be capable of inflicting another October 7th. The Israeli soul is exhausted and waiting to exhale, mustering resolve even as it fights for survival and legitimacy while continuing to nurse open wounds. The Israeli soul which every Saturday night begins hostage rallies and anti-government protests with moments of silence and prayer for soldiers and ends with the singing of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem. The Israeli soul where parents of fallen soldiers and slain hostages say Kaddish shoulder to shoulder. A national soul holding the silver platter of sacrifice and the moral reckoning of Al Zot at one and the same time.
And if this is how Alterman felt then, and how Israelis feel now, should it be any surprise that we, a community invested in Israel with every fiber of our being, also wrestle with these selfsame feelings? If I had to name the malady of our age, it would be the mythically seductive and corrosively simplistic fiction that to be a Jew demands a monolithic voice, uniform identity and uncritical loyalty. No person is any one thing; we are all compound creatures – adjacent, overlapping, sometimes competing poems bound together in a single volume. It is a truth that holds in every aspect of our being – the love we hold for our children, for our family, for our country, and as Jews who stand with Israel. We do ourselves immeasurable damage when we press one another into false choices: To be Israel’s fiercest critic or Israel’s fiercest defender, that Israel is always right or Israel is always wrong. Such binaries are a toxic distortion of reality. They do not reflect Israel, they do not reflect our love of Israel, and they do not reflect how love, or life, actually works. A human being with only one principle or one value is a diminished human being.
For as long as Jews have been Jews, our calling has been to hold multiple and competing loves and commitments in our minds and hearts at the same time. Consider Abraham, the hero of these High Holy Days, who argues with God on behalf of the wicked inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah: “Will You [God] really sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Immediately thereafter, Abraham must choose between the well-being of his handmaid Hagar and the demands of his wife Sarah. And then, in the most harrowing test of all, he is commanded to choose between his love of God and his love of his son: “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love . . . and offer him as a sacrifice.”
Sometimes Abraham’s tilts one way, sometimes the other. The point is not in any single decision, but in the through line that connects them all: a life spent wrestling with the tension itself. The sages note that Noah “walked with God,” while Abraham “walked before God.” Why the difference? When God decreed a flood, Noah built his ark and hopped on it with the animals. When God declared judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argued back. He lost the point, but he argued. And that is the point. It is why he, unlike Noah, “walked before God.” That is the essence of what it means to be an ivri, a descendant of Abraham.
It is the through line that begins with Abraham, that runs through our people and runs through today. On Yom Kippur afternoon, we read of Jonah, an ivri sent to save Nineveh, not just a wicked city but the capital of Israel’s enemy. They, too, God reminds Jonah, are the object of divine concern. God holds multiple concerns, and so must Jonah, and so must we. It is a sentiment best captured in Hillel the sage’s famed aphorism: Im ein ani li, mi li? U-k’she·ani l’atzmi, mah ani? “ If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?” The essence of Jewish identity is not found in one clause or the other, but in the breath, the neshamah, taken between. There, in that breath, lies the soul of the Jew, and the soul of the Jewish people.
And I get it, it is hard, hard to hold that breath.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” The hostages remain captive, our enemies are unrepentant, our soldiers’ lives at risk. Israel is isolated on the world stage, candidates for mayor are scandalously unable to call out antisemitic language, let alone affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. What business of mine is it to care about, never mind allocate tzedakah to, the inhabitants of Gaza? With a knife to our neck, is now really the time to look in that moral mirror?
On one of my visits to Israel this year, I met with a leader of Israel’s protest movement, a man who has stood up repeatedly to what he sees as real threats to Israel’s democracy. I asked him about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. His reply: “Give me back my hostages and then ask me about Gaza.” Love, he was telling me, is a finite commodity. To be a Jew, to be anything for that matter, is to prioritize one love over another. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? That is what it means to be an ivri, a descendant of Abraham.
And I get it. If I am only for myself, then what am I? To stand by Israel is to feel the weight of a love tested. It is hard to stand by Israel all the time. We see the suffering of Gaza, we see the policies coming from Israel’s governing coalition, we ask how we can support a country led by a government that does not reflect our hopes for Israel. Last month in our synagogue’s “Get Out the Vote” meeting, one committee member suggested, given the stakes of the mayoral election, that we encourage our college students to register to vote in New York City and not Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or wherever it is they go to school. Another parent responded, “Who is to say that our kids will vote how we want them to vote? Better they stay registered where they are.” And it is not just our kids asking the tough questions of Israel; it is many in this room. Lest we forget: the angel who saved Isaac on the altar was the same angel who saved Ishmael in the wilderness. The divine measure of empathy does not stand for particularism. When Jacob trembled before Esau, the rabbis teach, his fear was twofold, fear that he might be killed, and fear that he might have to kill. If I am only for myself, then what am I? That, too, is what it means to be an ivri, a descendant of Abraham.
I get it. It is hard enough to hold one side, never mind both sides at once. But this is not a zero-sum game. Somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that love of Israel requires the absence of empathy, or that the demands of empathy ask us to forsake Israel. Somewhere along the way, we fell into the trap of believing that unconditional love must mean uncritical love, or that honest critique is somehow incompatible with what it means to love. Anybody who lives in a family knows that this is not so. Real love, real commitment, is not blind. If Alterman could write Magash Ha-kesef and then write Al Zot; if Ben-Gurion could send Israel’s army into battle and then distribute copies of Al Zot to every soldier, then why do we find it so hard to hold both truths at once? With hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting every week – calling for the hostages’ release, calling for a ceasefire, calling for governmental accountability – how dare we exclude those who would do the same here from the community of the committed? With thousands of soldiers making daily sacrifices, and far too often ultimate sacrifices, on behalf of our eight million brothers and sisters, how dare we turn our backs on our people in this critical hour? As one Israeli friend recently said to me, after pouring out his fury at every misstep, mistake, and failure that the Israeli government committed before October 7th, on October 7th, and since October 7th: “Don’t walk away from us. We need you [meaning diaspora Jewry] more than ever. Your voice, your support, your critique, and your love are more important than ever.”
Love of Israel, like any love, means living inside its complexity. Earlier this summer, another friend of mine – a person of unimpeachable character and towering scholarship, who exists at the leftmost edges of Jewish politics – challenged me, asking, “Elliot, what exactly would Israel have to do, how grave a sin would it have to commit, for you to walk away?” I reject the question. As long as I live, I will not walk away from Israel, and as long as I am your rabbi, neither will this congregation. I could no more separate myself from Israel than from the air I breathe. If there is an answer to my friend, it is this: I will work harder. I will double down. I will defend Israel in its hour of need, as I have. I will fight for the release of the hostages, as I have. I will call for the end to this war, as I have. I will critique Israel when it strays, when it overreaches, when it risks losing its identity as a Jewish and democratic state, as I have. I will call out the pernicious blurring of line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, from the right and from the left, as I have. I will continue to lead and seed efforts in our congregation and community aimed at encouraging bridges and partnerships between diaspora Jewry and Israel, as I have. And I will continue to affirm the right of Palestinian self-determination because it is their right, because we were once strangers in a strange land, and because as a Zionist, I believe Israel’s security is bound up with their self-determination.
I will do all of this, and I will do more. Why? Because I love Israel. And I will do it all from within the camp of the committed, not in contradiction to my being a Jew, but as the very expression of it.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, then what am I? This is the dialectical balance that defines Jewish identity: self-concern and concern for the other, love and self-critique, held in perpetual tension. You may disagree with the person sitting next to you. You may disagree with me. The promise of this community is not unanimity of opinion or uniformity of expression. The promise, the challenge, and the sacred task of this community is to hold ourselves together as we hold the well-being of Israel as our shared and urgent goal – even when, and especially when, we disagree on the tactics by which we seek to achieve that goal. Ben-Gurion once remarked concerning Britain’s White Paper restrictions upon Jewish immigration to Palestine as Hitler was conquering Europe, that he would fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler, and he would fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper. There is never only one threat and there is never only one value. So, too, for us. We hold both at one and the same time, as an expression of the love of Israel we share.
For Alterman, for Israel, for me, for you – ultimately the heart of Hillel’s teaching is not in the first clause, nor in the second, nor even in the breath between the two. It is in the third clause, the one that at first feels like an afterthought. V’im lo achshav, eimatai? “If not now, when?” To act with urgency. To act with agency. To believe that now is the time to express a love for Israel infused with justice and compassion, advocacy and accountability, and to know that doing so is not a betrayal of our nature, rather it is our nature and our glory.
It is, if you stop to think about it, what today, Yom Kippur, is actually all about. A candid reckoning not just with the other but with ourselves.
Mi-yom kippurim she-avar, ad yom kippurim ha-zeh; mi-yom kippurim zeh, ad yom kippurim ha-ba . . . “ From last Yom Kippur until this Yom Kippur; from this Yom Kippur until next Yom Kippur.” May each of us, and all of us together, rise to the calling of the hour, and at this time next year may the people and state of Israel be closer to security, wholeness, and peace.
The poems by Natan Alterman are available on the PAS website:
Magash ha-kesef, The Silver Platter
Al Zot, For This
Thank you to Rachel Korazim (https://www.korazim.com) for her insights.