Rosh Hashanah Sermon by Rabbi David Baum 2024/5785
I looked down at my phone and saw the name of one of our young congregants. I pictured her as a bat mitzvah girl, but she is an adult now. “
The message read: “Rabbi Baum, do you have time to talk?"
I called, and she picked up immediately; I could hear chants in the background, "Intifada revolution! Intifada revolution! Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!"
She called me on her way back from Hillel, the only place close to campus where she could study because protestors blocked the library. She was walking on the street I walked on every day, getting off the subway at 116th on my way up to JTS.
She told me about the protests on campus, but she would have to whisper lest anyone hear her and find out she wasn't the right type of 'Jew.' Frankly, it was terrifying. Some Jews were allowed on campus, even in the heart of the anti-Israel protests, but they could only be let in if they left something behind their Zionism.
Over the years, we've heard a lot about unsafe spaces. Most of those spaces aren't physically dangerous but deeply uncomfortable to be in. Being a Zionist or a Jew on specific campuses used to be uncomfortable, but now, it can also be physically unsafe.
A couple of weeks ago, at the University of Michigan, a student was asked if he was a Jew and then physically attacked when he answered yes. Imagine if you were on the subway, trapped in a small space, and a rush of protestors wearing keffiyehs flood the car with signs that glorify Hamas's attack against our people and yell out, "Any Zionists on board?" Never in my life would I think that I would fear raising my hand in America to identify as a Zionist. And if it isn't outward discrimination, it is more subtle. Suddenly, your friends stop texting you; you feel increasingly alone and isolated once you see how your friends really feel about Israel and Jews when they post online. When and how did Zionism become a bad word?
How many people in this room have had difficult conversations about Israel with your family members over the last year? I have heard stories of grandchildren calling their grandparents, cursing them out because they support a genocidal regime. I have seen parents and children break contact because a specific polarization has occurred: you're either with us or against us.
It all centers around one word: Zionism.
As we gather here on Rosh Hashanah, a time of reflection and renewal, we are called to confront our world's complexities and identities. The challenges surrounding Israel today feel particularly raw, especially after a year filled with tragedy and increased antisemitism, but the tension we feel in talking about Israel isn't new. It's part of a longer history of Jews being asked to leave behind crucial parts of who we are. Today, for many, that part is Zionism.
Rosh Hashanah, Yom Harat HaOlam, the day the world was created, begs us to ask ourselves, how was the world created? Our tradition teaches us, it was created with words. God spoke the world into being. Jews are people of the book; we are close readers of the text, and every word and letter matters; one small linguistic change can give a completely different message than one might expect. Words have power - language is how we understand the world.
But what does it mean to be a Zionist? Do I have to move to Israel? Because, no offense, but we're kind of happy here. Does it mean I have to support the government in power because I definitely don't? You may not be so sure what it means to be a Zionist, but if you ask an anti-Zionist, you will hear that Zionism is racism, settler colonialism, and the new one: Zionism is genocide.
Not surprisingly, I define Zionism differently. My definition: Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people in their ancestral land, the land of Israel. There's a lot of wiggle room there, but this is Zionism on a basic level.
Ask yourself, when did Zionism begin? Most people would answer, the late 1800’s with Theodore Herzl, but I disagree.
Here’s my answer: 1948…BCE. That’s the birthday of our main character for today Abraham.
וַיֹּאמֶר יְי אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ׃
The LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
וְאֶעֶשְׂךָ לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל וַאֲבָרֶכְךָ וַאֲגַדְּלָה שְׁמֶךָ וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה׃
I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing.
God says I will make you a great people, not a great religion. People are tied to a land - the land that God will show him. Our story begins with peoplehood - with a family, Abraham, Sarah, their nephew Lot, and all the souls they brought with them. Our Sages teach that these 'souls' were converts to this new monotheistic faith.
Community precedes covenant. We were a people long before we received the Torah. Our peoplehood binds us together, but a people must have a land to live in together without persecution and with self-determination—a land to aspire to build together.
Amazingly, later in life, after Sarah dies, he buries her in that Promised Land. When the local chief offers Abraham the land for free, Abraham insists on purchasing it. (pause) Surprisingly, the first Jew was not a good haggler. He ended up paying double for a cave in the city of Hebron.
We see something interesting here - the first Jew, the first Zionist, has a dilemma. God promises Abraham the land and a great nation, but how will this actually work? Abraham takes matters into his own hands. Ironically, when it came to land, the man of faith who, in the immediately previous story, almost sacrificed his only son, chooses property and payment over promises and providence. We read:
וַתָּמׇת שָׂרָה בְּקִרְיַת אַרְבַּע הִוא חֶבְרוֹן בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנָעַן וַיָּבֹא אַבְרָהָם לִסְפֹּד לְשָׂרָה וְלִבְכֹּתָהּ׃
Sarah died in Kiriath-arba—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan; and Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her. (Genesis 23:3)
Rashi comments on the words that Abraham mourned her and cried - the text includes both actions to remind us that Abraham was especially sorrowful. This story immediately follows the story of the Binding of Isaac. When Sarah heard about the binding of Isaac, she was so shocked that she died before she heard that her son was saved by an angel. Abraham is in deep despair: he thinks he's caused the death of one wife, and he threw his last wife and firstborn son out with a little bread and water. All he has is his son Isaac.
The purchase was an act of hope and aspiration. It was a burial plot, but it created a destiny and a home for his child Isaac and his descendants. Immediately after this story, Abraham stakes his entire life on the enterprise of finding a wife for his son and perpetuating his name. Out of his despair, he aspires for a brighter future for his offspring. Imagine what Abraham would think if you returned to that cave today, Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv?
Abraham teaches us that there are two types of Zionism, a Zionism of despair, born out of the reaction to persecution; and the Zionism of aspiration, aspiring for a future that you will not see. The Zionism motivated by the revival of Jewish culture, the Hebrew language, and a return to our ancestral home. It is the opposite of the despair which is constricting; Zionism is meant to be expansive through including new voices, ideas, and identities. Zionism is not one without the other, it is both despair and aspiration.
To understand what Zionism truly represents, we must go beyond political debates and look at the human stories behind it. Zionism is more than just a political stance—it's the embodiment of thousands of years of yearning, of hope, and of survival. It's a connection to a land and a dream that has sustained us through persecution and displacement. I heard the story of Zionism this summer, in the living room of Danny Adeno Abebe, Israel's first ever Ethiopian Jewish journalist.
Danny grew up in a tiny shack in the Jewish village of Tilamado in an area called Mayliko, north of the town of Gondar. Danny told us, "The Torah begins with the verse: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." In that case, God must have also created my village, but He never came back. He created it, and forgot about it.." Life in the village was simple. His family lived in a tukul—a small house made of mud with two small windows with no electricity in the village. Their cattle and sheep lived inside the house with them in a small room. They didn't have much, but they made the most of it.
For Danny and his family, the village was their whole world except for the one hope they clung to: to leave—one day, somehow—for Jerusalem. Everyone spoke about Jerusalem saying it quietly, like a secret, especially on Shabbat and the holidays. Jerusalem was the center of every prayer and festival. His father used to tell him at every opportunity: "One day, we'll reach the Land of Israel, Jerusalem, and we'll hug Jerusalem like a father hugs his sons.”
But in Ethiopia, the Jews were known as falasha which means "outsiders" and "the landless". The Ethiopian authorities, from top to bottom, treated them like unwelcome foreigners, second-class citizens to their Christian neighbors; they were strangers because they could never own land. There was a cruel joke people would tell in Ethiopia: "Why don't Jews get rich? So they won't leave property behind when they run away." But being called falasha never offended them because they knew, deep down, they didn't belong. Falasha is an offensive term now; the community is known as Beta Israel, but what surprised me was that the word Falasha comes from Ge'ez, their sacred language. They may have been treated like outsiders, but that it was also a part of their identity, one based on deep yearning for that day when they would fulfill the dream of generation and return to Jerusalem, a place they had fantasized about their entire lives.
In 1983, the soil had stopped yielding crops, the fruit on the trees were wilting, and the river was drying up. They thought, as poor farmers, their fate was sealed, a slow death by starvation, but then, some unfamiliar faces started showing up in the village. Within days, Danny's parents secretly sold all of their possessions, including their prized animals. Danny was a shepherd, but suddenly, he had no sheep. He asked his father, why are you selling the cows and the sheep, not the horses and donkeys?!? And the day came—one night, under the cover of darkness but a full moon, they left Ethiopia for good, in secret, so their Christian neighbors wouldn't detect them.
It was akin to Bnai Israel leaving Egypt at night, on the 14th of Nissan, with a full moon to help them as they journeyed to freedom.
Their horrendous journey brought them to Sudan, to a refugee camp, Um Raquba. In the morning, they woke up to a post-apocalyptic nightmare of babies with swollen stomachs and heads. The image of a Sudanese policeman beating everyone, even the elderly, is seared in his memory. Danny felt completely powerless.
4,000 Ethiopian Jews out of a total of 20,000 died in Sudan at the Um Raquba refugee camp, one out of every five Jews. He told us something in his living room; they felt that Um Raquba was their Auschwitz. He told us: "If you've never carried your dead for burial beyond the mountains without even having the strength to cry, if you've never buried a small child or a mother who died from disease, hunger, or thirst - you cannot possibly understand what we went through."
I want to put things into perspective: they thought they were the last Jews on earth. Imagine if you lost 1/5 of your people in the span of a year, with almost no hope in sight? At that moment, I saw the face of my family in his, a face of despair and hope. Two of my grandparents survived Auschwitz, one survived Mauthausen, and another hid as a Christian. They had no contact with the outside world, no knowledge of if the Nazis were winning or losing; each one of my grandparents thought they could be the last Jews on earth. After the Holocaust, the first thing my grandparents did was find each other, marry, and have children.
Feeling powerless in the face of non-Jewish brutality, they survived for us. They came to their Promised Land and built something for their children. They chose life. They aspired for something unimaginable in the depths of their despair.
Danny once asked his father, knowing what he went through, would you have done it again?
His answer shocked him: "Absolutely. It was a millennia-long dream, and all the suffering, the beatings, the hunger, the thirst, and the bodies buried under a tree or behind a big rock - they were worth it, to reach our destination. I'd do it all over again."
As I listened to Danny's story, I was struck not only by the suffering his family endured but also by the incredible sacrifices they made out of hope and love for the future, not despair. Since Abraham, our ancestors have faced impossible choices and made painful sacrifices for us.
Hope and love are what we aspire for in our lives. It is what makes life worth living.
The founders of Israel weren't just committed to saving the Jewish people; that was only part of the dream; they were also deeply committed to creating a society much more perfect than those from which they had come. I believe every generation of Zionists feels the same way.
As the first Ethiopian born Journalist in Israel's history, Danny uses his voice to bring awareness to the racism and injustice that the Beta Israel community faces in Israel.
“I have been through a lot, I have experienced racism in all sorts of situations, and I have known how to deal with them. But since my children were born, for the first time in my life, I am gripped by uncontrollable fear. I am afraid for their future…I am afraid because my children are different because of their color. I tremble with fear that they will not be accepted in schools, in clubs, just because they are different. I am gripped by fear because once, people used to be embarrassed about being racist, but now, the Israeli racist stands tall and gives public expression to his racism. I am afraid because I feel that everyone seeks us sinking, and they are silent. I am afraid that my eldest son will inherit the foreignness within me. Next time, when you see racism on your TV screens, think about me. Think about my native-born Israeli son and about my reflections and intense pain..”
And despite what I read, Danny and the Beta Israel community are arguably the most ardently Zionist group in Israel. They serve in the military at one of the highest percentages of any group in the country. During this war, Danny told us a disproportionate number of Ethiopian Jewish IDF officers have been killed in combat.
Danny told us: I am a Zionist - this is my home. He's a Zionist despite the racism; he has a job to do, to make Israel the country that his ancestors dreamed about for longer than a millennium.
The Zionist movement has achieved miraculous and seemingly impossible things. For 2,000 years, our ancestors prayed toward Jerusalem, and we reconnected with our history, land, and people. There has been only one nation that has returned to their homeland after exile; Jews have done it twice. Never in the history of the world had a dead language been revived as a spoken language until 1858 when Eliezer Ben Yehudah was born, and now Hebrew is a vibrant spoken and written language once again. Israel and the Jewish people have created so much in our small homeland over the last 76 years. Some of these innovations and miracles were born out of despair, the idea that we have nowhere else to go. Still, without the aspirational aspect of Zionism, these innovations never would have been created. Zionism was always much more than mere survival. Survival is essential for any people, but it isn't enough. The founders of Israel dreamed of creating a unique society, a state that would be different because it is a Jewish state and holds itself to a different set of standards.
In this last year, Israel has shown its aspirations amid despair. Israelis are still sitting shiva after October 7th, but we are also watching history unfold before our eyes. The TikTok generation, a generation that is maligned for its self-centeredness, is giving up their lives for our people, both in Israel and around the world. The pro-Democracy protest movement against Prime Minister Netanyahu's government's attempts to subvert democracy that was supposed to tear the country apart and lead us to a civil war turned into a movement on October 8th to help free the hostages, give voice, and help support the hostage families and those directly affected by the massacre including hundreds of thousands of Israelis from evacuated kibbutzim whom their own government seemingly abandoned.
There are so many stories to tell and stories that will be told about this year, but one story is clear: The nation of Israel is stronger than its current government. A nation, a people, is rising in leadership.
Israel and its government have serious problems. Being a Zionist doesn't mean you have to support the sitting government of Israel, but being a Zionist means supporting all the people of Israel.
Learn - This year, we will be learning about Zionism as we bring in a Scholar in Residence, my friend Rabbi Leor Sinai, who lives in Israel with his family and has done incredible work both in organizational life and at a grass roots level. After that, I'll be teaching a new five part class on Zionism where we will learn about Zionism, and what kind of Zionists we are, and are not, through learning about pivotal Zionist moments in history.
Take action -There is no shortage of ways to act and advocate on behalf of Israel. We can do it this year through the World Zionist Congress elections. If we say we are Zionists, then we, our Conservative/Masorti movement, should have an increased voice in Israel. Let us speak with the spirit of the prophet Isaiah, who said: "For the sake of Zion I will not be silent, for the sake of Jerusalem I will not be still, till her victory emerge resplendent, and her triumph like a flaming torch."
Share your story of Zionism with your family and friends. Tell them why you are a Zionist, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and listen to their stories or doubts or concerns. You don't have to agree, but you can share your story and give a different perspective that perhaps TikTok isn't offering.
Zionism is a mixture of despair and aspiration. We stumble and fall, but we get up and aspire to be greater, to build a country that isn't perfect and may never be but strives for perfection.
Israel is the Jewish people's fortress for safety, but it is also our shining palace or Temple to bring light to the world. We must be both, and we here today must be a part of it because there's no guarantee that we will have a third chance at a national home. That seems like a heavy and daunting obligation.
This year, I was at a talk with former Ambassador Michael Oren, and an interviewer asked how he defines Zionism. His answer was one word: responsibility. My interpretation of these words: To be a Zionist means to be responsible for the past, present, and future of world Jewry, not just our bodies, but our souls and our morality. It seems like an impossible task, but to quote the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer."
The impossible takes longer. Our people waited for Zion for 2,000 years, but we never stopped hoping and moving toward our goal. The year ahead will undoubtedly be tough, with challenges we can't imagine. But if we are one, we will not fall into despair; rather, we will rise up together.
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