Time for a Paradigm Shift (or: This Path is No Longer the Right One)

This path is no longer the right one… Erev Rosh Hashanah 5772
Community Synagogue
Rabbi Daniel Gropper

A Story: Once there was a man who went for a walk in the forest and got lost. He wandered around for hours trying to find his way out, trying one path after another, but none of them worked. Suddenly he came across another walking through the forest. He cried out, Thank God for another human being. Can you show me the way back to town? The other man replied, No, I’m lost, too, the ways I have been exploring have led nowhere. But we can help each other by telling which paths we’ve already tried and been disappointed in. That will help us find the one that leads out.

A second story: One day Author Steven Covey was visiting New York City and was traveling by subway. A man boarded the train with his two sons and they all sat down. In no time, the sons were running all over the place, bothering others on the train, climbing on the seats, making a commotion. Becoming increasingly irritated as he tried to focus on his presentation, Covey finally got up to ask the father why he wasn’t doing something to control his kids. The father replied, "We just got back from the hospital where their mother died. I don't know how to handle it and I guess they don't either." (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)

Imagine you are Covey. Suddenly you see everything differently. We call this a paradigm shift. They are the same kids yelling and screaming in the subway, but you look at them and understand them in a different way. Sometimes when you are lost and it seems like you are going in circles, it’s better to stop and look for a fresh path. Sometimes it’s best to change the paradigm. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we need a new paradigm. We need to find a new path out of the forest. And if we don’t change it, it will likely be changed for us.

Throughout our history there have been a number of these paradigm shifts, sometimes by our making, sometimes as a response to the actions of others. At age 75, Abraham chose a radical leaving, having heard lech l’cha - go forth. His act changed the face of history. After 400 years of bondage in Egypt, we threw off the shackles of slavery and wandered into the wilderness. There we learned what it meant to be a covenant people. In the year 70, as Jerusalem lay burning, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the leading sage of his day, approached Vespasian and asked to build a school in the little city of Yavne, just south of where Tel Aviv is today. This move saved Judaism but it did more. It changed the paradigm. As Rich Cohen, author of Israel is Real writes: “Judaism became portable in those years, a religion that could live out of a suitcase. They created the Jewish canon, the Tanakh. This meant that all Jews, no matter where they lived, would read the same words and tell the same stories.... In this way the Book replaced the city. In this way, the Temple became a book. In this way, study of the Book became as holy as worship in the Temple. In this way the exterior Jerusalem of hills and valleys was replaced by an interior Jerusalem.” (Israel is Real pp., 49, 57)

That was it for almost 2000 years. We moved from land to land, literally living out of suitcases. Commentaries were added yet little changed. Our story became one of victimhood, and we learned to play the role. “Shah. Still. Don’t make waves.” We looked inward and devoted ourselves to our own culture. We didn’t lead. How could we? We had no sovereignty. We bemoaned our predicament. We waited for God to save us as our scriptures said He would, but that’s not how God works.

Then suddenly, with the embers of the Shoah still warm, the paradigm shifted again. On the 23rd of November, 1947, The United Nations, passed resolution 181 and partitioned Palestine. We were home, free, living in the land of Zion and Jerusalem. People danced in the streets, sang Hatikvah from the rooftops. Some here I am sure recall that day like it was yesterday.

The state of Israel challenged the old Jewish paradigm of victimhood. If we wanted this new Jewish state to succeed, we had to make it succeed. Modern Orthodox Theologian and pluralist David Hartman writes, “Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel were a new expression of covenantal empowerment. What the Jews decided is this: Exile will end when we take responsibility for history. We have to learn banking. We have to learn agriculture. We have to learn self-defense. Only through our initiative will there be a change in Jewish homelessness.” (Jews and Judaism in the 21st Century) We built Israel but did it build us? The Jew was rebuilt from the outside but has Israel changed our inner psyche?

How do we respond to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Like a person who has not yet matured, we point fingers, blame others, and say, “It’s not our fault.”

We like to say that the Arabs don’t really want peace. We seem content with the long time practice of convening Jewish assemblies in which we talk to ourselves and bemoan the injustice. We continue to utter Abba Eban’s famous line of how the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. We say that before 1948 there was no such thing as Palestinian people. We tell the story of how the Arab nations told the local Arab population to leave. We tell how, in 1967, after capturing the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai, we were willing to give it all up for unilateral peace but the Arabs rejected it. We point out how in 2000, the Palestinians, presented with a breakthrough two-state solution plan by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, spurned it. We point out how, in 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert went even further, giving the Palestinians 98% of what they sought, and once again, the Palestinians walked away. We talk about how the Palestinians going to the UN to seek recognition of a unilaterally declared Palestinian state will not end the conflict and might make it worse. We play the victim card to the U.S., our most important ally, reminding the administration that we are its only reliable ally in the region and we keep saying, “it’s their fault. They won’t negotiate. They won’t recognize us. They don’t want peace.”

Take two children, raise them in the same home, with the same parents. Feed them the same food and send them to the same schools. Each will tell a different tale of their childhood. To each one, it is his or her own truth. As we tell our story, the Palestinians tell theirs, one that is equally true as ours. The Palestinians say that Israeli forces expelled Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1947 to ensure a decisive Jewish majority. They say that Israel’s goal is take over the West Bank with the building of settlements. “Just look at the maps,” they say. They say that twenty years of talking has gotten them no where so in desperation, they are going to the UN for recognition and legitimacy.
Someone asked me, “is Abbas’ going to the UN a stunt?” “No,” I said, “It’s symbolism. But it doesn’t end the conflict. You don’t become a state because the UN votes you in. Israel became a state because they won the war of independence. Palestine can only become a state because the Israelis and Palestinians reach an agreement. But going to the UN certainly changes the paradigm.

The end point is very clear. We know that the only solution is two states for two people - Israel for the Jews and Palestine for the Arabs. No other solution will allow Israel to be both Jewish and democratic. We know that these states must be based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreeable land swaps. Jerusalem will likely be the capital of both states with a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem where the Arabs live and an Israeli capital in West Jerusalem where the Jews live. So why can’t we get there?

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote:

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion and on the opposite mountain I am searching for my little boy. An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father both in their temporary failure. Our voices meet above the Sultan's Pool in the valley between us. Neither of us wants the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

We hear these words and think of the Akeida, the binding of Isaac. It makes us think of parent’s, both Jew and Arab who sacrifice - and lose - their children in the name of something larger. It reminds us that this issue in Israel isn’t about lines on a map. It is about people: parents, children, their successes and failures.

Amichai writes that neither wants the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels of the terrible Had Gadya machine. Neither wants that which is precious to them to get caught in this never ending cycle of violence. You know the story of Had Gadya - one little goat. (sing): Chad Gadya... Chad Gadya, my father bought for two zuzim, chad gadya, chad gadya. It’s the Jewish version of the Lady who swallowed a fly but with a very different message. In Chad Gadya the cat eats the goat, the dog eats the cat, the stick beats the dog, the fire burns the stick, the water quenches the fire, the ox drinks the water, the butcher slaughters the ox, the angel of death kills the butcher, and God kills the angel of death. All because of one little goat. Of course, there are many ways to read Chad Gadya. The classic interpretation is that chad gadya is about the different nations that have conquered the land of Israel. The goat symbolizes us. We are the world’s scapegoat. The cat is Assyria; the dog, Babylon; the stick, Persia; the fire, Macedonia; the water, Rome; the ox, the Saracens; the slaughterer, the Crusaders; the angel of death, the Turks. At the end, God returns to send the Jews back to Israel. A nice happy, hopeful ending.
Amichai sees it differently. To him, the Chad Gadya machine is what we see in the Middle East. You hit me, I pick up a rock to hit you, then you pull out a dagger and I take a sword and so on, until you are in a never ending cycle. And Amichai notes that neither the Arab nor the Jew wants that which is precious to them to get caught in this cycle but because it is a machine, it operates without feeling, without conscience, without morality and that, in and of itself is immoral. As I read chad gadya this year with Amichai’s poem in mind, I noticed that God kills the angel of death and I wondered, so who kills God? Do we? Do the Palestinians with their truth and the Israelis with their truth conspire, even unconsciously to kill God, here in the hills of that holy city of Jerusalem?
Sometimes when you are in a seemingly never ending cycle the only thing to do is to break it, to create a new paradigm, a new reality. Can it be done? Can Netanyahu and Abbas transcend their own psycho-biographies? Can Abbas get past the formative story of his youth, the one where he, at 13, was forced to leave his home in Tzfat and flee to Syria where he lived in a tent, dreaming to return to his homeland? (“The Long Overdue Palestinian State,” NY Times Op-Ed, May 17, 2011) Can Netanyahu in his intransigence, leave behind the right-wing revisionist ideology of his father, Benzion, a historian of the Spanish Inquisition? Can either of them be like Nixon, who set aside Cold War ideology and Red-baiting to visit China in the interest of practical global politics? Or will we continue to get caught in wheels of the terrible Chad Gadya machine?
Rabbi Donniel Hartman, son of Rabbi David Hartman raises an important question for us. He writes, “The fundamental challenge we face today as a people is how to respond, how to live within this existential reality which we know so well. Because it is so akin to our exilic past do we respond as a people in exile or as a people with sovereignty? And if it is the latter, how do we give expression to our sovereignty and power?” (“A Time to Lead” YNETNews.com, September 25, 2011)
One possibility is to remain mired in that same chad gadya machine, as the little helpless goat, continuing to be the victim. Since we are not responsible for our predicament, no actions are called for other than reinforcing our lines of defense, be it with the help of the Israeli military or the US Congress. But these sanctions are still laced with tinges of Jewish victimhood. We are the victims of history. We turn to those with more power to once again come to our rescue.
Yet if we do this, then the experiment of Israel has failed more than succeeded. It has failed to change the psyche of the Jew. Max Nordau may have written about the new Jew who is strong and self-reliant instead of cowering, weak and afraid. But if the psyche is still one of victimhood and our present reality is still viewed through the familiar lenses of the exilic narrative, then we remain in exile, even if we have our own homeland.

But we, as Jews, as demonstrated by the tent protests this spring, are no long a people in exile. The gift of sovereignty and power provides new opportunities and resources to which we can avail ourselves. It would have been wonderful if all of our conflicts were resolved at the negotiating table and the rest of the world viewed the Palestinian bid at the UN as the affront that it is to friendship and true partnership. But alas that has not been our destiny. So now what do we do? A sovereign people begins to lead. A sovereign people fights for its destiny. A sovereign people never gives up hope, while at the same time, never allowing itself the naiveté bred by those who either deny reality or forget our past. (“A Time to Lead” Donniel Hartman, YNETnews.com 09/25/2011)

Tomorrow we read the binding of Isaac, a tale that is truly the pinnacle of Abraham’s life. We focus on the characters: a testing God, a subservient Abraham, an obedient Isaac, a grieving Sarah. I know one rabbi who once gave an entire sermon from the point of view of the ram. But what of the mountain? The mountain is a character too.
The power of the Akeida is that as a story it was meant to be a counter cultural. As pagans brought their sons to be sacrificed in the valley of Hinom, Abraham brought his son up to Mount Moriah. The Valley of Hinom in Hebrew is known as Gai ben Hinom. Over time, Gai ben Hinom was shortened to Gai Hinom and then Gehenna, or hell. This valley where children were sacrificed in the fires to Moloch was Hell’s gate. Moriah, the mount where Abraham brought Isaac stands in contrast to Gai Hinom. If Hell is a place of nightmares where liberties do not exist, Moriah is its opposite. Moriah means vision. Moriah is a place of dreams, of different paradigms. Yes, blood was spilled upon and for this mountain, but it need not be. Moriah can serve as a beacon of hope sitting just at the edge of the horizon for us. Moriah can stand as a vision of a world as it should be, not the world as it is. For if we turn away from moriah we end up in gehinom and only get caught in the Chad gadya machine, condemned to burn in the valley below.

It is time then to change the paradigm. To do some cheshbon hanefesh, some real soul searching and to do some teshuvah, not repentance for our past actions but a corrective U-Turn for our future decisions, our own lives and in the life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If I was Netanyahu, here is what I would do. I would stop talking about negotiations. I would stop inviting Abbas to join me at the table without preconditions, where ever and when ever he wanted. If I were Netanyahu I would change the paradigm. Here’s what I would say:

“President Abbas, I want to try something different. I want to publicly declare that the path we have been traveling is not working. I have come to realize the following, Palestinian statehood is an Israeli interest as long as it can be accompanied by peace and security. I admit and declare that the fulfillment of our rights to all the land of Israel cannot be fully expressed if we do not allow the Palestinian peoples’ rights to be respected as well.

“President Abbas, not only do I have no desire to expand settlements but I recognize and declare that many of those settlements - in particular those not connected to Jerusalem or located in one of the three settlement blocs - have no future and that Israel’s political, moral and Jewish interests lie in dismantling them. And because I recognize this, I will put a complete freeze on settlement building for six months. Besides, what is six months in the history of a 5000 year old people?” (last sentence from “2 for 2, or 2 for 1?” Thomas Friedman, NY Times, September 27, 2011)

Could you imagine such a statement? The truth be told, none of us know if such declarations or policies would be helpful. The Palestinians have to agree to end the conflict, to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, to fight terror and hatred both in their streets and in their textbooks and to once and for all relinquish their aspirations to return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Uncertainty, however, is no excuse for passivity, but the impetus for action. While our enemies may not have changed, we have. It is time to stop counting all the injustices, enumerating all that which is unfair, telling over and again to anyone who can hear that it is not our fault.


It is time for us to take responsibility for our destiny, a destiny not necessarily defined by that which is forced upon us but which will reflect who we want to be. It is time to bring an end to the defeatist mourning for and incessant talking about what should have and could have been. It is time to stop the self-defeating and paralyzing fear and reconnect to the reality of Israel and the dream of what Israel was supposed to be, a light to the nations, and to claim our rightful place at the negotiating table – the place of the leader. What does leadership require? It requires vision. Leadership requires taking bold steps. Leadership requires a willingness to take risks. It takes innovation. Leadership asks us also to be humble, to admit that we don’t have all the answers and don’t always know exactly what the end point will look like. And leadership requires action.

Just as we all know where we were on that fateful day in September some ten years ago, I could tell you exactly where I was when I heard that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were going to shake hands on the White House Lawn. That year, as a rabbinic student serving a student pulpit, I said something about this being the year where peace would finally come. I was certainly naive.

This year I received a high holiday card from relatives in Israel. It was a picture of a dove with an olive branch in its beak. Their note said that you can’t tell if the dove is coming or going and while they feel that it is going, they certainly pray that it is coming.

So this year I am - hopefully - less naive than I was. But this year I am more concerned than ever. Inspired by Abbas’ speech at the UN and the vote that is surely to come, emboldened by the results of the Arab Spring and maybe feeling that there is nothing to lose, I am concerned that the anger and vitriol that lives just below the surface in so many Palestinian towns and villages may spill over into violence. And then, defending itself as any sovereign nation would, civilians may be injured or worse, killed. I am concerned that this would serve as a flashpoint for those in Arab nations, who, also emboldened by the Arab Spring, would turn their frustration and anger against Israel What then? Could Israel survive if the world turned against her? Would Israel not go down without a fight? Would Israel not unleash untold damage on her neighbors? On whose side would the rest of the world be on? Where would that lead? This is why we need Israel to seek a different path, to change the paradigm, to stop playing the victim, to lead.

Israel must never feel alone. It is not their exclusive struggle. It is also ours. Our faith speaks of Zion and Jerusalem. Those places are in Israel. Our tradition teaches us collective responsibility. Nearly half the world's Jews live in Israel. Our value system is rooted in the defense of democracy. Israel is such a democracy. Israel strengthens our sense of Jewish identity. She helps make us more than just another religion in the marketplace of American religions. Israel makes us a people.

This is a time where we all must be involved to support Israel. Join an Israel advocacy group. I don’t care if it’s AIPAC or J-Street or American Jewish Committee or ARZA or the New Israel Fund. Just join one. Stay informed, to help those around you understand what's going on and why it's so important to friends of Israel and, more generally, to democratic nations.

We must, and I don’t often use that word, buy Israeli products and invest in Israeli
companies. This ‘Start up Nation’ boasts one of the fastest growing economies in the world but with various organizations continuing to push for divestment from Israel without even handedly divesting or calling for divestment from Iran, Israel must know that people, especially her people stand with her. And we must travel to Israel. Going to Israel is a pilgrimage, it is a homecoming, it is privilege, it is perhaps, the best way to support her. It is safe. Join us this February on our congregational trip. If this February won’t work, make plans to join us in November 2012 for our first ever adult only trip. However you do it, get to Israel and send your kids there. Send your grandchildren there after 10th or 11th grade. On the eve of this Jewish new year, allow yourself to be pulled a little closer to the center, just as your eyes scan the horizon for the promise of a new tomorrow.

What will it take to get the Israelis and the Palestinians talking again? It will take, I believe, a new paradigm, a new path. It will take us resolving to stop the chad gadya machine from spinning out of control. It will require us to change our psyche from that of victim to that of leader.

There was once a man who went for a walk in the forest and got lost. He wandered around for hours trying to find his way out, trying one path after another, but none of them worked. Suddenly he came across another walking through the forest. He cried out, Thank God for another human being. Can you show me the way back to town? The other man replied, No, I’m lost, too, the ways I have been exploring have led nowhere. But we can help each other by telling which paths we’ve already tried and been disappointed in. That will help us find the one that leads out.

There is so much to be concerned about in our world. The economy seems ever to be on the verge of faltering. Israel remains in so many ways in danger. And yet at the same time we remain optimistic. Our Jewish religious tradition is one that is always marked by tikvah, by hope. So as this new year begins, let us hold onto that hope, let us remain optimistic, let us find the inner strength and courage to chart new pathways, to seek new beginnings and to be willing to change old paradigms. And as we seek to lead and impress upon the leadership of Israel to take responsibility for its future and to lead as a robust sovereign nation must lead, let us work for the day when the nations will be one and at peace. Amen.

(With many thanks to Rabbi Donniel Hartman to his wonderful article “A Time to Lead” that inspired much of the thinking in this sermon and to Yossi Alpher’s op-ed in the NY Times - September 11, 2011 - “An Israeli Case for a Palestinian State” that formed the notion of needing a paradigm shift).