NOT TOO LATE

As the owner of this website and as its editor, I want to state that the views expressed in this article by Rabbi Brous do not necessarily reflect my own personal views regarding Israel, Zealotism, antisemitism, Judea and Samaria, or any other opinon voiced by Rabbi Brous. I include this article because I find it interesting and because Rabbi Brouse is a wonderful lecturer, and also because I support the IKAR movement. IKAR can be found at www.ikar.org.

Sometimes there’s a piece of popular culture that captures your experience so precisely that you become convinced that they must be listening inside your head, or your kitchen. (And of course, they are.)

Example: The viral tweet from a couple of years ago: In every partnership, there is one person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and another who stacks the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth.

Or that New Yorker cartoon, where Moses is leading the people through the Red Sea when someone says: He's all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel.

Last winter, a sketch on ERETZ NEHEDERET [see below], essentially Israel’s Saturday Night Live, reached that level of attunement. Maybe you caught it:

Two Jews, old friends, run into each other at Ben Gurion Airport. Jennifer, an American, and Eli, an Israeli, are both relocating.

You know us Jews, one says. If history has taught us anything… they finish each other’s sentences: it’s knowing when it’s time to leave.

One morning you wake up, one says, and you realize… It’s not the same country you grew up in.

These two really get each other, until they realize they're each heading where the other is fleeing: Eli has given up on Israel, Jennifer feels she has no choice but to leave America. They’re each stunned that the other would move to literally the most dangerous place for Jews on the planet.
 
Enjoy Israel, says Eli. It’s hell.
Enjoy New York, says Jennifer. It’s a nightmare…

They walk off in opposite directions, each muttering about the other: what a moron.

Somehow, in 90 seconds, they capture the deep sense of dislocation and fear for the future that has erupted among many diaspora Jews, and the profound sense of dislocation and fear for the future experienced by many Israeli Jews.
I know many of us can relate.

This summer, I learned about a terrifying phenomenon oceanographers call a confused sea. It’s when an ocean current runs against the wind and tide simultaneously, creating steep, chaotic, sometimes deadly breaking waves.

The real danger is not any one of these forces alone, but the energy created by the collision of opposing forces.

We begin the new year amid a raging, confused sea. It is my sincere hope that speaking honestly about this might ease our disorientation. And maybe, the wisdom of our tradition can help guide us to safe shores, or at least help us feel less lonely amid these winds, swells, and cross-currents.

Let’s start with a Talmudic story, from MASEKHET GITTIN 56a-b:

The Roman army has surrounded Jerusalem and blocked off all access to food and water. According to the Gemara, this siege lasts for three increasingly desperate years, at the end of which a cast of characters emerges from within the besieged city. Pay attention to the order of their appearance:

First, the three wealthiest people in Jerusalem donate their saved provisions, enough wheat, wine, and wood to sustain the whole population of the city for more than twenty years. A remarkable, indelible act of generosity.

Next we meet the BIRYONIM, the Jewish zealots who arise with torches to burn down the newly replenished storehouses of grain, effectively starving the city from within.

Now why would Jewish zealots destroy their own people’s food source?

Their goal was to manufacture desperation in order to preclude the possibility of a weak-kneed compromise, a negotiated peace.

Only after we encounter the donors and the zealots do we meet a third class of characters: the Rabbis.

Yes, the Rabbis: the religious, spiritual, and moral leadership of the community, last to step up in a time of genuine crisis.

It turns out that the Rabbis had been quietly contemplating extending an offer of peace to the Romans, believing that surrender would allow them to save the city and people from total destruction.
But they wait too long, they equivocate. They perseverate. They procrastinate.

Maybe they’re busy with study, or important ritual matters. Maybe they’re morally mixed up. Maybe they don’t want to get involved in “politics.”

By the time they speak up, it’s too late. The zealots have consolidated power and established control over the city.

It is only at this point that Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is introduced– as it turns out, he’s the uncle of the leader of the zealots, a guy named Abba Sikkara (...because even back then, families were complicated.)

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai calls a clandestine meeting with his nephew. What are you doing? the Rabbi asks. You’re going to starve the people of Jerusalem to death?!

And listen to the response of Abba Sikkara: What can I do? At this point, if I challenge these lunatics, they’ll kill me!

I have no doubt that he’s right. At some point, among extremists, any hint at moderation is perceived as betrayal.

But I can’t help but wonder: what if these two– this rabbinic luminary and his young, passionate nephew– had had this conversation three years earlier? Where were the Rabbis all this time? Why do they appear only now, when it’s already too late?

Maybe you know the rest of the story:

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai (whom I now invite you to imagine as being played by Matt Damon, if only because we know he can pull off the beard) fakes his own death so he can be evacuated from the besieged city.

Once outside, he surrenders to Vespasian Caesar and is miraculously, perhaps providentially, saved. Granted one wish, the Rabbi asks not for Jerusalem to be spared, or for the Temple or his family or students or any those poor souls left behind to be saved. Instead, he asks for Yavneh, a small town about an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, where he will begin to forge the Judaism we practice today.

Perhaps, the Talmud hints, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is pragmatic – his modest request at least secures some small bit of salvation for the people.

Nevertheless, the great Rabbi never sheds the stain of this story. He dies knowing that when it mattered most, he abdicated moral responsibility, twice: once within the city walls, and then again beyond them.

It’s important to note that this whole story is told not to establish a historical account of the battles that led to the destruction of Jerusalem, but instead to answer a recurring question of Jewish diasporic existence: øáç îä éôð î ? Why was the Temple destroyed (YOMA 9b)? By which they mean: Who is responsible for all this suffering?

I will not divest the Romans of their responsibility for their savagery. According to Josephus’s account, Jews caught searching for food during the siege were crucified by the Romans—up to 500 a day!—until they literally ran out of wood and space for the crosses.

It was at the hand of Roman generals that our holiest places were desecrated and destroyed, that, according to Josephus, more than one million Jews were murdered, and 97,000 taken captive.

And yet, the obvious message of this text is that the Romans were not solely, or even primarily responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem.

Who then is responsible?

Perhaps counterintuitively, and certainly counternormatively, the story indicates that it was the people of Jerusalem who were themselves responsible.

This is not to blame the victim. It is an attempt to wrest meaning from a brutal and brutalizing past. Our culture incentivizes competitive victimhood. Our tradition calls us to sustained self-scrutiny.

It was the BIRYONIM, those extremists who destroy the food source, who render the city uninhabitable and ensure the destruction of the land and its people. The zealots – empty people, Rashi writes, eager for war (Gittin 56a). They are the ones who drive the Jewish people to the edge of the abyss.

And yet the zealots alone are not to blame. For an extremist cannot move from the margins to the mainstream if the space is not yielded to him by the absence of a sane, moral leadership.

Talmudic scholar Jeffrey Rubenstein explains that when the Rabbis fail to take decisive action, “when the rabbis fail to act as rabbis, as leaders, the anti-rabbis take over… and eventually destroy the city.” On some deep level, he writes, “we know that the [Rabbis] and their choices, not the BIRYONEI, are to blame.” (Rubenstein, 152-3)

Here’s the take away: The failure of moral leadership, the muting of our moral instinct creates a vacuum that will be filled by extremists.

The subversive, self-critical message of this Talmudic story is a lesson taught throughout our sacred literature.

We shudder at Shimon and Levi’s retaliatory massacre of Shechem after their sister, Dina, is raped by the town’s leader in the Book of Genesis. But the brutal and disproportionate nature of their response was fueled by the silent impotence of their father, Jacob.

Similarly, it is Moses's passivity in Numbers 25 that invites Pinhas, the zealot, to commit murder, an act of vigilante justice.

Time and again, the muting of a reasonable, responsible, moral instinct births a violent, extreme response.

This may help us understand what propelled those two old friends in Ben Gurion airport to seek out a new home that would be not only safer, but in stronger alignment with their core values.

Jennifer is from New York and Eli, Tel Aviv, but what they are fleeing is not specific to the United States or Israel.

The emerging dominance of a hardline illiberalism and the normalization of violent extremism is today a global trend, from India and Russia to South America, and across Europe.

In all these places, views that were once considered dangerous and marginal are no longer disqualifying. In fact, they are increasingly mainstreamed.

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay on extremism, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, is helpful in understanding this trend:

Like the BIRYONIM, the zealots from Temple times, Hofstadter explains that extremists in our time are born of the failure of mainstream, legitimate politics to respond to real grievances experienced by the people.

From the void emerges a movement, carefully attuned to people's fear and anxiety, but peddling in “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

The only way to ease people’s suffering, according to the extremists’ logic, is to eliminate the enemy, who is perceived to be “totally evil and unappeasable.”

If we’re stunned by how quickly the discourse devolved these past few years to: “Democrats are running a secret global child sex trafficking operation,” “There are no innocents in Gaza,” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” Hofstadter’s analysis is illuminating. Extremist movements see the fate of the world “in apocalyptic terms,” fantasizing the elimination, the annihilation of entire political orders, or of an entire people.

Yet, even as these movements grow increasingly totalizing and untethered from reality, even as they shift the Overton window toward violence – including against innocents– those who identify with them believe that their position is just and right, noble and urgent.

Eli and Jennifer are both trying to flee the downstream effects of an increasingly normalized extremism.

Jennifer has had it with what feels like an ever more precarious diaspora existence.

I get it. In the US, we’re living through what Professor Robert Pape of University of Chicago calls an era of violent populism in which tens of millions of Americans– on both the far right and far left– now support political violence.

David French noted in the spring that the majority of people in America view their fellow citizens as morally bad. As a result, we surround ourselves with likeminded people, isolating in monocultures that fuel extremism.

…“Red becomes deep red,” French writes. “Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even the capacity to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.”

This is a real threat to our democracy, and of particular concern for Jews… and not only because the Jewish world is itself splitting at the seams.

Extremism is fueled by the creation of a common enemy, someone perceived to have outsized power, to control the media and the banks. In Hofstadter’s words: “a kind of amoral superman – sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel,” and also, by the way, “sensual, luxury-loving…”

It is no surprise that as conspiratorial thinking becomes fashionable, old antisemitic tropes are reactivated. And that is precisely what we’re witnessing today.

Now, a caveat: I have become broadly disillusioned with the popular tools of assessment when it comes to tracking antisemitism, for a few reasons:

One, the tendency of some of our organizational leadership to treat every Palestinian flag (or watermelon) as hate speech, a failure of discernment that demonizes, catastrophizes, and renders actual threats white noise.

Two, the impulse to use the reality of antisemitism to justify objectively indefensible behavior in Gaza and the West Bank.

And finally, the cynical exploitation of our community’s real pain and fear to advance a nefarious political agenda: defunding universities, dismantling DEI efforts, and suppressing free speech. We’ve all seen how combatting antisemitism has been used as a pretext for many of the administration’s most flagrant violations of due process, an approach drawn directly from the authoritarian playbook.
 
Even still, it would be foolish, dishonest, and self-defeating to deny how rampant antisemitism is today. We must be clear eyed, both for our own health and safety, and for our collective wellbeing. Remember: antisemitism has always been a symptom of a broader collapse in moral and civic norms.

Today, many American Jews are experiencing what I’m guessing Jennifer would describe as political homelessness. For the first time in her life, she feels disenfranchised. Her political horizon has shrunk.

On one side, Jennifer sees an American hard right– controlling the White House, Congress, and the Court– whose values are anathema to her liberal Jewish values. And she witnesses the political and thought leadership of that power structure promulgating classic conspiratorial tropes of secret, well-funded Jewish cabals corrupting domestic politics. She hears them calling Israel a "demonic state," and promoting the lie that Jews orchestrated the transatlantic slave trade.

She hears them embrace the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, the conspiratorial claim that Jewish elites are orchestrating mass immigration to demographically replace white Americans.

And at the very same time, Jennifer has witnessed the popularization of a virulently anti-Israel and sometimes objectively antisemitic left. Please hear me: these threats do not have to be equivalent for them all to be taken seriously.

I reject the frame that harsh criticism of Israel is necessarily rooted in antisemitism. At the same time, the past few years have shown just how thin the line is between necessary and legitimate criticism and the revitalization of time-worn, dehumanizing, libelous antisemitic tropes.

Protests against the devastation of Gaza use images of prominent Jews drinking the blood of dead children. (This particular trope is so popular that it is propagated by both the far-right and the far-left.)

Around New York, messaging proliferates demanding an end to the predatory Esptein-Rothschild-Talmudist-Zionist corporate landlords’ stranglehold over real estate. And all of this feels so seductive, so transgressive precisely because it purports to reveal the hidden cause of human suffering.

And when violent rhetoric translates into violent attacks on Jews, people who should know better defer to context and justifications, rather than offer a genuine commitment to work toward Jewish safety, as they would any other targeted community.

Like many of us, Jennifer has learned over the past few years that to enter some of the circles she once inhabited, she must now pass a new moral test: the repeated, unequivocal, public disavowal of the Jewish State, no matter that literally half the Jews in the world– including many of our family and friends– it is their only home.

I get why Jennifer yearns to swim in calmer, more inviting waters.

And what about Eli?

Eli is trying to escape an Israel that has become increasingly unrecognizable to those who built the country on liberal, democratic, labor Zionist values. He can no longer abide a state whose destiny seems to rely on the whims of the zealots, the ideological extremists and their enablers who divided the nation and left the people vulnerable to Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

I spent a month in Jerusalem this summer, learning at Hartman with colleagues, visiting family, meeting with peacebuilders, and engaging in challenging dialogue across ideological difference.

As always, I left both heartbroken and deeply inspired; heartbroken by the depth of trauma my Israeli and Palestinian friends have experienced these past many years, and inspired by the brilliant, brave people who– as part of an astonishingly vibrant, dedicated Israeli civil society– absolutely refuse to give up on the possibility of a better future.

Each time I’m in Israel, I join the protective presence in the West Bank, Israeli Jews– often religious– who accompany and support Palestinians targeted in acts of vandalism and violence. The news, these past few weeks, has been saturated with stories of the horrors unfolding there, but here’s a glimpse of what I, personally, witnessed in July in Tarqumiya, a Palestinian village in Area B:

Our group walked through several homes that had been all but destroyed. Settler extremists had smashed windows, stolen appliances, and strewn children’s clothes across the floor. They sledge-hammered the furniture and spray painted walls with Magen David – the symbol of Jewish resilience, now too often used by Jewish zealots as a sign of brutal domination.

Grappling with the Jewish religious extremists terrorizing the West Bank, whose TZITZIT and KIPPOT have become symbols not of their humility before God but their depravity and inhumanity, I can’t escape Hofstadter’s claim that the zealots perceive their movement to be noble.

One settler explained to my colleagues and me the law of the Hilltop Youth: If we don’t take it, they will, she said. If we don’t lay claim to that hilltop, and the one beyond it, and the one beyond that, the Arabs will. Our children are doing Hashem’s work!

I noted how she never said the word “Palestinian,” not wanting to grant even rhetorical legitimacy to her neighbors. Similar, of course, to those who won’t dare legitimize Israel’s existence, so instead speak only of “the Zionist entity” and “the land mass currently known as Israel.” What violence is perpetuated through the fantasy of erasure!

Settler extremists perceive their actions to be in the service not only of redeeming the land, but redeeming our collective suffering at the hands of a hostile world that failed for centuries to see Jewish humanity.

But of course, the opposite of victim is not victimizer.
It is one who breaks the cycle of pain and punishment, establishing a new moral equation in which no one must suffer.

These “youth,” it’s clear to me, may win the hilltop, but lose the Jewish people the State and our souls.

But who really is responsible for the calamity unfolding in the West Bank?

These are not random, isolated acts of violence from a few juvenile delinquents, as the Prime Minister would have us believe. Instead, this has been a coordinated campaign in which perpetrators act with near-total impunity, because they are actively encouraged by hardline political leadership and enabled by a complicit security establishment.

Recently, a group of former IDF generals lifted their voices to forcefully condemn the reality on the ground.

Like the protective presence activists, these generals are fighting to save Israel– their home– from itself. One said: “When… you… see what is happening in the West Bank, you will have two choices. You can stay silent, and be complicit, or you can speak out, and tell everyone you know about what is happening.”

I was heartened to hear Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein, the head of Yeshivat Har Etzion, the flagship religious Zionist yeshiva, speak unequivocally about this last week. But sadly, too many political, communal and religious leaders, both in Israel and in the diaspora, have chosen silence and complicity in the face of this campaign of terror.

And just like in the time of the Roman siege, when extreme views, antithetical to our most basic values, are not contested by a strong, centered, morally grounded counter-argument, they become normalized.

“Once a society behaves this way,” one of the former generals said, “that society is doomed.” I can see why Eli bought his ticket to New York.

I respect you all too much to offer some pollyannaish answer to all of this. I’m afraid there is no simple fix.

I am kept up at night over Dr. King’s warning that in the unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai woke up too late. In my darkest moments, I worry that it’s already too late for us too.

But then I remember.

I remember dinner this summer with my friend, Dr. Yasmeen Abu Freha, a Palestinian, Bedouin Israeli doctor and October 7th first responder, who is heading IsraAID’s coordination of Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese humanitarian workers. They’re willing to work with Israelis? I asked her. And she answered: Of course! We share the goal of saving lives.

It’s not too late!

I see slates of candidates running in Israel’s upcoming election— new faces and alliances promising to stretch the political and moral horizon—leaders whom I hope and pray will be willing to lead the state in the hard labor of teshuvah, of reckoning and repair.

It’s not too late.

I think about what we just witnessed in Hungary, how a landslide victory kicked a strongman out of office after 16 years of authoritarian rule. And how we’re seeing concrete early signs of healing there, including a tangible sense of possibility coursing through Budapest. And I yearn for that sense of possibility here, and in Israel too. And I think: if it could happen there…

It’s not too late.

I see, right here at home, that even as old coalitions are collapsing, surprising new ones are being born of the shared refusal to give up on a redemption narrative for America. I see that

there are political homes where we can be loyal to our Jewish commitments, our core values, and the fullness of our humanity. We’re building them as we speak!

It’s not too late.

I remember the Muslim fruit vendor who risked his own life to tackle the gunmen targeting Jews at Bondi, and how the Jewish community showed up for Friday prayers a week after the shooting at the Islamic Center in the spring. And I think about New Ground’s Muslim-Jewish fellowships and film series and their stubborn commitment to building bridges when so many want to burn it all down.

And I think about how many beloveds in the multifaith community continue to deeply honor their relationships with our Jewish community– many of you are here in this room today and I see you and thank you and bless you.

It’s not too late.

I think about this community, born of hope and love, which sits through these hard sermons year after year not because they feel good, but because we know that the only way to heal is to be honest. And because we absolutely refuse to cede the public discourse to the extremists with their easy answers.

It’s not too late.

I remember what my sister, Dev, taught me about the miracle of ecological regeneration, how plants rush back to life after suffering near death. And I think of how we, too, can breathe new life, even into broken relationships, broken movements, broken political frameworks.

And I remember that as a person of faith, I believe from the deepest well of hope in my heart that as long as we are alive, it’s not too late.

There is work to be done, hard work. But it’s not yet too late.

Violence and extremism collapse our field of vision. When we stand in the breach with compassion, curiosity, humanity, we stretch open that field of vision. And doing so just might initiate what Professor Margaret Levi– cited in Ami Fields-Meyer’s book– calls a “belief cascade.” (On Courage, 227)

This requires stepping into the void. Investing less in performative solidarity and more in real relational proximity. Asking hard questions. Speaking up. Challenging assumptions. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

Less certainty and more complex, careful thinking. Less heat, more light. And fueling it all: the conviction that it’s not yet too late.

I started this sermon with a story from Jerusalem, long ago. Let me end with one from the very same place, but in our time, a story some of you know:

Hannah and Kathleen, beloved members of our community, were at the 2015 Jerusalem Pride Parade when a Jewish religious extremist stabbed to death a teenage girl, an LGBTQ ally.

Still reeling from the attack– they had been standing only 10 feet away– Hannah and Kathleen walked into shabbat dinner the next night to celebrate the upcoming bat mitzvah of a family member.

Seated across the table from Hannah was Asher, a life long family friend. Asher had been radicalized, a part of the growing movement of zealots engaged in vandalism and violence against “lefties” and Palestinians.
 
At first, Hannah was sick to even sit at the table with this person. But she stayed.

At the end of the meal, she stood up and blessed the bat mitzvah girl: “You live in a time and place of great brokenness,” she said. “Every day there are more and more stories happening right here in this country of hate crimes, retaliations… senseless hatred… Keep your eyes and ears and most of all, your heart open... And don’t ever lose your voice.”

The experience turned Asher upside down. Hannah’s words awakened in him a kind of compassion, humanity, that he had buried and nearly lost.

Three years later, Asher showed up at the Pride Parade in Jerusalem, not to protest, but to participate. The following year, he was back again, this time with his baby in a stroller, a rainbow kippah, and a sign that read: “Hate kills! Love is the only answer.”

“What I accomplished,” Hannah reflected, years later, “was simply not walking away. It’s hard to stay at the table, but if we walk away from each other, nothing will ever get better.”

I agree with that. But what Hannah really demonstrated is that extremism can’t beat extremism. Only courageous presence can.

It will not be easy to wrest the public discourse from the zealots. But before we flee from one endangered home to another, let’s do everything we can to change our shared sense of what’s possible.

This year, let us use our voices to counter both the silence and the violence. Let’s do this now. Before it’s too late.

SHANAH TOVAH

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eretz_Nehederet#:~:text=Eretz%20Nehederet%20(Hebrew%3A%20%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%A5%20%D7%A0%D7%94%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%AA%2C,Keshet's%20Channel%202%20in%202003.

ERETZ NEHEDERET (Hebrew: àøõ ðäãøú, lit. 'Wonderful Country') is an Israeli prime-time television satirical sketch comedy show that premiered on Keshet's Channel 2 in 2003. It features satirical references to current affairs of the past week through parodies of the people involved, as well as the thoughts of recurring characters. The program's concept is inspired by Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show and others. The program is one of the most watched and influential shows on Israeli television.[1][2] It is also one of the longest-running scripted shows in Israeli television to date, running for 20 seasons as of 2022. Beginning with season 15.