“I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul”.
In 1971 the celebrated Jewish poet and singer Leonard Cohen wrote these words during a period of deep depression, where “absolutely everything was beginning to fall apart”.
Over this last year, living as a Jew who loves Israel, I too feel like I have stepped into an avalanche. This is what it surely feels like for Jews across the world, including Australia. Everything that we have taken for granted as proud Jewish citizens of Australia seems to be falling apart. Our leaders are castigated, our artists are excoriated, philanthropists are humiliated. A former foreign minister, Bob Carr, dredges up the most disgraceful antisemitic slurs about us all and especially Jewish lobby groups (shades of the Elders of Zion canard), Jewish school children are targeted, university students intimidated, friends walking innocently along the streets of our city or visiting at a hospital are confronted with vitriol, and the pathetic “free free Palestine” mantra. And then there are merchants who won’t serve Jewish customers, Jewish businesses are being boycotted, and our places of worship attacked.
Is this what freedom in our democratic country has come to – a slew of toxic primitive hatred and anti-Jewishness? Never before have I felt what my mother and father must have experienced in pre-war Lithuania, when they ran to escape from hostile antisemitic groups. Suddenly Mum’s trauma of being attacked by a group of kids and having acid thrown at her when she was just seven years old doesn’t seem like a distant scene of horror any longer.
I simply can’t remember carrying a weight like this. A period aching with acute anxiety. An age of rage, a time of turmoil. The hatred is promiscuous, our capacity to communicate is collapsing.
It’s not just local, it’s global: Protest, propaganda, and the dangerous pusillanimity of mobs have replaced ceremony, respect, and composure. It’s well known that at times of crisis Jews become an easy target; that as things fall apart, we tear each other apart with fearless recklessness.
In addition, what is most disturbing is that almost everybody seems to feel free to express whatever comes into their mind. No filters. No reflection. No thoughtfulness. No caring. I try not to follow the social media invective because I don’t want to climb into the sewer.
I am in despair because polarisation is king. Black-and-white are the only colours. Simplistic primitive thinking at its very worst has pervaded our public spaces and is sadly evident in Israel and in our own Jewish community.
We desperately need to seek out and embrace nuance even when it’s uncomfortable. In my interfaith work I don’t avoid the difficult conversations with liberal Christians, Buddhists, or Muslim clerics. I have unsettling conversations with them, even if they express contrary views and attend the protest marches I so strongly oppose.
You grow stronger through living with uncertainty and confronting dissent. It underlies our Jewish Tradition of debate, argument, and disagreement. You meet it on virtually every page of the Talmud and it’s implicit in our daily prayers.
Yes, so much of this is because of the war in Gaza, and a wilful and inane inability to distinguish between the Jewish population of Australia and the government of Israel. As if the Jews of Caulfield or Bondi decide policy in Israel. I, too, agonise over some of the decisions and actions of the Israeli government, especially what was the short-lived withholding of food earlier this year. I am driven to distraction by the right-wing extremist Israeli politicians riding like mad Max across the landscape of Israel. My heart is shredded daily by the suffering of our hostages and their families, and by the suffering population of Gaza. The loss of the lives of all those young soldiers of Israel cuts deep into my soul. My faith in humanity is decimated daily by the barbaric audacity and brilliant propaganda strategy of Hamas.
But I know there is no other country for the Jewish people. I know that this is a lone democratic country in the Middle East where some of the harshest critics of the government are free to express their opinions. I am totally befuddled by the media from ABC to BBC, Al Jazeera to CNN, when it comes to Israel. They are so unabashedly one-eyed or, as John Milton put it, “eyeless in Gaza”.
I am tempted to latibulate – to hide in a safe corner until conditions improve, I am tired of talking about hatred. I am exhausted by the unrelenting barrage of hostility against Jewish people.
But the words of Deuteronomy speak to me with an alarming and urgent clarity: “I place before you today a blessing and a curse. Choose the blessing, choose life”. I will choose love above labitulation, reconciliation with those who choose dialogue before death, healing and repair rather than revenge and destruction. I am; however, not naive. I will not choose capitulation in the face of those who wish to destroy me, my family, and my people. As a Jew this Yom Kippur, I will again reassert that we are a L’Chaim people; remember us for life is the refrain of our many prayers.
The celebration of weddings in Israel constantly reminds me that love can be cultivated even in the midst of grief and loss. In a time of hate, we need to reaffirm love.
Love and chesed (deep loving kindness) are about not invalidating the other. It is about sharing the burden of protecting your community and your country. And it is about eschewing extremism (on both the right and left) and pursuing the path of radical moderation. If we do not find that path of the Biblical darchei noam, the way of peace and pleasantness, of reaching out in care and consideration to the other, what kind of world are we creating?
Love is power. American playwright, Thornton Wilder, called it the only hope, the only survival. South African writer, Alan Paton, put it that when one loves genuinely one does not seek power because they already possess real power. “And you shall love”, Veahavta is the imperative of Jewish prayer and of our most famous prayer – the Shema Yisrael.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks reflects on the meaning of love and chesed at this time of the year on the Jewish calendar when we ask God to write us in the Book of Life for the New Year. He writes: “What have you done with your life so far? Have you thought about others or only yourself? Have you brought healing to a place of human pain, hope to a place where you found despair?”
As we approach the awesome High Holiday season on the Jewish calendar (from September 23) I will pray more intensely and commit all the more passionately to pursue the path of life and love for my people, my community, the people of Israel, and for all humanity. May we all step into an avalanche of love and compassion!
Rabbi Ralph
