The Troubling Puzzle
D'var
Torah: Tazria Metzora
April 24, 2009
When we reach this week’s Parsha of Metzora, I am inclined to speak about the language we use, good and malevolent. The Talmudic Rabbis believed that a certain physical malady described in the Torah portion was caused by one’s ill spoken manner. They may not have gotten good grades in terms of the etiology of disease but they surely made the point that our language has consequences.
This past week, we observed Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. Each year, it is imperative to speak about this time of remembrance. This coming week, we will observe Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day and the following day Yom Ha-atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. I, of course, want to speak about these days as well.
In all there are three topics I want to address. Would that I had to choose to speak about one of these three, but sadly, they all fit together like the pieces of a troubling puzzle. These pieces fitting together makes it impossible for the horror of the Holocaust to recede as past history. They make this and future anniversaries of Israel’s independence of paramount importance to the Jewish people.
Look up malicious speech in the dictionary and you might find a picture of Iran’s shameful president Ahmadinajab. He was the only head of state to show up at a United Nations Conference in Geneva supposedly dealing with human rights and racial discrimination. The last such conference held in Durban South Africa became an international platform for nations dictatorial and repressive to vilify Israel as the most horrible country on planet earth. Anticipating that Geneva would be Durban II, both Israel and the United States boycotted what was feared to be another fiasco in Geneva.
If you are casting a lead role for a fiasco filled with hatred who better to place on the marquee then President Ahmadinajab and there he was. He spoke before this international gathering on the eve of Yom Hashoah. It also happened to be Hitler’s birthday, his soul mate. Ahmadinajab did not disappoint haters of Israel. He called Israel the most racist country in the world. He called Jewish suffering in World War Two merely a pretext for the Zionist enemy to expel the rightful inhabitants of the land and colonize it with imperialist Jews. Sixty four years after the liberation of the Camps, we could tragically say nothing has changed. If you believe in reincarnation, Hitler came back as a Persian President. While it took Hitler the effort of all the ghettos and camps to exterminate the Jewish people, Ahmadinajab wants to do it in one drop of an atomic bomb.
And then we can say so much has changed. More than twenty representatives of the European Union nations and others walked out on this purveyor of hatred. And then we can say nothing has changed. The representative of the Vatican sat silently in his seat. For him, the Iranian did not cross the red line of what is unacceptable. Sadly, representatives of many more than twenty some nations did not walk out and even applauded these lamentable words.
I believe we do Israel a disservice when we idolize Israel as a paradise and a place of perfection. To say Israel can do no wrong is wrong. There are cases of corruption and abuses and mistreatment for sure but I would pit Israel’s human rights record against all of her accusers and I know Israel would come out as a shining light in a dark world. Yossi Sarid writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz says “Even the "leading national newspaper" this week probed the question in a special edition: Is the Israel Defense Forces really the most moral army in the world. It probed, and immediately discovered that while the IDF may not be without flaws, compared to other armies it is entirely true blue and white; the theory of relativity works”
If however you begin with the premise that Israel has no right to exist or to being a Jewish state of six million Jews in a world of hundreds of millions of Arabs then the hatred of Israel is well understood. Israel is the Jewish State.
It is because of the Ahmadinajabs of yesterday, today and tomorrow that we need Israel. If only his speech were meaningless malicious words, we could also throw clown noses at him and laugh but his hateful rhetoric is to be taken seriously. On the very day he uttered his contemptible diatribes, we remembered the six million who perished during the Shoah. This week we will remember those heroes who fell in the establishment and defense of the first independent Jewish commonwealth in 2000 years. We will then celebrate the Jewish State's sixty first anniversary. Jewish suffering is not a pre-text for Israel. Israel is the response to Jewish suffering of the past and the shield against Jewish suffering in the future.
Happy sixty first anniversary Israel. May you celebrate two times sixty one and sixty one to the second power. By then, hopefully, Messiah will have come.
Shabbat Shalom,
