Sermon - May 1, 2009

ISRAEL IN OUR LIVES – ISRAEL AT 61 5/1/09
Rabbi Mark S. Kram, Temple Beth Or, Miami, FL

My love affair with Israel began early, but in 1967, just after the start of the Six Day War, when I was 16, I tried to "seal my fate" as an Israel advocate by telling my parents that I was going to Israel to help defend her.  There I was, all of 16 years old, with a future vision which included flying for the USAF.  And with all of my youthful exuberance, I wanted to help the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland.  However, this was a future which my parents DID NOT share.  The answer was "no".  and I trusted that they were right.  So I spent the Six Day War as most American Jews and other Jews of the Diaspora, on the sidelines.

What ties us to that land?  With all of its blemishes and imperfections, all of the political and moral challenges, Israel has survived 61 years in what many call, the worst neighborhood on earth.  Surrounded by 100 million Arabs which by and large wished that she did not exist, Israel lives – Yisrael Chai – and the People of Israel lives – Am Yisrael Chai.

Pride.  That's part of it.  The pride we feel when a new medical advance is announced.  Pride in how Israel holds itself among the community of nations.  Pride in that this land, IS the land of our fathers and mothers walked.  Moses saw it but did not cross over.  And so many centuries of uninterrupted Jewish settlement.

As any nation, it's not perfect.  David ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, once said that Israel will be normal when there are Jewish thieves (and another class of people I will not mention here).  In over 200 years, we Americans have made mistakes as well.  But given the neighborhood Israel shares, given the animosity, disregard and outright hatred from its neighbors, building the society that they have, holding a moral torch to light up those dark places, speaks volumes about its character, its tenacity and its creativity.  A state of refuge for all Jews – those in need of a home, and those whose ideals prompt them to physically join the Zionist enterprise.

Mindy and I have led many, many groups to visit Israel.  From teens to adults, staying in Moshavim without A/C in over 100^o weather to 5 star hotels – (I prefer the 5 star route).  Each time, without qualification, I can say that participant's lives were changed!  To learn what it means to live in the Jewish country is something one can only experience.  The pride which welled-up inside having seen how the kibbutzim grew, how the desert was partially "tamed", and blossomed.  And how one of the most advanced societies on the planet was created because of technological brilliance.

A story about our son David from Tel Aviv.  On one particular rotation at the hospital which focused on "guts," gastro-intestinal organs, he recalled that he had heard somewhere that the camera-pill swallowed by patients to view internal organs was invented in Israel.  He asked the mentor of his medical student group whether he knew where it was invented and by whom.  "You're looking at him," replied the doctor clad in his jeans and Crocks.  In a word, that's Israel.

The pride only increases with comments by Richard Z. Chesnoff writing for the Huffingon Post, April 29, 2009.  The title of his article, ISRAEL AT 61: A LESSON TO BE LEARNED:

It begins, "Now for something completely different: good news from the Middle East!"

In the midst of continuing rancor with its Palestinian neighbors and nuclear threats from Iran, Israel has managed to carve out a booming technological industry that far surpasses even Israeli expectations.

Six decades ago, the nascent Jewish state's star exports were primarily agricultural - the traditional Holy Land oranges, dates and olives, then flowers and specialty vegetables for a newly prosperous European market. Israeli hi-tech in 1948 was the export of Israeli made false teeth and polished diamonds.

Today close to 70 per cent of Israel's multi billion dollar global export market consists of hi-tech products and services - from computer science to ingenious medical mechanical innovations to ecologically linked processes for everything from desalination to solar power on cloudy days. Potentially, and possibly most important of all, large parts of Israel's technological it are making inroads into the vast Arab market that technically boycotts it.

Consider the following: Israel, the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population, can boast the following:

1.      The cell phone, developed in Israel by Israelis working in the Israeli branch of Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel.

2.      Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel. The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel. The Pentium microprocessor in your computer was most likely made in Israel.

3.      Converse Technology, whose main operations are in Tel Aviv, is the world's largest producers of voice messaging systems.

4.      Teva, with a network of plants south of Tel Aviv, is the world's largest generic drug maker.

5.      Pergonal, the world's most widely used fertility drug, was discovered at Israel's Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer.

6.      Various parts of the digital video and audio security systems developed by Israel-based Nice Systems are being used by everyone from Atlantic City casinos to air traffic controllers at Dulles and O'Hare airports to the NYPD and LAPD.

7.      Israel's Given Imaging has developed a pill containing a tiny video camera that can be swallowed to help physicians detect and locate intestinal tumors.

8.      The perimeter security fence around everything from Buckingham Palace to parts of Chicago's O'Hare Airport was developed and produced by Israel-based Magal Security Systems.

9.      Applied Cognitive Engineering, an Israeli company, has developed a video-coaching tool for basketball teams based on training techniques used by the Israeli Air Force to improve aerial shooting and passing skills.

10.  AOL's Instant Messaging system was developed by four young Israelis whose company Mirabilis was eventually acquired by AOL itself.

11.  More than 150 Israeli companies are traded on the New York stock exchanges, mostly NASADAQ where Israel is the largest foreign presence next to Canada.  

The list goes on.  Do you feel it?  The pride?

All have been touched by war.  The country is so small that when someone is killed by war or terrorist attack, everyone feels it.  The children of Israel are just that – children of everyone.  I know, I paint a very pretty picture of Israel.  It does have its blemishes as I said – and I won't delve into the political situation now.  That's not how I choose to use the pulpit.

But I will share with you a story that appeared in one of the Israel dailies this past week – a week which, as I mentioned in my D'var Torah column in our online weekly, that Israelis encountered two awesome days in a row.  Tuesday was Yom HaZikaron – Memorial Day;  Wednesday was Yom Haatzmaut – Israel's Independence Day.

In Jewish custom, we mourn first and then celebrate.  We cry and then feel joy.  The message is clear: things get better.  We are optimists (who wouldn't be; how could Israelis NOT be?!).  I'll conclude with this story.

It is a story of one soldier and his friend who visits his grave each year.  it is a story of devotion, one shared by all in the Jewish state.

YOM HAZIKARON 2009 - A Gaze that cannot be Forgotten. 

A letter by Yoram Duri to his friend Moshe, who fell in the Yom Kippur War, 1973. 

Hi Moshe,

Once again at this same time, just like the last thirty six years, I will stand at your grave, by the stone that bears your name.  In the beginning I would come to the temporary plots.  The terrible number of the fallen in the Yom Kippur war we needed a place to deposit the bodies, and you were among them.  Only after the war – when we were freed from the reserves - were you transferred to the place which we call the place of eternal rest- the cemetery in Kiryat Shaul.

I was one of the soldiers who worked with you in Tel Hashomer, and I carried your coffin, draped in the national colors to the Israel cemetery.  In my mind, it might as well have been today.  Tomorrow (-on Yom HaZikaron) in the cemetery I will see many familiar faces; families and friends who come here every year.  It is indeed a strange group that we create!  In the beginning we saw parents and young women, sometimes even infants.  Now there are few if any parents, a few wives, many friends who have since aged and now they come to the cemetery with their children.  Who are like the bereaved families and their friends kissing the graves?   They know that it is a loss that has no end, a wound that does not heal, a pain that has no release.

The stones are all simple and remarkably similar.  A slab of stone and upon it a name.  Yours Moshe is no different.  The personal ID number, the age, the time and the place where the soldier fell.  On yours it says, “2062022.  Moshe Mildiner.  Son of Yaakov and Ida.  Fell on the 20^th of Tishrei in the Sinai offensive.  Fell at age 23.” Around you are the same markers - religious and secular, Jews, Druze, and Bedouin.  Rows of identical stones throughout the land mark the places of those underneath with the future already behind them.

You Moshe decided to go (during the Yom Kippur war) to the dispatch area on the day you returned from studying medicine in Italy.  You were angered that your father called me up to the dispatch and only later did he call you.  “I do not care about the process.  I am now registered as a foreign student.  If I am not the first in line they may not draft me for the war.”  You asked me to lend you a shirt with long sleeves in order that you would not waste time going home, and you would have something to wear until you received your official uniform.  Today they would make a full documentary about you on TV.  During those days, all were like this, at least the decisive majority.  Today sadly 50% of the people do not go to the army.  Each has their own reason.  One is Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and one is Arab.  One is seeing a ‘specialist’.  The forth only received orders from God, and the fifth “mistader”- will get by.  However there are still the others - many of them.  They choose to enlist, and volunteer, and endanger their lives…

Today in the cemetery you see the families.  They just want one more time - one more time for that embrace that can never be forgotten.  For that gaze that is impossible to forget and will never return.  They all want one more time.  The smell.  The air.  You.  In this place they get a stone.  A final resting place, and yet a resting place which does not give respite for those who remain.  I was recently struck by the poem of Avraham Chalfi who describes the feelings of those coming to Kiryat Shaul, and not standing far from your grave.

First they cry

And then the crying subsides

They then remember

The one and only thing - the fallen son

They say nothing

They speak of the rain, about chit-chat

They speak of this, and then that…

The ear cannot bear it

They become silent

They get up from bench, then sit, and then rise, again

They now of only one thing

He does not return.

This is exactly what Yaakov told me time and again when we met after you fell.  That is what Ida told me as well.  Your father was not strong enough and died from a brain condition.  Certainly it is true that his brain could not conceive that you were gone.

I have always told your parents that I know there are not words that can console; there are not things that can mitigate your pain.  I can only give them a warm embrace, to strengthen them, to give them an embrace of love and partnership.

I have decided today Moshe, to change my style and not to write to you about the Israel of today, about contemporary politics, but to describe what is happening around you on this Day of Remembrance.  I speak of the simple, the camaraderie, and the awesomeness buried here.

In the afternoon I will go to the ceremony for Division 600, our division which was stationed in Latrun, and lost 120 soldiers in the war.  There we will all meet, exchange stories and tell jokes.  To there, my dear Moshe, I will take you with me, because you are part of us.  You recognize all of them, speak their language, laugh with them.  There, Moshe, you are one of them. 

The only difference is, they are all almost 60, but you have remained 23.

From Psalm 122 we read:

[So] Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
They that love thee shall prosper.
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.
For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will say now,
Peace be within thee.
For the sake of the House of the Lord our God I will seek thy good.       

AMEN.  Kein Yihi Ratzon.