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Tazria 5766
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation Bnai
Israel
Toledo,
OH
In the midst of a whole
bunch of stuff about different kinds of ritual impurity, this week’s Torah
reading has a commandment which stands out like a beacon from amongst all
the descriptions of emissions and skin disease:
“And
in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.”
That’s all it says on
the subject in this section of the Torah. Elsewhere, however, we are
told that the circumcision represents a covenant between God and the Jewish
people. A covenant going back to the first Jew, all the way back to
Abraham.
What is a covenant?
It is a reciprocal promise. You do something for me, I do something
for you. The covenant between God and Abraham was simple: we
circumcise our sons, and God will be our God.
Is that covenant between
the Jewish people and God still in force? Last week we observed Yom
Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day on which we remember and honor the
six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. In my talk
last week, I spoke of the theological challenges of Shoah – the question of
how can we possibly make sense out of the unspeakable. There are those
whose response was to give up on God, to say if God didn’t protect us in
those times there either is no God, or God doesn’t care and there is no
longer any covenant between us and God.
The Torah says that Jews
are a stiff-necked people. In this situation, that’s a good thing.
Most of us have stubbornly refused to give up on God. We don’t see the
Holocaust as something God did – we see at as something that people did.
There is a remarkable
story told how in one of the concentration camps during the Shoah, the Jews
decided to convene a beit din, a rabbinic court, and judge God – to judge
whether he had violated the terms of the covenant he made with the Jewish
people. After hearing testimony and arguments on both sides, the court
found God guilty of violating the covenant.
And what did they do
with that judgment? Right after they concluded their judgment, right
after finding God guilty of violating the covenant, one of the judges called
out “Mincha!!” and they said the afternoon prayers.
Even in the face of
overwhelming evidence that God had violated the terms of the covenant, those
righteous Jews upheld the covenant. Almost as if they were telling
God, “You don’t get rid of us that easily, Lord!!” They reaffirmed the
covenant. They said even if God has not fully lived up to his part of
the deal, and we don’t understand why, the deal is still in place.
As important as it is
for us to remember the people—Jews and others—who were killed by the Nazis,
I believe there is an even more important purpose to Yom Hashoah.
The more important
purpose to Yom Hashoah is to remind us every year, to reaffirm a new
covenant that Jewish people have made in the wake of the Holocaust.
The new covenant is not
a covenant with God. It is, rather, a covenant with future
generations.
“Never again!”
The Jewish people’s
response to the tragedy of the Shoah was to say “Never Again!” Never
again should such a horror occur. We promised ourselves, we promised
our children, we promised our children’s children.
It’s one reason that
Jews all over the world provide such strong support to the State of Israel.
As long as we have Israel to go to, we will never again have a time when
Jews are being killed and no one will give them asylum. As long as we
have a credible military force, people will think twice before trying to
kill Jews.
But “never again” needs
to be about more than just the Jewish people.
Never again needs to
mean NEVER AGAIN to genocide – regardless of the ethnicity or religious
background of the victims. It means we must be diligent in preventing
any other people from experiencing what we experienced.
The Torah over and over
tells us “be kind to the stranger, for you know what it is like to be a
stranger.” The Torah teaches we must learn from our experience of
being slaves in Egypt to create a world in which no one is treated badly.
Even though the Torah did not abolish slavery, it DID abolish mistreatment
of slaves: knock your slave’s tooth out, and he goes free. The Torah
tells us that even slaves are to be treated with dignity, are not to be
abused, and we know that we must treat them this way because we have been
there.
We must take the same
lesson from the Holocaust. We know what it is like to be the victim of
senseless hatred for no reason other than religion or ethnic group. We
have cried and we still cry and mourn for the innocent people—1.5 million
Jewish children among them—who were shot and gassed and burned in the Hell
of the Shoah. We know that pain, and we know we must do everything we
can to prevent other people from ever having to experience that pain
themselves.
Unfortunately, we have
not been doing a very good job.
It wasn’t just the Jews
who said “Never Again!” after the Holocaust. In 1948 the United
Nations passed the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide.” There are 138 signatories to the convention, nations
that agree to be bound by its terms. The Convention confirms that
“genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime
under international law,” and the Convention bounds signatories to prevent
and punish transgressors.
The Convention defines
genocide as murder and a variety of other acts of violence intended to
destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group.
Even though as I
mentioned last week, the US was slow to enter the second world war, by the
end of the war we had become among the most passionate supporters of
preventing other such tragedies. We took the lead in the
Nuremberg
trials, bringing many of the perpetrators to justice. When the
Convention on Genocide was presented, President Harry Truman called on U.S.
Senators to endorse the Convention on the grounds that America had "long
been a symbol of freedom and democratic progress to peoples less favored,"
and because it was time to outlaw the "world-shocking crime of genocide."
Where were the
signatories to the Convention when over 3 million people were killed, mostly
victims of genocide, in Cambodia between 1970 and 1980?
Where were the
signatories to the Convention when 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by the Hutus
in Rwanda
in 1994?
Why did it take so long
for the signatories to the Convention to respond the murder of 200,000
Muslims—and the forced relocation of many more—in Bosnia beginning in 1995?
Samantha Power of the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has pointed out how much
progress has been made in the field of human rights in the last fifty years.
There are global conventions outlawing discrimination on the basis of gender
and race, that outline rights of refugees and children. There is
planet-wide ban on land-mines, and there are international war crimes
tribunals that take certain mass murderers to task.
“But,” Power wrote, “one
ugly, deadly and recurrent reality check persists: genocide. Genocide has
occurred so often and so uncontested in the last fifty years that an epithet
more apt in describing recent events than the oft-chanted "Never Again" is
in fact "Again and Again." The gap between the promise and the practice of
the last fifty years is dispiriting indeed. How can this be?”
In the last 50 years the
United States has gone to war to stop the spread of Communism in Korea and
Vietnam, we went into Panama and forcibly removed Manuel Noriega, we stopped
Iraq from invading Kuwait, we attacked Afghanistan and removed the Taliban
and we have removed Saddam Hussein from power.
We have been ready to go
to war when our own national interests are at stake. We have not been
ready to commit troops, money, and American lives to stop genocide in places
like Cambodia, Rwanda, or Bosnia.
All recent US presidents
have pledged that they would never again allow genocide to occur.
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush the first, and Bill Clinton all
made that pledge. Yet they all did nothing to stop genocide when it was
happening during their terms in office.
When current President
George W. Bush read a report on the genocide in Rwanda, he is reputed to
have marked in the column “Not on my watch!”
The President said “not
on my watch,” and we, the Jewish people, have said “never again!”
Yet it is happening
again, and it is happening on President Bush’s watch.
400,000 blacks in Darfur
have been murdered by the Arab government and Arab militias in Sudan.
We read about what’s
happening in Sudan and it looks like just a bunch of violence, we think of
it as a civil war, it’s chaos, it’s Iraq, but what’s happening in Sudan is
far more sinister.
It is genocide.
As the UN Convention
defines it, when one ethic group tries to eliminate another ethnic group,
it’s genocide. Both houses of the United States Congress have declared
in official resolutions that what is happening in
Sudan
is genocide.
Arabs, living on
oil-free deserts in the north and east of the country, are taking over the
more fertile and oil rich south and west of the country, where blacks live.
Blacks in Sudan are being killed by the Arabs for no crime other than being
black – just as Jews were killed by the Nazis for no crime other than being
Jewish.
Many of the black
Sudanese in the south follow ancient tribal traditions, or are Christian.
Something that makes what is happening in Darfur, in the west of Sudan,
particularly heinous is that the blacks are also Muslim – but the Arabs
don’t care, for what they see are blacks, not fellow Muslims, and the
slaughter and displacement continues. It’s as if Ashkenazi Jews were
killing Sefardi Jews.
A report from the BBC
describes the scene:
“For
months, the Islamic government in Khartoum, together with traditional Arab
militia, have been accused of pursuing a scorched earth policy in western
Sudan.Everything we saw, everything we heard, suggests that this is true.
Strung out along our route, are more deserted, torched villages. In all of
them, the signs are of a hasty, panicked departure.
“Up to one
million people - a sixth of the population of western Sudan - is believed to
be on the move. The Sudanese of African descent have been "cleansed" from
their traditional lands, forced to become refugees in their own homeland.”
The BBC reporter also
interviewed some of the refugees. The reporter interviewed
a13-year-old girl, named Hawa. “She escaped to Kalma after her village
was torched.
She
identifies the attackers as Arabs on horseback, accompanied by government
planes. She and her six sisters managed to run away, but her parents were
killed. She takes us to the fragile straw and stick hut where the little
girls have set up house. Hawa cradles her three-year-old sister. A battered
pot, containing a little porridge, sits outside. During the attack, the
family's livestock - cows and horses - were also lost. The family is left
destitute.”
We cannot
allow genocide to happen to anyone. Jews have a long tradition of
sticking up for the rights of others. Not just the Jewish activists in
the struggles over civil rights. Going all the way back to Abraham –
when Abraham argued with God to spare the lives of the non-Jewish residents
of
Sodom
and Gomorrah. Years later, the prophet Jonah was reluctant, but he
ultimately did the right thing and went to save the non-Jewish residents of
Nineveh.
Last
Monday night, at our Yom Hashoah commemoration, we presented a certificate
acknowledging the efforts of Reverend Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha,
who have been honored by Yad Vashem as righteous Gentiles. Reverend
and Mrs. Sharp could not sit on the sidelines as genocide unfolded.
Leaving their two young children behind, they went to Czechoslovokia and
southern France in 1939, saving the lives of hundreds of Jews, smuggling
them out of the country, securing false papers, exposing themselves to
tremendous personal danger.
We can’t
all be Jewish Reverend Sharps heading for Sudan. But we can all be
“righteous Jews” working to save people of other nations. We can speak
out: in letters to President Bush, letters to Congress, letters to the
newspapers. We can stay informed about what’s happening, participate
in rallies—there’s a big one in Washington, DC tomorrow. And as always
with a crisis, we can provide financial support. The American Jewish
World Service is accepting donations to provide humanitarian aid to help the
people of
Darfur.
An information sheet can be found on the table by the entrance to the
synagogue.
Ribono
Shel Olam, Master of the Universe, please God, strengthen the hands of those
who would stop the slaughter of your children in Darfur. Bring the
survivors under the wings of Your sheltering presence. Help the
leaders of the civilized world to remember their promise of “never again,”
and help them to act on that promise. Help us, Lord Almighty, to bring
peace to the land, peace between black and Arab, Muslim and Muslim, Muslim
and Jew and Christian and all peoples on this earth,
Amen.
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