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Sermons 5785/2024

Yom Kippur Sermon 5785
Am Yisrael Chai?
Rabbi Alexandra Wright

 

It was Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist, in his treatise entitled The Meaning of History, who wrote:

‘The Jews have played an all-important role in history. They are pre-eminently an historical people and their destiny reflects the indestructibility of the divine decrees… And, indeed, according to the materialistic and positivist criterion, this people ought long ago to have perished. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history; all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny’ (The Meaning of History, Nikolai Berdyaev (1936).

Despite his close association with Russian Jewish philosophers of the period, Berdyaev’s chapter on ‘The Destiny of the Jews’ is double-edged. Is he in awe of the indestructibility of the Jewish people, the ‘dramatic intensity’ that characterises Jewish destiny, the vigorous Jewish ‘aspiration towards the future… the stubborn and persistent demand that the future should bring with it an all-resolving principle, an all-resolving truth and justice on earth’? Is he admiring of the Jews as ‘an historical people, active and self-willed’? Or is he pointing to what the Jewish people lack: the power of contemplation peculiar to the highest levels of ‘Aryan spiritual life’, the limitations imposed by a national God, before God was recognised as the Creator of all life, and the limitations which created ‘all the peculiarities and the specific characteristics of the religious destiny of the Jews.’ Empirical evidence, he concludes, shows that the destruction of the Jewish people should have happened long ago and yet, we have survived.

Last Sunday, as a group from the LJS stood in Hyde Park alongside 30,000 others to mark the first-year anniversary of October 7, the refrain and cry from one speaker after another was the phrase that has repeatedly been expressed and sung at gatherings of Jews over this past year: Am Yisrael Chai – ‘the nation (or people) of Israel live.’  The phrase is neither biblical nor rabbinic; it is not found in our traditional sources, nor in our liturgy but has become a contemporary response to the trauma and tumult of the past year.

Although it may go back further, these three words are associated with the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in 1945.  Some say that Reverend Leslie Hardman, the first British Jewish Chaplain to the armed forces to enter the camp, allegedly cried out, ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ after hearing survivors sing the words of Naftali Herz Imber’s poem ‘Tikvateinu’, now Hatikvah –the Israeli national anthem. Others state that it was Ben Gurion who, after a visit to Bergen-Belsen said, ‘The people of Israel are alive, and the land will be ours.’

Am Yisrael Chai became the campaigning battle-cry for Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of communism. In 1965, Shlomo Carlebach composed the song that would become the anthem for this cause: Am Yisrael chai. Od avinu chai – ‘The people of Israel live. Our father lives’ – the last phrase derived from Joseph’s anxious question to his brothers: Ha-od avi chai (Genesis 45:3) – ‘Is my father still alive?’

Countless other songwriters and poets have incorporated the phrase into their songs and poetry – from Russia to Israel; and in June 2023, a giant mural celebrating four thousand years of Jewish history by the Mexican artist Julio Carrasco Bretón, was unveiled at Ben Gurion Airport. Its title – Am Yisrael Chai.

Am Yisrael Chai – three simple words – ‘The people (or nation) of Israel lives (or is alive)’. What do they mean to us today? How do they inform our existence as Jews?  How do they determine our character and the nature of our survival?  What do they say of our destiny?

Berdyaev was not the only person to write of the resilience and strength of the Jewish people. In 1899, Mark Twain penned his famous essay ‘Concerning the Jews’, in which he compared the great empires of Egypt, Babylonia and Persia, Greece and Rome, to the ‘immortality of the Jew:

‘The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he [sic] always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?’

Leo Tolstoy, describing the Jew as a ‘unique creature’ whom ‘all the rulers of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and fury, continues to live and to flourish, asks ‘What is the Jew?’ What are we that our detractors have never succeeded in ‘enticing with all the enticements in the world’? What are we that we do we not fade and disappear as the great empires of the past vanished?  

Am Yisrael Chai – defiant words of resilience and strength, echoing words we read at the seder: She-lo echad bil’vad amad aleynu l’chaloteinu, ella b’chol dor va’dor omdim aleynu l’challoteinu – ‘Not just one has stood against us to make an end of us, but in every age many have stood against us to make an end of us…’  And how do these verses end? Do they end with the fervour of a self-reliant people, celebrating our national or ethnic identity - Am Yisrael Chai? Do they acknowledge that the survival of our people has been by our own hand alone? Do they affirm the necessity of war and conflict for the sake of survival, or the dominance of one forceful and compelling voice, suppressing dialogue and conversation? No. These verses begin and end with an acknowledgement of God’s faithfulness with Israel from the beginning of our Jewish story until now. It is, says the Haggadah, the Holy One who has sustained us and continues to sustain us throughout all generations.

But I wonder… I wondered as I looked around the Sanctuary on Rosh Hashanah to witness diminished numbers in the congregation. I wondered when a conversation with a Bar Mitzvah boy the day after Rosh Hashanah revealed that he had no idea what festival had just occurred twenty-four hours earlier, because he had been in school. No doubt, I will wonder again when, in five days’ time, our beautiful Sukkot services on Thursday morning, will be attended by a tiny, faithful percentage of the congregation.

What does it mean to survive? Is survival about numbers? Does God look out into the world and say – the future of my people is assured: there are seven million Jews in Israel, 5.7 million in the United States.  My people represent 0.2% of the world’s population and I will guard them as the apple of my eye and guarantee their future. No matter that they are surrounded by enemies who seek their destruction. No matter that they are dispersed throughout the world, or that they are splintered into hundreds of denominations, from the messianic, apocalyptical Jews that populate parts of the Israeli government, to those whose parents turned away from the rituals, prayers and ceremonies of their ancestors, forgetting even oppression and exile, passing on nothing to their children, except an awkward remnant of memory that something might or might not belong to them.

What will survive of us? The dangerous, maximalist messianism that wants to turn the Jewish State into a theocracy, or a faint trace of memory in a generation of children, who like the fourth child of the seder - eynam yod,’im lish’ol – ‘do not know how to ask.’

In the months following October 7th, reports of antisemitic incidents increased dramatically in multiple European countries, including the UK.  In an Institute of Jewish Policy Research paper on antisemitism after October 7th, survey data revealed that the number of recorded antisemitic incidents had been vastly underestimated. On the street, on campus, on social media, this evident rise of antisemitism has had a significant impact on our feelings of safety and security. The degree to which the Hamas attacks on October 7 were marked by open celebration and affirmation of violence unveiled a level of antisemitic hate existing within parts of Western Europe. A culture of what is described as ‘ambient antisemitism’ has emerged in the post-October 7 period, marked by incidents such as defacing or tearing down posters of Israeli hostages. Whether this is termed as strictly antisemitic or not, it creates, says the report, a broader milieu that feels threatening and hostile to many Jewish people. In addition, the IJPR report states that inaccurate and irresponsible media reporting may have led directly to an increase in antisemitism.

And yet, despite this increase in antisemitism, despite a blame culture that holds Jews living outside Israel responsible for what is happening in the Middle East, there has been an inexplicable rise in the number of people seeking to connect with their Jewish heritage or simply wishing to convert to Judaism.  How many are here today whose parent or grandparent, or even great-grandparent may or may not have been Jewish? How many have entered the synagogue for the first time this past year, seeking to explore and perhaps convert to Judaism, on a tentative journey to foster a Jewish identity and a find a place of belonging?  And how many have stepped into a synagogue since October 7th after a long estrangement from Judaism, because this great rupture in our Jewish history has paradoxically created a desire, even a passion to identify with the Jewish people, with their history and destiny – with their suffering?

But whether we have been born into Jewish families and have been part of a community our whole life, or whether the experience of joining a synagogue and creating a Jewish home is new, we enter these High Holy Days at a time when, some would argue, all the old certainties and frameworks of our faith have become exhausted, when Liberal Judaism, with its optimism and hope, its ethical principles of justice balanced with mercy, its foundational faith in a loving and compassionate God, has become ill-equipped to counter extremism, injustice, inequality and the arrogance and ill-judgements of leaders.

And so, how will we survive? Is our watchword to be that catchphrase Am Yisrael Chai –the survival of our numbers, the exertion of our power, the forcefulness of our voices, survival of a Jewish ethnicity or nationalism, survival for the sake of survival in precariously unjust times?

Surely more than all these things, more than Am Yisrael Chai, our survival as Jews must depend on something that both transcends this time-bound materialism and has intrinsic value. I do not believe, as some have said, that we have ‘systematically undone the philosophy, theology and metaphysics that have sustained us up to this point,’ ‘that critically, we have not been able to replace them with something else, something better’, or that we are currently experiencing ‘a growing feeling of groundlessness.’ [1] (Rabbi Judith Rosen-Berry) I cannot believe that the ethical framework envisioned by our prophetic tradition has collapsed, that the beauty and spiritual depth of our heritage have become worn and exhausted.  

We cannot survive only as numbers. We cannot survive riding on the coat tails of our more observant brothers and sisters, living with the belief that God sustains the living, supports the falling, heals the sick and frees the captive. For if that were the case, why then is our world hurtling towards a climate catastrophe; why is the natural order of the world inverted when children die before their parents; and why have the hostages, still languishing in tunnels under Gaza, not been freed. Perhaps that was how the authors of the Bible saw the world, but even the rabbis recognised the paradox of God’s omniscience and power and the gift of human freewill in Rabbi Chanina’s statement: Ha-kol bidey shamayim chutz mi-yirat ha-shamayim – ‘Everything is in the hands of Heaven, except for the fear of Heaven’ (bBerakhot 33b).

In other words, although we recognise and praise the omnipotence of God, we know too, that there is, so to speak, a limit to God’s power and that we exist at the liminal boundary of that knowledge and the recognition our own capabilities, choices, resilience and strength.

Am Yisrael chai – at what cost the survival of our people? At what cost to our morality, our spiritual heritage and faith? ‘It is too small a task for you to be My servant merely to preserve the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel,’ says Deutero-Isaiah. ‘I will make you a light to the nations that My salvation may reach to the ends of the earth’ (Isaiah 49:6).  Our prophetic tradition – the eternal edifice on which Judaism is based, the ethical structure that survived the destruction of the Temple, the loss of the land, the loss of the sacrificial cult and priesthood – demands something different: ‘the work of righteousness’ and an acknowledgement in humility of a loving presence far greater than ourselves.

If, as Tolstoy said, ‘the Jew is a symbol of eternity … the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind,’ then we must embody that eternity, acknowledging the reverberations of Sinai, of faith, prophetic justice, love and compassion, truth and integrity.

This coming year, let us think about the life of the spirit, about how we embody the prophetic vision of truth justice and hope, how we create a Jewish home for our children, how we connect more deeply to this community, giving of our time and skills and ensuring the survival of this synagogue as a place of spirituality, Jewish learning and kindness to others.

These are the things that nourish the spirit of our people and will ensure our survival so that in years to come, our descendants and those who are part of this community will say, yes Am Yisrael Chai, but, more importantly and more vitally, Nishmat Yisrael chayah – ‘the spirit, the soul of the Jewish people is alive’ and may it live forever.  Amen.


[1] Rabbi Judith Rosen-Berry, Commentary on Parashat Shoftim 5784, https://www.liberaljudaism.org/2024/09/parashat-shoftim-5784/

 

Fri, 14 February 2025 16 Sh'vat 5785