Moral clarity on the war against terror
Sermon from Rosh Hashanah II, 5766
Rabbi Clifford E. Librach, United Jewish Center of Danbury
I. Do you know how suicide bombers were announced in the Palestinian press? They were not announced as martyrs. They were not announced as heroes. They were not announced as victims. The few who were women were announced as Angels in Paradise, and the men, of whom 95% of the suicide bombers were, the men were announced as bridegrooms. That’s right: the announcement of their activity was a wedding announcement. “The Wedding of Martyr Muhammad Zahidah Dahlam [or whatever name] to the Black-eyed in Eternal Paradise is announced”. There is a death orientation in parts of Islam today that is very frightening.
II. Contrast Judaism. We departed Egypt, which was saturated with death. The Pyramids were nothing but tombs; monuments to the dead. The Bible of Egypt was entitled nothing less than The Book of the Dead. We refrain from eating chametz on Pesach and for its seven-day duration because it symbolizes fermentation – decomposition – or death itself. When we refrain from eating chamets we symbolically reject death. The word means “sour” and it refers to the chemical decomposition of perishable food – but its deep symbol is Egypt and its culture and absorption in death. Ours is a life orientation, not a death orientation.
The contast is clearer to them than it is to us. One of Osama bin Laden’s early statements after September 11 was so telling: “We love death as much as you in the West love life,” he said. He was right.
III. ASPECTS OF MORAL CONFUSION
A. Why do they hate us? [this has filled the pages of London’s left wing press]
1. During the days of Jim Crow in the American South, did black Americans ask why do racists hate us so much? Did they wonder what they could change in their behavior to accommodate and assuage the violent, rabid, and racist hatred that stalked them? What about Jews during the Crusades, or the Cossack massacres, or the scores of pogroms or the dark days of our own time – did any Jew blithely inquire after their own responsibility for the illogical rage of Jew hatred? Should they have done so? For a black person to even ask such a question would be evidence that he was so pathologized by the hate as to somehow sympathize with his tormentors.
2. Answer: We are the totalitarian’s nemesis. We have made an alternative to tyranny which their leaders and ideologues loathe. We honor human dignity and freedom, and they abhor the same. The Nazis hated Britain and America; the Fascists hated Britain and America; the Communists hated Britain and America; and the Islamic totalitarians hate us as well. Muslims in America have more human freedom and dignity in America than they do in any Muslim country on Earth.
[I am proud, by the way, to be a member of the two most hated groups in the world: Americans and Jews.]
B. But America props up anti-democratic regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
1. Answer: True, but what is the alternative? Would you prefer pro-Western authoritarian regimes or Islamic totalitarian regimes. Would you prefer Egypt or Sudan as a model? Unless and until the experiment in some form of democracy in Iraq (creating a new paradigm) takes hold, that will be the choice, and may I say: the boldness of our current effort should be celebrated and not disdained.
C. But Iraq was stable.
1. Answer: Iraq, we now know, did not just torture dissidents, but the children of dissidents in their presence. None – not even Stalin – behaved with such depravity, except the Nazis in their own most shameful behavior by their own accounting. Saddam Hussein practiced using Anthrax on Kurds and Iranian POWs. Taliban Afghanistan required Hindi to walk around with special yellow badges, just like we were forced to do in Nazi and Christian Europe.
The regime of Sudan hates us as well – they have slaughtered over 1.4 million black non-Muslims. I asked the black ministers of Danbury to join me in condemning this genocide and they told me it was just not on their screens! Could it be because the perpetrators are not white Christians? Why do you think the slaughter of Ruwanda went virtually unchecked? In this, we dare not look to the United Nations, which put Sudan on the UN Human Rights Commission in place of the United States.
D. All people want peace and freedom for their own people. One man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.
1. Answer: At the College of Nablus, there is a Palestinian Exhibit of the Suicide Bombing of the Sbarro Pizza Restaurant in Jerusalem in 2002. It has plastic model body parts splattered across the walls with plastic model pizza slices interspersed. It is a tourist site. To this day, from Morocco to Indonesia, it is generally accepted in the Muslim world that Israelis and Americans engineered the events of September 11. Muhammad Atta’s father, a prominent attorney in Cairo, proclaims to this day that his son was kidnapped by the Mossad and made to look like the ring leader of 9/11 . This is the nature of the enemy of Israel, the enemy of the Jews, the enemy of America. One of our greatest myths is that of the logic and inherent decency of our enemy. Anyone who cannot distinguish between French or Polish or Jewish underground disruption of the Nazi occupation in the 1940s and the Nazi regime itself has a broken moral compass. Anyone who grants moral equivalence to one who blows up pizza parlors and school buses filled with children dressed for Purim and the effort to eliminate its organizers and perpetrators has, it must be said, a broken moral compass.
E. Poverty causes people to hate this much.
1. Answer: The suicide bombers and terrorists, just like those in London, were not poor or even middle class. One woman who was caught in Israel before her belt was detonated was an attorney who had been cared for in Shaare Zedek Hospital, where she attempted to destroy the Children’s Wing, and all of its patients, physicians and nurses. Osama bin Ladan is a billionaire, not just a millionaire. We are dealing with a values problem, not an economic one.
F. We cannot make moral judgments of others because of the virtue of multi-culturalism and the sin of judgmentalism.
1. Answer: These are paralyzing ideas. All humans are equally valuable before God, but all cultures are not equally valuable. Take Nazi culture, for example, or ante-bellum American culture, or Soviet Communist culture or South African Apartheid culture or Talliban Afghanistan culture. If we cannot make judgments, we cannot claim taste or human judgment itself – we assume the character of the animals of the jungle that are without judgment and also without justice, decency, ethics, history or recognizable grandchildren. America is not merely a geographic location, but a nation built upon an idea – E Pluribus Unum [From Many, One], not E Pluribus Plurum. We are multi-ethnic, not multi-cultural.
G. The Global War on Terror is simply the playing out of a cycle of violence.
1. Answer: This is born of the same moral confusion as that which leads us to say in a school bully situation: “I don’t care who started it!” What we are saying with such a phrase is that there is no right and wrong, no element of moral responsibility. Did anyone say that after Pearl Harbor in 1941? Did anyone say that after the Lusitania was sunk by the Imperial German navy in 1917? Did anyone say that to the French or the Poles or the Czechs or the Belgians or the Danes or the Dutch as the Nazi German Army marched in and they struggled to resist? Israel stared at three mobilized armies armed to the teeth in June of 1967, and had to face such a morally bankrupt charge of moral equivalence. Israel has its children blown up on a school bus and finds and executes the thugs and butchers who did it and are told by the UN, “stop this cycle of violence” – as if its just a washing machine cycle, and as if Israel would behave this way even if their children were not victims.
IV. Milhemet Mitzvah vs. Milhemet R’shut (War of Necessity vs. War of Choice)
A. Barbary Pirates, Mexican, WW I, Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo – all wars of choice
B. Civil War, WW II, GWOT – this is an American Milhemet Mitzvah, a war of necessity
V. Speaking now frankly, American to American . . .
A. We need American kids to learn American history and culture – what it means to be an American. [LCF teaching Honors English to 11th graders in LA – no recognition of Walt Whitman, but worse – no recognition of Abraham Lincoln or the purpose or results of The Civil War!]
B. We need a July 4th Seder, in which the birth story of America is told from generation to generation, as a national ritual of renewal, just like our Passover Seder, which retells and relives the Exodus narrative 3200 years later
C. Patriotism is not the same as valuing the US Constitution. We love our teenage kids, not because of the ideas or values they stand for – gevalt! – but because they are our kids. Love of country should be above that for which it stands in its founding documents. It should be a natural impulse of national affirmation, not a conditional affiliation.
VI. Speaking now frankly, Jew to Jew . . .
D. The Bulgarian attaché to the US Embassy in Sofia in 1978, who said to me and my brother . . . “you [Jews] are the people who always help each other, right?”
E. Any victory in this war is our victory and is a victory over our enemy.
F. I have spoken and pleaded with you to support what is right; but I implore and beg you to defend what is yours. At this fragile time in our history, within memory of the great eclipse, little Israel is all we’ve got. The purpose of life is not to be safe. The purpose of life is to lift ourselves out of the jungle and make what is instinctive and habitual into something moral and purposeful. May God give us the strength and courage and make the Bulgarian observation a true description of a great people. V’chein yehi ratzon.
God bless you all. God bless Israel. God bless America. May you have a blessed and wonderful year of 5766. G’mar Chatimah Tova.