Shabbat Ha'atzmaut/Emor
Written by Rabbi Dr Michael Shire Tuesday, 13 May 2008
This week’s Torah portion Emor falling just after Israel’s 60th birthday describes the Israelite who curses God and is stoned for doing so.
The Chinese proverb “May you live in Interesting times” is often categorized as a curse. To live at this moment of 60 years of Israel’s existence is a blessing not granted to previous generations of Jews. For hundreds of years Jews yearned and prayed to return to Zion both as a relief from their diaspora existence but also as a vision of a new conception of society where Jewish values would infuse a nation with Justice and holiness. However to live during this reality of 60 years of a Jewish state is also to be forced to confront the ongoing challenge of creating that society whom some regard as a curse due to its very existence.
When the early activists of the American revolution in 1776 wrote and spoke about their ideals, they too envisaged creating a new society breaking from the past hegemony of an aristocratic European model and seeking to build a new way of living based on freedoms of individuals, religious tolerance and republician representation in Government and legislation. The language they used was classical and exalted, “We told these truths to be self-evident…”. However sixty years later, having fought and won two wars for its very existence, the American republic was still struggling with the very conception of what it was to become. Though liberty had been achieved, the very notion of freedom of individuals was being challenged by those opposed to slavery and representation for the increasing number of native peoples under their control was non-existent. As the third generation of America began great challenges, left unresolved by the founding generation, came to the fore and led not long after to a bitter Civil war.
We too are beginning the third generation of the existence of our Jewish state today. The founding generation wrote and spoke about their ideals in magnificient terms, “THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
We know now that these ideals could be not fulfilled without having resolved the very issues that the founding of the State created: a displaced Palestinian population, discrimination for Israeli Arabs in education, the workplace and politics, religious discrimination within Judaism itself and an Ashkenazi hegemony only recently swept away in the face of Sephardi, Mizrachi and Russian discrimination, sufferance and poverty.
