Drash for Friday evening, Shabbat Nitzavim

Syrians killed by chemical attack by the Assad regime

A Dangerous World

The part of the service we’ve just completed is called various things.  Sometimes we call it, ‘The Amidah,’ which means ‘Standing,’ because that’s the posture in which we say it.  We don’t kneel or sit; if we’re able to, we stand as if before God.  We also sometimes call it, ‘The Tefillah,’ which means ‘The Prayer,’ because it is one of the select parts of the service where we are not talking about God but rather to God.  Also, because it provides us with a model structure even though our personal prayers may be entirely spontaneous.

          Sometimes we call it ‘Shemoneh Esrei,’ which means ‘Eighteen.’  ‘18’ is an allusion to the fact that there are nineteen blessings in the weekday prayer.  The name ‘18’ predates the addition of the one blessing that bumped the number up to nineteen.  Despite the change, the name ‘Shemoneh Esrei’ stuck.

          The weekday prayer contains a series of requests:  for knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, healing.  There are 15 such petitions.  In the Shabbat and festival prayer, all but two are missing.  The retained ones are:  the prayer that our prayers be accepted in favour, and the prayer for peace.

          We don’t ask for the same long list of things on Shabbat and holy days; we imagine such days as being God’s days ‘off.’  But we do ask for peace.

          The word Shalom, translated ‘peace,’ means something far more than an absence of fighting.  It does mean that I’m not in fear of my neighbour killing me, but it means more.  It means ‘completeness.’  It implies that real peace is only possible when we experience a degree of completeness.

          In our Tradition there’s an implication that peace in this sense will come only in the Messianic Era.  The Prophet Isaiah predicts: “[The Nations] shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war anymore.”  In other words, when this redemption comes, no one will be afraid of anyone else.  But in our siddur, the verse is mis-rendered:  “Let them beat their swords into ploughshares…let nation not lift up sword against nation…”  Perhaps it is a subtle difference, but I don’t think so.  The editors of Mishkan T’filah have taken a Messianic Prediction and turned it into an immediate imperative.  My complaint about that is, of course, that no amount of starry-eyed unilateral disarmament will change the nature of the world in which we live.

          It is in the nature of the Free World that we want to see every world event as a harbinger of the Messianic Era.  We become weary of war.  And why wouldn’t we?  We grow tired of seeing our tax dollars go year after year, decade after decade to manning a military establishment and purchasing machines of war.  We would like to dedicate these resources to the amelioration of our society’s many ills instead.  We grow tired of seeing the real costs of war:  the diggers’ funerals, and the disabled veterans.  It makes one want to cry.

             Many have been the voices that counselled unilateral disarmament, and a deliberate policy of non-violence in the face of any and all threats.  For example, M. K. Gandhi, the Father of Modern India.  I know that it raises eyebrows to criticise Gandhi in polite company, but Gandhi had strange ideas.  In 1938, he thought a war against Germany would be unjustified.  He wrote that German Jews should stand up and claim their rights as German citizens, and if they get killed, so be it.  He counselled against any organised partisan activity to save any portion of European Jewry.  He counselled against any organised international resistance of Hitler’s designs to rule all of Europe.  He would have had the British stand by and let the Wehrmacht land on their beaches.

          Gandhi was not the only revered figure in history to write things this outrageous.  Since I’m in an iconoclastic mood, let me add Martin Luther King Jr., to the list.  In America, they have just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of whose I Have a Dream speech.  I Have a Dream should go down in history as one of the most eloquent and moving appeals for sanity ever.  But his counsel with regard to unilateral nuclear disarmament in the face of the Soviet threat, was as pie-in-the-sky as Gandhi’s advice to appease Nazi Germany.  Others have counselled appeasing equally evil and dangerous regimes.  Why would someone think that evil can be appeased?  I believe that it stems from the philosophical device of drawing equivalence.  That is, the mistaken philosophical device of drawing equivalence, where none really exists.

          Gandhi’s enemy – actually, ‘enemy’ is too strong a word, probably ‘opponent’ would be fairer – was Great Britain.  Although 1938 was premature for predicting how and when India would gain her independence from Britain, perhaps the prescient could have predicted that it would have happened in a non-violent manner.  But Britain, even in her worst sins, has never been a nest of evil of even a tiny proportion to that of Nazi Germany.  To equate the two is absurdity of absurdities.  Suggesting that the Jews – really the world – should seek redress from the Third Reich in the same manner as that, in which Gandhi led his people to seek redress from Great Britain, is really breathtaking.

          The world is still a dangerous place.  Gandhi’s successors in India know this.  India has been a member of the small ‘fraternity’ of nations possessing nuclear weapons for the better part of two decades.  And she possesses all manner of conventional arms.  Because her potential enemies today are not the likes of Great Britain.  They are the likes of Pakistan and China.

          As if we needed a further reminder of how dangerous our world is, now the Syrian regime has killed its own citizens with chemical weapons.  And now we have a good idea what happened to the chemical weapons that most reasonable world leaders believed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed, but which were never found in almost a decade of Coalition presence in Iraq.  It appears that they were hidden in Syria, in the hands of the regime there.

          This is not going to turn into a drash calling for Western military intervention in Syria.  I feel the call of ‘Do Something’ as strongly as the next guy.  But that call, and the Western response, did not produce the desired effect in Iraq, and not in Libya.  I’m frustrated by the boldness of Syria’s Assad to gas his own citizens.  But I’m not equally frustrated by the reluctance of the likes of Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama, to intervene.  Maybe intervention is called for, but I don’t think we can agree on what form that intervention should take.  So I’m not going to use my pulpit this evening to call for action.  That’s a political decision, and as I’ve said before, I try to avoid making political statements from the pulpit.

          But I am using my pulpit to remind us all that the world is still, and will continue to be, a dangerous place.  It would be wonderful if there were truly an ‘Arab Spring’ to celebrate.  But it is folly not to recognise the ‘Arab Autumn’ that we have been witnessing.  Of course, we Jews have a particular interest in the upheavals of the Arab world inasmuch as they endanger Israel.  But the rest of the world needs to have as much interest.  Because the brutality of Syria is mirrored throughout the Arab world, the differences being largely of degree.  And by extension, through vast parts of the planet within the orbit of Islam.

          This is also not polite to say publicly.  But integrity requires it.  The conflict in Syria is particularly dangerous not because a few thousand Syrians have met a brutal death at the hands of their regime.  That’s bad enough.  But it is particularly dangerous because the rest of the Arab-Islamic world is simmering and could very well fall into the same conflagration.  And that would – could – lead into a worldwide open conflict.  Our guest speaker last weekend, Dr Daniel Pipes, does not think that this is inevitable, and perhaps it is not.  But it is definitely well within the realm of possibility.  It is something we should fear.  And prepare to counter if, G-d forbid, we face it.

Let us work to bring peace to the world.  Let us pray that each sector of the world that is experiencing deep conflict, the Arab world included, will see a breakout of good will.  Let’s counsel our national leaders to be ready to help broker it, if requested.  But let’s not dismantle our armed forces just yet.  Because the world predicted by Isaiah has not yet been seen.  Not even in small part.  Shabbat shalom.