Walking a Very Narrow Bridge

A NUMBER OF PEOPLE CAME TO SHABBAT SERVICES yesterday morning at my synagogue specifically to draw some collective comfort for the confusion and concern they were feeling about the newest battles this week in Israel’s longstanding conflict with the Arab world.

Before the service began, people were saying (and I paraphrase), ‘I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about what’s going on.’ ‘I’m very upset by it, and not sure what to do about that feeling.’ ‘I’ve been waiting for days for the chance to be with fellow Jews to sort this out.’

I was co-leading the service with another lay member (the clergy were on a well-deserved break), and we had decided ahead of time that we would recite (as we do every Shabbat, even at less turbulent times, which seem so rare) the prayer for the State of Israel. In addition, we would sing “Lo Yisa Goy,” Isaiah’s famous exhortation that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation or practice war anymore,” and “Gesher Tsar Meod,” an evocative song based on the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav that tells us that “the entire world is a narrow bridge. The main thing is not to fear.” 

I tend to favor “Gesher Tsar Meod” as the proper anthem of this particular moment. Israel -– and, I would argue, the entire peace-and-freedom-loving part of the world -– is walking a narrow and precarious bridge, tiptoeing carefully between two bad and dangerous choices.

On the one side, there is the option of restraint, of “not lifting up sword,” as Isaiah might say, which could expose its people and, indeed, its very existence as a state, to maiming and killing.

On the other side is the knowledge that any military action it launches – certainly anything of the scale that it has deployed in Gaza and Lebanon in recent weeks and days – will subject Israel to criticism, to smears that it is a genocidal oppressor. And it delays the possibility by yet another generation that its enemies will finally realize that the Israelis just want to live in peace. Let me quote again, as I did earlier in this blog, the famous utterance by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said in 1969: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons."

As Rabbi Nachman suggests, given such options, the only thing left for Israel -- and, again, the rest of the world -– is not to fear. That’s the hard part. If the Jews who gathered in Bethesda, Maryland, yesterday morning were feeling fear –- not for themselves, but for relatives and for fate of a land that they love and pray for – imagine how the Israelis themselves feel about it. From what little I can tell from blogs and newspaper reports from Israel, there is fear, yes, but Israelis have lived with fear for a very long time. This time, though, I detect a new (and, for Israel, unusual) consensus.

First, there seems to be a sense that this is The Big One – or the precursor to The Big One – that Israeli analysts have been predicting: the showdown of a generation between Israel and its committed enemies. One of the better developments from this current episode is that there seems to be a growing recognition I have not seen much evidence of before, at least in the U.S. press, that this is not a parochial cross-border spat, but a regional confrontation aching to become a conflagration.

Unfortunately, the poor victims of the shelling and shooting in Israeli and Lebanese towns are innocent bystanders to this battle royale, and, of course, many who can’t (or don’t care to) see past the horrible violence perpetrated by both sides will tend to blame the one who appears (and I say appears) to be more powerful here: Israel.

Second, though I’m reading tea leaves here from a long distance, there seems to be a rare consensus emerging in Israel about the Israeli government’s response to Hamas and Hezbolleh. There’s a strong sense among Israelis and its supporters around the world that they cannot afford to lose this one.

As Shmuel Rosner, the chief U.S. correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote two days ago while he was back in Israel: "It's very  hard to define the exact moment in which a nuisance turns into something you just can't live with anymore. It's not just the kidnapped soldiers on the border -- that has happened before. Just months after the withdrawal, in October 2000, three IDF soldiers were abducted from the Har Dov area. Ehud Barak, prime minister at the time, decided to let it pass - and his approach was repeated many times by his successor, Ariel Sharon, who carried many scars from his previous involvement with Lebanon and preferred not to open a ‘second front’ in addition to the one in the Palestinian territories. But where Barak and Sharon chose restraint over action, the current prime minister chose to go the other way and for many good reasons." 

"You can hear them on every street corner, in every cafe, and in almost every living room: people of the right and the left, young and old, from north and south -- frustrated, toughened, disillusioned."

"Frustration is the most visible motive for the current Israeli mood…. But this cry for the military to act -- to react -- is now more vocal and more desperate than it was 15 years ago. After all, it was a military failure that led to the abduction and escalation in Gaza, and yet another failure on the Lebanese border that led to the kidnapping of another two soldiers and the further deterioration on the northern front.

“In this atmosphere, no military officer and no civilian decision-maker can even think about restraint,” Rosner adds. “Reaching at least one of the two goals they set for this current operation in Lebanon -- bringing the soldiers back home and "changing to rules of the game," meaning no more Hezbollah militias on the Israeli border -- will decide not only the future of the northern front but also the political future of Israel's leaders.”

In another blog entry from a couple of days ago, Rosner said that during this visit in Israel he was taken aback when some hardcore Israeli peacenik friends uniformly endorsed a policy of striking back fiercely to Hamas’s and Hezbolleh’s recent attacks on Israel. Even these people, who typically would be on the barricades protesting such Israeli government actions, he said, wanted to send a message of “don’t mess with Israel," but the second word they really used begins, at least in English, with the letter “f.”

This comes not with the kind of cowboy swagger and faux patriotism we see from many of the more macho leaders and their followers in the U.S. To hear Israelis say it is to hear a doctor say with resignation, "We have no other choice but to amputate."

That, of course, doesn’t mean there isn’t some second guessing in Israel and elsewhere in the Jewish world. It is, after all, a narrow bridge they’re traversing, and Jews can’t let a consensus just sit there. I found it amusing that next to Rosner’s column about this newly formed consensus, the Haaretz Web page featured one of those quicky surveys that Web sites like to offer in the interest of interactivity: “Israel’s response in the north is (vote for one): Weak and insufficent; Reasonable and balanced; Unjustified and irrational.”

You’ve got to wonder: Are the Palestinians offering similar polls on their Web sites? Or are they, like many Syrians profiled in this morning’s New York Times, giddy about the hits Israel has taken? 

At my synagogue, which is made up mostly of members whose views tend to range from left-of-center to even further left, there has been some of that second guessing of Israel's response. But now it is mixed with the frustration that there is no peace movement on the Arab side of the conflict willing to join Israel in turning swords into plowshares. Even after we recited the prayer for Israel and sang “Lo Yisa Goy” and “Gesher Tsar Meod,” people wanted still more. (Our members don’t have much use for quaint institutions like The Suggestion Box; rather, they just spout out what’s on their minds –- mostly on our e-mail listserv and sometimes right there in services.)

Someone started singing an Israeli song of peace (I don’t remember the name) that symbolically includes  Hebrew and Arabic lyrics. Another congregant stood up after that and, very respectfully, emotionally and with real regret and distress, said she could not sing this song, not when there are no similar songs being sung in mosques around the world and when the wrath of the Muslim and Arab world focuses on the eventual destruction of Israel, if not the entire Jewish people.

Sensing that a debate about Middle East policy could overtake Shabbat services and that we may never get out of there (though we were, for perhaps the only time in 4,000 years of Jewish history, running ahead of schedule), my co-leader and I asked the group to stand, and we led them in the singing of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. Everyone sang. In unison. With feeling.

One or maybe both of our synagogue co-presidents quickly made an executive decision: we would set aside some tables during the oneg lunch after services for people to talk about Israel. I wasn’t there but heard that 48 people showed up, which is a lot when you consider that there were maybe 80 people at the service, a small crowd of people for us on Saturday morning, but typical for summer. 

That was the right way to handle it. First of all, people -– Jews especially –- cannot debate such serious, emotional issues without a little food in their stomachs. And they need the sustenance of a full portion of prayer before they can contemplate the fate of the world.

Jeff