This week’s Torah portion includes a verse that is undoubtedly the most well-known to all Jewish people throughout time and space. For more than three millennia, these were the first Hebrew words that most Jews would learn and, by tradition, the final words uttered before one’s death: Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad! Hear O Israel, the ETERNAL is your God, the ETERNAL is one! (Deuteronomy 6:4)
The Sh’ma is the closest thing Judaism has to a statement of faith. Every Jew, every descendent of Israel/Jacob, is to bear witness to the fact that there is but one God. It also points to the interconnected nature of being itself. One force brought the universe into existence. Jews call that force Adonai and when we say the words of Sh’ma Yisrael, we acknowledge that profound truth.
The verses that follow form the first paragraph of the V’ahavta prayer; instructing Jews to love that one God with everything we’ve got.
But, given the news of this week, I’m most interested in the three verses that precede the Sh’ma:
And this is the Instruction—the laws and the rules—that the ETERNAL your God has commanded [me] to impart to you, to be observed in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, so that you, your children, and your children’s children may revere the ETERNAL your God and follow, as long as you live, all the laws and commandments that I enjoin upon you, to the end that you may long endure. Obey, O Israel, willingly and faithfully, that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly [in] a land flowing with milk and honey, as the ETERNAL, the God of your ancestors, spoke to you. (Deuteronomy 6:1-3)
Whether you see this text as divinely revealed, divinely inspired, or as an entirely human document, what is objectively clear is that this People called Israel has a long history with a place which, generation after generation have understood as the land of promise; a land flowing with milk and honey, a land that we see our inhabiting of as part of our destiny so that in this one place we might revere the one God and there follow God’s ways so that we might live meaningful, good, and long lives.
Of course, we call this land Israel. Most Jews –not all to be sure but the vast majority– understand their Jewish identity, be it religious, secular, or some mixture of the two, to be inextricably bound up with this land and in our time, the nation-state that carries its name. (Not necessarily its government, of course, or any of its duly elected political leaders, but rather the state itself.)
I don’t know if U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi is familiar with these verses but the preliminary injunction he issued this past Wednesday demonstrates a deep understanding of how most Jews relate to Israel and to one of its synonyms: Zion. For many Jews, myself certainly included, Zionism –the belief that the Jewish people have a right to return to their ancestral homeland and resume sovereignty so that they might live in dignity and freedom– is a core part of their religious identity. Asking most Jews to reject their relationship to Israel and to their age-old dream of returning “upright to our land”, as the Rabbis would have it, would be akin to asking them to reject any other deeply held belief or article of faith. Here’s how Judge Scarsi put it in his ruling:
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”
Judge Scarsi’s words demonstrate a deep understanding of our relationship to Israel– the idea, the place, the people, and the nation. Israel is, for the vast majority of us, a part of our very faith and therefore, a part of “our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”
This preliminary injunction will surely be challenged and there will be much debate in legal and Jewish circles about what it all means. But, for this Jew, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the privilege of being a part of a diaspora community wherein, notwithstanding the deeply troubling uptick in antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric we are witnessing, we might enjoy protections and rights which have all too often been denied us in our wanderings from place to place; from nation to nation.
We are Israel, commanded by our tradition to endeavor with all of our might and soul, with every fiber of our being, to hearken to God’s word so that we can behave in a way that is consistent with our understanding of what it is that God demands of us. We believe that to do this fully, we must be able to live in dignity and freedom. And we believe that having one place on this planet where we can control our own destiny is necessary.
Our right to exercise these beliefs which make up parts of our faith is reasonable, justified, and not at all unlike the rights of others all over the world –including, someday, Palestinians– to do the same.
Reasonable. Justified. Ordinary, even.
Of the roughly 195 sovereign nations in the world, we desire but one state to call our own, and it’s rather small in stature, by the way. The state we currently have makes up 0.004% of the land mass of this planet (for comparison, Canada, whose population is approximately four times that of Israel, makes up 1.958% of the world’s land mass which is roughly 455 times larger).
We are Israel, a People whose homeland is part of its faith, its history, its destiny, and its identity.
Thank you Judge Scarsi, for seeing us, for understanding us, and for this temporary injunction which we hope might lead to more robust and permanent protections for our people.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Yoshi