High Holy Day Sermon 2023 | 5784: Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback’s Kol Nidrei Sermon on Israel

On Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback delivered a sermon on the State of Israel for Kol Nidrei services. You can view and read other High Holy Day sermons, music, and photos on our High Holy Day Highlights page.

Transcript of Rabbi Yoshi’s Kol Nidrei Sermon on Israel: “Our Responsibility, Like It or Not”

My first trip to Israel was in the summer of 1978, just five years after the Yom Kippur war, whose 50th Anniversary we commemorate today.

We traveled as a family to celebrate the B’nai mitzvah of my older sister and brother.

I was 8 years old and I remember it vividly. And even if I didn’t, I have an amazing photo album from that summer that includes one of my favorite pictures from my childhood: me and my mom standing on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv. I’m rocking a big giant CHAI necklace.

At my mom’s insistence, I also kept a “Travel Diary.”

I’m holding in my hand that historic document.

The first entry, and every subsequent entry, is entitled: “What I Did.”

Entry number one:

“On Sunday…a bus came and took us to the hotel Sheraton. Then we went walking around to different places such as an ice cream place and a tater-tot joint.”

The second entry:

“What I Did”

“I woke up Monday morning in Tel Aviv and put on my swimming suit and went in the Mediterranean sea and surfed the waves and swam. Then came back to the hotel… When we finished breakfast we went to the bus. First the bus went to a famous person’s house by the name of Ben Gurion and we saw the Beit HaTfutsot museum… Then we went to Jerusalem and… went out to dinner at the Sea Dolphin. Then we went to the Wall and I put a note in and we came back to our hotel and went to sleep.”

It continues like this for several pages.

We visited Ammunition Hill and the Israel museum. I guess my parents thought I was mature for my age and decided it was appropriate to bring me along to Yad VaShem, a very explicit museum about the Holocaust not designed for eight-year-olds. 

A few days later, they demonstrated this same confidence:

“On Friday we went to the people who died in the wars and saw their graves… Then we went to the Orthodox Jew part of town and went home, got dressed, and went to Friday night services at the Old City.”

Three takeaways from my “Travel Diary”:

1. My personal relationship with the State of Israel goes way, way back.
2. In those diary entries, are many of the same issues that continue to animate, inform, and complicate life today in Israel: memories of the Holocaust, the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, cemeteries filled with young people who made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation, and religious segregation–neighborhoods and sometimes whole cities and settlements set aside for ultra-orthodox Jews.
3. My writing, if not my penmanship, has definitely improved.

I moved to Israel for rabbinical school in 1992 and lived there for two years. That’s where I met Jacqueline–on my first Simchat Torah in the Holy Land.

Later, I spent two summers leading high school trips to Israel for NFTY, the Reform movement’s youth organization.

After I became a rabbi in 1998, I returned to Israel often for visits and congregational missions and then more intensely over four consecutive summers as part of a fellowship through the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

In the middle of that program, Jacqueline and the girls and I decided to move to Israel full-time, making aliyah and becoming citizens. 

It was an incredible adventure and experience, filled with many, many high-lights and some challenging, low-lights as well. One highlight was running the Year-in-Israel program at HUC where Cantor Emma and her husband, Adam, were my students.

As a family, we worked hard on our Hebrew, navigated challenges both predictable and unforeseen: finding doctors, getting our Israeli drivers’ licenses, signing long forms all in Hebrew to set-up our retirement accounts, paying our taxes (lots and lots of taxes)… We got involved in our kids’ schools, joined a synagogue, and signed our kids up for after-school activities like dance and Capoeira.

Mainly for family reasons having to do with my father-in-law’s health, we decided to move back to America three years later, relocating to Los Angeles to join the Stephen Wise Temple family, first as your Head of Schools and then a few years later as your Senior Rabbi.

Apart from the pandemic, I’ve been back to Israel every year at least once since we returned. I’ve led multiple trips to Israel for the Temple with another one coming up next winter, 2024, in honor of our congregation’s 60th birthday. (Sign-up online after Yom Kippur!)

Israel has been my full-time home for five years of my adult life. Now it is a 2nd home, a place I return to again and again to be with dear friends and family. A place I go to study and to teach.

I know many of you could share similar stories. Some of you have lived in Israel for extended periods of time. Some of you grew up there. 

Others might have visited only once or maybe, feeling that pull, that sense of connection, are planning your first trip.

But let’s be honest, today is a day for honesty after all, there are many in our extended Jewish community who feel, especially at this moment, detached from Israel, apathetic even about the very Jewish state that their ancestors could only dream of.

And surveys indicate that their numbers are growing.

More and more American Jews are saying that they are “done with Israel.” Tired of talking about it. Tired of hearing about attempts or threats by one government or another–including this one–to marginalize Reform and Conservative Jews. Tired of hearing about government ministers–including some current ones–making racist or homophobic comments. Tired of efforts by members of the ultra-Orthodox community to segregate women in public settings or deny full equality to members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Tired of reading about the seemingly unending and unresolvable Israel/Palestine conflict.

And, if we’re being honest, we are complicit in this as a community. We have allowed Israel to become a wedge issue, a “third rail” that many are reluctant to touch, including quite a few rabbis I know. No matter what you say or how carefully you say it, someone will get upset.

You will be labeled too “liberal” or too “conservative.” Too critical or not critical enough. An ultra-woke universalist or a right-wing nationalist. Focused solely on the fate of Israeli Jews or obsessed with social justice for all.

If you raise a concern or offer a loving critique, someone will accuse you of being anti-Israel. 

Everyone to your left is soft or naive. Everyone to your right is a zealot, blinded to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

On Yom Kippur, this Yom HaDin, this day of judgment and introspection, let’s acknowledge our own complicity in this crisis.

Al cheit shechatanu–for the things we were afraid to say and for the things we said too harshly that might have caused others to feel more distanced from Israel.

Al cheit shechatanu–for being too quick to judge and too impatient to listen.

Al cheit shechatanu–for maligning our fellow Jews for failing some “purity test” of our own creation.

Al cheit shechatanu–for not figuring out how to talk about Israel openly, honestly, and respectfully. 

And our own domestic politics makes it worse. Israel as an issue is now routinely weaponized by both American political parties to rally votes from one segment or another of the electorate.  Some deploy Israel to curry favor with the more traditional, pro-Israel Jewish or Evangelical communities, others to mobilize the progressive, less Israel supportive or even anti-Israel crowd.

As much as we might be tempted to just ignore it, we really can’t because as one of my dearest Israeli friends, Guy, told me recently: “Israel is your country, too – whether you like it or not.”

Israel is our country, too. We are members of Am Yisrael and no matter where we live or what passport we carry, we are part of this story.

And make no mistake, every Israeli friend I spoke to said that they wanted, needed our help now.

A widely circulated article published last month in the Times of Israel by leading Israeli journalists and thinkers, Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein-Halevi, and Rabbi Daniel Gordis entitled, “Diaspora Jews: It’s Time To Take a Stand,” is an invitation, a plea to us to be more involved.

These thought leaders describe what is happening as an “existential threat to Israeli democracy and to the long-term viability of the Jewish state.” They characterize the current crisis as “not just one more Israeli debate over policy, but a struggle over the fundamental identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Now Friedman, Klein-Halevi, and Gordis acknowledge, as do I, that there are many other threats Israel faces–some existential in nature. It’s a tough neighborhood so you can take your pick: Iran, Syria, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon. And of course there are those around the world who seek to delegitimize Israel on college campuses, on social media, in Houses of Parliament, Congress, and at the United Nations. 

And they would also acknowledge as do I that it’s not all doom and gloom. There is much to celebrate including the recent Abraham Accords and even the possibility of normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia which was once thought of as mere fantasy.

But their focus–and mine tonight–is the “existential crisis” that they argue is a result of actions of Israel’s current government which include:

• The recent bill limiting the power of the judiciary to review and invalidate laws passed by the Knesset that are deemed to be “unreasonable.” Since Israel doesn’t have a formal constitution, this would allow the government to pass laws that conflict with core values expressed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, values that are sacrosanct in many democracies.
• A proposed law that will enable the government to ignore the legal advice of Israel’s Attorney General.
• The proposal that judicial nominations be entirely controlled by the government as opposed to by an independent selection committee allowing the government to appoint whomever it wishes without oversight or any attempt at bipartisanship.
• Statements made by some members of this government, including ministers, expressing their intentions to
  •  delegitimize Reform and Conservative Judaism;
  • marginalize women and the LGBTQ+ community along with Arab citizens of Israel
  • create a permanent military exemption for the ultra-orthodox community; 
  • and unilaterally annex the West Bank, effectively ending the possibility of a two-state solution.

This unprecedented crisis has led many Israelis to call for American Jews to become more involved in Israel’s domestic politics which marks a significant change.

The Diaspora’s relationship with Zionism has been complex. In the late 1800s as the Zionist movement was taking shape, many Jews around the world were unsupportive, focusing instead on the work of emancipation, making a place for themselves in European or American society. 

It was in fact Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, the man for whom this Temple was named, who helped the American Jewish community embrace Zionism, our dream of a Jewish homeland. Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, our founder of blessed memory, chose to honor Rabbi Wise for just this reason, as an expression of his deeply held Zionist impulses which we continue to cherish and uphold as a community.

Indifference and even opposition to Zionism transformed in time into passionate support: buying Israel bonds, planting trees, funding Israel-focused philanthropies, visiting our brothers and sisters on missions and family tours, and lobbying government officials on Israel’s behalf.

When the chips were down in 1948, 1967, and again in 1973, Diaspora Jews were critical to Israel’s financial, military, and diplomatic survival. Without the support of the Jewish communities around the world but especially in America, it’s likely that the State of Israel never would have survived to this day.

We are part of this story. Israel is and always has been the shared project of the Jewish People.

Long before my grandparents and parents took me on that trip to Israel, their parents and grandparents were collecting coins for the pushke, the tzedakah box, to send to the Yishuv and then later to the State of Israel.

This is a photo taken in February of 1936 in the elegant ballroom of the Hotel Willard in Washington D.C. at a fundraiser celebrating the launch of the United Palestine Appeal (that’s of course what it was called during the Mandate years).

On the dais are seated some of the great Zionist luminaries of the day: 

• Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver 
• Justice Louis Brandeis
• The President of the Zionist Organization of America, Louis Lipsky
• And Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise.

Jews from across the country attended these fundraisers to demonstrate their support and passion for the Zionist cause. 

Seated at one of the tables is a couple that traveled by train all the way from Kansas to show their support: my maternal-great grandparents, the ones I mentioned in my Rosh HaShanah sermon, Herman and Fannie Levinson.

Before it was even a state, Israel needed us. As powerful and established as it is now, it needs us still—perhaps more than ever before.

Al cheit shechatanu–for the sin we have committed by seeing ourselves as by-standers, witnesses to the miracle of our people’s return to sovereignty as opposed to partners and participants in it.

I shared with you the words of some of Israel’s most respected thought leaders simultaneously calling out the cause of the crisis–the current Israeli government–and asking us to be their partners in solving it. 

But tonight I also want to share the words of several of my friends, ordinary Israelis who are in the trenches during one of the most challenging times in our national homeland’s history.

I’ve known Hadar since she moved to Palo Alto in 2001 to be with her boyfriend Guy whom I mentioned earlier while he was working in tech after his service in the army and his studies at the Technion. Hadar and Guy–they are like family. After Guy’s stint in Palo Alto, they returned to Israel. Here’s how Hadar describes the present moment. 

“Every Saturday night we go to Kaplan” – that’s where the big protests in Tel Aviv are held. “This is what we do. We have whatsapp groups for everything. What happens if a friend is arrested at a protest. What happens if someone is injured by a water cannon. What if the timing or location of a protest is changed.”

She explained that these gatherings are amazingly polite. Everyone is well-behaved. All ages come out to participate–grandparents, parents, teenagers, and children. “They come and protest and then they leave and it’s spotless. That’s a miracle,” she said. “No garbage.” And for emphasis she added, as if I had forgotten: “And these are Israelis.”

And these protestors are most definitely not all secular, Tel-Aviv lefties. Far from it. It’s an amazingly diverse group: Orthodox, national religious party members, and folks like Hadar’s father in law, Tzuri, who was born in Baghdad and immigrated in March of 1951 as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemia in which more than 100,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel. Tzuri was a lifelong Likud supporter. Now he’s out protesting Netanyahu and his government.

But Tzuri is far from the only Likud supporter or orthodox Jew at these gatherings. Recently there have been protests in major West Bank communities including Ma’aleh Adumim, Efrat, and Ariel. Thousands of Israeli residents from these settlements are coming out each Motzei Shabbat to protest this government.

Everyday people with busy lives and families and work and bills to pay and other things they could be doing. Hundreds of thousands of them, out on the streets week after week in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa–all over the country and even around the world. There is a group here in Los Angeles called UnXeptable that holds rallies every Sunday outside the Israeli consulate.

For 38 consecutive weeks, including just last night when more than 100,000 protestors gathered in Tel Aviv. In fact, when I woke up this morning, there was a WhatsApp message on my phone from Hadar that included photos from that demonstration. Here’s how Hadar explains it: 

“There has always been an agreement between the people and the government. The citizens are expected to pay their taxes and serve in the army. They have to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. The unwritten contract was that in exchange for all that, the government would protect our democracy. And that contract,” she told me, “is being broken…”

And what troubles Hadar and many Israelis I’ve spoken to along with leading commentators and political analysts like Friedman, Gordis, and Klein-Halevi is that the person leading the government that is attempting to make these changes to the legal system, changes which are widely considered to be damaging to Israel’s democracy, has himself been charged with fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in three separate scandals involving powerful media moguls and wealthy associates. And some of these proposed reforms are clearly in his own self-interest.

My friend Leon, a college classmate who made aliyah just after college, is now a Rabbi and Ph.D. who serves as the director of Kolot, a non-profit that brings together diverse groups of Israelis from religious to secular, Jewish and Arab, to learn and reflect on texts from our tradition that can help fashion Israel as a model society inspired by the highest Jewish ethical principles.

Leon acknowledges that, notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s legal troubles, there is a good case to be made for judicial reform. Many have argued this point including legal experts I greatly admire. Israel’s system is far from perfect and lacks a constitution or Bill of Rights that might prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” 

But this reform isn’t attempting to do that and it’s easy to see why so many Israelis and others have concluded that Netanyahu has used the legitimate interest of improving the system for personal gain. 

Many fear that those Knesset members and ministers who’ve vowed to roll back rights for women and erode protections for the LGBTQ+ community will do just such “unreasonable” things as soon as the Supreme Court is removed as an obstacle.

Al cheit shechatanu–for the sin we have committed by not holding our leaders accountable for their actions and for allowing them to put their own interests before the common good.

Leon too characterized this moment as a time of existential threat to the state of Israel, noting that many people are voting with their feet—with consequences that are far-reaching to the state. Israel’s military fitness is being compromised by reservists who have stopped showing up for their miluim duty in protest and, going forward, because more and more young people will refuse to enlist. Leon worries about the brain drain as well–the start-up nation will have a hard time starting up if more and more talented engineers and entrepreneurs decide to leave.

He fears the unraveling of Israel’s social fabric and the possibility of real bloodshed, even civil war.

And he has grave concerns about the rule of law as well. 

“We have ministers of government,” Leon told me, “who are criminals. I’m not talking about their repeated espousal of racist, sexist, or homophobic beliefs, which is bad enough–I mean actual criminals.”

Two of these ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir are especially divisive and problematic. Smotrich was arrested in 2005 for participating in an attempt to blow up a major highway in Israel as a protest against the Gaza disengagement. He is now the Minister of Finance and has been tasked with expanding settlements in the West Bank. Another minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, didn’t serve in the IDF because the Army didn’t want to draft him. Given his ties with a Jewish terrorist organization, he was considered unfit to serve and too dangerous to be given a gun. Now his portfolio as a minister astonishingly includes oversight of the Israel police force.

As Leon put, “we are fighting for the soul of Israel, fighting for what democracy itself means.”

Al cheit shechatanu–for the sin we have committed by allowing our highest values to be betrayed. Values that are core to our Jewish tradition like not perverting  justice or taking bribes. Values focused on protecting the most vulnerable, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. Values like the commandment at the center of the Torah, the verse we’ll read tomorrow afternoon from Leviticus 19: “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Values that honor the dream of what Israel is supposed to be as articulated by Herzl and later enshrined in its Declaration of Independence which calls for a Jewish State based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.” A place that ensures “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.”

What’s particularly tragic about all of this is that what we’re doing to ourselves now, we’ve done before.

Recently, Yossi Klein Halevi noted in a public webinar the historical connection between this moment and another one two-thousand years ago which he described as a “meeting point between political corruption and zealotry.”

It was this same convergence that destroyed ancient Judean sovereignty in the year 70 of the Common Era.

The sages of the Talmud labeled it Sinat chinam–senseless hatred.

And we’re seeing it again today in Israel and here in our own communities as well.

It’s just what our enemies want isn’t it? With antisemitism on the rise on college campuses and social media, we can’t afford to keep making the same mistake again and again. Now more than ever is the time to call for and model unity and compromise, empathy and understanding.

Al cheit shechatanu–for the sin we have committed by repeating the mistakes of our past.

Chatanu. Pashanu. Ta’inu—We have transgressed. We have fallen short. We have sinned.

A central lesson of this day though is that it’s not too late to return. Not yet at least.

There is cause for hope, for tikvah.

My friend Guy told me that what gives him hope are the “Three Superwomen,” today’s defenders of Israel’s democracy:

One is named Shikma Bressler, a professor of Physics who has found her civic voice by speaking out again and again against this government. She has become the face of the protest movement.

 Another is Esther Hayut, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, for now at least, the final and only check on the power of the government.

The third is Gali Baharav-Miara, the Attorney General of the State of Israel, the first woman ever to serve in that role in Israel’s history. Last week she called on the Supreme Court to strike down the controversial law that was recently passed by the Netanyahu government limiting judicial review.

My friend Leon finds hope in the protests. Week after week, people keep coming. He sees the hundreds of thousands of people showing up and he knows he’s not alone.

And here’s how Hadar puts it: “I really want to do something else on Saturday nights but I feel like I don’t have any choice. Even if we lose–I want to know that I did everything I could that is legal and non-violent to say that I am opposed to what is happening. If not now–when? If not me–then who?”

Here’s what might give them even more hope: if we would get involved. The protesters need our support financially which we can do through ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists. We can support the Israel Religious Action Center and its extraordinary executive director, Orly Erez-Likhovski, whom I recently interviewed on my podcast.

We can reach out to our Israeli friends and ask them to share their stories, learn more about what’s happening through their eyes.

We can gather together for Shabbat services to offer prayers for Israel each week and learn from some special guests in the coming months including Major General Nadav Padan and former chair of the Meretz party, Yossi Beilin.

We can travel there and participate in a protest ourselves, demonstrating our belief that Israel is ours too and that we care about it being a Jewish, democratic state. And, please, let’s show that Israel matters to us as a community by joining together in great numbers for our congregational mission in 2024.

I know that some of what I’ve shared with you this evening might be hard to hear—it hasn’t been easy to say.

[Hold up Travel Diary]

But here’s one last thing that gives me hope.

My parents took me to Israel in 1978 and shared a dream with me that goes back thousands of years. 

They showed me all sorts of things like Ben Gurion’s house and the Israel Museum. Challenging things like Har Herzl, the military cemetery, and Yad VaShem. And delightful things like the beaches of Tel Aviv, plenty of yummy ice cream, and an unnamed “tater tot joint.”

And that visit, those experiences, sparked a love and a commitment in me that has only deepened through the years. A love of that place and its people, what it has become, what it might yet be.

My grandparents and parents tried–successfully–to implant that love in me and I’ve tried to do the same for my children.

The crisis that this “shared project of the Jewish people” finds itself in is largely self-inflicted.

And that means, perhaps, that some of the solutions to the crisis are in our hands, as well.

In 5784, as Ohavei Zion, a diverse group of lovers and supporters of Israel, may we have the courage, the commitment, and the koach, the energy, in partnership with all Am Yisrael, to do better as a People, so that we might be worthy of that dream.