Overcoming Despair, Working for Peace

By RABBI JOY LEVITT

This is a hard time to be alone. If nothing else, it is important to come together, to acknowledge our concern, our fears, and our despair.

All week, I have been thinking of a story I once read by the great writer, I.L. Peretz. It was a story about a man whose chicken laid an egg on the Sabbath. He went to the rabbi to find out whether it was permissible to eat the egg. The rabbi told him to come back the next day for the answer. The next day, when he returned, the rabbi told him he wasn't sure, that he still had to check some sources, to come back in two days. Then in two days, the rabbi told the farmer that he needed to check with a colleague. And so on and so on until finally the answer didn't matter anymore. The egg was rotten.

The story haunted me in a very personal way. Many of us in this room have been going to meetings, rallies, more meetings, conferences, and more meetings for over twenty years. For some in this room, the pursuit of peace in the Middle East is their life's work. All of us feel deeply about this. And tonight, I look back at all those meetings, all those emergency trips to Israel, all those conference calls and know deeply that time was never on our side. While we talked and planned and marched and hoped, the potential went unrealized; the egg was rotting And now it has exploded.

I am--we are--unspeakably sad. I am not talking about the death of the peace process. I am talking about the deaths of children. The deaths of parents. And the knowledge that death is not the beginning of anything. It is the end of everything for the families who suffer. The Palestinians are not one inch closer and several miles further from their national dream as a result of these killings. The Israelis are not one inch more secure and in fact far less secure for all the tanks and live ammunition. I guess the only winners are the extremists who seem to applaud when children die. Why is that?

As I sat in shul on Yom Kippur, I was struck by a weird sense of letting go of hope. It was actually easy. Painful, but in some way safe. No more working hard. No more fund raising. No more listening for the good in people who despise me. No more trying to convince my friends and family that peace is the only way. Time to pull the plug and say kaddish and get on with the process of mourning. I became numb to the pain and blinded to the realities that such a defeat really means.

Then my teacher, Rachel Cowan, got up to speak. And she reminded us that among all the al hets that we say on Yom Kippur, all the sins for which we ask forgiveness, one stands out it its starkness at this time. Al chet shechatanu lifanecha b'timhon levav--for the sin of giving into despair. For the sin of losing heart. In the mahzor,the High Holiday prayerbook, that I was using, that al hetwas coupled with one immediately preceeding it-al het shechatanu lifanecha b'sinat chinam-for the sin we have committed through baseless hatred.

Baseless hate leading to despair. And both of them sins. And I snapped out of my comfortable numbness. For the rest of Yom Kippur, when we came to the confessional, I ignored all the other sins-even gossip, even arrogance, even eating too much. I said the al het for losing heart over and over like a mantra. And I beat my breast as though to wake myself from the stupor I had allowed myself to fall into. I went to another meeting. I wrote another check. And I am here with you this evening to find the strength to take the next difficult step.

In a d'var Torah at Congregation Bet Simchat Torah on Shabbat Shuva, Ayelet Cohen reminded us that tradition holds that it was on Yom Kippur that Moses came down with the second set of tablets. The first set he had smashed in his rage at witnessing the golden calf built by the Israelites in their fear and frustration at his long absence on the mountain. According to tradition, the first set had been given to Moses by God. The second set Moses wrote himself. It is for that sin of losing faith in God and in Moses that we continue to repent on Yom Kippur. And it is for the sake of the second set of tablets that we have hope.

The first set of tablets have indeed been smashed. And like the Israelites who carried around the smashed tablets in the same ark that held the whole tablets, we too will carry with us the sense of brokenness, loss, missed opportunities, failure of nerve. We will carry with us the bodies of the dead and the tears of their families.

But the new set of tablets will be written. It has to be written. We cannot continue to carry only the brokenness. We will rediscover the will to move forward. We will learn to live with an imperfect peace-all of us-or we will be brought down by the weight of all that has gone wrong.

A poem by Yehuda Amichai, alav hashalom (may peace be upon him):

I, may I rest in peace--I, who am still living, say,

May I have peace in the rest of my life.

I want peace right now while I'm still alive.

I don't want to wait like that pious man who wished for one leg

Of the golden share of paradise, I want a four-legged chair

Right here, a plain wooden chair. I want the rest of my peace now.

I have lived out my life in wars of every kind: battles without

And within, close combat, face-to-face, the faces always

My own, my lover face, my enemy face.

Wars with the old weapons-sticks and stones, blunt axe, words,

Dull ripping knife, love and hate,

And wars with new fangled weapons-machine guns, missile,

Words, land mines exploding, love and hate.

I don't want to fulfill my parent's prophesy that life is war.

I want peace with all my body and all my soul.

Rest me in peace.

Rest us in peace.

This talk was originally deliver at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in New York, NY.