Address by Rabbi Michael Melchior,
Deputy Foreign Minister,
to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities
Washington D.C., 13 November 2001
Last year in Chicago, I stood before you and shared the difficulties
we faced in Israel with the renewal of violence and terrorism. I
counted on your sympathy and support, and thanked you for being there
for us. "With God's help", I told you, "we will be there for you as
well."
This year, in circumstances more tragic than any of us could have
imagined, I come to the United States to offer the sympathy and
support of the people of Israel. To say: "We are here with you."
The attack of September 11, the brutal and deliberate murder of more
people than are gathered in this hall, raises profound and
bewildering questions for all of us. And ever since that day the
civilized world has struggled to formulate a coherent response on
many levels - political, military, legal and economic. But as we
gather here, bonded together even more closely by this tragedy, I
think we also have to stop to ask ourselves: what is our Jewish
response?
I think we need a Jewish response to the worst terrorist attack in
history, above all because this atrocity was carried out in the name
of religion. That someone could shout out - in any language - 'Allahu
akhbar' 'God is great', at the very moment that they sent hundreds of
innocent people to their deaths, is, in the very clearest sense, a
chillul hashem, a desecration of the Divine Name.
The third of the ten commandments is usually translated as "You shall
not take the name of the Lord your God in vain," and it's generally
understood to mean that you shouldn't blaspheme or write God's name.
But the literal translation suggests something much more powerful:
"You shall not carry God's name in vain" - you mustn't use God as
your justification - don't devalue religion for your own ends. This
is the only one of the ten commandments that God says He will not
forgive, because it doesn't just discredit the sinner, but religion
as well.
The terrorist attack of September 11 was a human atrocity, but it was
also a religious atrocity - and needs a religious response.
It also needs a Jewish response because, in addition to being
perpetrated in the name of religion, this terrorism is, at its very
root, diametrically opposed to three fundamental values that the
Bible gave the world: the sanctity of human life, the tradition of
tolerance, and the ideal of human progress.
The first of these values that the terrorists seek to destroy is,
quite simply, the sanctity of human life. The single sentence in the
Bible that tells us that God created man in his own image is perhaps
the most radical idea that Jewish teaching has given to mankind - the
notion that we are, all of us, irrespective of race or faith or
gender, equally reflections of the divine image, and the life of
every one of us is of absolute value.
This is in total opposition to the credo of the terrorist, for whom
human life has no intrinsic value; it is nothing but a means to his
political ends. The lives and hopes and dreams of mothers and
fathers, the futures of their children, are nothing but fodder for a
campaign of fear and intimidation.
I think this is what the Mishna meant when it said: "He who destroys
a single life, it is as if he destroyed an entire world." No human
life is less than a world. So there is no cause so important, that it
can justify the taking of a single innocent life, let alone the
hundreds killed in terrorist attacks in Israel this year, and the
thousands murdered here in the United States.
But, incredible as it may seem, we hear repeated assertions that
there are certain goals which are so elevated, that they can justify
acts which would otherwise be acts of terrorism. On this we can be
categorical: there is no goal that can justify the deliberate
butchering of innocent people. The contortions of certain parts of
the international community to prove that "all terrorists are equal
but some are more equal than others" miss the fundamental point:
Terrorism is defined by what terrorists do, not what they say they do
it for.
Our fight against terrorism has to begin with a recognition of the
sanctity of human life, of every human life. The first murder in the
bible was the murder by Cain of his brother Abel, a lesson that every
murder of another human being is really the murder of a brother. We
have to fight against any and every attempt to deny this common
humanity.
Terrorism, which seeks to destroy this recognition of the humanity of
others, reminds us that we have to root out incitement in school
textbooks, and hate-speech in sermons, and vicious caricatures in
newspapers; we have to use every effort to stop conferences such as
the Durban conference against racism from being hijacked as vehicles
for mindless and venal hatreds, not only because these are wrong and
hurtful, but because they are the first step in a heinous process
that leads from hatred to delegitimization, from delegitimization to
dehumanization, and from dehumanization to death and destruction.
The second value terrorists abhor is the idea of tolerance. The
poisonous cocktail of fundamentalism and nationalism which fuels the
terrorism we witness today could not be further from the Jewish
vision. The Jewish world vision is of unity - but not unanimity.
Nations, we pray, will live in peace - but not lose their separate
identities. This is the idea of the rainbow that God made the symbol
of his covenant to Noah - a covenant that would embrace the whole
world, but would maintain and respect different hues and colors. And
it's also the reason why Abraham, the father of monotheism, was
called Abraham, to emphasize, as the Bible says, that he was av hamon
goyim, the father of not one, but many nations.
For Judaism, any belief in a universal God that doesn't lead to a
belief in universal humanity is nothing but idolatry.
Tolerance doesn't just mean accepting other peoples and cultures, but
also, and maybe more importantly, other ideas. The fanaticism that
drives people to take others' lives, derives from a dangerous and
absolute certainty. Suicide bombings are the ultimate statement of
such certainty - a willingness to stake one's eternal life for one's
beliefs. This fanatical certainty is an anathema to Judaism - and to
democracy. It's striking that when we think of the great Talmudic
sages, we think of them in pairs: Hillel and Shammai, Rav and Shmuel,
because in the Jewish view the truth lies not in any one particular
opinion but the dialectic of debate between them.
The secret of Jewish learning through the ages has not been
agreement, but machloket - dispute. Indeed the Mishna teaches that
the reason that the opinions of both Hillel and Shammai are recorded
is to teach future generations that no-one should insist on his view,
since the great teachers did not insist on theirs. It goes on to give
a description of cooperation between the two schools of teaching,
despite their differences, that serves as a powerful lesson for the
Jewish people today: Despite differing opinions over marriage laws,
the Mishna tells us, the disciples of Hillel and Shammai would still
marry into each other's families, and despite differing opinions on
the laws of purity they would still use each others vessels.
The terrorist stands at the far end of the spectrum from this
democratic and Jewish tradition of tolerance and argument. For him
there is no "other hand". There is only the imposition of the will of
the minority by force and by intimidation.
Confronting the fanatical certainty of terrorism, our response must
be to renew our commitment to tolerance and dialogue. There is a very
real danger that the fear of seeming weak in the face of terrorism
may lead us to curtail our internal debates, or to engage less in
questioning among ourselves as to the rightness of our actions. But
we must remember that such debates and questioning do not undermine
our resolve. To the contrary they are the very basis for that
resolve.
This means that in Israel, in spite of the attacks we face, we have
to continue to struggle over moral issues. Until our Palestinian
partners are ready to make a lasting peace, we have to continue to
engage in painful dilemmas, weighing security and humanity, finding
the elusive balance between protecting our citizens and easing the
hardships of those Palestinians who find themselves under our
control. And if there are those who seek to paint these deliberations
as weakness, or concessions to terrorism, we have to remind ourselves
that the real surrender to terrorism would be sacrificing our
conscience. In the fight against terrorism our greatest asset is not
our power but our conviction.
And the third fundamental value is the idea of progress; the idea
that the past must serve us as the foundation for building a better
future. The Jewish people were not the first to imagine a perfect
world, but it was Judaism that proposed the radical idea that it
could be here - and not in an afterlife or elsewhere. And to this
radical idea, Jewish teaching added an even more astonishing notion:
not only could this become the perfect world, but that we, human
beings, could be the ones to make it so. With this outlook, every
mark of progress, every scientific advance, becomes another tool to
be used in building a better future, for perfecting the world.
But for the terrorist every technological advance is not a hope for a
better future, but merely a more powerful means of destruction.
Global communications are merely a means for spreading incitement,
postal services for spreading biological warfare, airlines for
committing mass murder, all in a manic attempt to undo civilization
and return us to a world of anarchy and chaos.
There's a curious feature of biblical Hebrew: Whenever the word
'vehaya' 'and it will come to pass' is used, it almost allways
introduces a positive or happy episode. But when the phrase 'vayehi'
'and it came to pass' appears, it presages a negative or unfortunate
episode. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook suggested a fascinating explanation.
Both of these phrases use an unusual Hebrew conjunction, it's called
the vav hahipuch, which changes verbs from the past tense into the
future, and verbs from the future into the past. The word and 'it
will come to pass' is actually the past tense - 'it was' - turned
into the future. And that's Judaism's ideal: to take the past and
build on it as the foundation for the future. But 'and it came to
pass' is the opposite, the future transformed into the past - that is
the antithesis of the Jewish vision. It's a regression, a return to
tohu vavohu, the chaos of a world without order and morality. To take
the past and use it as a foundation for building a better future -
that's Judaism's ideal. To take the future and bury under the rubble
of the past - that is the essence of fundamentalist terrorism.
Our response to this attempt to drive us back into the dark past has
to be to redouble our efforts to build a better future. And, in the
Jewish context, this need to build a brighter, more united, more
purposeful Jewish future, gives added urgency to the work we have
begun to do together.
Now more than ever we need to give our youth a sense of our history,
and vision, and peoplehood, and encourage them to embark on their own
journey of Jewish discovery through programs like Birthright. Now
more than ever we need to address the challenge of denominational
divisions in Judaism, especially over the issue of conversion - and
to take pride in the fact that under new interdenominational programs
we have introduced to help deal with this issue in Israel, there will
be more conversions this year than ever before. And now more than
ever, we need to work to make Jewish unity, between Israel and the
Diaspora, not a slogan but a fact.
Abraham Joshua Heschel once described the Jewish people as "a
messenger who has forgotten his message". The Jewish response to the
fundamentalist terrorism we are witnessing must be to remember that
message, and in particular the values of respect for life, tolerance
and progress.
These are the values which we live by, and which today we need to
fight for. Of all the enemies the Israelites faced in ancient times,
only one were they commanded to wipe out entirely, to the end of
generations - the Amalekites. The Amalekites had to be completely
destroyed because they were the terrorists of the Bible. They
attacked from behind, they killed the weak and defenseless, they
showed no mercy or compassion, just a blind hatred for the values of
humanity.
The Bible describes the battle of the Israelites and the Amalekites:
when Moses' hands were raised, it says, the Jews prevailed. But when
they were lowered the Amalekites prevailed. The rabbis explain: when
Moses' hands were raised, the Israelites looked to heaven and
remembered the divine values they were fighting for. This gave them
the strength to be victorious.
While the Amalekites of the Bible were lost in history, we are facing
a long and hard battle against the Amalekites of our day. A battle
for our most fundamental values. But if we remember that, if we raise
our eyes and see - above and beyond any pragmatic coalitions that we
may need to make - the true values that we are fighting for, we also
will be sure to be victorious.
I began by saying that the fanatical terrorism we are witnessing
today is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God's name. In Jewish
teaching we have another concept, an antidote to hillul hashem - and
that is kiddush hashem, the sanctification of God's name. That
sanctification can mean different things: for those innocent and holy
people who have lost their lives to terror, it means the recognition
that they have died in defense of the values we hold dearest. And for
us the survivors, it means the response of those they left behind
them, our commitment and rededication to fighting for those
values.
The most powerful statement of kiddush hashem is the kaddish, the
prayer for the dead. It's a remarkable prayer. Not sad or morbid, not
fixated on loss or the past. But an affirmation of hope and
commitment to the future. It tells us that the greatest credit to
those who lost their lives is the way that we live our lives, and the
extent to which we renew our commitment to fighting evil, to ensuring
that yitgadal v'yitkadash shme rabba, that the divine values of life
and tolerance and hope they died for, will be cherished and
defended.