There Will Yet Be Singing

Every so often, we encounter stand-up moments—opportunities to, well, stand up and show (to yourself, to your children, to the world) if you actually hold the values you claim to espouse, if you are the person you think of yourself—and wish others to think of you—as actually being. I had a moment like that last week, which I thought I’d share with my readers this week. Life doesn’t dole out these opportunities so often. But this this was my moment and, because Joan was part of the discussion and the decision, it was hers too.

Like every student of Scripture, I have my favorite Tanakh personalities. I actually identify with bits and pieces of lots of different biblical personalities and regularly have “wow, that guy in that story is just like me” moments in the course of which I suddenly see the text before me as a kind of mirror in which I suddenly—and mostly unexpectedly—find myself reflected. That is a feature of all great literature, I suppose: that ability to function both as a gateway into the author’s world and, simultaneously, as a mirror in which the reader (or, in the theater, a member of the audience) is suddenly possessed of the conviction, impossible yet fully real, that the play being watched or the book being read is actually about him or herself. Historically speaking, of course, that conviction is lunacy. Shakespeare lived and died centuries before I was born and there are no secret messages meant just for me in any of his plays. But that is not how it feels when I am seated in the theater and my level of engagement with the dialogue makes it feel precisely as though King Lear has stepped out of time to speak directly to me. Or, far more disconcertingly, to others about me.

For me personally, the biblical personality I’ve always identified the most meaningfully with has been the prophet Jeremiah. And, yes, I understand fully well that this makes no sense at all. For one thing, his life could not have been less like mine. He had no wife and, as far as anyone knows, no children. He spent a serious portion of his adult life under arrest or in jail. His was the epitome of bravery in the face of impending doom, speaking the oracles of God aloud and in public regardless of the danger that he knew fully well inhered in doing so. He was beaten, mocked, pilloried. He was brave, but he paid a gigantic price for that bravery and was considered a traitor to his king and country by most of his fellow Jerusalemites. He was nothing at all like me.

But he was also just like me. Or rather like the version of myself I would like to think I could yet become. He was fearless. He was righteous without being self-righteous. He was the both articulate and eloquent. And he was secure in his faith, unrattled by the existence of phony prophets who insisted that their good-news messages were the true oracles of God sent to guide the people forward and that Jeremiah’s jeremiads were just the depressive ravings of a seriously depressed person blinded by his own pessimism. Despite it all, though, the man had it in him to stand up in public and speak honestly—and that is the quality I'd like to find reflected in myself, in my own preaching, in my writing. I want to be secure in my faith and unequivocally honest. And I want also to be suffused with hope—which Jeremiah also was, and at the same time (this is the big trick, at least for me) that he was both realistic and honest.

The prophet had been vouchsafed a double-screen vision of the future. There was still time for the people to avert catastrophe by embracing the core values of their faith, but otherwise destruction and devastation were on their way. And this was a make-or-break moment: the destiny of the nation was in its own hands if they had the courage to seize it. But even if the people refused to mend their ways and proved unable to avert catastrophe, there would always be a future for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. There would be exile. But there would also be return. There would be devastation, but there would also be renewal. There would be a miserable past, but there would also be a future.

And then the opportunity presented itself to put his money where his mouth was. It was the last year the kingdom of Judah would exist. The Babylonians were already at the gates of the city. The king had put Jeremiah in jail for refusing to lie to the people about what the future was about to bring—to them, to their city, to their nation, and to their king. And then, out the blue, a cousin of Jeremiah’s named Haname’el showed up in prison with the news that a parcel of land outside the city in a place called Anatot was Jeremiah’s to purchase if he wished it. Why exactly this offer came to Jeremiah is not made clear; probably he was the closest male relative to the recently deceased owner of the field. But the point was that this was the worst real estate deal imaginable, buying land in a nation at its lowest point, facing implacable foes, its very future uncertain. But Jeremiah had it in him to look past the moment and see a bright future for the land and for its people. He closed his eyes and saw bridegrooms and brides standing beneath their chuppah, children playing in the city streets, young people out together drinking and singing. And so he bought the land, using his fellow prisoners as witnesses to the transaction. (The whole story is in the thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah for those who wish to read it. Shul-goers will recognize part of it as the haftarah  assigned to the Torah portion called Behar.)

So the other morning, Joan and I had a Zoom call with our kablanit, a nice woman whom we have engaged—but without yet signing a contract—to undertake some renovations on our apartment in Jerusalem. When we first conceived the project, it was just fun. We are hoping soon to spend a lot more time in our apartment and there were repairs that needed to be made. There were some cracks in the flooring. There wasn’t enough storage space in either of the bathrooms. There wasn’t the kind of closet in which you could hang coats or winter jackets. The oven wasn’t big enough. There was no shade on the balcony, which problem we wished somehow to address without making it impossible to build a sukkah on the balcony. That kind of stuff. In the world of renovations, small potatoes. But not to us: for us, this was a way for us of staking out our future in a part of the world we love and in which we want to spend maximal, not minimal time as the years pass.

But that was last summer. Then we had the chagim. And now we have Gaza. The stories we’ve read are horrific. The story is nowhere near over. More loss is, I’m afraid, on the books. The IDF has shown remarkable forbearance to date, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? And the stories of the pogrom itself—the violence, the Shoah-style brutality, the almost unimaginable savagery of the attack—all that has made the bathroom storage space issue seem—to say the very least—strange to worry about, almost bizarre to discuss seriously. We were going to sign the contract before Rosh Hashanah, but then the contractor’s father died and she was busy with shiva and dealing with her loss. We obviously stepped back, told her to take her time, promised her we didn’t mind waiting a few weeks to settle things up.

Should we move forward as planned? Are we being ridiculous to worry about the sukkah-on-the-balcony issue at a time like this? We both dithered for a while, unsure how to proceed. But then I caught a glimpse of Jeremiah, my guy for all these years. I noticed him in a few different places, actually. He doesn’t speak—at least not to me personally—but I somehow know who it is. And then I somehow see that poor man in his jail cell pondering his own real estate decision and, somehow in my mind’s ear, I hear him singing his own words to himself: od yishama ba-makom ha-zeh…b’arei Yehudah u-v’chutzot Yerushalayim, kol sason v’kol simchah, kol chatan v’kol kallah. There will yet be heard in this place, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, sounds of joy and merrymaking, the voices of bridegrooms and brides. And that was enough.

The man bought the property in Anatot. And we signed on with the contractor.

Israel is facing tough times. The enemy is savage and violent. The devastation left in the wake of the massacre will take years to repair, the psychological damage to the national psyche even longer. But I am possessed of the unshakeable faith that the state will endure, that Jewish life will never again be uprooted from the Land. And we will yet—one of these years—enjoy our Sukkot dinner in our own sukkah on our own balcony overlooking Gad Tedeschi Street, and I know that just as surely as I also know that God will yet spread out God’s own sukkah of peace over the land and over its people.

  

Eyeless in Gaza

I was waiting for the elevator in one of our local hospitals when my phone started to vibrate last Tuesday afternoon with the news—reported as simple fact by the Bing-Microsoft news service that funnels breaking events into my personal news feed—that Israel had intentionally blown up a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 hospital staff and patients, including children. Then the elevator came and I got into it. By the time I got out on the ninth floor, the original story had been “confirmed” by the New York Times. So how could it not be true?

Two hours later, the original message was gone—magically withdrawn into thin air—and unretrievable. The original Times banner “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” was also gone, replaced with the slightly (but only slightly) less inflammatory “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.” But the damage was done. Not everybody who has an iPhone that features ongoing news alerts is as involved in news from Israel as I am. (Could anyone be? Maybe. But no one could be more emotionally and personally involved in the events of these last weeks.) And a fair number of them, I’m guessing, just quickly scanned the first headline, then filed it internally as yet one more terrible thing Israel has done to the innocents of Gaza. And so a scurrilous story—one that for me (and for anyone who knows as many IDF veterans as I do, and who has the respect for the IDF that it deserves) could not possibly be true—gains traction. By evening, the murder of these poor innocents was lighting up X, formerly Twitter, as though it were an established fact, as though it were a story featuring confirmed reality that only a willfully blind Zionist would even try to deny.

But, in fact, the story was not true. Or rather it was not true as reported. Yes, a terrible explosion killed hundreds at the al-Ahli hospital (also called the Baptist Hospital) in southern Gaza. And it is also true that all the victims appear to have been innocent civilians. But the IDF insists that it did not target that hospital and that, as far as they can tell, the damage was done by a missile intended by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to murder Israeli civilians that misfired and landed in Gaza not far from where it was launched. And they also noted that the IDF is bound by rules of combat that specifically forbid its servicepeople from slaying civilians indiscriminately. And then, shortly after that, the P.M., Bibi Netanyahu himself, issued his own statement on Twitter saying plainly and unambiguously that this was not the work of the IDF.

Later, the President of the United States said clearly that American intelligence supported Israel’s claim of non-involvement. Plus, the hospital, it turned out, was not “blown up” at all, but is still standing. Aerial photographs showed rocket shrapnel on the roofs of adjacent buildings. And then, later that night, Israel released an apparently undoctored recording of Hamas operatives more or less confirming the Israeli version of events. (The recording is in Arabic, but click here to hear it with English subtitles.) Even the Gazans themselves eventually pulled back from their initial inflammatory reports, no longer mentioning 500 dead but merely referring to unidentified “hundreds.”  But by then the damage was more than done. The Arab street was on fire. There were huge demonstrations in many Muslim capitals, including Istanbul, Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. President el-Sisi of Egypt, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan cancelled their plans to meet with President Biden, apparently thinking that insulting him for not embracing the initial (and almost fully incorrect) version of the story was a rational plan forward. On home turf, our own Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) asserted unambiguously (but apparently fully falsely) that the Israelis had “bombed the Baptist Hospital and killed 500 Palestinians.” And Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) shamelessly referenced the incident as an Israeli war crime without a shred of evidence to support her vitriol.

To wave this whole incident away as yet another success, albeit a temporary one, of the Palestinian misinformation campaign against Israel would be very wrong, however. The tragedy here is fully real. These poor people fled south in the first place to avoid being caught in the crossfire if Israel ultimately decides to enter Gaza to find and free the 199 hostages being held by Hamas. I suppose they must have imagined they were safe, or safer, in the southern part of Gaza and safer still in a hospital, a place of refuge and healing. If it turns out that this was “just” an accident, that the jihadists trying to murder innocent Israelis accidentally ended up murdering innocent Palestinians, then that will be terrible enough and grimly ironic. But if it turns out that this was intentional, that Hamas did this to prompt—almost to force—el-Sisi, Abdullah, and Mahmoud Abbas publicly to disrespect President Biden by refusing to meet with him in the course of his trip to the Middle East, then the raw cynicism of the move will be almost too much to bear.

I want to think that this was an accident. What normal person wouldn’t? But what if this was intentional, if this actually was undertaken fully intentionally as a piece of grotesque political theater intended to upend President Biden’s visit to the region? To refer to the concept of blowing up a hospital to further political aims as bestial behavior would be an insult to the animal kingdom. But some part of me wonders if that isn’t precisely what’s happened. And, indeed, President Biden’s trip to underscore our nation’s support for Israel and to meet with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the PA—that may simply have been too clear a harbinger of a future featuring an alliance of leaders implacably opposed to the kind of barbarism for which Hamas stands for the Hamas leadership not to do whatever it was going to take to prevent from happening. And the fact that the Palestinian president was going to be included—for which invitation the price was surely going to be his willingness to join in a blanket condemnation of Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel and the unimaginable destruction directed almost solely against innocent civilians that incursion brought in its wake—that just may have been too much for Hamas to swallow. I have no evidence of any of the above. But I am too much a student of history to wave the darkness in my heart away as merely depressive or necessarily delusional. Terrible things happen in the world. And they often happen fully intentionally.

And that brings me to my real point. The challenge facing me personally in the wake of his incident is to find it in my heart to set everything I know about the Middle East—about Hamas and about the IDF and about Israel itself—to set it all aside and to mourn the dead of al-Ahli. I am by nature a bit cynical, but I specifically do not want to bring politics or cynicism to my appraisal of this tragedy, of this disaster. The children who died in the hospital was no more deserving of their fate than the Jewish babies and children murdered in cold blood by Hamas two weekends ago. So to wave them away as “mere” collateral damage in a larger story to which they were tiny footnotes—that would require a level of callousness and insensitivity of which I want—even need—to think of myself as being incapable of sustaining.

Since Simchat Torah, thousands have died on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border. To look past the death of innocents should be an impossibility for all who fear God and revere the sanctity of human life. Many more will die as Israel does what it can to eradicate Hamas and, in so doing, to avenge the death of its citizens. Still others will die as Hamas descends to ever darker degrees of demonic depravity in its anti-Israeli rage and does whatever it thinks necessary to hurt Israel and put space between it and its allies. In the end, Hamas will surely be annihilated. Of that, I harbor no doubts at all. But to take pleasure in that thought without mourning the innocents of al-Ahli should be impossible for even the most ardent supporter of Israel. As well it is with respect to me personally: I ardently look forward to the day when terror is defeated once and for all, but I mourn for those innocents who died when that rocket landed on the hospital in which they were seeking healing and refuge, and I feel their loss as a stone in my heart. To feel otherwise would be to deny their humanity—and that is something no decent person should even be able to do, let alone wish to do. 

The Simchat Torah War - One Week In

I was a college senior in 1973 when the Yom Kippur War broke out and I can remember all too well the shock and dismay that permeated not only the big Jewish world out there but also my own synagogue community and my own circle of family and friends as the first terrible days of the war unfolded on our television screens. But as the tide turned quickly and it became increasingly clear that Israel would yet again vanquish its enemies, that dread lifted and was replaced—and replaced easily—by my customary confidence in the future, by my faith in God’s watchful and protective guardianship of the people Israel, and by my certainty that, in the end, good always wins out over evil. If I had been temporarily uncertain, my trust in the future snapped back into place almost instantly.

I was busy preparing myself that fall for the entry exams you had to pass back in the day to be admitted to rabbinical school at JTS. And my studies in the course of the  rest of the year only appeared to support that trust that sprung up so automatically for me once the tide turned and Israel’s victory seemed certain. Indeed, the more I read to prepare for my exams, the more certain I became that the course of the war had merely mirrored the larger course of Jewish history. Yes, we’ve known nights of unimaginable sadness. But then dawn breaks and the sky is filled again with light. The tide ebbs, but soon flows back. A remnant always survives, always returns, always re-asserts its right to chart the destiny of the Jewish people into the subsequent generation. My father’s joke about the difference between a Jewish optimist and a Jewish pessimist—the Jewish pessimist says, “Oy, things couldn’t get any worse,” to which the Jewish optimist responds, “Of course, they can. And will!”—seemed funny to me precisely because it so little mirrored how I perceived things really to be. The arc of Jewish history, I felt certain, always bends towards survival.

I have begun this letter a dozen different times. My original plan was to recount my memories of the Yom Kippur War in even more detail and then to assure you all that just as our enemies were vanquished then, so will they also be beaten now. I know everybody wants to hear that. And mostly I do write today to tell you all that—and not because it’s my personal job to cheer people up, but because that conviction regarding the inviolate destiny of Israel is too much a part of who I am to dissolve in even seriously bad news. I am, as always, a man of faith devoted both professionally and emotionally to the cultivation in others of the confidence in the destiny of the Jewish people that is so foundational to my own worldview and so much a part of who I am.

But this has been beyond challenging for me, this whole detour into hell that we have all been experiencing over this last week. I suppose part of that has to do with the degree to which the terrorists have somehow turned in my mind from merely violent thugs motivated by raged-based frustration into latter-day Nazis. And, indeed, the images and stories that have come out from the events of this last week would earlier on have been familiar to me only as the stuff of Shoah memoirs. But these stories, all verified and clearly true, are not made-up or embellished. And the first-hand accounts I’ve read—that we’ve all read—of young women being raped, of old people being dragged from their homes and killed, of babies being slaughtered, of young people at a desert concert being shot by the hundreds at point-blank range—these cannot be decried as mere crimes or acts of brutality. Nor do I see a way to explain any of this even as extreme political activism. After the events of last weekend, the enemy has surely lost all pretense merely to be acting forcefully to improve the lots of Gazans as the soldiers of Hamas takes their place in the history of the world as true monsters who have done their worst to destroy the Jewish people. Yes, I am more than aware that the Nazis were eventually vanquished, that they lost the war, that at least some Jewish people did end up surviving in every single country the Nazis occupied. I know all that. And yet I feel myself seized by a sense of dread that I am not quite sure how to justify or even explain.

Yes, the support that Israel has received—and especially from some unexpected quarters (including especially in Europe)—has been heartening. Even the New York Times managed to publish an editorial that was far more supportive of Israel than that newspaper has been in a very long time. President Biden’s and Secretary of State Blinken’s unequivocal statements of support meant a lot to me, as I’m sure it also did to all of you. (On the other hand, underlying all that heartening rhetoric is the certainty that, in the end, no amount of supportive rhetoric will mean anything if it is not accompanied by an equally solid commitment to deny Iran entry into the nuclear club.) Still, both the President and the Secretary of State did say the right thing and I have to give them credit for that. So did a lot of people—say the right thing in the course of this last week, I mean—but the real test, of course, will be to see if those lovely words are followed by action or not.

So that’s where I’ve been for most of this last week: buoyed by confidence and seized with dread, riven and subdivided like an actor impossibly hired to play two different roles on the same stage at the same time. (There’s a reason they don’t save money on Broadway by doing that: because it can’t actually be done.) But, in the end, I have to let what I know about Jewish history guide me forward.

I wish I could promise you all that this will somehow end well. I actually do think that, of course. But I also know that the journey from here to there is going to be long, painful, and beyond arduous. Our friends and family in Israel are mostly too old even for reserve duty, but their children and grandchildren—other than the ones who are actually in the middle of their military service—have more or less all been called up. I’ve been speaking to friends and family all week, and the message I’ve heard over and over has been more or less the same one: yihyeh tov, things will work out…but the journey from here to there is going to be grueling and challenging. And so, in the end, that is my message for all of you as well. Yihyeh tov.  This will end with a total defeat of Hamas, with the annihilation of its stores of menacing weaponry, with the restoration of Gaza to the actual people who live there and many of whom (click here) would be thrilled to live in peace with Israel and to prosper and thrive as their neighbors’ neighbors. The Saudis will eventually joint the Abraham Accords. The Palestinians will eventually realize that they can have their own state as soon as they are signal their right to nationhood by signaling their readiness make peace with making peace with the people next door. Hamas will join the Crusaders and the Cossacks and the Nazis in the dustbin of history. And the same God who makes peace on high will bless the world with peace as well.

And our job, as ever, is to remain staunch and steadfast in our support for the State of Israel. I can’t stress enough how important it is to write to the President and the people who represent us in Congress in support of Israel.  (Click here for guidance.) We need to give as much as we can manage to the charities that support the soldiers of the IDF and the civilian population of Israel. Most of all, we need to find the courage to reconstitute our riven selves into single-minded individuals possessed of faith in the future and confidence in the IDF. As I wrote above, I feel that riven-ness too, that uncertainty, that ill ease that we’re all feeling. But I plan to devote myself in these coming days and weeks to shucking it off, to re-integrating what I believe and what I know and what I hope to create the fully confident Jewish soul that I know myself capable of becoming, the one that is reflective of the truest me there is. The task in front of us all is a daunting one. I myself am on that journey as well. But if we travel together, we’ll at least have each other for company. And we’ll surely reach our destination with our faith and our trust intact. 

Neilah on Dizengoff Square

It’s hard to know what to make of the events that unfolded in Tel Aviv towards the end of Yom Kippur. But what’s not difficult at all is to understand that the incident—not quite a riot, but a serious incident of incivility and poor behavior—is a good example of what happens when people mistake intolerance for zeal and antagonism for principled disagreement.

The incident had to do with a public-space gathering to recite the Neilah Prayer that ends Yom Kippur. Every shul-Jew knows this to be a highlight, not only of Yom Kippur or even the High Holiday season, but really of the entire prayer-year. The mood in our sanctuary at Shelter Rock, for example, is intense, focused, and very stirring. The spirits whose palpable presence made the air in the room so heavy during Yizkor have mostly departed back to Sheol (or wherever), but the residue of their ghostly presence lingers still in the room. The fast has begun to take its toll; people are hungry and thirsty. Those of us for whom a day without caffeine is torture are mostly nursing giant headaches. The specific nusach that the cantor uses to chant the prayers is hauntingly beautiful, but also vaguely ominous; the notion that the gates are poised to swing shut—and our chances to have our initial inscription in God’s great Book of Life upgraded through some combination of repentance, prayer, and pledges of charity thus dwindling by the minute—creates a unique blend of resignation and (despite all we know of ourselves) hope that all who have experienced Neilah in a traditional setting will recognize easily. It’s a remarkable moment.

And, for the last few years, an effort has been made to hold public prayers services in Tel Aviv, the heart of secular Israel, in an attempt to reach out to Jews who would otherwise not experience any aspect of Yom Kippur as a day devoted to prayer and introspection. The service the previous evening—the Kol Nidre service—went well enough, but there were those present who strongly objected to the insistence of the prayer service’s organizers, a group called Rosh Yehudi (“A Jewish Head”) headed by one Israel Zeira, to separate men and women during the service. Gender segregation is a big deal in today’s Israel, a kind of a flashpoint between secular and Orthodox-religious Israelis. It's not only a matter of synagogue seating either—the issue has to do with mixed-gender seating on buses and trains, on mixed-gender classes in public schools, and in public swimming pools maintaining “men only” and “women only” hours alongside the “regular” schedule that invites men and women to use the pool simultaneously. So this is a big deal in Israel and, as such, a much touchier issue than it is in our country.

Erev Yom Kippur went more or less as planned. But the following evening, both sides of the dispute dug their heels in. Suddenly, there was an actual barrier separating men and women, albeit a flimsy one that was really just a wall of plastic Israeli flags. But that was just as provocative as the Rosh Yehudi people should surely have known it was going to be. And so, when secular Tel Aviv arrived in Dizengoff Square with their own agenda and their own strong, angry, hostile words to add to the mix, things did not end at all well.

To refer to what ensued as a riot (as I noted in several on-line sources) is probably an exaggeration. But what happened was a travesty nonetheless and, at that, one that could and should have been avoided.

The good news is that large numbers of secular Israelis, most of who would not think of spending Yom Kippur in a synagogue, have been drawn to these public prayer services since their inception in 2020. That yearning for spiritual fulfillment I have noticed in Israel over the years in many different contexts—and to such a great extent that even the traditional division of Israelis into secular ones and religious ones has seemed less meaningful to me in recent years. So the idea itself of organizing public prayer for shul­-averse citizens is not only rational but, in my opinion, laudable. But by insisting on gender segregation during prayer—given the status of that specific matter as a hot-button issue across Israeli society in recent years—was almost to doom the effort to failure even before it got off the ground.

On the other hand, the secular types who came to the service with their dukes up, spoiling for a fight and prepared to use the most vile, insulting, and vituperative language—those people have a lot to learn about what Yom Kippur means and should mean. A day devoted to prayer, to repentance, and to making peace where peace needs to be made was sullied by extremists more eager to make their own point than to reconcile with people who feel differently than they do. And that was a true travesty and a disgrace.

It's easy to make peace with people with whom you disagree slightly, significantly less so when the parties involved are at loggerheads on foundational issues relating to culture, societal norms, and a nation’s basic ethos. But that is how peace is made in a society divided against itself—by listening carefully to the good on the other side and by finding a way to be flexible emotionally and politically without being untrue to yourself.

The secular types who were outraged by the idea of gender segregation in a public spot needed to get a grip on themselves: this wasn’t an instance of women being denied the vote or made to wear chadors in public, and neither was it an instance of women being told to go home or not to participate or not to say their prayers at all. Yes, it was a bit ham-fisted (if you can say such a thing about religious Jews on Yom Kippur), but it was also a way to draw in Jews used to the idea of separate seating during worship and so to make such people feel comfortable and welcome. And that seems to me to be the more crucial issue here.

The Rosh Yehudi organizers and their follows who couldn’t imagine a Neilah service that didn’t involve gender segregation needed to get a grip on themselves too. Dizengoff Square is not a synagogue. The whole idea of public prayer is that the prayer service be welcoming to the public, a goal at total cross-purposes with an insistence on flouting the laws regarding gender separation. The idea of creating an opportunity for secular Israelis to feel drawn to tradition through the medium of public prayer is a noble one, a good one. But if someone is drowning in the sea, you can only do good by throwing a life preserver into the water where the person in trouble is, not where you yourself are! To involve secular Israelis in prayer means to create a setting in which such people are comfortable and at their ease, in which they are predisposed to let the words of the liturgy enter their hearts and move them, possibly even to awaken some kind of dormant faith in them. And if that requires abandoning some norms that would prevail automatically in a room in which everyone present self-defines as an Orthodox Jew, then that’s what’s required. The Rosh Yehudi people, as far as I can see, wished to do good. But they wished only to do it on their own terms. And that is, generally speaking, not how good is really ever done.

So that was last week. This week, Israel is covered with sukkot both in public places and on people’s roofs and balconies, and in the courtyards and gardens of apartment houses. Those sukkot represent the great sukkah of peace for which we pray daily in our evening prayers. And this year those sukkot should be suggestive to all of the great lesson of Sukkot: that the medium in which spiritual progress—both on the individual and the societal levels—is made is peace: peace between nations, peace between warring factions within society, and peace between individuals. Yom Kippur in Dizengoff Square was a disaster. But it could also serve as a wake-up call for a riven nation in need of healing on all fronts: politically, religiously, and societally. What is needed is compromise, the cultivation of intellects supple enough to respect others’ opinions, and the abandonment of the kind of cultural arrogance that cannot imagine an alternate opinion to one’s own being valid. Intransigency is not a virtue. Reaching out to others with respect and a willingness to compromise—those are the virtues that can save any society, no matter how divided against itself it might have grown.