Taking Risks for Peace

I On 13 September 1993, three days before the Jewish New Year, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn in a momentous gesture for peace.

It was a moment fraught with emotion for Jews throughout the world. But unlike an earlier gesture, the visit of the late Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the occasion provoked violently mixed reactions. On the one hand, among Jews in Israel and elsewhere, there was a powerful longing for an end to the constant fear of terrorism and war which has marked the State of Israel since its birth. Having been in Israel throughout the Gulf War, I knew how weary the majority of Israelis were at having to live in daily insecurity. A perpetual state of military alertness is no way for Israel to fulfil the dreams of those who see it as the renaissance of the Jewish people in our time.

Set against that, though, there were many anxieties. Were the Palestinians ready for peace? Would the agreement raise expectations that could not be delivered? Would it be sabotaged by those on both sides who saw any negotiation as compromise? At the most visceral level, the sight of an Israeli Prime Minister shaking hands with the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which had been responsible directly or indirectly for so many brutal terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, was disturbing for many Jews. Was this an act of statesmanship or simply of betrayal?

As a religious leader, my duty is not to offer political or military judgement, but spiritual and pastoral guidance. The government of Israel was taking a risk for peace. The road to peace is invariably tortuous, full of setbacks and bestrewn with obstacles. But it is the road we are called on to take. My task was to set that route and the emotional difficulties it involves in a spiritual context, and to help Anglo-Jewry frame their perceptions of what was happening. The conflicts Jews felt were genuine, and they had their precedents in our religious literature. But that did not mean that there was no clear counsel. In Judaism, peace is a supreme value, and one must sometimes take risks to secure it.

The following text was sent to rabbis before the White House ceremony, and many of them read it as a sermon on the preceding Shabbat.

These are critical days for Israel. They are days of hope, but they are also days of anxiety and fear. They have taken place between the week in which we read the Torah portion of Ki Tetse (Deuteronomy 21:10) which describes the Israel of war, and the week in which we read the passage of Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy 26:1), which describes the Israel of peace.

But is there peace? Israel is divided, as we are divided, between those who are moved by the imperative, “Seek peace and pursue it,” and those who warn, like the prophet Jeremiah, against saying “Peace, peace when there is no peace.” Even the great Jewish sages of our time have been divided between those who say that Israel must make concessions for the sake of peace, and those who say that every concession only increases the likelihood of war and terrorism and bloodshed. How then shall we respond?

We are an ancient people, and one of our great strengths is that for us what is old is also new, and what is as new as today’s newspapers is as timeless as the Torah. We face the prospect of the government of Israel recognising the head of what has been seen until now as a terrorist organisation committed to the destruction of Israel. But we know that our forefather Jacob, after whom the State of Israel is named, once faced the same prospect. The Torah tells of how Jacob prepared to meet his brother Esau who had earlier sworn to kill him (Genesis 32:4–33). Like Israel today he was prepared for three things, “for diplomacy, for prayer and for war.” And like Israel today, preparing for that encounter involved Jacob in an intense inner struggle. “A man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.” Jacob had to wrestle, as Israel has to wrestle, between contending forces and conflicting inclinations. It is from that struggle that, as a people, we get our name.

What is even more striking is that when Jacob and Esau met, they kissed one another. If you examine a Torah scroll, you will see that at the word vayishakehu, “he kissed him,” there are dots over the letters. Tradition tells us that in the rare cases where there are dots over a word in the scroll, this indicates that there is a doubt about its meaning. In this case, the doubt was about the kiss itself. Was the gesture genuine? Was Esau sincere in his act of reconciliation? Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said he was: “It is well known that Esau hated Jacob. But at that moment he had a change of heart and he kissed him with true friendship.” Rabbi Yannai disagreed. “Esau did not come to kiss Jacob but to bite him.” When the leader of the PLO shakes hands with the Prime Minister of Israel, will we not have exactly the same doubt?

Not only does this division apply to our understanding of Esau and Jacob. It applies to the Jewish law of war and peace. The relevant biblical verse states, “When you come near to a city to make war against it, you must first offer it peace” (Deuteronomy 20:10). Peace takes precedence over war. The question is, to whom does this apply? On this, the two greatest rabbis of the Middle Ages, Rashi in the eleventh century and Maimonides in the twelfth, disagreed.

Rashi says that it applies only to “cities that are far away.” It refers to towns and populations that lie outside the boundaries of Israel. But according to Maimonides, it applies even to nations living within Israel’s borders. He rules: “One may never wage war with anyone until one has first made an offer of peace.” Peace always takes priority over war, regardless of who and where are our adversaries.

This disagreement led Rashi and Maimonides to differing interpretations of the wars described in the book of Joshua. According to Rashi, Joshua fought in order to conquer the land. But according to Maimonides, Joshua only fought because the nations then living in the land declined his offer of peace. Had they accepted, they and the Israelites would have lived together in the same territory.

In the days of Joshua, one group did establish a peace treaty with Israel: the Gibeonites. They did so on the basis of an elaborate deception. They pretended to have come from outside the land. They put on worn-out clothes and took with them old and mouldy bread and pretended to have travelled a great distance. According to Rashi this was because they knew that Joshua intended to conquer the whole land including the territory in which they lived. According to Maimonides it was because they knew that their neighbours had rejected peace with the Israelites, and they did not realise that Joshua would have been prepared to sign a separate peace treaty with them.

As soon as the deception was discovered, the Israelites complained and wanted to have the agreement declared null and void. But the leaders of Israel insisted that since a settlement had been reached, Israel was bound to keep to its terms. The treaty was honoured. Shortly afterwards, Israel had to come to the defence of the Gibeonites when they were attacked by those among the Canaanites who objected to them making peace with Israel. Centuries later, King David punished the descendants of Saul who had unjustly attacked the Gibeonites.

Once again, we find our concerns today anticipated in the Bible. The Gibeonites were capable of saying one thing and meaning another. There was a conflict between the people and the leadership of Israel. The people said that the Gibeonites could not be trusted. The leadership said: We have given our word. There was even civil war among the non-Israelites between moderates like the Gibeonites who were prepared to recognise Israel, and militant Canaanites who were not; and Israel had to intervene. Nonetheless, the peace treaty held, as it did between Jacob and Esau throughout their lifetimes.

How then, in the light of our history and faith, shall we respond to the perplexity of this time? First, we must recognise that there can be legitimate disagreement in Israel and outside as to whether to make concessions to the Palestinians for the sake of peace. There was a disagreement amongst the sages as to whether Esau was genuine in his desire for peace. There was a disagreement between Rashi and Maimonides as to whether Israel may make peace with an autonomous group inside its borders. We should respect those who disagree with us, for in this instance we face a genuine “argument for the sake of Heaven.”

Secondly, the Torah teaches a unique combination of idealism and realism in the political arena. We are neither pacifists nor militarists. We pray for peace but we are prepared to go to war. We say, “How good and pleasant it is for brothers to live together.” But we also know, from the very beginning of Torah – from Cain and Abel – that brothers are capable of killing one another. We know that a group hitherto dedicated to the destruction of Israel does not change overnight. Maimonides says that nothing in human nature changes overnight. But we are also willing to take risks for the sake of peace, risks taken out of cool political calculations of the lesser of two evils, but risks nonetheless.

There is a remarkable midrash (rabbinic homily) about the creation of the world. It says that when God came to create man, the angel of peace objected because “man is full of strife.” God ignored the angel and created mankind. The midrash raises the question that has hovered over human existence since the beginning of time. Why did God create a being capable of destroying all else He had made? Humanity has consistently disrupted the harmony of the world and engaged in violence and war. What answer did God give to the angel of peace? The answer implicit in the midrash is that God had faith that humanity would eventually learn that peace is better than war and that even a difficult peace is better than an easy war. The Holy One, blessed be He, took a risk for the sake of peace. And so at times must we.

Which brings me to the third and final point. There are two words for strength in Hebrew: koach and gevurah. But they mean quite different things. Koach means the strength to overcome your enemies. Gevurah means the strength to overcome yourself. Defining gevurah, the rabbis said, “Who is strong? One who is capable of self-restraint.” Koach is the strength to wage war. Gevurah is the strength to make peace.

For many years the State of Israel has shown unparalleled koach. Since it came into existence it has had to fight wars, sometimes against overwhelming odds, merely in order to survive. No other state has faced such opposition from its neighbours. No other state proclaimed by the United Nations has been surrounded by countries who deny its very existence, its right to be. It has fought impossible wars and won. But in recent years Israel has shown that it has gevurah as well. It took immense courage for Israel to practise self-restraint during the Gulf War, but it did so. It has taken even greater courage for it to negotiate with its sworn enemies and be willing to pay a high price for peace. But it has done this as well.

There can be no greater contrast between Bosnia, where people who have lived for decades in peace are now engaged in killing one another, and Israel where two peoples who have lived for many years in hostility are coming together to make peace. And there can be no greater sanctification of God’s name than this, that in an age of conflict it is the State of Israel, a tiny state surrounded by enemies, which is teaching humanity what it is to show heroism in pursuit of reconciliation.

It will be a difficult peace, fraught with dangers on every side. But for that very reason not only we, but the nations of the world as well, should pay tribute to the courage of those who take this risk in the spirit of Isaiah’s vision of a world where “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” May the Almighty bless the people and the State of Israel and may He spread over them and us that most fragile but powerful of all dwelling-places: the tabernacle of peace.

II In the sermon above I had sought; without obscuring my own commitment to the peace process, to give recognition to the conflicts Jews felt about it. In the following sermon, also delivered before the White House signing, I set out another perspective, that of contemporary history seen with the eye of faith.

Uniquely in the religious literature of the ancient world, the Hebrew Bible saw God in history. Great events in the chronicles of Israel were not mere happenings. They were part of a narrative of redemption. To be a prophet was to have an insight into the course of history, seen as God’s call to the people of the covenant and their response or lack of it.

For more than two thousand years we have had no prophets, and to attempt to see the events of our time from a prophetic viewpoint is full of dangers. Nonetheless, it is sometimes worth taking the risk. The events that have befallen Jews this century have too many biblical resonances for us to ignore them, and this has been felt by secular no less than religious Israelis. The return of Jews to their land after the darkest night of exile is central to both the biblical drama of redemption and the experience of the Jewish people in our time. From this perspective, the peace process has an altogether larger significance, to which a religious leader must give expression.

The occasion of this address was deeply atmospheric. It was delivered on 11 September 1993 at the midnight Selichot service at the Bevis Marks Synagogue, the oldest Jewish place of worship in Britain. It was here that the Spanish-Jewish community gathered at the beginning of the eighteenth century to lay the foundations of modern Anglo-Jewry. The synagogue, which has changed little in almost three centuries, was packed and candlelit, and one could almost imagine oneself thrown back in time to those early Anglo-Jews for whom ancestral memories of the Spanish expulsion were still vivid. The contrast between then and now, between a Jewry dispersed and insecure and one that had lived through its rebirth as a sovereign nation in the land of its beginnings, was overpowering.

On this holy night, one of the great moments of prayer and penitence in the Jewish calendar, I sought to give expression to the religious meaning of the events through which we had lived.

“Seek God where He is to be found. Call Him when he is close” (Isaiah 55:6). These seem like simple words. But they are far from simple. Because it is with these words from Isaiah that Maimonides states one of the great paradoxes of Jewish life.

“Even though repentance and prayer are always appropriate,” he rules, nonetheless some times are more favourable than others. There is such a thing as an et ratzon, a “time of favour,” a window of opportunity, a moment of grace. How do we know? Because Isaiah says, “Seek God where He is to be found. Call Him when He is close.” There are times when God is to be found and times when God is not to be found. There are times when God is close and times when He is far away.

How, though, can this be? A great Hassidic leader once tested his son. He said to him, “I will give you a rouble if you can tell me where God can be found.” The son, wise beyond his years, replied: “I will give you two roubles if you can tell me where God is not to be found.” God is everywhere, in all places and all times. He is as far away as the furthest galaxy and as close as the human heart. How, then, can there be times when God is close and times when God is not close?

The answer is this. The world is full of the light of God, but not always can we see it. There are times when God reveals Himself and times when He conceals Himself. God is always close. But not always do we feel Him to be close. There are special individuals to whom God reveals Himself. We call them prophets. There are particular times of the year when God reveals Himself. We call them the Days of Awe. And rarest of all, there are ages, eras, when God reveals Himself in history, when it as if the entire Jewish destiny emerged from darkness into light. To live in such an age is a privilege that few generations have known. To live in such an age is to seek God and to know that He is to be found, to call on God knowing Him to be close. This year we know we live in such an age.

At the end of his life Moses, the greatest leader the Jewish people has ever known, turned his eyes towards the future and gave his people a solemn warning. He said: There are two roads before you, one of blessing and one of curse. He spoke briefly about the blessings. But about the curses he spoke at length. He listed the fearful sufferings that lay in store for the Jewish people if they turned aside from serving God. So fearful were these curses that to this day, when we read them in the synagogue we say them in an undertone, as if reading them aloud would be too traumatic. But the most fearful curse of all was contained in a simple phrase: “A day will come [says God] when I will hide My face” (Deuteronomy 31:18).

Defeat, exile, suffering, persecution, are full of pain. But the greatest pain is to seek God and not to be able to find Him. “God is my light and my salvation,” said David in the book of Psalms. “Of whom, then, shall I be afraid?” “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil if You are with me.” But if You are not with me – what then? If God’s light shines but we cannot see it, if God is close but we cannot feel it, if God speaks and we cannot hear, what then?

Once in the Garden of Eden God called out to man and asked, ayeka, “Where are you?” But for nearly two thousand years we have called out to God, ayeka. When the Temple was destroyed, where were You? When Your sages and saints were put to death as martyrs, where were You? When Your people were dispersed and scattered and exiled and forced to wander homeless across the earth, where were You? When they were tortured and murdered for their faith, where were You? Almighty God, when Your people cried out to You from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor and Maidanek, where were You? When one million Jewish children were gassed, burned or buried alive, where were You?

“A day will come [says God] when I will hide My face.” It came. But it was not a day. It was two thousand years. “You hid Your face, and I was terrified” (Psalms 30:8). We knew the chill, cold fear of darkness. We knew what it was to seek God but not to find Him, to call Him and discover that He was not close. We carried in our souls the words of the book of Psalms:

You have given us up to be devoured like sheep And have scattered us among the nations. You have sold Your people for a pittance, Gaining nothing from their sale. Your have made us a reproach to our neighbours, The scorn and derision of those around us. You have made us a byword among the nations, A laughing-stock among the peoples… All this has come upon us, Yet we have not forgotten You, Or been false to Your covenant. (Psalms 44:12–18)

That is what it was for God to hide His face. That is what it was to be a Jew.

Then something began to happen. “That night, the king’s sleep was disturbed” (Esther 6:1). In the midst of darkness, we began to see what looked like the first faint signs of light. One after another, prayers that Jews had said for hundreds of years, more in hope than expectation, began to come true.

“Sound the great Shofar for our freedom.” The ram’s horn sounded and in one country after another Jews left the ghetto and were free.

“Raise the banner to gather our exiles.” The banner of Zion was lifted and from across the globe Jews began to return to the land of our ancestors.

“Restore our judges as at first.” The State of Israel was born. The Jewish home was granted independence. For the first time in almost two thousand years, Jews had sovereignty. They could rule over themselves instead of being ruled over by others. They could defend themselves instead of depending on others.

“Return in mercy to Your city, Jerusalem.” In 1967, Jerusalem was reunited. Jews could pray again at the Temple wall.

And they streamed into the land. From Yemen, Iraq and Iran, from Russia and Ethiopia, Jews who had been cut off from their people for decades, for centuries, came home. “Even if you have been banished to the ends of the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.”

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik of blessed memory once said that with the birth of the State of Israel there ended the “hiding of the face” of God. God had re-entered history. It was the beginning of the end of exile. This century, one after another of the prophecies of Moses and Isaiah has come true. All except one. The Jewish people always knew that this would be the last of the promises to come true. Therefore, in our prayers it was always the last: “Lord who blesses His people Israel with peace.” Has any people ever prayed for peace as we have prayed? The Amidah ends with a prayer for peace. So does Kaddish. So does the Grace after Meals. So do the Priestly blessings. Peace is always our last prayer, never our first, because we know how hard peace is to achieve.

Jews were always willing, sometimes too willing, to make peace with the world. The question was: when would the world make its peace with us? One empire after another, one nation after another, one religion after another, refused to let Jews be. Even when the State of Israel came into being at the decree of the United Nations, its neighbours still refused to let it be. What other nation has had to face this fate, of being unrecognised, deemed not to exist, forced to live in continual fear of terrorism and war? But this year, as if out of nowhere, we are beginning to hear the word “Peace.” Not from Israel’s friends, but from her enemies. Let none of us underestimate the momentousness of this hour. Today our final prayer is no longer a dream. It has become a hope.

The rabbis said that when God revealed Himself in history at the division of the Red Sea, even the simplest Jew was privileged to see what the great prophet Ezekiel did not see. Today God whose name is Peace is revealing Himself in history again. We are living in times the like of which no Jews have known since the days of Solomon. “I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My lover is knocking” (Song of Songs 5:2). On our television screens and in our newspapers, if we listen carefully, we can hear the sound of God knocking on the door of Jewish destiny, telling us we live in extraordinary times.

Tonight we feel God very close. It is as if God has emerged from centuries of hiding and is making His face shine on the great events of our time as they touch the Jewish people. Tonight, if we are still, if we open our souls, we will feel ourselves touched by the wings of the Divine presence. And anyone in whom a Jewish heart still beats must know that there can be only one response. “Seek God where He is to be found. Call Him when He is close.”

III Yitzhak Rabin’s speech on the White House lawn was one of the great political addresses of the twentieth century. It was the speech of a secular Jew. But it was full of biblical echoes, some explicit, others merely hinted at. It was this that gave his words and the occasion itself an epic gravity. None of the commentators fully analysed his speech, and as a result, though they sensed its power and the courage of Rabin’s gesture of reconciliation, they missed its profoundly religious undertones.

This was sad for two reasons, one Jewish, the other universal. Jewishly, the birth of the State of Israel has not lessened the sharp divisions between religious and secular Jews. What is forgotten in this war of cultures is that many secular Israelis are driven by a faith that to an outsider seems quite clearly religious. Rabin’s speech was a perfect example and a moving instance of how religious faith can surface in the most secular heart.

More generally, religion is often condemned as leading to war rather than to peace. But the Jewish tradition contains a powerful thrust towards peace, not only in its explicit prayers, but in the subtle ways in which Jews are called on to see situations from vantage points other than their own. Peace only comes about when we see the world through other eyes, from the perspective of the stranger, the victim and the rival. One of the most striking examples is an image Yitzhak Rabin invoked in his speech: a mother weeping for her child. This image, taken up in five different ways in the liturgy for the Jewish New Year, forces us to feel the pain of human suffering, even when it is the suffering of our enemies. The fact that Rabin used this phrase in a speech delivered three days before the New Year could not have been accidental. It was a signal reminder that a religious imagination can be one of the most potent forces for peace.

This analysis was published in The Daily Telegraph*, 15 October 1993.*

As political ideologies wane in the contemporary world, so the hold of other loyalties grows: racial, ethnic and religious. It is a development full of dangers. Ethnic identities can rapidly descend to the politics of the tribe, exploding as in Bosnia or simmering ominously as in the urban ghettoes of America. Religion in these contexts is rarely a force for reconciliation. It can make conflict more intransigent, lending divine imperative to racial difference. In the course of history, religions have led to war as often as they have paved the way to peace.

Against this background, one recent event has received too little attention: the speech of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House on the signing of the peace agreement with the Palestinians. It was an historic moment. But it was also a religious moment, full of biblical resonances. President Clinton set the tone, speaking of Israel and the Palestinians as the latest chapter in the drama of “the children of Abraham, the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael.” Both he and Shimon Peres quoted verses from the book of Isaiah about peace.

But it was Yitzhak Rabin’s speech that broke through the boundaries of political rhetoric. What was striking was not his overt religious references. He quoted the book of Ecclesiastes about “a time for war and a time for peace.” He ended his speech with a famous Jewish prayer for peace, and invited the assembled politicians to say Amen. These were moving gestures, but perhaps no more than a sense of moment demanded.

It was not these, but his oblique allusions that made me sit up and take notice. There was the moment when he turned to the Palestinians and spoke about their common humanity. He said, “We, like you, are people, people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love.” This sequence of images was not accidental. It was a reference to a striking biblical passage.

The twentieth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy specifies that when the Israelites prepared to wage war, three groups of people were to be offered military exemption: those who had built a new house, planted a new vineyard, or had become engaged but not yet married. War must not destroy these three scenes of human creativity. Rabin’s allusion was precise and powerful.

The most stunning example, though, was when he spoke about the suffering of war. He used a single image. He spoke about the pain of a land where “mothers weep for their sons.” As soon as I heard this phrase, I knew that it was a reference to the verse in Jeremiah (31:15), “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her sons and refusing to be comforted, because her sons are no more.”

There were other biblical mothers who wept for their sons, and I listed them. There was Hagar who wept for Ishmael as he lay dying in the desert (Genesis 21). There was Hannah who wept for the son she could not have (I Samuel 1). There was Sarah who, according to rabbinic tradition, wept when she learned that Isaac was about to be offered as a sacrifice (Genesis 22). There was the mother of Sisera who wept when her son was killed in battle against the Israelites (Judges 5).

With a shock of recognition, I realised that these five texts were connected. The peace agreement with the Palestinians was concluded three days before the Jewish New Year. Four of the texts were taken from the biblical readings for the New Year. The fifth is the symbolism behind the festival’s great religious act, the blowing of the ram’s horn. Its sound, says the Talmud, is meant to represent the weeping of the mother of Sisera. In a single phrase, Israel’s Prime Minister had evoked five biblical echoes, all drawn from the synagogue service of the forthcoming holy days. This was more than rhetoric. It was the voice of a great religious tradition.

Yitzhak Rabin is a secular Jew. What moved him, at that moment, to speak in the language of the prophets? Surely this. He was taking the most risk-laden decision in the history of the State of Israel. He was making peace with a group which has no tradition of moderation or peace. He was shaking hands with a man previously dedicated to violence and terror. He may have had no alternative. But what a risk it was.

Risk demands courage and courage needs faith. At the heart of the Hebrew Bible is a faith in peace. The Bible sometimes speaks of the necessity of war. But it unsparingly records its human cost on both sides. On the Jewish New Year we remember the tears shed not only for Israel, but also for Israel’s rivals, Ishmael and Sisera. Behind Rabin’s decision, and woven into his words, was the most powerful literature of peace the world has known.

Religion can fuel conflict. But it can sometimes move us beyond it. In the year of Bosnia, it is no small thing that in another troubled area of the world a religious vision led the secular government of Israel to take a momentous risk for peace.