I don’t remember where I was when I learned about 20 second rule~the 20 seconds it takes to get to the bomb shelter after the air-siren goes off but I do remember thinking yikes, twenty seconds? That’s nothing! On a the best of days, it takes us longer than 20 minutes to leave the house! I then thought about my friends and colleagues in Israel who live this reality and I know that I can not imagine the terror that they lived with this past summer with the incessant air raid sirens warning of rockets heading in their direction. I wanted to help, but felt helpless. I wanted to connect with them, I wanted to be there, in Israel, so badly that I decided to download the Red Alert App, on my smartphone. The Red Alert App is a real-time monitor and alert system of when enemy or terrorist rockets are fired into Israel. The first night in July that the app was on, I was on faculty at OSRUI, our Union overnight camp. I woke up from a sound sleep to the alert-sound, thought it was my alarm and turned it off, but the alarm kept sounding back on… it finally dawned on me that with each alarm, a family was going to the bomb-shelter, an elderly person, was going, men, women—everyone in that particular area was going towards the shelter, no one was excluded. Again and again the red alert sounded. Rockets every 15 seconds, every 5 seconds… I couldn’t take the pressure. I silenced my Red Alert app after not even five minutes.

Friends, I have spoken publicly about Israel before. Each High Holiday I make it a point to talk about why we each should care about the Jewish State, the place of refuge for our people, the Sanctuary for our brothers and sisters around the globe, but this year the stakes are higher, this year we have reached a new level of terror, of uncertainty and unrest. Anti-Zionism and thus anti-Semitism world wide has reared its ugly head in perverse ways forcing us to leave our homes and close our stores on the streets in Europe. On our college campuses Anti-Zionism rhetoric is calling on our students to defend Israel with an intensity that they are hardly prepared for. Our level of response has to be commiserate with the new reality in which our people are living.

I was at the rally for Israel at the Thompson Center this summer with Rabbi Prass and many other members of Beth Am and I looked across the street at the Palestinian counter-demonstration outside of the Daley Center. Our demonstration had a serious tone, we were strong in our conviction that we must remain hopeful and work for peace but it can not be at the expense of the security of the State of Israel. We had a short prayer vigil for the solders killed and the three Israeli boys kidnapped and murdered. Across the street was an angry mob screaming and waving pictures of their friends and relatives who had been killed. I had deep compassion for their losses and they felt even deeper hatred for us – for we represented the evil force which has brought so much anguish into their lives.

Communication, once the first step in working with the enemy is I suspect not the first step here, for we have to have two peoples willing to be at the table and see each other each as a People with a right to believe each has the right to exist is a mandatory prerequisite for sitting at a peace negotiation table together. In our case, in this case, Hamas does not yet see us, Israel as having a right to exist. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Terrorist who used the cement they had received from the US and Israel, not to build schools, hospitals, even bomb shelters for their people, but rather they used it to build more than 30 tunnels of terror underneath homes of Israeli citizens and kibbutzim for the sole purpose of killing and kidnapping Israeli children. And they had a plan. Just like Al-Qaedah had a plan for 9/11. So did these terrorists. They would use these tunnels, infiltrate the southern part of Israel, capture and kill, and kidnap thousands of Israelis and all this was to happen 10 days ago on Rosh Hashanah. Had we not found out, had we entered Gaza, had we not found the tunnels….

Israel and Jews everywhere must take this new dire situation very seriously. We are in trouble, times are not good for us and just because we do not feel it in Buffalo Grove does not mean it does not exist. It does. When Anti-Israel Protests trap hundreds of Jews in a Parisian Synagogue, when the Babi Yar Monument is desecrated, just to name a few incidents, there is trouble for us here, too. All you have to do is read the Anti Defamation League website and you can scroll through the ever increasing anti-Semitic acts on College Campuses and in our communities around the country to know that the increase in hate crimes has arrived and we have got to wake up and be aware! http://blog.adl.org/anti-semitism

The media is not our friend and we have to be diligent to seek out sources of news that report with accuracy and fairness and we have to make it known to the public when we see media- bias occurring. The national international press was hostile towards Israel during the summer’s fighting. On a day when the Pope made an impassioned denunciation of ISIS for the forced conversion of Iraqi Christians to Islam with the associated torture, rape and murder, the CBS world news led with an Israeli errant mortar shell that killed three Arab youths on a beach.

My friends, we know that the enemy is not the civilian population of Gaza. It is terrorists groups Hamas, and others, who build tunnels underneath our homes and make us think that we are hearing imaginary voices. We are dealing with kidnappers and suicide bombers, thugs who carry out beheadings and use explosive devices targeting kindergarten classrooms and playgrounds. These are terrorists who want our children and who want our land and who want us wiped off the face of the earth and will go to any-lengths to get their sick and demented wish.

Yes, I once thought communication was the answer to peace between Israel, her neighbors and the Palestinians. Given the current state of hostilities and blame, I no longer believe that the long road to peace can begin with communication. Instead, at this terribly low and tragic point in the Israel-Gaza conflict, compassion or as Rabbi Jill Jacobs, called for in her July 31st, 2014 Washington Post Editorial, radical empathy is what is necessary before communication will be beneficial. The deterioration of the situation is too pathetic and fragile for something as basic and primitive as communication to be the fix-it solution right now. Communication requires among other things, someone to be the listener, and no one is listening. No one is available to hear the cries, feel the pain or recognize the fear and loss of real people living only a few minutes away from each other.

So what comes before the basic human need for connectedness through communication? Love and compassion. I am not so saccharin to suggest that we must love everyone, particularly our enemies. On the contrary, in this case, a place to start is that we show love for ourselves by taking a stance of compassion. Compassion for the other is an ultimate goal; that one should eventually be so enlightened to be able to pray for one’s enemy. But for those who, like me cannot do that right now, yet want not to harbor hate, because we know that little can come from that, what are we to do? Developing self-compassion is one way that will enable us to eventually act with compassion towards others.

Staying with the pain and sorrow that we feel and not running away from it or suppressing it can indeed lead to more compassion and a loving heart, turning brokenness and pain into light and strength. The medieval philosopher and poet Yehuda Halevi writes, “I have sought Your drawing-near, Calling You with all my heart; And in calling out to You –I found You calling within me.”

The agonizing situation in Israel leaves me struggling for an answer as to how to cope with the reality of the fear, deaths of so many, suffering and loss. I feel the brokenness and a simultaneous need to engage in this world as part of the solution and not the problem.

The Rabbis of the Talmud teach, “The Compassionate one desires the heart.” (Sanhedrin 106b). I know there are many ways that we navigate in times of great crisis such as these. Developing radical empathy, beginning with compassion for oneself is a place to begin. If each of us develops a compassionate heart, we will become more peaceful. And we will be ready to come to the table and to see the Other as another human being. We will seek peace and pursue it. It will affect all our relationships and it will affect the world. I believe this to be true.

Once we are working towards a compassionate heart, we will work to sit down at the table together, with The Other.

In order to sit at the Peace negotiation table with the Other and be successful, we must first sit together at the Tea or coffee table, the classroom, the lecture, the Interfaith dialogue group or meeting house. And we must meet in Israel and in the territories, together. I am thrilled to let you know that June 14, 2015, Reverend Margaret Gramely, retired pastor from Kingswood United Methodist Church and I will be doing just that and I hope you will join us. Reverend Gramely and I will be leading an Interfaith Tour to Israel,  an information sheet about the tour was handed to you as you came in to the sanctuary this evening. This is a trip of a lifetime. Rev. Gramely and I worked with Da’at, the educational wing of ARZA-the Reform Zionist Movement and it is a spectacular trip. In addition to touring the Israel’s Holy Sites together, we will meet with scholars, youth, rabbis and ministers, and communities who will teach us what is to live in the Holy Land and work with others towards a peace solution in the region, and in the localities in which the live.   I hope you will join us and tell your friends to sign up as well. Traveling to Israel is a game changer for sure. We will tour together, and experience holy sites that belong to all of us and meet with people on the ground working for peace and we will bring it back to our own communities and become agents for peace, in our own communities.

Visiting Israel is critical and there is more, What else can we do? This is what I suggest:

I suggest we enter into this new year with the knowledge that no matter how far we stray from our community-from the Jewish community, From Beth Am, from each other, we keep coming back because the truth is, we need each other. When the media decides to report Israel’s maneuvers as war-crimes rather than self-defense and then report Hamas’s actions as self-dense and not criminal, when the BDS boycotts, the acts of anti-Semitism on college campus increase and begin to hit home. If your Jewish community and your synagogue, is not there for you and you are not there to support the foundational structure of our community, hope is lost, there will be tremendous hardship amongst us. The situation will be disastrous and this is not out of the realm of possibility. I do not think I am being overly dramatic here.

I am committed to doing more in our community to help Beth Am move us forward in forging stronger ties to Israel and to each other. On November 16^th, we will host, with Temple Chai, Beth Judea, Shir Chadash and Or Shalom, The first Northwest Suburban community JNF/Jewish National Fund Event. Professor David Adelman, of the University of Denver, will speak on “Israel Among the Nations: Israel’s Relations with her Neighbors, and Other World Powers.” I hope you will join us. In addition, I am committed to hosting a combined Northwest Suburban Jewish Federation Synagogue event as soon as possible. Times have changed; there is no time for politics or divisions. We must be helpers and doers, builders and partners.         We are here to be models for our teens and young adults. And we teach and model that we do not have to agree with everything but we do have to be involved in causes that advance the betterment of our people and the world, causes that make sure to protect our religious freedom and rights, causes that stand up to bigotry and hatred. And we must make sure to Stand With Israel.

I also suggest that we enter this new year with compassion for oneself so that we might know when to have compassion for others, and when to defend ourselves with compassion for our own situation.

I suggest that we enter this new year with strength to fight against those who seek to destroy us.

I suggest that we enter this new year with a desire, or the willingness to develop a desire to form a relationship with Israel. Whatever your politics, what ever your view, commit to figuring out for yourselves why you should care about Israel, because you should.

I suggest we enter this new tear with determination to support Israel because the media doesn’t, because our neighbors don’t, because the world turns her back against her.

Together, may we enter into this New Year and each of us say to Israel and our fellow Jews and to all people who want peace in the world: Heneini. Here I am.

Eternal God, grant blessing to the State of Israel, created to fulfill an age-old dream and to be a haven for the oppressed. Protect her people with Your grace, shelter them with Your peace, and grant them deliverance from the violence that surrounds them. May they live in harmony with one another and with their neighbors. May the bonds of faith and fate that unite the Jews of all lands be a source of strength to Israel and us all. AMEN. ~URJ PRAYER FOR PEACE