How we fight back

Mordechai Ben-Dat

The last days of summer will soon fall away from the calendar like lifeless petals on a depleted rose, to be swept with little effort into yesterday. But there is no sweeping away the choking heat of the summer’s horrible war between Israel and Hamas or the searing condemnation of Israel throughout the world.

Media outlets on every continent and of every imaginable technology carried commentary about the war – a great deal of it unfriendly to Israel. Individuals demonstrated en masse in countless cities around the world, most of them hostile to the Jewish state and even to Jews.

Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. This was the third war, in the seven years since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, in which the Jewish state had to defend its people against rocket and other fire aimed deliberately at Israeli civilians. 

We all recoiled at the scenes of war. But we also recoiled at the indignation directed against Israel for determinedly attacking Hamas fighters and rocket launchers. We recoiled at the anger against Israel for deigning to so expertly protect Israeli life. We recoiled at the moral equivalence given to Hamas, which deliberately targeted Israeli civilians, and indeed hid among their own people, and to the Israel Defence Forces, which sought to avoid civilian deaths. And we recoiled over and over again at the vehemence and frequency of the expressions of outrage, especially on the streets of Europe, directed at Israel and at the Jews of the Diaspora. 

But after recoiling against the moral perversity, indignation, anger and outrage, we must also act. Jews, today, fight back.

The sovereign Jewish nation acts – fights back – by defending its citizens. We, as individual Jews, fight back by being and doing Jewish, by affirming our uniquely personal sense of belonging to a people whose vital ancient-modern mission on earth is the betterment of the world for all humanity.

But engendering in our children a sense of belonging to a distinctive historic people requires effort. The best ways for us to do that is through personal example and education. Parents determine and set their own examples for their children. But only a community can create an accessible Jewish educational framework, the ultimate infrastructure on which the future of the community stands.

In his commentary to the siddur, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, points out that the first Kaddish we say each morning in synagogue is for teachers and their disciples. He then explains its significance. 

“Judaism is a faith whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers, and whose citadels are schools and houses of study. To learn, to teach… to join our minds with the… scholars of the past – this is a supreme expression of Judaism and the one from which all else flows.” 

Teaching our children is and has been the sustaining breath of our Jewish way of life. Since our very first days as a people, it has been the pre-eminent Jewish obligation of personal, family and collective national life.

In his recent work, The Story of The Jews, Simon Schama records an exchange that took place around 200 BCE, between a king in Alexandria and Eleazar the High Priest who, along with 72 scribes, had travelled there to translate the Torah into Greek. 

“The king asks courteously deferential questions about how best to reign, indeed how best to live, and receives decidedly Jewish answers.

“King: ‘What is the grossest form of neglect?’

“Eleazar: ‘If a man does not care for his children or devote every effort to their education.’”

The beginning of the school year is a timely reminder of Eleazar’s exhortation. He did not say to devote a significant or large effort to educate our children. He said, rather, to devote every effort.

That is how we fight back.

Shanah Tovah.

Mordechai Ben-Dat is the former editor of The CJN.