A Window Will Open Up

Bemidbar/2011
A Window Will Open Up

I was in Washington, D.C. this past week to attend the AIPAC conference to lobby on behalf of Israel, along with 10,000 other people, the largest ever. Our own Seattle contingent more than doubled this year from 42 to 90. And, I was especially proud of the six high school and college students from our congregation who were part of our group.

The very last lobbying session I attended on Tuesday was with Congressman Dave Reichert of Mercer Island who received us very warmly. The presenter on the issue of Iranian sanctions was Eliana Rudee, and she did an amazing job presenting a complicated subject succinctly and cogently. When the presentations were over, Eliana asked if the Congressman would mind being in a photo because her mother wanted one, which made everyone laugh.

Congressman Reichert said sure, and would you like to take the photo with the Capital in the background. It turns out, there is a ledge outside his office window, and if you climb out the window onto the ledge, you have an extraordinary view of the Capital. So, all twenty of us in the Mercer Island group climbed out the window of a U.S. Congressman onto the ledge, so we could take the picture. And, the sight of this scene was hilarious.

And, there was something sweet about this moment that embodied the spirit of freedom. Here we were, engaging in the democratic process with seriousness of purpose. And, yet, this moment was an unconventional, break the mold moment. And isn’t that what freedom is all about, the ability to be surprised and delighted by the new?

It was a uniquely AIPAC moment, too, because the message of AIPAC over and over again is - if you do the work of democracy, if you prepare, a window will open up. You never know when that will be, but persist, and you can be sure it will happen. John Thune, the Senator from South Dakota, and a presidential contender to be. He hails from Mulder, SD, a town of 700 people. Thune said to us when he wants to understand Israel, he asks his Jewish community in SD, Steve Rosenthal, and two other Jews. Steve Rosenthal got to know Thune when he was a local politician in a small town. Ultimately, he took Thune to Israel. And, as a result of a decades long friendship, Thune, now a powerful voice in the Senate, is a passionate advocate for Israel’s security needs. Do the work, cultivate the relationships, and you never know when that window will open up.

That message is central to today’s parasha. If we want to understand how an organization moves 10,000 people from one room to the next, just read parashat bemidbar which describes how B’nei Yisrael moved 2 million people from one place to the next. A people on the road to freedom requires patience, discipline and determination. This lesson was not obvious to the Jewish people when they marched out of Egypt. The wide open space of the desert they understood. But, they needed to learn that to transform from a band of runaway slaves to a nation with an inspiring purpose, they would need to learn the work of organization and thoughtful preparation. God’s message to us was then and is now: if we are willing to do the work, the window of freedom will open up.

I had another kind of experience of a window opening up at an earlier session I attended at AIPAC. It was a session on Palestinian leadership. One panelist, David Makovsky, said that the approach of President Obama was exactly right. Another panelist, Barry Rubin, said that the core of the problem was that the current Palestinian leadership even on the West Bank, haven’t accepted Israel’s legitimacy, and haven’t prepared their people for the fact that there will be no right of return.

The third panelist, Ghaith Al-Omari, was the former Foreign Policy advisor for Mahmoud Abbas. He was the one who surprised me. First of all, he said, he didn’t think this was the right time for peace negotiations. The Fayyad model of careful, step by step progress on the West Bank was working beautifully. The Israelis, American, and Palestinians were doing great work together, but the process needs more time for true trust to take root.

And, then he said that this business of saying Israel is a European implant in response to the Holocaust is a non-starter. The Jews have an ancient claim to the land, just as the Palestinians do, he said. “And,” he said, “we have to be willing to say so.” And, he admitted that even in Fatah on the West Bank many of the Palestinian leaders have not been willing to say that yet.

To me this was a breakthrough moment. For a Palestinian to say to a Jew, “You are authentic, you have an authentic claim to the land, just as I do”—that is groundbreaking. It means there can be two authentic claims. And, that shared belief is what it will take to create two states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, living side by side in peace.

Here is an analogy. When Pope John 23rd said in 1964 that the Jewish path to God is legitimate and authentic, he was saying that there can be two or more authentic paths to God. It doesn’t have to be either/or. Only when I see my friend who disagrees with me as being authentic can we really have a relationship. And, this idea of the authenticity of the other is also at the heart of democratic thinking and culture.

This thinking has been until now in short supply in the middle east, but if even one Palestinian is willing to acknowledge my legitimacy, that gives me tremendous hope. Don’t forget, that it was only in 1964, that the Christian world recognized the legitimacy of the Jewish people. So, if it takes a few more years for the rest of the world to come along, I can wait. I believe it will happen.

It will happen with a patient, disciplined approach. It will happen with the kind of one on one relationship work that AIPAC does so brilliantly. It will happen with the patient, one on one relationship that has been working until now on the West Bank under Fayyad, until Abbas reversed course and went back to the old strategy of isolating Israel. And, it can still work.

In the metro station on my way back home, I was approached by modern Orthodox Jew who needed some help figuring out how to get a metro card. Dov and I rode together to the airport. He is a dentist from Detroit who has been volunteering his time one week a year in Israel for 13 years - treating Jews, Arabs, Palestinians - those who couldn’t afford care - in a Jerusalem clinic.

One of the Palestinian dentists he worked with was himself a patient who was inspired by his experience in this clinic to become a dentist himself. And, now he volunteers, and was honored by the clinic. The presenter of his award was a Mormon, a dentist who said that he himself started out as a janitor, and when he graduated from dental school, all of his janitor friends came to the graduation. And they sat in the front row and applauded him wildly when he received his diploma, because they saw in his rise the possibility of their own. What the world was now seeing in their friend was in them, too. It remained only for the world to see it, and to end their isolation.

These are the values that lie at the heart of democratic culture. These are the values that bind America and Israel together. These are the values at the heart of the Arab spring, the belief that there is more to us than the world is currently seeing, the belief that if you work hard, if you prepare, a window will open.

In fact, the window is already open. The momentum of history is on our side, thanks to American persistence, and thanks to Israeli persistence. Now is not the time to lower the bar. On the contrary, now is the time to raise the bar, press our advantage. Senator Kirk of Illinois is encouraging us to adopt a prisoner of conscience in Iran. Follow his progress. Say her name. Nurture that spark of freedom bit by bit and the window will open wider.

Prime Minister of Spain Jose Maria Aznar said that Israel is on the front lines of a battle to preserve and spread the values of human dignity, pluralism and tolerance. Undermine Israel’s legitimacy, and you undermine the legitimacy of democratic civilization everywhere. But, we are winning that battle. Now is not the time to call for deeper concessions on Israel’s part. It’s time to press forward, and call for the end of incitement against Israel among the people who say they want peace. Because in the words of Oprah in her last show, hearing the words “I see you. I hear you” is the key to every relationship in the world getting better.

I came away from this last AIPAC conference inspired more than ever before that in strengthening Israel we help the world pursue a deeper dream. It’s the kind of patience, and iron discipline, and one step at a time persistence that was characteristic of the Freedom Riders who defied segregation, of the leaders of the Soviet Jewry movement who dared to believe that the iron curtain could be penetrated, of the founders of the United States of America, and of the founders of the modern State of Israel.

All of these causes raised the bar beyond what anyone thought was possible. All of them required persistence, determination, iron discipline, and hard work. Let’s raise the bar in our own community, towards creating an ever more vibrant Israel, an Israel of shalom. Most of all, let’s make a commitment to do the work. Because if we are willing to do the work, we can be sure that a window will open up.