The prospect of peace

Submitted by Rabbi Alexandra Wright

Is peace between Israel and her Palestinian neighbours now a pipedream, a hallucinatory, vain hope with no possibility of its own Dayton Peace Accords, Good Friday Agreement or Truth and Reconciliation Commission? How do wars end? How does conflict between nations find its resolution? Perhaps, as the Psalmist says, we are born ‘with iniquity’, ‘conceived with sin’ (Psalm 51), in the sense that our inclination towards evil is nothing but evil all the time (Genesis 6:5). Perhaps we are not the pure creatures our morning liturgy speaks of when we pray, ‘My God, the soul You have given me is pure…’

If that is the case, then it is no wonder that human history is stained with accounts of violence and war, massacres, degradation, rape, greed and ambition. We can list too easily the barbaric and cruelly executed deaths in Cambodia and Bosnia, in Rwanda and Myanmar – places where humanity – if we can use this word of men – sank to subhuman methods to eradicate their enemies from the face of the earth.

All this in my own lifetime, in the decades after Raphael Lemkin coined a term to describe the ‘disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.’

On Saturday night, as the sun sets and the stars appear in the sky, the Jewish world will come together to observe a fast that many of us thought was all but obsolete – Tisha B’Av. The 9 Av is the culmination of a three-week period of mourning in the Jewish calendar beginning on the 17 Tammuz, the date that marked the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Three weeks later, on the 9 Av, Jerusalem was conquered, the Temple destroyed, and the citizens of the city carried into exile.

The day is observed with the mournful chanting of the Book of Eicha (Lamentations), a five-chapter lament over the destruction of the First Temple – elegies that describe the utter devastation and ruin of Zion – the land and its inhabitants. Zion, personified as a lonely widow, weeping in the night, with none to comfort her, empty of her festival pilgrims, her gates deserted, her enemies now her masters, is not the innocent prey of Babylon’s victors. On the contrary, Jerusalem, says the poet, has sinned, ‘her uncleanness clings to her skirts…she has sunk appallingly’ (Lam. 1:8).

For the sages of the rabbinic period, Israel – the people – are not seen as victims, but as authors of their own crimes. On account of three things, the First Temple was destroyed, says the Talmud: because the people were guilty of idolatry, sexual immorality, and bloodshed. And the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam – baseless hatred.

There is no moral relativism here. The Rabbis measure the people’s conduct in the light of a permanent order to the universe. There is no room for individual moral preferences around faith, immorality or violence. Lamentations, and the rabbis’ theological reflections on 9 Av, are ruthless in portraying a God who is angry, without pity, who uses the Babylonians as a divine agent to punish the people. The devastation is relentless, ‘little children beg for bread…those who feasted on dainties lie famished in the streets…’ Those whose bodies were like sapphire are unrecognised in the streets, ‘their skin has shrivelled on their bones.’ ‘Better off were the slain of the sword than those slain by famine…’

It is not difficult to hear and see in these ancient texts, images of destruction, desolation and hunger in war-torn countries. Pity and compassion lie with our own people in the State of Israel, for those who waited for help and rescue from the army on October 7, for the hostages languishing deep in tunnels, many now dead, some perhaps still alive without access to medical aid. And our pity and compassion rests equally with the people of Gaza, doubly punished by their own Hamas-terrorist leaders and by Israel’s government and military commanders.

There are those who see Israel’s war against Hamas as justified, to be prosecuted until the hydra-headed monster is dead. But others argue that Israel’s longest war of nearly twenty-two months has become a war of unspeakable crimes, the veracity of which will need to be tested in the International Criminal Court.

As Liberal Jews, whose attachment to the State of Israel and its people is bound up with our spiritual heritage and with our place here in the diaspora of world Jewry, we need to place ourselves firmly in a place of objective justice, driven by equity and human rights. If as human beings, as Jews, we subscribe to the belief that every human being is created in the image of God – b’tzelem Elohim – that all humanity has a basic and inalienable right to water, to food, to sanitation, to education and medical aid, to a home and a land to call their own, then we must stand firmly with the call for an urgent ceasefire, for the release of the hostages, and for the Palestinian people’s right to their own homeland.

Only then will these hostilities wear themselves out; only then will both sides find their voices of humanity and compassion, able to listen to each other and to see each other as human beings.