“Cry for Your Brother Walking the Street Beside You"

Yom Kippur 5766/2005
Rabbi Judith Schindler

“When I die, give what’s left of me away to children, and old men that wait to die. And if you need to cry, cry for your brother walking the street beside you.”

This past year, I cried abundant tears for my twin brother, Jon, his wife, and for their baby Alexander Jax, who was born last December with a rare liver disease. During the most difficult months following Jax’s birth, the lines from the poem by Merritt Malloy with which I opened echoed continually in my mind and gave me the permission I needed to cry.

In the eyes of this poet, tears of compassion are more productive than tears of grief. Malloy’s words taught me that if anything is worth crying for, it is for our brother walking the street beside us. Whether it is our brother or sister of our family, our brother and sister of our city, the Gulf Coast, or of our world, it is our sympathy for our brother that will help us to heal and will help us to find peace.

No greater divide exists between brothers than in the Middle East. Over the past years of uprisings, thousands of parents, children, teachers, neighbors and friends have been killed. From the midst of these most painful struggles though, there have emerged stories of peace that can inspire and teach us all.

As we struggle on this day to heal our own relationships, we can use as a teaching model, examples of extraordinary individuals: victims, mourners, philanthropists, and leaders who have taught us that the path to peace is not easy. Their actions show us that peace requires us to move beyond our own pain and personal narratives to hear our brother’s anguish. Peace requires commitment, communication, trust, and the ability to forgive. And peace does not come without obstacles and times of failure.

It was this day, Erev Yom Kippur, when an Israeli Rami Elchanan’s little baby girl was born. And it was near this day fourteen years later that a suicide bomber took her life on her first day of a new year of school.

In the traumatic week of shiva, Elchanan was overwhelmed with thousands of visitors. And when the days of the most intense public mourning were over, he recalled the pain of waking up to his new reality of a father who had lost his daughter. No one was able to comfort him and he knew he had to make a choice. He could seek revenge or he could seek peace. He sought the latter and with his wife, became an outspoken activist, joining forces with hundreds of other Palestinian and Israeli parents who had lost children in the conflict.

Like Rami Elchanan, we too have a choice. While very few of us know a pain so deep, every day we, too, have options. We can continue to fuel the fires of our personal conflicts, allowing resentments to rise and walls of anger divide, or we can be healers and pursuers of peace.

There are 613 commandments in the Torah, but peace is the only one we are meant to run after to fulfill. “Seek peace and pursue it,” our Psalmist teaches. If two people are fighting, we are required to try and bring them together, even if neither side desires reconciliation.

Just seven weeks ago, Israel made steps towards that goal by disengaging from Gaza. Though the citizens of Israel were passionately divided over this issue, they showed remarkable respect and restraint. As Rabbi Lau, former Ashkenazi chief rabbi put it: “Settler and soldier faced each other and did not spill one drop of blood. They did, however, shed many tears together.”

Rami Elchanan, that father who lost his daughter, notes that what keeps people from healing relationships is their inability to move beyond their own narratives. Whether in personal or political conflicts, we continually tell our own stories to ourselves or to anyone who will listen, all the while drowning out the stories of others.

In a grassroots publication, Elchanan writes regarding Israel’s history: Each nation, the Israeli and the Palestinian, has its own version of events and each ignores the other’s version. Each is totally blind and deaf to the suffering of the other.

The same holds true with us when we get caught up in interpersonal fights and family feuds; we become blind and deaf to everyone’s pain but our own in the struggle.

In an effort to teach that peace requires communication, an organization called Parent’s Circle launched an incredible plan to encourage dialogue. They created a phone line called Hello Shalom/Hello Salaam that connected Israeli and Palestinian callers. Whether in the territories or in the heart of Israel, one can simply pick up the phone and dial a four digit number. Through that method any Israeli can talk to a Palestinian and any Palestinian can talk to an Israeli. Since October 2002 more than 400,000 calls were made to the phone line, resulting in over one and a half million minutes of dialogue between the two sides.

One grieving father, Roni Hirschenson remarked… “When callers get on the phone, at first they argue and blame each other. But after a while they start asking where the other person grew up, and talking about their own experiences and it becomes personal. There’s some shouting and some cursing at first, but then it becomes: where are you from? How old are you?” That’s all it takes for people to start communicating.

Peace requires communication. We need to speak to our brothers and sisters with whom we are in conflict and we need to remain silent to hear.

Rabbi Jose ben Halafta was once asked what God has been doing since the creation of the world. He responded: “God has been making ladders for people to ascend and descend.”

We have all been on those ladders, at times reaching towards heaven with our actions and at other times, stumbling and falling earthward. Our sages teach that we could never have reached the Promised Land without knowing slavery. Freedom, repentance, forgiveness, and peace all come with a struggle. Peace cannot come without risks, without compromise, without stumbling blocks and without disappointments.

This summer, in just 48 hours, real estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman collected 14 million dollars to guarantee that Israeli greenhouses would be in working order for Palestinians after last month’s disengagement. Their purchase would maintain 3500 Palestinian jobs and would hopefully jumpstart their economy. Yet one month after the pullout, Palestinian Police could not hold off looters. The prized greenhouses were ransacked and emptied of their valuable wares.

I tried to find a comment by Zuckerman on the looting, but there was only silence. I imagine that he would say that despite our best efforts, sometimes even our most honorable actions bear no fruit.

Every banker here in Charlotte can attest that even though you do your research and make your decision with the best information possible, sometimes our investments do not pay off. Though investments in peace have not always yielded the returns we desire, we still have to keep optimism alive. For peace cannot happen without hope.

What do we need to live? Some say we need food, shelter and clothing. That was the first thing we provided to our evacuees at the Coliseum and to the families from New Orleans that as a congregation we adopted.

But according to a great rabbi Hugo Gryn we need even more. He told the following story of being in a concentration camp in the winter of 1944: “My father took me and some friends to a corner in the barracks. He announced that it was eve of Hanukkah and produced a small clay bowl. Then he began to light a wick immersed in his precious but now melted margarine ration. Before he could recite the blessing, I protested at this waste of food. He looked at me, then the lamp and finally said, “You and I have seen that it is possible to live up to three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water. But you cannot live properly for three minutes without hope.”

And there is reason on the Palestinian/Israeli front for us to continue to hope. Stories of peace do not sell newspapers and do not make the 6:00 news. But partners for peace in Israel abound.

Arab and Israeli orchestras have played concerts around the world for peace. Arab and Israeli artists have created exhibits and writers have written books promoting a calm coexistence. Arab and Israeli youth have gone to camp together in locations around the globe, and victims on both sides of the intifada have traveled together to cities far and wide. Even Arab and Israeli comedians have kept audiences laughing -- all for the cause of peace. There have been seders for peace, potlucks for peace, marches, rallies, and interfaith prayer services too numerous to count. We need to trust that there are true Palestinian partners who dream, hope and pray for peace just as passionately as we do.

On Saturday night, May 29th at midnight, my twin brother received the call we had all been praying for – a liver was available for my nephew’s transplant. Sadly a 24-year old boy had died in Manhattan in a car accident. His liver would save my nephew’s life, as would this young man’s esophagus and heart save the lives of two other souls.

In June of 2001, five Middle East citizens received similar lifesaving calls. Mazen Julani, a 33 year old soft spoken Palestinian who was the father of three toddlers, lost his life as the result of the conflict. His organs saved three Jewish and two Palestinian lives.

Israelis, too, have donated organs to save Palestinians. In the painful Passover seder bombing of 2002 that killed twenty-nine and injured one hundred and thirty, Zeev Vider lingered in intensive care for five days before his death. His kidney would save the life of a 54-year old Palestinian mother. Vider’s son commented: "There was a choice on who to give the donation to; we could have said no, only transplant a Jew. But to us, it was not important whether the organs went to Arabs or Jews. Our father always taught us that 'life is life' and that there is no difference between us. He taught us to be on the side of the sublime and to never judge anyone by their religion or their race.”

Throughout the years of the conflict, there have been Palestinians and Israelis who have saved one another’s lives – through organ donation, through medical care, through nursing, and emergency assistance. We are all human beings made up of the same physical substance. We can sustain one another as we move towards peace, or we can destroy one another as we continue to sow the seeds of war.

In our interpersonal relationships, as well, we can continue the cycle of hurt, or we can begin to heal. Reb Nachman of Braslav taught: “We have not come into this world for friction and dissention, nor enmity and jealousy and vexation and bloodshed. We have come into the world solely that we might know God and we might know peace.”

If Palestinians and Israelis who have endured death and violence between them can move forward towards peace, so can we in our own interpersonal relationships. For the goal of this day is to seek healing in every realm of our lives – healing of our bodies and our souls, of our relationships and of our world.

The Talmudic sage Ben Azzai says: Who is the strongest of the strong? One who turns an enemy into a friend.” May Israel know that strength. May Palestinians know that strength. May we know that strength. And may this new year of 5766 bring to the world and to us that peace for which we strive. Amen.