Every year on the second day of Rosh Hashanah we read the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. It remains one of the most powerful and yet troubling of all Torah readings. Traditionally, we are taught that it is a story of Avraham’s steadfast loyalty and faith in God, but many rabbis over the generations have been troubled by this story and have seen our ancestor as having failed God’s test. The very ambiguity of the text is what makes it both confusing and compelling. Texts of this type permit us to wrestle with them in an attempt to grasp their various meanings. It can be viewed from so many different perspectives, from Avraham’s point of view, from Yitzchak’s; we can even try to imagine it from God’s perspective. We can look at it from Sarah’s point of view even though she does not appear in the story. One I’d not considered was the perspective of the ram.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichi wrote a poem entitled, “The Real Hero of the Sacrifice of Isaac.”

The real hero of the sacrifice was the ram

Who had no idea about the conspiracy of the others.

……

I want to sing a memorial song about the ram,

His curly wool and human eyes,

The horns, so calm in his living head.

When he was slaughtered they made shofars out of them,

……..

I want to remember the last picture

Like a beautiful photo in an exquisite fashion magazine:

The tanned, spoiled youngster all spiffed up,

And beside him the angel, clad in a long silk gown

For a formal reception.

……

And behind them, as a colored background, the ram

Grasping the thicket before the slaughter.

The Angel went home

Isaac went home

And Abraham and God left much earlier.

But the real hero of the sacrifice

Is the ram.

I have to say that without an outside influence I don’t know that I would have pondered the Akedah from the ram’s point of view. It helps me take a new look at the whole story. Sometimes we have to look at a familiar situation from a new perspective in order to see it with fresh eyes. That’s sort of how I feel about Israel and the Middle East right now.

I suspect that many sitting in this room today are ardent Zionists, strong supporters of Israel; but know that we are a small and shrinking minority. Israel has less and less supporters every year even within the Jewish community; a sad, but honest assessment. So why does this happen? It seems to me that there was a time when Jewish liberals and face it outside of communities like ours most Jews are liberals, were able to suspend their political worldview when it came to Israel because Israel was of such primary importance to them and they had such pride in Israel that they could overlook whatever she might do that did not harmonize with their worldview. That is no longer true. After years of the media portraying Israel as the oppressor of the poor Palestinians today’s young Jews think of Israel that way. So today when there is a value conflict liberalism wins and Israel looses.

Israel is an amazing country! This tiny strip of land without natural resources, home to millions of immigrants has literally made the desert bloom. Has become a world leader in agriculture and technology, is one of the leading industrialized nations of the world. All done in a country the size of NJ while in a constant state of war with her Arab neighbors who occupy country after country with a population of millions and still they want the land of the only Jewish state in the world.

So what can we do to be supportive of Israel? The same things we have been doing – vacation there and send our children there – for a summer, a semester or a year; buy Israeli products, watch the media and call them when we discover bias, sites like www.honestreporting.com are great. Probably the most important thing we can do is promote and defend Israel to the people we know who are not as convinced as we are of Israel’s right to exist and to defend herself. The Mossad and the IDF are there to protect Israel from physical threats, our role can be in protecting Israel in the arena of public opinion where she has taken a terrible beating year after year and it is only getting worse.

The current edition of TIME magazine’s cover story is “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” by Karl Vick. Some of the most insidious attacks on Israel recently have come from those who claim not to be anti-Semites or anti-Zionist, but rather “normal” folks who consider Israel to be immoral and unethical in her behavior. I will freely admit that I don’t consider Israel to be above reproach. I am willing hear and to share criticism of her actions. I’m not part of the “Israel can do no wrong” camp. But I agree with Thomas Friedman who this summer wrote in the NYTimes, “…there is something foul in the air. It is a trend, both deliberate and inadvertent, to delegitimize Israel — to turn it into a pariah state, particularly in the wake of the Gaza war. You hear the director Oliver Stone saying crazy things about how Hitler killed more Russians than Jews, but the Jews got all the attention because they dominate the news media and their lobby controls Washington. You hear Britain’s prime minister describing Gaza as a big Israeli “prison camp” and Turkey’s prime minister telling Israel’s president, “When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill.” You see singers canceling concerts in Tel Aviv. If you just landed from Mars, you might think that Israel is the only country that has killed civilians in war — never Hamas, never Hezbollah, never Turkey, never Iran, never Syria, never America.”

And now Vick and TIME have article about the current Israeli economic success and the way Israelis have found to cope with the stress of living in a constant state of war, but they have done it in such a way that rather than taking pride in the accomplishments of Israel, makes Israel look bad, makes Israel look uncaring, unsympathetic, uninterested in peace; when nothing could be further from the truth. Is it true that in spite of the lack of peace with her neighbors, Israel has managed to facilitate an economic boon in a world overwhelmed by economic crisis. Israelis have learned to embrace life and live it to the fullest, all the while knowing that any time, a friend or loved one could die defending their homeland. At the same time poll after poll shows that the majority of Israelis are willing to sacrifice to achieve peace. It is not that they are uncaring, but rather, that they have had to learn how to live life in spite of their circumstances.

This has been a year of bad press. It started last fall with the release of the UN Goldstone Report on the Gaza conflict. Justice Goldstone was commissioned by the UN to look into allegations of wrongdoing during the conflict. As soon as it was released it was criticized as biased against Israel and the bad press began. In January, Israel suffered another PR setback, when agents suspected of being Mossad were accused of using foreign passports to enter Dubai and assassinate a senior Hamas official. A number of countries expelled their Israeli diplomats in protest. Israel neither confirmed nor denied the allegations.

Then in March Israel announced the building of 1600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem on the east side of the pre-67 border that most of the world still considers part of the occupied West Bank; at the time Vice President Biden was in Israel, upsetting the American government who saw it as an embarrassing slap in the face. PM Netanyahu apologized and claimed that it was inadvertent bad timing, not an affront on America. Some will be inclined to believe him, others will not, we’ll never know for certain. I can tell you that more than twenty years ago, when Dassy & I spent a year living in Israel, we lived in the Jewish Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill, right next to the Hebrew University campus. It is also on the eastern side of the pre-67 border, but I can tell you that we did not live in a West Bank settlement, we did not live in Arab East Jerusalem, we lived in a plain, ordinary, integrated Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem. One of the problems in even trying to discuss the Middle East is that people can’t agree on the terms to be used or on the facts on the ground. It is for this very reason that I believe the two-state solution holds out our best hope for peace; I don’t see Israelis and Palestinians finding a way to live together.

I consider myself a moderate in most things and on Israel, I am as well. I find aspects of AIPAC that I like and aspects of J Street that I like, but I’m not completely convinced by either of them. I’m somewhere in the middle. I know I’m not ZOA material, I think the settlements are an impediment to peace and I suspect that the government will trade land to keep many of the settlements that are close to Israel proper, but others will be abandoned. This of course is no small matter, but ultimately only Israel can decide what it is willing to negotiate. Just by comparison when Israel gave up Gaza they dismantled moved less than 10,000 settlers; the West Bank has over 300,000 and while a deal to keep many settlements could account for 250,000 that still means uprooting and resettling 50-60,000 of the most militant settlers. It will not be easy.

In May, Israel next ran afoul the international community with the Gaza Flotilla debacle. There is no question that Israel had every right to board the boats sailing in Israeli waters in violation of their blockade. However, once again, Israel may have been in the right, but that fact did not help them one iota in realm of public opinion. Once again, Israel was isolated, criticized and condemned. And it further strained relations with Turkey which once were good, but had been strained even before this incident.

In the midst of all this Israel is prospering economically. This is a good thing, this is an amazing feat. This is nothing short of miraculous. And so we have seen books like Start-Up Nation become best sellers as the world watches in amazement what Israel has accomplished and the circumstances under which she labors. And then along comes TIME with a slanderous article. It isn’t the first time someone has taken an underhanded shot at Israel and it won’t be the last. We shouldn’t let it deter us from our support; I can assure you that it won’t slow the Israelis down a bit. But neither should we ignore nor let it slide, we should watch vigilantly for these types of articles and we should vociferously oppose them.

Now Israel and the Palestinians are talk to each other directly once again under American auspices with the support and encouragement of both Egypt and Jordan. We don’t know what will come of these talks if anything, but we know that talking is good. Without dialogue there can be no resolution, there can be no peace. While I hope and pray for peace in the Middle East.

I am equally concerned about the Jewish nature of the Jewish state. It should come as no surprise to you that as a non-Orthodox American rabbi, I am opposed to the strangle hold the Haredim have over religious life in Israel. I am horrified by the positions of the Israeli government on marriage and divorce, on conversion and immigration, on religious pluralism and government support and recognition for all streams of Jewish life.

I am proud of the position and the activism of our Movement on the Rotem Conversion Bill. That we as concerned Jews opposed MK Rotem’s willingness to make a deal with the corrupt Office of the Chief Rabbi at our expense to solve the very real dilemma of Russian olim who wish to convert to Judaism, but are stymied by the current system. Leaders of USCJ and the RA joined together with Masorti colleagues in Israel to show PM Netanyahu that we would not stand idly by as the few rights we have were eroded. The Rotem bill was pulled; it has been slowed, but not yet stopped, so our work is not yet done. But, God willing, the commission headed by Natan Sheransky will over the course of the next six months find a solution to this problem and prevent the bill’s return.

I like many of you were horrified when Anat Hoffman of Women of the Wall (WOW) was manhandled and arrested by Israeli police while carrying a Torah at the Kotel. Did you know that a woman carrying a Torah at the Kotel or wearing a talit for that matter is illegal and punishable by Israeli law? It is so much more than our not having equal status in Israel, it is so much more than non-Orthodox not being popular in Israel, it is all about the right wing, black-hat Haredim in Israel becoming more and more like the Taliban that we oppose as Americans and their having the religious control in Israel. It is unacceptable. But we can’t turn our back on Israel and walk away saying it isn’t our country, it isn’t our problem. It is the Jewish homeland and we are inextricably connected. We need to fight for the soul of the State of Israel. It needs to be a homeland to all Jews, not just one narrow definition of who is a Jew. We are all Jews. We all have a place in Israel. We all deserve to be recognized there as legitimate Jews with an acceptable form of religious practice even if it deviates from what some in the government would personally practice. For Israel to truly be a democracy, they must learn tolerance, they must learn to respect the other, and they must learn to value pluralism.

There is a worldwide Masorti campaign taking place right now. The goal is to get every Conservative Movement family to donate just $36 to the Masorti movement between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. If you feel you can afford a $36 donation, then I encourage you to do so next week. You can either visit their website www.masorti.org or you can send it to me with a note that it is for this campaign and I will make sure it gets there.

May this be a year of growth and acceptance both of Israel by her neighbors and the world at large and within Israel for the broad diversity of Jewish life that thrives throughout the Jewish world today. Ken Yehi Ratzon/May it be so!

LiShanah Tovah Tikatevu v’Tichatemu/May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life for a Good Year!