From America

...One after another, as they were asked by television interviewers why they had come, they answered, "God wanted me to...

...American Jewish leadership taught American Jewry a generation ago about the effect of state-supported religion on our forebears and we were successful beyond anyone's expectation...

...But more and more it appears to me that this is the situation that exists in the Middle East today...

...As the United States Supreme Court stated in one of its landmark decisions upholding religious freedom in America...

...I would ask him, "And if Islam believes that God wants another result, what then ?" He would answer, "We are right...

...That is where they have led...

...We stayed for perhaps an hour, surveying the territory, meeting the settlers...

...That hope was nurtured by the reality that Israel could control terrorism, that in fact the terrorism from the West Bank itself was very much under control after 1967...

...I wondered then, as I have wondered ever since, how the very same experience that brought tears to his eyes could have made me turn cold with anger...

...But having to rule over 1,300,000 Arabs, and wanting to do so, are two entirely different things...

...Never have I been so anxious to be proved wrong...

...Security, we learned, had little to do with it...

...Yet, I observed that my friend Rabbi Israel Miller, a past chairman of the Conference of Presidents, had tears in his eyes...

...In short, the dangers that inhere in religious certitude supported by government are not something I or American Jews have learned from observing current events in the Middle East— though we could have...

...It is an aversion widely shared by American Jews...

...If the good Lord hardens the heart of the Palestinians as he once hardened the heart of an Egyptian, and the Israelis decide that for their own safety and the safety of their children they must remain on the West Bank, there is no immorality in that, and those who say otherwise are applying standards of behavior to the Israelis that they would never in a million years apply to themselves in their own daily lives...

...I like to think that I, too, admire courage and dedication to an ideal...

...One of our group wanted the settlers to join him in a Shehnheyanu to celebrate the birth of his grandchild on the previous day, Ihc settlers wanted us to join them in a Skehecheyanu to celebrate their new settlement...

...The notion that Israel should, stay there in order to make the borders of Medinat Yisrael coterminous with the borders of Eretz Yisrael is far, far outside that consensus...

...It was rather the religious motivations of the settlers themselves that made Rabbi Miller cry—and made me shiver...

...That is because of our enormous respect for the security decisions Israelis face, and because of our belief that from the safety of our homes 6,000 to 9,000 miles away we are ill-equipped to recommend what risks Israelis ought to be willing to take...

...I think that he, too, wondered how this could ever lead to peace...

...I now do so once again...

...On a windy day in June of 1979...

...The peace with Egypt validated that hope...

...For as we looked down on the West Bank's most populous town, it became clear that no Arab living there could ever look up at the sky without seeing an Israeli encampment on the ground high above him...

...But in large part, too, it is because other Jewish forces have been unleashed, and the genie of extremism has been let out of the bottle...

...and that hope persisted even though the basic facts of Israel's existence, that she was surrounded by nations pledged to destroy her, never changed until November of 1977...

...Nor am I urging, upon Israelis that they adopt the American principle of separation of church and state...

...The propriety of remaining in Judea and Samaria for security reasons is well within the worldwide Jewish consensus...

...There has been an enormous amount of hope in Israel from the beginning of its re-creation...

...If Rabbi Miller had cried and I simply hadn't, I would have thought nothing of it...

...There is all the difference in the world, and the differences are as important to American Jewry as they are to Israelis, and therefore American Jews have both a right and an obligation to speak out about them...

...This particular aversion to religious certitude, especially when it receives governmental support, is not a personal idiosyncracy...

...Why, then, should Rabbi Miller and I have reacted so very differently...

...Instead, it appears to many of us from afar that it has diminished it...

...Not very long ago, there was a convocation of 200,000 evangelist Christians in Washington, D.C...

...If those forces became stronger we may have to look forward to the possibility of the postponement of any resolution of the conflict until two totally irreconcilable religious beliefs about God's intentions become reconciled, that is, until the Messiah comes...

...Today virtually every major American Jewish organization shares our view, as do all 107 Jewish community relations councils that dot the landscape of America, and as does, I add parenthetically, the United States Supreme Court...

...That much patience few Jews have...

...You yourself, Ted Mann, have argued to President Carter and the Secretary of State and in the major media of America that until the Arabs accept Israel's right to live, Israel must remain on the West Bank...

...They had in common a number of beliefs, some— conservatism, giving their country back to the majority, an amalgam of assorted hatreds—having nothing to do with Christianity as most Christians understand it...

...I speak in the name of a diaspora community which not too long ago rejected almost unanimously a half-Jewish presidential candidate who believed in extremism in the defense of liberty...

...at various times and places, Catholics have persecuted Protestants, Protestants have persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects have persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief have persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews...

...How many more of our people must be brought to grief by actions undertaken because "that is what He wants me to do...

...It is even possible that separation, as we Americans understand it, could never grow in Israeli soil...

...In part this has resulted from the vituperation with which the whole idea of the peace process has come under renewed attack, this time with fresh support from some so-called friends...

...Since the future of the West Bank has an obvious and direct bearing on the security of Israelis, American Jews (under the leadership of the Conference of Presidents) have, over the years, been enormously restrained on this subject...

...If that is so, I am asked, if the principal thrust of your efforts is to convince Americans that Israel must remain where she is because no nation other than Egypt will negotiate with her, what possible difference does it make what the Israeli motivation is for doing so...

...To the extent they do, 1 have urged organised American Jewry—with little success—to express its views on this subject...

...they are wrong...

...Fifteen hundred years of our people's history attest that those two moral transgressions in combination have always caused misery and death...

...Countless Jewish children were conceived because of that hope...

...This self-imposed restraint is very difficult to apply to the West Bank under the current circumstances...

...The separation experiment was a typically American, a remarkably pragmatic, experiment...

...As I try to see Israel from Philadelphia, it seems to me that those who are certain that the Almighty wants the Jewish people to settle in Judea and Samaria and to keep them forever, and who act on that belief, together with elements within the political establishment that encourage them in order to further nationalist aims, or in order to keep a frail coalition together, are unwittingly pushing Israel to despair, perhaps even to war...

...a modern society was built in Israel out of a desert because of that hope...

...that is where they will lead...

...What I saw and heard at fch)n Moreh struck another chord Ux)—perhaps even a distinctively American Jewish chord—concerning the more recent history of our people, the medieval trauma...

...This was not and is not just idle speculation...

...Israel was invested with the hope of 2,000 years, to borrow a phrase from a song we all sing...

...As I stood at Elon Moreh I kept asking myself, how much blood has been— and must yet be—spilled in the world in the name of the Almighty...

...If so, it will be one more war brought about by the deadly combination of religious certitude married to political expediency, fought by innocent young men and women, many of whom will pay the ultimate price...

...To choose to incorporate within this Jewish State 1,300,000 additional Arabs is to flirt with the destruction in another generation of that which all of us and our parents, our grandparents and our great-grandparents have struggled for in the modern era...

...Obviously, my emotions were affected not only by what I had learned from the Bible...

...For us—pardon the irony—it is an article of faith, whose source is Jewish history...

...First one must know why...

...We had thought that the problem of several peoples purporting to hear opposite messages from their God, each prepared to carry out His will as they see it, was just a terrible memory of medieval times...

...It was not the location of Elon Moreh, nor its imagery, nor its political implications, that accounted for our differing reactions...

...I speak in the name of a great Jewish community which believes that it is peculiarly the function of wise leadership to dampen the forces of fanaticism that arise from time to time in every society, and that it is peculiarly the function of courageous leadership to do so regardless of the political risk—and to do so now...

...t was that very religious certitude by Christians, added to expediency by politicians, that caused so much of the medieval trauma suffered by our people...

...But perhaps it is more authentically Jewish to be less pragmatic and to deal instead with the actual moral questions involved...

...But the most important difference that motivation makes is the difference between hope and despair...

...I am often asked: What difference does it make...

...One can derive.no moral conclusion from the mere statement that Israelis are ruling over others...

...My young relative who lives in Kiryat Arba talked with me several years ago about the Jewish right to Ju-dea and Samaria...

...That hope thrived on the worldwide Jewish consensus that Israel must be ready for war even as it pursues peace and from the knowledge that even in such abnormal circumstances it was still possible to live a real life...

...This story is recounted in the Eileh Ezkerah, as also in other sources that have had tremendous impact on the attitudes of American Jews...

...I don't pretend to know nearly enough about Israeli society, despite dozens of visits, to make such a judgment...

...So let me proceed now to express my deeply held view that it is a moral transgression of the first magnitude when those who are unwilling to consider the possibility that they have misread God's message seek political power in order to impose their religious views on others...

...Obviously it does not require a uniformity of views on all subjects—else we would not have endured until now...

...I don't want to speak for Rabbi Miller, but I think that he, too, must have been appalled by the symbolism inherent in the new settlement's location...

...But to use a magnificently descriptive expression of Thomas Jefferson—out of context—in respect toJudea and Samaria, Israel is holding "a wolf by the ears," torn between the dangers of letting go and the dangers of holding on...

...I and five other American Jewish leaders climbed into a helicopter with Arik Sharon and flew to Klon Moreh, consisting then of a few tents on ground overlooking Nablus...

...In some respects, ihc issues involved clearly go beyond considerations of security...

...It was still possible to conceive that given strength and patience, one by one Arab nations would come to accept the inevitable...

...And therefore those who would pull the Jewish people in that direction forfeit the right to call for solidarity in the name of Jewish unity...

...One would have thought it would have enlarged it...

...Furthermore, what grips all American Jews is that there must be a sovereign Jewish State with a Jewish majority for the very physical survival of the Jewish people...

...I am not one of those who believes that it is somehow un-Jewish for Israelis to be governing 1,300,000 Arabs who don't want to be governed by them...

...I stayed out of the celebration tent, angered by the misimpression that was purposely being conveyed to the raeli public, waiting for the festivities to end...

...countless Jews from other nations were ingathered in Israel because of that hope...

...And it is no less immoral when politicians, for a consideration, are willing to invest such dangerous religious certitude with governmental power...

...But when the same developments cause part of Jewry to cry and another part to be cold with anger, one is faced with disunity at a very fundamental and hence dangerous level...

...Unity—as that term is used when we say, for example, that world Jewry must be unified in order to endure in a hostile world—is an elusive concept...

...Fingers crossed behind backs, each made common cause with the other, thanking God for having reached their respective new seasons, Alt this before the glare of Israeli TV crews...

...This is what God wants me to do," he would say, thus ending any possibility of rational discourse...

...That hope derived from Israeli strength, from the certain knowledge that even if another generation must pass, and then still another, before the Israeli reality penetrated the Arab consciousness, Israel would remain steadfast...

...We mingled with the settlers, talked with them about their motivations in deciding to settle in this barren place in the heart of the West Bank...