Rabbi Howard Morrison

The centrality of Israel? Do you know how to respond?

Last Tuesday, one week ago, I and many rabbis from across the GTA were invited to teach a class at CHAT. How can I ever refuse when my commute is the shortest in the city? The gathering of rabbis is symbolic of Sukkot itself. During the Festival when we gather the four species, our tradition teaches, we are binding together all the diverse elements of the Jewish people. Among the rabbis gathered at CHAT last week, were representatives of Chabad, ultra-Orthodoxy, centrist Orthodoxy, modern Orthodoxy, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. Gathered among us were male and female rabbis.

The CHAT leadership had assigned a single topic for the rabbis to address in any way we chose - the centrality and significance of Israel. The students were comprised of eleventh and twelfth graders who could choose with which rabbi to study, and their was a maximum size per class of approximately 25 students. How touched I was that over half of my students came from Beth Emeth affiliated families. Now the pressure was on for me. How well would I do? What would they tell their families? To this day, I do not know.

My presentation began with the following scenario: You are walking on the streets of Toronto in a safe area. You are identified as being Jewish. You are approached by a non-violent person who asks to speak with you. Kindly but firmly, this person challenges you. Palestine was a known term two thousand years ago. Israel usurped, colonized, and stole Palestinian land in 1948 because of sympathy after the Holocaust. Israel should rightly return the land to the original citizens of Palestine. I asked the students to respond. How would you respond? I told the students, as I tell you, that each of us needs to see ourselves not only as members of the Jewish people, but as leaders of the Jewish people. Being surrounded by falsehoods on television, in print, and on social media, we need to be armed with correct, factual and authentic information.

 I went on to study with the CHAT students texts from an array of Jewish sources, harkening back to the founding patriarchs who were promised the land of Israel some 4000 years ago to this very day. We looked at sources from the Bible, classical commentaries and the Siddur. I reminded the students last week that it was the Roman Empire that invented a variation of the word "Palestine" from the Biblical Philistines, an enemy of the Jewish people in Biblical times. The Roman word, Palestina, was chosen by the Romans as a purposeful and overt shtuch at the Jewish people, and which has no connection at all to those who call themselves Palestinians, and who became an organized entity in the 1960's.

Consider the Haftarot for the first two days of Sukkot: On day 1, the prophet Zechariah teaches us that Israel in general and Jerusalem specifically will be an ingathering site for Jews and nations of the world in futuristic Messianic times. On day 2, today, we read how King Solomon established and dedicated the first Temple of Jerusalem, which was already the sovereign Jewish capital from his father King Day, some 3000 years ago. The Haftarot for the opening days of Sukkot affirm the centrality and significance of the land of Israel from thousands of years ago right into the Messianic era.

"U'Fros Alein Sukkat Shlomecha - May God spread the Sukkah of His peace over us and all of Israel speedily in our day."

Chag Sameach,

Rabbi Howard Morrison