Noach 2018

We have just finished the High Holidays, culminating with Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret. Over the course of the holiday of Sukkot, we offer 70 bulls in the Temple, corresponding to the 70 nations. On the 8th day, Shemini Atzeret, we bring one bull for the Jewish people.
Jews are not xenophobic. We believe that the Jewish people have a unique relationship with God, and a unique mission and responsibility to the world, but we also believe that a sacrifice in our holy Temple should be brought for the other nations. Indeed, non-Jews were historically allowed to send sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem any time they wished.
In this week's parsha, Noach, the Torah writes of a time in which all peoples had become unified, with one language and one mission. This turns out to be negative in God's eyes, and so God diversifies their language and scatters them to different areas of the world. God does not want a world of uniformity, but one of cultural and religious diversity. There are many roads to the Divine.
This past week, we experienced the tragic murder of both a young mother and of a father of three in Israel. The struggle and the violence that exists between Israel our country, and its neighbors - and indeed even within its citizenship - is deeply painful.
My rebbe, Rabbi Avrohom Magence zt"l, taught me that we must be strong Zionists. We must see Israel as the Messianic promise, a place of refuge and of light, for the Jewish people. We must herald its successes and its victories, pray for its welfare, and give praise to God for the open miracles He has done with the modern state of Israel. At the same time, he taught, we must see the children of Ishmael as our brethren as the Torah does. We must see the image of God in them and cultivate love for them. The Jewish people are our immediate family, but other peoples are our cousins, for as we read in the Torah last week, we share one mother and father.
So what are we to do? How can we move forward in the face of tragedy that makes us seethe with anger?
One of the Rabbis who visited the shivas of the families of Ziv Hajbi and Kim Levengrond Yehezkel reported the following in the name of a brother:
"...We can live in peace and work with them (the Palestinians). This was one crazy man - it doesn't define everything. Politics are inescapable even amidst pain."
And the following in the name of a mother:
"If you try to stop them for 20 years and it doesn't work, you have to change. Do something else. Why do we have to have one more orphan here...We need something different. What should be done?"
I think we have no choice but to compartmentalize our attitude. We cannot be all black, or all white. As Rabbi Menachem Frohmen, the Chief Rabbi of the city of Tekoa in the West Bank, said: There is a contradiction between loving the Land of Israel and hating the Arabs, both attitudes can not coexist. It is upon us to find a new path forward.