Parashat Shelach Lecha: We Have No Other Country

  

Then the Lord spoke to Moshe, “Send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I am going to give to the Israelites, one man from each of their ancestral tribes, each a leader among them.”  So Moshe sent them at the Lord’s command from the Wilderness of Paran.  They were all leading men among the Israelites. [Bamidbar 13.1-2]

There are certain songs that transcend the moment and become much more in that they define an era or take on a status beyond their original form.

One example that comes to mind is Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’.  It has become synonymous with the Second World War, particularly amongst veterans who fought and tragically lost their comrades during the long and difficult campaigns across the globe.

In our Jewish world, such a status has been bestowed on Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, the song written before the Six Day War but which subsequently (and understandably) came to symbolise the anthem of the reunification of Jerusalem fifty-nine years ago, in tandem with our nation’s four-thousand-year connection to the holy city.

There is another less well-known song that I (and many others) would confer a similar status, particularly in the years following the massacre of 7^th October 2023.

It is called ‘Ein Li Eretz Acheret’ translated as ‘I Have No Other Country’ and it was written in 1982 with words composed by one of Israel’s most respected lyricists, Ehud Manor (d.  2005) and melody by Corinne Allal (d.  2024.)

Gali Atari, a popular singer recorded the song.

She had gained fame as the main vocalist in the group ‘Milk and Honey’ who famously won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1979 in Jerusalem with ‘Halleluyah’.

The (abridged) lyrics are translated thus:

I have no other country

even if my land is aflame

Just a word in Hebrew

pierces my veins and my soul -

With a painful body, with a hungry heart,

Here is my home.

I will not stay silent

because my country has changed her face

 

I will not give up reminding her

And sing in her ears

until she will open her eyes

I have no other country

until she will renew her glorious days

Until she will open her eyes

With a painful body, with a hungry heart,

Here is my home.

Ehud Manor wrote the song in memory of his late younger brother, Yehuda who had been killed in a tank battle against Egypt during the War of Attrition in 1968.  When Gali Atari sang it on her album, ‘Emtza September/Mid September’ in 1986, Israel was deeply divided in the midst of the First Lebanon War and this became its rallying cry and the era’s defining protest song.

A decade later, following the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, she re-recorded the song for a tribute album by the cream of Israel’s popular artists, called ‘Shalom Chaver/Goodbye My Friend’ (recalling President Clinton’s famous greeting to his close friend at Rabin’s funeral) which came out shortly after the tragedy - one that almost led to a civil war.

It has been voted by the Israeli public as being Ehud Manor’s greatest composition.

More recently, it was the anthem sung by protestors for and against the Israeli Government’s controversial plans for Judicial Reform.  Once again, a country riven by different factions.

And then the ‘7^th October’ happened.

What makes the song so special is that it speaks to all lovers of Israel.  Everyone who considers themselves to be a Zionist, irrespective of their social status, nationality, religious belief or political leaning.  At the heart of the song is the title, ‘Ein Li Eretz Acheret – I have no other country’.

This is it.

I can be British, American, French or Australian but at the end of the day, the only country that I can truly call my own is Israel.  It’s the one place that the authorities cannot expel me from.  They cannot accuse me of having dual loyalties or acting in a subversive manner or throwing any other antisemitic tropes in my direction.

A single word in Hebrew pierces my veins and my soul.

Here and only here is my home.

They were not simple men.  Each was a leader among them.  They were all leading men amongst the Israelites.

So how could ten out of the twelve get it so wrong?  How could they come back and speak Lashon Hara, the worst kind of slander, regarding the land that Gd had promised to us through our patriarchs, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov?  How could they?

And how can our fellow Jews, following the worst massacre since the Shoah, when Israel is under constant attack from nation after nation, do the same in the present day?

No-one who loves and cares about Israel should stay silent when her citizens act in a reckless and immoral manner.

·         An Israeli politician’s atrocious behaviour against the activists on the Flotilla must be condemned in the strongest language.

·         Settlers who violently assault and, in some cases, kill Palestinians or damage or destroy their property must face the strongest remedy under Israeli law, the least of which should be a lengthy custodial sentence.

·         Any member of Israeli society that disgraces the country and by extension the Jewish people, causing a Chillul Hashem, needs to be censured and punished.

How could they, the greatest men of their age get it so wrong?  How can those people I have referred to, act against G-d, the Torah and the land He gave us in perpetuity.  Nothing in our religion sanctions such behaviour and I will argue this to the n^th degree.  This is not the Judaism that I (and many of our co-religionists) want to have any part of.

They are not you and they are not me.

You may not like policies enacted by the current government of Israel, you may not even agree with the way the war has been conducted in all its theatres but how can anyone, who claims to be a lover of Zion, publicly give ammunition to our enemies so that they use it against us?

I will not stay silent because my country has changed her face.

I will not give up reminding her

And sing in her ears

Until she opens up her eyes.

Earlier this month, Stephnie and I visited the Nova Exhibition which was a harrowing experience.

Later that day, we had two speakers at our shul in Bushey.  One, Almog Meir Jan was one of the hostages who was rescued from Gaza by the IDF and Yamam (the elite, national counterterrorism and hostage-rescue unit operating under Israel’s Border Police) on 8^th June 2024 after eight months in captivity.  The chief Inspector, Arnon Zamora was killed leading the operation.

The other speaker was Ben Ladany, a soldier in a canine unit who was shot seven times during Operation Iron Sword in November 2023.  He suffered grievous injuries and was placed in an induced coma for several months but unfortunately his dog, Jack, was killed in the operation.

One of our members asked Ben how Israel, which had constructed the world’s most expensive and sophisticated hi-tech security barrier, could have fallen prey to the horrific events that transpired on that day in October.

He replied that because the Israelis were split over the reforms and disunited as a result, our enemies took advantage of this division. This reminded me of how my father zl used to say that internal discord amongst the Jews was much more of a threat to the State of Israel than anything that our adversaries could envisage. As we found out, he wasn’t wrong.

Those leaders in the desert, and their descendants in the land they reported on, forgot that that they, and we, only have no other country.  That’s it.  Warts and all, Israel is our one and only chance to live freely as Jews, irrespective of what kind of Jews we think we are.  Just because they were the leaders of their tribes didn’t give them the authority to speak ill of the land.

For whatever justified reason (and our Sages state many), they erred and the catastrophic result led to a further thirty-eight years of wandering in the desert and the deaths of thousands of people, most of whom should have entered the Promised Land a few weeks later.

When we, the Jewish people, criticise Israel, we betray the gift that has been given to us by Gd.  It is for this reason (and many more) that I have changed my status on social media so that it reflects my lifelong mission to be a ‘Rabbi, Zionist, Activist for the Jewish People and Israel’.  I will not be silent.

I and we have no other country and until she will renew her glorious days and
until she will open her eyes, with a painful body and with a hungry heart.

We will believe steadfast that, despite everything that happens to her, good or bad, here and only here - is our Jewish home.

Am Yisrael Chai and Shavuah Tov.

Parashat Naso: The Gift of Giving

 It could have been a very different story.

A few months ago, I wanted to access a video recording of a talk that was given back in 2008.  I casually popped the DVD into my laptop’s player and to my dismay, it refused to recognise the disc.  Not one to be easily deterred, I tried to get it to perform on other devices but they too declined to comply with my instructions.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

The outlook was decidedly blue.

It was decidedly a very foggy day in Bushey Town (with apologies to Ira Gershwin).

I spoke to a friend who suggested a contact who runs a ‘vintage video film and audio transfer service’ (as he describes his business on LinkedIn) and crucially lives nearby.  As it happened, I also came across an old Camcorder tape which held the original recording.  Eureka!  Problem solved.

Except it wasn’t, as the Camcorder refused to play the tape.

I phoned my friend’s friend, whom I shall refer to as ‘H’ and he happily agreed to take on the work.  A quick car journey and two tapes (I found a second one with the first) handed over for digital transfer.  In a jiffy, I was sent a link to download the footage onto my laptop.  Job done.

And then (speaking in a Jeremy Clarkson type voice), I had an idea!

Sitting in a box in my garage were a bunch of old cine films that belonged to my parents.  When I was a child, one of THE most wonderful things my mother did, was to get my dad to put up the portable screen in the living room, close the heavy gold-coloured curtains, set up the vintage reel-to-reel projector, switch off the lights and spend the evening screening old silent films that either she or my grandfather had shot (he loved filming and was able to afford colour film), stretching back to pre-war Belgium when she and her brother were little children.

If you are curious to know where my love of movies comes from, it probably originates from those lovely soirees with the three of us and my mother providing a detailed commentary to the grainy images appearing on the screen.

This is a shot of my three-year-old mother, filmed in Knokke (Belgium’s equivalent of Bournemouth which the Jews of Antwerp have frequented since time immemorial) in the summer of 1939.

Who could have guessed what would transpire just a few months later?

I shlepped over a bag of twenty or so films and sure enough, within a few days, was able to view a cinematic pageant spanning over forty years of memories, including the first footage of yours truly when I was a smiley three-month-old baby:

Concurrently, I found a way of transferring Camcorder cassettes from an earlier recorder that thankfully worked and allowed me to watch my daughters growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  This is my eldest, Hadassah when she was just under four months old:

I appreciate that there can’t be too many people around who have colour footage stretching three generations going back to the 1930s!  My mother inherited her father’s love of cinematography and kept a video diary (as it were) of her life from the late 1940s to early ‘80s, capturing her teenage holidays, my parents’ honeymoon, life in America and then in Europe, settling in London.  All of which explains how I have ended up with over two dozen digital files.

Several years ago, I purchased some decent video-editing software which allows me to delve into the files and trim them thus creating mini films of selected material.  As my mother filmed so much footage, I have numerous scenes with family and friends in beautifully restored colour (H cleaned the tapes up during the digitization process).  I have sent these files to the people who were the subjects.  As you can imagine, very few folk will object to seeing themselves as babies (in the case of my family and friends - my daughters were thrilled to see themselves as toddlers) or significantly younger versions of themselves!  In return, I have received some wonderful comments from the recipients.

In this week’s Parasha, the longest single sidra in the entire Torah, we read a lengthy passage which describes the bountiful and identical gifts brought by the princes of each tribe to the Mishkan/Tabernacle.  The reading describes a joy that is almost palpable.  It is one that we can understand because when we give a gift, we receive so much more in return and that’s why it is as much a skill to know how to receive as it is to give in the first place.

It’s not difficult to give someone a present (the challenging part is often to know what to choose in the first place) but when we receive it, do we react in a way that rewards the person who has given us the gift?  Are we appreciative or gracious enough and how often are we mindful of the other person’s feelings when they have given of themselves?

It dawned on me when editing and creating the individual files how some of the recipients might not be comfortable seeing relatives that are no longer with us.  Watching my late parents is a bittersweet experience but, at least for me, there is something really comforting knowing that, with the click of a button, my darling mother and father are ‘alive’ again.  Young, silent yet animated and happy in the moment.  Unaware of what might (and did) lie ahead in their lives.  Each frame is a snapshot, a slice, an instant when they didn’t worry about the future.  When the camera did what it should be doing, they were there – in the moment – frozen in time, happy to be alive.

The tribes of Israel were about to experience the repercussions of the failed mission of the spies and a future that would find them wandering the deserts of the Middle East for four decades.  However, at that moment, before everything else, they basked in the joy of bringing the gifts to the Mishkan and in return, celebrating the events which lasted for nearly a fortnight.  It is not by accident that these readings are also repeated over the entirety of Chanukah, since they were dedicating (Chanukat) the Tabernacle.

One of the fundamental mitzvot that is incumbent on all of us is to give charity or as we call it, Tzedaka.  The root of this word is Tzedek which means justice.  When we give tzedakah, we are elevating the act of giving to a higher plane.  In doing so, we not only raise the financial status of the recipient, but we are also, at the same time, rewarded with the mitzvah/commandment of giving Tzedaka (which is mandated in the Torah).  In other words, we are creating a just society which provides an equivalence between the benefactor and the recipient.

In Parashat Re’eh (Devarim 15.7-8), we are instructed to do the following:

“If there be a poor person among your kinsfolk in any of your towns in the land that the L-rd your Gd is giving you do not harden your heart or close your hand towards your brother in need.  Open your hand generously and freely lend him enough to answer all his needs.

The Talmud tells us:

"The poor man does more for the giver than the giver does for the poor man."
[Ta'anit 10b / Leviticus Rabbah 34:10]

and as Rabbi Sacks ztl put it so beautifully:

“The paradox of giving is that when we lift something to give to another, it is we ourselves who are lifted.  I believe that what elevates us in life is not what we receive but what we give." [ https://rabbisacks.org/quotes/the-paradox-of-giving]

I began this Drasha with the following sentence:

‘It could have been a very different story.’

If the DVD had worked in the first place, I wouldn’t have needed to look for the source and take myself on a personal journey that led to my uncovering a treasure trove of reminiscences.  It was a walk down ‘memory lane’ which I began on my own and have now been accompanied by all the people who received their freshly minted digital time machines.

This contributor has become a recipient and the pleasure it has brought me is immeasurable.  If you would like to know how it feels, give a gift (or even better, Tzedaka) and savour the response you receive both from the recipient and in the latter example, your soul.

Enjoy that moment for as long as you can, irrespective of what might transpire in the future for it is the fire that will burn brightly and light up even the darkest of future nights.

Happy giving and Shavuah Tov!