Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Thursday March 13, 2008

What the students died for we will live for

by rabbi dov greenberg

A massacre at a Jerusalem rabbinical seminary: eight young students dead, many maimed and wounded. Daily shootings and missile attacks on towns within Israel proper — Sderot for years, Ashkelon last week.

This cannot go on. No country can sustain what Israel is sustaining.

Almost two centuries ago, the French tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte was the master of Europe. In Spain, an embattled English army under the Duke of Wellington was resisting his advance. One day a young lieutenant came into the British general’s tent, clutching a map in his trembling hands:

“Look, general, the enemy is almost upon us!”

“Young man,” the general replied coolly, “Get larger maps, the enemy won’t seem so close.”

For three decades, many Israeli leaders said: Give the Palestinians land and their own state, and then we will have peace. Others argued: They don’t want their state; they want our state. They claim not just Ramallah but Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well. If you make territorial concessions in this tiny country, the enemy will be upon us.

And those same leaders responded: Don’t look at the small map, but rather at the larger road maps to peace.

Alas, today the enemy’s terror campaign is upon us.

Terror is worse than war. In war, there’s a battleground with obvious combatants. In terror, a coffee shop, a bus, a rabbinical seminary become the battleground. In war, there are specific targets; in terror everyone is a target — children, students, innocent pedestrians. The goal is to make Israeli life intolerable and to force Israel’s surrender and ultimate elimination.

Israel has a strong army, but it failed to protect its citizens from this terror. Why?

In Hebrew there are two words for strength: koach and gevurah. They mean very different things: Koach is physical strength, the ability to overcome adversaries. Gevurah is internal, moral strength to live by one’s convictions. Defining gevurah, the sages said, “Who is strong? One who conquers the weakness within himself.”

For many years Israel has shown unparalleled koach. Since its rebirth, it has had to fight wars merely in order to survive. It fights impossible wars and wins. But in recent years many of Israel’s leaders and thinkers have shown a lack of gevurah. It took immense weakening of gevurah for Israel’s leaders to entrust the security of the Jewish state into the hands of its sworn enemies, who practice, support and glorify terrorism.

The Jewish people have not always had koach, but they had gevurah, which sustained them. The behavior of some Israeli leaders today reversed this winning formula. We have a lot of koach, but very little gevurah.

Israel’s inner strength atrophied when it began tolerating the murder of its citizens, based on the myth that by restraint, it will bring an end to the ill feelings of its enemies and thus to the terror. In reality, what the last few years have proven is that when you are confronted with neighbors who wish your destruction, any such tolerance encourages more bloodshed.

Now is the time for Israel to stand up to terror with moral and political self-confidence. The Jewish state must let the world know that peace will come not when Israel will give away land, but when Israel’s neighbors stop destroying themselves in their attempt to destroy Israel.

We can all take part in the defense of Israel and the Jewish people, whether on the physical battlefield or the battlefield of ideas. We honor the fallen students by remembering them and saying: What they died for we will live for — the right to be, the right for Jews to live as Jews and be a blessing to humanity. The right for Jewish children to live without fear and to cultivate the kind of community Jewish children deserve. A community in which every child and adult has the opportunity to be exposed to the grandeur and majesty of Jewish history, the enthralling insights and special sensitivities of Jewish thought, the sanctity and meaning of Jewish existence.

The prophets of Israel were the first to conceive of peace as an ideal. Isaiah gave voice to the great words engraved in the imagination of the West: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”

But the way to hasten Isaiah’s vision is to fight terror, not allow it to flourish.

At another time, when the Jews needed to forcefully confront their enemies, the prophet Joel declared, “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”

The use of force must always be the last resort. But when all other attempts fail, righteous might is the only response to terror.

Rabbi Dov Greenberg is the executive director of Chabad House at Stanford University. He can be contacted at info@chabadstanford.org.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.