At a time when some American Jewish congregations are avoiding the Israel subject as divisive, the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York has doubled down on its support for the “Jewish state,” and that support was rewarded two days ago in the middle of its Rosh Hashanah service with a video speech from Israel’s Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid.
Lapid told the Conservative congregation that Israel loves American Jews and is waiting for them to come to Israel.
Introduced by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove nearly 2 hours into the service, Lapid related that he had first met Cosgrove in June 2015:
“I’ve been speaking with Rabbi Cosgrove since that day. We’ve discussed faith and politics, leadership and the community, Israel and the Diaspora. I’ve learned from him and I’m proud to call him a friend. But there was one question he raised that day which stuck with me. It was a question on behalf of your community and behalf of many others. It made my heart stop for moment. Rabbi Cosgrove said at times, too many times, we’ve been left to wonder whether Israel loves us as much as we love Israel. That day I was a Knesset member in the opposition. Today just over six years later, I am the foreign minister of Israel and I have an answer for you, rabbi. Yes, we do love you as much as you love Israel. Yes, you are a part of us as much, a full and equal part of us. Yes, we are family. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or secular, those that go to the synagogue once a week and those that go once a year, those that pray in Hebrew, those that pray in English and those that don’t pray at all.
So I have one message for you this year. Israel loves you and we are waiting for you. So from the land of Israel and from one member of the family to another, I’d like to wish you all l’shana tova.
Lapid was addressing worship issues at the Western Wall in Jerusalem that have caused friction between Israel and American Jewish bodies. Though the Palestine issue has also divided some American Jews.
His speech was followed by the synagogue’s cantor and daughter singing a prayer for the State of Israel.
The closeness of the rabbi and the foreign minister are indicative of Park Avenue’s long record of support for the country. The synagogue has led some of the largest trips to Israel of U.S. synagogues, including bringing 61 board members there in 2018. Last May when Israel was bombing Gaza, killing over 200 people, a rabbi at Park Avenue gave a worshipful sermon about the gun his son carries in the Israeli Defense Forces. Another Park Avenue rabbi said that the synagogue is highly intentional about this support, at a time when others have walked away: “At a time when Israel has become a divisive topic in some parts of the Jewish world, our synagogue’s clergy, professional and lay leadership have emphasized the importance of this experience as an expression of our abiding commitment to Israel despite its political and spiritual differences and challenges.”
Lapid prides himself on being the leader of the secular Israelis. There is not a religious bone in his body. He not the first secular politician to use religion for his political services. What’s news is that a so-called religion allows itself to be used in this political way. It exposes the true nature of Conservative Judaism in this flagship congregation. Their sole credo is peoplehood and the State of Israel.
Lapid is lying through his teeth. The only thing he can offer to American Jews is this message, i.e.hypocritical lip service. American Jews are only interesting to Israelis so long as they can help them. Israel is the troubled teenager, contemptuous of the old fools who continue to bankroll their shenanigans.
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Attention Yair Lapid!
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/9/8/the-mafia-and-israels-child-killers
“The Mafia and Israel’s child killers”
“Are Israel’s child-killing snipers any different to the Mafia’s hitmen?” By Andrew Metrovica, Al Jazeera, Sept. 8/21
EXCERPTS:
“The hitman and the Mafia came to mind as I read about the murder of yet another Palestinian child, instantly erased by one of a ruthless crew of gangsters masquerading as ‘soldiers’ who populate the Israeli military.
“Truth is that the Mafia and the Israeli military have a lot in common: life – including the budding lives of children – is considered cheap and disposable in the pursuit of their base, parochial instincts and interests. And the fantasy that the Mafia abides by an honorable ‘code’ that, despite its heinous modus operandi, affords it a measure of ‘perverse credibility’ is as obscene as the Western-media-manufactured myth that the child-murdering Israeli military is the ‘most moral army in the world’.
“‘The difference is that when the Mafia kills kids, outrage and loud calls to bring the inhuman culprits to justice are de rigueur. But when the Israeli army guns down and mutilates Palestinian boys and girls with armor-piercing bullets and stealth-like drones – again and again and again – the response, if any, among Western capitals and editors is usually of understanding, acceptance and overt, if sometimes grudging, approval.
“The death of 12-year-old Hassan Abu al-Neil on August 21, a week after he was shot in the head while standing on what remains of Palestinian soil in Gaza by a government-trained hitman sporting a military uniform is more proof that, for Israel, it is not only easy to kill Palestinian children, but just as easy to get away with it.
“Hassan was executed. The Israeli hitman (aka ‘sniper’) who plucked him out of a crowd of Palestinians simply exercising the right to resist their occupation had to know that Hassan was a child. A picture purportedly of the boy reveals a small, thin figure with a radiant smile and a thick wave of black hair and large, ungainly ears – the unmistakable signs of youth.” (cont’d)
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“And yet the hitman trained his sophisticated weapon’s scope on Hassan’s head – not an arm or a leg – but his head. It was a ‘kill shot’ meant to tear through flesh, skull and bone with disfiguring and lethal accuracy.
“Anyone capable of knowingly and intentionally killing a child from a safe, comfortable distance has forfeited the privilege of being called a human being. The decrepit void of that ‘soldier’s’ evaporated soul must have been occupied, long ago, by malignant malice and corrosive hate that permitted him to ‘whack’ a child with a sociopath’s ease.
“That is one possible explanation. Another, equally nauseating interpretation is that, like the ‘soldier’ many common Israelis and their apologists abroad, are convinced that Hassan and many other Palestinian children who have been shot in the head and stomach or dismembered while playing football on a beach, deserved their fates.
“Israel and its cynical allies have tried – drip by drip – to drain Hassan and the other slaughtered Palestinian children of their humanity with the sick, incessant accusation that they were willing, malleable ‘tools of terrorists’ or ‘rock-throwing terrorists.’ They, in effect, invited their violent and sudden deaths.
“The responsibility for Hassan’s murder rests with the Israeli hitman who shot him and Israel’s diseased, irredeemable army of military and political ‘godfathers’ who, like the Cosa Nostra henchmen, deem children to be legitimate targets.
“Unlike Mafia-hired-killers, Hassan’s Israeli hitman will never be held to account. The farcical ‘investigations’ the Israeli military launches on occasion into the litany of Israel’s state-sanctioned killings of Palestinian children are a pathetic pantomime designed to exonerate its stable of hitmen in fatigues by fixing blame on the boys and girls it murders. All the while, the so-called ‘international community’ nods or shrugs in unconscionable agreement.”
“some American Jewish congregations are avoiding the Israel subject as divisive” – well, that’s new! and good news. It used to be uncontroversial – or at least, any Jews who did not support Israel would keep their mouths shut.
Are Yom Kippur sermons still pitches for Israel bonds? We’ll find out.
I resent the author’s calling Israel “the Jewish state.” The Jews who raised me were in the forefront of the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement in the U.S., advocating equality for all human beings. They would strongly disapprove of the brutal apartheid that Israel if perpetrating against the native population of Palestine. Zionist Israel is no more “the Jewish state” than Nazi Germany was “the Christian state.”