Sermon: The Taxicab and the Dream
Rabbi Jonathan Miller
Temple Emanu-El
Birmingham, Alabama
May 16, 2008, 12 Iyar 5768
Usually, I don't do what I am going to do tonight from the
pulpit. But I want to share with you the
title of my sermon, which will become clear to you by its conclusion. The name of the sermon is, “The Taxicab and
the Dream”, and this will be my sharing with you my paean to the state of
Israel on its 60th birthday. If it
weren't for the taxicab, I wouldn't be here as your rabbi.
The State of Israel has turned 60 this month. I can hardly believe it. It means that I am 53. I was born a short seven years after the
founding of the Jewish homeland, restoring the Jewish polity after 2000 years
of exile and homelessness. My middle
name is Ari. Growing up as a Jewish boy
in Wichita, Kansas, I was the only child with such an unusual middle name. Since my Dad was a rabbi, I suppose it was a
given that I would have an unusual name.
I was named after a cousin of mine whom I had never met, whose name was
Ari Miller. Ari was born in Opeleh,
Poland, where my father’s father’s family lived. Most of my family had come to America. But a precious few went to Palestine, imbued
by the ideals of Zionism with the desire to remake the Jewish people. Ari Miller settled in a kibbutz halfway
between Tel Aviv and Haifa. He and his
wife Tsilah, also from Poland, were among those pioneers who literally drained
the swamps and turned the malaria infested coastal plain into a place of
agricultural bounty. They had four
daughters, none of whom settled on the kibbutz.
In the past few years, the kibbutz has decommissioned and my beloved
cousin Tsilah has died in her 90s. But
that is for another sermon. Ari Miller
died in the early 50s. He was the head
of the kibbutz. He died of a heart
attack, and I bear his name.
I often think about my middle name. Why did my parents choose to give me what was
then such an unusual name, after someone they never met? My middle name was not Robert or Scott or
Steven, but Ari of all names! I believe
my parents wanted to link me irrevocably to the State of Israel. They were passionate supporters of
Israel. On my mother's side of the
family, there is a picture someplace of my great-grandmother and her brother
who donated money to purchase a Magen David Adom (the Israeli Red Cross)
ambulance. I don't know if they bought
the whole ambulance, or if they just contributed enough money to be able to
stand before it and get their picture taken.
But I do know that my great-grandmother was very poor. Her husband died some years before I was
born. His Yiddish name was Yankele, and
his Hebrew name was Yaakov. My Hebrew
name is also Yaakov. He was a shoe
repairman, and owned a small shop that never made any money. And he died suddenly in his early 50s leaving
behind a widow who never learned English.
Yet, my great-grandmother who had nothing, literally nothing, scraped
together enough money to donate an ambulance to the fledgling Jewish state.
My father’s side of the family had a great passion for
Israel. My father’s name was Judea, not
Judah, but Judea. He was born in 1930
and was named in part in honor of the land of Israel. Like me, his name linked him to the land of
our ancestors. My father was an Ohev
Yisrael, a lover of Israel. After
World War II, my father as a teenager would disappear at night and head down to
the docks in New York City where he would meet his friends and they would crate
boxes of illegal arms and mark them as agricultural supplies to ship to the
Hagannah in Israel. The British had put
the Jewish Yishuv, the nascent Jewish government, under an arms
embargo. My father broke both the law
and his curfew to support his brothers and sisters as they tried to defend
themselves against those who planned to do them harm. On November 29, 1947, he attended the
historic session at the United Nations when the nations of the world met in
Flushing Meadows and spelled out an end to the British Mandate for Palestine,
and divided the land of Israel into two states, a Jewish state and a
Palestinian state. The Jews accepted the
half loaf that was offered them. The
Palestinians refused. Since then, the
Jews in Israel have prospered. The
Palestinians have become more abject in every generation. But that too is for another sermon.
My mother and father grew up in the Bronx, and met each
other in the Zionist youth group, Habonim, which means “the builders”. The Habonimniks were socialists and supported
the labor Zionist movement. They were
somewhat ardent and very idealistic kids.
Many of the older Habonimniks had already gone to Palestine to set up
kibbutzim. My father was part of what is
called a garin, a group that planned to move en masse to Israel and join
a kibbutz in the Negev. He was going to
be a plumber in this new settlement.
(Trust me, my father couldn't fix a leaky faucet!) On May 14, 1948, the British mandate for
Palestine expired, and David Ben Gurion read the Declaration of Independence in
Tel Aviv declaring the first Jewish commonwealth in nearly 2000 years. For Jews around the world, it was a day of
great rejoicing.
Anticipating the declaration of independence, the
Habonimniks, and other Zionist groups assembled for a grand celebration in
Central Park. My mother was there. She was 15 years old. All their friends were there, but my father
did not show up. “Where’s Judea? Why would he miss this historic event?” On the night that Israel was reborn, my
father was hit by a taxicab on the streets of New York. He almost lost his leg. He spent six months recuperating and doing
physical therapy. For him, this had to
have been the first time in his life that he had ever slowed down. While he was convalescing, his garin emigrated to Israel and settled on the
kibbutz. My father literally missed the
boat. My mother and father became more
serious with each other, and my dad stayed in the states to finish
college. He then entered rabbinic
school, my parents married in 1952 and I was born 22 months later. My father never became the kibbutz plumber. Apparently, God had other plans for him.
Oh well, such are
the vagaries of life.
My first trip to Israel was my first trip overseas. I was 14 years old and my younger sister and
I traveled with my parents as they chaperoned a teen trip to Israel. We spent seven weeks in Israel. This was my parents’ third summer in
Israel. I fell in love with Israel from
the moment I arrived. It was, after all,
in my genes. In 1969, Israel still had a
third world feel to it. This was the
first time that I had ever seen tropical flowers, vegetable gardens, and
orchards of orange and grapefruit trees.
The roads were primitive. We
traveled around and did much of our sightseeing from the backs of lorries. The food was not that great or that
plentiful. During that summer, we built
a playground in the city of Lod, a poor city populated by immigrants who had
come mostly from Arab countries.
Jewishly, I never felt more alive than I did in Israel. I loved hearing the sounds of Hebrew, and
being with people with whom I shared a history and a heritage.
I returned to Israel many times as a young man. I left college after the Yom Kippur War and
did volunteer work on a kibbutz. I did a
variety of things during my youthful years in Israel. I worked in the orchards, in the cotton
fields, and in avocado groves, in the chicken houses, in the factories, and in
the fishponds. I worked in the
kitchen. I even spent a week working as
a plumber's assistant. (Don't ask me to fix a leaky faucet!) I studied Hebrew, Zionism, and sacred Jewish
texts. I have prayed in Jewish holy
places that my grandparents could only imagine in their dreams, and I rejoiced
in the rebuilding of the land of Israel!
I am grateful to Israel for giving me and my people hope for the future
and a place among the nations. No longer
do we Jews have to be the Blanche Dubois of the earth, ever dependent upon the
kindness of strangers. As a Jew, I can
stand up for myself in ways that my grandparents could never imagine. They had to cower before the bullies who
would torment them. And even though
there are still plenty of dangers ahead for the Jewish people and for the State
of Israel itself, we Jews no longer have to cower. Israel has given me and the Jewish people
pride and confidence, two gifts we had not known in our historic lifetimes.
I have been back to Israel more times than I can count. In America, Israel is depicted as a place of
unending conflict and strife. In Israel,
life is filled with noise, bustle, passion, excitement, and love. People live their lives, and they love the
lives they live. The conflicts recede,
and the unfolding miracle that is Israel over these past 60 years continues to
astound. The two lane roads have turned
into eight lane highways. The orange
groves have transformed themselves into industrial parks and scientific
research centers. The Jaffa orange, once
the sweet symbol of Israel has been replaced by the computer chip. Israelis have become more worldly and more
traveled. Their food and their art and
their literature celebrate the renewal of Jewish life and the return of Jewish
engagement in the world at large. For
me, Israel has always been my second home.
And I have had the joy of sharing my second home with my children, a new
generation of ohavei Yisrael, lovers of Israel.
On Israel's 60th birthday, I want to share with you what
Israel means to me living as a Jew in the modern world. For my grandparents, Israel was the
opportunity to hope and to dream. For my
parents, Israel is the opportunity to fight and to build. For me, Israel is the opportunity to protect
and to defend. But I believe for my
children, that Israel will be the opportunity to celebrate and to complete the
rejoicing begun 60 years ago.
Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi was a prominent theologian and physician
who lived in 11th century Spain. He
longed for Zion and wrote psalms in praise of the Holy Land. According to legend, he was killed as he
approached the Western Wall after fulfilling his life's wish by making
pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Before his
pilgrimage, he wrote, “Libi ba’mizrach, v’anochi b’sof hama’arav, My
heart is in East, but I am at the edge of the West.” Nearly a thousand years later, that best
describes me. Every time I visit Israel,
I ponder what would have happened to me if my father were a plumber on the
kibbutz. How different my life would
have been were it not for the taxicab that ran over my Dad as we Jews
celebrated our national rebirth after two thousand years of exile and
helplessness? Who knows, but I might
have become a plumber, the son of a plumber, living in the land of Israel,
rebuilding her piece by piece, dream by dream.
And who can judge who would have made the greater impact on helping
God’s will unfold in this world, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham,
Alabama or a plumber in the Jewish homeland, rebuilding her after two thousand
years of exile?
Let me conclude this celebratory sermon with another poem by
the great Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi, written a thousand years ago.
Zion will you not inquire after the
welfare of your captives?
They, who are the remainder of your
flock, seek your peace.
From the west and the east from the
north and the south—Peace.
From far and from near carry forth
on every side
Peace is the desire of the captive
Who sheds his tears like the dew on
the Hermon
And yearns that they fall on your
hills.
I am a mourner, who weeps for your
desolation,
And when I dream of the return of
your prisoners,
I am the music to your songs.
To be a Jew today in the 21st century is to be a
prisoner of Zion, to weep when Israel weeps and rejoice when she rejoices. To be a Jew today, in the 21st
century is to be a dreamer, to continue the dream, to dream the dream and to
live the dream. And to be a Jew today in
the 21st century is to be the music to Zion’s songs, to sing of her
beauty and her charms, to be enthralled with her promise, to love her stones
and her people, to keep the hope alive in the midst of everyday life, and to
lift us all up, ever and ever higher, heavenward.
Happy Birthday Israel!
May those who love you prosper!
Amen
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