Israel’s Election and The Courage to Be a Beginner
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
Of course, not everyone who receives emails from a synagogue is necessarily interested in political developments in Israel. For some of us, our relationship to our Judaism or to synagogue life is primarily religious or spiritual in nature. For others, it may be social: we seek a place to celebrate Jewish holidays, to pray, to study Jewish text and tradition, to see our children learn the foundations of Jewish life and to celebrate becoming B’nai Mitzvah, or perhaps simply to find points of social connection with newfound friends who share a cultural context.
Some of us are interested in some, but not all, of these features of Jewish life. Jewish life is multifaceted, and it’s my belief that a vibrant synagogue community can speak to the diversity of Jewish experiences that make up Jewish life (while recognizing that no single synagogue will be the right fit for everyone). Included in this diversity of Jewish experiences is a relationship to the one Jewish state in the world, in the Jewish people’s ancient homeland, formed to be a place of refuge for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.
Of course, having a relationship to the State of Israel does not mean unquestioned agreement with every formal or informal action the state or its representatives take. Israel, like the United States, is a democracy, subject to fierce internal disagreement, and the worldwide Jewish population has long been engaged in debating the direction of Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and broader issues of war and peace in the Middle East weigh heavily on the hearts of Jews everywhere.
So while not all Jews will be interested in synagogue discourse around Israel, for some it is integral to our experience of being Jewish.
And in just two weeks, Israel faces what some are calling the most consequential election in Israel’s history, the first since October 7, 2023.
The nature of the debate in Israel is not quite like it is in the United States, in the sense that political perspectives of Israeli Jews are often different than those of American Jews. Israeli Jews lived through October 7, with major home evacuations taking place all over the country. Israelis in the north of the country were displaced for months during Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israelis’ lives have been disrupted on a regular, sometimes daily, basis, with frequent sirens going off calling for everyone to drop what they are doing to run to the nearest bomb shelter. Israeli reservists have spent months over the past couple of years called up to reservist duties away from their families. These experiences, as well as those hearkening back to the Second Intifada, when terrorist attacks invaded daily life with explosions on buses, in restaurants, and in cities, killing over 1,000 people, have left a searing mark on the Israeli psyche. As a result, the safety and security of daily life tends to take precedence over all other electoral issues.
Of course, none of this is to minimize the toll of the conflict on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and others throughout the Middle East. But it is to underscore what reports show is on the minds of most Israelis as they cast their votes on October 27. Our experience in the United States reading the news is often quite different from the Israeli experience.
Most polls suggest that neither the current far-right governing coalition led by longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor a centrist coalition led by Gadi Eisenkot — the son of Moroccan immigrant parents and a retired lieutenant general and former Israeli army chief of staff whose son and two nephews died in the war in Gaza — are likely to reach the electoral threshold necessary to form a governing coalition.
Possible next steps could include: (1) the Eisenkot coalition turning to Israel’s Arab-majority political parties for the support needed to cross the electoral threshold, a move not without precedent, though one that has been rarely invoked; (2) Israel’s President Isaac Herzog seeking to establish a joint coalition between Netanyahu’s Likud party and Eisenkot’s coalition, a move already viewed with deep skepticism by leading figures in Eisenkot’s coalition; or (3) a new round of elections until the stalemate is broken.
Issues of difference between the major coalitions include whether the Haredim/Ultra-Orthodox can be exempt from military conscription (Netanyahu coalition largely for exemption; Eisenkot coalition largely against); whether to rein in the independent power of the Judiciary (Netanyahu coalition largely for reining in that power; Eisenkot coalition is for keeping the current role of the judiciary); whether there will be an independent commission of inquiry for understanding the attacks of October 7 (Netanyahu coalition against; Eisenkot for); and the role of formal religious life in Israeli law (Netanyahu coalition with its strong presence of religious parties tends to favor a strong hand for religion governing, for example, who can get married in Israel, and whether public transportation runs on Shabbat, with the Eisenkot coalition often pushing for a more secular approach to these areas). Both coalitions lift up the primacy of security, and neither signals a readiness to move, for example, towards a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict. But while the Netanyahu coalition is more likely to push for increased settlement building in the West Bank, the Eisenkot coalition would be more likely to crack down on the horrific settler violence in the West Bank, as well as taking a more conciliatory approach to US led initiatives in Gaza.
Few of us have the capacity to vote in Israel. Still, under the Talmudic teaching of kol yisrael arevim zeh la’zeh, all of the Jewish people are responsible for one another — not to the exclusion of others, but with a shared understanding of the unique, albeit diverse, experience of what it means to be Jewish — we remain deeply concerned and engaged with the ongoing developments in Israel.
Holding prayers for a peaceful future.
Next I’d like to share the d’var torah I delivered this past Friday night Shabbat service, Shabbat Bereshit. This is the Shabbat where we begin reading the Torah anew from its beginning, and it falls on the same night when we gave out our distinguished service awards, the Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit, to Bruce Hirsch and Sara Schwartz Chrismer respectively:
You know, the world didn’t have to be this way. If you imagine that prior to the creation of the universe, existence was a blank canvas, or alternatively, to use the language of our tradition tohu va’vavohu, “unformed and void,” you can imagine that the world by no means needed to be this way, to be constituted of light and dark, sky and ocean, stars, moon, and sun, heavens and earth, humanity. You could conjure up an entirely different universe. Maybe you’d want to.
Still, according to Jewish tradition, this earth, this universe we inhabit, is the result of divine creativity. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan writes that God’s approach to creation teaches us, therefore, that creativity constitutes the most divine phase of reality. And because, as we know, according to tradition, we were each created in the image of God, that means each of us has this same capacity for creativity, to respond to the questions presented to us, the challenges laid out before us, with echoes of the same creativity we see present in creation.
Rabbi Kaplan defines creativity as “the continuous emergence of aspects of life not prepared for or determined by the past.”
Each morning in the blessing before we say the Shema, we twice use the phrase ha’mehadesh betuvo bkhol yom tamid ma’aseh vereshit — in God’s goodness each day God begins anew the process of creation.
The “continuous emergence of aspects of life not prepared for or determined by the past,” this is a gift of life we have all been imbued with, and hopefully it inspires us to consider each year, each day, each moment, new possibilities that have not yet been produced; the future is not predetermined.
We reflect on this on Shabbat Bereshit, the Shabbat of Genesis, the Shabbat where we begin anew the process of reading through the entire Torah to see what possibilities we have never conjured up before.
Judaism has a paradoxical relationship to time: on one level, we love our cycles: the cycle of reading Torah again and again; the cycle of our year, returning each year to the rhythms of our holidays and our seasons; the cycle of a life: from dust we come and to dust we shall return.
Cycles ground us in a sense of continuity and rhythm. On the other hand, if we’re not careful, our relationship to cycles can keep us stuck, giving us the impression that the future is predetermined, that there is nothing new under the sun, a verse from Tanakh that is probably meant ironically — there is newness. Each of us has never existed before, in this way, in this time. Each of us is created, according to Jewish tradition, in the image of the Creator, with our own capacity, and indeed, imperative, for creative responses to the challenges we face. Why else would we be here?
Judaism asks us to hold both of these relationships to time in tandem. The cyclical: the world will continue to rotate on its axis, orbiting the sun year after year. Fall settles in anew and we get the chance to do it all over again, and also, we have the possibility to do something new, to produce aspects of life not prepared for or determined by the past.
Each year on this Shabbat Bereshit, we celebrate the contributions of people who have brought new creative responses to the challenges and opportunities of building Jewish community. When a group of congregants were struggling to read the Hebrew in our prayer book, our Hatan Toarah, Bruce Hirsch, created a class to teach them Hebrew; when we wanted to infuse our Shabbat mornings here at Society Hill Synagogue with life and to immerse our students in the weekly rhythms of the Shabbat Experience, our Kallat Bereshit, Sara Schwartz Chrismer, joined me in reinventing our Hebrew School, moving it from Sundays to Shabbat mornings.
Each of us, in the course of our lives, has the capacity, the gift, and again I’m going to say the obligation, to be creative, to create, to imagine. The creativity teacher Julia Cameron who assures us that creativity is not something reserved for artists and painters and sculptors, writes that, “creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing that you must invent.” And she says, it’s not talent that makes a person an artist. It’s audacity. Nerve. What in Judaism we call, hutzpah. The hutzpah of understanding that, as creations of a Creator, we continue that process through creating creatively.
The third of the sheva berachot, the seven blessings that we offer to a couple under the huppah, as they are beginning a new chapter of their life together, creating something new is as follows:
Blessed are you, Adonai our God. You created humanity in Your image, drawing from the same pattern, and made for them from yourself a binyan adei ad — a structure of perpetual creation.
The upshot is this notion that God creates and imbues us with the capacity to keep creating. Through family, through work, through life.
Now, easier said than done. A lot of us feel daunted at the prospect of creating creatively. Well, writes Cameron, “in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly. Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen.” If we’re always focused on the results immediately, she continues, “creative life can feel foolish or barren,” but if we’re focused on the process, “our creative life retains a sense of adventure.” “The grace to be a beginner,” she concludes, “is always the best prayer.” Can we give ourselves the permission to be a total and absolute beginner as we explore our creativity in response to the challenges we face?
Here we are at Bereshit, the beginning, once again. Shabbat Bereshit, the beginning of our Torah reading. Can we give ourselves permission to be beginners and to boldly create whatever comes forth?
You know, the world didn’t have to be this way. If you imagine that prior to the creation of the universe, existence was a blank canvas, or alternatively, to use the language of our tradition tohu va’vavohu, “unformed and void,” you can imagine that the world by no means needed to be this way, to be constituted of light and dark, sky and ocean, stars, moon, and sun, heavens and earth, humanity. You could conjure up an entirely different universe. Maybe you’d want to. 
Each year on this Shabbat Bereshit, we celebrate the contributions of people who have brought new creative responses to the challenges and opportunities of building Jewish community. When a group of congregants were struggling to read the Hebrew in our prayer book, our Hatan Toarah, Bruce Hirsch, created a class to teach them Hebrew; when we wanted to infuse our Shabbat mornings here at Society Hill Synagogue with life and to immerse our students in the weekly rhythms of the Shabbat Experience, our Kallat Bereshit, Sara Schwartz Chrismer, joined me in reinventing our Hebrew School, moving it from Sundays to Shabbat mornings.