The Wounds of a Friend

I hate when these sermons start like a news report, but this week as has been the case too often in recent years, the news is relevant to the message. This week the President of the United States signed a memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran. He signed it inside the Palace of Versailles, at a dinner, beside the President of France. The agreement reopens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts the American naval blockade, promises Iran some three hundred billion dollars in reconstruction, and pledges to end the fighting on every front, Lebanon included. It says nothing about Iran’s ballistic missiles. It says nothing about the militias Iran arms from Beirut to the Red Sea. Iran’s own government boasted that it got everything it wanted. And in Israel, a poll released this week found that only eleven percent of Israelis believe their country won this war.

Eleven percent.

Now I am going to say something that may surprise you, though I don’t think it should. Almost all of the criticism of Israel’s government this week is fair. I have my own quarrel with this government. So, it turns out, do most Israelis, who told that same poll that the prime minister’s conduct damaged their country’s standing with the one superpower it cannot do without. A war was fought. Its aims were not won. A people that loves Israel is allowed to say that out loud. The Torah does not merely permit it. The Torah commands it. Hocheach tochiach et amitecha. You shall surely rebuke your kinsman, the Book of Leviticus says, the one you are bound to. Rebuke is what you owe the people you refuse to give up on.

So, I am not telling you that Israel’s leaders are beyond criticism. I criticize them. That is the wound of a friend.

But that is not what we heard this week from Washington.

This week the Vice President of the United States stepped to a podium and told Israel, in almost these words, that America is the only powerful ally it has left anywhere in the world. He said the President is the only head of state on earth still sympathetic to the Jewish state. He reminded Israel, the way a creditor reminds a debtor, that most of its defensive weapons were paid for with American money. He told a nation that has buried its sons that it cannot kill its way to safety, and he told its leaders to wake up and smell the reality.

Listen to that language: Not that you are wrong about Lebanon. Not that we disagree about Iran’s missiles. But this: you are alone, you are dependent, and you had better be grateful. That is not the wound of a friend. That is the kiss of a man reminding you exactly how replaceable he believes you to be.

And here is what unsettles me most, and what I refuse to pretend away from this bimah. The Vice President spoke those words in a particular season. It is a season in which his longtime friend Tucker Carlson has spent months naming Jewish Americans out loud, Miriam Adelson, Ike Perlmutter, and others, and branding them warmongers who drag this country into wars for their own ends. That is not a new slander. It is the oldest slander we own, the one that whispers that the Jews are a hidden hand steering the nations toward blood. The vice president has been asked, more than once, to break with that voice. He has declined. He calls it a healthy exchange of ideas. He even admits, in his own new book, that he sees antisemitism rising on his own side of the aisle. He sees it. And still he will not name it. Rather, he will use it.

So when the man who will not name that hatred turns to Israel and says you have no friends left but us, I do not hear the honest rebuke of an ally. I hear something colder. I hear a threat wearing the costume of concern.

How then do we respond? Let me first tell you how we do not. We do not abandon Israel because its government failed. A people is not a government, and our covenant was never signed with a prime minister. We do not decide that because the politics turned hard, we will study our shoes or the Torah and not participate in public life. And we do not, God forbid, accept the bargain being offered to us, the one that says you may keep your seat at the American table so long as you agree that your love for your own people is a little suspect, a little disloyal, a little too much.

We respond the way Jews have always responded when the powerful turned cold. We turn toward one another. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, teaches the Talmud. All Israel is responsible, each for the other. Not all Israel agrees with one another. Responsible for one another. That is the covenant, and no one in Washington signed it, which means no one in Washington can tear it up.

Heschel taught that in a free society few are guilty, but all are responsible. Rabbi Sacks, may his memory be a blessing, warned that the hatred which begins with Jews never ends with Jews. They were teaching the same lesson. We do not have the luxury of waiting to see whether this storm blows over. We have work to do.

So here is the work. Defend Israel’s right to defend itself, whoever sits in the prime minister’s chair in Jerusalem and whoever sits in the White House in Washington. Refuse the charge of dual loyalty every single time it surfaces, at your dinner table and on your screen, and refuse to let your own honest criticism of Israel’s government be drafted into somebody else’s war against your people. Teach your children that they belong to something far older than any election. Build the friendships and the institutions that do not rise and fall with one man’s mood. And vote, and write, and show up, like people who fully intend to still be here long after this week’s headlines have yellowed.

Solomon told us that the wounds of a friend are faithful. The test of a friend is whether the cut was made in love. And the test of a Jew, in a week like this one, is whether we draw closer to one another at the very moment the powerful begin counting how few friends we have left.

This week they counted, and they told us the number was small. Let us show them they do not know how to count. Let the answer rise from this room and from this people. We are not alone, because we were never only as strong as our friends in high places. We have always been as strong as our grip on one another.

And that grip will remain firm.