Ishmael, Abimelech,
Amalek: Three Types of the “Other”
A Sermon for First Day Rosh Hashanah 5775 (2014)
Ben Bag Bag exhorted us: “Turn it
over, and rummage around in it, for everything is in it”—referring to the
Torah. Israel has been on my mind for a long time, particularly Israel’s
relations to its neighbors, or more precisely, the relation of Jews in our
homeland to the resident aliens in the same land—call them Arabs, Palestinians,
Muslims.
There are two threads in the Torah
reading for First Day Rosh Hashanah (Genesis Chapter 21) that relate to this
problem. And there is a third thread, which we read a few weeks ago, that is
also relevant.
Ishmael. Abimelech. Amalek. The
Torah gives three different paradigms of the “other” to whom we are compelled
to relate. They could hardly be more different. And they are all relevant to
our recent and present experience.
Abimelech is the Torah’s paradigm
of the good neighbor. Our own situation, and that of the world, would be a lot
simpler if the “other” in our contemporary narrative were always like
Abimelech. In the current reading, Abimelech says to Abraham, “God is with you
in everything that you do. Therefore swear to me here by God that you will not
deal falsely with me or with my kith and kin, but will deal with me and with
the land in which you have sojourned as loyally as I have dealt with you.” And
Abraham said, “I swear it.” There is a subsequent disagreement over water
rights, but Abraham and Abimelech work it out peacefully, and enact a covenant
at Be’er Sheva—the Well of the Oath. The name of that site commemorates the
peaceful coexistence of different ethnic groups in the same land.
There is resonance between Abimelech’s
words and those spoken by Anwar Sadat when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize (which
he received jointly with Menachem Begin) in 1978:
“Let us put an end
to wars, let us reshape life on the solid basis of equity and truth. And it is
this call, which reflected the will of the Egyptian people, of the great
majority of the Arab and Israeli peoples, and indeed of millions of men, women,
and children around the world that you are today honoring. And these hundreds
of millions will judge to what extent every responsible leader in the Middle
East has responded to the hopes of mankind.”
It would be an oversimplification
for us to say that this was all that Sadat ever stood for. This is a man whose
position evolved considerably in the course of his lifetime (as, for that
matter, did Begin’s). Sadat supported the pro-Nazi front of the majority of
Arabs during World War II. He loyally supported Nasser in the wars of 1956 and
1967, and personally launched the Yom Kippur War in 1973. But at a certain
point it dawned on him that the way of God was to pursue peace. By choosing
that new course he paid the price of Egypt’s ostracism from the Arab League, and
eventually was assassinated by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Though his
successors, Mubarak and Sisi, have been less charismatic in style, in substance
they have followed his fundamental policies. Egypt’s pursuit of moderation and opposition
to extremism—especially of Gaza’s Hamas—has been helpful to Israel’s containing
the violent extremism of that faction, and was especially crucial in ending the
recent Gaza war on terms that were favorable to Israel.
To be complete, we should mention
also the crucial role that the monarchs of Jordan, the late King Hussein and
his successor King Abdullah, have played in cooperating constructively with
Israel over many decades, helping at every stage to contain the fomenters of
extremism and to encourage moderation.
* * * * * * * *
At the opposite extreme, it is
unfortunately all too easy to identify the modern counterparts of Amalek. They
have been far too many and far too dominant over the past hundred years of
history. At times, it has even seemed as if the Arab world was one solid front
of Amalek, the eternal enemy of Israel.
The chief herald of the Amalekite
banner for the first half of the twentieth century was Haj Amin al-Husseini,
whom Herbert Samuel in a blundering fit of absent-mindedness appointed Mufti of
Jerusalem in 1921. Husseini considered it an insult to the Arab national honor
that the Jews should be granted even an inch of homeland in Palestine, and over
many decades he used every technique of propaganda, innuendo, conniving, and incitement
to riot and murder (including the murder of moderate Arab mukhtars) to rally
the Arab masses of Palestine to oppose Jewish national aspirations in Eretz
Israel, to block Jewish emigration during the Nazi period, to propagandize on
behalf of Nazism at the height of the Holocaust, and to inspire the war of 1948
whose purpose was to extinguish the Jewish state at its moment of birth.
The next proponent of Israel’s
destruction, for a brief period, was Gamal Abdul Nasser, the bright star of
secular Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, famous for provoking the
six-day war by blockading Israel’s shipping access to the Red Sea at the
Straits of Tiran. But already before 1967, in 1964 Yasser Arafat had founded
the Palestinian Liberation Front and begun launching raids on Israel, across the
Green Line, from his positions in the West Bank. Also in 1964 the Charter of
the PLO declared that Palestine was an indivisible territorial unit, to be
ruled by the Arab Palestinians, that the Balfour Declaration was null and void,
that Zionism was a fascist colonialist movement, and that Israel, as the
spearhead of Zionism, was a permanent source of tension and turmoil in the
Middle East that had to be removed. This, mind you, was when the whole of
Israel existed only within the Green Line. Thus the PLO in its inception was
not against the presence of Israel in the West Bank, which had not occurred
yet; it was against the existence of Israel altogether.
When the PLO agreed to the Oslo
accords in 1994, a split arose in the movement. The rejectionists, together
with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, continually worked to sabotage the peace process
through terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings. Arafat’s ambivalent role
at this crucial juncture showed that it was difficult for him to shed his
original militant persona. In speeches to his followers, he assured them that
conquest of the whole land by one means or another was a historic
inevitability. At the 2000 Camp David summit, he derisively dismissed Ehud
Barak’s generous territorial offer without making a counter-offer. Though
nominally approving compromise, he stood emotionally and rhetorically with the
rejectionists to the end of his days.
To summarize: Husseini, Arafat, and
Hamas have been virtually consistent over a period of nearly a century in pursuing
a policy of total rejection to Jewish national aspirations—no to Jewish
immigration, no to Jewish sovereignty over any portion of Eretz Israel.
* * * * * * * *
In the middle, between Abimelech at
one extreme and Amalek at the other extreme, stands Ishmael. Ishmael is Abraham’s
oldest son. The relationship between Isaac (or Israel) and Ishmael is
complicated from beginning to end, but the Torah and the rabbis never condemn
him outright. There is competition between Ishmael and Isaac for Abraham’s
legacy that continues into the later history of their descendants. In the
Muslim narrative, in the Quran, it is Ishmael, rather than Isaac, whom Abraham
brings to Mount Moriah at God’s command to be bound on the altar.
In the Torah portion we read today,
Ishmael incurred Sarah’s disapproval because he was metzahek with Isaac. Though the English translations translate metzahek as “playing” or “making sport,”
there is a definite connotation of abuse, whether sexual or otherwise. Sarah
orders Abraham to cast him out, together with his mother Hagar. Abraham
consults with God, who tells him to accede to his wife’s demand, but not to
despair, because God will make Ishmael, too, into a great nation. But not a
nation destined for peace; rather, the Torah predicts: “He will be a wild beast
of a man—his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him.”
Cast into the desert, at the point
of death, Hagar and Ishmael are rescued by an angel who shows them water. This
is reminiscent of the earlier expulsion of Hagar, when she was pregnant with
Ishmael, and she discovered a well which she named “Be’er Lahai Ro’I”— the well
of the Living One who sees me. It is significant that later, when Isaac is
waiting for the arrival of Rebekah who is to be his bride, he is meditating at
Be’er Lahai Ro’i. He is cognizant of his older brother’s departure and feels
connected with the place that marks it. When Abraham comes to the end of his
days on earth, his sons Isaac and Ishmael come together to bury him. In the
later narratives of the Bible, from the Joseph narrative onward, the
Ishmaelites are the nomads of the desert—in trading caravans, or living off the
scrubby land, or engaging in raids on other peoples in order to eke out a
living.
* * * * * * * *
If I ask you, which of these three
(Abimelech, Amalek, or Ishmael) are family to Israel, it is a trick question.
Ishmael is obviously family—he is Abraham’s son, Isaac’s older brother.
Abimelech is identified as the “king of the Philistines.” But this is an
anachronistic designation. The Philistines did not come to the land until the
period of the Judges, after Moses. The name Abimelech is a Hebrew or Canaanite
name. So we really know nothing about him except that he was a king of some
people that lived in the south, near Beersheba.
But Amalek? Could Amalek possibly
be family? According to the genealogies of the Torah, he is; he is the bastard
grandson of Esau, or more precisely the son of Esau’s son Eliphaz by the
concubine Timna. (Gen. 36:12) If there is a symbolic truth of this (and I think
there is), it is that the most vicious enemies of the Jewish people have not
come from nations that have no connection with Judaism—such as India or China.
Rather, they come from those religious communities that have descended from
Judaism. In the medieval typology, Ishmael was considered symbolically to
represent Islam, and Esau was considered symbolically to represent
Christianity. The bitterest, most lethal hatred comes from sibling rivalry.
But the contemporary moral I will
attempt to draw from this is that Ishmael is always the one in the middle. In
today’s political constellation, both Abimelech and Amalek are components of
Ishmael. The historical legacy of the Quran and of Islam includes both tolerant
universalism and militant exclusivism. Given this diverse legacy, Islam is struggling
to define its identity between these polar opposites. In fact, the most lethal
battles of the past several years have been between Muslims and Muslims—between
Shi’ites and Sunnis, between Islamic reactionaries and moderates, between the
Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian army, and between Allawites, the Free
Syrian Army, Kurds and ISIS.
* * * * * * * *
All of this greatly complicates the
question, what policy Israel should take toward the resident aliens and close
neighbors among whom they live. I suggest it is incumbent on us neither to ignore
the threats that the militant exclusivists and rejectionists pose to us, nor to
pass up the opportunity to forge a constructive relationship with those who are
willing to shoulder the burdens of peaceful coexistence.
The Amalekites in today’s world are
many and easy to identify. They include Al Quaida, ISIS, and the hardliners in
Iran, as well as their smaller clients, among whom can be numbered Hamas and
Hezbollah. Their will to attack Israel if given the chance must not be
underestimated. If not for Israel’s war against Gaza this past summer, the news
this Rosh Hashana might have been of Hamas emerging from the tunnels and
attacking the settlements of Israel adjacent to Gaza.
The Abimelechs are few and far
between, and number far more wielders of the pen than of the sword; a few that
come to mind are Sari Nusseibeh, Salman Rushdie, Mohammed El-Baradei, Kanan
Makiya, and my favorite Canadian Muslim lesbian writer Irshad Manji. I would
hesitate right now to put any actual holders of power in Arab countries in this
category. Still, we must give them a chance. No one expected Sadat to come out
for peace as forthrightly as he did. Maybe we will be pleasantly surprised
again if we hold open the possibility. On the other hand, we must not let down
our defense until this possibility becomes an actuality. If you think this is a
contradiction, then maybe you are beginning to understand the difficult
situation Israel finds itself in.
* * * * * * * *
Who, then, is Ishmael in today’s
world? I would suggest that we include in Ishmael anyone in the Muslim world
who has not proved himself to be either Abimelech or Amalek. Ishmael includes
first and foremost the ordinary Palestinian Arabs, who since the first years of
the Zionist Yishuv shared their coffee, hummus and falafel, fruits and
vegetables with the pioneers who built the Jewish State; who worked as
construction workers to build the urban developments of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv,
Haifa, and other Israeli cities; whose music was one of the factors influencing
the growth of the characteristic Israeli musical idiom; whose counterparts
within the Green Line are still a dominant demographic element especially in
the Galilee and have elected members to the Israeli Knesset. They sold their
crafts to Israeli and foreign tourists in the market of Jerusalem’s Old City
after 1967.
Not everything they did was
positive. In the early years, they raided the new settlements for chickens and
produce, necessitating the formation of Hashomer, the first Zionist
self-defense organization. Some of them were responsive to Husseini’s
propaganda and joined in the anti-Jewish riots of 1929 and subsequently. More
recently, they launched the intifadas when their hopes of being accorded
national autonomy were disappointed. As the biblical Ishmael was expelled from
Abraham’s household when he treated Isaac abusively, so members of the modern
Ishmael suffered expulsion in the 1948 war when it became essential for the new
Israel state to establish areas of absolute security, free of infiltration from
the Amalekites who then posed a deadlier threat than they do today. Some of the
descendants of the expelled bear the grudge and cast their lot with Amalek;
others are ready to try to put it behind them if offered the opportunity for a
constructive existence and autonomy in their present places of residence.
* * * * * * * *
The story is unfinished. The ending
depends on what all the actors in the drama do from this point on. It would be
a mistake to take all the responsibility for the outcome on ourselves. It would
equally, I think, be a mistake to shrug off all responsibility and say it is
beyond our capacity to work constructively toward a solution.
In the Talmud, Tractate Shabbat
(31a), Rava tells us that when we are brought for judgment in the next world,
we are asked several questions: “Were you honest in business? Did you set aside
time for study? Did you engage in procreation?”
One of the questions applies to our
situation: “Did you hope for salvation?” It is a mitzvah not to give in to
despair, but to maintain hope and keep working for the positive outcome.
Ishmael is a difficult brother, but we are still family. We need to continue to work it out.
Dear Rabbi Leonard,