Ishmael, Abimelech, Amalek: Three Types of the “Other”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.