Who was on those boats in the Mediterranean Sea?

This campaign against the blockade will continue until the blockade has ended. There’s plenty of room for more passengers. Might they include you?

You won’t qualify for a particular group of ships now preparing a journey to Gaza, unless you’re Jewish. European Jews for a Just Peace (EJJP) did not intend to exclude non-Jewish passengers until so many Jews applied they had to add a second boat and are already contemplating a third.

EJJP is a coalition of Jewish groups from 10 European countries opposed to Israel’s occupation of Palestine who see the Gaza blockade as “immoral” and who “believe there should be a just peace for the Palestinians.” Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-hall/european-jewish-group-to_b_605987.html.

A drash (teaching) offered by Reb Irwin Keller to the Ner Shalom community in Cotati last Shabat (Sabbath) moved me deeply and, with permission, I’ll share some of his words with you. Keller tells me Congregation Ner Shalom “represents a spirited and diverse community of people who explore Jewish-centered paths of ritual, learning, song, community-building and mindfulness.”
When flotilla ships were recently boarded by Israeli soldiers, Reb Irwin was in Boston, an honored guest invited to participate in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony for a special young man. In Irwin’s drash, which you may read in full at his blog: http://itzikswell.blogspot.com, Keller discusses his difficulty with the assignment to read “A Prayer for the State of Israel.”

“Now if I were being asked to create a prayer for the State of Israel,” he told his community, “this would have been an easy request. Israel is always in my prayers. But I was being asked to read the words in the Conservative siddur, which step slightly beyond a plea for safety, survival and peace.” Out of integrity, he took on the challenge.

When Reb Irwin heard of the flotilla incident, he was “filled with sadness and anger and a feeling of betrayal. How can the Israel that I love – and I do love it even when I am outraged by its actions – let this happen?”

At the Bar Mitzvah, listening to his friend’s son chanting a Biblical story about planning for military conquest, Irwin heard characters protesting, “We cannot attack, for the people are stronger than we. The country devours its settlers. The people are giants – and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so must we have looked to them.

“I sat and listened to the parashah, thinking how we, all these years later, have possession of that very same real estate. So which are we now, I wondered, grasshoppers or giants?

“It seemed to me that as possessors and not the dispossessed, it would be easy to cast us in the role of giants. Certainly much of the world paints Israel that way. But I’m beginning to think that after two thousand years of relentless conditioning, however we might be perceived by others, we still don’t know how not to be grasshoppers.

“To a grasshopper, every encounter with the greater world involves the risk of being crushed underfoot. And hasn’t this been the Jewish experience over the last two and a half millennia? The risk of annihilation at every turn? We tell our tales of exile and pogroms and close escapes and failed escapes. We pray for peace; we pray to God to confound the counsels of those who would do us harm.
“But nothing in our tradition has taught us how to hold power. How to be giants. Instead, we’re left to be giants who think like grasshoppers, or grasshoppers who have grown to gigantic proportions. And it is that constant, deep fear of being crushed underfoot that has informed and, arguably, poisoned so much of our policy in Israel…

“The flotilla was at least as much or more a public relations mission as it was an aid mission, as some people hasten to point out. But so what? Sit-ins at lunch counters in the 1960s south were public relations stunts also. That is how public opinion is swayed, it is how one appeals to the hearts and consciences of the world.

“Using deadly force against a public relations mission is the sign, to me, of government by grasshopper. To Israel this flotilla looked like another shoe about to crush us. Everything looks like a shoe about to crush us. Give a grasshopper a gun, and what will it do? It will shoot. If not today, then tomorrow.

A giant, on the other hand, well, giants are perhaps underestimated. A giant who understands and trusts its own power can afford a far greater range of responses to seeming threats. The use of force would only be one possible response among many…

And so, young grasshoppers, courage is required. Not the courage to use force. But the courage not to. The courage to dream up other paths and to actually risk taking them. The courage to engage in peacemaking – real, non-grudging peacemaking – and earn back the world’s trust. The courage to help our neighbors and former enemies prosper. Maybe we can’t put down the guns entirely at this moment. But surely we can move our fingers off the triggers, even if just a little.

It will take more courage not to use force than it does to use it. It will take greatness. And I still believe we are capable of greatness; of the greatness of giants. We are already giants in military might. Let us soon be giants in wisdom and compassion and vision and patience.

I hope these excerpts will prompt you to read in its entirety: On Grasshoppers, Giants and Flotillas at http://itzikswell.blogspot.com/.