1.
Comfort, o comfort My people. We have shared a common fate throughout our long history as a nation; we shared this fate together in the face of the great waves that threatened to drown us – and we overcame them. Our destiny has been subject to debate, especially in recent generations when we returned to history and established a political framework to live in together. Our past has both national successes and failures; their interpretation can, of course, be debated. The fact is though that in our history we survived the Valley of the Shadow of Death of peoples and nations, destruction and rebirth, exile and redemption. Beating within us was a constant desire to live, not to commit national suicide, to remain together as a people, despite the dispersion, despite disputes and the fact that we had no national home.
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After the destruction of our land in the first century, the national body began to disintegrate. Century after century, we moved away from political life and focused on the world of Halachah (Jewish law). The national core remained dormant within the religious envelope that kept it together as an idea that would one day return to our life.
2.
When our national consciousness began to awaken, a process emerged from a great storm of debate about our identity and purpose. Religious life was no longer the root of our common identity, certainly not in the way it had been preserved until that point. Those who left religious tradition and were opposed also to our national revival were mostly assimilated among the nations under whose shadow they hoped to find rest and to disappear amid the consuming current of time. Only those who grasped on to at least one of the ancient components of identity – faith and nationalism – remained. We have never stopped arguing about these two elements. The perennial question that has accompanied us from the dawn of our existence has been, "Who are we?" – what identity do we want for ourselves as a nation? This is the question that is at the core of the dispute between us today.
There is no need to fear controversy, even if it is fierce. It is through disagreement that we build ourselves and clarify our life's truths. Our ancient legal codex, the Mishnah, defiantly contains the opinions of the dissenters, not just those on whose rulings the law was decided. Our sages taught us that just as "a knife is sharpened only at the side of another," so too "a Torah scholar is sharpened only by his fellow." This is our democratic tradition. Not only do we fight for the right of others to express their opinion (God forbid that we should silence voices!), but in fact, we need the other's opinion to understand our own, to sharpen it, and sometimes even to correct it."
3.
This constant process of debate is the secret to our existence. It has given us a unique ability to adapt our identity to changing historical circumstances. While the deep nucleus remains stable, the envelope takes on different forms to cope with the challenges of different eras. Often, we bled as we argued vehemently, slinging insults at each other to the point where we thought to separate, "To your tents, O Israel" (1 Kings 12:16). Historical perspective has taught us that these bloody storms were birth pains. If we desire life, the debate over our purpose must not undermine our common fate. Anyone who thinks they can manage alone without the various components and currents of our nation should learn from history. We are a people of long processes, and any attempt to expedite these processes and bring them to an early end, will lead to resistance and confrontation.
4.
Over the past few months, we have been dealt a lesson after pushing a large and important part of the Israeli public into a corner. In our naivete and our desire to rectify what we see as an ongoing injustice in the legal system (I will make no attempt to embellish the situation. I think the present situation is an injustice whereby the balance of power between the branches is skewed in favor of the judicial branch), we tried to force the other side's hand. We did not assume that this was an existential matter for them as the way they perceived it, (certainly not how I perceived it!); the Supreme Court and not the legislature is the body that guarantees their ability to live without religious coercion or coercion of any nature, in a society in which they have become destined to be the minority. As I have already written in the past, you cannot argue with fear, especially when we added to the necessary judicial reform, clauses that substantiated their fears. Irresponsible leaders in their camp added fuel to the fire by going overboard in their statements. As a result, we must now suspend the reform and rethink our path. Patience.
It is important that opponents of the reform know that they cannot stop historical processes and they cannot delude themselves that they can get along alone in the "State of Tel Aviv." Not "Peace Now" and not "Enlistment Now." Haredi society is undergoing deep processes of change and involvement in Israeli society. Look around and see how many Haredi personalities appear on screen and on social networks; look at the aid organizations helping the general public; at the increasing numbers of Haredim going out to work and enrolling in academic studies, and look at the slow but steady rise in enlistment. Patience.
5.
Behind the Great Synagogue of Rome lies the 16 October 1943 Square. It was on this date that the Nazis gathered the Jews of Rome in the square and sent them by train to Auschwitz. Thus began the great deportation of the Jews of Italy. At the edge of the square is the Marcello Theater, a Roman theater from the first century CE. When I arrived in Rome as ambassador, I heard that the area is called "Portico di Ottavia." It is a colonnaded portico that Emperor Augustus built in honor of his sister Octavia in 27 BCE. The name was familiar to me from Josephus Flavius' book "The Jewish Wars" and the more I thought about it, the more I trembled.
The Roman-Jewish historian recounted what his eyes saw in the Portico one bright morning. Shortly after the great destruction of Jerusalem and Judea, a stage was erected there on which the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus sat, preparing for the triumphal procession. Captives from Judea and Jerusalem were brought there, along with the temple vessels, symbols of our lost independence, among them the golden menorah, the table of the showbread, and an ancient Torah scroll from the Temple library. It was a kind of national funeral for the Jewish people. The future seemed to belong to Rome.
From the Roman theater, I walked 19 steps and 19 centuries to the center of the square. I started with the prisoners of Judea and our Temple vessels in the first century and progressed through time to the middle of the twentieth century, to the Jews of Rome who were left to their fate at the hand of the Nazis. Here, in a small Roman square, we can see in a chilling illustration of cause and effect. Why did the deportation happen? I have been asked many times, why did the Holocaust happen? If all the heavens were parchments, and all the trees quills, and all the seas were ink, it would still be impossible to write down all the answers. Still, there is a simple answer that precedes them all. The deportation was enabled because they could do it to us, because we lacked a national home. The Holocaust did not descend on us from nowhere; it was the climax of 19 centuries of persecution that began symbolically with the triumphal procession celebrating our destruction in that same square where the Jews of Rome were sent to Auschwitz in 1943.
From this perspective, the Holocaust did not end in 1945. It had a corrective epilogue: the establishment of the State of Israel. Not a correction of the evil but of the conditions that made it possible. Last Tisha B'Av, I stood in the square and thought about the two events 19 centuries apart. My imagination went into overdrive, and I was overwhelmed by emotions. I was not there as a private person, but as the official representative of the political entity that we did not have in these two decisive events. We all share one fate. We should remember that. Am Yisrael Chai! The People of Israel live!
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