Message From The Rabbi

Rabbi Spike Anderson

I’m going to point something out to you that you will never unsee again. 

On every flight I’ve ever taken to Israel, everyone applauds when the plane lands in Tel Aviv.  Not a polite clap, but one that seems to resemble something fierce.  I find this curious, and compelling because clearly there is something unspoken going on here that is deeply important.

Think about it.  When you fly from Atlanta to Boston, or New York to Rome, nobody claps when you land.  Never.  With one exception:  bad/dangerous weather.  Only then, when there is a safe landing after a really turbulent flight might there be spontaneous applause from the passengers. 

We can understand this.  “Thank God, we’ve landed.  That was really scary.”

I think that this type of applause is something akin to prayer.  It is a collective response to a dangerous time with safe emergence on the other side of that danger.  We give thanks to the pilot, and God, to have escaped a scary situation.  It’s a primal expression of gratitude that our life did not end abruptly.  We get to live. 

This type of clapping is especially impactful because it echoes off other people’s claps, and in doing so, for a brief moment, seems to harmonize into a singular collective.

This explains an airplane full of people applauding a safe landing after bad weather, and it also gives us insight into why we clap when we land in Israel.

The Jewish people have been through so much ‘bad weather’ (if you will) throughout our long history.  In the two thousand years (or so) that we were living in exile (now diaspora), there was not a sovereign Jewish state for us to return to.

Yet for dozens of generations, we prayed three times a day… our prayer was that one day, once again,  there would be an Israel to return to and that we (or at least our children’s children) would be able to go there.  At Passover, we declared that “if we ever forget Jerusalem, let our hand whither.” Our rituals and liturgy were (and still are) ripe with reminders that, despite our distance and social-historical situation, our orientation and faith could one day change our reality.

I’ve always loved this.  And I know that I romanticize it.  Especially because I could intellectually understand this type of nostalgia for ‘the old country’ for a generation or two after we were forced to leave (70 C.E), but after ten or twenty generations… at some point, this would seem nothing short of delusional.  As if to say, “Hey!  It’s been 1000 years… enough already”.   But we kept doing it anyway. 

We know the history.  Like raindrops into a stream and the streams into a mighty river, our collective daily prayers and rituals (along with desperation from the violence against us) led to the aliyot movements of the last century, until Israel was re-established in 1948. 

But we also know that this was not the end of the story.  And at this moment, as I write this message to you before Shabbat, Israel is flying through a really dangerous storm.  By the time you are reading this on Monday, I truly do not know what will have happened over the weekend.  I pray nothing.

In the past few days, Israel has assassinated the Hamas architects of the October 7^th pogrom, and the Hezbollah commander who ordered the missile strike which killed 12 Israeli Druze children while they played soccer in their village square. 

As I write these words, Israel’s enemies are mobilizing their weapons for retaliation, and saber-rattling about an imminent strike.  

The IDF is on high alert. Israel’s allies are circling the wagons.  And Israeli children and grandparents, mothers and fathers, are going to sleep tonight wearing their clothes and shoes so that they can more quickly get to their bomb shelters.

When Marita asked her 88-year-old grandmother, who we call ‘Sunshine’, if she was afraid, grandma replied that she was not… in fact, she told us that she was more “afraid of ghosts.”  She is, I know, a rare exception.  Most Israelis are afraid.  And how could they not be?  Yet they continue to light their Shabbat candles, like their mothers and grandmothers before them.  They continue to kiss their kids goodnight.  And they continue to exhibit resilience of a biblical proportion. 

We clap when we land in Israel because we know that our people have experienced “rough weather in the extreme” to get where we are, and by landing safely in Tel Aviv, we are acknowledging this truth as a collective.  We know in our kishkas that walking through Ben Gurion airport is an expression of both gratitude and of miracle.   

One of the prayers that we pray on Friday nights at Shabbat services is the Haskeivenu.  This prayer acknowledges that there are dangers in this world to life.  Our lives.  Sometimes these dangers are personal, like sickness.  Other times these dangers are communal, like famine and war.  With the words of Haskeivenu, we ask God to protect us, and all the residents of Israel, with God’s “sukhat shalom/canopy of peace.”   The imagery is of God placing something above Israel, like the Iron Dome, to shield its people from danger from beyond.   Most of the time, I pray these words as metaphors.   I allow my doubts (does God really work this way?) to flavor my approach.  My metaphoric prayer is still authentic, but it is somewhat…removed.   Right now I’m praying these words differently.   I can’t help it.  I am scared for what might come and vulnerable in this realization. 

I pray that diplomacy might temper the violent escalation. 

I pray that the innocents in Israel, and Lebanon, and Syria, and Iran, and anywhere else vulnerable be protected… that they be spared. 

I pray for the Israelis who are sleeping with their shoes on, and the Arab villagers who are desperately fleeing their homes to get out of harm’s way.

I pray for the IDF.

I am so very desperate to be able to clap my proverbial hands, with you, and with good people everywhere as a way of expressing thanks for landing safely through this crisis.  To be on the other side of danger.

I pray that this Shabbat, and the many Shabbats to come, are ones with only peace.