I remember walking into my childhood house on a Saturday afternoon. I’d been playing hockey with some friends and I was looking forward to some rest. Instead, when I walked in, my dad was watching breaking news so I sat down next to him. The Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, had been shot after leaving a peace rally. We were numb and we were hurt. Within minutes, it was announced that he had succumbed to his injuries. The Prime Minister of Israel was dead. In the minutes and hours that followed, we all assumed he’d been killed by an external enemy. We all assumed this would trigger a giant war. Then we learned the even worse and more devastating news. It wasn’t an external foe but a terrorist from within. Rabin had been murdered in cold blood by a Jew. He had been murdered by a person who professed to be a religious and observant Jew. He had been murdered because of the difficult and necessary decisions he and his government had been making.
Those days are etched into my memory. President Clinton’s famous words: שלום חבר/Shalom Chaver/Goodbye my friend. The hastily convened funeral at Mt Herzl featuring leaders from around the world. The immensely tearful eulogy Rabin’s granddaughter delivered, discussing not his leadership or military accomplishments, but his core and soul and who he was as a person and her grandfather. Watching people hold up his widow, Leah. Seeing Shimon Peres suddenly assume the role of leader.
Zionism already was a core part of my identity. I was already deeply committed to, and involved with, our people and our religion. The tragedy could not be lost on us that this was not some foreign action or the act of an enemy we were battling. This was Jew vs. Jew, and one of the greatest leaders of the young state paid with his life. It just so happened I made my first trip to Israel less than a year later. I was on the 1996 March of the Living. On that trip, we would go to Mt Herzl and see the new grave of Prime Minister Rabin and we were taken to Rabin Square in Tel-Aviv. There was no way to look past the enormous mark his life and his murder left on Israel and the Jewish People.
This week, we read the powerful and troubling words of the עקידת יצחק/Akeidat Yitzhak/The Binding of Isaac. There’s a midrash I believe could be instructive to us about this: “ ’As אברהם/Avraham raised his arm’, and the knife, how was this? It teaches that three tears fell from the ministering angels (Heaven) and broke the knife.” This midrash evokes the tears of heaven over this action, and it evokes the breaking of the instrument that had been intended to kill. There can be no comparison made between the act of a terrorist and the act of our righteous ancestor, אברהם, but there can be some connection in the way we understand the world.
Rabin’s murderer saw himself as fighting to defend the Jews and the Land of Israel. He was wrong and anyone who sees him as an inspiration is wrong. אברהם was seeking to fulfill a command from God and thankfully that was negated by God telling him to stop. In the case of Rabin’s murderer, he was unable to hear the Divine voice stopping him because of his hatred and his inability to recognize he was wrong. If Heaven was brought to tears by the potential death at the command of God, how much more must Heaven cry when the deaths are not commanded by God but by the command of misguided hatred? The tears shed by Heaven must break these weapons and these inclinations. The tears of Heaven must break the divisions we Jews are experiencing. The tears of Heaven must remind us that we’re never alone and that God is with us in all of our struggles.
Today we continue to be a people divided. We must look back at our history and recognize our divisions will not strengthen us but weaken us. We need to see that to live together, we need to put our weapons away and open ourselves to being unified, even with people we sometimes disagree with. Our tears can unite us, and in that unity, we can build a better Jewish world.
