Remembering Rabin

Thomas A. Boogaart

Since I have returned from a sabbatical year in Israel, many friends have asked me whether I had a "good experience." I do not know how to answer them. It is hard to find adjectives to describe my year. I usually respond by replacing "good" with "full," or "intense," or "tumultuous." This fall on the eve of the Jewish new year (rash hashana), commentators in Israel itself were hard pressed to interpret the past year and to find the right adjectives. Early in my stay Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and later the war in Lebanon flared up. I and my family were living on the Christian moshav, Nes Ammim, in Western Galilee about fifteen kilometers from the Lebanese border between Akko and Nahariya. My Son now knows what a Cobra attack helicopter looks like and that an F-16 fighter-jet can outmaneuver anything in the sky. He has seen them perform overhead on their retaliatory raids in Lebanon.

Sojourner Our experience of Israel? So much blood, so much history, so much energy, so much hope, so much hatred. Israel is a welter of longing and passion. Conversations in the shuk (bazaar) erupt and spill over the passersby; the Arab woman harvesting herbs along the road leading to Nes Ammin raises her head as I walk by, and her obsidian eyes are so brilliant and intense that I avert my own; the butcher in the grocery store in Nahariya with numbers tattooed on his arm moves sleepily from customer to customer, his body in this world but his soul clearly in another; an Arab friend sinks into depression when we visit a zoo of desert animals in the Negev because he sees in their lethargic captivity a symbol of his own. Living, working, and playing in Israel, I could not help but absorb what was happening all around me . The insistent and labyrinthine relationships put my soul into a state of suspension. I found myself someplace between America and Israel, someplace between Christianity and Judaism. Both my naivete and my wisdom evaporated in the extreme heat. I offered my opinions; I embarrassed myself; I had flashes of insight; I felt my ignorance. My Christian beliefs did not settle easily in this passionate and divided land. My theology and I were sojourners. The conviction that light is more powerful than darkness, that good triumphs in the end, that love is more powerful than hate was especially difficult to maintain here.

85 I had come to Israel with some vague notion that the land of Jesus would somehow enhance the experience of Jesus. I had come as a pilgrim not a tourist, or so I convinced myself. I was not just another middle-class American from West Michigan, looking for a spiritual rush by combining exotic travel and religion. I did not join a gaggle of tourists, donning funny hats, and following an umbrella held high in the hand of a disheveled guide ambling through the streets of Jerusalem. I was looking for the afterglow of glory, the embers of holiness. I was hoping that proximity would have the same effect on me that it had had on Isaiah when he approached the temple. I wanted to see the seraphs and to hear another round of "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3). And if the coals on the altar were no longer hot enough to burn my lips, I at least wanted them to warm my hands. Almost without thinking, we call Israel the Holy Land. Yet it is hard to sustain any understanding of the holy in the undifferentiated modern world of here and now and this and that. For too many of us in the late twentieth century, nothing is related to anything else, and therefore everything is amenable to manufacturing and marketing. There are no boundaries in our world and therefore ultimately there is no trespassing. We do not violate any spirits when we cut through a forest, dam a river, tear open the land, or demean a person. The holy presupposes a world of relationships, an intimate world; God is the creator and connected to all that exists. God's Spirit holds everything together and life-giving power is potentially made available to us in such ordinary things as land. If the land of Israel is holy, it is holy in ways I was not prepared to see. I have walked the streets of the city of David, climbed the mountain of Deborah and Barak, seen the sources of the Jordan bursting from the rock, dipped my hand in the sea which Jesus quieted, sat on the hillside where he multiplied the bread and fish, knelt where he hung on the cross, and entered the empty tomb. Yet, I did not experience the holy in any of this. I was more tourist than I now care to admit. I, like so many today who travel to the Holy Land, was impulse buying in a shop of religious curiosities. Not having carefully examined what I needed spiritually, much less what the community I served needed, I bought what I merely wanted. Impulse buying can be a dangerous thing in the Holy Land. As a rabbi lecturing at Nes Ammim warned us, Christians can lose their faith visiting the holy sites, if they do not know what they are looking for. What kind of spiritual experience are you likely to have in the empty tomb of Jesus when you have been fighting to hold your place in line for half an hour and a brown-robed priest allows some dignitary to cut in ahead of you? What kind of spiritual experience are you likely to have beneath the cross of Jesus when a man smirks for the camera with his hand reaching for the black hole in which Jesus' cross was placed? Calvary reduced to a Kodak moment. The black box, which some refer to as a camera, is voracious enough to swallow

86 everything holy in the land. Exploiting these holy sites and fighting to control them have demonstrated the worst side of Christianity since before the Crusades. If the land is holy, it will only yield its particular glory after much digging and careful sifting. In this article, I have reluctantly begun the process of sifting my Israel experiences. I say "reluctantly" because to remember is to resurrect. To remember is to feel again the ambiguity of belonging and not belonging, loving and leaving. I leave it to the reader to assess my opinions, my embarrassments, my insights, and my ignorance. In this article I shall focus on the assassination of Rabin, for his blood overcame my year and more than anything else defined it. The sources for these reflections are news clippings from the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Report, conversations with friends in Israel, and documents made available at Nes Ammim.

The Blood-soaked Song of Peace The months leading up to the November 4 peace rally at Kirkar Malkhei Israel (Square of Israel's Kings) in Tel Aviv were difficult ones for Yitzhak Rabin. He had led the Labor party to victory in the June, 1992, elections and the nation toward phased negotiations with the Palestinians. The centerpiece of these negotiations was the principle, "land for peace." In exchange for a Palestinian rejection of violence as a means of diplomacy and recognition of the State of Israel, the government of Rabin agreed to the creation of the "Palestinian Authority," that is, limittd sovereignty in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The resistance to negotiations was intense. Some Israelis distrusted the Palestinians. Their fears were forcefully expressed by General Rafael Eytan, "The mentality of those who call themselves Arabs is based on the Koran . . . . The Koran preaches the law of the sword. Infidels have the choice between conversion and death. This is the Koran's definition of peace. Thus, according to the Koran, there can only be peace with a non-Muslim if he becomes a Muslim or if he dies." David Wilder, a community spokesman for the Jewish enclave in Hebron, drew the inevitable conclusion from this understanding of the so-called Arab mentality: "Israel has to make sure it is in as strong a position as possible. The Arab mentality understands strength and takes advantage of weakness." Other Israelis believed the land itself was a non-negotiable gift of God, first promised to Abraham and miraculously restored in the 1967 war. Their feelings were summarized in the words of Rabbi Haim Druckman: "Just as it is forbidden to give up one letter from the Torah, it is forbidden to make concessions on the Land of Israel." In the hearts of many Israelis, fear of the Arab and anxiety over the land hardened into hatred for Rabin. Aharon Domb, spokesman for the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District, warned Rabin in a letter written on May 13, 1994, that people were despairing of his policies and

87 plotting violence, "To my sorrow, I have been hearing recently that the one solution ... is assassination . ... We must do all we can to prevent this. We for our part, are doing all we can, but I see it as proper to warn you, and to say that if you continue with your sharp statements you will bear 'indirect responsibility' for such evil action on the part of an individual as an outcome of your policy." On September 13, 1995, Moshe Feiglin, leader of Zo Artzeinu (This is our land) said that his group planned to hold the government responsible "for its crime against security and Judaism." Standing outside Rabin's residence on the eve of Yorn Kippur, a rabbi, whose name was not reported, read out this curse in Aramaic from the practical Kabbalah: "And on him, Yitzhak son of Rosa, known as Rabin we have permission. :. to demand from the angels of destruction that they take a sword to this wicked man ... to kill him ... for handing over the Land of Israel to our enemies, the sons of Ishmael." On October 5, 1995, the present Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Natanyahu, addressed a huge crowd in Jerusalem demonstrating against the Oslo II accord and crying out, "Rabin is a traitor." On October 13, 1995, a man named ltamar Gen-Gvir, member of the outlawed Kach party, vandalized Rabin's Cadillac and when arrested, made this threat against Rabin: "The same way we got to the hood ornament, we can get to him." The months leading up to the peace rally in Tel Aviv were indeed difficult for Rabin. Yet the rally lifted his spirits. He was impressed by the number of people (more than one hundred thousand), touched by their affection, and encouraged that so many were young. Shimon Peres would later sadly muse that the day of the rally had been the happiest of Yitzhak Rabin's life. Rabin addressed the gathered congregation with words that within a few short hours would be recalled with pain and bitter irony: I have always believed most of the nation wants peace and is prepared to take risks for peace. And you here, who have come to take a stand for peace, as well as many others who are not here, are proof that the nation truly wants peace and rejects violence. Violence is undermining the foundations of Israeli democracy. It must be contained. It is not the way of the State of Israel . Democracy is our way . . . . This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jews of the world, to the multitudes in the Arab lands, and in the world at large, that the nation of Israel wants peace, supports peace-and for this, I thank you. Miri Aloni, a popular Israeli singer, brought the evening to a close by leading the assembled throng in Shir L 'Shalom (Song of Peace). This song with

88 its confident beat and optimistic lyrics had become the anthem of the peace movement: Let the sun rise, the morning light. The purity of prayer will not bring back, One whose candle has been extinguished, who has been buried in the dust. Bitter crying will not awaken him or bring him back. No man will be returned to us from the dark pit. Rejoicing in victory and songs of praise will not help. So sing only a song to peace. Don't whisper a prayer! Sing only a song to peace In a great shout. Let the sun shine through the flowers. Don't look back, let the fallen rest. Put your eyes to hope and not to the gunsights. Sing a song to love and not to war. Don't say a day will come-bring the day! And in all the city squares, shout only for peace. So sing only a song to peace. . .. One hundred thousand voices united in the words of this song achieved a measure of peace and harmony- at least for a moment. Rabin folded the lyric sheet, put it in his jacket pocket, and sang quietly from memory. Aloni was even able to coax a relaxed Rabin to sing into the microphone, an unusual display of vulnerability for this shy man who was self-consciousness about his voice. After the singing was over, first Peres, and then Rabin made their way' to waiting limousines. Lurking in the parking lot was someone not caught up in the words of Shir L 'Shalom but in other words, words like din moser and din rodef. A din is a legal judgment based on the halacha. An unnamed rabbi had judged Rabin a moser, that is, someone turning over a Jew to a hostile non-Jewish authority. Another rabbi had judged him a rode/, that is, someone pursuing a person with the intention of killing him or her. The latter is a very serious judgment for it sanctions violence against the rodef. A third party can kill a would-be murderer with impunity. The din rode/ was extended to Rabin because in giving over territories to the Palestinians without proper security, he was ensuring that Jews would be murdered by terrorists. Yigal Amir was a twenty-seven-year-old law student at Bar-Ilan University and former soldier in the Golani, a brigade defending the Golan Heights. He was .connected to a small, virulently anti-Arab group called, Eyal, and had tried

89 twice before to get close enough to Rabin to murder him. In part encouraged by the words of his rabbis, he had come to Tel Aviv this night with a kippah (yarmulka) on his head and a 9-mm Baretta beneath his coat. He chatted easily with the security guards who assumed that any threat to Rabin would come from an Arab and not a Jew. Amir melted into the crowd and waited for the rally to end . He let Shimon Peres pass, calculating that Rabin would be equally vulnerable. With his wife, Leah, by his side, Rabin made his way past Amir and toward the waiting limousine. Unchallenged, Amir approached and fired at point-blank range. Two bullets stiuck Rabin in the back, and he slumped to the pavement. His bodyguards covered him, lifted him into the automobile, and rushed him to the nearby Ichilov Hospital. Rabin mumbled to his driver, "It hurts, but don't worry." These were to be his last words, and they ironically offered a summary of his life. He had felt the hurt of war and the hurt of political life. Yet he had always tried to calm his soldiers and citizens with an abiding hope in peace. Suffering was not in vain. "It hurts, but don' t worry." Although Rabin's automobile reached the hospital in minutes, the doctors could not revive him. In stripping off his clothes, they discovered the copy of Shir L 'Shalom folded in his jacket pocket, now bullet-pierced and blood-soaked. They handed it to Eitan Haber, Rabin's close aid and speech writer, on whom the responsibility fell to announce Rabin's death to the world. He quieted the unruly throng that had assembled at the entrance of the hospital and at 11: 14 p.m. made this statement: "With horror, grave sorrow, and deep grief the government of Israel announces the death of Prime Minister and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin murdered by an assassin." Most people gasped and wailed at the announcement, but the few present from the radical Kahane group took satisfaction in Rabin's death. Spontaneously people began to gather, at the hospital, at Kikar Malkhei Israel, at the Rabin home in Ramat Aviv, and at the official residence in Jerusalem. They lit memorial candles and fitfully sang Shir L 'Shalom. The next day, Sunday, Rabin's body was brought to the Kenesset and people from throughout Israel began to go up to Jerusalem. The Egged bus line offered free passage to anyone who wanted to pay their last respects to Rabin. By Sunday evening, more than a million people surrounded the Kenesset. The press of the crowd was so great that it threatened to crush those pinned against the fence . Helicopters hovered overhead and barked out orders to disperse. The Kenesset was closed for a time and many people never got to file past Rabin's body. Rabin's funeral was held the next day on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. The whole world attended. The hope of peace for the Middle East is intimately connected to the hope of peace for the world. All these hopes had been embodied in this courageous man, and now, quite possibly, they had died with him. The nations seemed less secure without him, and they mourned his passing. Rabin achieved briefly in death what he was not able to achieve in life:

90 Arab and Jew united in grief over the senseless shedding of blood- although Yasser Arafat paid his respects to Leah Rabin and the family privately, realizing that his attendance at the funeral in Jerusalem would have been too volatile. One after another, world leaders paid their last respects along with friends and family. Some eulogies were perfunctory, some heartfelt. Jordan's King Hussein spoke with deep feeling and his words confounded the all-too-typical depiction of the so-called Arab mentality, You lived as a soldier. You died as a soldier for peace, and I believe it is time for all of us to come out openly and to speak of peace. Not here today, but for all the times to come. We belong to the camp of peace. We believe in peace. We believe that our one God wishes us to live in peace and wishes peace upon us. Eitan Haber produced the blood-soaked text of Shir L 'Shalom, now carefully unfolded and sealed in plastic, and waved it in front of the mourners. He said dramatically, Your blood, your blood Yitzhak, covers the printed words . . . This is the blood which ran out of your body in the final moment of your life and onto the paper between the lines and the words. From this red page, from the blood which screams out to you, I would now like to read these words ... after you sang there, after you and peace were shot. After the funeral, Rabin's copy of Shir L 'Shalom became an object of reverence and was displayed on Mount Herzl until the family requested its removal.

The Blood Screams Out I was living in Nes Ammim when Rabin was assassinated. At about six o'clock Sunday morning, I was cutting roses in greenhouse E along with the rest of the crew-a Frenchman, three German women, an Ethiopian, and a Russian. The only language our international contingent shared was modern Hebrew, and none of us spoke it well . Having gone to bed early and risen early, we were not aware of the assassination. Walking up and down the well-worn paths between the roses while listening to the radio, we suddenly stopped . We heard the words of the special news bulletin, but did not trust our understanding. Surely we had it wrong. But the news spread quickly throughout the moshav. By breakfast we had most of the details, and by dinner we were on a bus going up to Jerusalem and to the Kenesset where Rabin lay in state. The next day we watched the funeral on television, listening to the commentary as translated by companions more accomplished in Hebrew.

91 I will never forget the image of Eitan Haber waving the text of Shir L 'Shalom in front of the mourners like a message sanctified in blood. My first reaction to his gesture was negative. It was too theatrical and therefore inappropriate for the occasion. But the image kept surfacing in my consciousness, and his words keep repeating themselves, "From this red page, from the blood which screams out to you, I would now like to read these words . . . . " This image of blood was slowly bringing into focus vague feelings and impressions deep inside of me. The blood-soaked song of peace was becoming for me a symbol of Israel itself. The land of Israel is blood-soaked from Gamla in the north to Masada in the south. Israel has known general upon general and battle upon battle: Joshua, David, Tiglath-pileser III, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus Epiphanes, Judas Maccabaeus, Titus, Hadrian, Richard the Lion-Heart, Saladin, Begin, Allon, and Rabin. Cain has killed Abel again and again, and the blood cries out from the ground. As Scripture teaches us: blood is life; life is breath; and breath has a voice. The land of Israel is alive in blood, holy in a way Western pilgrims can hardly fathom. We have eyes, but do not see; we have ears but do not hear (Jer. 5:21). But God hears: "[God] expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!" (Isa. 5:7). The slain live on, and their cries influence the course of events. If you listen carefully, you can hear the blood. Walking to the ruined citadel of Gamla in the Golan Heights, I could hear it. There three Roman legions (sixty thousand men) under the leadership of Titus breached the seemingly impregnable fortress, and the last Jewish defenders and their families leaped to their death into the deep canyon below. Listening to Yusef, a Palestinian Arab from Abu Sinan, tell the tragic story of his uncle's life, I could hear the blood. Forced from his land in the war of 1948, his uncle lost his wife and sons in the crossfire of the Arab/Israeli conflict in Lebanon. Watching a special contingent of Orthodox Jews combing the street and picking up every scrap of human flesh after a bus bombing in Jerusalem, I could hear the blood. Wandering in the quiet of the evening through my little corner of the Zevulon Valley, when the only sound was the twinkling of village lights in the Galilean hills to the east, I could sometimes hear a stirring in the ground, a vibration that produced in my heart the faint strains of a song. History dances to the song of the blood, of that we can be sure. But what song does the blood sing? Some are sure they hear a song of vengeance. They whip themselves into a frenzy, and cry out with the Psalmist, Remember, 0 Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!"

92 0 daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Ps. 137:7-9). Others hear a different song. The blood sings through the Hebrew prophets' strikingly beautiful and moving songs of peace: He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Mic. 4:3). The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fading together, and a little child shall lead them (Isa. 11: 6). Vengeance or peace? For what does the blood cry? The Lord said to Cain, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground!" (Gen. 4: 10) God was gracious to Cain; is this what Abel's blood was calling the Holy One to be? Eitan Haber said to the mourners at Rabin's funeral, "From this red page, from the blood which screams out to you .... " What did he hear the blood screaming? It was not by chance that a sticker was to be found everywhere in Israel after Rabin's funeral with two simple words: Shalom, Haber (peace, dear friend) . They were the simple, yet dramatic, words of his wife Leah. At one and the same time, they said both good-bye to Rabin and affirmed the deepest longing of his life, peace. Was the blood of Yitzhak Rabin not crying out for peace? Vengeance or peace? The breath of God, the breath of God in our blood, what is its true desire, its deepest longing? May it be peace. May it be these words of God: How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, 0 Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim;

93 for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath (Hos. 11: 8-9). May it be these words of Jesus, "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). May it be the song of Salvador Dalcorta from El Paso, Texas, who remembers a friend dying in his arms, Hate entered my mind, my soul, my heart, my being. All I could think about, all I cared about, all I wanted was revenge. Wanting a life for your life, a death for your death. All I wanted was to get to the coward, who had shot you in the back. And in the crazed fantasy of what had to be done, and the rationalizing why, I would see you smile, even though you were no longer there. Your smile kept coming back, and I would hear, Todo esta bien carnal (Everything's alright, brother), todo esta bien" (Everything's alright). And with that I would hear you say, "Go after them, don't think of anything but them. Your only care should be, to get to them. Don't let anyone or anybody stop you, get to them, and then . . . . And then, take them! Hold them, care for them! (abridged)

Secular Zionism The lyric sheet of Shir L 'Shalom kept emerging in the tragedy of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. According to Eitan Haber, its message was sanctified in his blood. Yet I was and remain deeply ambivalent about Eitan Haber's gesture and its meaning. Shir L 'Shalom proclaims with bold lyrics and aggressive beat that death is absolute: one whose candle has been extinguished can not be brought back; no man returns from the dark pit. It admonished people for wasting their time pursuing false hopes in the face of death. Do not bother to

94 pray, the song says, for there is no god who can make anything different. Do not mask your pain and justify death with patriotic songs of victory and praise. Do not transfigure your pain in fighting vengeful wars. It reminds its singers that the natural world testifies to a new day: the sun does rise and even shines through the flowers. Shir L 'Shalom rouses people not to wait for this new day but to make it come. There is life-giving, if not resurrection power, in voices joined together. People shouting mightily, singing to hope, love, and peace can speed the sun and make it come. This is , of course, the creed of secular Zionism and the moshavim and kibbutzim movements it fostered . Camaraderie, work, sacrifice, stoicism, and determination will make the day come and will remake the land of Israel. In the entry of the hader 'ochel (dining room) of our moshav was a huge mosaic. One picture shows a boy squatting and planting a pine sapling; another shows three teenagers trailing behind a plow with the sun setting in the background; still another a path winding through a dense forest. The caption of the mosaic was Ezekiel 36:35: "This land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined towns are now inhabited and fortified." The greening of Israel was evidence of the truth of the Zionist movement and proof of the Jewish right to the land. One did not need God, one only needed human beings, united and motivated. Yet people could no longer sing Shir L'Shalom after Rabin's assassination. That evening and the next, groups in Jerusalem tried. But the song did not rouse the faithful the way it had before. They found it difficult to get past the second and third lines: "The purity in prayer will not bring back, one whose candle has been extinguished." Many, many people felt that the hope of the whole peace movement hung on the thread of a man, and they feared deep in their hearts that Yigal Amir had killed the peace. When Amir was allowed to vote from prison in the May, 1996, elections, people protested sarcastically that it was not fair to allow a man to vote twice, once with a bullet and once with a ballot. Rabin may have been the last prime minister of Israel to have been raised in the spirit of the halutzim (pioneers) . He had a vision for building the State of Israel. He called people to sacrifice for this vision, and drew strength from it. Now that Israel exists and is relatively prosperous, the spirit of the pioneers is waning and the influence of the Labor party is weakening. Many Zionists are casting their votes for the religious parties. They sense deep down that a true Jewish state must mean more than simply making the land green, being one democracy among many in the world, and having shopping malls and supermarkets. They sense that a Jewish state must be somehow connected to Jewish tradition and to God. Other Zionists, especially the young people who most visibly mourned Rabin's passing, are rejecting the austerity that was the ideal of Rabin's formative years and are enjoying the rich fare of prosperity.

95 Songs of camaraderie do not move them in the same way that they moved their parents and grandparents.

The Promised Land All religious communities eventually come to grips with the issue of sanctioned violence. Over the course of time, situations arise when blood must be weighed in a balance; people are forced to consider taking one person's life to save countless others. Usually, sanctioned violence is applied only to extreme situations and then only as a last resort. In the halachic tradition, the rabbis discussed a situation in which one person was pursuing another with the intent to kill. In such a situation, the rabbis had the authority to judge such a person a rodef, and the din (judgment) rodef sanctioned violence against that person. Certain rabbis declared Rabin a rodef, as I have described above, and in so doing gave encouragement to Amir. One of the situations that prompted the judgment was Rabin's decision to turn Hebron over to the Palestinian Authority. This decision was interpreted as endangering the lives of the community of about five hundred Jewish residents. Yet in November, 1996, Benjamin Natanyahu decided to withdraw Israeli troops from Hebron in accordance with Oslo II , and the rabbis did not pronounce him a rodef Regarding his decision, they applied another halachic principle, namely that preserving Jewish life is more important than keeping land. Rather than targeting Natanyahu, they have encouraged the Jewish inhabitants to evacuate. Why the difference? To my knowledge the Orthodox rabbinate has neither attempted to learn who may have declared Rabin a rodef nor accepted any responsibility for creating a climate that led to his assassination. Remembering Rabin a year later, Abraham Rabinovich wrote: "Though no rabbi was implicated in the assassination, a network of nationalistic rabbis had woven the ideology which spawned Amir, who took their preaching to what seemed to him its 'logical' conclusion. So the line between 'theoretical' messianism and 'practical' messianism was crossed with a pistol loaded with hollow-tipped bullets. " I remember browsing in a gift shop in Jerusalem's Jewish quarter. The proprietor was selling an attractive print of the Old City. Inspecting it, I suddenly noticed that the Dome of the Rock had been replaced by a temple. "What is this," I asked? "The third temple, " he answered. I learned that the material for building the third temple and all the accouterments have been assembled. Some radical groups are waiting for a chance to blow up the Dome and build the new temple, believing that the messiah will return when he finally has a temple to enter. Gershom Gorenberg writes: "In one of the bitter ironies of history, the countdown to Yitzhak Rabin's death began with the victory he orchestrated as chief of staff in June, 1967. Religious Jews, understandably, regarded the triumph as a miracle. But many went further; they saw the

96 conquest of the heart of the biblical homeland as proof that the final redemption was near, that the State of Israel was caught up in a divine drama." To equate God and land in this way and to expand the understanding of rodef to include anyone who gives up a piece of the land of Israel is to sanction violence on an unprecedented scale. This passion for the land and for Jerusalem is not new . People were enraged when Micah, the prophet, said , "Therefore because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the housF. [temple] a wooded height" (3: 12). The people of the Old Testament struggled with the meaning of the land and its role in the worship of God. They realized that God had not called them to live above the ground. They understood that the material world was real and that they needed to build religious communities around places and things. The Old Testament ultimately declared that God is giver and the land is gift, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it" (Ps. 24: 1). A gift is received and enjoyed, but it has no meaning apart from the giver. The gift of children and land established a relationship with God and brought the children of Israel into harmony with the purposes of God. This is what Abraham had to learn and what all of us who follow in his footsteps must learn. God called Abraham so that through him all the families of the earth might be blessed (Gen. 12: 1-3; 18: 18). To achieve this realm of blessing, God promises him family and land. But there is a danger lurking in this promise. Ties to both can become so strong that they can draw attention away from God's realm. Blood and land easily become in the hearts of believers objects of devotion, and praised as the source of life itself. So elevated, they divide peoples and set them at each other's throats. God tested Abraham in Genesis 22 to deepen his understanding of the moral consequences of his heart commitments. Abraham would not be a means of blessing to all the families of the world if his affection was drawn to one family and one land. He needed to learn that life was not in the blood of Isaac and not in the promised land; it was in God. Only God provides. Abraham groped for this understanding when he said to Isaac, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son" (22:8). And he achieved it when he finally gave a name to his place of testing, "So Abraham called that place, 'The Lord will provide'; as it is said to this day, 'On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided'" (22: 14). This radical notion of providence counteracts the power of tribalism and nationalism and reveals to Abraham and all the people of the world their true pedigree. God is the provident one, the giver of life, the parent. All tribes and nations are brothers and sisters in the family of God. The hope of blessing for all the families of the earth rests in this revelation being planted deeply in the heart of Abraham and the heart of every believer.

97 Conclusion On November 4, 1995, a bullet from one world was driven into the heart of another, and both worlds died. Both those inclining toward theocracy in Israel and those toward a secular democracy would never be the same after the assassination. Elements within the Orthodox community had raised devotion to the land above devotion to God and had sanctioned violence against any who challenged their interpretation of the land. Elements within secular Zionism believed that the human spirit, properly organized and motivated, possessed the power to transform the land of Israel into a garden of Eden, a model state among the nations. The death of Rabin shook both movements to their ideological foundations. On the eve of my departure from Israel, a Jewish friend from the nearby moshav Regba asked me how I felt about my year. I reflected for a moment, examined my feelings, and surprised myself with the answer. I said that in a short year I had grown deeply attached to this young country living on the edge of hope and despair. I said that even though I was a sojourner, I had identified with the intense longing of the people, with their hope of peace and their dread of war. My friend smiled knowingly and asked, "So will you be coming back?"

98