Last Thursday and Friday we celebrated the concluding days of our annual Fall holidays, marking the festival of Shemini Atzeret (the Eighth Day of Solemn Assembly) and Simchat Torah (Rejoicing with the Torah.) As we all recall, it was exactly one year ago that the celebration of these holidays, observed together on one day in Israel, was abruptly terminated by the horrendous, unprovoked attack by Hamas on the civilian population of Israel. Nearly 1200 people, men, women, children, babies, teenagers, young and old, Jew and non-Jew, citizens and foreign workers, soldiers and mostly civilians were brutally murdered, some subjected to torture and sexual violence, homes were burnt and destroyed, families massacred, and some 250 people taken off as hostages of Hamas and its allies. I repeat this even though it is well-known to us, since too many people have chosen to forget about it or even justify it amidst the wave of anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations and violence we have witnessed in the past year in this country and around the world. There are still two empty chairs on our bimah awaiting the return of two brothers taken hostage that day and representing all the other remaining captives who have yet to return home.
We are a small congregation, yet we continue to offer services and programming for our population in Aurora and surrounding towns. We often struggle to get a minyan and sometimes do without. Nonetheless, we held services both on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah last week. In a sense, the separation of these two days of the holiday observed in the diaspora gave us the opportunity on Shemini Atzeret, during the Yizkor memorial prayers, to remember the victims of this horrendous attack as well as the military and civilian casualties who number well over 800 who have died to date. They were mentioned and singled out in our Yizkor prayers and are not to be forgotten. We also recalled the Israeli farmers on Shemini Atzeret through the Geshem prayers of Musaf. As the rainy season begins in that part of the world, we begin adding the words to the Amidah, about God causing the winds to blow and the rain to fall. Our tradition links this brief mention of the forces of nature to our belief in God’s power to renew life even after tragedy. Mashiv Haruach, He causes the wind to blow, ”ruach” represents the Spirit, the Soul, ruchniyut. Morid HaGashem, “geshem” is rain, but it also refers to the material world, gashmiut. Jewish tradition affirms the belief in a day when ruach and geshem, body and soul, will reunite as affirmed in the second blessing of the Amidah.
The second day of the holiday, on Simchat Torah, was an opportunity to look to the future, to affirm our commitment to the continuity of Jewish life as we completed a cycle of readings in the Torah. We read the final portion of Deuteronomy, V’zot HaBrachah, telling not only of the death of Moses, but of the rise of a new leader, Joshua, who was endowed with the “spirit of wisdom,” conferred upon him by Moses to lead the people into the Promised Land. Immediately after, we turned to the opening verses of B’reishit, the creation story in Genesis. We spoke of the Midrash that claims there were many worlds created before ours which were destroyed, but God went on to create new worlds. Even though we are so far away from Israel and cannot truly appreciate all that our brothers and sisters in that land have suffered and the loss and the trauma they continue to deal with and will continue to experience long after the war comes to an end, we join them in declaring “We are still here and we maintain our faith in a better world.”
On Monday night, we were privileged to welcome to Aurora, Asaf Grumberg of the Jewish National Fund and Yedidya Harush, JNF-Amerca’s liaison for Negev Community Development. Asaf reminded us that JNF is far more than the planting of trees. Many of us recall those cards we got in Hebrew school with slots for quarters. When we had collected $2.00 or $2.50, we sent them in and bought a tree to be planted in Israel. Some of us have even planted those little twigs in groves in Israel ourselves and one can see the results throughout the land. The border between Israel proper and the West Bank area of Judea and Samaria, is called the Green Line. When I first visited Israel in 1967, just after the Six Day War, the green line of the border was obvious. About 25 years later, on a JNF mission, we saw that there was much more than trees. We traveled all over Israel in a few days and saw JNF preparing the infra-structure for new communities and apartment buildings among other things for the influx of immigrants at that time from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia.
Asaf’s special guest, on leave from the battle front in Gaza, was Yedidya Harush who shared his story with us. He told us of growing up in a house built in one of the 21 settlements on the territory then held by Israel on the Gaza Strip. When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to unilaterally withdraw from that area and turn it over to the Palestinian Authority in 2005, he had dreams of it becoming a beautiful resort on the sea with an influx of tourists from around the world. Those Israelis living there were forced to evacuate, their homes were destroyed, and they had to resettle in Israel’s interior. Yedidyah was an entrepreneur who helped his community recover after the disengagement. They settled in a new community in Halutza which is on the border of Israel, Egypt, and the Gaza Strip. He described for us the amazing variety of fruits and vegetables that they produce in this very hot and dry area of the Negev. It receives approximately 3” of rain each year, yet with modern agricultural techniques they are able to raise this tremendous output of produce. They also have a flourishing dairy farm in Halutza as well.
On October 7, they were celebrating Simchat Torah when the alarms sounded and they hurried to get their daughters to the shelter. While Halutza was not attacked that day, they got word that their neighbors in nearby Pri-Gan were under attack. Reluctantly leaving his own family, Yedidya led the local civil defense unit from Kibbutz Shlomit to their aid and drove out the terrorists. While no one in Pri-Gan was harmed in the attack, tragically four members of the civil defense unit, close friends of Yedidya, died in the action, leaving behind fifteen orphans. Since then, he has been serving in reserves in an elite IDF unit while supporting the Shlomit community which was evacuated from their homes.
He was very cognizant of the impact of the events of the past year on Israel and in particular on its children, not just those who lost parents, but those who were and are still traumatized by what they experienced in the past months. However, in spite of the ongoing situation, his message to us was one of hope. Yedidya serves as liaison for the JNF-USA for Negev Community Development. He works with the organization to achieve its Blueprint Negev strategy and, as such, is working to support regional development in southern Israeli communities.
The Negev makes up about 60% of Israel’s territory but contains only about 8% of its population. JNF’s Blueprint Negev aims to double the population and bring a half million new residents to the area. In order to accomplish that they are working on creating the infrastructure for new settlements like Halutza, the same type of work I witnessed over 30 years ago. The plans are very exciting and you can read about them and about Halutza on the JNF website: https://www.jnf.org/our-work/community-building/our-blueprint-negev-strategy. Just as we for centuries have merged our holidays of joy with days of mourning, here too we see a country still battling enemies north, south, and east, mourning their losses, treating those wounded both physically and emotionally, yet at the same time working to build an exciting future for the people of Israel in the Negev.
We are grateful to both Asaf and Yedidya for visiting with us and sharing this important message of hope and renewal for the Jewish people in the State of Israel and for all of us around the world. As we conclude the holiday season, we pray for our brothers and sister in the State of Israel and look to the day when peace will be restored to the land.
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