Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Park Avenue synagogue said last week he didnt want to respond from the pulpit to the Amnesty International report charging Israel with apartheid and instead let his congregants go to Israel lobby groups AIPAC and the ADL and J Street to read their disavowals of Amnesty but he couldnt help himself because hes committed his synagogue to supporting Israel. So Cosgrove spent 15 minutes trashing a report he admits he hasnt read, because thats what you do when a family member is attacked from the outside.
I reviewed the Conservative rabbis sermon closely because: Cosgrove is forthright about his commitment to Zionism in a religious setting, as so many rabbis are. So This Is What It Means to Be Jewish for the Jewish Establishment; rabbinical umbrella groups have called on rabbis to denounce the report from their pulpits. Yet Cosgrove is out of step with the only Jewish future. Fully a quarter of American Jews disagree with him; they think Israel is practicing apartheid. Among young Jews, that portion is nearly 40 percent. Jewish intellectuals call for Separation from the thug nation.
Cosgrove admits that he has only read the executive summary of the report, but sees that it is the latest in a decades long drumbeat of anti-Israel sentiment emanating from the halls of the UN and a handful of other human rights NGOs.
He says hes thought long and hard about whether to speak about the report, which has been out for five days, and doesnt want to turn the pulpit into political theater. But he overcame his reluctance, because hes a Zionist. This is an honest ideological confession:
I do so because for me Israel is part and parcel to my Jewish identity, its central to my vision of the rabbinate, and as long as Im the rabbi of Park Avenue, it will remain central to the mission of this synagogue. I want you, your children, your grandchildren to keep kosher to create Jewish families to live proudly as Zionists. None of us chose to live in this miraculous era of a sovereign Jewish state where after thousands of years of exile Jews have the right to national self-determination For me to be Jewish today means to be actively engaged with Israel. Regardless of whether the claims of Amnesty are new, to fail to address those claims strikes me as an abdication of my role as a Jewish educator.
So after 1000s of years of exile documented in the bible, people gain political rights to a land from which they ethnically cleanse the indigenous people, and its a miracle. (This is called Koolaid.)
Cosgrove hammers the point of the Jewish peoples claim to the land and says Amnestys questioning of that claim betrays a bias that colors every other claim it makes. After all if the Jews have no right to the land, then Israel is a national project conceived in sin, its very creation an act of dispossession.
Cosgrove says hes also speaking as a father, with children on campus. We must provide the tools to contend with the Amnesty report and the like For Zions sake, I must not stay silent. Imho, telling your kids that Jews were exiled from the land 1000s of years ago and thats why they have special political rights now is not going to be a good tool on campus.
The rabbi is defensive about the new climate of delegitimization of Israel. Apartheid is clickbait for the feeding frenzy of Israels detractors. The singling out of Israel is antisemitic. The report serves as a respectable hook for people who hate Jews.
And heres the family bit. For Israels defenders, this report has shifted everyone into a defensive posture and thus excuse any of Israels actual misdeeds. I have all sorts of criticisms of Israel, its systematic and ongoing restrictions of Palestinian rights, its repeated actions impeding Palestinian sovereignty, most recently the illegal outpost on Evyatar, Israels inability to house liberal expressions of Jewish life, most recently the collapse of the Kotel deal. But today Im not giving full voice to any of those criticisms because well, when a family member is attacked from the outside, thats not what one does.
Cosgrove concludes by saying that the Amnesty report will make peace harder because both sides will just dig in. This is the old argument that Israelis must be hugged to change. But when you hug them, they just evict more Palestinians and dance outside their homes. The news is not good for Zionist rabbis.
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